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  Memento Mori

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.1 – June, 2013

  Published by Brian Jackson at NookPress

  Copyright © 2013 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Chapter 1

  “From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

  —Garden of Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Monday, 8:15 p.m.

  The Santa Ana winds were blowing and every breath from the east was filled with dusty menace. Nerves were stretched so tight that Juliet was sure she could hear the subliminal humming as they thrummed and sometimes broke in those around her. People in the San Fernando Valley were reaching for aspirin, for liquor, for the prescription bottles at the bottom of their desk drawers and purses. She knew that that night, if she turned on the TV in her hotel room, there would be reports of fires. And murder.

  The south end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ran up against the Mojave Desert and the wind was blowing out of the aptly named Devil’s Playground. The mountains down there were desiccated and brown, unlike the coastal hills near Santa Cruz where she lived, and this devil wind was impolite, pulling at her clothes with hot fingers. As she watched, it lofted a section of the Los Angeles Times left on a bench and turned it into a kite. She recalled a saying about when the winds of change were blowing strong enough that anything could become a deadly projectile. It took a real connoisseur of the desolate to appreciate the scenery.

  She had thought that she might take a short break from hanging draperies and sketch the castle in the westering light, but she was too on edge. Her mood would beget nothing but macabre and sinister images, and those didn’t sell especially well on aprons and t-shirts.

  Those who were out in the wind that late afternoon looked very similar, eyes squinted against the heat and noses wrinkled as they sniffed for smoke and other dangers. Up on the bluff, they were far enough from the city to have rattlesnakes come calling, so people tended to keep their heads down especially at twilight and if they had their hands full of crates or boxes.

  Below on the highway a radiator had lost the battle with the heat and it vented its distress into the air where the wind whipped it away. Other angry cars broke around it. All that anxiety crawling along at three miles per hour as it tried to outdistance the wind and get home for dinner. Juliet found herself checking her purse again to make sure she had her car keys handy. Just in case. They were intruders in the desert and darkness was a threat. It was time to leave.

  To the west, the sky went slowly red, highlighting the pyre of wood being collected for the opening night bonfire, which might not happen if the winds didn’t die back. The risk of wildfire was too great when the winds could hurl sparks and embers into the dried shrubs around the castle.

  Juliet turned slowly from the road. The castle ramparts glowed like they were lit with hellfire and a jet’s contrail scarred the sky as it ripped through the atmosphere. Details were lost to the backlighting which left a fiery silhouette, but the anachronistic castle followed a fairly standard model of a nine bay central block, flanked by pavilions and quadrant passages set back from a Doric portico reached by a twin set of shallow curved stairs. There was a tower in the southwest corner, added on as an afterthought, and it was this that blotted out the sun. The museum had gotten the property cheap, the previous owner having been a Colombian drug lord indicted posthumously the week before his body was found in a ravine. His narco-dollars had purchased the empty castle but he hadn’t lived long enough to modernize it. The retrofit had been expensive and Juliet gathered that the project was over budget, having had to borrow more money than expected.

  To the east a coyote howled, driven to madness even before the moon had risen over the inappropriately named Los Angeles National Forest.

  There was a fountain in the small front courtyard but its precious liquid had turned garnet red and no longer looked refreshing. Though popular with the birds in the morning and in the heat of the day, they had all fled the strange red waters ruffled by the moaning wind.

  What a week for the opening of a new exhibit which celebrated death—fires all over the state, minor earthquakes, and a drought. They would come though, regardless of the winds, Juliet was sure. Carjacking and star watching could only entertain people for so long and then they wanted something different. Something morbid yet fashionable that they could share on Facebook.

  The museum had a bit of an inferiority complex since it had neither the fame nor the budget of the Getty Center or Forest Lawn Memorial Park, and it had needed to borrow many of its displays to augment its own meager collection: better preserved mummies from the Egyptian museum in San Jose, silvered skulls from Mexico, a pyramid of German helmets which had been on display at Grand Central Station after the armistice in 1918. Another war memento was a mattress made in Germany during the Second World War. It had been bisected so everyone could see that it was stuffed with hair of women from the concentration camps. This was on loan from the Wolfeschlegelsteinhausendorff Institute. This display particularly repulsed Juliet, but really there was nowhere for the eyes to rest inside the castle without being assaulted by something gruesome.

  There was a hearse from a museum in Spain, carved as beautifully as any statue Juliet had ever seen, and a collection of nooses from famous lynchings which demonstrated the different styles of knots favored by various hangmen. There were also little vignettes on plaques scattered about the walls detailing hangings that went awry. Fortunately those stories had mostly happy endings. Apparently they wouldn’t hang a man—or woman—twice for the same offense. Not in England or Scotland.

