Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  The tree engulfed in shadow. Nathaniel paused, for fear of a gaffe in movement.

  Conditions had radically distorted resulting in the blue-tinted surrounding icicles to progress inward and bite at the trunk like a thousand axes bent on dismantling the tree. Adam could be seen near the top but, like Nathaniel, was temporarily immobilized by the shifted gravity of the hardwood as the icicles chopped the husk.

  Holding on to the branches, Nathaniel looked out through the summit of pine needles. The foliage was thinning and showed the tree top.

  Jonas stood at the tip like a perched gargoyle clenching the squirming Annette in his claws. A thunderstorm was approaching above the tree top crown.

  “He wants me to come and save her,” Nathaniel thought to himself. “He does! Jonas wants me to join him up there to reclaim her as my own as I’ve always done.” Why else would Jonas go to such trouble to construct an abnormally high tree to keep her from Nathaniel’s immediate reach? If he wanted Annette dead, she’d be dead. Nathaniel knew that, if he had played into Jonas’ hand, their insane cycle would travel the same destructive trail. Nathaniel needed to rescue Annette out of his common modus operandi in such a way that Jonas wouldn’t expect.

  Luanne, who looked to be in shock, was between Nathaniel and Adam. She wasn’t considering the Christmas ornament that gamely dangled from her finger by the red strap. She was noticeably paralyzed due to an observable vertigo that kept her movements in check. The tree was in a critical status because Luanne’s spirit was on the brink of collapse. Her insecurities were causing the promising sapling to crumble into ligneous twigs.

  If Nathaniel was going to rescue Annette from the falling woody perennial he needed to save Luanne first. It was the best, if not only opportunity. With determinative gumption, in spite of the retrogressive tree, Nathaniel turned his eyes from Annette’s plight and mounted several branches toward Luanne.

  He met her gaze and took her shaky hands in his. Nathaniel kept Luanne’s stare focused on him as he asked, “What do you have there in your hand?” Luanne’s eyes reflexively looked at the ornament and darted to Nathaniel. She was visibly more concerned about falling than focusing on the ornament. But Nathaniel was determined to corral her apprehensions and transform them.

  He went on in saying to her, “Can I let you in on a little secret, Luanne? I’m not much for heights either. Especially large pine trees that erupt without notice. I know you rode this branch as this tree jutted from the ground so you didn’t have the opportunity to witness the ornaments. However, I know that you saw something in Phillip’s story: a moment with your children. As I climbed this tree, I listened to the ornaments. They sang about the astonishing things that’ll happen to you in the future. They attested that what you saw, what you’ve been hoping for, will happen!”

  Luanne shook her head disbelievingly.

  “I know,” Nathaniel nodded. “How can you have blind faith in a promising future if you don’t see for yourself how it’ll play out in advance?” He kept his gaze and said earnestly, “The future isn’t as bleak as we fear it’ll be, Luanne. Yes, it feels as if we’ve run through our own ordeals that, frankly, appear to be punishments. I get that. Completely. My life, or the past seven of them total, has been nothing but trial after trial after trial. I’ve recently considered that maybe it’ll mean something. Even if I may not believe it’s right for me. Do you understand?”

  Though the pop-up book was coming to an end, Nathaniel allowed time for Luanne to respond.

  “I think so,” Luanne answered.

  “I’m going to make a pact with you, Luanne. From here on out, I’m going to believe that positive things can, and will, happen! Even if I have to make them happen myself when everything else is falling apart, even when the darkest days come and it feels like there’s no hope, I’m going to find something, anything, to keep me moving forward. Let’s both do it. Let’s both promise, right here in these thorny needles, to let go of the past and think of the amazing things that can happen to us if we at least try?”

  He lifted Luanne’s hands bringing the ornament to her eyes.

  “Let this ornament signify the future . . . a positive future with more ornaments signifying hope.”

  Luanne looked askance at Nathaniel for a moment. And then her sorrowful eyes were clear with recognition.

