Annette looked up from her attempt at a lattice crust and to Nathaniel. He added a pinch of pepper and seemed to stir in his own melancholic memories while circulating the soup’s consistency.
*
The memory Nathaniel remembered while stirring the soup was this: Evangeline and Nathaniel sat in the light of the kerosene lamp. She was considerably older than he and he, despite having his old memories, was still inside the young body of a boy named Yuri Abramovich.
“The estate was moved from Paris at the turn of the century,” Evangeline told him on that night. Her eyes studied the roses on the table as she recounted the past events. “Brick by brick: all of the portraits, all of the furniture, all of the memories. In the beginning, the estate looked as beautiful as you remembered it. Throughout the years, it’s fallen apart. It’s been one hundred and thirteen years since I saw your face in 1808. But I see it in my dreams, watching over me as I sleep.” She showed him the copy of Canterbury Tales. “This book is what I was reading when we were young. Every year around this time I read it on the anniversary of your death, in memory of you.”
“One hundred and thirteen years . . .” Nathaniel pondered in Yuri’s Russian accent. “You’ve been alive all these years? How old are you?”
“Oh,” Evangeline looked away, bringing a frail hand up to her wrinkled lips. “I’m old, Nathaniel. So old. Each day I wish it was my last so I can escape this flesh and reside in Heaven where I envision myself eternally young. Each passing day, month, year and decade, I wake older and older. Every time I close my eyes, even for a second or two, I see a circus tent on a field of dandelions with its front flap open . . . darkness inside. In my dreams, my feet are made of stone. I have no idea who or what is inside, but it calls to me in every dream, whispering my name.” Evangeline seemed anxious by this lingering vision. It was evident from the anguished sound of her voice choked with emotion and tears.
A cold shiver ran through Nathaniel as he heard this.
Evangeline composed herself adding: “There were rumors of your coming here to America as a Russian immigrant, of your kerosene lamps. How I hoped that I would see you again. I hoped that, upon seeing you, the vision of that persistent tent would dwindle, if even in slightest.”
“And has it dwindled?”
Evangeline slowly closed her eyes. For a brief moment it seemed as if she noticed the tent, but a serene look eventually spread. Nathaniel assumed now that he was here, her thoughts and dreams would be free of the Sisters’ dandelions. Evangeline remained in this position, succumbing to a sound slumber.
Nathaniel removed Canterbury Tales from her lap and gently covered her with the heavy quilt. He felt cheated by the turn of events and equally enraged that Evangeline had felt the same. How he hated the Sisters but how he was also grateful for them. If the Sisters had not come to him in the alley, then Evangeline would be suffering nightmares. As much of a disease that the Sisters had been, they were also the cure. In Nathaniel’s mind the negative and positive cancelled out making their purpose annoyingly futile. Despite how puzzling the Sisters had been, Nathaniel’s true enemy was the painter that had murdered him. The hatred toward his master filled him with such breathless seething anger! Nathaniel wondered if the painter had suffered the same fate as Evangeline. He wondered if the painter was alive and perpetually aging in his own gruesome manner.
“If anyone has to pay for what’s been done to you, it’s the painter,” Nathaniel had whispered.
Evangeline opened her eyes which resounded with chilling terror.
“What is it, Evangeline?” Nathaniel asked, alert to her needs. “Tell me what’s troubling you?”
Evangeline slowly shook her head.
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” he had asked.
“Please, Monsieur Cauliflower, don’t dig any deeper. Stay here with me in my house. I can give you a life of luxury. I can provide anything for you with a wave of my hand. All that I have can be yours. The only thing I ask is not to go searching for answers . . . for him!”
“He’s here in America, isn’t he?” Nathaniel asked. His voice was quiet but menacing. “Here in the city?”
Despite her inner protests, Evangeline barely nodded. Mournful tears streamed her cheeks as she wailed. Talking about the painter brought Evangeline pain. It hurt him seeing her in such agony. Nathaniel soothingly hushed her and tenderly stroked her gray hair. He removed one of the roses from the vase and held it between them. He tickled it lightheartedly against her nose. Evangeline didn’t smile nor did she show signs that his gesture made her happy.
