Mnemo's Memory

by David Versace

  Mnemo's Memory and Other Fantastic Tales

  ––––––––

  By David Versace

  Copyright

  ––––––––

  Mnemo's Memory and Other Fantastic Tales

  Copyright © 2018 by David Versace

  Cover design by Damonza.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Edition 2018

  www.DavidVersace.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Lighthouse at Cape Defeat

  Industrial Disease

  Breakdown

  Plastic Reclamation

  The Nature of Monkey

  Second Time Around

  Mr Lupin's Hat Trick

  The Census Taker's Quandary

  Seven Excerpts from Season One

  Gorilla Dentists

  The Dressmaker and the Colonel's Coat

  Out of Context

  Imported Goods—Aisle Nine

  Red Fire Monkey

  The Feast of Horns at the House of St. Mitus' Eye

  Incidental

  Lost Dogs

  The Mirror Witch and the Wormwood Miranda

  Mnemo's Memory

  Thank you for reading

  Acknowledgements

  Biography

  Dedication

  To my mother Jean, who taught me how to write

  To my father Grahame, who taught me how to work

  To my wife Fiona, who gives me strength for both

  I owe you all so much

  The Lighthouse at Cape Defeat

  As the first pink hints of dawn cracked the sea's darkness, Brega looked down from the lighthouse at the sailors reburying their dead. They had left it almost too late this morning. In a few more minutes the nocturnal burial party would boil away in the sun's breaking rays. For months now, she had greeted each morning watching the funereal scene dissolve.

  Green incandescence flared at her back as the main lamp rotated past, casting its beam across the ghosts' longboat, moored on the choppy waters off the Cape Defeat headland. The respite from the storms would be brief; already thunderheads were regrouping in the north, flaring and snorting, gathering themselves for the stampede. The air tingled, cold and alive, awash with salt and a distant rot.

  She adjusted the timing mechanism to shutter the lamps in three hours; the illumination chemicals were expensive, and few storms were so ferocious as to obscure the craggy promontory by day. Even the least attentive ship's watchman should not fail to spot the hazard and steer a path clear of the coast. Brega's was a nocturnal duty. The days belonged to her.

  Or they once had. She stomped down four storeys of cramped spiral stairs to the kitchen. Assent was pouring himself a mug of tea from her brew pot. "Are you still here?" The question's acidity was more than usually concentrated today.

  Assent's raised eyebrow disappeared into the steam rising from his mug. He was no more than thirty, with an academic's pallor restless eyes and a vulture's beak of a face. He never stopped moving or muttering, dictating notes to an absent assistant, only to scrawl them later on whatever surface presented itself. Brega had rescued her diaries and relocated them to her personal chamber the moment she had recognised the trait.

  "Really, Keeper?" he said. "Must we do this every morning?"

  Brega took the brew pot from him and raised it to her nose with a frown. They did not steep tea long enough in the city. "I am a creature of my routines, Professor. How long do I have to endure their interruption?"

  With an exaggerated sense of ritual, Assent plucked a crinkled sheaf of papers from beneath his vest and handed them over. "Need I remind you again? I have complete authority to conduct my research, Keeper Brega, however long it may take."

  Brega snorted and folded the papers open on the timeworn slab table. She resisted the temptation to hold them open with the brew pot; defacing Ministry documentation was an offense, even with tea stains. "I see you are authorised to requisition all necessary resources. Dare I hope you'll make good on your promises to restore my provisions? My supply ration does not stretch far beyond my own needs."

  Despite several layers of woollens under an outer shell of oilskin and the charcoal stove's radiant warmth, Assent shivered and gripped his mug tighter. "You will be adequately compensated for all expenses and inconveniences," he observed through tight lips. As much as she wished he would pack away his brushes and spades and return to the cosy familiarity of his lecture chambers, Brega didn't expect it to happen soon.

  "What progress have you made?" She was more interested in climbing into her bunk for a few hours than needling Assent but it was abundantly clear he would not become discouraged on his own.

  "If you've attended to all your responsibilities, perhaps you might come and see for yourself. Yesterday's deluge uncovered some remarkable new pieces. I believe they may penetrate even your formidable disinterest in scientific affairs."

  A yawn forced her jaw open. The storm's crashing tumult had kept her from sleep since yesternoon. If she could get even two hours to huddle in her cot before duty recalled her to the lamp room, it would count as a miracle.

  Assent's bottom lip drew in and his cheeks coloured and she regretted giving involuntary offence. Sighing, she nodded. "It will have to be brief. I have sleeping to do."

  #

  The workshop was a long outbuilding attached to the base of the lighthouse. Legacies of its original purpose as a storage shed for a rescue boat remained: a massive timber door on the beachward wall, rusting iron tracks embedded in the crumbling concrete floor, chains hanging from the raked ceiling high above. The boat was long gone.

  Upon taking up her lonely post, Brega was inspired by the beautiful violence of the barren headland to take up painting. She repaired the door's corroded rollers and converted the disused space into a studio. With the door open and her easel positioned just so, she had an unobstructed view of the beach, the headland and the jutting offshore rocks littered with dozens of skeletal hull fragments.

