Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  Lucas scooted to the edge of his swivel chair.

  “As you know . . . I, too, was a muse in this department, like you, a very long time ago. It was after my second life when Management gave me an office and a Lite-Brite board. Nearing the end of my own board, I was given a green-colored peg. That peg was yours. When I inserted it into the Lite-Brite, it delivered me to the morning of 9/11, to a specific cubicle, and individual. There was a framed picture of two young boys holding a guitar and, having sat below the picture, was a lone guitar pick. Management assigned me to take that guitar pick so that it may be forwarded to the proper location in the second half of the inspiration. So, I did what any normal muse would do. I pinched the guitar pick and held it in my hand. There was a young man at that cubicle who, from my assumption, was an adult version of one of those boys in the picture.”

  There was a glistening in Lucas’ eyes.

  “Gabriel never knew I was there, Mr. Richardson. But I was there . . . in the building, in his cubicle with him, when the first plane hit. He sent a quick e-mail telling you that he loved you. And I was there as he was thrown from his cubicle into the pandemonium.”

  Tears streamed down Lucas’ cheeks.

  “I’m not saying this to bring you more grief, Mr. Richardson. I’m saying this because you deserve to hear it. We deserve to have a token of something positive in our life, and sometimes in our afterlife, to keep us going.” Nathaniel reached into his pocket and took out the same guitar pick, placing it on Lucas’ desk.

  Lucas reached for the object. “This was the item in my ivory box. It’s what gave me my memories.” He looked at Nathaniel. “I can keep it?”

  Nathaniel nodded. “This guitar pick won’t return Gabriel to you. It merely serves as a reminder that, whenever you are feeling alone, you were . . . are . . . loved. By Gabriel, your muses here, and Management.”

  “Why did it take you this long to say this?”

  Nathaniel stared at the surface of Lucas’ desk, gathering the strength to tell him what he had wanted to share for Generations. He said, with mounting courage “There are two reasons. Until recently, I’ve found myself shutting out those memories from before, and have been quite successful.” Nathaniel felt inside his other pocket and took out a glow-in-the-dark star, fiddling with its distinct edges. “Ever since Miss Redmond came along, I find myself less able to keep those memories hidden. She has that inquisitive nature about her.”

  “Yes,” Lucas smiled. “She does.”

  “The other reason . . .” Nathaniel frowned. “. . . Why I never came forward . . .” He felt along the contours of the glow-in-the-dark star as if massaging a worry stone. “Right after I handed you the guitar pick, I returned to my office in the department. I expected to find more envelopes in my postbox, but instead I found Fiona who stood by my door. She had told me that Evangeline had opened her final envelope, and that Evangeline was standing in front of a mailbox with a misdirected letter. Whenever I think about inspiring you, the memory is paired with Evangeline and her downfall.”

  Nathaniel, upon confession, recalled that rainy afternoon.

  *

  Nathaniel entered Evangeline’s final inspiration and watched from afar, so as not to disturb her work. The churning, turquoise bands of the approaching thundercloud attacked the morning’s pristine spring sky in the same fashion that certain dread gradually constricted upon Evangeline. The passing years had taken such a toll on Evangeline that her exact age was indiscernible. Crows-feet were petrified around her glassy blue eyes. Her hair was a stringy mass of spider-webbed strands which whipped this way and that in the ever-growing ominous breeze. She wore a white cotton lace dress circa the nineteen twenties. It had a floral pattern which, upon the wind striking it, came to life in a maddened rabidity of disturbed petals. She held an envelope in her gnarled, arthritic right hand which she had been assigned to place in the mailbox in front of her. By now the sky had turned black. The fear inside Evangeline had darkened as bleak as the tumbling clouds overhead.

  Nathaniel approached her from behind cupping his hand over her own. Evangeline’s eyes fluttered closed and a single tear traced along her wrinkled cheek.

  “Evangeline,” Nathaniel whispered to her. Nathaniel was in his early thirties and sported a bald head and a shaved face. His brown eyes were encased behind brown frames. He adorned his usual dress shirt, matching brown tie, suspenders and dress pants. He stood behind her affectionately. His voice was calm and reassuring. “Breathe, darling, and it will all be over in a moment.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Evangeline told him.

