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

by Стив Хиллард

  “What?”

  “Yeah, and I went to Iowa for Cris-sakes!”

  His tone opened a little window into his psyche. He suddenly reminded her of a boyish, sputtering Luke Skywalker. “I … I’m not a half-bad pilot myself!”

  She started to let it slide, but something told her to push him back while he was in this vulnerable zone. “So, with these Tolkien documents, I guess if all else fails, I could go on Oprah?”

  He leaned back, the momentary look was priceless.

  “Just kidding, Mr. Chricter. OK, so what about the legal stuff. I’m only trying …”

  He recovered smoothly. “Hold on. Just suppose some of these documents are real. Then you’re a threat. Worse, you’re a sinner against the god of money. Forget kindly old Professor Tolkien. He’s wonderful but irrelevant. This is about something unowned, uncontrolled. That’s a threat. That’s where I come in. Without me, you know who you’ll see next?”

  “Well …”

  “Intellectual property lawyers. They are terrible. They are the bloodless low priests — our friend Everett excepted — who have the sacred access.”

  “Access to what?”

  “ To the blessing that all stories that want to get told must procure. Copyright. It’s a genie, a jealous little god that can bedevil people like you for a century or more.”

  “But I’m not writing a story. I just bet this is the real thing. The Ara that these talk about,” she patted the valise for emphasis, “is a heroine in somebody’s world. A world no one, not even Tolkien, has ever really seen before. She seems to have made a huge difference. It looks to me like this may be all that’s left of her. This … orphaned story.” Cadence bit her tongue. She went on. “It belongs to everyone …”

  “Bullshit. Nothing is real and nothing belongs to everyone. This is either nothing or, just possibly, a question of … very precious property.”

  She sat back, thoroughly dejected.

  “Let me give you a little story, Cadence. You know movies, of course.”

  “Yes … I think I do.”

  “You like monsters?”

  “Not particularly, especially if they’re fiery.”

  “Well, you know the movie Alien? You know, ‘acid for blood’?”

  She nodded, unsure where he was going.

  “Well, you know where Ridley Scott stole that idea from?”

  She looked puzzled. “No.”

  “You should. Every good story steals something from the past. Anyway,” he shook his head and clucked in disappointment. “Look it up. And one other thing.”

  “What?”

  “Take some friendly advice: don’t bet your life on a movie trivia contest.”

  She felt the growing heat of being lectured to, and couldn’t stop it from slipping out: “Thanks, Dad. I’ll remember that.” She didn’t skip a beat. “So where am I? I do what, just take the peach crate and put it back in the attic? No one ever reads it?”

  “It all depends on one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Provenance. Proofs. Is this stuff real, or just somebody’s scribblings.”

  She waited, sure he would continue.

  “Then, of course, if you’re right, if it’s real, some people will want it and some people will try to stop it.”

  “So, I’m stalled.”

  He paused. “No. But there is another way.”

  “Somehow I knew you would say that.”

  He leaned conspiratorially forward, his squinting eye focused on her. She leaned too, her left eye narrowing in rapport, her silk blouse grazing the breakfast halibut on her plate.

  His voice fell to a stage whisper. “Look, there is a bigger story. Perhaps a tale of which these fragments are but a part. Use their evil genie against them. The sparse contents of this peach crate are not the real story here. You’re the story.”

  “Only one problem,” she whispered.

  A moment of unexpected silence, he wasn’t following.

  “I don’t have a story to tell,” she said.

  “Bullshit, and I don’t mean that about what you have to say. Tell what really happened. Start with the start. Where’d this stuff really come from?”

  “I …”

  “And if you don’t know, find out.”

  Yeah, she thought, as in find my grandfather after a year of a cold trail. I might as well find out who killed JFK and where Jimmy Hoffa is? I’m no good at this.

  Cadence looked at him, certain he was following her dismal interior dialogue almost word for word. She steeled herself for a dismissive wave of the hand.

