The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  That was true, Jac thought. Why hadn’t she?

  “Except I wanted you to see what your brother was working on.”

  So it had been a conscious decision. Jac turned away from the desk to the mistress of the house. “Why is that?”

  “I wanted to ask you if you would consider taking up his quest.”

  Jac immediately shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “But you haven’t even considered it.”

  “There’s nothing to consider. I’m a mythologist, not a perfumer.”

  “Your brother said you were a perfumer as well and had been working with him. He told me about the fragrances you and he were developing.”

  “My show airs for only twelve episodes a year, so during the downtime I was working with Robbie . . . but I’m not a scent scientist, I have no formal training . . . His fascinations are not mine . . .”

  “Are you on hiatus now?” Melinoe asked. There was something in her voice Jac hadn’t heard up till now. Almost a challenge. Jac wasn’t sure she understood why.

  “Yes, I was in Greece, finishing up the last episode, when Robbie took ill.”

  “So you are free now?”

  It wasn’t any of her business, Jac thought. Yes, after Robbie died, Jac should have gone back to New York to edit next season’s shows. Instead she and her editor had been working online because Jac just didn’t want to leave France. When her mother died, she couldn’t wait to get away, but this was different. The memories and reminders of Robbie didn’t overwhelm her—instead they cosseted her, comforted her. While she felt hollow and sad, she also felt Robbie was still with her. She was almost sure of it. And she was afraid if she left France, she’d leave him behind.

  “What were you shooting in Greece?” Serge asked.

  Jac wasn’t sure if he was curious or trying to cover the tension Jac’s refusal had engendered.

  “A series about the Fates. Trying to find the origins for the myths of the three women.”

  “Interesting,” Melinoe said. She looked at Serge and smiled as if they had a secret this had reminded them of. “You know my father was a student of mythology. That’s how I got my name.”

  “I was surprised when I heard it. It’s very unusual,” Jac said.

  Melinoe fingered the stack of rings on her ring finger. One was much thicker than the others and heavily engraved.

  “Yes . . .” Melinoe said. “A rarely-heard-of minor goddess. Melinoe, the goddess of ghosts. Imagine giving that name to a child? But then he wasn’t an average man.” She paused and then with a laugh added: “And I wasn’t an average child.”

  “Have you ever been an average anything?” Serge asked, also with a laugh.

  “Did you grow up together?” Jac asked, including Serge in the question.

  “No,” he answered. “My mother married Melinoe’s father when I was seventeen and she was sixteen.”

  Melinoe glanced at him, and something unsaid passed between them. Jac sensed a wave of sadness coming from Melinoe. Comfort coming from Serge in return. Then Melinoe squared her shoulders as if she was trying to shake off her melancholy, and her eyes returned to Jac.

  “I inherited my father’s love of collecting. And all of his collections. Which I’ve added to. There are collectors who make arrangements for their life’s work to be kept intact after they die. But do you know how often their wishes are upheld? The enormous sums of money it takes to ensure that a collection is not disbanded? We don’t even have full records of some of the most important collections in history. Emperor Rudolf had one of the greatest in the world, and we only know a few hundred paintings, jewels, curiosities and other works of art that he owned. I can’t think about all this being broken up. I must be with it always!”

  Jac sensed Melinoe’s passion might have an edge of hysteria. Her objects were lovely and fascinating, but she spoke as if they were children.

  “That’s why your brother’s work was so important to me. Jac, René le Florentin’s true life’s work was finding the formula to capture and reanimate a dying breath. Your brother was trying to figure out René’s formula.”

  Jac was trying to listen but was too confused. The morning after Robbie’s death, before his nurse had left, she’d come to see Jac. She had something to show her, she’d said.

  Apparently Robbie had taught the nurse how to capture his breath in test tubes and made her promise to try and catch his last exhalation. The nurse gave Jac a box containing a half dozen corked tubes.

  “The one with the blue X was his last one,” she’d said as she pointed.

