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

by Стив Хиллард

  “Here, you read it. It’s a note, probably from Tolkien, probably never sent. It was paper-clipped to the piece I just read.”

  She picked the page up. It was undated, but in the familiar scrawl of the Good Professor Tolkien:

  Jack,

  Your point on the lectures is well taken, though some may not take it well. We shall see. As we discussed last Tuesday at the Bird and Baby, the approach of All Hallows Eve increasingly fills me with a dread that isn’t about Hollywood monsters.

  It’s about something both ancient and unsettling. I have found a translation tool for much of this trove of documents. Use of it has unnerved me, for I fear that some, at least, of this Elvish must be the work of Dark Elves that make merry with caprice and ill-luck to others. It may be far worse; they may seek to forge a portal into our own time, into our very midst. The crux is this. The intensity of this damnable pile increases every fall, peaking on All Hallows, that ancient pre-Christian time, like the rise of some marauding fen-beast from the wastes below the keep.

  Let’s hope I am just imagining things again. More when next we see each other.

  JRRT

  As she put the page down, he said out loud, “Don’t you see? We’re the Holder. We’re the Hunted!” He was losing it. She could almost smell the fried rotors in that old Emporia mixer.

  She decided to stop the madness, at least temporarily. “Os, you’re at burnout. Put down the paper and pen. Stand up and walk out the door. We’re going to sit down and have a nice, civil lunch. As usual. On Mel.”

  They convened in the Round Table Room. The same waiter fussed agreeably over them. They munched on designer bread, and didn’t begin to talk until the soup came. She waited until they agreed that the bean and ham soup was quite nice.

  “Os, what do you think is going on? You know something.”

  As usual, he deflected. “I can tell you the big picture as I see it, and then the situation we are in right now. And, Cadence …”

  “What?”

  “After I say my piece, will you agree to return home, go somewhere? Leave?”

  “I’ll think about it. Now tell me.”

  Chilled forks carried by unobtrusive hands came in from the side, along with icy plates of asparagus spears.

  Osley began, “Here it is. All boiled down. Let’s indulge the assumption, one held by the majority of people — including Professor Tolkien in his own heart-of-hearts — that all sorts of fantastical things and places do exist, right here in our midst. Indulge, also, the thought that maybe there was once an embodiment of power — a wand or ring or pointy hat or something like that. The name of it—‘Bind’—keeps coming up. Maybe it was evil. But for every ounce of malevolence there was an equal measure of magic bound to it. With its loss went much of the magical power of our little corner of the universe. The twinkle went out.”

  He took a swig of iced tea to bolster his pace. “This left a vacuum. The loss of this object did cost the world much. Into that vacuum, evil once again crept — not the evil that bears a capital letter in its name, but evil that is diffuse and cannot be wholly cornered or pegged down. It lives everywhere and compounds the petty and tawdry into horrors that are unnamed and often unnoticed. You can see this everywhere.”

  “Try right here. Give me a for-example.”

  He held up both hands to form an oval window the size of a football. “Fume, Narcross, the Great Eye that sees all …” then his right hand closed to a smaller circle, “… has been replaced by the little eyes. First TVs, then computer screens, now these phones. They are everywhere. They communicate to all. They speak the perfect hidden language of the pedestrian evil that is the lot of the Fourth Age. This manuscript, and all those who consort with it, are in danger. Someone is uncomfortable with it, not merely for the tale it tells, but with its very physical existence!”

  “You think this Elvish keeps some of the original twinkle alive?”

  “Most certainly, even though the hands that wrote it will never return.”

  “But Ara, her story and her existence …?”

  “I’m afraid, whatever we do, her days may be numbered.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you not suspect the answer? You are the steward of this document. Surely you must see something. Speak up!”

