Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  There came a crunching sound in the hushed winter day snow. As the sound grew closer, Nathaniel turned his attention from the two strangers and said to Annette “Aha! Here we go!”

  Annette’s attention was also diverted from the two figures as a semi-truck appeared through the wall of falling snow. It was moving at a moderate pace from Annette’s left headed straight for them. Another vehicle appeared to Annette’s right coming straight for them from the opposite direction. The second vehicle was perhaps a smaller private passenger car. From Nathaniel’s perspective, Annette turned her eyes to the strangers. As mysteriously as they had arrived, the expanse was vacant, with only the swirling of flakes.

  Nathaniel retreated a step to allow Annette the opportunity to inspire by her own inner instructions. Nathaniel knew that both the truck and the passenger car were bobbing along too fast for this weather. And as the semi-truck approached, he watched as Annette studied each vehicle, no doubt astute to the fact that each set of wipers were fighting hard to sweep the accumulating frost. As the distance between the two cars decreased, he could tell that Annette knew that she and Nathaniel were standing in the middle of the road of equal distance between them.

  “Mr. Cauliflower,” she said to her fellow muse.

  “Just a moment longer,” he told her with confidence.

  “But if we stay here we might get run over,” Annette pondered out loud.

  “Precisely the point, Miss Redmond,” Nathaniel said evenly. He watched as she retreated a few steps and pushed Annette back to where she had been standing. “Stay here seven more seconds,” Nathaniel told her while consulting his wrist-watch. “Seven . . .”

  “But in seven seconds we’ll be road-kill.”

  “Six,” Nathaniel chimed.

  “Is this punishment for the arguing we’ve done?”

  “Five,” Nathaniel said over her words.

  “Mr. Cauliflower . . .”

  “Four.” The vehicles were both headed straight for them. He didn’t have to look at Annette to realize that she found herself in an uncomfortably threatening situation, desperate to leave. But the colored peg had put them in this exact spot for a reason, and he was determined to make sure that she must stay there. “Three.”

  “What kind of operation is Management running here?” she yelled at him.

  “Two!”

  “We’re supposed to be inspiring people, not causing accidents!”

  “One!” The semi-truck, finally noticing him and Annette in the road, slammed on its breaks. Nathaniel grabbed Annette and reeled her off to a snow-covered curb.

  Unfortunately for the semi-truck, the ice was too slick on the road for the vehicle to stop normally. It skidded along the slippery road spinning along the ice. The driver of the other vehicle, noticing the truck, also put on its brakes to avoid being part of the collision. However, it too began to slide on the road until, eventually, it spun and stopped in the opposite direction. The semi-truck driver, trying to over-correct, caused the rear bumper to slide across the road until there came a sickening crunch of metal upon metal as it struck the Mercedes, propelling it further into the falling snow, down a camouflaged ravine.

  Once both vehicles came to a stop, Annette raced toward them calling out that she was on her way. The inspiration was coming to an end but she rushed regardless.

  All Nathaniel could do was stand in the snow and watch as Annette tried to interfere with circumstances in which she had no control. It was clear that, with each step, Annette could feel the rumbles of thunder. Nathaniel took a breath and closed his eyes doing the only thing he could have done: whispering a word of prayer to Management. He followed Annette’s path through the snow finding her at the edge of the snow-capped ravine. He watched as Annette passed the semi-truck driver who was climbing out of his truck. Nathaniel then watched as Annette found her footing, shuffling down the ravine through an exposed path to a Mercedes. The sound coming from the wreckage was a crying baby, its tiny screams piercing the surrounding storm.

  Nathaniel watched as Annette reached the Mercedes. There she found a man in the driver’s seat, conscious and fighting his way past the deployed airbag. Annette found the baby in the back seat, strapped safely into a car seat, wailing for its mother. Though Nathaniel was some distance away, he knew what Annette must have seen for herself: the front passenger seat where a woman, supposedly the mother, lay unconscious with a bleeding head wound.

  Even where Nathaniel stood he could hear the father calling the baby’s name.

