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

by Стив Хиллард

  The jar of gravel, its label inscribed in crayon by the boy’s hand to say SHARKS TEETH, with kid drawings of sharks on either side, sat sealed on a mantle in the house for years thereafter.

  There was a companion to this day, years later, when Arnie took eleven year old Cadence to this same spot. Same parking area, same walk across the Dobies. Same searching around for the right lemon-squeezer.

  Once he recognized the entrance around the rocks, he turned to Cadence and said, “Let’s stop and eat lunch.” They rested in the shade of the rocks, and he opened their backpack and took out two wrapped peanut butter sandwiches and two coca-colas. Sitting together with their backs against the cool sandstone, he pulled out a dog-eared paperback book that had lost its cover through long use. She looked at the first page, saw “Ace Edition” and the strange title: “The Hobbit.”

  “That’s a silly word,” she said.

  He looked at her, “Yes it is, but I think you’ll like it. Let’s read a few pages while we eat. We’ll start it today and maybe you will finish it later, even if it’s a long time and a long way from here. After we eat we’re going to squeeze up in here and get some shark’s teeth!”

  The cycle of the moment and the place rolled on years later. After she had created her own series of dog ears though its pages, she lost the book. But she never forgot her own version of The Perfect Day. It was marked by another, a more modern style of jar, filled with that same gravel and labeled in Cadence’s neat fifth grade lettering: ME AND DAD 1993.

  The desert wind blew.

  She woke with a start, feeling the cat’s tail loop and caress her ankle. She looked around and saw the cat on the check-in counter, still watching her. She did a stare contest with it. Who hated whom the most. It didn’t blink.

  OK, cat, you win, she thought. She got up and headed for the elevator.

  “Heraclitus.”

  “Huh?” She looked over at the desk clerk.

  He scratched the cat’s neck. “He’s the resident philosopher.”

  She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Got it. I’m dealing with another one upstairs.”

  When she came back into the room, Osley was walking around, gesticulating and muttering. He started in as soon as she sat down and looked at him in the cautious way one regards a lunatic. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Professor Tolkien believed that every one of those pages he wrote was a promise of something real.”

  “But he made it all up!”

  “Hardly. Virtually everything in his stories was already out there. Straight out of Northern Mythology Central Casting. Wily dragons, wraiths, Merlin-like wizards, marching forests — remember Macbeth? Birnam Wood? Rings of Power — a staple of Norse mythology. The ‘Fell Winter’ echoes the historical fact of the Little Ice Age in the twelfth century. So, you see, a name is a covenant, as is a story.” Osley let out a breath and sat down. He suddenly seemed subdued, like a messenger burdened by ill tidings. He looked away from her and held out a handwritten page. “I finished this a few moments ago. The word haknuun, Elvish for sharpener or grinder, caught my eye.”

  She took the page and began reading, involuntarily collapsing to a sitting position on the bed.

  He was taken captive. He told them he was no more than a travelling sharpener of knives. They took him before a horrible band of orcs. The chieftain, grim and gaunt, put him beneath a long blade. “Tell me any information you have, tale or stone-cold fact, about a trove of writings. Perhaps it was given to you by others.”

  He told them little, save that he was a wanderer who had gone far astray from the stars of his world. The chieftain listened, then nodded to a guard. “He is useless. Kill him.”

  “That sounds like Grandpa Jess!”

  “Yes, so it would seem.”

  “They’re going to … Execute him!” Cadence began to stutter and flail her hands. “This ca-can’t be true! It’s crazy! How, how can this … end up in here, in this pile of writings, when he disappeared in Topanga a year ago?”

  Osley stood up. “Cadence, don’t worry. Not yet. I don’t know what this means or how it fits, but I’m going to find out. I’m … I’m sure … he’s not there. But I would go there. In a shot, if I could.”

  “Now don’t tell me it’s just something on paper. All this bullshit about the word is the promise of the thing. Then how’d he get there?”

  For once, and disturbingly, Osley was without words.

