Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

by Стив Хиллард

  Out of the mist suddenly loomed a giant dwarf. She stabbed the brakes and the Jag’s tires screeched in protest. The dwarf was plywood, a full-color figure of Disney’s “eighth dwarf,” a clutching, leering “Greedy.” The next sign objected to a proposed development in the canyon by Disney heirs. She took a deep breath and blew it out, settling her eyes on the road and both hands on the steering wheel.

  The canyon remained an undeveloped gash in the Santa Monica Mountains, despite being at the shoulder blade of the great city. It had a few homegrown shops, a theater started decades ago by blacklisted Hollywood refugees, a nudist colony, and clutches of “creeker” cabins hovering streamside — at least, until the next fifty-year storm.

  The triple threat of natural holocausts — fire, flood, and earthquake — still dominated the canyon’s existence.

  Fire, of course, Cadence knew only too well. Mother Nature’s conspiracy of topography, fuel load, and wind, birthed horrific infernos. The names of the recurring beast’s incarnations made headlines: the Hume Fire of 1956, the Wright Fire of 1970, and the Pluma Fire of 1985. But the speed and fury of the Topanga Fire of 1993, slouching its molten hide through the ridgelines and canyon corridors on its way to the coast, was unparalleled in a hundred years.

  Downshifting as she approached the ocean lurking ahead, she couldn’t help but see a few of that fire’s hateful scars: blackened, cracked trunks of older trees. These were surrounded by flurries of new growth.

  She shuddered and tried for the millionth time to block the images of that night: her father grabbing the spare truck key and rushing out of the house as the red glow in the sky approached— the crackle and whoosh of a wind-driven firestorm — the cries and shouts — the mad scramble down the twisted hillside road as the air prepared to explode into an inferno.

  And the insane roar of the unleashed monster.

  That was the last time she saw her father.

  “So, you see, it’s natural,” she remembered the musings in one of her grandfather’s journals. “Stories of family, of crisis, of achievement — all seek patterns of disaster.” One of many quaint chestnuts he left in his wake. Now the waters of his passing were still. It had been almost a year since that Halloween night when he disappeared. Right after — out of the blue — she got the telegram. Yes, the old-fashioned yellow thing delivered for a price for people that distrusted phones, much less even understand the internet. It read:

  Cadence: I would like to see you in Topanga. We have much to catch up on. I vow I won’t leave you.

  Jess

  It was short and awkwardly to the point. The word— “vow”—was particularly desperate. Like a drowning man yelling for help to the only person left on shore who might listen. And she’d arrived to find a disappearance. No pattern leading to renewal, no cycle to redemption. No answers to any of her questions.

  She glided through the last turn before the beach. Dwarves. Spells. Things unstoppable. When there are no clues, everything is a signpost hidden in the overgrowth.

  The only sure thing was the blue-margined court document peeking from under the valise in the back seat. “Essentially an overdue bill,” her lawyer, Everett, had told her. “Pay two hundred thousand dollars within thirty days or your grandfather’s estate will be seized and liquidated and the money shelled out to his creditors.”

  That would be it for the Forest, this car, his documents, all of it. After foreclosure and one hell of a garage sale, what would be left? Zip. Nada. The man might as well have never existed. The last trace of him snuffed out of existence before she could even get a handle on him. An erased person, she thought, except for me and his bills.

  She downshifted catching the green at the light to Highway One, and glanced at the dashboard clock. It told her she risked being late for the lunch she’d pulled every string she had to set up.

  Soon she was stuck in traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, at what must be the world’s slowest intersection. The reason was obvious. Huge billboards, upgraded to full digital displays, loomed like monstrous, angry televisions over a sea of gawking drivers. People weren’t driving, they were watching. The screens closest to her advertised the newest, epic remake of Tarzan. It flashed the word “Ju Ju” in immense red letters and she could just hear, over the traffic noise, deep thuds of jungle drums emanating from the screen. She shook her head in disbelief, saw a sudden lane opening, and gunned ahead.