  “It’s alright Jonas,” said the father. “Everything’s going to be alright. Mommy’s just sleeping.” A roll of thunder, this one louder than before, splintered the snow-covered ground. The baby named Jonas continued to cry so high-pitched Nathaniel thought perhaps the shrill might cause the glass to break. “Jonas, it’s okay. She’s just . . .” It was then that the father wailed with as much anguish as his newborn son until both screams were carried through the storm, rising up into the clouds, muted by the torrents of falling snow that cascaded upon them.

  There were three horrendous rumbles of thunder that signaled the end to this segment. In those three roars Annette, realizing she was alone at the car, turned her attention at the ravine, where she spotted the driver of the semi, a portly man with a ball cap, descending the slope. But it was Nathaniel that her eyes were locked on; Nathaniel who looked toward his handiwork like an artist consulting the brush strokes of a masterpiece.

  As the inspiration came to an end and Annette was deposited back into her office there was one word that echoed far beyond its rumblings: “Jonas.” Annette turned to Nathaniel, who casually shed the accumulated flakes of snow from his clothes.

  “We caused that accident,” she said to him.

  “Yes, Miss Redmond. I was there.”

  “We caused that accident by standing in the middle of the road!”

  “Yes, Miss Redmond, we did. A job well done.”

  “A job well done?” Annette raised her voice, riding on the last shred of adrenaline.

  “A successfully administered catalyst, if I do say so myself.”

  “How does bringing about death inspire someone, Mr. Cauliflower?” Annette asked of him.

  Nathaniel looked into Annette Redmond’s blue eyes and studied the stray lock of brown hair amidst the red. He wasn’t sure how to respond. He had asked himself the same question at the end of each of his seven lifetimes, only to have the question go unanswered.

  *

  Morning arrived stealthily in 1808. Evangeline’s skin was warm beneath Nathaniel’s fingers. Her breathing was calm and unrestricted. Sunlight struck her hair just as it had the morning that he had first painted her in the chateau’s conservatory. Nathaniel collected these details with his barely opened eyes. He learned then that the most precious moments had to come to an end, and they did in this approach: a scuffling sound was heard from behind Nathaniel causing his eyes to widen. In the excitement from the night before, Nathaniel had forgotten to store his paintings into the rafters. Much to Nathaniel’s horror, he spun to find his painter standing in the loft amidst the ghostly faces in the daylight. In his painter’s hands was the Fiona portrait.

  “Explain this to me,” the painter inquired. Nathaniel stood. His bare, toned torso and lower half were draped by unbuttoned trousers.

  Nathaniel wondered how he could have been so careless by leaving the paintings on display through the night? And worse yet, how could he have been so bold by having taken advantage of Evangeline, who presently stirred from the floor boards? Both the painter’s and Nathaniel’s eyes turned to Evangeline who had sat up and protectively gathered the corset at her chest. The painter said nothing.

  Nathaniel on the other hand assisted Evangeline from the floor bidding her to go. She scrambled down the ladder. When she reached the lower level, Nathaniel started to go down the ladder himself.

  “Boy, let her go,” the master ordered. Nathaniel turned his face to him knowing that Evangeline had exited into
the daylight, fleeing the two artists. As the painter approached the ladder, staring intently into Nathaniel’s eyes, Nathaniel clutched the rungs with his heart thudding heavily in his chest.

  The Dandelion Sisters had warned Nathaniel about this moment, and Nathaniel had desperately attempted to have kept it from happening. Yet it happened anyway.

  The painter, for reasons of his own, grabbed the rungs of the ladder tipping it, and the boy, from the ledge. Nathaniel grasped at the growing distance between the ladder and the loft in an attempt to connect the two again, but to no avail. Within not even a moment, Nathaniel lay on the lower landing, dead.

  *

  Definitely, Nathaniel had asked himself the same question that Annette Redmond had asked of him. It had appeared that the only woman who had truly known the answer had been Ninth Generation muse Annette Slocum. He hoped Annette would remember, but it was evident that the promised memories were unwavering.