  There was every type of jewelry made from hair and teeth and scraps of dead men’s clothing. And there was one spectacular exhibit acquired from a casino in Nevada, though there were some who would argue that the bullet-ridden car of a mobster was at the very edge of what was true memento mori.

  And then there were the modern art displays which included Esteban’s bone puppets. Juliet found them horrible, but Esteban was a friend and one did things for friends. Like attending the opening of the utterly morbid Memento Mori Museum and Art Gallery in southern California when the Santa Ana winds were blowing straight out of Hell.

  And she wouldn’t leave until the show was over no matter how creepy it got. Juliet was, truth to be told, also there because every once in a while, her past blew into town and tried to look her up for auld lang syne. So far it had always departed again with both parties unscathed, but her old work ethic kept her alert and on guard for signs and portents that her former employer’s shadow was reaching toward her. This time she was avoiding a former colleague who happened to be around Bartholomew’s Wood supposedly “on vacation.” This seemed highly unlikely as there was nothing there except artists, and Dane Hough didn’t know painting from sculpture. He was also impatient, and she figured that he might very well give up and go away if she stayed gone long enough. Not that he would stay gone forever, but every reprieve was a victory.

  Winston Churchill once said that a lie gets halfway a
round the world before truth has a chance to get its pants on. The agency for which she had worked had the standard three-letter acronym expected of government creations, but her division didn’t have a catchy abbreviation. They didn’t make the news. They had no movie stars or matadors or other people around whom the media built cults of personality. They hadn’t done anything glamorous, just set about finding the roots of political disinformation. Juliet’s specialty was seeing patterns in data and, to be strictly honest at least with herself, listening to that inner voice that told her to look for things in places no one else ever saw. Her boss had once asked a psychiatrist to do a work-up on her, part of which he let her see before destroying the file. The shrink was sure that she had extra-high levels of certain neuropeptides like vasopressin, norepinephrine, and enkephalin. The latter was a kind of pain blocker that allowed her to shut out distressing events and concentrate on gathering information. This made her brain seem like it had psychic abilities but really it was just enhanced brain function, or so the shrink insisted. Juliet chose to accept this explanation rather than shadowboxing with even wilder ideas.

  She was not a spy, not a hero, not especially brave. She also wasn’t neurotic enough or so addicted to adrenaline that she couldn’t leave her job when she needed to. In fact, when the opportunity offered, she had walked away with as much speed and had achieved as much distance as her governmental leash would allow. Certainly there was a leash. Intelligence work is sort of like being in a gang and when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet ’til your dying day. And it wasn’t easy fighting the system or people who believed that they were called by a higher power. Naturally it wasn’t as bad as the old days when you were born into a class and even a profession—dad was a blacksmith so the son would be one too—but the same forces were at work. You committed yourself to a direction in college, choosing which career to train for and spending a lot of money to do it. Then you got a job, gained some experience, got promoted. That was what the system wanted, and the people in it believed that this was the best way of life with a conviction that bordered on religious faith. It took real will to break out of the set pattern when all the pressure was to conform, to be your brother’s keeper whether he wanted a big brother or not.

  Juliet had started her career believing that everyone involved was following the dictates of conscience. And maybe they were, but one of them had turned out to be a sociopath so his conscience’s mandates meant absolutely nothing. And she hadn’t realized it until someone died. She saw that man—not every day but often enough to be on a first name basis—and she hadn’t guessed the harm he intended. She had not foreseen that he could kill.

  It was odd how emotional pain worked. The nails hammered into the heart could kill if they went too deep, but they also pounded an important lesson home. It was a working version of the old saw about what didn’t kill you made you strong. She learned that day that she had limitations.

  After the deaths, Juliet had nothing to choose from but rocks and hard places. She started to suspect that the agency might have been infected, even riddled, with treasonous cancers. Not that the killer cells worked together. Not always. Not even often, but they were there, individuals reporting to other government agencies. And maybe worse, because where there had been one traitor there could always be another. They were not inviolate. And Juliet no longer trusted herself to tell the sheep from the goats, the elect from the damned. A shadow of doubt would always precede her and make her question her actions.

  And the higher up the chain she went, the more she came to distrust the bureaucrats and the decisions they made with her information. There were honorable men, like her boss, but many were personally and morally cowardly, unwilling to go and fight their own battles, yet they still thought they were patriots because they had lots of pictures of dead presidents on the hundred dollar bills in their custom-tailored pockets, and vaster sums deposited in secret bank accounts in the Caymans where they could use funds for—anything. Those at the top didn’t want to expend any effort to comprehend other points of view, but they hated and feared everything they didn’t understand, and seemed always ready to urge the government to send someone to bomb it for them if things got inconvenient.

