Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  “You’re concerned that, if he’s responsible, Mr. Rothchild may have taken Adam?”

  “Or may take him at some point,” Annette confirmed. “I can’t return to my wedding day until I know for a fact that I’ve completed this open file.”

  “You’ve loosely based the evidence on Mr. Rothchild.”

  “For now,” Annette told him. “But, if you’d allow me to gather more information by turning pegs perhaps I can prove to you that I’m justified.” She took a step closer to him, saying solemnly, “Wouldn’t you want to do everything in your power to protect your loved ones from someone who may want to do them harm?”

  “I suppose I can see your logic. I’ve already ordered the pegs to be delivered from Management’s personal library. Until then, we’ll rotate the remaining two we have.”

  Annette reached into her desk drawer and pulled out Phillip’s red peg and the blue peg corresponding to the blizzard. She put the red peg into the Lite-Brite. Nathaniel touched his hand gently to her wrist.

  “If we rotate these pegs, and we don’t find anything, promise me you’ll return to your wedding day, close the case and revisit your pie-making aspirations.”

  Annette nodded in agreement. The red-colored peg was rotated counter-clockwise. They disappeared from the office into the life of Phillip: the boy destined to witness the glow-in-the-dark stars.

  As soon as they left, Icarus appeared at Annette’s doorway making sure that the coast was clear. He wore a black hoodie which he carefully zipped. Icarus’ eyes caught sight of Lyle Slocum’s photograph on the dry erase board. With both hands, he reached and pulled the hood over his head. Wearing a sly grin, he walked down the hall to his own office.

  *

  The rain pounded onto the Slocum house in 2009 as two figures, Jonas and his friend in the hoodie, were on the front porch.

  “When I stood here previously,” Jonas told his escort, “I had a copy of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray that I intended to give Annette as a gift. I discovered the identity of the individual who repaired her library books when she was a little girl, and I intended to take her from this place and show her who repaired them. But her husband intervened. He guided me into my car and I drove off, defeated.”

  Jonas moved his gaze to the lawn, and to the tumbleweed-type bush that haunted the mailbox, where the mailman pulled up in his carrier truck. Jonas and the mailman exchanged glances. The mailman gave a slight smile, stuffed the mail into the mailbox and drove to the neighboring address.

  “Today, I have no intention of being defeated,” he told the hoodie-clad individual. Jonas held in his hand an electric screw driver which he plugged into an outside socket. He held the electric screw driver aloft pressing the trigger button bringing the mechanism to whirl. He wore black leather gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

  “Why don’t we ring the doorbell?” asked the hooded individual.

  “No amount of ringing the doorbell is going to pull Lyle from his depression. At this moment, he’s sitting in his recliner dozing in misery while watching old re-runs of television shows. He’s heard the doorbell ring several times and has yet to budge. If we’re going to get his attention, it’s time to take our own direct measures.”

  With a simple flat head screwdriver, no bigger than his ring finger, Jonas spied a little latch near the knob and pushed in. He removed the knob setting it on the porch floorboards. He removed the exterior rose plate. There was a mounting plate underneath attached by two screws. Jonas took the electric screwdriver, gave it a few spins, and touched the tip on the end of each screw. Both screws fell to the porch. Jonas then pushed the other side of the doorknob out from the other side and removed the lock. Soon there was a gaping hole where the doorknob had been.

  Jonas smiled. He pressed his left hand against the door causing it to swing open.

  “Admittance arranged,” Jonas told his friend in the hoodie who had crouched down with him during the process. Jonas wrapped his tools. They both stood at the same time. Jonas opened the door wide, allowing a view into the foyer. “Now it’s time to collect who we’ve come for. After you, friend. Don’t worry; there are no guard dogs to drug, no trip wires to avoid. It’s only a house filled to the brim with past memories.

  His friend went in first.

