Psychopomp

Graceful iron-wrought doors welcome them through the stone archway. An algae green stains the gray blocks that erect this building and when they enter its center, an aquatic acoustic splashes all around. Water pours between the carved, staggering points crowning the awnings of each balcony to collect into a rippling pond below. Warm tangerine illumination cascades from the apartments through the falling torrents. Weaves of vine and ivy blanket nearly all the rails and twinkle with the sunset sparkles of the droplets upon them.

Air flows through the open halls as they ascend, coating them in cool mist. When the Consul raps upon the door, disarming chestnut eyes peak through its opening crack. They grow wider as they look at each of the three men.

“Miss Cornelia Petrus,” the Consul whispers so his words do not drift far in the hall, “we must speak with you. We can wait until you are decent.”

“One moment, please,” a tender, dejected voice answers before the door shuts. When next the door cracks, it creaks open all the way and there stands a petite young woman. A floral, pleated cream skirt ruffles around her knees while a striped long-sleeved blouse with puffed shoulders loosely hugs her chest. Bobby pins and ties pulled her brunette hair into a tight bun and scant makeup powders her face. She looks down with a bow and anxiously fidgets her fingers, “Sirs.”

“May we come inside, Miss?” requests the Consul. A formality. All knew she had little choice.

Miss Petrus nods and steps aside to let them in.

Floral decorations linger everywhere, with humble landscape paintings placed to match each set of plants. Gathered upon a table in her common area are many wooden pieces, symbols carved in the shapes of a lyre, stag, raven, and so on, statues made in the likeness of Undryn the Father, Jara the Mother, and many of their divine children, and chests beset with carvings of swans, flowers, and cranes. All gifted form by hand and surrounded with wraps of laurels and bulbous, bright flowers. “Where would be best for us to speak?” Ewain asks, the sound of falling water outside undeniably alluring.

“Please,” she finally raises her eyes just enough to look into Ewain’s, “I must hear it first. Is this of Norma? Is she dead? The lockdown…the power outages…they only occur when a murder happens, I’ve heard and you, a Psychopomp, asking to speak to me….” Her words trail, as if she already said more than she should have.

“Yes, Miss Mortenson was murdered five nights ago at her apartment.”

Around her lips her fingers rub in quiet and her moistening eyes stare into space for a few moments. She rubs her nose just as it sniffles, “On the balcony,” somehow more direction and confidence fill her quivering voice. “We can talk out there. I’m afraid there aren’t enough seats for all three of you.”

“That is okay,” assures Ewain as he removes his glove, “it can be just you and I.”

“Please don’t touch anything,” she tells the Consul and Krypteian before beckoning Ewain to proceed ahead of her as she grabs from her small kitchen a bottle of bourbon and pack of cigarettes. Sheets of cascading water fall just beyond the balcony’s dominion and plants crowd its perimeter. “I would offer you some, but money’s short and I have expensive habits that I won’t be stopping anytime soon,” she explains as she pours herself a glass and pulls out a small pill bottle.

Just as she opens it, Ewain stops her with a delicateness that belies how quickly he moves and reflects in his voice, “What is that?”

“Numerta,” her moistening eyes gaze at him with a profound gravity that he now feels siphoning into him where he touches her, “Trust me, if you’re wanting to have an intelligible conversation with me right now, you’re going to want me to take this.”

“Before you do,” he decides after seconds of internal deliberation. Her bellowing heart beats through his fingers to his own. He feels the drag of the body to teary depths, “I have to be certain you understand the parameters of this conversation, the Trust you are entering into.” Mournful as she is, painful as the confirmation of death must be, he cannot make an exception for her. They must talk now. He informs her of the confidentiality and forthrightness this conversation will require, the consequences she risks if she violates them in any slight way. “Do you understand, Miss Petrus?”

“I do.”

“Do you swear upon Detia’s judgment to speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

“I swear it in sight of Detia the Judge.”

Finally, Ewain removes his hand from her wrist and sits back into his seat, “I feel obliged to implore that you do not mix the two,” he watches her ready both liquor and pharma.

“Will you report me if I do?” her defiance comes weak yet stubborn, “Will it constitute a breach of this recent Trust?”

“No. You are free to do as you wish so long as you remain sober enough to speak true and clear.”

“Then I shall, sir,” and so she chases the two round blue pills with a generous pursuit of bourbon.

He waits until she puts the glass down and makes eye contact, “Do you take any other pharmas? Medicinal or recreational?”

“Why?” she rubs her nose, “You wish to implore me against those, as well?”

“It is a question now pertinent to the conversation you swore to abide by, Miss Petrus. I implore that you abide.”

Cornelia sighs and grasps her elbows, “I do. Have been since I came of age. Vilenium, Mirazone,” she knows he will ask her what she takes, “Trovnia, Chrysantol. I have quite the ’script.”