  The room’s slanting light behind gauzy curtains was spent. She sent him away, telling him to come back the next day. She needed down time to think about the bizarre reference to the itinerant sharpener. She needed to find her own splinter of magnetic ore to match Ara’s, and so make her own compass out of this murky landscape.

  She needed a plan.

  Chapter 22

  OCTOBER 25. 8:30 A.M

  The next morning Osley got stopped at the front desk. Cadence came down and, seeing as it was Mel’s tab, rented a separate room for Osley. She was frustrated. Old-fashioned discipline had to be brought to this situation. As she held up the plastic entry card, she said “Os, look at me.” She kept her eyes on his, following them as they shifted evasively. “See this. This is not magic. It is real. As in soap and hot water. Now, I have a plan and here’s your part. I can’t save, even find, my grandfather until we get organized. First thing you do, give me your clothes sizes. Second, go take a shower. Third, order room service. I’m going shopping and I’ll have new clothes brought up to your room. Meet me in the lobby at noon. Lunch is on Mel. Oh yes, here is the translation key and some more pages to decipher. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  He was waiting there at noon sharp, cleaned up with new khaki pants and a simple pastel shirt, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Best of all, no smell.

  As they sat down to eat, she decided not to wait. “So, where is he now?”

  “Who?”

  “My grandfather, come on!”

  Osley was caught off guard, “I … I’m sure he’s OK. Don’t believe …”

  “Look, your babbling! You are translating this, talking like this imaginary world’s real, so how do you know he’s not caught in … there?”

  “Well, I do know, miss sarcasm, he’s not in there. I have more to figure out before I can go beyond that. Remember, these writings are treacherous. They can force the reader into mistakes, take us down lost paths. Let’s just take it easy. I’m working on this one passage now. I’ve been trying to figure out this one term. It seems to be orrour or errour.”

  She ate quickly, and got up. “Keep on working Os. I’ve got things to do.”

  “Cadence?” His hands were on his knees. He looked at her like a helpless bystander about to witness an accident. “Be careful.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be back.”

  She was determined to follow her own action plan, right or wrong. She would cut the Gordian Knot of all this hocus-pocus. Wherever her grandfather was, she now had one solid clue and she was going to follow it. As she walked out of the door, the napkin-map from Tolkien’s archive box in hand, it marked the last time she would consider herself a cynic about what’s real and what isn’t.

  The far end of the subway stop at 137th Street had been left unscrubbed for years. The walls were so overwhelmed with black, purple, red and pukey green graffiti that it hurt her eyes. A few stray travelers were waiting for the next train — a Dominican family of five on a jaunt somewhere, an Eastern European immigrant with lunch pail in hand, a bedraggled student, refugee from last night’s partying. Cadence wondered about their stories. The roar and screech of steel wheels straining on steel tracks barreled down the subway tunnel, along with a gusty change of air pressure. She walked to the front of the stop. She would get in at the front of the train. She would watch the view whizz by and try to find the place on the map.

  She already knew there was no 130th Street stop on the 1 train. Not on the maps, not in any brochure, not by any indication on the streets. She had walked that entire c
orner and several blocks around and found nothing but asphalt and buildings and the nonstop blur of life at the intersection with Broadway.

  The next train came in all its shabby glory. As it pulled up, she locked eyes with the conductor in his cubbyhole at the front. There was no way to talk to him, sealed in his control room. She got on and sat down in a seat that afforded a good view out the front window of the train. The door rattled closed, and the train began to move into the dark. She got up and looked out of the front window.

  There were a few yellow lights ahead, but they quickly gave way to the dark. The train gained speed, its headlamp stabbing into the blackness. Peering through the glass, she saw glimpses of the underground ribs of the city, etched in stroboscopic blue from the rails. Old wooden support beams, rigged with Y-shaped supports at the top, whirred by. The shiny tracks arched ahead, twin curves of reflected light running into a morass of soot and grime from the heaving, breathing metropolis laboring above.

  She leaned up to the glass and cupped her hands around her eyes to take away the reflection. The images became clearer. Piles of trash, an old shopping cart, bashed and mangled, lay off to the side. A stream of falling water splayed with a whack! across the glass as the train roared through. Her destination would be coming up soon.

