Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  In the glass window of the billiard hall was the outline of a man in a suit and tie who casually slipped in with a closing black umbrella. Adam, who had since stood from his previous position at the pool table, looked at the dark silhouette with an understated suggestion of familiarity. When the lights and music restarted Adam was able to see the stranger in more detail. The person had white hair, cold gray eyes and a stern frown that hinted to the newcomer’s current unhappiness. The feeling of familiarity that Adam felt before was doused in a certain feeling that they had never met.

  Actually, Adam McCloud and Jonas Rothchild had not yet encountered one another in this present life. Adam had no previous memories beyond those of his current childhood or early toddler years. This updated version of Adam wasn’t aware of Jonas’ previous involvement in Annette’s and the bookseller’s affairs. Adam didn’t remember Annette’s prior heroic attempt in having rescued her own obituary from Jonas in 2012. He didn’t remember tumbling angrily with Jonas over the rain-spattered pavement of their shared apartment complex. He didn’t recall Jonas having been struck and killed by lightning and therefore was not aware that Jonas had transformed into the intentionally neglectful Tenth Generation muse. Instead, Adam was simply Adam Eustace McCloud: talented ice sculptor by trade and devoted fiancé to detective Annette Redmond.

  Unfortunately for this reincarnation of Adam, the suited man from the storm had come to use this fact to his advantage; Jonas had set out to act upon a glorious, yet mischievous, sleight of hand. But Jonas’ initial tricks were not executed without a methodically manipulative plan. The diverse implementation of his preparation had to be calculated precisely to the minutest degree. And so, instead of charging forward, Jonas simply stood. He mentally moved his metaphorical pawns across imaginary checkered black and white squares.

  Unbeknownst to the stranger’s true agenda, Adam didn’t feel threatened. He unsurprisingly assumed the stranger had come in for respite out of the rain and happened to catch eyes with Adam while doing so.

  Adam’s best man, a middle-aged athletic fellow in a dark green polo and baggy pants, wrapped an arm around the groom in a side-crippling bear hug jostling Adam’s attention. His laughing buddy was caught in a conversation in which Adam wasn’t involved.

  “Where are you, McCloud?” asked his best man. “I go through this trouble to plan party for you and you’re a million miles away.”

  “I suppose it’s the thunderstorm,” Adam told his friend while fishing for his cell phone in his jeans pants pocket. He lifted the phone to answer a call from Annette.

  “What’s her deal, brosky?” his friend asked. “Whenever a thunderstorm comes into town, you’d think it’s the end of the world for her.”

  “We have an agreement,” Adam told him. “When there’s a thunderstorm brewing, and we’re not in the same room, I’m supposed to check in.”

  “That’s an odd agreement,” he said with a laugh. “What does she have against thunderstorms?”

  “‘It’s more about who might be in the thunderstorms that she’s concerned about.” As the words had come out of his mouth, he wanted to retract the statement. Annette asked Adam never to discuss her missing person’s case, or her neurosis concerning it, to anyone. Adam bit his lip and laughed it off, blaming his babbling nonsense on the alcohol he consumed.

  He answered the phone and felt reassured by the sound of Annette’s voice. He believed that the days of checking in, while they were far apart, were soon at an end. Eventually there would be no need to verify his unknown status with her as their marriage would fuse their proximities.

  Or so that had been the plan if Jonas, in his calculating wisdom, had not entered the billiard hall on that tempestuous evening.

  In the hour that transpired, as the thunderstorm ebbed and the alcoholic accumulation intensified, the bachelor party was brought to a lofty level of inebriated masculine playfulness. All the while, Jonas sat in the corner with an untouched bottle of beer in front of him staring at Adam. He didn’t wave or acknowledge Adam with any gestures; it was the steady sinister stare in Jonas’ eyes that locked on to him. Adam wasn’t a brawny physical bar-room brawl type. Instead of rolling the sleeves of his navy blue button-up shirt to prepare for a few punches, Adam took it upon himself to keep from consuming any alcohol. He feared that it might hinder reflexes he might need in case the stranger decided to approach with malintent.