  Jonas then crossed the threshold. He spotted a framed wedding picture of Annette and Lyle. He removed the picture from the frame holding the flimsy photograph to his eyes. With his hands still gloved, he tore the picture in half separating husband and wife. He held up Annette Slocum’s half studying it in the waning light of day.

  As the rain cascaded the windows of the house, Lyle slept in the living room recliner as the single withering occupant in the abode’s peeling, faded wallpaper of bad dreams.

  Jonas who was still in the foyer, looked at his feet where he found a funnel cake had splattered on the floor. He kicked it aside. “Funnel cakes,” Jonas sneered. As the rain sounded, Jonas indefinitely interrupted the love story that Management had strategically set into motion.

  *

  Several days later in 2009, an eye witness confirmed to a detective named Annette Redmond that he had been the one delivering the mail when he noticed two men on the porch. Upon further investigation, detective Redmond found the empty frame with Lyle’s half of the picture sitting on the carpeted floor. She then spotted a discarded violet envelope on the recliner in the living room that read “7.”

  “Detective Redmond?” asked one of the officers who dusted fingerprints. “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest,” was her response. “Someone’s out for a laugh and I’m not finding the humor in it.”

  She pocketed the photograph of Lyle Slocum into an evidence bag and added it to her case files. It was the same ripped photograph that, many years later, in 2016, ended up on her dry erase board in her cathedral office after she had been brought back as one of the Nine Greatest muses in history.

  CHAPTER 11: A BOY AND HIS STARS

  The retelling of Phillip’s life began with stars. Not the common stars as one might find in a nighttime sky while casually adjusting eyes upward or by utilizing a telescope to map out the specifics of a glowing dot. The stars introduced at the beginning were far smaller and didn’t give off any light. They existed on the left forearm of Phillip’s father who held his two year-old son late in the night. Young Phillip had developed an awful cold, and was filled with such congestion, that nothing short of his father’s loving embrace could cure it. Having already applied vapor rub to the toddler’s chest, his father cradled his son in his arms and now soothingly rubbed his back. Phillip’s chubby face leaned against his father’s left shoulder peering at the stars on his father’s arm. His young eyes blithely studied the stars while his tiny fingers traced the inked, pointed angles. This instant would be Phillip’s most treasured childhood memory.

  As Nathaniel watched this, he felt a fluttering in his heart; a yearning to have a moment like this one day. He gasped, hoping that the intake of air might stifle the urge to feel any kind of emotion. He was pleased that it worked.

  “Are you okay?” Annette asked, witnessing his reaction.

  “Acid reflux,” Nathaniel lied.

  “There may be some antacids in the department’s common bathroom,” Annette offered.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Time skipped forward with the propulsion of a rocket ship exiting the atmosphere. The second scene was of several months later when Phillip lay in his crib trying to fall asleep on his own. He was healthier in this moment than he had been previously. Phillip’s eyes gazed at the revolving mobile above his crib where miniature planets in the solar system spun with the power of AA batteries. As the view of the room expanded, the crib and the solar system were only a minute fraction of the outer space surrounding him. The entire room was dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars which shined dimly in the encroaching darkness. There was also a slowly twirling nightlight that showed a circling panorama of nearby
constellations and remote galaxies varying in shape, size and luminosity. Phillip’s private universe expressed the impression of a forever expanding space centered on the little tyke as he finally closed his eyes, ending each day in the hypnotizing cosmos.

  Phillip grew older, as all children do. He developed into a young lad with apricot-colored hair, brown eyes, and slightly chubby physique. When he was in the fourth grade he, and his class, visited the local planetarium where Phillip’s father worked. It was here that he officially learned the terminologies regarding the spinning, twinkling objects on his bedroom walls.

