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

by Стив Хиллард

  Barren looked at him and slowly took the glass and smelled it and drank the liquid. It swirled and stirred a flow of memories, the smell and taste evoking the very earth on which Barren had so often lain in ambush. He put the glass down and looked dead center into the barkeep’s single eye.

  “Your days behind this bar are over, Cyclops.” He watched the big man stiffen, observed the knife scar across his face. “I’ve got some advice for you — leave this place. Now. Don’t be here when I come back.”

  The man started to reach for a whiskey bottle, neck first, but something flashed in front of him. Barren’s knife hand sprung out like a viper’s head, cutting the two top buttons neatly from the bartender’s shirt and then whisking his throat. It was a teasing scratch, but not a cut. The buttons rose in the air in slow motion, the man’s lone eye rotating up and then down to follow them.

  When the buttons clattered on the bar-top, he looked for the man with the knife. The bar stool was empty, the door already easing shut and cutting off a slice of afternoon light.

  The one-eyed ogre-man flipped up the bar partition, walked away from his job that very day, and disappeared from this tale.

  Six blocks away, Cadence was late and hurrying. She watched her feet as she quick-stepped up a massive set of stone stairs. She stopped and looked up. Her first impression of Columbia’s Low Library from the outside: Monticello on steroids. It towered up and forward, glooming over all that approached by the twelve immense casements of steps. The doors were massive wooden guardians, fit for a great keep that could withstand a hundred Grendels. She inquired at the door and was quickly redirected by a student. “The working library is the Butler Library. There.” He pointed to another stern edifice across the quad. She scurried over, entered, and stopped cold.

  The Reading Room of the Butler Library stretched on and on, its roof soaring up into hazy dimness. She gawked her way to the entrance desk, where an officious-looking student served as minion. His overseer watched from an elevated plinth, half-walled in mahogany and gleaming brass. This man, obviously the head librarian, was thin and bent, long-nosed, with too-long gray hair thinned out on his pate. The whole effect was of a well-dressed, oddball hound dog. He looked impassively down at her over his bifocals, his bony hands resting on the ivory knob of an oversized, dark cane.

  Students were coming and going in a stream, navigating through a turnstile activated by electronic ID cards. She approached the desk.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You a student?” Officious was right, she thought, but well dressed. His nerd-heroic style was straight out of Central Casting.

  “No, just a visitor.” She sensed tentacles of red tape creeping toward her as he sighed and pulled out a blank form.

  Half an hour later she was in. She walked around the Reading Room, looking back once at the head librarian. He stared down at her and then over his nose to inspect the form she had filled out.

  The homeless man from the West End Bar was nowhere to be found.

  Then a hand, barely extended from a rumple of coats, beckoned her from the far end of the room. Yes, she saw, that was the man hanging back behind one of the book stacks. Before she even got there he had turned and was disappearing down a long line of overburdened steel shelves. He had a distinctive limp as if dogged by sharp pain. She followed him to an alcove and a heavy oak table, its surface scarred like the back of a long-lived sea turtle.

  “Here,” he said, “we can talk.”

  She sat, feeling a strange security in the ancient grain and bumpy knotholes in the wood.

  “Now you can ask some of your questions, Miss Cadence Goosebumps.”

  Good, this was going to save her some time. “Look, until I find some clues about my grandfather, I’m here to get some proofs, to find out the, well, provenance of these documents. So, who exactly are you?”

  He replied, rolling his eyes and muttering to himself, “Why have I allowed my indulgence to be so tested?” Then he took the weary breath of the patient saint.