  Instead, he softened and said, “Everett told me you were pretty lost about what to do. After you got to L.A. with the disappearance and all.” His demanding eye narrowed. “So, what are you doing now?”

  “Keeping house at his property. Ignoring his creditors, and …,” she brightened, “teaching school. Fifth grade.”

  “Saints’ praise to you.”

  She rushed on. “Yeah, L.A. public schools. Raynor Elementary. I like it. I hope I get hired back. But for right now, I’m here. I’m ready to do something.”

  His lean fingers once more tapped the edge of the business card on the table. “Look, Cadence, “I can tell that you really want to find your grandfather or, excuse me if I’m too indelicate, what happened to him. So if he’s the one you gotta find and the one who knows about these writings and Tolkien, then you need to go look for him. What’s an angle you haven’t tried? Tell me something new.”

  They were both quiet. Then she said, “Well, you wouldn’t believe all the stories about him.”

  “Oh? Try me.”

  “Well, here’s the root of it. He was a scissor sharpener.”

  “A what?”

  “You know,” she held up two fingers and brought them together several times, “for cutting. Meshed single-edge blades? Really hard to sharpen? I’m sure you’d just throw them away, but that’s not how they used to do it.”

  He nodded.

  “Sharpening them used to be a wayfarer’s trade. Scissor sharpeners travelled all over. Like gypsies.” She was warmed up, talking faster now. “You see, my folks said he had a valise, probably this one, that he carried all his stuff in, a folding grinding wheel, whetstones, a few items for sale. He hopped trains and hitchhiked and walked through all the big towns and half the small towns in America. He kept a journal every day. He’s sort of a family myth.”

  “I’d be wary of myths. What’s the real truth?”

  “I don’t know … at least not yet. I never met him.”

  “OK, take a break and eat your fish. I’ve got a call to make. Then I want to know all about your grandfather.”

  Chapter 3

  INKLINGS I

  Timothy Lessons, a student at Oxford, was the first in a long line from Exeter College who intermittently recorded lectures of J.R.R. Tolkien — possibly surreptitiously — and even meetings of the writers’ group loosely known as the Inklings — undoubtedly surreptitiously. These meetings, which occurred from the 1930’s through 1970, traditionally took place on Tuesday evenings at a pub called the Eagle and Child. Tolkien, often called Tollers, was a member. His close friend, C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia, and known to friends as Jack, seldom missed a session. Like each of the surviving tapes recorded by Lessons and his followers, this one is undated. They are placed in rough chronological order, earliest first. What follows is a partial transcription:

  Noise. Shuffling and scrapes. Coughs. Approaching voices.

  “Here we are again. I’m late and still no ale?”

  “So, Tollers, back from a visit to Barrett?”

  “Bit of a holiday?”

  “Even better, Charles. I had a fine time roaming about the hills. All of a summer day. Just at evening, I came to one of my favorite growing-up places.”

  “Well, don’t dawdle. Our thirst grows restless.’

  “Madame Sarah, your indulgence, please!”

  The clanking
of freshly filled pints, presumably dark and topped with brown foam, sliding on a sheet of ale. The sound of jostling around the table.

  “Now you may tell us!”

  Tapping of pipes all ‘round — except for Charles Williams, the sole cigarette smoker at the table. Scratching and flare of matches. Sucking sounds and tiny grunts of contentment.

  “All right, I will. Sit close and listen. Imagine a place that somehow didn’t change over a long, long time. Not much of that left in our little isle today. And what’s more, it’s not only still there, but it’s still working. Now, grown older — I have, that is — and finally unafraid, I just went in.”

  “I’ve got it. A house of fallen virtue. Ha!”