  “Well, I’ve thought for a long time …”

  “Sometimes Cadence, behind everything there is a question. It may be so hidden we never see it. It may be at the edge of our mind. It may be a whisper on the sea sounds floating up through the long spirals of a shell held to our ear. But not this question. This one is clear. Tell me the blunt question.”

  “OK. What happened to the women?”

  “Precisely! There must have been a process of censorship. Tolkien was discovering a myth. But myths don’t stay still. Something wants to erase the story of this once-famous heroine.”

  “All right, Inspector Os, who is the culprit?”

  Osley looked stymied.

  Cadence picked up the inquiry, “OK, let’s look at what’s evident. This manuscript maybe, just maybe, fills in something from the Middle Ages, or Middle-earth or Middle somewhere. Take your pick. Or out of the mind of some writer.”

  “Or some translator. Is that it? You think I’m making this up?”

  “No, Os. You’re a type, just not that type.” Cadence didn’t signal her lingering doubt.

  Osley kept on rolling. “Look, Ara was a mover and a shaker. She must have played a role far bigger than we have read so far. That’s the key!”

  Cadence thought for a second. “Fine, I’ll play. We’re here eating. Let’s set the rest of the table, a mystery-story dinner to find the culprit. Who are the guests?”

  “Well, not the authors of these manuscripts. They could have been participants in the tale, their descendents, or, more likely, historians in later ages. But that’s missing the point.”

  “Ara?”

  “Yes, at our own end of the table, at the head, is Aragranessa, the famous halfling, daughter of Achen. And you, my dear Cadence, are the Steward and the Holder. You sit at her right hand. Now who shall be our other guests?”

  “Professor Tolkien?”

  “Ah, yes. Our special guest. Just to stir things up. Let’s seat him in the middle, on Ara’s left, so he needn’t have to take sides.”

  “And you, Mr. Osley, where’s your seat?”

  “Consider me the maître d’, standing and attending exclusively to this fine table.”

  Cadence laughed for a second, then paused. “My grandfather?”

  “Yes, Jess. A place set in his honor. Alas, the chair is empty. My dear, you must accept that he probably won’t show. I’m sure he is, well, somewhere, with important things to do.” Osley briskly moved on, finding a new question. “What of your friend, Mel?”

  “Yeah, he should be a guest.”

  Osley put a finger over his lips in mock concentration. “I think he is … the bus boy. An errand runner for forces as yet unseen.”

  “He doesn’t have bosses. He’s an independent agent.”

  “There’s no such thing, my dear. Everyone works for the man. Even I, a derelict of the street, serve some masters. Like the gangs that let me come and go unmolested.”

  “He doesn’t act that way. He acts like all his angles are his own.”

  “Well, for all his façade, he may yet serve as your tool. I know I’m ungrateful. Look at this French dip and julienne fries he’s paying for. Anyway, as to his ‘bosses,’ I know of them, or at least of their kind, and can surmise the rest.”

  Osley sat back, savoring the last morsels of roastbif and au jus. “Name a name. Who had long-term access to these writings? Someone that lives a long time.”

  She thought she was in tune with him. “The Elves.”

  “No. They left and knew they were leaving. Their writings are but a glowing artifact, priceless and radioactive with their power, but not really them.”

  “Wizards?”

  “Close, but no ci
gar yet. Someone who had a particular dislike for Ara and her story.”

  “So we’re left with only one other suspect, Sherlock.”

  “Precisely, Dr. Watson.”

  They both leaned over and whispered simultaneously, “The Dark Lord!”

  Osley gave a grand gesture. “Then seat him at the far end of the table and order his favorite meal.”

  “Anything that’s not on fire. No Baked Alaska!”

  He grew solemn. “You know, Cadence your thing with fire. You can’t take vengeance on a thing. Fire, wind, day and night. They are just dumb things.”

  She listened but, deep down, she didn’t buy it. Fire was the enemy. A monster that stalked her. If she could, if she had the courage, she would one day confront that monster.