  “I had to . . .” he told her on that day. “I had to . . .”

  *

  Nathaniel stood from the swivel chair and excused himself from his muse’s company.

  “Before you go, Mr. Cauliflower,” Lucas asked. “I have to ask you something. You’ve lived seven lives. When you inspired me, you looked as you do at the present. Have you always looked the way you do? In every single one of your lives, have you always had a bald head, glasses and suspenders?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “No, in fact I looked vastly different in all of my lives. I had different hairstyles, features, and went by different names. In the afterlife, however, I inevitably, between every life, looked the way I do currently. I suppose you could say that with my lives led, and of the incongruities, Management needed an element of consistency.”

  “That has to be disorienting, you know?” Lucas asked.

  “I suppose I’ve gotten used to it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cauliflower, for the guitar pick,” Lucas told him, “thank you for being my muse and for being there for Gabriel.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Mr. Richardson.”

  “And hey, if you see Annette around, tell her to stop by.”

  “I’ll certainly do my best.”

  As Nathaniel left Lucas’ office, Lucas turned to the thunderstorm he had been watching earlier. Nathaniel realized that he had not given him his assigned envelopes. He placed them into the postbox as he had habitually done for Generations. Postbox after postbox, Nathaniel had delivered the envelopes to the rest of the Nine Greatest Muses, settling on Annette’s office.

  He stepped inside her empty cathedral walking close to the dry erase board.

  She had made considerable progress in her detective work with the Thunderstorm Man. The last time he had seen the board, only dates of thunderstorms had been listed around the perimeter, and the center was left blank. Since he had seen it last, Annette had matched pictures of three nameless individuals to three thunderstorms. Beside each name had been a numbered violet envelope starting with “9” ending with “7.” What perturbed Nathaniel the most was a recent photograph of him that had been placed in the middle, with lines connecting him to the three victims! Fastened beside his photograph was the invitation that he had given to Fiona shortly after the colored pegs had fallen. Its wax seal was broken.

  Oh how Nathaniel wished he could get inside Annette’s mind! Even though she had Mrs. Slocum’s memories, Miss Redmond was inside somewhere, tinkering at this project. It concerned him that, even though his picture was smack-dab in the middle of it, she was not consulting him with its vague details.

  Annette’s office folded and unfolded depositing her into her swivel chair.

  “Mr. Cauliflower,” she said after seeing him. “I suppose you and I need to have a chat.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Slocum,” Nathaniel said, looking at his own photograph. In the years that he had imagined himself to be a father, he had never pictured himself one that could not have been trusted. But he had supposed that not all fathers could be the heroes that their children idolized. Some parents, no matter how hard they try to win their children, are looked at with suspicion.

  He scowled at Mrs. Slocum adding, “I suppose we do.”

  CHAPTER 9: A NARRATIVE EXPRESSED BY AN ACCUMULATION OF CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS

  “I see that you’re back to your old reading habits,”
Nathaniel observed from his exposed memoirs manuscript on Annette’s desk. He coolly flipped through to the details of his second life. He grimaced while spying the words “kerosene lamps” and “uncontrolled vengeance.” He quickly closed the pages.

  Annette explained, “There was a time as Lyle’s housewife, when I could read at least fifteen books in a single month. After Lyle left for work, and the housework was finished, I walked to the nearest library, immersed myself in fictional worlds, avoiding my own life.”

  “I know,” Nathaniel told her.

  “I stayed up late through the night reading at the kitchen table. Oh, how I enjoyed those quiet evening hours. When the rest of humanity was sleeping, I partook as a nocturnal bibliophile exploring the convoluted pathways of an author’s chapters!” Annette, suddenly catching herself taking almost too much delight in the prospect of a good read, changed the direction of their conversation by asking “What about you, Mr. Cauliflower. Any good books on your bookshelf?”

  “I’ve read a few.”

  “What are some of your favorites?”

