Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles Read online

  The other glasses were raised. This was the second time the glasses were raised for him. Unlike the first time, which had been strictly due to his meal, this salute was because of his moral character! It was Nathaniel’s turn to speak. He felt ridiculous standing with the final bowl of watercress soup in hand. His stillness lasted only a second longer before he took a breath and changed the subject. “Where is Miss Redmond?”

  The muses, taking their sips, looked about themselves and conceded that Annette was not at the table.

  Harriet answered “I told all of them about the staff meeting like you requested. She must not have heard me. Go figure.”

  “I’ll find her,” Fiona stood.

  Harriet stood with Fiona, impersonating a sense of authority.

  “No, I’ll go,” Nathaniel told them, setting the bowl at Annette’s empty setting. “Please, enjoy. Help yourselves to the rest of the hors d’oeuvres. I’ll be along with her shortly.” Before anyone could object, he was headed toward the door.

  As Nathaniel left the room for the hallway, he could hear Icarus’ comment to the room “there are nine place settings, yet only eight of us are being served. Do you think Mr. Cauliflower will be dining with us during this meal?”

  “Mr. Cauliflower doesn’t eat,” Fiona could be heard. “At least not that I’ve seen. I assume he takes his meals in private once the plates are cleared.”

  “What about you, Icarus?” Lucas’s voice chimed. “Who was your muse?”

  “I didn’t have the privilege of being granted a muse,” Icarus told him. “However, if I were to give a word of thanks to someone who attempted to save my life, my individual would have to have been my father, Deadalus, who crafted my wings. He was the closest thing to a ‘muse’ for me.”

  “Mrs. Slocum once said that a muse doesn’t need to have a Lite-Brite board and colored pegs to inspire,” Fiona said to him. “Not a truer statement was ever spoken.”

  Nathaniel stopped paying attention to the discussion. Giving a slight knock on the wood frame, he entered Annette’s office.

  Annette was preoccupied in her own affairs. Since he had seen her last, Annette had solved the ten-digit combination lock on the glass cabinet. The contents were exposed, lying on her desk. She held up the mason jar of twenty-one dead dandelions, studying them from within the glass. Annette wore a pair of latex gloves as if handling a piece of important evidence.

  Hatred seethed within Nathaniel as he watched her fondle the specific instrument of his past. The examination did not stop there. Nathaniel watched as Annette abandoned one container for another. Annette, with her fingertips, held up the jar that contained the piece of parchment ripped from a ledger. Some of the words were exposed to the sunlight. Annette squinted, bringing the jar closer to her face to inspect it more in depth.

  He took a step forward but felt himself stymied by his fury. “Find anything interesting?” he asked, eventually finding his voice.

  Unaware she was being watched, Annette jumped. The jar carelessly left her fingers and flew into the air. She scrambled to catch it but gravity was far more devious. The glass jar, like the dessert plate in his kitchen, collided with the floor and shattered onto a pool of sunlight.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Leave it.”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” Annette tried to explain. “The cabinet was sitting there in my office with the combination staring at me, almost as if begging to be solved. After a while, the word came to me. Almost as if . . .”

  “As if what, Miss Redmond?” Nathaniel wanted to know.

  “Almost as if it were a memory,” she told him defensively with hands on her hips.

  Nathaniel’s focus was elsewhere; not on Annette’s words or the broken jar, but on Annette’s eyes, trying to deduce the irregularity. It then occurred to him: Annette’s eyes, which had noticeably been a shining green were, at present, undoubtedly blue. The Dandelion Sisters, upon having handed him the three violet envelopes in his seventh life, predicted this would happen.

  “Ever since you arrived here you’ve been digging for information on me,” he told her. “I’m equally curious about you. So I’ll make a deal. I tell you a secret about me, and you tell me a secret about you.”

  Annette said without thinking twice “Deal.”

  There was a pause before they both said, at the same time, “You go first.” To which Annette gave a sly smile.

  Nathaniel frowned. He didn’t know who Annette Redmond was, but he presumed she was far more dangerous than he had remembered her to be all those Christmas Eves ago.