  Os kept on talking. “OK, the fun’s over. At stake here is nothing less than the fate of each of the guests, good Professor Tolkien excepted, bless his soul. That means you, Cadence. You cannot stay. The more you seek to help Ara, the greater your danger. You must leave tomorrow.”

  “All right, I’ll go. Just as soon as you finish the translations. There aren’t many pages left. Don’t you want to know what happens to Ara?”

  “I’ve learned to be cautious about seeking our fates. But so be it. And for you, no wondering around alone in the subways. If something bad happens before I finish, you must leave immediately. Agreed?”

  “Check.”

  BOOK III

  We lack the word for it, the lost tale that takes us into a deepening place where no steps can be retraced.

  — Timothy Lessons

  The human word is but a battered timbale, beating out patterns fit for making bears dance.

  — Mel Chricter, paraphrasing Gustave Flaubert

  O! for a Muse of Fire!

  — William Shakespeare

  Chapter 30

  DETERIORATION

  From Silicon Blog, Timespan:

  Loss is the handmaiden of human archives. Ancient documents come and go. In the end, like most things, all are doomed. The culprit isn’t a dark overseer or a conspiracy. It’s water, the great solvent that allows us to exist, and which dissolves all.

  Other natural forces, of course, also intervene to destroy our archives. Fire, earthquake, mold and insects do their fair share.

  Our digital information is eroding from cosmic rays, solar flares, and quantum indeterminacy far faster than stone carvings fade. This is not to mention technical obsolescence and the stranding of vast content in archaic hardware and unlockable digital codes.

  Alongside these, human folly is never to be underestimated. Things just get lost. Or consider that the greatest library ever assembled, containing originals from the hand of Aristotle and other giants of intellect and art, was at Alexandria in Egypt. It was put to the torch by an overzealous bishop. There you go.

  All we have from the past is a declining base of information. The point of the lesson is humility. Never trust a history to be the only story.

  Chapter 31

  INKLINGS VIII

  The sounds of greetings and bustling, overcoats thrown aside, and chairs pulled up.

  “Tollers! You return looking hale and refreshed. Was it absence from our witticisms that was so good to you?”

  “Yes, that and more. Since you ask, I do feel invigorated since my little adventure to America. Relieved and unburdened, I should say. Able to look forward and see farther all at once.”

  “Well, we missed you. Our topic last week was the de-foresting in the highlands. Another old-growth grove once protected on an estate. All under the axe.”

  “But first, a toast to your safe return.”

  Cries of “Hear, hear!” An amiable clanking of beer glasses.

  “Alas, to trees, men are infernal. They fulminate and pollute and heat the world. They hack away whole forests. For this, why should trees see men as better than orc-kind?”

  “You may think that a tragedy, as one of many you have seen, but is not the loss, once perceived, at least the affirmation that it was? What if it never existed at all?”

  “Ansel, your mind is a wind-up toy, all whirrs and wheels but not sure where it’s going.”

  “I’ll go with Ansel. Better than knowing and have no whirrs to get there!”

  Groans around the table.

  “You should listen to Tollers and Jack. They never stop testing the boundaries between the real and what you Victorians call the Realm of Faerie, the mind-state of imagined worlds. They would say there’s just one step, onto a road, perhaps through a hidden gate, and you’re there. Have I got that right?”

  “Pretty much. There are indeed many worlds. This one is ours. But it’s all a tale and tales change backwards and forwards. Life is an interweaving of tales lived, thought, told, heard, scoffed, and believed. A summing up. Or a hiving off. Ah, but here’s the thing damnable and divine. It’s in the seams that the truth lies. That which intricately binds it all together in ways we can’t imagine how to imagine. That’s the wonder. That someone, something, somehow knows and tells our tales. We hope so, but we can’t be sure. So we have to tell them ourselves, all the time. Backward and forward and reassembled. Unravel a tale and much more may be lost and gained than just some quaint fiction. There is no end, and all tales are one, and people should never forget this.”

