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

by Стив Хиллард

  “When and where do you want to travel?”

  “Today. New York City.”

  Cadence watched the supervisor study the voucher again, and only then scrawl OK on it. The supervisor’s initials followed on the lower left corner. The whole thing was obviously a tremendous inconvenience, requiring extra steps they didn’t want to take. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had actually paid for her ticket. The voucher was the equivalent of Amtrak welfare, and Cadence could damn well wait. The supervisor walked away, the agent again took his seat on the high stool, shot his cuffs in preparation, and gave a sigh that indicated that a long, laborious process was about to begin.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  He was a two-finger typist. As Cadence glanced at the clock, something inside her died.

  A clunky printer got to work, spitting out three tickets onto a tray.

  The P.A. boomed, “AMTRAK 14, SIERRA SUMMIT, BOARDING NOW THROUGH GATE 10!”

  “Is that me?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She thought about squeezing her hand under the grate and grabbing for the tickets, but the clerk was not finished. He pulled over a stamping device that looked like a loaner from a transportation museum. Cadence watched in agony as the process ground on. He worked slowly and with great deliberation, as if following instructions whispered through an earpiece: Put the tickets in the little hand-press one at a time. Apply palm sharply. Stamp. Check the stamp. Repeat.

  “SECOND CALL, AMTRAK 14 …”

  The only other place this slow, she thought, must have been the Bulgarian Railroad, circa 1930.

  Stamp. Check stamp.

  Now a rubber ink stamp came out.

  No better example can be made of the layering of technologies that burdens progress, she thought; just add on — never displace.

  “LAST CALL, GATE 10 …”

  “Is this going to take—”

  The clerk smiled and shoved the tickets into the trough. “Have a great trip.”

  “Thanks!” Cadence turned and sprinted down to the platform. People were hurrying, blocking her way with bizarre collections of luggage. Red hard-side Samsonite Travelers, army duffles, BlackHawk Assault backpacks, string-tied boxes, greasy brown paper grocery bags.

  She found the right car.

  The conductor was ready to pick up the footstool.

  P.A. rumbling. “TRAIN 14 DEPARTING …” She stopped and looked very deliberately at the steps.

  “Ma’am?”

  She took a step, her eyes following her foot as if it belonged to a stranger. She climbed aboard, then turned to watch the uniformed conductor. He looked at her, then smiled and slowly pulled away the stool. He did this grandly, as if his secret job was to create life’s points of no return.

  She wrestled down the aisles and found a window seat. With the nesting instinct of travelers embarking on a long journey, she deposited her backpack on the aisle seat. A mark to ward off strangers. She secured the rollerbag packed with the valise and manuscripts on the floor.

  She looked down the car and smiled. Not crowded at all. Maybe eight out of thirty seats occupied. But the headrest smelled musty.

  Arrival time at New York’s Penn Station was four days away.

  The train lurched and the platform outside began to act strangely, sliding backwards from this oddly immobile perspective. Redcaps glided by with empty luggage carts without walking. She closed her eyes to reset her perspective. There followed a slow, accumulative creaking sound as hundreds of tons of metal protested against scores of train couplings.

  The world soon reordered itself to the eyes of the mover. In less than a minute the great upside down U of the station mouth opened to spill into an outside world of endlessly parallel and crisscrossing tracks. She squinted at the maze of rails shining brilliantly atop the black lines of metal, as if some monstrous spider had spit out ferrous webs to ensnare some fantastic prey.

  She liked this exercise in abstraction — the high contrast, the confirmation of order and art in all systems derived from life. Flowers, whelks, the faces of mites, whale cochlea, sermons, movie genre rules, journeys …

  “Excuse me …”

  She jumped.

  The man in the aisle looked to be in his late twenties, well groomed but in wrinkled clothes, his hand extended toward the opposite row.

  “Are these taken?”

  “No, feel free.”