  She discovered she had an affinity for landscape studies in light and shadow, once her hands stopped shaking. Her knack for sitting still and training her eyes for tireless hours had never left.

  Assent's presence had reduced the workshop's martial order to bewildering chaos. The benches were cleared of tools and supplies. These were heaped in a pile along with crumpled canvas sheets and timber off-cuts. Once, soon after she took up her station and before operational orders had become fixed routines, Brega had left the door to the adjoining stable unlatched. The havoc her supply mule had wreaked was nothing to this systematic demolition of her orderly workshop.

  Brega's struggle to suppress her dismay at the sight was redundant. Assent beetled away to the commandeered trestles, dragging off a heavy linen dust sheet and tossing it on an untidy stack of her paintings in the corner.

  He motioned her with a quick, crabby wave to join her, looming over a display case framed in rough pine and lined with felt. It ran the length of the two tables pushed together and overhung the ends. A protruding scrap of canvas blotted with a greying sunset informed Brega that some of her landscapes had been dragooned into the Ministry's service.

  "I think it's a thigh bone," Assent said. "I've made a study of such things, if you will excuse my ghoulishness."

  She found his ambiguity remarkable. He was too young to have served during wartime, she supposed. The luck of the young, not to have intimate knowledge of what insides looked like on the outside. She couldn't remember what
that ignorance felt like.

  Biting her tongue, she inspected the bone.

  It was at least three metres in length, weathered smooth and its bleached surface was tinged with patchworks of green moss. It was certainly a femur.

  "Where did you dig this one up?" She felt obliged to make conversation though she already knew the answer. She'd watched him recover the bone during a brief lull in the violent storm late in the afternoon, slipping about on the rocks with a long spade and a hand pick, his thigh boots inundated time and again by the surging waves. At the time she'd shrugged and reminded herself that she had already done her duty by him, with repeated warnings about the dangers of being dashed against the rocks or swept into the black water. Now she wondered if it were not so much reckless luck as sheer implacable determination that fixed him in place.

  Assent shrugged lean shoulders unfamiliar with the rigours of hard labour. "West along the point, at the base of the cliff. Fortunately, storm erosion did most of the work for me. Mind you it was quite difficult to persuade your mule to accept the harness."

  "Your success in obtaining his cooperation amazes me." The beast, once her sole companion, was annoyingly compliant with Assent. Brega had once managed to slip a yoke and saddlebags on the treacherous creature and walk it the five miles to the nearest village for her art supplies. Never again.

  "He was sensitive to the Ministry's expectations."

  Brega studied Assent's face, searching for some sign of wry amusement. "I'm sure that's it," she replied evenly. "Do you expect to make very many more such finds?"

  "Do you mean to say, how long until my intrusion on your solitude comes to an end?"

  "That's not what I asked."

  "Either way I cannot answer in the specific. If my theories prove substantial, there is a great deal of work yet to be done. I hope my continued presence will remain tolerable."

  "I am sensitive to the Ministry's expectations, Professor." She pursed her lips. "You haven't discussed your theories before."

  "I suppose I have not." He fussed over his bones, pretending not to cast eager glances at Brega. "Tell me where you first heard the name of Cape Defeat."

  "I didn't know you studied children's stories, Professor."

  "Indulge me, Keeper." Assent was too slow to slip a blank mask across his disappointment. Brega was disappointed too. She had thought he was wise enough not to display weakness to a soldier.

  "I know what every child knows. Cape Defeat is where the final battle of the Titan War supposedly took place. The First Kings cornered the last of the Titans between their armies and their fleets and bombarded them to extinction."

  "Did you know that this lighthouse was erected to commemorate that victory?"

  "Some victory, trading enslavement to monsters for the tyranny of despots."

  "Hmm," agreed Assent. "But Cape Defeat's real location was suppressed for so long it was all but forgotten. Until the royal archives fell, it might as well have been myth."

  "Uncovering a great hidden secret like that must have made your career."

  He ignored the sarcasm. "This lighthouse has proven a site of great historical significance."

  "Lighthouses keep ships from hitting rocks, Professor. That's significant enough for me."

  #

  The storm granted Brega several hours' fitful sleep before its return was heralded by a volley of spectacular lightning strikes off the point and an eruption of thunder fit to wake the dead, let alone an exhausted lighthouse keeper. She roused herself into action with a splash of freezing water to the face and dragged herself into her wet-weather slicks.

  A glance through a rain-lashed porthole into darkness told her she had underestimated the storm's intensity. Ministry regulations stipulated she should consult a light meter before making an daylight ignition. Brega had thrown the standard issue smoked crystals into a box days after taking up her station. Her instincts had served her well this long; she trusted them more than any instruction manual.

  Still, she was not incautious. Even as the clouds buried the last signs of daylight and the rain intensified to an oppressive density, she checked and rechecked everything; the chemical reservoirs, the greased cogs, the snaking electrical cables bound in tarred cotton braids. She topped up the reagent that lent the great lamp its green hue and rewired a heavy zinc fuse that gave off a scorched odour. Finally she donned an insulated gauntlet and threw the ignition switch in the small niche that connected the lighthouse lamp to the tidal engine room down beneath the workshop.