  She saw it from the side, quickly there and then gone. A line of tracks veered away and into a dark maw. The tracks were flat black, unused.

  Ahead, the headlamp played for a split second off distant walls of grimy white tile. She tried to take it in, absorb everything made visible in that split-second. A subway stop, old, quaint, turn of the last century. Tiled words in Victorian lettering: 130TH STREET — BLAIN PLACE.. No graffiti. An old mattress laying on the platform.

  Her heart pumped hard and fast. So, it’s there. The map from Professor Tolkien’s box must mean something. She adjusted her backpack. The hard bulk of the flashlight pushed against her shoulder blade. She prepared to get off at 125th Street and walk back along the tracks. She had, of course, done her homework the night before.

  Minutes later, she stood at the edge of the 125th Street station’s pall of fluorescent light. She looked around the platform. There was just a hint of smoke in the air, but far off, perhaps a cigarette fire smoldering in a trash receptacle on the opposite platform. After a few moments, trains departed in both directions and the platforms were empty. There were security cameras but she trusted them to be permanently “under repair.” With a quick left-right glance, she crouched down and lowered herself onto the track bed and skulked into the dark. She kept in mind three lessons from last night’s homework — especially from the odd website, subwaytunnelhiking.com. First lesson, avoid the electrified third rail. It is not an urban legend. Second, listen and watch for the next train. Third, have a safe place to get to on the side so you won’t be swept away by oncoming trains. Easy. Common sense.

  The flashlight did a passable job, but soon it was like a penlight in the Grand Canyon at night. She had a tube of visibility three feet wide and twenty feet long. The darkness that encroached beyond that perimeter was absolute.

  Her feet moved ahead, searching with every step, feeling the low vibration of the ground. Her ears became her best sensors. Far away, the sounds of the trains played over the deep, incessant rumble of the metropolis above. On top of those, she could hear, like a metronome, a steady drip of water.

  There was a junction in the tracks, and, sure enough, a set of dirty, unused rails led off to the side. She followed them. She stepped over and studied a berm of detritus, most of it covered with soot. The crumpled grocery-store cart lay on its side, black accretions giving it a fantastic countenance as if it once lay at the depths of some unvisited sea. Other piles were so covered as to be unrecognizable. She shuddered at what touched her feet as she shuffled through this debris. The smell of smoke was thicker now, as if the endless whoosh of underground air columns sucked in the essence of some distant garbage dump. Those juju drums throbbed in her nerves.

  Now the tracks veered away at an acute angle. Her flashlight’s shaft of light caught faint eddies of smoke. She shot the beam front and back. Her nerves, on edge with the suggestion of a fire, jangled toward indecision. She stopped, then decided to quit and go back. Then she stopped again. Isn’t this always when something hideous rises up?

  She stood there, frozen in indecision, casting the light in every direction. She noticed there were many bag-like lumps, probably grimed versions of those kitchen trash bags made of fibrous and flexible material. She moved closer to one, playing the light over a textured surface that seemed to have shrunken around disturbingly familiar bulges and angular lines. She sensed it before she could admit it. They were like cocoons, webbed and closed around desiccated forms. Like adults shrunken to the size of children. She played the light down to the end of one bag, and there protruded a black and silver Air Jordan with the toe bitten off. She thought she could see bony protrusions within the deeper shadows of that toeless sneaker. No matter, she’d seen enough. She turned, almost fell, and stumbled back toward the junction of tracks. She got a few hundred feet, probably within sight of the rail junction if her fading light would only shine that far. She heard a train approaching on the main track. She blew a deep breath of relief, knowing that her bearings were right and the 125th Street station was up ahead.

  The train approached with a deep rumble, the ground beginning to vibrate. The whoosh of displaced air came, and with it the acrid taste of approaching combustion. She saw the train’s light up ahead, tinged with orange. Then it came barreling into view.