  Her enthusiasm died. Her dedication weakened to the point that she couldn’t find its pulse. There were suddenly too many shades of gray between the black and white and there was no longer any sugar-coating on the ugly realities she faced daily. She could also see the day coming when they would ask her to stop finding the lies and to begin creating them. A mind possessed with conflicting beliefs could not find peace. Then came the shake-up and a bulldozer came through their division. When her boss decided to retire she asked to exit with him. And because her gifts of prognostication with even limited facts had been kept a secret from other divisions who might requisition her, she had been allowed to leave and start a new life as an artist in California. And she liked the life she inhabited. She would never willingly go back.

  However, the agency seemed to have belatedly become aware of their mistake in letting her go and there had been overtures. No overt pressure, probably because she had done them some big favors while on the outside, proving that she hadn’t switched sides, but she knew that the policy of forbearance could change and they could decide at any time to rope her back in.

  The exterior lights came on, striking her eyes and dark thoughts. Juliet turned away from the sunset and her memories and went back inside, passing the small plaque mounted on the wall that read:

  Castle Kingman

  1923

  Willkommen

  The welcome part was in smaller letters suggesting to Juliet that it had less meaning for the Kingmans than the establishment of their dynasty. Which had only lasted two generations after investing in a fraudulent gold mining venture, so what price the purchased fame and fat-headedness? Nor had the owners who came after fared much better. Some properties just had a lot of bad luck. They could only hope that this time the building would outrun its bad karma.

  She didn’t check for long on the threshold of the lobby but the impulse was there, in spite of the interior being safe from the vicious wind. The museum gallery was one of the early twentieth-century castles that went up in Nevada and California, made from sandstone with thick walls and tiny windows which still ended up sandblasted. It had also been updated with state-of-the-art electrical, plumbing, and climate control and ventilation, and airtight display cases for their precious artifacts that would reside there. There was no way that anyone could smell … antique rot. Shrunken heads. Mummies. Especially not from outside. And yet Juliet’s sensitive nose persisted in thinking that the odors were there every time she walked into the building. Perhaps this was because her last castle had had a body bricked up in the fireplace and her psyche was untrusting.

  But that was just her imagination and she needed to ignore it. There was work to do. She finally stepped over the collection of cigarette butts which had missed the trashcan and pulled open the second set of heavy doors that formed a kind of airlock against the wind and sand. Yesterday the janitor, Jorge, had complained about what the ash was doing to the marble and how long it took to clean it. There was only one smoker in the museum. He was one of the guards and Juliet could see why the janitor preferred to talk to her than to the offending party.

  And speaking of the devil…. The museum guards looked crisp and fresh sitting behind the heavily carved bar which served as a desk. They also generally appeared a whole lot friendlier and relaxed than they really were. This didn’t usually bother Juliet. She liked being around professionals who were vetted and trained in their jobs and not just some college kids looking for some easy summer cash. There were historic treasures in this stony oasis erected in the middle of three million human termites, many of whom were avaricious and stupid enough to try robbing a museum. A visible deterrent might help keep them safe.

  There was one of the guards she didn’t care for though. His name was Geary and, in addition to being a smoker
and litterbug, he gave off a strange woman-hating vibe that she had hoped to never encounter again. There were men like him all over the place, men with muscled bodies and small brains who might be willing to have sex with a woman, but inside—and sometimes outwardly if they thought they could get away with it—they were beasts clawing at their prey emotionally and often physically, maybe to compensate for some perceived testicular shortage. She was also willing to bet his personal social compact had no sanity clause after work hours when he would add alcohol and delaminate. If he got angry enough, he would get violent. It figured that he would be manning the desk that afternoon. The hot winds probably weren’t helping his seeming permanent state of suppressed rage. She had known people like him. Anhedonic, incapable of normal pleasures, because anger was always in the way.

  Juliet thought unkindly that he’d have to pay his grandmother to love him.

  “Juliet,” said a small nervous voice which belonged to one of the artisans, saving Juliet from having to wish the guards a good evening and possibly being drawn into conversation and kept in Geary’s orbit.

  “Hi, Vickie.” Juliet forced herself to use the diminutive of her name since she preferred it, though it somehow seemed inappropriate, like calling a male bulldog “Tiny” or naming your female Chihuahua “Butch.”

  Victoria Bremen did modern re-creations of Victorian hair jewelry. She specialized in mourning broaches, but would happily make other kinds of jewelry from locks of baby or pet hair. Hair from a dead donor was not a requirement. Her voice belonged on a small person, but Vickie was actually very tall and muscular, square of chin and shoulders. She always smelled a bit of the incense she used while meditating.

  “That wind. It’s.…” She shivered, either with fear or excitement. “I keep expecting for people to start screaming or for someone to come rushing in waving a knife. We don’t have anything like it back home.”