  “Very well,” he said. “For reasons I can’t disclose, I can tell you only so much. That being said, in nineteen sixty-eight I was a newly hired teaching assistant here at Columbia. My field, which I was faking, was Marxist literary criticism. Those being the times, I was in high demand. Like any good Marxist, I had come to despise all storybooks and their writers as distractions and opium dealers, respectively. I was offered positions at Princeton and Yale. But, feeling an … uh … urgent need to be outside the U.S. for a bit, and being adept at manipulating the systems of academia, I managed to get a one-semester teaching fellowship at Oxford. Once I got there,” he feigned the world-weary traveler, “I realized the stint was really a glorified go-fer position serving tenured professors. I looked around and grabbed a spot with the most fun guy around …”

  “Who?”

  “JRRT himself!”

  He looked around, as if realizing he was being too explicit and too loud. He hushed his tone and hunched over, “Anyway, I spent six months in his company. That understates it considerably. I learned in a short time an immense amount about some very … obscure things. Then … it was over. I came back here.”

  “So you went back to teaching … Marxist theory?”

  “It’s … a little more complicated. I brought back some shadows with me. Hell, I was scared. More of that later. In any case, teaching, as in sitting behind a desk, was suddenly irrelevant. The revolution, you see, like the old mole Marx described, was popping up here! So I jumped in feet first, went to the barricades, embraced the vanguard of the movement, and helped shut this place down. Boycotts, marches, riots, the whole schmeer. You don’t remember, child, but that was a glorious time. Along with the tear gas, you could smell change in the air. Within the year, what with the precipitous drop in alumni contributions, that evading arrest thing, and my own refusal to support the system by teaching even one of my classes, I was, to use their term, removed from employment. Bastards. Anyway, that seemed to affect me more than it should, being a revolutionary and all. A kind of malaise took over from there. I ended up living on the street. A vanguard itself in a way, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “So, I learned the way of the downtrodden, mastered its perks and shortcuts, figured out how to survive the cold, the dehydration, the looks of disgust. I became used to the lifestyle. It wasn’t the first or last time I morphed my life. They even let me come in here now, as long as I don’t fall asleep. Now even that meager privilege is being questioned, I know it, by the new head librarian.”

  He rolled his eyes to give direction. “You saw him, up on that station. I hide in the stacks now.”

  “So how did you get to know my grandfather? And where does Tolkien fit in?”

  “Charity, my dear, cuts through all distinctions. Your grandfather — an incurable good Samaritan, you should be proud to know — offered me a meal, even held open the door to the West End Bar for me to pass before him. This despite his own meager purse. Do you remember him or know what he looks like?”

  “Not really. I was really little, and he didn’t leave behind any real pictures.”

  “Ah, a shame, really. Anyway, times being what they were, I accepted. At the table — at the very booth in the West End where we sat the other night — Mr. Tolkien was sitting. ‘You look a wreck!’ he said to me. We all ate and talked.”

  Steps echoed down the corridor, heading their way.

  “Silence!” he whispered. The steps stopped, then continued. A student, complete with backpack, came around the corner. He stared, bug-eyed, obviously surprised to see two such dissimilar people huddled in conversation. He hurried on, his steps echoing away.

  “Now we must hurry to the heart of it. Tolkien was afraid, but as he said, not afraid enough.”

  “‘Jess,’ he told your grandfather, ‘As you know well from our discussions these past few days, I am an unexpectedly successful author. I invented languages. I toiled to wrest a history from the
barest artifacts of language. But underneath, something beyond and older than me or my father’s father was stirring. It far eclipses my modest tales. It …’”

  “Stop just a second. Before this second lecture gets going, tell me at least the simple stuff. What’s your name?”

  “They call me Coats on the street. My real name I’ll save for now. Anyway, I remember that, like you have done, your grandfather stopped him there. He said something like ‘Professor, you look, well, flat-out scared!’”

  “Then Tolkien sighed and said, ‘Yes, perhaps I delved too deep. There are many forms of good and evil, and there are many things that render our definition of those words irrelevant. I thought evil in my time had grown beyond measure or hope of redemption. I saw its hand when my closest friends were killed during our first month at the Front. I saw it drag its loathsome, dripping form up, not just in Grendel’s dam, but in a million acts of atrocity, until it no longer had a face. And then, as I struggled to explore it in these stories … this I fear you will have trouble understanding … something began to stalk me and demand changes in what I had to say.’”