  The entire face of the train was engulfed in sweeping wings of flame. It had prowed into a burning shipping crate. Loose metal bands like maimed robot tentacles were flailing about and sparking madly on the tracks. Like some sardonic fire-grinning banshee of the dark underground, it roared toward and then past her, all noise and smoke and fume.

  From her point of view it seemed much slower. Her mind altered speed and fury to a processional. A thing relentless and somehow grand in its fiery splendor. A thing for which she reserved a special icy ball of hate.

  In its wake the train left a firefly frenzy of swirling sparks and these promptly caught the trash berm on fire. It sputtered and flared. As she watched in horrified incredulity, some distant part of her mind recalled the fourth (or was it fifth?) famous lesson of subway hiking: Beware of track fires. She remembered the text: “They are not that unusual, given all the flammable crap that is discarded and accumulates down there. If you are near one, just go the other direction. Fast. They are oxygen hogs.”

  No argument there, she thought. She could try to jump the fiery berm, but then, of course, she could never, ever do that. No way.

  She turned and ran past the shopping cart and the field of ominous trash-bags.

  Soon, she was far into the abandoned tunnel. The depth of the debris diminished until she could see the track-bed surface. The track fire smoldered far away and, ironically, she felt safer. She kept going until the first reflection of tiles from the Blain Place station showed in her light.

  She walked up to the center of the platform, looking across at the ancient stop with her eyes almost at floor level. But for a grimy mattress, it would have looked enchanted, as if it hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. She pulled out the little map and shone the flashlight on it, then to the station walls and back. The door — where was the door? There it was. She smiled in relief.

  Click.

  Her ears pricked up; every hair on the back of her neck stood out like wires. She wasn’t sure where the sound came from. She turned off the light so she wasn’t a beacon, and listened. Something was moving, struggling in labored increments, as if it had been still and waiting for a long time. Another sound, as if something were reaching out and then settling down. Then a sound of air — not breathing exactly, but the slow intake of breath not necessarily human. Followed by the faint rattling of things hard and polished as they practiced once again the art of moving together.


  It was coming.

  It was as yet only a thing surmised out of the blackness from the gooshy scrunch of joints and the low whoosh of baggy body parts. The reptilian complex of her brain, however, knew exactly what it was.

  She tried to hoist herself up on the platform, but it was too high. Her feet kicked, her chest wheezed, and she fell back, losing the flashlight.

  It clattered away in the darkness somewhere beneath her. She froze with the realization that no nightmare could be this real, this weighted with the realization that she was in imminent and mortal danger. The sounds were getting closer and so distinct she could envision the source: the big, flaccid bag borne toward her by the steady progress of eight legs stepping in an orchestrated pattern. Cadence got down on her hands and knees and searched with the desperate hand-sweeps of the blind. The approaching thing, she knew to a certainty, was now hovering somewhere near, gloating, looking at her in full view. Her hand brushed something … a beer can … a rock … more dirt … and … there!

  She grabbed the light, clicked it again and again until it turned on. It revealed the platform as she took three steps and hurtled herself up. She landed mostly up on the platform, rolled on over and stood up. The flashlight swept out its little halo, and just beyond its reach, she saw eight glints in a pattern.

  The thing lurched forward.

  Only the bits of image from her shaking, sweeping flashlight could be assembled in her mind into the horrible whole. The immense spider was now moving toward her in purposeful, creepy arachnid strides to match its ten-foot long legs. The details, the spikes and hairs on its legs, the glinting dashboard arrangement of eyes, the uncaring and hungry pincers, the sense and smell of rot and malevolence, all swirled in a chaos of movement and jiggling light. She turned toward the door, described on the map now bunched in her hand. What had it said? Locked? Key? Hidden key? She didn’t have time for this! She found the door locked with an ancient, unpickable, industrial-strength Slaymaker holding a loop of bulky chains in tight embrace. She pulled at the door handle, jangling the chain and locks. She screamed, “Bastard! Come on!” She stopped, gauging the sound behind her and sweeping the light along the floor, around the doorjamb, until it caught something hanging there. The key! Just hanging on a nail! She grabbed it, put the flashlight in her armpit, and began to work the lock and key.