  There was a small number of titles that came to mind; titles that had been the ones that he had rescued for Annette in his most recent life. He had the works which he rescued. Though he had never seized the opportunity to be friends with Annette, or to know her personally, Nathaniel read her library books in hopes of capturing who she was through the words that she had so comfortingly relied on.

  “I suppose you could say that I like any tale and how it develops,” Nathaniel offered. “The memorable stories are more than words on paper. The most intriguing stories are a client’s life when their peg is rotated. You can understand where I’m coming from, can’t you? When you were here before, as a Ninth Generation muse, you rotated your share of colored pegs in hopes of gaining better insight into the human condition.”

  “I remember rotating several pegs.” Annette nodded. “I remember Jonathan’s green peg, where I understood why he was destined to receive the violin. I recall the cream-colored polka-dotted peg of a waitress named Doris who was inspired by dropping a donut to the floor of her diner. Doris was ringing the doorbell of my ex-husband Lyle with the intention of wooing him with hand-crafted funnel cakes. I even turned Lyle’s purple peg inspiring him to answer the doorbell that Doris, with funnel cake in hand, was ringing. I remember a man named Patrick, whom I inspired by admonishing that he watch sunrises instead of sunsets. He was Lucas’ replacement. Then there was a blue-colored peg, which belonged to a bookseller named Adam Mansfield who worked in a privately owned bookshop called The Muse’s Corner. Of course, that was before Adam Mansfield and I were both reincarnated. Adam Mansfield reincarnated into the man who later became my fiancé: a handsome ice-sculptor named Adam McCloud. In the same fashion as I reincarnated into Annette Redmond. Did you know that he and I, in our new lives, found one another again underneath the light of a streetlamp one snowy Christmas Eve night? That was right after I saw you and Fiona in the graveyard. After I instinctively waved to you and you returned the wave.” Annette was lost in thought, thinking of the colored pegs that she had turned in her past employment.

  Nathaniel did not answer.

  Eventually she added “Which is why I have to turn them again.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cauliflower,” Annette told him. “I have the first three colored pegs from my violet envelopes, which you gave me, but I need access to the other pegs.”

  Nathaniel asked bluntly “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the dry erase board would it?”

  Both he and Annette looked at the dry erase board where the faces of the three victims, along with Nathaniel’s picture, were tacked.

  “You don’t recognize any of these faces?” she asked him.

  They studied the display like art students contemplating an oddly tinted relief painting.

  “No, I don’t recognize any of these faces,” Nathaniel sighed. “Should I?”

  “This right here,” Annette pointed to the picture of a middle-aged woman wearing thick black glasses whose eyes had been magnified several times over by the lenses. “This is the waitress named Doris whom I inspired in the diner with the donut.” She jabbed an index finger to the picture of a man with a comb-over and a handlebar moustache. “And this is my ex-husband Lyle from my former life.”

  Nathaniel looked closer but said nothing.

  “Lyle!” she clarified. She waved her right hand in a circular motion to help get Nathaniel’s gears to move as clearly he wasn’t seeing it.

  Nathaniel still said nothing.

  “Come on, Mr. Cauliflower. Lyle, who I inspired to answer the door while Doris was ringing the bell with the funnel cake in hand?”

  “Okay?”

  “And this individual. She was the first to disappear. Surely you remember her!” Annette tapped the picture of a young woman with a name and face that Nathaniel didn’t recognize. “You assigned me these colored pegs, Mr. Cauliflower. Doris and Lyle were my clients that you delivered to my postbox when I was a Ninth Generation muse. This third woman may have been the client that Jonas was supposed to inspire on his twenty-second envelope but took with him instead! Don’t you see?”

  “That handlebar moustache is hideous. Who couldn’t forget facial hair like that?”

  “You don’t remember reassigning the others?”

  “No,” Nathaniel shook his head. “These faces don’t mean anything to me.”

  “Even this third woman?”

  Nathaniel sighed, getting frustrated. “No, Mrs. Slocum. I don’t recognize the face of . . .” he read the victim’s name out loud, “‘Sarah Milbourne.’”