  Compared to Jonas’ grand entrance during a flash of lightning, his exit was as notable – he vanished from the table. One moment he was there. The next he wasn’t. It was as if he stepped out of the current timeline.

  Relief passed through Adam and, as it did, he found himself exhausted from the instinctual tensing of muscles. Adam inspected the table from afar noticing that the stranger hadn’t offered the waitress a tip for the beer. He approached and removed his billfold taking out a few dollars to set down on the un-bussed table. A violet envelope had been addressed to him with the name “McCloud” scribbled on the front. Adam flipped the envelope over. The number “4” had also been added. Annette had mentioned the significance of the numbered envelopes in conjunction with the Thunderstorm Man and it caused his hands to shake slightly as he lifted the flap.

  Inside the envelope was their wedding invitation. On the reverse side was another message:

  Detective Annette Redmond will be abducted on your wedding date by the person around whom her missing person case revolves. If you want to save her in time, you’ll meet me alone on the rooftop of The Muse’s Corner tomorrow at noon.

  It was signed “A friend who is on your side.”

  The rising noise that accumulated in the billiard hall receded bringing about a daunting, unnerving stillness. Despite the calling voice of his best man, Adam dropped the dollar bills on the table and, with the violet envelope and wedding invitation in hand, fled the billiard hall.

  Stars poked through patches of lingering clouds. Street lamps buzzed an orange glow as Adam’s eyes caught sight of a deserted neighboring storefront. There was a ‘For Lease’ sign in the window. Cupping his eyes on either side with his hands, Adam stared into the vacant building. Several years ago, before the proprietor named Gwendolyn Mansfield had liquidated her stock, it had been a used bookstore called The Muse’s Corner. It had sat empty ever since. It would also prove to be the spot where Jonas cold-heartedly planned to abduct him.

  *

  Adam fiddled with the piece of billiard chalk while taking a few moments to recall the rest of that evening. He went on to further explain that, “Several weeks prior to my bachelor party, I decided to change my wedding ring selection I’d picked out to something less befitting a missing person’s detective and more a pie maker. I also put down a loan deposit on that empty building for her. I was going to give her the best wedding present any groom could give his bride: I was going to give Annette the long-awaited fantasy pie shop she had frequently mentioned.”

  Nathaniel turned to Annette’s fiancé with a look of incredulity. That pie shop had been Nathaniel’s initial idea and that snake fiancé of hers had stolen it! Hearing this crushed Nathaniel’s soul. He had watched Annette and Adam from a distance for years. He had grown somewhat comfortable with the theory of their upcoming marriage and the safety it presented. But as he listened to Adam’s recanting of old memories, Nathaniel was too close to the relationship. Even though he couldn’t hold Annette the way that Adam had held her or spend meaningless minutes and hours with her throughout a lifetime as Adam had been privileged and even though Nathaniel had visualized being a loving husband to Annette and having children – the fact of the matter was Nathaniel could never have that life with her. It was an exclusive club where he had been denied membership. It was a relationship that survived healthily without Nathaniel’s involvement proving him to be obsolete in its collectiveness.

  With this thought, Nathaniel decidedly stepped away from Adam’s stories.

  The narthex of the church was a narrow lobby in the back of the sanctuary
with beveled glass windows. Though the structure of the narthex was the same, the aesthetics had depleted over the years resulting in a shadier temperament. Discarded dust-covered offertory plates were stacked by an aged, yellowed guest book and dried up ink pen. Seeing the guest book reminded Nathaniel of the ledger in the tent of the Dandelion Sisters. He recalled each of his seven visits to the Fates and how, on his last visit after he had scrawled his name with the quill, Nathaniel had intentionally scratched two lines through his last entry to break his bonds.

  The plates also brought about another distinct set of memories. During his childhood years, while having suffered the pangs of being Jonas’ younger step-brother, young Nathaniel waited in line as a miniature usher during the offertory. As he had stood by the open side doors waiting for the anthem to begin Nathaniel remembered watching, Sunday after Sunday, as Jonas had been misbehaving with his friends in the back pews.