  “Did my brother tell you why he wanted you to do this?” Jac asked.

  The nurse shook her head.

  Jac had been so overwhelmed with sadness and shock, she hadn’t thought much about why Robbie had made such an odd request. She’d assumed it had something to do with thinking he’d been poisoned . . . that he wanted his breath analyzed.

  “If there is a way to reanimate a soul,” Melinoe was saying, “a way to force a reincarnation if you will—then I could be reunited with my collection. My stewardship of all these wonders would continue from one lifetime to the next.” Her eyes were shining. Her face was slightly flushed. She looked almost possessed.

  Melinoe couldn’t be serious. Did she truly think this was possible? Was all this effort so she could come back to be with her collection?

  Melinoe walked to the armoire in the corner of the rook. Took a key chain out of her pocket and unlocked the cabinet. Then she flung open the doors.

  “Come look,” she invited Jac.

  Inside were twelve antique, slightly battered bell-shaped silver domes about ten inches high and five inches wide at the base, with rings at the top. Jac had never seen anything like them.

  “There has always been a legend about a purported alchemical solution to reanimate dying breaths into new souls, but there was nothing to go by until these came up for auction at Sotheby’s in London. Actually, it was a friend of your brother’s and an old friend of mine who found them. I’d been helping fund his research, and he wanted me to purchase them for his foundation.”

  “You mean Malachai Samuels?”

  Melinoe nodded. “Yes, so you know him too?”

  “I do.” Jac was relieved Robbie obviously hadn’t told Melinoe anything about her history.

  “Once I knew this collection existed, I had to own it. I needed to solve the mystery of how reanimation worked so I could use it myself. The bells had come from this château, and after I found out that René le Florentin had spent his last years here, with his son, working on a method to galvanize these breaths, I approached the owner and offered him more than he was asking for the house. It wasn’t romantic foolishness. It was very likely there might be something here that would help us learn about the process. Something tangible . . . If René lived here—maybe if I lived here . . .” She shook her head as if she was refuting something she’d thought of. “There is something magical about this château. How long it’s stood here relatively undisturbed. How few changes have been made to the building. How much of it is now the same as it was then. Barbizon is a town out of time, and so is René’s château. And when your brother agreed to come and work on my puzzle, I felt sure we’d find the solution.”

  “Can I see those?” Jac asked, gesturing to the bells.

  Melinoe carefully removed one of the domes. Underneath was a bottle about seven inches high made of thick pale-blue glass. Inside was a thin layer of something dark. She tipped the bottle. The residue didn’t move. Wasn’t liquid. Wasn’t even viscous.

  “Do you know what this is?” Jac asked.

  “We know the bottle is from the sixteenth century. We’ve guessed, and your brother concurred, it’s someone’s dying breath mixed with some kind of elixir or potion.”

  Amazed, Jac stared at the dark sludge. Then she took
the proffered covering from Melinoe. Clearly very old, the metal surface was deeply engraved and from the look of the tarnish appeared to be silver. The writing looked like a combination of Latin and Hebrew. There were Egyptian and Syrian symbols. Roman and Greek numbers.

  “What do all these inscriptions say? Is this the formula?” Jac asked.

  “We didn’t get that far. Your brother was working on the translations with someone, but whoever it was hadn’t finished. I’d like to get the results. I had agreed to pay for them.”

  Jac nodded. Felt a slight clench in her stomach. She could guess who Robbie had gone to for translations of the arcane inscriptions. The last time he’d needed help like this, he’d gone straight to Griffin.

  “Do you think you could at least be able to find out who he hired?” Melinoe asked.

  “I can try,” Jac said. “Are all the inscriptions on all the covers the same?” she asked.

  “There’s some repetition, but most of what’s written on each bell is unique,” Melinoe said.

  Jac picked up the second bell and then the third. Beneath each was another of the same pale-blue bottles.