  The man began to do his own nesting, but with the air of practiced routine. He plumped his pillow, tidied his books and newspapers, adjusted the seatback, stashed his eyeshades just so, and nestled his radio in the open bag down at his feet. The bigger bag went up above, and she somehow knew he wouldn’t have to open it during the trip. She half expected him to wipe his hands together in satisfaction, but he abruptly turned to her and asked, “Want anything from the café car?”

  She waved a no thank you and turned back to watch the rail web and the trashy backside of Los Angeles dissipate as the train gathered speed. This was a chance to get some perspective on the rude and strangely fascinating ass-end of the city, and she gorged herself. Vines, trash, dumps, back entrances to seedy shops and bars. Inexplicably, she saw the lost graveyard where a thousand rusted and battered supermarket carts trundle off in the night, squeaky wheels and all, to gather and die.

  Finally bored, she rummaged for something interesting in the valise. Clues to Ara seemed to come and go in this pile. Even the documents seemed to shift around. She found a small piece of paper, shaped as if sliced by a knife from a larger page. She pulled it out and held it up to catch the strobe light of a passing bridge. The paper contained a bit of verse:

  Down roads long and weary

  Past borders high and far

  Through gates shut tight

  Each to the other vow

  Together to spy that dark blue sea!

  A rather simple and affected halfling limerick, she thought, barely qualifying as a riddle. Of no magical significance or power whatsoever. All in all, a trifling thing.

  Or was it? It was, after all, a vow, something far weightier than a promise. Whoever “each to the other” were, it was theirs. Cadence pondered whom in the world “they” could be. Ara? The one called The Bearer? In this pile of scrap it was doubtful she would ever know.

  The train slowed and came to rest in a maze of tracks and warehouses. It lurched and stopped, again and again, as if queuing in an unruly line of racehorses at the starting gate. Liquid metal slams cascaded along its length. It rolled forward and gained speed.

  Soon enough, the sun was setting in the ocean, far beyond Topanga and the quiet and shuttered remnants of the Mirkwood Forest. That place receded from her mind as evening shadows swept forward over the shoulder of the train. Her view flew past the dusty tracksides of San Bernardino. The country was thinning out.

  The neighbor across the aisle had not returned.

  She watched with the pensiveness of one accepting the lockdown of a slow journey while other events ran at full speed. The train rumbled on, finally approaching its maximum velocity. Cadence opened one of her grandfather’s journals, one she had packed after thumbing through it and finding that a part of it had been written on a train. Her attention was diverted, though, with a whoosh of air compression. Looking up, she saw a long row of salvaged doors riffling by, very close by the train. Hundreds of doors, it seemed, were all nailed side by side to make an endless color-chip fence, a bright sampler book of discarded gates to unknown lives.

  As she watched the kaleidoscope of doors pass by, she thought of the many houses she had lived in. All the bedrooms and bathrooms … and back doors.

  The procession ended abruptly with a de-whoosh and a return to slightly more open spaces. She thumbed through the journal, put a bookmark at one spot, and fell into a ragged, dreamless sleep.

  An unwelcome consciousness came to her, stiff and crumpled. Bleary, gray, morning light fused with atonal flatness so that all land and sky were a single-hued haze. The Great Salt Lake stretched
off to the north. A porter came by with coffee. It was hot and cheap and surprisingly good. She set it on the next seat’s tray table and opened the journal again. Each page or so had a heading and entries in her grandfather’s jittery script, etched with different instruments — pencils, exhausted Bics, fine-lined points of apparent pedigree. Finally she found the entry she was looking for:

  Lakeside Ballroom, June 12 ’74

  Hopped off the D&RGW last night. Slept in dry culvert on the ROW. Saw strange building mile or so off toward the lake. Went over and found huge abandoned resort and ballroom, maybe from the 1920s. Then at the shoreline, now stranded half mile inland. Looks funny there, standing on huge pilings. 20 foot ceilings, 3 stories. Grand staircase all gray and forlorn and crusted and scary as hell. Easy to get lost in there. Always sounds going on. Birds fluttering in and out. Wind moving non-stop, like an off-key organ with only a few pipes left. Echoing so the sound is amplified. Old boards clapping somewhere in the wind. Put it all together and it’s like ghost music resonating eternally from past revelry.