  “Unless the worst of fates overtakes a tale.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Erasure.”

  A moment of silence.

  “I suppose you’re right. Life comes and goes. Death is common to all, and our fate is to be stalwart before it. But elimination from the very Tree of Tales?”

  “As if you never existed?”

  “You’re right, that is a terrible fate for a story.”

  “Tollers, you’re quiet for one who prides himself on retrieving stories.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve seen forces that would inflict such a cruelty and seek, as you put it, to erase a tale and its heroine.”

  “I thought you didn’t find many true heroines in your discovered mythology?”

  “Aye, but there was one, and she may yet survive if my strategy works.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Let her, and her tale, hide for long awhile.” “But who will bear witness for her, if not you?” “That role was denied to me by forces I shall not speak of here. But you are right, nothing exists except by witness. And to a great tale we all bear witness, and the meter of truth is told in our hearts. Who then is the last and the first witness, between which all else bounces?”

  “Bounce that extra pint over here.” “So are you going to complete your other writings?” “I doubt it. My major books are done. Even those would have been fated to oblivion had Stan Unwin, my editor — you’ve all met him — had not given his ten year old son the first manuscript. Raynor gave it a jolly good review. There’s a bit of seams and joinery for you. Anyway, there are other steps to take, perhaps the children for the father. Perhaps for others.” “But what about this mysterious cache of writings?” “My work on those documents of antiquity, delivered to me in the night long ago, has ceased. I long suspected their most recent history, that they were the very documents buried away by S.I.S. before the war. My doorstep was but one stop in the long, desperate journey of these fragments. Now they have traveled on. I’ve rid myself of them. They are across the sea, in America. They exist and they have a destiny, but not one in which I play a further role. They are the lost tale we just spoke of, whose heroine some would erase forever. And yet … by the valiant hand of some witness as yet unknown, that heroine may still survive. I hope so.”

  Chapter 32

  OCTOBER 30. 7:30 A.M

  The next morning, Cadence was cruising the shelves at Orkney’s Grocery on West Fifty-fifth Street. Her hands moved briskly, selecting edibles for Osley. She planned to keep him fueled up and going strong to avoid any more fried circuits. She had resolved to quietly finish out the string of this trip. Tomorrow she would gather up (
hopefully) the last of the translations and pack her bags and go. Nice and simple.

  The “dinner party” exercise had been entertaining, and it let Osley blow off some steam, but the only real thing left to do was nurture him along until he tracked Ara’s destiny down to the end, if it even existed. The manuscripts might peter out, her story just another path lost in Mirkwood.

  As she glided along the store shelves she even began to rationalize the confusing — her mind had already downgraded it from horrifying — events in the subway tunnel. A track fire. OK, scary but natural. The rest? Well, darkness like that is like a theatre screen. Your mind can throw whatever it wants up there. Her reasoning had only one sticking point: why a spider?

  If she were to imagine elemental monsters in the dark, they wouldn’t include a spider. Maybe Morlocks or bubble-headed Martian Invaders, or the veiny-headed mutant under-people from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. She could even conjure up the Mud Men, oozing out of sticky cave walls in Flash Gordon.

  But the spider? That came from somebody else’s imagination.

  And Ara, the wavering vision in the pool? She should have followed her instincts and done something right there. Now she would have to see where Ara’s written trail led. Most likely nowhere. Cadence felt again that need — beyond admiration, beyond role model — that need to connect with Ara. She felt their crossed destinies were already entwining.

  She carried her basket up to the counter. Bacon and egg burritos and double-stuffed Oreos would keep Osley focused this morning, like a bloodhound on Ara’s trail. She left the store, turned the corner, and stopped.

  In the midst of a flowing crowd, a man stood still and stared at her. His look was not the moon-eyed hunger for recognition typical of the don’t-make-eye-contact-with-them cast-offs of the city.