  “We had the glass tested. The bottles date back to the mid-sixteenth century. We believe they were part of René le Florentin’s collection.”

  Jac removed the fourth silver bell. Beneath it was . . . nothing.

  “What happened?”

  “There are two missing. One was lost before I bought the collection. Your brother broke that one by accident.” Melinoe shook her head; the incident was obviously still bothering her.

  “I’m sure Robbie was careful.” Jac wasn’t certain why she was defending her brother.

  “Yes, I know he was,” Melinoe said.

  Jac continued to inspect the inscriptions. Robbie had clearly been fascinated with the idea of what these bottles contained and the concept they represented. And he had done his best to bequeath his interest in it to her.

  “What is it? You were shaking your head,” Melinoe asked.

  “Nothing really.” She put the bell down. “Other than these measuring tools, ingredients and books—is there anything else of Robbie’s?”

  Melinoe pushed the door back a little. A navy sweater was hanging there. Thick cashmere, hooded. Jac recognized it and took it off the hook. Robbie had so many sweaters just like this. Once he found a style he liked, he stockpiled it. There had been a hunter green one on the back of his chair in the workshop at home. As she held the sweater, Robbie’s smell rose up and surrounded her. Jac knew that the olfactory center in the brain was next to the memory center. There was a scientific reason for scent and memory to be connected. But for her it was more exaggerated. And now, suddenly, in front of these strangers, not quite in the room, not quite in her mind, she heard her brother’s voice.

  I haven’t left you. I won’t leave you.

  For years, Jac’s mother had talked to her from the grave whenever she visited her at the family mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in upstate New York.

  Hearing her mother’s voice was just one of the reasons Jac was never quite sure she was completely sane. The hallucinations she’d had since she was a child were another. When they multiplied after her mother’s death, Jac’s father had taken her to a myriad of doctors. One finally determined the manifestation was caused by a bad synapse in her brain. She’d seen the MRI on her father’s desk with the doctor’s notes attached. Read the words and studied the picture. Jac was fourteen. Old enough to understand that in her brain, in the area where the disease was usually found, she had a cluster of malformed cells. What the doctor wrote proved she didn’t suffer from an overactive imagination but from an illness. There was no cure, but there were psychopharmacological drugs that could prevent the hallucinations. But there were side effects. Jac felt as if she were living behind a wall. Soon, the world dulled. She became lethargic.

  That’s when her grandmother insisted Jac be sent to the Blixer Rath clinic in Switzerland. A Jungian institution where Malachai Samuels was one of the therapists. This “last resort,” as her father had called it, was run by disciples of Carl Jung, who believed many so-called “brain diseases” could be cured with the healing of the soul. Like his mentor, Charles Blixer said the psyche required mythic and spiritual exploration before medications.

  The traditional medical community was openly hostile to this holistic, soul-centered approach. But it helped Jac. During her nine months in the clinic she was exposed to in-depth analytic therapy designed to strengthen her own healing abilities. In order to understand the symbolism of her dreams and drawings done after deep meditative sessions, in order to translate her symptoms and recognize any possible synchronistic events in her life that might have a deeper meaning, Jac had to learn the universal language of the soul. What Jung called mythology. And the man who taught her that language and spoke it with her was Dr. Malachai Samuels.

  On leave from his practice at the Phoenix Foundation, Malachai was at Blixer Rath as a Jungian therapist, not as a reincarnationist. He never talked to any of his patients about possible past-life episodes. Only years later, reading a magazine article about Malachai, did Jac realize he’d been at the clinic investigating his theory that a high percentage of schizophrenics were misdiagnosed and suffering from past-life memory crises.

  Jac folded Robbie’s navy sweater and put it into a cardboard box Serge provided. Then, book by book, she packed up. Melinoe’s phone rang, and she left the room to take the call.

  Outside, a steady rain fell, and the moat that Jac could see through the window was so full the water was spilling over onto the mossy bank.

  She shivered.