  A beam of green light speared oceanward. A moment later it swept away clockwise. Brega stood in the lashing wind, battered by icy javelins of sleet, secured to the precarious outer balcony by a belt clipped to the steel railing. She watched the light complete a full dozen rotations before she was satisfied that it was functioning just as it should.

  As she reached for the carabiner to unfasten herself from the rail, light from below caught her eye.

  It was Professor Assent, clambering out along the rock ledge toward his dig site, carrying a long pole attached to a chemical lamp that threw lurching blue shadows up the cliff face.

  "Are you mad?" Her hoarse cry was swallowed by the storm; she almost could not hear herself. Through the sheets of rain, she saw Assent stumble to his knees. The light swayed and dipped, then wobbled and righted itself. Assent's outline rose on unsteady legs and advanced, pressing close to the cliff wall. Across the narrow span of tide-flattened rock, cresting waves dashed themselves into fountains of angry spray, as if frustrated that their quarry remained out of reach. His preservation would be temporary. The tide had already turned and would reclaim the rocks with savage speed.

  Brega allowed the cold-hearted impulse to leave him to his fate to pass unheeded. She detached herself from the rail and clambered back inside the lighthouse. Ignoring the wall hook for her safety harness, she spiralled down past the workshop to the engine room, the buckles of her harness bouncing in her wake like a tail made of bells. Beyond the giant steel drive shaft rising like a greased fir tree from floor to ceiling was a storeroom containing a cache of Ministry-mandated rescue equipment. Brega had never been given cause to use it. To founder in the turbulent waters off the promontory was a guaranteed death sentence.

  Still, she was familiar enough with its use. She selected the heaviest rope cable she could carry, threw it over her shoulders and pushed, breath already huffing, back upstairs and out into the storm.

  The wind hit her like an artillery bombardment. The uneven weight of the rope on her shoulders bore her down. The mule brayed from its stable. She considered pressing it into service but quickly rejected the idea. In these conditions, it would probably find a way to engineer her death from sheer cantankerousness.

  She threaded the cable though a ring bolted into the rock above the high tide line. Long ago it had been installed to moor lighthouse visitors' longboats. It hadn't been used for some time, not since a chain gang of His Late Majesty's detainees had spent their sentences and their backs reinforcing the causeway. Brega reviled the king but even she admitted the windswept pathway was an improvement over risking a boat on the shoals of Cape Defeat.

  With the rope secured and the other end looped through her belt harness, she set off across the rock ledge. She had lost sight of Assent around an outcrop which had been no obstacle from the vantage point of the lighthouse balcony but was an absolute obstruction now.

  Tasting seaweed, brine and blood on the wet air, she squinted into the spray and pressed forward. She stopped every few steps to jog the rope free of hidden snags and snarls. She attempted a full-throated call of Assent's name, then again. The wind sounded like an army at the charge, a juggernaut roar that overcame all human competition. The waves burst like shells to her left and flung impotent surges at her ankles. In a few minutes they would be at her knees and all but irresistible.

  More by feel than sight, she navigated to the outcrop and clambered up out of reach of the wash. "Professor," she called again. In
answer, a swirl of blue broke through the gloom and spray.

  "Keeper? What are you doing out here?" Assent's face appeared as a glowing turquoise phantom against the darkness. He wore a grin that made Brega think of a wounded soldier's last fever.

  "My duty." It was funny how often her duty corresponded to someone else's bad decisions.

  Assent nodded impatiently. "So am I. Come and see."

  Snarling curses from every language she knew, Brega looped her cable through a channel in the rock and pushed herself down from the outcrop. The water had risen a few centimetres.

  One end of Assent's staff was wedged into a large boulder lodged in the cliff face. He had raised the lantern end overhead and was levering it this way and that, throwing a delirium of shadows in every direction. As she grabbed his shoulder, the great rock dislodged from the crumbling cliff wall and rolled into the roiling surf.

  With a cry of alarm, Assent pushed Brega's hand off and threw himself down. He tackled the boulder just as a fresh wave surged forth and grabbed at it. Gushing water submerged his body, throwing him off balance as he wrapped his arms around the boulder. His head disappeared beneath the foam. The lantern pole drifted out of reach on the choppy wash. Brega grabbed for Assent's collar but missed it in the dimming light.

  He emerged, spluttering to clear his lungs. He had not regained his footing. His arms were still clinging to the boulder. Brega couldn't see why it wasn't dragging him down again. "Help me!"

  The wave retreated, regathering for the next sortie. Brega hauled Assent to his feet. She overcompensated for the mass of the boulder and wrenched him more roughly than she'd planned. He looked at her with wild, triumphant eyes. "It's all true," he said, almost sobbing. Brega had no idea who he was talking to, only that it wasn't her.

  "We have to get out of here." Brega contemplated slapping him sensible. She settled for grabbing his trouser belt and dragging him bodily after her. He followed in a daze, still clutching his rock as effortlessly as a bag of bread.