  “You’re missing an interesting account in the sanctuary,” Fiona said from the nearest open door.

  “What does it matter how Adam became, or escaped from being, Jonas’ apprentice?” Nathaniel said with a hint of disdain.

  “It matters a great deal how Mr. Rothchild manipulated Mr. McCloud at the beginning,” Fiona offered. She slipped the rest of the way into the door. “While initially meeting with Mr. McCloud on the rooftop of The Muse’s Corner, Mr. Rothchild pretended to be you. He also had Mr. McCloud convinced that you were Miss Redmond’s missing persons culprit; that you had somehow stolen her the same way that the victims from her case files had been taken. Of course, it wasn’t long after falling into the trap that Mr. McCloud realized the lies. By the time the violin had been extracted from Jonathan’s fingertips in the motel, it was too late . . . He wanted to reach out to her. But Mr. Rothchild forced him to watch us under strict orders not to expose his identity. He threatened to do harm to Miss Redmond if her fiancé didn’t adhere.”

  Nathaniel’s focus was then on the beveled glass where he could make out the dark blotted shape of Adam in the front pews. “A play-by-play isn’t needed, thank you,” he said flatly.

  Veritably, Nathaniel didn’t need a play-by-play. What he needed was to hibernate. He wanted so badly to disappear from this state of affairs by burying himself in his work and, in the process, cram the memories of Annette into the crevice from which they had surfaced. Sadly, returning to his private sanctuary was no longer an opposite alternative. The fragmented pieces of his office rested in Purgatory like cracked shards of an unwanted porcelain. The emotionally fortified rotunda walls, which had been built to keep out Evangeline and her invading reincarnations, had been fragmented beyond repair.

  “Please talk to me, Mr. Cauliflower,” Fiona said sympathetically.

  “What else is there to say?” Nathaniel looked at Fiona. Though his words were sharp, his tone of voice was composed. “You held Annette and Lyle’s honeymoon flight in 2009 so that Adam Mansfield could board the plane at the last minute. You gave Annette Adam’s blue-colored peg when she was a Ninth Generation muse. I watched as you stitched their stories into a romance. You even brought Adam here to Annette’s first retirement party so that, if she had reincarnated, he could reincarnate with her. You caused Annette Redmond and Adam McCloud to meet under a street lamp on Christmas Eve in their new lives and I had to watch them as they developed the relationship that you, yourself, set into motion. And you have the nerve to stand here giving me a rundown on his deceitful actions as Jonas’ apprentice as if you’re still on his side, rooting for him!” Nathaniel stared at her intently. “You knew how many lives I’d suffered to find Evangeline. You knew how much I’d yearned to be with her over the decades and throughout various reincarnations to evoke that one secluded evening we had in 1808. You knew how I felt about Annette and yet you were uninterruptedly an advocate for their union!”

  The acidity in his voice deflated. He physically buckled under the weight of this stress and leaned his forehead against the window’s glass melting into an overwhelming defeat. Nathaniel closed his eyes. “I’m at the lowest I’ve ever felt. I can’t do this anymore, Fiona. There’s no sense in trying to cling to something that I know Management doesn’t want for me.” He gave a long sigh and spoke in a volume no louder than a whisper. “I give up.”

  “Words that no muse should hear from anyone,” Fiona quietly responded.

  Nathaniel was too inflexible with hopelessness to move.

  “My intentions to bring Mr. Mansfield into Mrs. Slocum’s life were in your best interest,” Fiona started to explain. She paused for a brief moment to allow a response from Nathaniel but he was too wrapped up in his misery to answer. She went on. “When Mrs. Slocum was indoctrinated as a modern day Ninth Generation muse I felt confident that, after you had waited a healthy length of time for her official arrival, you would introduce yourself properly to your childhood friend; that you would perhaps put an end to the avoidant silent silliness. Instead, you ducked into the restroom and kept yourself apart from her furthering the circumvention. As you and I both know, you ducked out of sight whenever she entered a room. You made more of an effort to sidestep her than you did to be a part of her life. I knew that you loved her but I also knew that you didn’t appreciate the effort that Management went through to return the reincarnation of Evangeline. So I took steps to implement an alternate love affair for Mrs. Slocum. Not out of nastiness but to vicariously spur you into action. I figured that if you noticed she was with someone else you would fight to tell her how you felt.

