Manon's last week at the office was easy-peasy. Francis of Assize, a baby who died aged three weeks, four Jesuses, and, lastly, this Helen of Troy appointment.
With her seniority at the Medium Cybernetics Inc., Manon should have gotten tougher Dinner Dates with the Famous Dead guidings, like the Genghis-Khan four-in-a-row booking. The HR would probably chew the owner's ear off because she was underutilized. Manon toyed with a notion of thanking him, but decided against it. She was just a dead working girl, someone inconsequential. Nobody was dying to talk to her.
Helen of Troy, on the other hand, was one popular dead girl.
So, back to work, Manon, she told herself. Go to Necropolis. Find Helen. Bring her through the portal for the Dinner Date. Easy-peasy!
Necropolis was just like every other city in the Land of the Dead, LOD for short. Half-mist structures sprung overnight. The dead stayed there when they missed the safety of the walls. If they left for the groves afterwards, everything dissolved back into fog. The LOD didn't have hunger, pain or possessions, so the choices were made on a whim.
Today the city felt deserted. All Manon could see was a wall, a temple and a washed-out outline of a house. But just as she spotted Helen on the ramparts, a bathhouse with a colonnade began to materialize.
Helen greeted Manon with an excited shout. "Manon! You are my savior! I was so torn... couldn't decide whom to spend the day with. It is so difficult to be in love with two men, my dear, so difficult!"
"What, only two today? That's new."
Helen gave her a playful pat on the cheek. "Ah, who cares! You are here, and you can take me away, and we can go shopping, have lunch and ah...! We'll shop some more! Is the dinner client very ugly, Manny?"
"Not really," Manon lied. Helen would be past caring anyway the moment she dove into a boutique. That was her paycheck, the endless shopping in the world where the things lasted and held value. The dead, of course, couldn't take anything back to LOD. It all dissolved after passing through the Portal, so Helen had to content herself with leaving the bags at the Medium's office. The staff shipped most of her purchases back for a refund.
Helen rearranged a perfect curl in front of a hand-held mirror and set it aside with a sigh. "Then onward, darling! Let's launch this ship."
Manon led their way to the Portal. The locations were never the same, to avoid the restless souls asking for a free trip. The Guides received the coordinates daily.
She let Helen through, made sure there were no stowaways, dropped Helen off at her Dinner Date, returned to the office and settled in an armchair with a stack of magazines. Easy-peasy!
The cell buzzed, startling her. She picked the gadget up, frowning. This was from Helen's client, Mr. Rivka. Helen's dates normally went overtime, rather than being cut this short.
"Hello! Medium Cybernetics, Manon speaking."
A shrill screech assaulted her ear. "Helen of Troy is dead!"
Stop the presses! We're going to make a splash with this news!
Manon reached for her cool-and-collected voice to calm down the problematic client. "Mr. Rivka, I thought you understood the conditions of the contract. The dead remain dead."
"The contract," whined the voice, "didn't say anything about her dying here and now."
"I'll be right over." Manon tasted bile in the back of her throat. Sickened or not, she couldn't afford inaction. There were plenty of other nameless dead souls after her job.
A cab ride, a flight of stairs, and an elevator ride later to the client's apartment, Manon stared at Helen of Troy.
One porcelain-like cheek rested on a platter. The wavy curls soaked up spilled wine. The candles and the white satin of the tablecloth made it look funerary. Manon spit on her fingers and pinched the candles out.
Unfortunately, even once she flicked the electric lights on, Helen of Troy stayed dead. Not dead-dead, but a corpse in the Land of the Living dead.
"She's just... just got here... didn't touch anything... toppled. Just like that. Toppled!" Mr. Rivka made a helpless gesture towards Helen and mumbled, "Police, uhm... do I call the police now?"
Manon shook her head like, 'no!' It was millennia too late to report Helen's death. However, the thriving business providing her with gainful postmortem employment was threatened by this incident.
"On behalf of Medium Cybernetics Inc., I apologize for the inconvenience," she said. "It's an uncommon technical glitch we're in the process of fixing. Helen's soul simply has returned to the LOD unguided."
Manon made a quick prayer for her lie to come true.
"Will a voucher for two personal sessions be sufficient compensation for your distress? We'll reverse the charges and reimburse any expenses you have incurred preparing for this session."
"Two sessions...? With... with her?"
Manon studied Helen's waxy features. "At the moment I'm unsure when Helen can come back without bugging up again."
"I'm willing to wait," Rivka replied.