  “Are you cold?” Serge asked.

  “A little.”

  “The sweater?”

  Jac picked it up. No reason not to put it on. It would keep her warm. Her brother wasn’t a tall man. Not very broad either. The sweater would only be a bit big. But she couldn’t. She didn’t want to smell him that intensely.

  “Do you have any newspaper? I need to wrap up the bottles of ingredients so they don’t break.”

  Serge left the room to get some. Jac was alone. She went back to the window and looked out again. The shadows were heavy. There was no way to sense how deep the woods were. She wondered how often Robbie had stood here and looked out. Jac suddenly saw it darken. She saw trees falling and branches breaking in some kind of violent storm. How could the rain have gotten so much worse so quickly? But even as she watched, the view changed again and she was seeing it as she had before. The felled branches and trunks were covered with moss and lichen. They weren’t falling anew. She’d seen the view from a different perspective. Had imagined what it had looked like years ago. Not hard to do when your mind is so ready to play tricks on you anyway. Her imagination was both her heaven and her hell. And right now all she wanted to do was finish packing up and get back to Paris before she had to indulge it anymore.

  When Melinoe and Serge returned, he was carrying two rolls of paper towels. Jac began to wrap the bottles, tightening the cap on each one.

  “Do you share your brother’s belief system?” Melinoe asked. “Are you a Buddhist also?”

  Jac shook her head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t believe in anyone—sorry—anything.” The slip of the tongue had been embarrassing but true. In these last weeks Jac had become aware how little faith she had in anyone. Even Robbie had left her. Abandoned her the way her mother had, the way their father had.

  “So you don’t believe someone’s dying breath could contain his soul?” Melinoe asked.

  “No.”

  “But your brother thought it could.”

  “Yes, I know that now. He had his nurse collect his dying breath.”

  Jac didn’t know why she’d revealed that to a stranger.

  “I wondered if he might.”

  “Why?”

  “He was so taken with t
he idea. We’d talked about it at length,” Melinoe said.

  Jac was almost finished putting the bottles in the box.

  “My brother was a dreamer. Like my father. And like my mother until the dreams broke her.”

  “And you?”

  Jac shrugged. “I’m not my brother.”

  “But you are a perfumer. And, he told me once, a far better one than he was. He was convinced that the solution to the dying breaths would have something to do with scent and essences. He said that alchemy and medicine and scent were closely aligned until the nineteenth century and that he’d done a lot of research suggesting there were ancient ingredients that might have held secrets we’ve become too sophisticated to trust.”

  “Yes, that sounds exactly like my Robbie.”

  “If he’s right and if you have his dying breath, then perhaps you should rethink your decision. Wouldn’t it be worth a few weeks of your life to find out if it’s true?”

  Chapter 11

  MARCH 17, 1573

  BARBIZON, FRANCE

  Time passes slowly in hell. A young man turns bitter in prison. A personality is forged. You change when you live in rancid darkness, forced to inhale the stench of your own body mixed with the stink of the years. When your only companions are monstrous rats and insects. When all you hear is silence.

  Every hour was the enemy. Every minute pushed against my sanity. I believe I spent most of my jailed hours hallucinating. Now, I do not remember enough about them to recount how I passed them all. I know I slept because my nightmares clung to my mind through my waking hours.

  When I was lucid, I tried to live in my memory. Starting from my earliest days, I worked at recounting everything in an attempt to keep my mind active. For the very first time I remembered moments that I did not know I had access to. I saw my mother—even though up to my days in jail I had never been able to recall her face. How much she looked like one of the women in the frescoes in the chapel at Santa Maria. A pale, thin woman so clearly heaven bound. How long had she been sick? Of that I’m not sure, but in my cell I was able to pull up the distant memory of her speaking to me as she walked me to the monastery on the day she left me there. It was a moment that had never surfaced before but floated to me out of the empty darkness of the prison. And in the dark I wept for her. My young mother whose name I do not know to this day.