by James Cole
At first Monika laughed off their questions and innuendoes. “I guess I’ve just got good genes,” she would say, but her sneaking suspicions insisted there was more to it than that.
By the time she turned 48, there could be no denying the obvious. It didn’t matter what the calendar indicated; her body was still young and she began to entertain grand thoughts. Monika wondered if she might stay young indefinitely.
She now viewed Nick as a problem. Monika had a higher calling and he was not a party to it. She couldn’t stay with him.
*****
“Baby, I’ve got some bad news.”
Every year, during the brunt of the late summer heat, Monika made a pilgrimage to the swamps of Reefers Woods to harvest the lotus blooms. The year was 1999, and she had just returned home to New York.
“There has been a drought in Destiny,” she declared solemnly. “The swamps dried up and all the lotus plants have died.”
Nick made no effort to hide his distress. “What in God’s name are we going to do?”
“We’ll just have to learn to live without it,” she replied.
The truth was that this would be Nick’s cross to bear. The lotus crop had come in this year, just as it had every summer, once the plants recovered from the commune fiasco of ‘69. Most years, Monika harvested far more than she and her husband could possibly use. As a result, she had amassed a substantial stockpile of the dried lotus blooms. Of this, Nick was completely unaware, but she had hers. Monika burned when she had time away from Nick or at doses too low for him to notice. As his mental state deteriorated, her lies and deceptions became easier to slip past him. In the end, he became so completely lost to himself and so totally dependent on her that she could have convinced him to do anything, even to kill himself.
And that was exactly what Monika had done.
Nick had been more than willing to end his misery and had wrapped his car around a tree on a lonely stretch of road in upstate New York. The highway patrol officer who wrote the report observed that the severity of the crash split the vehicle in two and attested to the high rate of speed at which the vehicle was traveling.
Her late husband’s life insurance policy, however, was intact. With great anticipation, Monika liquidated his assets and set out to begin the next phase of her existence. A larger life beckoned. She left Gotham City, driving the same 1969 vintage Mustang she drove into the city thirty years prior. This time, however, Monika was not alone. Tavalin, her son, now 16, accompanied her as they headed south, toward the small town called Destiny.
*****
Claire and Tavalin
Tavalin was halfway through college by the time Monika figured out how to isolate and concentrate the active ingredient from the lotus blooms. This advancement made for much easier storage and transport of her burgeoning stash, but more importantly, it changed the nature of the experience. Before, she prepared a tea of sorts by soaking the blooms in wine or some other alcoholic beverage. This made for a pleasant trip but it did not compare to the intensity of the experience using the new extraction method. In the process Monika learned a thing or two about chemistry. She realized that it might be possible to synthesize the active ingredient from scratch, thus bypassing the laborious trips to Reefers Woods entirely.
At his mother’s bidding, Tavalin finished out his undergraduate years as a chemistry major. Afterwards, he enrolled in graduate school at the University in Destiny, where his mandate was to amass a deeper knowledge of chemistry, specifically of the chemical synthetic techniques that would be required to synthesize the Unreal.
After two years at the Facility, Tavalin had been unsuccessful in his bid to determine the exact chemical structure of the Unreal, the prerequisite step for the synthesis. Monika grew impatient with him and constantly reminded him of his ineptitude. In the end, Tavalin obtained the structure, not from his own research, but from June’s research notebook.
The string of events that led to Tavalin’s fortuitous discovery began after he grew suspicious of Jeremy and all the late hours Jeremy spent working in June’s lab. Whenever Tavalin dropped in on them, they always stopped in the middle of whatever they were working on and seemed overly protective of whichever notes or papers that might be lying about. Whenever he asked Jeremy what he and June were working on, Jeremy turned evasive. On the night of the RockFest, Tavalin entered June’s unoccupied lab and found her research notebook hidden inside her desk. He was unable to decipher much of what was written inside until he came to the page where she had sketched out a certain three-ringed molecule. Tavalin had made just enough progress on his own to recognize that this was what he had been trying to figure out for the past two years. This was it – the detailed structure of the Unreal.
At that precise moment, June walked in and caught Tavalin red-handed. For a long time, he had resented June for refusing to go out with him. He believed she thought herself too good for him. Tavalin imagined the denigrating words that would spew from Monika’s mouth when she found out how easily and quickly June had figured out what he hadn’t been able to do in two years. Fueled by his anger and embarrassment, as well as by all the beer he had drunk, Tavalin attacked June. He stabbed her with the scissors from her desk and, in the end, choked her until her body went limp.
“You did what?” exclaimed Monika when she answered Tavalin’s frantic call. “What do you propose we do now, you idiot?”
Tavalin had no clue.
“Just leave.”