  He educated himself about the volatile temperament of the immense powerhouse bonfire known as the Sun. He was enthralled by Mercury’s scarred, cosmetic appeal as it orbited the fastest of all the planets, yet rotated equally as slow on its axis. Phillip gaped while discovering that Venus, although being the shiniest, most recognizable planet to the naked eye, possessed a dense atmosphere of poisonous greenhouse gas. He marveled at how Earth was protected by an invisible magnetic bubble known as the “magnetosphere” which sheltered his home from space debris and emission particles ejected from the neighboring star, and how, because of that field, colorful auroras could occasionally be witnessed near the poles. He bit the skin around his right-hand thumb as the expansive scarlet terrain of Mars was explored by a mechanical robot. He widened his eyes further at watching tumbling varied asteroids as they spun around in a gravitational belt between the red planet and the gas giant Jupiter. He was amazed as the show took him inside the Great Red Spot, delving the audience further into Jupiter’s gaseous, churning atmosphere of liquids and metals. The screen danced from moon to moon, briefly touching on each of the sixty-three smaller satellites that orbited the planet. Phillip gazed wondrously at Saturn’s rings, marveling at how, from afar, they seemed solid, but flying closer discovered there were hundreds of discs, each consisting of their own collections of billions upon billions of spinning icy rock particles. Uranus was next: a brilliant blue sphere with an atmosphere of methane gas storms, and how its axis was tipped on its side, causing its rings to run vertically. Neptune winded him as it described how the planet’s gales were the fastest recorded gusts in the solar system. At last there was Pluto, re-classified as a dwarf planet, along with its only orbiting moon, Charon, in the Kuiper Belt of other smaller ice chips, each rotating on their own, obscure axial tilt.

  This virtual tour ignited Phillip’s curiosity. He visited the local library in hopes of procuring more books on the subject. Over the years, Phillip’s fascination with the universe expanded with his new-found knowledge on rotating, fantastically plumed, glittering galaxies; some were small clusters of moving stars in a tight, dwarfed system. There were irregularly shaped galaxies that had no true form while glowing brightly in a concentrated white center. Other galaxies were scintillating metropolises shaped like suspended discs. Some as whirling spirals, some were shaped as elliptical spheres. A few had energetic centers shooting matter into space!

  Phillip soaked in the vibrant colors of surrounding nebulas. He imagined himself rocking inside the warm, inviting reds. Phillip flew through the blues as rich as a mid-afternoon sky. He gowned himself in the rich silken purples and gold, resting upon fields of soft greens and picking apart the present yellows, holding them in his hand like plucking tulip petals. It was in these nebulas that he, himself, felt responsible for the birth of every star, playing a proud parent in the colorfully illuminated nurseries.

  As the years soared by, and his astronomical education expanded, Phillip was overjoyed at learning the nature of stars, and how there had been many classifications and sizes starting from the small brown dwarfs to stars similar to Earth’s yellow star all the way to massive blue giant stars. He was enthralled at the varying life-spans of each star, awestruck by the idea of novas and supernovas.

  In his education through his teens, Phillip grasped the concepts of elements listed on the Periodic table and their relationships with the universe. He learned of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, of Stephen Hawking’s genius, theories surrounding the ideas of multiple planes of reality, wormholes and multiple universes. He researched different theories about how the universe may have originated and pondered where the universe was headed. Some believed the universe would eventually stop expanding and retract upon itself, while others counter that perhaps the universe would rip apart.

  All of these ideas and more flooded around Nathaniel and Annette by way of colors, sounds, phantom voices reciting textbook theologies, visions of exploding stars, glowing galaxies teetering too close to one another, raging storms of hydrogen and methane, living constellations at war, whizzing comets, dipping asteroids, startling eclipses, raging plumes of coronal mass ejections, solar flares, spinning satellites, images of Phillip’s astronomy teacher giving lectures on the quantifiable speed of light, multitudes of mathematical equations measuring distances from one object in space to another, and the plethora of knowledge sweeping from the first astrologers in history to the most recent.