  “I’ll start,” he said. “But I’ll need a pair of those latex gloves.”

  Annette nodded, turned to the desk and opened a drawer. Nathaniel spied her pistol, the file and an exposed box of latex gloves he had not seen before. Annette did not keep any of this hidden from Nathaniel. They were locked in a delicate, and conceivably intimate, game of truth sans the dare.

  Nathaniel took two gloves from the box, fitting them over his hands. He bent down. Brushing away pieces of glass, he picked up the freed parchment. The page was held to the light, though not in the ray’s direct path, so they could both view it accurately. The document listed the name Nathaniel J. Cauliflower seven times each with different, nonconsecutive ages and years throughout history; a cost of three dandelions was scribed by each entry. It had been since 1807 when he initially signed it, yet the day unfolded upon him like a gaping flap of circus tent.

  *

  The Paris of 1807 in Nathaniel’s memory was ruled over by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had crowned himself emperor on May 18th, 1804. The ceremony of Napoleon’s self-appointed inauguration had taken place in Notre Dame and was the precursor of many Roman buildings to appear in the landscape of the ever-growing metropolis. Nathaniel’s painter practiced techniques in both Romanticism and also Neo-Classicism. In the year 1807, his master decorated many houses with tour de force and worked with well-to-do Parisians until he came into good graces with Napoleon’s entourage.

  Nathaniel was a faithful and quiet apprentice who assured that his painter’s brushes and canvases were well cared for. Even though Nathaniel also enthusiastically learned techniques from his master, his amateur fingers were not motivated with such a skilled heart. Where perfection came naturally to his painter, Nathaniel worked conscientiously to improve on his own strokes. Day after day, the subjects sat in pre-calculated positions. Nathaniel sat and watched his painter work, studying the muscles in the painter’s hands. Nathaniel moved his own hand in the same way hoping to emulate his genius. However, when it came time for him to practice on his own canvases, Nathaniel tried too hard and was ultimately dissatisfied with his inexperienced portraits.

  “You have raw talent,” said his painter one evening as they shared a meal. The painter was forty-nine and bore a clean shaven face with a jutting chin and well-defined cheek bones. His shoulder length hair was parted to the side. He wore fresh, high-collared linens with a cravat, tight breeches and silk stockings.

  “The issue is harnessing it, boy,” the painter told Nathaniel. “Control your brush. Be confident.”

  “But I do control my brush,” said Nathaniel.

  “Ah, but you control your brush the way I do.” The painter lifted a single brush to Nathaniel’s eyes. “You must have your own way of working a brush. Don’t you see that each brush is as unique as a woman?”

  The painter’s apprentice shook his head.

  “See here. The handle is like the bones and tendons, the bristles are as fine as a woman’s hair. But it’s the soul of the brush, boy. Within this brush, within all of them, is energy that the artist must control. You must immerse yourself within the soul of the brush and, to do that, you must paint uninhibited.”

  “Uninhibited?” Nathaniel had asked. “But the rules…?”

  “What I’ve taught you is technique,” said the painter. “What you must teach yourself is assurance and passion. A painting can be just a painting, b
ut it’s the relationship with the artist and his brush that gives the art its soul. It’s the affair, the embrace.”

  But the painter’s words were lost on Nathaniel.

  “Have you never been with a woman, boy?”

  Nathaniel had shaken his head.

  “Well, there’s the problem.” The painter sat the brush on the table and took a sip of wine. “Today, I was commissioned by a wealthy family to paint their daughter. In three days time, you will go without me and paint her.”

  Nathaniel had choked on a piece of bread. “Me?”

  “Yes, boy. You will find that the only way to experience true passion with a woman for the first time is to paint her. There is nothing more intimate than understanding their form, their shape. Painting a woman is far more erotic than simply having your way with her.” Standing from his chair, the painter patted Nathaniel’s shoulder, swigged a final sip of his wine and retired to bed.