  “Do you really think I can be happy?” she said. As she held the ornament closer to her, Luanne could feel Nathaniel affectionately patting the top of her hands.

  Nathaniel had been too intent to inspire Luanne that he had neglected to realize that his hands were sticky with drying tree sap. Thankfully, this didn’t deter Nathaniel’s speech from taking perfect aim like an arrow through a bull’s eye.

  The tree righted, ablaze with lights and carols as if a fuse box had been tripped to restart. The encircling icicles melted into an arctic membrane of harmless snowflakes which overlay the branches. Luanne, all smiles, released Nathaniel and receded into the lights and sounds with her ornament, intentionally immersing into her timeline. Luanne quickly aged before him until she became an older woman with a Christmas tree sweater. Luanne, Nathaniel realized, ultimately renovated into the ornament vendor that he and Annette had initially taken the ornament from.

  Nathaniel thought about the pact that he made to Luanne and felt optimistically liberated.

  Nathaniel raised his eyes to the tree top. He didn’t save Annette. He gave Adam the chance to save his fiancé. It wasn’t that Nathaniel felt that he was incapable. It wasn’t that he felt hopeless about this situation as he had in the church. In a point of fact, Nathaniel knew that he would never be happy if he followed the same hazardous routine. Clutching onto the branches, he felt it passable about delegating the responsibility and forgoing his tediously ensconced pursuit.

  He did not present them with a silver tea set for their pending nuptials. He did not gift them with China dishes or a pre-paid card to a high-end home furnishing store. Alternatively, Nathaniel supplied them with the solid ground on which their success could be planted in these final chaotic moments of evacuation.

  His donation was presented by the following: Multiple helical-turned pop-up books spiraled into closure. The details of the previous rescues filled the snow-covered well, which held Luanne’s supercilious tree, as if it were a clogged drain. Distinct violin music erupted from the attic’s crevices and bounced on hovering solar systems to distant star clusters within an expanding universe. Wafting through the music was the aroma of freshly-baked funnel cakes and the new-car smell of rubbed-down leather car seats. Colorful client images created a living patchwork quilt of pasts, presents and futures which collectively eddied with multilayered insights.

  Rising colored pegs acted as hands at a revolving potter’s wheel in molding the detonations into a single, clumped form. The worlds coalesced in reversed acceleration collapsing into a spiraling singularity. In this process of increased density the plane reformed to a spiraling disc.

  In this gravitational disorder, Adam was able to free Annette from the string of Christmas lights. Jonas launched himself at Adam but was restricted by a falling stained-glass window which banned admittance as it landed to the ground. More stained-glass windows appeared and were accompanied by wooden church pews and bellowing organ pipes. When the Greatest Muses in History appeared in this setting, it was obvious that the sanctuary’s pop-up book was also shutting. Nathaniel was relieved as the men banded together to bind Jonas.

  He could see Annette and Adam. She urged him to stay in the church and wait for her while she sorted everything out in the afterlife. Her fiancé protested but surrendered.

  The department was reconstructed. The hallway walls, doorless offices, desks, postboxes along with piles of white and violet envelopes, all trotted the repairing slope of the agency’s floor. Energy-efficient light bulbs burned brightly. Nathaniel’s luscious feasts from the botched retirement party returned. The painted portraits of the muses, the kerosene lamps, repaired library books and t
he encyclopedia of destinies realigned in the rotunda of Nathaniel’s seven obsessions. Steady crashing waves from Icarus’ private Grecian beach could be heard as well as the rumbling approaching gales in Lucas’ Hall of Thunderstorms.

  When the department mended, bringing an end to the reversals, a well-known tranquility that Nathaniel had needed was presented. Everything that the department stood for, and had achieved by way of its inspirations, returned to its former splendor with the muses, their detainee Jonas Rothchild, and public speaker Edgar Allen Poe, to inspect the wonders.

  Fiona smiled and said, “We’re home.”