  By the time she got access to Little Santa Monica Boulevard, missed the ivied entrance to the Peninsula Hotel, and inched around the block, she knew she’d have to dig deep into her purse and valet park. And still be late.

  She pulled to a jumpy stop, handed the keys to the attendant, and opened her purse to deposit the valet ticket and gather her thoughts. She looked at her purse. It was from Macy’s, some obscure brand called “Borunda”, which sounded like a country in Africa. It cost twenty-five bucks. It had never held more than a few hundred dollars. In twenties. This purse that could never save her grandfather’s — her — property. She closed the latch and hefted the valise and tried valiantly to slow her nervous walk. She wanted to run. Her heels clacked as she entered the tiled foyer and saw the restaurant. “The Belvedere Restaurant in Beverly Hills”, to be exact. She tried to gather her thoughts. Everett told her that Mel had recently fallen on lean times, but still had one hell of a Rolodex. He was once a journeyman editor for a publishing house in New York. A description which suggested sepia-tinted days when stacks of manuscripts would wait patiently and whisper: Bide your time. A well-told tale is timeless.

  A waiter escorted her to a table flanked by palms amidst the gauzy, canopied white light of the restaurant veranda. At the table loomed Mel. He was twiddling a business card. A hefty amber drink and an iPhone sat by his right hand. He had a face made for print media. Thinning hair, angular features that formed a kind of broken reef, in the middle of which rose a prominent, craggy island of a nose, a great bumpy nose, long-battered by waves of single malt scotch. He had peculiar blue eyes, like the ocean, like salt and wind and sun-fade. They beckoned in the peculiar way of a very perceptive drunk. He looked as if he had squinted and seen some distant light, some rare existential truth, through the bleary long lens of booze and ill fortune.

  She recognized the look. From long ago, from her own dad’s eyes. Cadence smiled nervously at Mel across the breeze-rippled tablecloth.

  Calmly, he continued to twiddle Everett Marlowe’s business card. Everett, Mel’s roommate at Duke, Class of ’83, was Cadence’s attorney as administrator for the estate of her grandfather, recently declared “Missing, Presumed Deceased.” The lawyer was, as they say out here, a close personal friend of Mel-the-Agent.

  Suddenly, like a conductor’s initial baton flourish, Mel tapped the card on the table and poised it in the air. He turned his right side toward her and his right eye gave a peculiar knowing squint, like that of an old conniving pirate. It was a look that offered intimacy and demanded candor. “So … Cadence,” he paused. “Everett told me about you and your … interesting find. But first about you. You’re just out of school?”

  “Yes. I graduated last year from Colorado State … University.” She felt more secure adding that last part. “I was an art student, with a film studies minor.”

  “I see.” His iPhone came alive and vibrated across the tab-letop. Mel’s hand deftly silenced it. “Cleveland State. Fine school.” She grimaced like a good alum, but held her tongue. He glanced at some text on the screen. “You got family?”

  This was awkward territory for her, but that engaging eye made her feel she could confide in him.

  “No, not really. My mom passed away two years ago. My dad, he … died when I was younger. So my eccentric grandfather was it. And now he’s disappeared.” Mel put Everett’s card down and took a drink as he studied it, as if there were still some deeper meaning to its sparse information. Cadence looked into the depths of her iced tea for some normal conversational tidbit to throw out. Finding none, she waited until he
looked up, again with the narrowed eye, and spoke.

  “Everett said you have something interesting to show me.”

  She fumbled with the valise, nestled like a Pomeranian on her lap. “Well, yes, I found … my grandfather had these manuscripts, actually.” She dug into the papers in the valise. “I found all this in a peach crate in his attic. I, it, I think it’s … some of it’s by J.R.R. Tolkien.”

  “Hmm. You and everyone else wish they could find just that. I’ll share some things with you in a bit. Hmm.”

  A cloud passed over the seaswept atoll that was Mel’s face. He looked at her like this fifty-buck breakfast at the Belvedere was a very expensive use of his very valuable time. In other words, The Big Favor was being bestowed. It was time for her to deliver.