Manon treated the client to a sunshine smile. "Our most popular ladies are Cleopatra, Mona Lisa, Lucrezia—"
Rivka's mouth started to open in refusal.
"And, of course, Marilyn Monroe. She has the best stories."
"Maybe..." Mr. Rivka licked his lips, "maybe after you fix the glitch, I can meet Clytemnestra and Helen together?"
Did Mr. Rivka conduct his own research or did someone in sales tried to impress him with the piquant details to boost niche bookings? Clytemnestra wasn't exactly their top-lister, even though she and Helen were rumored to be twin sisters. Of course, they were also rumored to be hatched from the same egg, laid by a mortal woman Leda after Zeus 'visited' her as a swan.
Rivka probably didn't buy this nonsense, but he had no troubles believing Helen was back in the LOD. Comforting lies were the easiest to believe in. If only Manon could convince herself and calm her nagging worry!
"Sir, I'll let our sales team help you with the specifics of your booking. If that's what you really want." She wiggled her brows. It felt good to shift the problem on the shoulders of the living.
"Right now, let's just..." She stared at the corpse. She couldn't lag Helen in her arms out of here and load her into the cab. "Do you have a car parked in the building, Mr. Rivka?"
"What...? Yes, yes... I do!"
"Could you give Helen a lift to the office? She will really, really appreciate it when I tell her about it."
If Helen's face launched a thousand ships once, it could launch one sports coupe or whatever Mr. Midlife Crisis had in the garage.
While Mr. Rivka went to bring his car to the entrance parking garage, Manon dismissed the waiting cabby and wrapped Helen in the tablecloth. After that, they each grabbed their side and the body removal presented no problem.
When they were wrestling it through the narrow elevator door, however, Rivka touched Manon's hand. The man squeaked. "Are you... are you...?"
Manon wondered if she'd ever hear one complete sentence from Rivka.
"I'm a Guide, Sir. I work out of LOD." A euphemism for saying she's dead, and another comforting lie. She pulled leather gloves higher up her wrists, but Rivka watched her hands anyway for the rest of the elevator ride.
"I thought... you wouldn't mind, if I'd ask you to... ah... sit in the back with her? Seeing you both dead, and..." Mr. Rivka flipped the front seat of Honda Accord forward and thrust a finger at the tiny back seat.
Manon regaled him with a sunshine smile. "Sure. We'll be cozy." Super-cozy, but at least it wasn't a Smart car.
They climbed in and Rivka drove off.
It took Manon two tries to speed-dial Pavel, however, when the phone connected, she had no clue what to say to her boss. 'Helen of Troy is dead!' didn't work all that well for Rivka.
"Pavel, we have a glitch in programming." Then, in a voice nearly as breathless as Rivka's, Manon added the inevitable.
"So... Helen of Troy is dead."
"Dead..." Pavel echoed into her earbuds, "what sort of dead?"
"The sort that requires someone trustworthy to meet Mr. Rivka and I in the parking garage to transport a body."
"Oh," Pavel replied, "We don't need this. But how? Never mind. What are you driving?"
When Pavel's "r's" and "z's" re-surfaced as they did just now, it was a sure sign of stress. But stressed or not, he had two security guards—aka Pavel's not academically inclined cousins—waiting for them in the parking garage of the Medium's building. They brought Helen into the office like carrying bodies was routine.
"Valium, boss?" Manon sniffed the air in the conference room after she followed them in.
"No." Pavel eyed Helen's curves under the tablecloth and scratched blond stubble on his chin.
She got it. Pavel couldn't afford nerves.
A bone fide Ph.D., a physicist by training, Pavel once found himself without prospects in a foreign land. Instead of taking up a job in the food industry, he cobbled together a contraption from pieces of electronics collected at some dump and styled himself a cyber-medium.
Maybe transferring calls from dead aunts made Pavel want to prove his own sanity. Maybe he guessed that the needles registered more than the background noise.
Whatever the case, Pavel fiddled till he developed a way of imprinting souls on memory chips, and projected their corporeal presence in the world of the living. He found Manon and others like her, who could manage the modern world, but died long enough ago to know the ins and outs of LOD.
These Guides rounded up the invitees, guided them through the portal, and translated for the customers who wanted to dine with, say, Caesar, but their Latin was rusty.
Out of these humble beginnings, Medium Cybernetic was born. There were objections on religious grounds and incensed letters from the utility companies. But until now, they weren't seriously threatened.
It would run smoothly again. It had to. Manon looked at her boss for confirmation.
Pavel set his gaze on Rivka.