  Indeed, they were home. It was a feeling that Nathaniel equated with revisiting the boarded, vacant farm house in his adult years. Though the department didn’t have the same musty smell as the farm house, Nathaniel couldn’t help but to think of it at present. This hallway and its offices was his home and, while it was meant to give him a sense of safekeeping, Nathaniel knew that it wasn’t Annette’s. With the timelines corrected and Jonas apprehended he knew it was a short matter of time before she was to leave this “vacation house” and discard Nathaniel, who was one of the visited cottage’s bygone antiquities.

  CHAPTER 27: WHAT WAS SALVAGED

  A blue and white Copeland Spode pitcher and wash basin was used as Nathaniel dipped his cupped hands into the cold purified spring water. He splashed his face. Looking at himself in an antique tri-fold vanity mirror with distressed glass, he found that the cuts, scrapes and bruises had healed without scarring.

  Fiona was waiting patiently in the reflection.

  Taking a white cotton face towel from a pewter hook, he carefully wiped his face dry. He reached for his cracked glasses and fit them on. Nathaniel turned to face Fiona with the towel which he used to finish drying his hands. He wore the untucked, sweat-stained v-neck undershirt with Evangeline’s opal necklace around his neck.

  They stood in Nathaniel’s private office washroom which was decidedly colorless with its white marble countertops, pallid cabinets and pasty honeycomb floor tiles. Hints of cerulean came from the wash basin, the tinted glass of the shower doors and Fiona’s baby-blue pants suit.

  “You’ve not said a word to anyone since we’ve arrived. It’s been a relatively protracted interval. Can you help me understand?” Fiona agreeably asked. When Nathaniel didn’t answer, she said “This has to conclude, Mr. Cauliflower. The Nine Greatest Muses in History no longer serve a purpose. They’re anxious to return home to their own lives and their own timelines.”

  “You know where the ivory boxes are as well as I do,” Nathaniel presented. He placed the used towel on the hook and met Fiona in the doorway. “You don’t need me to officiate the farewell ceremonies, do you? Have them put their objects inside the ivory boxes. Seal the chests in the vault behind the mural in the conference room. Have them retire. If they’re insistent on a warm meal, the retirement party food is still set. The victuals are roasting.”

  He brushed past the Head Muse to the main rotunda of his office where a mainstay of daylight transferred through the oculus to his desk, water cooler, inbox, three Lite-Brite boards and the nearest ring of visible kerosene lamps.

  “Some would like to say goodbye to their caretaker,” were Fiona’s words as she heedlessly followed. “A certain red-headed missing person’s detective turned pie maker, for instance.”

  “There’s nothing that I have to say to her,” Nathaniel announced as he busied himself with executing minor maintenance to the kerosene lamps.

  He refilled the kerosene in those that had been absorbed. He replaced the used wicks and greased the knobs so that, when revolved, the soundless process of igniting each lamp produced an equally noiseless afterglow. With the outer band of kerosene lamps burning, the circumference of Nathaniel’s office expanded to show the alcoves that held the encyclopedia of destinies, collection of writing pens, portraits of muses and glass-faced library book cabinet. He walked the office making sure that everything was in its place. One of the portrait frames was off by a centimeter and, with scrupulous eyes, he tilted it into place. In his typical obsessive compulsive behavior, Nathaniel assured that his pens were laid pristinely parallel to their ink-filled companions.

  Nathaniel asked, “What are you going to do with Jonas?”

  “When the retirement party ends, we’ll do what we always do. Mr. Rothchild will pass through the waiting room, at which point he’ll walk through the far door and reincarnate into a new life, a better life, where his soul can eventually learn from mistakes that he’s made.”

  Nathaniel shook his head.

  The exit, to which all muses walked through, regardless if their destination was Heaven or reincarnation, had been the same “asphodel door” that tormented the door maker at Sisyphus Hill. When the original muses had retired, the waiting room door had been commissioned as a muse’s specific departure gate at the retirement of their term. It was its divergent ability to transform a soul, transitioning it from “dead” to “alive” and vice versa. It had been obvious early on how safe-guarded it was to be kept, considering its secure location at the end of a soundly fortressed waiting room. While the door was depended on by the department, Nathaniel didn’t trust what it had to offer. In his experience, it was a temperamental fixture both erring on the side of good or bad and cloaked in ambiguity.