All she had said was: “Promise me you won’t go after your painter, Nathaniel. Promise me that you’ll stay safe inside my home. Together we can live the rest of our days. Promise me that, whatever happens, you won’t let the darkness in your heart overtake you.”
“I promise,” Nathaniel had told her. Though he knew his words were a lie, Nathaniel said them to her anyway. These words brought about a smile on Evangeline’s face and temporarily comforted him from the heavy desire for uncontrolled vengeance.
He sat with Evangeline for at least an hour longer patiently and silently watching as she fell into an idyllic slumber. Nathaniel studied her face, the shape of her jaw and the line of her exposed, wrinkled neck as it extended to her left shoulder all the way down to her arm and eventual hand that had earlier waved him to move forward. There was a subtle occasional breath that could be heard from her partially opened lips as she slept. Evangeline was a shadow of her former self, but he found her as stunningly beautiful as she had been in 1808.
Nathaniel shifted his focus onto the roses in the vase and eventually settled on the iridescent kerosene lamp he had delivered. The numbered zero could still be seen on his retina. It bothered him in knowing that, even though the prophecy came to fruition, and even though Evangeline’s dreams were healed, Nathaniel remained inflicted. The Sister’s prophecy hadn’t truly come to pass, at least not yet. It was then that, as he thought this to himself, a flash of white lightening tore beyond the window’s glass. He crossed to the window where he noticed the sky was blotted with approaching storm clouds. The yard’s grass could be seen as the lightning flashed. Sitting in the middle of the yard was a second glowing kerosene lamp which had not been there prior. Farther away was a third lamp which was followed by a fourth. A fifth lamp was placed even farther.
With the storm fast approaching, Nathaniel wrote Evangeline a brief note stating that there was unfinished business to attend to in his life as Yuri Abramovich. He fled down the hall, descended the grand staircase and found himself at the estate’s foyer door. As he stood on the veranda, Nathaniel gained better perspective. The kerosene lamps were placed in such an inexplicable way as to suggest a path to the city. As he contemplated how this could be possible, he heard a voice behind him.
“Can I drive you, Mr. Abramovich?”
Nathaniel spun to the chauffeur at the door. “Please,” Nathaniel said in his Russian accent “I have to follow the kerosene lamps.”
“The kerosene lamps, sir? What kerosene lamps?”
Nathaniel turned his eyes to the road where the kerosene lamps showed the appropriate direction. Oddly enough, the kerosene lamps were meant for Nathaniel’s eyes only.
The chauffeur obliged regardless, taking Nathaniel past the kerosene lamps that only his passenger had been able to see. He retraced the path of the supposed “evenly situated lamps” to the city.
Rain punched hard on the surrounding vehicles, streets and buildings but the fire in the kerosene lamps seemed unaffected. As they passed each lamp, Nathaniel counted in his head. They passed Nathaniel’s tenement building and drove by his shop where the chauffeur had earlier retrieved him. A final kerosene lamp was seen sitting on the stone steps of a nondescript three story townhouse. The windows were dark and proved no signs of waking life.
Nathaniel thanked the chauffeur for his time and started to exit the vehicle.
The chauffeur stopped him by saying, “Mr. A
bramovich, I don’t know what’s happening here tonight and I’m not sure what you’ve seen that brought us to this location, but I urge you to think of Mademoiselle Evangeline and her love for you.”
Nathaniel considered the chauffeur’s words carefully. “I won’t be gone but a minute,” he reassured his driver.
The storm hovered above them in wait for the showdown between the painter and his apprentice. As Nathaniel approached the door to the townhouse, he was not expecting it to be already cracked slightly ajar for him. He lifted the glowing kerosene lamp from the front steps and carried it with him.