"You were instrumental reporting this glitch, Mr. Rivka. It takes a very brave man to accomplish this." He issued two vouchers for the "Deluxe Dinner with Three Guests from the Past".
"Thanks," Rivka said. Helen got a longing look from him, then he departed.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Pavel yanked tablecloth off the body.
Helen's seductive frock offered little concealment, but there was nothing to see. In terms of wounds or marks that is, but Pavel ignored her generous curves.
"Nothing. Not a clue," Pavel admitted at last, then waved to his cousins. "Get rid of her, bratva."
"The river?" the burly bros asked in unison.
"Yes."
Manon's last memory as a living woman was of salty water stinging her eyes, pressing relentlessly like a tightening vice on her head. She shivered. "You aren't going to...?"
"To resurrect her, or some such?" Pavel rolled his eyes. "Do I look like Merlin?"
"Merlin can't resurrect a cockroach," Manon grumbled. Not that anyone would want him to practice reverse pest control.
"I don't think anyone can. Look for Helen around the LOD, Manon, but... It seems to me, Helen used up both of her lives. Don't the dead just disappear sometimes?"
"I always thought they went into hiding. LOD is a big place, Pavel. Endless...." Manon cringed. It came out feebly, as if she were a child repeating a lie about a puppy sent to a farm.
"It doesn't happen often that someone goes missing. I see Cro-Magnons every day, as vibrant and colorful as yesterday's car crash victims. I figure it's enough for us to die once. Is it... is it what you really think it is? That Helen hit her limit?"
Pavel shrugged. "Did she look unhappy to you? Suicidal?"
"No," Manon replied slowly, remembering. "No."
She shook her head to emphasize her point.
"No, Pavel, Helen didn't look like she was about to take her own life."
Something still bothered Manon, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it "Unless being ditzy is a sign of a suicidal behavior."
Pavel groaned. "Don't speak ill of the dead, Manon."
The dead harbor no awe for the other dead, so Manon made no effort to accommodate Pavel's request.
"Some sources claim that Helen led Bacchanalia celebrations to distract the Trojans the night the Horse was brought into town. Others say no, she came to the Horse and tormented the Greeks inside."
"Are you going somewhere with this?"
"I bet she did both. It was a long night, she was bored, tipsy, and her husband of the day, Deiphobus, wasn't much to look at. After all these centuries, dead and buried, she still falls in love daily. That's how she is. Too dumb to be suicidal."
It was the longest speech Manon had given in decades. The longest anyone listened to her, for sure.
"Who the hell was Deiphobus?" Pavel drummed his fingers on the gleaming conference table.
"Hector's and Paris' little brother. Helen's husband-du-jour. He inherited her when his better known siblings fell to the Greek swords."
"Can't say I heard of him."
"She pulled a prank on the boy too—she hid his sword the night Troy fell."
"Hilarious. And there is one man with a motive to kill Helen, if she was murdered."
"Pavel, the only person in Greece who didn't have a motive to kill Helen was someone blind, deaf and lost at sea during the Siege of Troy. But why would the angry mob wait for millennia to do her in?"
Manon wandered over to the serving table with a built-in fridge, pulled the door open, fished out a water bottle and gulped half of it down.
Pavel rubbed his temples: "Did they try?"
Manon snorted. "Menelaus, the First Husband, went as far as bare her to the waist to plunge his sword into her chest. Her... ahem... beauty stayed his hand."
Pavel raised his palm to stay her. "Okay, Manon. Recent motive it is. Let's go through the list of clients Helen entertained in the past few months."
Medium Cybernetics rented an entire floor of the office tower. That space was divided into a maze of personal workstations. Manon found one and lowered herself in the swivel chair in front of a computer. Nobody was watching her, so she winked impishly at her reflection in the dark screen as she always did. Then, her fingers froze over the keyboard.
Reflection! That's it!
That's what bothered her! It was a tiny thing, all too easily forgotten in Helen's flamboyant company, and... she had to check it.
Without a word to Pavel, Manon raced back to the portal.
***
Necropolis' agora filled with people and goats since Manon had left. Women lined up with amphorae by a newly flowing font. A few dozen houses now formed winding streets.
Manon found the place on the ramparts where Helen sat in the morning. Something flashed between the stones at her. She kneeled and picked up Helen's mirror. Her memory was correct. It wasn't period polished bronze, no. It was glass, and it shattered in many pieces the way modern glass did.
She removed every piece from the mist-wrought wall collecting it into a leather pouch she willed out of thin air.