“And Miss Norma? Did she, as well?”

“Everyone here does. You’re likely to end yourself if you don’t. Norma tried her best to avoid them, said they’d be a distraction, but she let things get to her, stress her out.”

“How do you mean?”

“There were times every now and then when she broke down, came crying to me about how she was worried she’d never reach her goals, that she wasn’t doing enough or wasn’t enough. I could tell when it got bad because her hands started to shake,” Cornelia lifts her rough, worn hand from her glass just enough to show it trembling, “she’d get panic attacks. I…I’ve never been a good comfort person. I didn’t know what to say to her, so one time I gave her some Numerta to calm her nerves. It’d work, and Norma’d ask me to get her more. She didn’t want to be seen at the apothecary.”

“Did not want people to see her there? Associate it with her?”

“Funny, right? Apothecaries are generous here, will give you just about any ’script you want, and most people take full advantage, yet she wanted to seem better than that. For a girl that dressed as she did, caught people’s attention as she did, I’d never met someone so intensely private with her life.”

“She was afraid to be judged,” the sentiment comes to Ewain without thought, “That any little thing may hold her back.” A warmth radiates from his right cranial implant.

Cornelia nods in agreement.

“What else did she ask you to procure?”

“More Numerta,” eye contact struggles to maintain itself for her, “Trovnia. That’s it.”

“And you got them for her often? Every time she asked?”

“I did. Every time.”

“When did she start the Trovnia?”

Cornelia sighs and moves for another sip of bourbon before she answers, “Recently,” droplets bud in her eyes, “Within the last month or two. Grace, her mother, became ill. Lung cancer, inoperable, terminal. Six months to live at most. Norma started doing double shifts at the refinery and some modelling gigs to make extra money. It really messed with her. I’d see her exhausted, hardly able to walk sometimes, and she covered herself in so much makeup just to try and hide it all. I only spent time with her twice during the past month.

Her thoughts pause to formulate, “First time, about three weeks ago…it was the happiest I’d seen her in a while. It was infectious,” a curve just barely lifts the corners of her modest pink lips and vanilla eyes, “she was so excited even I felt it. Norma somehow got hold of a death box, a beautiful one, too. It fascinated just looking at it. A treasure, she called it, and it truly looked like one. When I asked her how she came of it, she wouldn’t tell me, just said someone she met found it for her and that this person could be her entry into her new world.”

New World…. “Her dreams?” Ewain clarifies.

“Soon to be a sweet reality,” Cornelia toasts her glass.

Gently he puts his fingers upon the wrist of the hand clutching the glass and compels her to lower it, “What else did she say of this person?”

“Not much. I told you Norma was a private person. She didn’t like to say much about what she was doing until it proved fruitful.”

“Someone as hopeful and excited as her, feeling like her dreams were finally within reach, she said something more. Sharing our excitement multiplies it.” She looks down at the table, and he clutches her palm and prompts her to look back up, “Recall, Miss Petrus, any single word.” He feels the barbed restraints on her words.

Shakily, Cornelia returns to his eyes, “Connections. Whoever they were, she said they’d been in the industry a while, had real connections. Told her they recognized her talent and character.”

Her talent…her talent…. Her singing…her modelling…her looks. “Tell me of the second time you saw her.” Ewain removes his hand.

“Broken. The death box was a fake. The Carver Norma hired to engrave it for her mother told her. Fortunately, he wasn’t a heartless bastard who tried to take the money and keep quiet of it, the good it did her…. ‘What the hell do I do with it,’ she asked me again and again. Norma wanted to sell it, hoped the money might shorten her mother’s Dormancy and maybe get them both away from here.” Silence comes over Miss Petrus. Her dilated irises quake, “’Don’t tell a soul,’ I told her, ‘don’t try to sell it.’ Maybe she should have.”

“No,” judges Ewain, “No patrician would ever purchase a funerary box from a plebeian. Krypteians,” he looks to Anaxander, who appears to sit silent next to the Consul on a fabric couch, his eyes glazing around the room, “they show no mercy for those party to distribution of forged Ashwood.”

“You think that a worse fate?”

“Yes. No Deliverance for such condemned. Indefinite Dormancy.”

“Will Norma be Delivered?”

“Immediately. I assure it. She will not have to sleep for long.”

Cornelia scoffs and finishes her glass. Her pale skin now flushes red in her face, “How ironic. Perhaps someone should have killed her mother, then.”

Ewain only glares at the young, slurring woman.

“A senseless thing to say. Uncalled for,” she rubs her face, “That night I was at her apartment, and I asked her about her connection hoping maybe there might be some upliftment there. She didn’t say a word about it, pretended she never heard me. That’s when she asked about the Trovnia. Of course, the wonderful friend I am, I gave her plenty. That night we laid down next to each other on her floor, turned on the radio, held hands, and took it together.” A bittersweet smile wants to come across her face, yet just watching the young woman he can see it cuts sharp. How to feel about the memory now is no longer clear. The layers of nuance added to it by time more cruel than kind.