  She ransacked the valise for a moment, stopped and looked at a small, brittle page with hand-written lines, then thrust it at him. Mel sighed and took the page. He squared in his seat and put on his reading glasses and his eyes began to track down the yellowed scrawl. Ever so slowly, his focus steadied as he read:

  I fear that I no longer have the will to withstand their presence. They conspire to have me destroy all that is contained in these writings. Much of it they believed destroyed long ago. Now they will spare nothing. They will return. So that these pages are not snatched from my own hand, I hereby set them, through my new friend and purveyor of sharpening services, into what I hope will be a sea of conflicting currents and untraceable tides. On these shores in New York City, I hereby gift these manuscripts to Jess Grande for safekeeping.

  JRRT

  Mel’s right eye inquired of the worn leather valise, pondering the raggedy shoulder strap attached with bits of tie-dyed cloth.

  “So what else is in there?”

  Cadence looked up, her hand already forearm-deep in the documents. She swept out another page, this one torn and frayed as if it had spent years trapped in the corner of a desk drawer. Mel took it and read:

  The halfling entered his room, quietly humming the singsong tune of the elderly. The sun slanted in, motes of golden dust in the air and a perfectly halfling-sensible bed looking out of place amongst the draperies and refinements of the chamber. A robed and hooded figure was sitting there. On his bed! With his book! His special precious book. The figure was tearing out pages and smearing others with a sheep’s wool wad of ink.

  “I beg your pardon sir, but you are intruding in my quarters!” Anger rose in the halfling’s chest now. Then the figure looked up and pulled back his hood.

  “Old friend,” sighed the wizard. “I left you to tell the tale, not dress our fellowship in wasted details.”

  “Details? What may those be?”

  “We have spoken of this before. Your story will be measured and preserved only if properly told.”

  “Told? I have only reported the truth.”

  “Not … about her …,” choked the wizard, continuing to tear and smear.

  Their breakfasts came. Mel took a call. Cadence ate while keeping the valise on her lap, awkwardly guarding her grandfather’s trove of scribbles, runes, and ornate writings from many hands. Whatever it was, someone, or multiple someones, had gone to extraordinary lengths to create it.

  Mel’s iPhone vibrated again and he picked it up, studying the caller’s ID before declining. He held the phone out importantly. “These new touch screens, sensitive as hell. This thing keeps dialing people up on its own. Dangerous, huh?”

  She nodded. She didn’t want to talk about her own phone, the rudimentary little freebie Nokia that came with her basic prepay plan.

  “Cadence, let’s get down to our business. I understand you need money to save your grandpa’s place. I wish I could help, but this seems like bits and pieces. You got anything that we can frame into a whole story?”

  OK, try your last, best card. “How’s this?” Across the table, she slid another ancient-looking manuscript, creased and stained with candle wax, in a readable but archaic script.

  He began to read, and then put down his fork as the words unwound before him:

  Herein lies the account of the Fourth Book.

  In the last days of Middle-earth, when the Ascendance of Man was assured, and many plots wove through the separate ambitions of all races, there was lost a fourth volume to the Red Book of Hertegest.

  Unlike the three “known” volumes, of which many copies were scribed and long cherished, the original and the few secret copies of the fourth volume were doubtless destroyed in the hopes of erasing the contents forever. The effort was successful, and little of its tale escaped save as unexplained lapses and obscure references in what readers, now far removed from those elder days, presume to enjoy as truth.

  It was only in the deep to the south of the world as it was then recognized, where the dimming of all the other races and their powers was swift and complete, that Azakuul, Third Caliph of the Realm, extracted much of the tale. It came to him from Orontuf, most quiet and humble of the Great Wizards. The Caliph, proud of a long lineage of learning and knowledge, was adept at collecting both information and power — by charm, by the bribe, and, if necessary, by ruthless cruelty.

  And so our story has a source, but we know not if the giving of it was willing. The grim circumstances of the Confession of Orontuf are little known now. As he was, by reputation, not inclined to speak to mortals, we may surmise that His Brownness, Master of the Plants and Harvest, was coerced. So also does the unflinching character of Azakuul the Beheader testify that most certainly not all was voluntary.