"Careful, don't cut your finger," a voice said behind her back.
Manon glanced around to see Simeon. Medium Cybernetics used the guy in place of Jesus H. Christ, who couldn't be located despite the Guides' best efforts.
"Have you seen who broke it, Simeon?" Manon asked.
"No, I have not, but the shards have remained here for a long time. They shouldn't have had."
To illustrate his point, Simeon put his staff on the ground and walked away. As soon as he took his first step from it, the staff melted into the fog.
"This mirror persists, when everything else disappears after we stop using it. I'm taking this to Pavel."
Simeon watched her guardedly. "Something troubling is afoot, isn't it? Pavel barely said two words to me just now. Usually, he's more of a conversationalist."
"You look tired," Manon deflected. "Too many tough questions?"
Simeon took the forceful change of subject in stride. "No. This generation's propensity to demand empirical proof is the very reason I participate in Medium's ruse."
"Nobody doubts that you've had a noble reason to accept Pavel's offer. We all know how you've died, Simeon."
He smiled indulgently. "We swipe stories of how we've died with the same abandon the wives talk about giving birth to their children."
"And to listen to them you got off easily! What's being torn to pieces by the wild beasts for the amusement of Roman crowds compared to contractions?"
"You didn't die in childbirth, I take it."
Manon didn't respond and Simeon graciously changed the topic himself. "That Pavel of yours, sometimes I envy him. When he couldn't find the Savior here, it didn't ruffle a hair on his head. He remained an unbeliever."
"He's a fourth generation atheist. That's their faith."
"It is a difficult choice to believe in nothing, even in the face of irrefutable proof to the contrary."
"Oh," said Manon, feeling precariously out of her element here, "oh."
Simeon fixed her with his clever dark eyes.
"Of course, what proves to me that our Savior had been raised to Heaven, to Pavel spells that Savior is a mere myth. And this is why, Manon, I share meals with your clients and pretend. It gives them peace of mind."
"Until they die."
Simeon nodded. "Do I betray my faith by my actions, or serve it... Manon? Manon! Where are you going?"
"I'm sorry! I must run!"
The philosopher just told her who and why killed Helen of Troy, if not how.
But 'how' would have to wait. She had to start with 'who'.
***
The sounds of lyre music came from a pleasant olive grove. The musician, Manon's chief suspect, started a complex tune, tripped and cursed under her breath.
"Good evening, ma'am," started Manon, "I'm here on behalf of Medium Cybernetics Inc."
The blonde woman looked up from her lyre. Her features were so similar to Helen's, she could only be the famed beauty's twin.
Yet nobody was likely to mistake one sister for another. Clytemnestra had none of Helen's magnetic aura. The familiar cornflower-blue eyes had an unfamiliar expression. They belonged to a cunning, persistent woman that earned, nay, clawed the things she wanted from life. It should have appealed to Manon, who fancied herself something of the sort, but it didn't.
Clytemnestra didn't even mask her smugness. "Go on, my dear. Give me your best offer. I'm listening."
"We'd like to interview you, if you have time."
"It'll be my pleasure." Clytemnestra followed Manon to the portal with effortless grace.
***
Pavel sat with a laptop perched on his knee, by the portal in the Locker Room, named thusly because that's where the spare clothes were kept for the arrivals. Even the dead didn't like running around the office naked after the transition from the LOD.
"I'm amazed by your dedication," Manon greeted him. "Another manager would have locked up and hit the sack, leaving an underling in charge."
Pavel didn't respond. He stared at the mirror shards that spilled on the floor when Manon stepped out of the portal and her pouch disappeared along with her clothes. Pavel picked one of the pieces up and examined it.
Clytemnestra made a move as if to step back into the fog, then shrugged and stayed. She didn't hold all the cards, but she had an ace up her... whatever.
"Why don't you welcome our murderer, Pavel?"
"Hello, Clytemnestra," Pavel said, looking up from the shards."Grats on your record in holding grudges."
"Not so fast, boss. Her hatred may be ancient, but her motive is new," Manon corrected him. "She wants to be Helen's stand-in for the Medium."
"Ah," said Pavel thoughtfully. "That explains it. Who babbled about Simeon's deal?"
Manon shook her head denying the accusation. "The word travels in the LOD. There's literally nothing to fill the eternity in but gossip."
Clytemnestra hissed. "Don't you dare talk over me!"
She paused for a short moment to fix Manon with a cold stare: "I claim what was stolen from me! My mother wasn't the mortal woman Leda, but Nemesis, the Goddess. It was for my mother's sake that Zeus took the swan shape and flew down from Olympus!"