The noise of thunder and rain was muted as Nathaniel crossed through the darkened foyer. It was most definitely the home of the painter. Every wall was plastered by framed landscapes and faces that his master had painted. It even reeked of the painter’s sweat that had secreted out of him while having slept in his nightly drunken stupors. Nathaniel spotted a flight of stairs with a back window which overlooked the stormy sky. Sitting on the top landing was the unleashed greyhound that he had seen two years earlier. It whimpered upon seeing Nathaniel. Its eyes reflected the dim lamp light. As Nathaniel approached the stairs, the greyhound nudged its head up further into the house. Nathaniel followed close in the wake of the dog’s footsteps. His ascent was accented by flashes of lightning.
He found a room filled with familiar faces: the portraits that Nathaniel had painted, and hidden, in the Parisian attic rafters. They lined the four walls of the tiny gallery, staring inward. In the center of the room, growing from the floor, was a patch of dandelions. Above the dandelions was a figure who stared out the window to the storm.
“Here we are again,” the figure said to Nathaniel. “In the same room with the same faces looking over us.” Somehow the painter had known his long-awaited apprentice was coming. The murderer was older than Evangeline and resembled a rotted skeleton canvas with flesh barely hanging on to the bodily frame underneath. “You look different than I remember,” his painter told him. “I suppose I look different as well.”
Nathaniel held the kerosene lamp aloft. “I’ve come to ask you a question.”
“Have you?”
“Why did you murder me?”
“Oh,” the painter smiled menacingly, “for the paintings. They were unlike any other paintings I’d seen. The technique was almost too perfect, flawless! I knew that if I murdered you and sold them as my own, I would be well off. After you died, I sold them to the highest bidders, sending them each on their own separate ways. The buyers offered handsome sums for the paintings which led me to an early retirement. But with the sales, my nightly dreams worsened. When I closed my eyes, I saw a circus tent resting upon a field of dandelions. And every year since your murder, the paintings mysteriously, on their own volition, were in my possession. I came to learn that each patron had suffered their own demises due to their purchases. They bequeathed the cursed paintings to me in their wills. Year after year the paintings accumulated until tonight when the final painting appeared.” He crossed to one of the walls where he introduced to Nathaniel the painting of the aged Evangeline from 1808. “I knew that, upon accumulating this canvas, you wouldn’t be far behind.”
Nathaniel studied Evangeline’s portrait, feeling a sense of sorrow.
“It’s unnatural to have lived as long as myself and Evangeline,” the painter told him.
“We’ve been punished enough,” Nathaniel said to Evangeline’s painting.
“That we have.”
“I often wondered what we would say to one another when our paths would cross,” the painter told him. “What questions would be asked, what venomous insults would be spat, or who would end up killing who first?”
“What you’re describing?” Nathaniel chided, “It’s unhealthy to live with that kind of pessimism.”
“And what are you filled with, boy?” The painter sneered. “What does Evangeline’s beloved ‘Monsieur Cauliflower’ feel within him?” Before Nathaniel had time to react, the painter snatched the kerosene lamp from Nathaniel’s hands and tossed it across the room. The glass shattered. Flames stretched from the wick to the floor and then to the walls. A hellacious blaze engulfed the room.
Nathaniel scrambled to flee.
The painter had other plans for him. Surprisingly agile, he shoved Nathaniel to the ground, pinning him face up from the floorboards. Nathaniel tried to free himself but the painter’s body was encompassing. His enemy’s hands were brought to Nathaniel’s neck and he squeezed hard. Nathaniel fought to regain a sense of power but was not able to breathe. Thusly he was not able to fight. He looked into the hollow eyes of his painter. The portrait of Evangeline stared judgingly at him in the surrounding flames.
“It will be done in a moment,” the painter told his apprentice. “You’ll die. I’ll die. The paintings will burn and this nightmare of our long, overly drawn out hatred and misery will cease!”
The passion play of Yuri Abramovich and Nathaniel J. Cauliflower did cease. As Nathaniel stared at his painter’s face, the zero digit that had been engrained into his retina faded. All that was left of his life were seven brief seconds as the flames consumed the room, and the two men, who took the blight of the Dandelion Sisters with them.