  Standing in the center of this multihued bedlam was the evolution of Phillip who grew to be eighteen. In his late teens, he was confident and more aware of himself than ever before. It showed the meaningful relationship between him and his father and the growing collection of books, star charts and telescope equipment. Phillip’s early adulthood revealed a storyline in regards to the relationship between Phillip’s arguing parents, who were on the cusp of their own supernova, set to negatively ignite at even the slightest provocation.

  The tale was muted by pitch-blackness and a stillness void of everything previously viewed. There came a rustling sound in the darkness which Nathaniel determined was Annette spinning in place.

  “What happened?” Annette asked into the void. “Did someone snag a power cord or something? Did we sink into a black hole?”

  Annette’s question was answered by the sound of scratching leaves on the side of a road as they were upturned by a pair of shoes. A faint gray light appeared, expanding to an autumn afternoon when Phillip walked home from school.

  In his nineteenth year Phillip’s five o’clock shadow matched the spiked cherry tinge of his textured hair. It was hard to deduce his exact body shape considering that he wore a bulky maroon hoodie with a sagging hood around his nape. He also donned frayed, loose-fitting blue jeans and absentmindedly kicked the leaves with his scuffed Doc Martens while listening to music through a pair of headphones attached to a cell phone.

  Phillip found himself in his own driveway. He flipped the opening of the mailbox removing a wad of envelopes. Carrying the mail with him to the single story, gray-siding coated house, he passed by the closed single car garage and took out keys from his right jeans pocket. An aroma of fresh-burning leaves traveled on the wind and he briefly look up to determine the source of it.

  The scene switched to the inside of the house focusing on Phillip as he entered the foyer and set down his school bag and mail. In his bedroom, he sat on the edge of his plaid brown and blue bedspread. He was too busy untying his laces to notice that his room was not the same as it had been that morning.

  Annette was aware of a change and she examined it scrupulously. She touched the bare walls. She crossed to Phillip’s desk where there were no signs of the school books and pictures regarding the universe.

  “Where is everything?” she asked.

  As if Phillip heard her, he stopped untying his shoes and observed the room.

  “What the . . .?” Phillip asked. He crossed to his walls looking for his research. He checked his desk drawers, the closet, under the bed, underneath the mattress and box springs, but to no avail – everything associated with the universe, and its splendor, had gone missing. He heard a faint tapping against his window as if a few rogue pebbles were being tossed at the glass. He parted the curtains to find the source of the burning he had smelled in the street. With the words “It can’t be,” Phillip retreated from the glass.

  “What is it?” Annette approached the
window.

  Phillip sprinted from the room with his shoelaces whipping back and forth.

  The sound wasn’t from pebbles hitting Phillip’s window. It was the sound of a crackling fire in the backyard. Burning in effigy was a mountain of personal astronomy items! The green trunk from Phillip’s bedroom was dragged by his mother to the inferno. It contained his modest collection of literature, star-charts, glow-in-the-dark stars and the mobile, all sentenced to execution.

  “Oh, Mr. Cauliflower, you have to come see this.” Annette brought a hand to her mouth.

  Nathaniel said to Annette: “There’s no need, Mrs. Slocum. I’ve seen it.”

  Nathaniel and Annette stood in the backyard as Phillip stumbled through the overgrown grass to reach his mother. Inch by inch, she dragged the trunk closer to the fire.

  “Stop!” cried Phillip. “Mom, why are you doing this?”

  It appeared that his mother didn’t hear him or, if she did, his words went ignored.

  Phillip tripped over his shoe laces and fell to the ground, grasping the strap on the opposite end of the trunk. Feeling resistance from the other end, his mother whirled, glaring at her son.

  She was a portly woman in her mid-forties who had forgone her thin figure years ago masking it with frumpy jeans and a sweatshirt with a local college football team logo. Her shoulder length black hair was mixed with rascally gray strands. Her bloodshot eyes were filled with rage bringing Phillip to shrink back slightly with his hand still on the trunk’s side handle.