  Annette went on in saying, “I was a missing person’s detective before I came here, Mr. Cauliflower. And that job consumed me for many years, and still does. I’ve spent my life avoiding the kind of messes that we’ve caused, obsessed with finding individuals who disappeared at the hand of an elusive person who I’ve nick-named the Thunderstorm Man. I almost lost my fiancé, Adam, because of my work hours. I made a promise to him three months ago that it would change. Our wedding was supposed to take place moments before I was handed an invitation by a woman in a baby-blue pants suit, your Head Muse, Fiona.”

  Annette turned from Nathaniel facing toward the sunlight. “That invitation carried with it a strong lead that could break the case of the Thunderstorm Man wide open, so who was I to deny it? Fiona told me that, if I went with her, I would be returned to that exact place and time as if I’d never left. So I left my fiancé, Adam Eustace McCloud, standing at the altar, waiting for me!” Annette sighed. Her back was turned to Nathaniel. “Here I am causing more destruction than before I left. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like had I taken a different road? What would have become of me if I followed my dream to become a pie maker, like you mentioned? What would become of Adam? What would become of everyone?”

  “Miss Redmond,” Nathaniel told her “sometimes . . . sometimes we have to trust that Management knows what’s best for us. I, myself, have a hard time believing in it, but it’s the only thing that keeps me . . .” he hesitated for a moment, then surprised himself by earnestly saying “. . . that keeps me cooking in my kitchen, re-assigning those colored pegs and delivering the envelopes. It gives me enough strength to make it through each day. Sometimes circumstances change, causing us to take one path over another. But we eventually find our paths. I have to believe that.”

  There was a silence. Annette then asked “What did you say?”

  “I said that we eventually find our paths.”

  “No, before that.”

  “Circumstances change.”

  Annette gave a breath. “Yes, I’d heard that from Fiona when I first came here.” She gasped, turning to Nathaniel. Her hair was no longer red. Instead it was brown all over. Her skin, which had been tan with freckles, was a steady pale. The facial features, which had been recognizably Annette Redmond, showed a face that Nathaniel had known for years; it was the undeniable face of Annette Slocum. “I remember,” she said with tears.

  “Do you?”

  “I remember being a little girl with a mom and a dad, and two older brothers named Franklin and Michael. I remember being incredibly shy and living inside the pages of library books. And I remember there was a boy who rescued them for me, a young boy named Nathaniel J. Cauliflower!”

  Nathaniel didn’t say anything. He allowed Annette to remember all that she needed to.

  “I remember when I graduated high school my father bought me a car: a champagne-colored 1979 VW Beetle that he asked me to use while traveling and exploring the world. But I didn’t. Instead, I married the car salesman who sold it to my dad. I was a housewife to Lyle Slocum for ten years and, for many years I waited for you, Mr. Cauliflower. I waited for you all my life to come and fix me the way that you fixed my library books but, as I grew older, I gave up on that idea. I immersed myself into my solitude, living each moment of each day cooking Lyle’s breakfast, watching Lyle’s dress shirts flutter dry on the backyard line, and kept myself safely inside the confines of the books I borrowed from the library.

  “I remember the day that Fiona arrived, standing at my mailbox, waving to me as if she had known me for years. And I remember the chase that happened at the library. All she wanted to do was talk to me but I was too antisocial to let her! I remember making a quick getaway for the library parking lot and how there were so many cars driving by. And how one, a blue Cadillac, struck me!”

  Annette then took off the black hoodie. She held it in front of her.

  “I remember after my death waking up in the waiting room and becoming a Ninth Generation muse. My first inspiration sent me to a man named Jonathan whom I handed a violin while he lodged in a hotel room. Later I found out who Jonathan really was: the very same driver of the vehicle that caused me to be here as a muse at the outset!”

  Annette stepped forward. The black hoodie was clutched between her fingers. “Oh Management . . .” she said with a laugh. “I remember!” She handed Nathaniel the hoodie and said to him intently, “Thank you.”

  Nathaniel took the hoodie. There were many things he wanted to discuss with her, but all he could say was “Welcome home, Mrs. Slocum.”