Monika told him to find June’s keys, lock the door, and to call her after he got to Jeremy’s condo. When Tavalin arrived at Jeremy’s condominium, he immediately stripped down to his underwear and put his blood-tainted clothes in the washing machine. He told Jeremy that he had thrown up on his clothes and that was why they needed to be washed.
Tavalin volunteered to order and pay for a pizza so he would have an excuse to wait downstairs in the foyer, ostensibly to watch for the delivery person. Monika swung by on her way to the Facility to pick up the keys to June’s lab. She also obtained Jeremy’s key chain, which Tavalin swiped from the hook in the hallway. This gave Monika access to Jeremy’s lab and the cold room. She dragged the body from June’s lab to Jeremy’s lab and into the cold room, an area specifically designed for tissue dissection. She painstakingly carved up the body on the stainless steel counter, making sure these operations took much longer than the time available to Tavalin. That way, Jeremy could vouch for Tavalin’s whereabouts and lead the police to believe that Tavalin could not have been involved in the murder. Afterwards, Monika used the overhead water sprayer and chemical cleaners to wash away all vestiges of her actions. She did not hear June’s loose earring as it tinkled down the sink drain, the same earring Jeremy would later discover.
Monika tossed the body out the window into the dumpster to make it appear as if the crime were perpetrated by some random deathcore rocker who got a little too excited at the RockFest. That was also her reasoning for choosing to inscribe the symbol ascribed to one of the bands – Cocytus – that had performed earlier that night. It was an ingenious plan, especially considering Monika made it all up on the fly, and it might have worked, were it not for the lost earring and the clump of June’s hair that got caught on the window frame.
Even then, Monika reserved a back-up plan. She wrapped June’s excised heart in a plastic bag and took it with her, knowing it could serve as a most convincing means of framing someone else, if need be. As it turned out, Grady became the perfect fall guy. She would have killed him anyway when he refused to tell her where he got the youth-preserving fruit but to be able to get rid of Grady and, in the process, frame him for the murder worked out better than she could ever have imagined.
*****
Claire and the Fruit of the Lotus Tree
Youth is wasted on the young.
Only someone who had seen their youth come and go would likely agree with the adage. Monika, however, represented the ultimate exception. She was a beautiful and sexy young girl who knew
precisely the clout of a beautiful and sexy young girl. She possessed 60 years of experience in this world and knew all the tricks of life’s trade. Hers was a considerable arsenal and she meant to make the most of it.
Ever since she first discovered the effects of the lotus blooms that grew in the swamps of Reefers Woods, Monika had entertained ideas about a new utopian society, what she coined as Claire’s Alternative Way. If she could find and harness the source of her enduring youthfulness, she would be an unstoppable force. What would anyone, even world leaders, give in exchange for extended, if not unlimited, days on this earth?
But what in the world was the root of this wonderful gift? Monika wondered if the lotus bloom extract, of which she was so fond, might have something to do with her youthful appearance. It seemed a reasonable hypothesis, were it not for her husband. Nick had also partaken of the lotus flowers over the last two decades and his youthfulness had faded in a manner typical for a man his age.
He had not, however, been a party to the fruit of the purple lotus.
That a single fruit might exert such an effect was an intriguing notion. Every summer, Monika searched a different part of Reefer’s Woods but she never came across any fruiting lotus. She even set aside a small plot of the lotus plants whose flowers she never harvested but none ever developed anything other than the seed pods typically produced by the plants. Except for the single fruit presented to her by the boy so many years ago, she had absolutely no evidence of its existence, even though she had visited the lotus fields every summer for the past 39 years.
Finally, with Jeremy’s assistance, Monika had found it. She smiled at Jeremy’s crucial role in her grand plans. Through him – and June – she obtained the structure of the Unreal, paving the way for its synthesis. Jeremy had also helped her find the Source, and even though he had also managed to blow it up, it was not before she bestowed its benefits upon Tavalin and the 11 members of her group. When she found Jeremy – and she would find him – she would have to remember to thank him before she killed him.
*****
Begin Again
It was still wintertime when Monika and Tavalin returned to the King’s Pinnacle for the first time since that night in late December.
“This place brings back bad memories,” said Monika. “I still can’t believe those two got away from us.”
“I can’t believe they survived that jump into the river,” added Tavalin. “Someone must have been looking out for them.”
“No, they were just lucky.” Monika caught herself clinching her jaw. Thinking of that night still made her furious. “They won’t be so lucky the next time I get hold of them.”
When they reached the pool, it was impossible to see much other than the steam that wafted heavenward. Tavalin used his arms as fans to disperse the cloud.
“You were right!” he exclaimed excitedly. “There’s definitely something here.”
Together, mother and son knelt at the edge of the hot-spring pool as they examined the jagged stump and the tender shoots sprouting from it.
“How long do you think it will take to grow back all the way?” asked Tavalin.
“Does it really matter?” Elation beamed from Monika’s face like from a fire burning within. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
THE END
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