  Such was the time: halflings dwindled, elves fled to their havens, dwarves toiled ever deeper into the mountain fastness, yes, even as orcs became extinct from a noxious plague of their own foul making, and trolls grew smaller and hid under bridges. So too did the Wizards of Old change forever. Gone now was their power. Orontuf, it is said, survived his unfortunate stay with the Caliph, and became a wanderer in the Far Lands. Legend has it that his nature was changed, such that he began to speak to Men and ended his days as a mortal, quietly growing the best potatoes in all the region.

  The Caliph, himself beheaded, quite lost his grasp of the tale. Thereafter it passed through paths unknown until it lay, long dormant and unnoticed, in the personal library of an ale merchant that collected, but never read, what were even then ancient manuscripts. Then once again it disappeared into obscurity.

  It drifted on tides of ebb and flow for a long, long time.

  Mel held up another page, similar in appearance, and read:

  It is said by ancient sources that, at its core, the events that came to be known as the Saga of Ara span but thirty days between two full moons before their terrible conclusion. These were marked by a … WONDER.

  Her journey began with a full moon that was a great fat coin of harvest time. The next full moon was discolored and bruised, a battered shield of war hanging in a sky fumed with anger and strife.

  And in between those so different moons, the great red star Narcross grew large and hove close to the land of Middle Earth. There it grew progressively brighter until it filled the intervening run of dark nights with a deep red gloaming.

  Narcross stared balefully over the land like a watchful eye. People fretted, fearful of portents that herald a return to the dark legends of the past. Seers and auguries in multitude arose. Owls in twain crossed that angry red star. Beasts misshapen pulled by night carts laden with unknown cargo that fouled the air for leagues about. Crows cawed in sentences and sat upon the heads of docile children.

  People shuttered their windows and barred their doors. Folk of design both fell and fair withdrew to refuge common to their kind. Within keep and hut, smial and cave, underbridge and deepest forest, sheltered eyrie and simple hole, all huddled and hoped. Please, please let this likeness gaze only with harmless envy on lands untouched by its evil purpose.

  In the span of a week, the celestial intruder dimmed and receded into the twinkling tapestry of the night.

  But something had stirred, great mo
vement was afoot, and events came to pass that shook the world. Ara, as all the world once knew, moved at the very center of this tumult, and by her witness the Long Age ended.

  Mel put the last page in his lap and took a deep breath. “You know I’m close to both Houghton-Mifflin and New Line. Bernie Alsop and Maxwell Karis are personal friends. That’s the little morsel of good news. Want the seriously bad news?”

  “OK.”

  “You’ll probably never get this stuff published.”

  “Why!”

  “Two reasons. First, publishing as we, as I, know it, is gone. It is the Great Auk. It is going bankrupt. Almost no one will take a chance on an unknown like you.”

  She listened, slightly stunned, waiting to finish getting hit with the one-two punch.

  “Second, one word. Lawyers.”

  She caught the whiff of threat, could see the long unspooling of a tangled thread of hassle and delay before anything got done. It pissed her off. “All right, so tell me first about the publishers.”

  “In truth there are only a handful of big houses left, mostly foreign-owned. And they are fragments of bigger conglomerates. I work this street. I know. I haven’t done a decent deal in six months. This industry’s worse than General Motors because it’s broken and it won’t get bailed out.”

  “But won’t it all come back soon? This can’t last too long.”

  “It will never come back, not the way it was. What’s coming is what you see everywhere else — a digital tsunami overwhelming the old ways. Newspapers? Dying. Magazines? Falling like flies. Big label music and CD’s? Gone. Broadcast radio? So last century. TV. All sliced into bits. Now, clunky old hard-copy paper books that are hauled around from warehouses to dying bricks and mortar emporiums? And then back again. No way. The whole industry is compressing to a few survivors. People are getting laid off, budgets cut, and that’s not a great time for unproven writers. Hell, even I got rejected this year. Totally. My first book.”