  Nathaniel sat at the table with his fearful eyes staring into the darkness beyond the candlelight. Starlight glowed gently through the open window. Though outside it was an early autumn evening fresh with the scents of gardens abloom with petals, the flowers barely masked the stench of Paris’ sprawling city. There was a smell of fresh paint and thinner inside the studio which heightened the atmosphere around them. The room was cast in an orange, shifting hue of candlelight. Nathaniel climbed to his attic loft where he pulled out another blank canvas. He lit a thick yellow candle, setting it close to his work so that he could see.

  He took a paint brush and held it in his hands. He tried to adhere to the master’s words, attempting to paint with the soul of the brush. After half an hour, Nathaniel grew more and more disgusted with the painting. He poured his wishes of wanting to become the perfect painter into his work, but all he managed to create was the likeness of a withered old circus tent amid a field of motionless dandelions. How could he possibly be able to paint the young woman when all that he made was rubbish?

  In a tempered fit, he grabbed the wet canvas by both paint-spotted hands and tossed it across the floorboards into the shadows. Nathaniel crouched down to gather up the paints and brushes he had used, fuming over his lack of talent.

  There came a sound in his attic. Weight pressed on his floorboards beneath him causing them to rasp and cry out in objection. Nathaniel turned his eyes toward the shadows. Taking the candle he had painted by to the darkness, he revealed the miracles that had arisen. Nathaniel found a lawn of fresh grass dotted with real dandelions! Standing on the turf, housed below his rafters, was the tent that Nathaniel had painted, constructed out of real leather and multi-colored aged rugs. To make matters more unsettling, the tent’s front flap opened invitingly, with pitch-darkness beyond.

  Nathaniel pinched himself, thinking this to be an affect from too much wine at supper. The vision stayed. He slowly walked to the open tent. As he did, Nathaniel noticed a wooden sign had been shoved into the earth which read:

  Dandelion Sisters

  Admission: Three Dandelions

  Nathaniel picked three dandelions and brought them with him as he approached the otherworldly tent, with candle in hand. He stopped outside of the tent’s opening. Nathaniel thought it foolish to walk into a tent that had sprung from his own canvas, but there was a sense of adventure that kissed him on both cheeks, ushering affectionately.

  *

  Nathaniel, who retold the recollection’s description to Annette, stopped. He held the ledger in his hands, feeling the heaviness of the paper and tracing the indentations of the quill as it had been used to document his visits. He wasn’t quite sure why his hands began to shake while holding the parchment. Holding this ledger was a token of the decisions he had made which led him to be here in Annette’s office. It was as if revisiting an old house with tumbledown wings and brittle, bare-branched winter gardens; a gallery of words said and actions taken.

  He heard Evangeline’s voice in his head again repeating the words she had spoken to him in front of the mailbox: “I can’t . . . I’m sorry.” Nathaniel wondered if he had never stumbled inside the tent on that fateful autumn evening in 1807, would the disaster with Evangeline have been avoided?

  “There are seven appointments listed on this ledger,” Annette prodded, “varying in years and ages. The only thing consistent is the name ‘Nathaniel J. Cauliflower.’ Surely you weren’t named the same in all seven timelines?”

  “No,” Nathaniel confirmed. “I was only named Nathaniel in two of the seven lives that I’ve led: the first and the last. In one of my lives was I officially surnamed Cauliflower. But the Dandelion Sisters, and the cost of admission, have remained the same.”

  “And yet in every instance where you encountered the Sisters, you always signed as Cauliflower.”

  “Only because,” Nathaniel went on to explain, “every time I stepped through the circus tent’s opening, I was instructed to.”

  *

  In point of fact, Nathaniel was instructed to scribe the name ‘Cauliflower’ on the pages in 1807. It took place in a tent, accompanied by the unkempt leather and mildewed rugs that made up the establishment’s shell, which smelled of damp, ancient rot. Had it not sprung from his attic floor moments before, he would have turned his back on such a sad abandoned plot. Conversely, as it had entered his life in the most auspicious way, Nathaniel ignored the obvious blemishes of the dilapidated pavilion and went on to explore its contents.