  “And where would you send him, Mr. Cauliflower, if given a choice to decide Mr. Rothchild’s fate?”

  “To the warehouse in Purgatory where his memories will be wiped. But also where his soul will be deconstructed completely. It’s been proven, after multiple reincarnations already, that no matter where you send him he’ll return to the same devilish core. Releasing him into the wilds of an added unsystematic life for the innovation of his soul is sending him on another fool’s errand.” Nathaniel looked at Fiona and added, “But that’s who you are, isn’t it Fiona? Giving everyone a second chance? Believing that they’ll find the goodness that you see in them? Why do you believe in his potential?”

  Fiona gave a questioning look. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s for the reason that I’ve seen too many miracles in my day demonstrating otherwise.”

  “And he’s currently residing where, pray tell?”

  “With Harriet who’s keeping watch.”

  Nathaniel said gravely, “Oh no . . .”

  *

  Strictly, Harriet and Jonas sat in the Hall of Thunderstorms listening to the differentiating clouds and dissimilar tempests as they rumbled through the nine archways. Some breezes were warm while others brought Harriet, who was sitting alert in a swivel chair, to shiver slightly and squeeze her already intentionally strapped-tight blouse.

  Jonas, who sat in his own swivel chair, restrained by a set of pinched handcuffs behind his back, didn’t seem bothered by the chill. He opened his mouth to speak but Harriet cut him off before words were spoken.

  “Don’t start, scumbag,” she interjected.

  *

  The more Nathaniel thought about Fiona’s choice in having no-nonsense Harriet watch Jonas, he understood why.

  Nathaniel circled the office and was satisfied with the placement of his things. He sat at the desk with both hands on the surface.

  “I knew who I was before this happened,” Nathaniel explained. “My life was heading in a direction. Admittedly, this was a direction that dissociated me from everyone. Including Annette. Though it wasn’t a perfect existence, it was comfortable. The dust has settled and here we are starting afresh in a daring domain. I don’t know how to live in this new-fangled situation, Fiona. I’m mindful of how I’m expected to feel: excited and grateful for opportunities and needing to embrace the chance to make my soul mean something. I’ve helped rescue multiple timelines and also brought Annette back safe and sound, as you’ve asked. I know that, if I really wanted to, I could tell Annette how I feel about her. I could say the words ‘I love you’ instead of wishing I could.”

  Both hands were then swept apart exploring the nearly empty
tabletop. There they stayed near the desk’s side edges with palms faced down. He looked over the top of the glasses rims to Fiona.

  “But I can’t, Fiona. Everything that’s inside me screams against it. Perhaps it’s the small part of the old Nathaniel or maybe it’s a piece of me that’s unknown and restructured. From my gut to my soul, I feel that telling Annette how much I love her is unwise. You tell me that regrets are unsavory but something in the pit of my stomach tells me that if I tell Annette, it’ll be another regret. I have to release her. I have to feel how I feel in my own way, in my own time, regardless of how Management believes.”

  “So you’ve chosen to discharge Miss Redmond, the reincarnation of your beloved Evangeline whom you’ve lived and died in search of during seven lifetimes, without even talking to her?”

  Nathaniel tossed his hands up in capitulation. “Yes, Fiona. At this time, I choose to sit here unobtrusively at my desk. I choose to paint portraits of upcoming muses and wait for the ensuing healthy colored pegs to drop.”

  Fiona looked at him and said “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there, Mr. Cauliflower? Of what are you really scared stiff, my friend?”

  Another woman appeared in the doorframe, rapping her knuckles against the wood. Fiona and Nathaniel turned to see Annette Redmond in her strapless Chiffon wedding dress. Annette looked to Nathaniel then to Fiona. It was obvious that she had interrupted a serious conversation.