  “No, but this place is the more strange for still being in working order. Imagine an old mill at Sarehole. Tall stone wheelhouse so ancient that no one alive remembers who built it. It sits beside a stream. Inside, a grind and creak that is like a voice worn with time. The labor of water, wood, and stone continues. Full-span belts of oxhide, sutured and sized as if to hold up the pants of giants, whirr and slap. Mighty shafts that once were tree-sentinels in some Mirkwood now lost to us — these turn and shudder with power. Miller’s dust everywhere. Water glides from pond to pond. Quiet and calm. Green and deep and dark. Each gathering its fill of unreleased energy. Suddenly the water pours into the race. It tumbles down the sluice with irresistible momentum. Wooden gear teeth mesh into morticed slots in the rolling cogwheel the size of this room. It turns and the grindstone rolls. All this is overseen by a miller named Roos with a long black beard.”

  “And you finally made his acquaintance?”

  “Well, it was his father that I saw as a boy. But the name and the measure of the man remain the same. I listened, and delved, as best I could, into the names and lineage of his family and the place.”

  “Ever the philologist you are, Tollers.”

  “Give me a name and I can find a story. Give me a language and I can find its bones.”

  “Give you ale and your pipe and you can talk all evening.”

  “Aye, from my view, Tollers, in the case of our English, the bones are a bit jumbled, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Much has been lost. Yet much may still be seen, if dimly.”

  “And your invented language? This dwarvish tongue? “

  “Elvish. Not invented so much as, well, found.”

  “Since we’re picking on our good Professor Tolkien tonight, let me ask him a personal question. For all these … myths you explore and populate, you yourself never seem to change. Jack here goes grayer by the month.”

  “Or the week.”

  “Or the pint.”

  Laughs and the sort of snorts that come from older men in their own company.

  “Don’t be foolish, Ian. I can change. Why Jack has even brought me around to a Christian point of view. No mean feat that. But here’s the lesson, and listen close …”

  Hush and the creak of chairs.

  “Never underestimate a man’s ability to transform himself, especially when he travels the borderlands between myth and reality.”

  There is a sound of movement, as if someone, perhaps C.S. Lewis, leans further toward him.

  “Tollers, as much as I admire your intellect and your pursuit of this hobby, there are those at the college, the newer of them I admit, that ask if you should not be working toward publishing something more, well, scholarly?”

  “And you, Jack, of all people, should listen to them?”

  Someone can be heard dropping his pipe.

  “So, you continue to dream of inventing this mythology for England?”

  “For my own small part, yes.”

  “You said at our last gathering that you aspire to replicate the Finns. They had a thousand-year head start on you. Lonnrot only compiled the Kalevala, he didn’t write it. And the Finns didn’t mix in with the Romans and the Normans along the way.”

  “Nonetheless, now that we are all well bound by our ale-oaths, I tell you I find myself unable to stop. I’m not even sure if it’s made up any more. It seems to be a tale less invented than discovered. The thing is rather unstoppable in its own way.”

  “And at last that is to be published?”

  “That, Owen, remains to be seen. I have a fine, growing collection of rejection letters to vouch for my diligence and some critical advice from these no-longer prospective publishers.”

  “Such as?”

  “‘Too extravagant.’ ‘Hard to follow.’ ‘Silliness. Let it go.’ And my absolute favorite, ‘Hobbits … really?’ I could go on till our next round of ale.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “If a tale inspires, someone will seek to destroy it. It’s the way of the world. What are a few snide publisher comments, anyway? Great epics of heroism and adventure have been rubbed out routinely. The victors write the history.”

  A pause. Murmurs.

  “It’s not my tale anyway. It is a lost tale, partially rediscovered at best. I’m happy to unearth it as I go. Besides, my children enjoy all its bits and pieces. It may fall to others to finish it because it goes on and on, backwards and forwards. But enough of my ramblings …”

  “Jack, tell us of your holiday.”

  “I will, just as soon as we are relieved of all this miller’s dust and language-bones of our forefathers. Sarah, bring a round full-drawn of fresh pints, if you please.”

  Chapter 4

  OCTOBER 16

  An hour after the meeting with Mel, Cadence drove home with the Belvedere’s breakfast special, “Halibut Sous de Mar” drying on her blouse and flopping in her stomach.