“That was her first time with the pharma?”

Cornelia nods, her thoughts now drifting in the past.

With no tolerance, no prior exposure, hypersensitivity defined her first few experiences with it. It truly must have transported Norma to another world. “Did Norma have a boyfriend? Any lovers or romantic encounters?”

Miss Petrus eases out of her reminiscence and wipes tears from her eyes, “Ichorians no. She had suitors plenty, every day it seemed. A lady like her around here, men probably thought it’d feel like trysting with a Demichorian had they the opportunity. As far as I know, she never gave any the chance. She thought it’d all be a distraction.”

Someone as guarded of their lives as Norma, Ewain thinks, perhaps feared letting an unknown within the boundaries of intimacy. She wanted to be as physically perfect as possible and her clothes and makeup permitted control over it, over what people see. Yet bare, shorn of all ornamentation and modesty to be felt and looked upon by another in such an intense way meant giving them the innermost peak at her, at her flaws, her feelings. The things they may learn or may say of her afterward to others…a terrifying prospect for a girl dedicated and eager for dreams.

“Did Norma keep any diaries or journals? Personal letters or other thoughts to paper?”

“She did,” her devouring brown eyes swim in crystalline waters, “but I don’t know what she ever did with them. What interest are they to you?”

“They could be invaluable to the case, to understanding the condition of her soma and psyche,” Her eyes tremble yet remain firm in lock with his.

“You believe her death dissolves her memory’s right to privacy? She’d burn them before ever letting there be the remotest possibility of them being read.”

“Even at the cost of her Deliverance?”

“Are you suggesting you will fail in your endeavor without them?” Cornelia shows him displeasure for the first time.

“No. I will resolve this case and see her to the Beyond.” Just as Ewain resolutely punctuates, a sigh reverbs through his bones, so heavy it nearly commandeers his breath. Art, dutifully quiet to now, failed to contain it. His hand upon the ionizing metal table, Ewain taps his finger in a pattern of varying intervals. Say it.

“You should not give such assurance of yourself. It’s very possible this site will kill you. Be more ambiguous with promises of hope.”

“I hope it rains soon,” Cornelia says, breaking their eye contact to look at the thin cascades of water by them. “You can tell the reservoirs on the roof are drying. When the rain pours and they’re full, it sounds like you’re inside a monstrous waterfall here. I like to imagine it’s what the Eye sounds like before we reach its edge and go to the ashen shores and sunless sky. I want to hope it’s what Norma might hear when she finally rides the Stygian and goes to peace Beyond. Is that accurate? Do you Psychopomps know?”

Ewain looks at her profile, and sees that Cornelia is very much a lost beauty in her own way. Subtle, modest, hidden beneath the wear and lines of ceaseless work and little joy. “’Through an iris of weeping willows,’” he recalls, “’the Eye sits, ensconced by mists and tides of a thousand waterfalls which plunge into the End and a New Beginning.’ You never see it, the plunge, but you hear it, the unceasing roars of falling water a thousand times more profound than this.”

“Then it is as we thought…terrific and terrifying,” she remarks with a weary smile and gaze that suggests she tries to imagine the majesty in sight. “Norma and I, we’d sneak up to that rooftop and lie together, pretend we were just at the Eye’s precipice and talk.”

“About what?”

Cornelia looks down, tries to rein in her sob and with a pyrrhic exhale answers, “Our dreams. Our lives. The Ichorians. If they listened to our prayers for everything to be better. We looked forward to it when we were kids,” she wipes her eyes, “always asked each other, ‘want to go to the watery edge tonight’ like we were all-knowing and cool.”

The watery edge…. “When I was younger…” he wonders if he should say anymore, “I lived on this land that had a waterfall only I and my siblings knew of. Sometimes we snuck out to it with each other or some other kids we were trying to impress. We would race to the top, trying to cheat each other to be the first up there, then dare one another to take ‘The Plunge,’ as we called it.” Now his eyes look into the past, “We must have taken it a hundred times.”

“What fools we are as kids,” Cornelia gazes at him with tenderness in her eyes.

“Yes…but…I would give anything to be that foolish kid again.”

They say nothing more. Ewain puts his glove back on and both return to the common room where the Consul sits patiently and the Krypteian stands about, perusing the room.

“Apologies, miss,” Anaxander begins, delaying their exit, “I touched nothing, I promise. Your place is remarkably clean, and these figures,” he gestures to the table of wooden items, “they beckoned me. They are your work?”

“They are,” she replies somberly, hands clasped before her.

He nods approvingly, “Quite the talent, miss. These could have been done by Tytus himself. Are any for sale?”

“No, I’m afraid not. All still need some finishing touches.”

“Shame. I shall inquire again at a later time, then, if I may.”