Chapter Eight

The Kesemanetow and the Door of Death

“Long, long ago,” Isabel began after clearing her artificial airway, “life began upon Mecawetok, a great, egg-shaped island in the center of the Sea of Life.

“All creatures lived in harmony and there was no hunger, no pain, no longing. We didn’t have to ask what was right or wrong because All-Father set four Pillars along each of the cardinal directions. He inscribed the names of the Center into each so that all could find their way.”

“Pillars!” I blurted out. “That’s what the dead kid was talking about, right?”

Isabel gave me one of those looks that means, “Shut up now.” I shut up, and she continued.

“Mecawetok or ‘Center Island’ was marked by the things that make life whole: compassion, wisdom, unity, and love. Three Pillars were carved in blue stone. The fourth was inscribed upon the Tree of Life itself, whose very roots ran down into the Sea of Life.”

I tried to make a quick comparison of Isabel’s list with the Catholic Church’s litany of cardinal virtues, but she was on a roll and gave me no time for contemplation.

“One day the Great Deceiver approached All-Father and said, ‘Your people are righteous because you have given them no choice. Allow me to send them across the bay and we shall see if they can find their way home to you.’ All-Father thought upon this and agreed.

“The creatures of this world were sent away from Mecawetok, their true home. They became separated from each other by a deep green sea. They settled upon lands you now know as Washington Island, Plum Island, and the Door Peninsula.”

Isabel had named those landmasses strewn along the merging waters of Lake Michigan and Green Bay. A magical place.

“The skies remained sunny and blue, and Center Island remained visible from every shore. Birds were able to fly home when their time came, fish swam the clear water, and men and women canoed the calm seas. People began to question right from wrong, but the answers became clear when one faced home, where the four Pillars called to them.

The Great Deceiver approached All-Father again and said, ‘Of course your people find their way home. They have your compass to guide them. Allow me to carve my own towers. Your children will have free will to choose. We shall see if they find their way.’ All-Father thought upon this and agreed.

The Great Deceiver inscribed his own four Pillars with the names of the Nizad.”

“What’s a Nizard?” I interrupted.

“Not nizard. Nizad is Algonquin for foot. It means the place that is as far from the heart as one can reach. Now shut up and listen.”

“The Great Deceiver set his towers in competing directions to All-Father’s. His runes spelled the many names of the Nizad. Ignorance, tyranny, tribalism, unnatural hunger for the things we want but do not need.”

Isabel paused to give me time to digest this Native American version of cardinal vices.

“Great storms roiled the sea and thick fog hid Center Island from view. The sun, too, lost its way. It no longer set in the same place twice. It shifted every day, causing men to lose their bearings. Men tried crossing the violent seas with no stars to guide them, but they drowned in the bottomless water.

“The waterway was thereafter called the Door of Death, and many warriors died trying to cross over. Men could no longer find an easy way to tell right from wrong.

“Those children of All-Father who drowned in the bay became something different. They grew hungry and fed upon the souls of those who lost their way. They became Binders of Souls and caused great suffering.”

“Binders!” I shouted. That was the name Amanda used.

“It is a form of slang for Path Breakers.”

I wondered if the Menominee had as many words for “demon” as the Inuits had for “snow.” I guess I seemed distracted. Isabel gave me the look.

“All-Father wept at the fate of his children. He pressed birch bark against the runes of his four Pillars and breathed upon them the names of the Center. In so doing he created palm-sized paintings that transcended all language. He called these the ‘Kesemanetow,’ meaning ‘The True Path.’ They were the world’s first tarot cards, but they were never intended for divination or other cheap tricks. He gave them to his children for use as a compass to help them find their way home.

“The Great Deceiver grew angry. He created his own Kesemanetow using his four Pillars. He called these ‘Miskenupik,’ meaning, ‘The Broken Path.’ He sent them out into the world.

“The power of the path-breaking magic was very strong and, in the imbalance, the Kesemanetow became unreadable. Men and women began to cling to their tribalistic ways. They soon believed that their way, as it was taught to them, was better than the ways taught to others. Ignorance and tyranny replaced compassion and wisdom. Killing became rampant. Eventually the Kesemanetow became lost.

“The Great Deceiver assembled an army and led them against the children of the All-Father. A great battle was fought. The Great Deceiver took the form of a giant black serpent. The serpent used his poisonous scales to pierce the eyes of All-Father.

“As he lay blinded and dying, All-Father wept tears of pain, rage, and violence but also tears of compassion and hope. The tears carried the spirit of all eight Pillars, those of the Center but also of the Nizad, and flowed into the great bay.

“It is said that at the end of days, the tears of All-Father will follow the sun into the heart of one man. He will become a great warrior with the names of both the Center and the Nizad inscribed upon his soul. He will make the True Path whole again. All-Father will then rise to defeat the evil serpent who he, himself, once created.”

Isabel’s myth was fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which was the mention of those mysterious words and phrases used by the dead girls. I had not realized that, in my excitement, I was standing up next to her. She was not done with me yet. She indicated I should sit across from her, so I did.