  His candle’s meek glow uncovered an object: an ornate wooden lectern sat dead-center of the tent, positioned in a rigid stature the way some unlucky trolls become stone when exposed to the garish light of morning. The lectern, constructed of walnut wood, was richly carved into a substantial echelon overgrown with timeless dandelions. On the slightly slanted surface of the lectern’s writing desk was a leather-bound ledger opened to a fresh page. To the right of the lectern were a quill and a bottle of black ink. He waved his candle to his right and left where he found nothing but the inside of the nearby putrid parapets.

  He placed the three dandelions and candle on the lectern to inspect the quill further. As Nathaniel reached for the quill, the drops of melting wax slid down the side of his candle, spreading along the surface of the writing desk. The plume was light on his right hand. In a way almost childish, he brought the feather to his nose, tickling himself by brushing the wispy barbs against his face.

  He unscrewed the bottle’s lid and dabbed the end of the hollow shaft into the ink. Nathaniel was, by no means, an author and possessed limited skills in perfecting his penmanship. The action seemed almost reflexive, as if the quill knew what needed to be done, with Nathaniel as its vessel. The quill, having taken control of Nathaniel’s motor skills, guided his hand to the page.

  No sooner than he and the quill scrawled anything on the ledger’s page, there came a horrendous screeching that besieged the encamping silence. The sound was an awful rattling of tiny, piercing bells repeating itself, over and over in a pattern: a two second ring followed by two seconds of silence in which the shooting bell’s echo had extinguished, followed by the same distastefully obtrusive clamor.

  Nathaniel, with the ink-stained quill in hand, lifted the candle from the desk, waving the flickering wick through the room to distinguish the noise’s origin. It was after a few seconds of enduring even more persistently dreadful ringing, that he spotted the source: an antique wall phone mounted on the far wall opposite the tent’s entrance. The wall phone was foreign to him but he examined it anyway.

  The body of it was made of oak. There was a black ivory mouthpiece that jutted out from its front. Below the mouthpiece rested a small writing desk that curved downward. Above the mouthpiece were two silver bells that vibrated with deafening reverberation. To the left of the phone’s body was another piece of black ivory, which dangled from a hook, connected to the phone by a thin black wire.

  Nathaniel knew that the sound came from this device, but he didn’t have the slightest clue how to tame it. It was then that the receiver jumpe
d from the side cradle on its own, swinging down below. The ringing stopped. But with this comforting silence there came another far quieter sound.

  The noise sang from the receiver as it had suspended below the phone. Nathaniel placed the quill on the phone’s desk, picking up the receiver and placing it to his ear to hear the message. He hoped that the faint sound on the other end would explain everything to him. As Nathaniel would soon discover, the call proved informative, starting off with a single word queried by a young female child: “Cauliflower?”

  “Bonjour?” Nathaniel asked into the receiver. Considering that the useful invention of Alexander Graham Bell would not yet be invented until many years following this exchange, Nathaniel had no idea how the voice managed to come from such a tiny box to his ear. He pictured himself stumbling farther and farther into a dream, embarking ever more as the voice then replied.

  “I see that you have brought us three dandelions,” said the child’s voice.

  Nathaniel turned his eyes back to the lectern. “How do you know I’ve placed them there? I’m the only one here.”

  “Into the mouthpiece, please,” the child instructed.

  Nathaniel turned to the wall phone and said “The mouthpiece?” He placed his lips an inch from the apparatus between the desk and two bells. “Is this what you are referring to?” He had inquired while keeping the receiver to his ear.

  “Oh yes,” said the child. Her voice had a decidedly neutral accent, which aided very little in attempting to calculate her current location. “That is lovely. Now, we must have you sign the ledger, Mr. Cauliflower. Once you have done so, we can begin.”

  “Mr. Cauliflower?”

  “Why yes, you are Nathaniel J. Cauliflower, I presume?”

  “I’m afraid you must have me mistaken for someone else. My first name is Nathaniel but I don’t go by ‘Cauliflower.’”