"Okay," Manon said.
"And to think that certain charlatans claim Helen to be Nemesis' daughter! Helen! As if that shrew hasn't gotten enough of what should have been mine. I was the Goddess living among the mortals—and I might as well have been a slave's daughter. Everything was thrown at Helen's feet. Everything!"
Manon wasn't going to ask what Clytemnestra considered a 'god'. But things about Helen, they sounded very real. "I bet she never asked for a single thing in her life."
"You bet!" Clytemnestra snorted bitterly. "There was a wooden sheep when we were five. Our step-father refused to buy it for her. The twit cried a little, then wiped her nose and said: 'It's easier to wait till you're given, than to keep asking for it.' "
"A profound observation for someone so young." Pavel commented.
"And that's what happened, time after time. Toys, jewels, men... everything was flung at her feet, including the deal with you. I want it."
"Rightly or wrongly, you'll get what you want, Helen, if you answer one question for me." Pavel flexed his shoulders, and the familial resemblance between him and his mighty cousins became more obvious. "Did this man give you the mirror for Helen?"
Clytemnestra grimaced, then studied the tablet Pavel offered her. "Yes."
"Did he order you to tell her to keep it in the LOD or it'll disappear?"
"Yes." Clytemnestra now had tears in her eyes. It must have been a tiring day for her. All that murdering and waiting...
Manon crooked her finger. "Time to go, Princess."
Actually, it should have been 'Queen', but for whatever reason people associated petulance with the princesses, as if the annoying qualities disappeared with ascendance.
"Rest in peace," Pavel called to Manon, the livings' farewell to the departing dead.
"I will." She shoved Clytemnestra through the portal. On the other side, she didn't waste her time with farewells. Her stomach was churning too much for that. She just said, "We will be contacting you shortly," and dove through the closing portal back to the Land of the Living.
***
"Manon!" Back in the Locker Room, Pavel extended the dress to her, modestly looking away. "You're breaking the protocol."
Luckily, Pavel scooped up the mirror shards while she guided Clytemnestra. She didn't fancy walking on the broken glass barefoot. Her voice was muffled by the dress she pulled over her head. "I know. And I'm very, very sorry, but I simply have to know."
Pavel waited for her head to pop over the collar and extended the tablet to her. The title read, "Are the Dead Being Served?"
Manon glanced through the article.
My grandmother thought that to see a person you are talking to on the phone is a fantasist's rubbish. Long before that, she even thought the phone was a fantasist's rubbish. Yet she believed that a soul survives the body's demise, and that it can be contacted.
Her grandson, your humble author, thought her séances were utter rubbish.
Medium Cybernetics Inc., explores the boundary between science-fiction and the occult, and sides with my Grandma Enid. So I asked the Medium Cybernetics Inc., to bring Grandma Enid to dinner and dove into the science, the fiction, the occult, the trickery and everything else the Medium serves its clients [...]
It went on and on, but Manon scrolled to the author's photograph.
The man's graying hair was cropped short, and the receding hairline opened his tall forehead. He looked attentive, even intense. His shoulders slouched slightly towards the reader, as if he was talking from the screen in confidence. It was a good picture.
"I know him! I guided the bastard a few weeks ago."
Private investigators, reporters, and assorted other 'specialists' made a beeline for their office. This one was called Miles Richardson. Dr. Miles Richardson, actually. He held one of those university positions Pavel coveted when he first came to America.
"And I even liked him, because he didn't lie about his assignment, nor his skepticism. And... I've missed the case of industrial espionage. I'm so sorry, boss."
"No use crying over the spilt milk, Manon."
"What did Richardson do to the mirror? Why did it kill Helen?"
"He found the way to encode it with her soul, the same way I do. Only, I kept it together, their soul and the matter it borrows from the environment to materialize—and he didn't. Some of the soul remained behind with the mirror to keep it whole in the LOD. The rest embodied as usual here. This couldn't continue for long, so Helen died the final death of a broken spirit."
"She felt heart-broken this morning," Manon said softly.
Pavel shrugged. "It was like a spring stretched past its tensile strength. Richardson spied, followed into our footsteps and made advancement or two of his own. This all means one very bad thing."
"We've lost our monopoly!" Manon exclaimed.
"Yes, this too. Plus something more important."
"What?" Her job was more important to her than anything since she'd died.
"Manon," Pavel said. "From now on the dead should be afraid of the living."
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