She pressed a button to lift the head of her bed eighty degrees so she was in a seated position. She placed a spread of tarot cards face up upon her portable bedside tray. To my eyes the cards appeared from nowhere.

They were small paintings in fact, beautifully drawn and vibrantly colored despite their obvious great age. She asked me to sit closer so she could place my hands in hers. Her skin was rough, and her fingers were thick and meaty. She didn’t have the hands of a child but rather those of a debilitated septuagenarian.

The first such painting in her deck featured a black-robed figure standing upon a rocky shoreline. To his right was an arched bridge leading over a narrow river. In the hand of his extended left arm he bore a long dark wooden staff. One end of the staff rested gently on the ground, and the other end stood at an angle in front of the figure, its height greater than that of the robed man. The subject had his back turned to the painter, his gaze slightly downcast and fixed on a point across the sea. The sun was a ball of flame, its reflection on the water a fiery path connecting the somber figure with the distant horizon.

The painting had an eerie quality to it. The combination of color, texture, and theme made the playing-card sized image seem real. I felt the tremendous burden borne by the black-robed man. He belonged to a world not far removed from my own where immense and terrible powers clashed over the fate of the unity of life. I longed to place my hand upon his shoulder to lend him my support. Isabel slapped my hand away from the image, breaking my silent reverie. I did not realize I had reached my fingers toward the painting.

“Do not touch what you do not understand,” she scolded me.

“What have you got there, Izzy?” I asked playfully, almost forgetting why I had come. She ignored me but slid the pile closer to me. At close range I saw the thick, woven fibers upon which her artwork was painted. “Is that papyrus?”

“Mirthril birch,” Isabel answered after a brief delay. “The mirthril only grows in one small stand, deep in the heart of a secret forest. My people discovered the stand and learned to press the bark into canvas many ages ago. The bark is said to retain the magic of the living tree.”

Isabel held the remainder of her deck close to her chest and fingered the fine, woven fibers. The reverse side of the cards were painted a deep shade of blue with the profile of a white wolf set beneath a blanket of gold stars. A beautiful device, that. She turned her eyes westward, toward the one window in her room. “The magic is leaving our world, Paul,” she spoke with a great sadness. “Very little remains of what once was.”

A brief recollection, a barely perceptible feather touch flashed across my memory. It was lost before I opened my mouth to speak. “Are those the work of your people?”

“They are.” Isabel flashed a smile, brief and tinged with sadness.

She stared at me, her misshapen features made more pronounced by her stony silence. Her eyes bulged outside bony orbits until I was certain she was peering deep into my soul. “Time has moved in unexpected directions,” she told me, “and the world is no longer the same.” She touched a heavy, sausage-shaped finger to her thick lips and continued to study me.

“Yes,” she said. She nodded in assent to highlight her newfound conviction. Her features softened, but her voice served as a constant reminder of her gargoyle anatomy.

“I thought Amanda would seek a child, but I can see she was not mistaken. You are the one.”

I heard but did not fathom the full meaning of what she just said. I was lost in the details of several of the antique-appearing images. I took in the outline of gallant robed figures and was mesmerized by the evocative scenes of triumph and destruction.

“They really are beautiful, Izzy,” I replied, hypnotically. “Powerful, somehow.”

Isabel allowed me to look at the brilliant colors and breathtaking scenes that conjured thoughts of nobility, struggle, death, triumph. Magnificent little paintings, really.

Isabel collected the tarot cards, if that is what they were, shuffled them, and then spread them upon her bedside tray table, wolf device up. “This is your second and final warning,” she stated ominously. “Once you touch them, you cannot return to your old life. Do you understand?”

According to her myth, both the All-Father and the Great Deceiver painted their own tarot cards by exhaling their breath against the four Pillars of their own making. Here I sat, inches away from tarot cards the likeness of which I’d never seen. Not a decision to be made lightly. The beacon was signaling me.

I inhaled deeply and picked a card at random. A flash of electricity ran through my fingers and up into my arm. Alarm bells rang in my head, the same bells that toll from cathedrals during funerals and births. This piece of parchment felt unnaturally cold to the touch. Cold like a tombstone. I dropped it involuntarily. “What the hell?”

Isabel picked up the discarded piece but said nothing. She turned it over to show me what I had chosen. The man in the black cape reappeared, still facing away from me. He held his head low in a pose of introspection. Or intense grief. Perhaps he was simply looking toward the sun’s path of fire.

“What is this?” Panic filled my voice. This card had not come from the world I knew. The world of myth had both an All-Father and a Great Deceiver. From whence had this card arisen? “Is your myth real?”

Isabel’s eyes were alight with fascination. She looked at me with an intensity that caused my throat to constrict. “This is the Fire Walker, Doc,” she explained. That name again! The long-forgotten memory of something profound but distant tickled the back of my mind. Like a splinter lodged just deep enough to avoid extraction.

“Myths are not created,” she said in response to my second question. “They are found.”

My beeper sprang irritatingly to life, and I was forced to put the card down. I recognized the four digits immediately. The page had come from the emergency room.