  “To my surprise, you did nothing. You allowed their relationship to flourish and, as a result, you were broken-hearted. You punished her with sixty-eight violet envelopes at the end of her musing term. I thought you would be inspired to act upon your feelings in a constructive way then, but no. You avoided her at her retirement party. You were so close in meeting her, Mr. Cauliflower. All you had to do was stay at the table with library books. If Mrs. Slocum would have stayed, met you, and taken the role as my replacement . . .” Fiona shook her head. “But Mrs. Slocum didn’t stay. She reincarnated. You let her walk out that door as if she was just another muse when I knew she meant more to you!”

  Fiona kept on with her story. “Management and I gave you another chance, you see. It was Christmas Eve and the snow was falling heavily upon a graveyard. As you and I meandered through the field of gravestones, I knew that Miss Redmond was watching us closely. You had the opportunity then to intervene. You could have introduced yourself to her on that night and been a part of her life but you didn’t. She waved at you, you waved at her, and that was it. Management and I gave you every occasion to reconnect with her but you intentionally neglected the favors. I’ve never understood why.”

  His eyes opened at this but his forehead remained stuck to the glass.

  “I suppose that’s one of humanity’s most basic follies: letting feelings go unspoken. Take a look at Harriet, for instance: she died of a torn aorta before she could tell her friend Harold her true feelings. And Mr. Richardson: he lost Gabriel during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center before they were able to express their emotions. I suppose take my story as well . . .”

  Fiona grew complacent. “There was a young man during the Salem Witch Trials, Alexander Thibodaux, whom I loved dearly. I never expressed my adoration. I want to say we were in love, but we only batted eyes at one another a few times prior. It was nothing that you could constitute as a shared appreciation. I, like you, was given talents that were considered the work of the Devil. When Alexander’s father accused me of witchcraft I stood trial and was ultimately sentenced to death by burning. In the end, because of my neglectfulness, Alexander was brutally attacked while defending me in the trials. He didn’t know of my unspoken affections and I wonder if he would be alive if I had expressed my feelings. I wonder if we would have blissfully lived the rest of our lives apart from the colonists. But my words went unspoken. Alexander’s father forced his son to light the pyre. And as the fire cooked the straw beneath my
feet I watched as Alexander was promptly murdered for his supposed conspiracy to save me. As snow fell on the ground that day, also collecting on the blank expression on Alexander’s lifeless face, I died. After three thousand pegs I was given one that sent me back to Alexander. But I couldn’t hold him. I couldn’t speak to him. I watched his life race through the years that he had been alive each time ending in the fateful moment between him and the angry Salem Puritan mob. I gave the colored peg to you for safekeeping and haven’t reviewed his life since. My thoughts went to him as they often do but no amount of wishful thinking could bring him to me the way that he was.

  “What I have left of him is a portrait on my office wall and an old faded parchment that contained a love letter I meant to give to him three days before the trial. Mrs. Slocum graciously brought Alexander back to me for her Ninth Generation retirement party but it wasn’t the same. You see, though he was present at the party it was a mirage. It was as if revisiting the yellow-colored peg. We couldn’t touch. When he opened his mouth to speak he didn’t have a voice. He couldn’t hear or understand me due to his ghost being deaf and dumb. I couldn’t communicate how much I loved him. And then he was gone. He faded with the other retirement illusions.

  “You at least told Mrs. Slocum how you felt about her. Expressing those feelings gets it out there into the open. Imagine how painful it feels, Mr. Cauliflower, to love someone and to know that, no matter how much you want to, you can never tell them. And what’s worse that you can never, like me, save them when they needed rescuing the most.”

  “Annette doesn’t need my help,” Nathaniel told Fiona. His gaze was toward the window looking past Adam and the muses to the visually distorted Lite-Brite.