  Too sad for me. I hoofed back out and caught this westbound. Am huddled inside a firewood boxcar now. Snug here, writing by slats of light. Vienna sausage for lunch.

  She watched the lakebed stretch away as minutes and miles clacked by. There! That had to be it! Coming up and passing by in the distance was a pile of burned timbers and a high framework of tottered concrete beams. Those gray-black remnants had to be the ruins of the Saltair Pavilion. It was used as a set in the 1965 cult film Carnival of Souls. That, along with The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari, were her favorite progenitors of zombie movies.

  OK, she thought, that right there touches it. Everything so damn academic with me. No substance, just the look, the special effects, the trivia. Life as just a movie to watch. The image but not the touch. The picture but not the danger. The illusion, but not the magic. Her mind wouldn’t stop.

  Worse yet, I’m just a trained observer, a student of, what, movie history? Pop art? Comics? God help me, television? I’m really just a librarian, an archives clerk. How far removed from life can you get?

  Well, maybe it’s not removed at all because, to quote somebody, that’s all there is. If you don’t believe in magic, all you’ll ever see is the pragmatic, maybe spiced with a few cheap tricks for entertainment. After all, that’s why they call them “shows.”

  Her mother’s voice came to her, timbre-perfect: “Two generations of romantic misfits. That’s the men in this family!” That voice was imbued with yearning for a touch of normalcy that marriage never dealt her.

  The voice echoed away as the train wailed out a long whistle, decelerating to the station stop in Salt Lake.

  She reopened her grandfather’s journal at a bookmark:

  Montana summertime with high cumulus ranges and big blue-sky days to knock your eyes out. I’m looking at this good luck charm given to me this week. I did a favor for a man who needed help. The favor’s not important now, though it was important to him. He searched me out and said maybe he’d give me a blanket, but that was too easy. Then he said maybe a beaver skin, which could have magic aplenty but was too heavy to lug around. Then he said he had something that was just right. He knew, he said, because his father was a shaman. He’d been off the rez too long, but he said he still knew what it was all about. So he gave me this thing. Said it was good luck if I used it, but serious back luck if I didn’t use it and keep it sacred. “Not like rabbits’ feet where you can take em’ or leave em’. You got to be one with this,” he said.

  I told him I wanted to give it back to him, but he said that was also bad luck.

  Then he leaned very close. “Not only do you got to use it, you got to change your ways.” I dreaded what he was gonna say next. “Your spirit is lost. You got to quit wandering like a man with no home.”

  Maybe someday I will. But that’s a scarier thought than hitching rides right now. I’ll keep this thing safe and maybe pass it on. If I ever get home again, that is.

  Anyway, I’m sitting in a truck stop, just finished eating lemon pie, and I’m looking this thing over. It looks kinda special. It’s ivory and it’s old. Looks like a tooth from a giant bear maybe, back when bears were twice as big as they are now. Maybe like Alaskan bears in the museum except beefed up even more. There’s a spot for a hole to be drilled and a key chain, if I had any keys. I’ll keep it and hope my luck doesn’t sour. I sure as hell can’t let go of it now. I guess whoever has it has to figure out the truth it’s trying to say. Even if, like me, they know bad luck is their own damn fault.

  Cadence looked into the mirror of the train window and studied the part of her that were her dad’s features. His, of course, were an echo of the man whose journal she held. She unzipped a pocket on her backpack and took out a tinkling assemblage of keys and chains and little gewgaws, all of it anchored by a polished tooth four inches long and punctured by a hole with a small welded chain, looped though it.

  A talisman with interrupted history.

  Up till this moment, all she knew was that it had been her father’s. He used it for his truck key, but couldn’t find it that fateful day, so he grabbed the spare off the keyhook. The fire’s orange glow was already spilling over the canyon rim and sending Halloween shadows through the house as he gunned the truck and took off. She knew the story of the fire line and where it happened. She still had videotape of the news reports, including interviews with firefighters who had been there. One of them even spoke at the funeral.