  “You assigned Jonas’ last envelope. You must have seen something about who it was or where they were from. Sarah Milbourne: disappeared on July 17th, 2005.”

  Nathaniel shook his head.

  “Who was it, then, that you assigned to Jonas? Who did he neglect?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Three of these people, Mr. Cauliflower,” Annette explained “all three of them disappeared on a day of a thunderstorm. There were eye-witnesses on those days who gave statements about a man in a black suit and tie, with grey hair, that had been seen with them! At some point during the thunderstorms, they went missing with no indication as to where or when. Empty violet envelopes were left with numbers listed on them.” She pointed to each name and corresponding envelope. “Sarah, ‘9.’ Doris, ‘8.’ Lyle, ‘7.’”

  “What are you saying, Mrs. Slocum?” Nathaniel wanted to know, looking unconvinced. “That Mr. Rothchild is out there plucking people from history?”

  “Really?” Annette scowled at his blatant skepticism.

  From Nathaniel’s perspective, even though she looked like Mrs. Slocum, there was an undeniable side of Miss Redmond that resided within her.

  “I need to turn the other pegs again, Mr. Cauliflower, to see if there truly is any connection. I’m a detective; it’s what I do! I’ve been working this case for years and the only real piece of solid evidence is you. Looking at it through my ‘Redmond’ eyes, it didn’t make sense, just a bunch of pieces that didn’t add up. But I have the advantage of knowing two of these individuals as Annette Slocum. You are my key to this padlock, Mr. Cauliflower, and if you won’t help me turn these colored pegs, I’ll find a way to do this on my own.”

  “Mrs. Slocum,” Nathaniel tried to reassure her “if Mr. Rothchild were extracting people from history, more colored pegs would have fallen.” He turned his eyes to her cathedral ceiling and to the doorway leading to the rest of the department. “Everything seems fairly quiet here to me.”

  “I would like to investigate all the same,” Annette countered. She reached in to her desk drawer taking out the three pegs, holding out the first one. “Please turn them with me, Mr. Cauliflower, so that I can prove to you the method to my madness!”

  “We don’t have time, Mrs. Slocum. We still have many more envelopes to work before we can get you to your weddi
ng.”

  Annette considered his words. “If we turn these pegs, and the others, and there’s nothing to suggest Jonas’ involvement, I’ll work as many envelopes as you want. I’ll go to my wedding day with my fiancé. But if it turns out that there is something happening, proving more pegs are about to fall, I want to stop it before it spreads.” She re-inserted the blue peg into an empty slot on her Lite-Brite saying “It’s a means to an end, Mr. Cauliflower.”

  “I suppose it is.” Nathaniel felt unsettled by this exchange. He hoped that Annette was wrong, however her frame of thinking was irrefutable. He didn’t recognize the face of Sarah Milbourne, but he couldn’t negate that the face of Sarah Milbourne didn’t mean something to Jonas.

  Annette rotated the peg counter-clockwise saying to Nathaniel, “Here we go.”

  The life of the bowling alley attendant, Luanne, arranged itself like Christmas ornaments set on parade in a delicately-strung garland of memories. Rustling red tissue paper ignited the prologue as a gift box was opened, revealing its prize.

  “Look, honey,” said a mother as she cradled her newborn in a heavy navy-blue blanket. She held a polished brass ornament in front of her and the baby. It was in the shape of a sleeping cherub on a cloud. Dangling beneath the cloud were three brass discs embossed with brief messages, which the mother read aloud to the child. “‘First Christmas,’ and then ‘Born July 16th, 2029,’ and then ‘Louis.’”

  The baby looked at the ornament with gleaming eyes. The lights on the Christmas tree beside them reflected off the brass ornament and the light bounced from the ornament to the baby’s cheeks.

  Annette voiced concern. “Louis? Did I miss something? Did we turn the wrong peg?” She looked around the client’s room for any further signs that they were reviewing the wrong client. “It should be Luanne that we’re watching, not Louis.”

  “This is Luanne,” Nathaniel told Annette.