  *

  The thick churning bands of the approaching thunderstorm casually streaked across the sky and moon devouring the Heavens in its cold, bitter wake. The storm stretched across a highway dotted with pale orange street lamps. It clawed itself across the great field, the gale of its darkness wreaking havoc on the acres of corn and rapeseed. It settled upon a particular spot of land where it seemed to linger in anticipation of an unprecedented event. Lightning flickered in the twisting plumes as if an indiscernible mob occupied its fury carrying torches set in a concentrated inferno. The storm dared not rain, at least not yet, for fear of ruining this fine moment.

  The structure which the clouds hovered over was a seedy motel with an indecisive neon vacancy sign. The night manager of the motel stepped out of the front door and, looking up in awe of the towering storm, lit a cigarette. But the storm was not looking down on the night manager. The storm’s attention was upon another individual: a man named Jonathan who occupied one of the hole-in-the-wall rooms.

  Jonathan was in his forties and looked as if the world had truly done a number on him. Jonathan was fast asleep on the mattress of his grimy bed. The covers had been kicked off the foot of the bed hours ago. He lay exposed in a pair of boxers and a wife-beater, sleeping soundly despite the chaos on the other side of his dust-caked window. Jonathan supported a violin and bow in his arms in the way some children covet teddy bears to ward off creatures from under the bed. Unfortunately for Jonathan, the act of cleaving to such an item of safety did not stop a monster from stepping out of the room’s shadows.

  While Jonathan slept, a man with gray hair and a black suit and tie appeared, watching him sleep. The man was in his mid-thirties but looked older than his age. Crow’s feet expanded around his eyes. The man’s glacial stare focused upon the violin in Jonathan’s arms. A scowl formed across the man’s face.

  Jonathan was too lost in his pleasant dreams to notice he was no longer alone. He absentmindedly abandoned the violin to turn to his pillow, fluffing it a bit, and returned to his slumbers.

  With the violin unprotected, the uninvited man took his opportunity. A rumble of thunder helped to accentuate the stranger’s hands as they reached out and seized the instrument. A tendril of lightning shot across the sky as the man held the violin up to his icy, hawk-like stare.

  The man studied the violin, taking disgust in the item, offended by its very presence in the room. He strode across the room and cracked open the window. Dangling the instrument over
the several stories between them and the parking lot below, the man smirked and purposefully let the violin and bow drop through the air delighting in the sound as the wood splintered upon collision. He brought his eyes to the storm nodding at the clouds as if they had been friends for years.

  Jonathan stirred from his sleep to find the violin gone. He frantically searched the covers, overturned the pillows and looked over both sides of the bed. Jonathan’s bloodshot eyes settled upon the man in the suit and tie, who was still looking out the window in reverence of nature’s ominous display. Rain started to sprinkle, the moist darting drops glistening the man’s fierce expression.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” the man asked, placing both hands on the exposed window sill. “I love watching thunderstorms. They seem to know when to arrive, heralding a sense of peace, a feeling of comfort. They never stay for very long, do they? As soon as they arrive, they’re gone again. It’s important, no matter where we are in life, to relish these rare moments and to take advantage of each fleeting second of its countenance.”

  “Do I know you?” Jonathan asked.

  The man shook his head.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “My name is Jonas,” the man answered, his attention still on the storm. “And I, like this storm, have come to give you a personal sanctuary from the grim reality of this decaying, desolate world.”

  “My violin,” Jonathan shook his head, running his fingers through his greasy hair. “What have you done with it?”

  “Violin?” Jonas’ eyebrows raised in concern. He shook his head, giving his attention to Jonathan. Jonas then looked Jonathan squarely in the eyes and said with a well-rehearsed, almost convincing lie: “There is no violin.”

  Jonathan nearly took Jonas at his word but then tried to piece his memories together to prove the interloper wrong.

  “No. I remember. I woke up and she was standing there, right where you’re standing! She was wearing a housedress and slippers. She was holding the violin and bow in her hands. I thought it surreal seeing her – the woman that I had hit and killed with my Cadillac all those years ago in front of the library, holding a violin!”