  “Was he really afraid?”

  “Yes, and don’t interrupt now. Tolkien was saying ‘Then an … event occurred. A trove of documents came to me unbidden. Some in the form of an Elvish writing that, while superficially similar, was far deeper than those which I had been inventing. Like a pool of true deep water compared to a rain-filled pothole. Elvish, as you know, is a powerful language, of much depth and misdirection. It often whispers to you things which it does not literally say.’”

  “He was visibly shaken at this point, and Jess told him to just say what he wanted to say, and to take his time about it.

  “Then Tolkien nodded sadly and said, ‘This, Jess, is where you come in.’ He then grabbed your grandfather’s hand and whispered hoarsely, ‘I want you to keep them. These documents. All of them. It is you, traveler, whom I ask for help.’”

  “Your grandfather was as startled as I was. He laughed and said it was a preposterous suggestion, but Tolkien was insistent. He said, ‘Many of the stories were not mine to begin with. Take them away, you must! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? These forces beckon me to their service. They urge me to edit away a truth. It has all gotten to be too much for me. I feel like a character in my own books, baffled at the end or just wanting it all to go away. Enough, I’ve told my tale as best I can. Let others pick up the clues where I have left them. Save this!’ And here he drew himself up, closed his bushy eyebrows together like twin hedgehogs, and talked as a man resolute in actions.

  “‘There are many kinds of hidden gates’, he said, ‘and for these documents there is a special one. A key. An Elvish ‘Rosetta Stone’ in a way. But it is more. It is the beating heart of this trove. Through its powers I have unlatched this gate. Yet its true power and purpose remain obscure to me. The very use of the key draws this presence, as yet but a shadow, which would rob the world of all these tales! Thus I have resolved to hide this key away. Still and separate and secret. As for the rest of the documents, let them now be swept away with your travels, my Sharpener friend! May they and their key be long separated, and their meeting, if ever, not be an accident!’”

  “And that’s pretty much where it was left. Your grandfather chose his own way.”

  “What about Tolkien?”

  “We’ll get to that later. Now I have to go. I will be back tomorrow. Meet me at the Archives desk. Heed my warnings until then. Good day.”

  Struggling to get his balance, he heaved himself up and departed in a hitched, painful flourish, leaving behind a scent of damp coats and body odor that reminded her of a wet dog.

  She stayed for a while afterwards, staring at the scars etched across the table’s oaken back. The cracks in it were deep: they ran in long lines that joined together in tight fists of knots, like crossroads. She put her hands on the whorls and closed her eyes. Her grandfather, gone by a year and untold miles, had once vectored to this crossroads, sat at the West End, met these people. He seemed almost … here. Just a few more puzzle pieces and some picture would appear.

  Tonight she would concentrate. She would read more of the documents. She would find some new element. Maybe, she would sketch. Something would happen.

  She opened her eyes and stood up, weightless as an elf, and almost ran for the library exit.

  In no time, Cadence was at the Algonquin. The valise sat empty on the floor. Her bed was covered with documents. She made piles of rough categories: stuff she’d already read or tried to read, then stuff she would look at more carefully. From there she separated stacks into readable English (small), non-readable stuff like Old English and maybe Norse (medium), and a pile of what she thought might be Elvish scripts (large).

  The latter included the scrolls, seven of them. They were brittle and resisted unfurling, as if they did not wish to be read. One or two had clever locks on the spindles, which she finally figured out. She regretted that she had not fully organized the documents before. She noticed again that some of them had little marks, not exactly numbers, but small symbols in one corner or another as if made by some monkish archivist. They sure looked like symbols for moon phases. After all, Ara’s journey had been set by a kind of moon-clock that metered her unknown fate. The archival effort was touch and go, as if it had been started but was never completed.