  Three years later she asked that man to tell her what really happened. He told her there were two dozen men and three pumper trucks lined up at the narrows at Old Topanga Canyon Road where a cluster of cabins stood. The canyon walls were steep, closing almost to creek side. The fire had already crested behind them so they couldn’t retreat more than a half mile. The fire crew chief said, “This is where we’ll fight.”

  The fire was coming fast, the wind shifting and blowing its furnace-breath down the narrow sandstone corridor into their faces. Still unseen, the red monster stalked up around the canyon bend, its shadows dancing clear up the orange-lit walls. Then it turned the corner. It bellowed and raged like a furious living thing, then gathered force and marched forward.

  They’d cut a line up the canyon sides, their fire hoses quickly draining a rubber dam placed in the creek. Three pumps sprayed huge plumes of water into the air, challenging the beast.

  It stepped into the first plume. Hose-drenched trees erupted like match heads. The water boiled in the air as it arced, steam hissing as the beast thrust out a fiery arm. The spray only angered it, like acid on the back of rippling red flesh. It lashed out another tentacle, and the next moment they were surrounded on three sides by walls of Day-Glo red and orange.

  Arnie was there. He had said he was going to help his friend defend his cabin. It was so like him, trying to do right but never getting it together. He was driven by something he could no more discern than a meteor understands its destiny before it flames out in the silent night sky.

  Six men died that night — Arnie and five firemen. The fire finally grew impatient or bored, skirting a last piece of canyon and sparing the cabin en route to once again confront its old nemesis, the ocean.

  Thinking about it rekindled her utter hatred for fire, the abomination, the true rough beast. The recurrent dragon that stalked her inner landscape.

  Chapter 6

  INKLINGS II

  All evening the group had discussed issues of faculty and politics, and only at the end came about to literary topics.

  “Jack, I want to return to this term ‘Mirkwood’, of which you are a fan. What does it mean to you?”

  “Tollers, whose absence to the loo will at least allow me to get a word in, is the historical authority. But to me, it is the place where tracks disappear and no line of sight exists. Once you are in there, it becomes the Forest of Doubt.”

  “Yes, Cambridge, exactly.”

  “Now, now, let’s not stir up that rivalry.”r />
  “Well, sounds like life sometimes.”

  “Exactly, we all stray into Mirkwood now and again. Getting out, into the place where belief can exist and be a proper guide, is the trick”.

  The sounds of footsteps, shuffling of chairs.

  “So I heard you speak of Mirkwood. Bandying ancient words in my absence could be dangerous.”

  “Well, then to you, Tollers, since you borrowed the term from Jack, what is the essence of Mirkwood?”

  “Hah! He’s the pickpocket of my purse of ideas! But to your question, I’ll skip the lecture on its deeper roots, its role in Eddic Poetry, its references in Scott’s Waverly and elsewhere, and get to its essence. It is the physical embodiment of Elvish language.”

  “Oh, well that’s a turn then! Anything else to add for those of us less learned in such?”

  “Yes, we’ve heard you talk of both, but never together. What do they have in common?

  “Elvish, I found, has aspects deeper and wider than I thought as I sought to, well, re-invent it. My poor linguistic attempts, Quenya and Sindarin, are just that. Real Elvish is far deeper and more mysterious. To call it a language is to gravely, perhaps dangerously, underestimate it. Elvish and Mirkwood are alike because each has paths that shift before you. Each beguiles and hides its truth. Dangerous things, Elvish and Mirkwood.”

  “You seem to have some new thoughts on this. You were, ah, telling us last week about this … trove of documents?”

  “Ah, yes, I suppose I did mention them. I’ve sorted a bit of it. It’s mostly a collection of bits of history that I’ve yet to decipher. The pages look as if they were torn out of many sources, Old English, more recent scribblings, and, the bulk of it, pieces of writing that indeed seem to be a form of Elvish. Curious, really. I’ll get to the bottom of it in due time.”

  “Sort of an ancient clipping service, eh?”