  Under the spell of Mel’s eye she had told him almost everything she knew about her grandfather, which, all in all, wasn’t a lot.

  For instance, she told him about sitting in the still, muggy, old-peach-crate smell of the hidden attic on that hot, never ending afternoon of Indian Summer. She told him about opening one journal after another. How she would note a place, a famous name, or a strange word. She told him how, looking at the brittle yellowed pages of his personal journals, she realized her last flesh-and-blood relative had traveled a very, very long way.

  For reasons obscure even to herself, she didn’t tell Mel one fact: that her grandfather’s story involved a secret riddle.

  Cadence had noticed it as Everett wrapped up the paperwork of declaring her the administrator of the estate. There was a poem in her grandfather’s handwriting, scrawled across the outside of the same envelope that contained his rudimentary will and named her executor:

  Cast in truth, stolen early

  Hidden well from yearning eyes

  Bears the tale of Ara’s role

  Thieved by hands that shun them all.

  It was as enigmatic as the man himself.

  Her current road however, was plain and practical. She needed to come up with some serious money, and she was driving on empty. There wasn’t a gas station until the Topanga turn.

  Her cell phone beeped. She answered. It was Bruce, her sometimes boyfriend.

  She was flanking the shore and approaching the turn into the canyon mouth. The signal would be lost as soon as she turned. The southern reach of Topanga Canyon, before it spilled out into the estuary and beach, was one of the few dead spaces for cell phones in the five hundred square miles of the city of Los Angeles. Vertical canyon walls barred all radio signals in the canyon for a six-mile stretch.

  Bruce’s voice warbled. She half listened as Mel’s insistent questions kept replaying in her head.

  Where’d this stuff come from? So find out.

  She multi-tasked, downshifting, steering into the turn lane, thinking of where those documents actually might have come from, trying unsuccessfully to say something to Bruce.

  “Helloo? Cadence, you still there?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? What’s with you?”

  “I’m … worried.”

  “About
what?”

  She caught the green light. Second time in a row. Lucky on the small stuff. She crunched the transmission into second and accelerated through the turn.

  Now she could talk. “About everything, Bruce, every damn thing. My job is ending. I’m out of school and I can’t get a permanent job. I send in my resume and they ignore it or they laugh. ‘Art’ or ‘American Culture Studies’ I don’t even know where to begin in L.A. You have to have connections, relationships.”

  “I’ll tell you a quick story. I was raised by foster parents. No easy gig. When I was eighteen I used to gripe and whine a lot. Cars, job, school, you name it. One day the old man, who was really old, pulled me down by my ear. He said, ‘You little shit. You know what I was doing when I was eighteen? I was inside a Higgens Boat with thirty other scared bastards, headed for the first wave on Omaha Beach. So shut up the damn whining.’ I never forgot …”

  The first missed bits of digital signal.

  “Anyway, speaking of relationships …”

  “Listen, Bruce, this thing with my grandfather. It’s hard to explain. He’s all I’ve got. And the Forest. I have a court-ordered sale notice on the seat next to me.”

  “Cadence, get out of yourself. Let go of the dead and missing. I’m here, alive and accounted for.”

  “You don’t know what I’m trying …”

  “I know it’s not about us. That’s a problem.”

  They had stepped into terrain they’d been avoiding. Still, his response was a little quick. “I’ve been think … out us.”

  She held the phone closer to her ear, twisting to get some signal. Then she heard, “So … think we … through.”

  “Bruce? You’re breaking up. Hey …”

  Dead air, their conversation was over. You’re breaking up. Did she really say that? She’d laugh if it weren’t true. She’d both delivered and received Dear John’s before. His tone, even the dropouts, said it all.

  “Damn!”

  She realized she had missed the gas station.

  “Double damn!”

  She gritted her teeth and prepared for the S-curves, pissed off at the uncertainty of the meeting with Mel, and now the drama with Bruce. Her mood spawned the unwelcome thought that had been swirling on the edge of her mind. It came forth, a dark metaphysic, fully formed and dreadful.