  She cleared a spot for one of the scrolls and slowly began to unroll it. It resisted like the others at first, but then its tension relaxed. She gently led the finished hide back to reveal … a wonder. It was inked in perfectly beautiful script, long, elegant traces that led into and among the lines above and below. If ever there existed true Elvish writing, here it was, so precise and composed it seemed to glow in its balance of form.

  She unrolled another turn and gasped.

  There, in a huge hand that dominated the page was an elaborate runic “A”. She knew instantly that this was the sign of Ara.

  Her muse was hovering there, anxious and eager. She took out her sketchpad and began to draw. She had to capture this moment. When it was completed she wrote at the bottom: Discovering Ara’s Rune.

  She unrolled the scroll another turn. Tucked inside the curves were separate sheets. They seemed to be a working translation in English, perhaps of this very scroll. The notes spoke haltingly, of Signal Hill and the Dark Lord, and then picked up strength as they recounted more of Ara’s journey:

  Beneath a moon that now nightly shed more of its rind, hidden in the deepish woods into which she fled from the Dire Wolves, Ara curled in a rugged burrow in a tree trunk. Taking warmth from a fire barely the size of her own cupped hands, she thought of returning home.

  Slow and bitter came the truth. Her home, the small village of Frighten, would be all the more mocked if she straggled back in failure. She heard the shrill cries of other children when they had visited the Great Fair: “Frighten, Frighten, weird and wary.”

  As all halflings know, if the truth be straight and fully told (as it is sometimes not, out of politeness), the residents of Frighten were viewed by the rest of their kind as eccentric and “keeping to themselves.” Whatever the positive traits of her own clan— resilience, persistence, and natural inventiveness — they were as nothing against the harsh judgments the residents of Frighten mete out to their own. The failure of her quest would be regarded as a folly, a black mark against them all.

  She spent the night watching the darkness, the waning moon spent, and Narcross glowing its red dusk across the land. The bloody hue of night became one with the embered glow of her campfire, the smoke mingling with her doubts. As she fell asleep, she knew that here, at this moment, was her last chance to turn from this uncertain path. Now was her chance to flee toward home.

  Dawn came swift and bright, dispensing the few clouds and unfurling a fresh breeze that swept away Ara’s doubts as if they were dandelion tufts. She left to another time the toting of grievances. She had skills to use and clues to find.

>   Perhaps all’s a journey, but most are as the errands of shopkeepers. Very few, and never by volition or knowledge foretold, slip the slope that funnels them into a quest. Even so, with the road offered, the heart in all its mystery will weed out those unsuited. Ara’s heart was true.

  The next evening she hovered at the threshold to an unnamed byway. She was at once fortunate and ill fortuned. A current of air wended down from ragged purple mountains to the south, sending leaves skeltering along the path.

  She stood for a long time at this crossroads — primitive tracks spun forth from great well-trudged roads. Roads were now her enemy. Roads like this had taken her away from home, ripped her from her comrades. Before her several loomed now, brooding and silent, save for the saw of the wind. Each path provided only a dumb way, withholding guidance to the itinerant who must choose She studied the four directions. Narcross had not yet risen this night. Soon, flickering points of light saturated the sky, overwhelming the fine lacework of black. One by one, a few died and fell in long arcs. For each one so lost, a thousand more flashed into view. The heavens were alive and breathing.

  And moonless. Ara knew that soon it would emerge as a sliver, a battered fingernail eroding nightly until it was gone. From there, it would reemerge and wax swiftly to fullness that would seal her Amon’s fate. She knew that every day meant miles to go to a destination she had never seen, save in dark legend.

  This week in Frighten, the great lamps of the Giant Pumpkins would be lit. She knew she would never see them again. She could hear her Mum, wise beyond even the village elders foretelling her destiny, “For some children, the front step, once truly left, can never again be found.”