*
Annette and Nathaniel survived their sharing of the kitchen. With the kitchen cleaned from their mess, Nathaniel showed Annette through the velvet curtain to the rotunda office past the 2,307 kerosene lamps and portraits.
Before she exited through his office door, she asked “Have you had the chance to order those colored pegs from Management yet? The ones for Jonathan, Doris, Lyle?”
“I have.”
“And?”
Nathaniel didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. “I’ve reviewed them. No signs of Mr. Rothchild.”
“I trust you, Mr. Cauliflower. If anything does present itself, promise me that you’ll tell me.”
“I promise.”
“Like you promised Evangeline you wouldn’t visit the painter?”
“That was different,” he explained.
With that, he shooed her out of his office and closed himself into his constricting obsessions. He studied the portraits and remembered his second life. Nathaniel looked at Evangeline’s portrait and said, “I lost you, Mademoiselle Evangeline. Someday I’ll find you again, in a timeline that’s agreeable to us both, and you’ll remember me. Even if I have to search for seven more lifetimes; I’ll find you.”
*
After Annette left Nathaniel’s office, she stopped to check on Lucas. He was standing in his office of nine thunderstorms with Icarus. Their backs were turned to Annette but their words were audible.
“I had a good time on the beach today,” Lucas told Icarus. “Thank you for keeping me company.”
“Here,” Icarus removed the black hoodie and wrapped it around Lucas. “This’ll keep you warm in this cold office.”
Lucas told him. “I know this hoodie well.”
Icarus kissed Lucas affectionately on his forehead and left the office passing by Annette. They shared an untrusting look. She watched Lucas in his office as he straightened the black hoodie. He crossed to one of the porches and looked out onto an approaching storm. There was a licorice-like shade in his eyes. It worried her.
By the time Lucas turned to the doorway, Annette was gone. He didn’t know she had been standing there. He wondered, as he often did, why Annette hadn’t been to see him yet. There came an unfamiliar rumble that he had not previously heard, and a flash of lightning that he had not previously seen. There came a sound of plastic colliding with wood somewhere beside the desk. Lucas looked to his feet where he spotted a single purple colored peg resting by its lonesome.
“Where did you come from?” Lucas asked, thinking perhaps it had come from his Lite-Brite. He bent down and picked it up turning it this way and that. He considered a startling alternative to where the peg had fallen from and shifted his stare to the lately developing storm. An arctic breeze, which ha
d not previously been felt, ripped through one of the porches. In an effort to keep warm, he zipped the hoodie and positioned the hood over his head obscuring his face. A new storm approached in all nine of the horizons. Thunder roared as if nine different run-away trains were derailing. Electric fingernails scratched with the ferocity of nine different power grids gone haywire. Lucas couldn’t help but to smile at the understated amendment in the atmosphere, welcoming it almost a little too devotedly.
CHAPTER 14: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MUSES
Though Nathaniel had never been a father, he sometimes imagined his pretend children opening their fictional eyes on Christmas morning. He imagined being forced from his slumbers at his children’s attempt to wake him before sunrise. He envisioned himself sipping a cup of coffee as his children would excitedly tear apart the multi-colored wrapping paper, nodding as they would have fun with the received toys. Nathaniel pictured himself shoving the discarded balls of used paper into trash bags while recalling the memories. Having never been a dad, and never having the opportunity to share such happy moments with any family in such a capacity, Nathaniel made up for it by reveling in the taxing, yet equally worthwhile, task of executing retirement parties for his muses.
The retirement party for the Nine Greatest Muses began with the Westminster chime from a limited edition Steinway grandfather clock which had blocked the closed waiting room door. Each muse’s eyes opened with the striking of the clock’s twelfth hour. The women muses were gifted garment boxes with evening gowns. The men were proud owners of freshly pressed black tuxes, bow ties and cummerbunds. Though they were in their respective offices, the spaces in which they occupied had been sectioned by opaque theatre scrims. Wearing the established dress attire, the muses pulled open their drapes. There was a distinct separation from the muses’ workspace to the extravagant retirement party that awaited them.
Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles Page 20