Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien
Page 29
Ara put her hand beneath her cloak as if to the hilt of a weapon, and said, “Forget your swords! Place that food here and retreat to the far side of the stream. Now!’
Without a word the nearest one, straw-haired and jack-o-lantern-toothed, placed a sack on the trail and the three of them backed away. Their swords and bodkins lay haphazard on the rocks.
She grabbed the food sack and a scabbard knife, amenable as a sword, and marched up the bank on the far side.
The hawk flew in short segments, a bellwether for her in the fine mist. Soon a huge black squirrel began to follow her, tree to tree, chiding endlessly. It was the only sound in the saturated stillness.
She wondered if it was in league with her enemies, a scout of some vast, innumerable legion that had spread forth to find her and her kind. Its excitement on such a day as this did not bode well. Any other squirrel would be busy counting nuts and adding to its stores.
The squirrel looked down at her from a high limb, switching and sweeping a proud black tail silvered at the tip. Its eyes were dark pearls of hatred. It chided once more, hurling personal and angry squirrel insults from its impregnable perch.
Suddenly it was gone. Multicolored leaves exploded in the air as a tumult of talons and fur and flapping wings disturbed the treetops. The hawk had seized it and was now swooping low and away, its wings beating full and loud and strong, gaining altitude with each sweep. The obnoxious squirrel was clutched head forward, as raptors will, with its long bushy tail trailing behind.
She continued on the road. With luck the squirrel had not relayed to others a message of this diminutive stranger on this unlikely path.
Through a long night that became a frost-rimmed dawn, Ara fled southwest along an ascending forest road.
For a brief moment the horizon cleared and an almost full moon, its prow cutting waves of glowing cloud, announced that little time remained to find her Amon.
The road degraded to oakbrush path, then rocky track, and finally to intertwined, twisting trails of high mountain sheep. Even this tenuous way she abandoned in her fear of pursuit. She trusted her instincts and so left little mark to show her route, and moved all but unseen.
Unaided by magic cloak or spell, Ara possessed facility for stealth that had allowed her in times past to observe undetected the passage of elves and even once to watch their secret council.
From treacherous screes to shady defiles to barren stone expanse, she moved haltingly, so that no sentinel’s glance from above would detect her movement. Autumn-dried highbush berries served for food, drip-springs for water.
Three days carried her to a ledge just below the summit. At its top, a hundred steps above, sat the hawk, its wings splayed for balance and its feathers rustling in the cold gusts rushing over the crest.
Looking back and far below, she saw, vibrant in the streaks of new dawn’s light, smoke coiling up from the sacked keep of Thornland.
She rested and then clambered to the top.
The hawk faced west and her eyes, weeping from the ripping cold of the West Wind, followed its gaze to a valley of ghostly ruin. Laid out steeply below her and spreading to the mountain walls bordering dimly in the distance, writhed a land in agony. Fumaroles, smoke holes, fissures of steam, slag heaps, burning pyres, all was pustuled and packed in a miserable expanse bisected by a long road. On that path scurried the ant-like commerce of war. Encampments scattered randomly. Great battle flags of purple and green and sickly yellow undulated slowly in the smoke-thick air. Dead center smoldered a volcanic cone. A road zigzagged up to a black maw that glowed and pulsed like a questing eye. A land of ruin feeding an empire of the enemy on the march.
Whether it be the first step or the last, all journeys are defined by a moment when one can go forward or retreat. Ara studied the land until the thin soup of light failed and she beheld an expanse of black velvet dotted with tiny fires more numerous than the stars she knew she would never see again.
She stepped forward and entered the land of the Dark Lord.
Chapter 35
OCTOBER 31. 12:42 A.M
Cadence put down the last yellow sheet and looked at the bedstand clock. It rationed out barely audible tocks, struggling to hold back what now seemed a breackneck, falling-forward stumble of time.
She looked over at Osley and he nodded back to her. Each knew what day it was. Each could sense in the quiet of early morning a coming change that compressed all the trick or treats, jack-o-lanterns, and Batman and Sarah Palin costumes into the crude ox-horn funnel of an ancient time. A time that might spill forth shadows capering in silhouette before a roaring night fire high and wild, sparks intermingling with stars, fed by the rich fat of a meat-harvest bonepile. A time when walls dissolved and secret gates swung open, creaking and untouched. A moment of passage and peril.
The tocks slowed and stopped for a full second.
Ca-ching!
The both jumped. Ching! … ca-chi— Cadence pounced on the room phone and ripped the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello!”
She listened, then spoke. “Yes. That’s me. … What? … What! … Yes! I’ll be right there.”
Osley stood up, his hands out, palms up. A big “what?” expression on his face.
“Someone broke into my room!”
She stopped mid-stride and they both yelled out loud, “The valise!”
She ran for the door, closing it with a muffled “Osley, don’t go anywhere!”
Sixty seconds earlier, Barren had stood, deeply frustrated. He regarded with a calm and deadly focus the entirety of an overturned hotel room. It has to be here! Pillow feathers still floated in the air. A few graced his shoulders and mohawked hair. A set of drawers from the dresser lay in a shambled heap. The dresser itself was tipped over on its back. Mattresses were askew on the bed frame. Perhaps he had been too intense in his search, too noisy. Too careless, he thought. The insistent knocks on the door continued. “Ms. Grande? Hello, Ms. Grande?” The meddlesome authority of this inn was now present and interference— unwanted, unsought but here — had to be reckoned with. If he could not find the documents he would take care of them otherwise. As for their troublesome steward, Cadence, well, he had tarried too long. There were other emissaries here he could call on, oh yes.
He took from his pocket a simple little box, the size of a coffee cup. In it was a crumple of paper, well soaked in a foul incendiary brew of Barren’s own devising. He put it on the floor of the closet, then put a small candle on it and lit the wick. He walked to the door, released the security latch and waited. The key card lock clicked to green and the door swept open even as he hid behind it.
Framed in the doorway was the officious manager of the Algonquin, his hand poised to knock and his eyes like saucers. To his side hovered his sidekick, the hotel detective. “Ms. Grande?” the manager muttered as his neck craned forward and side to side to better see the destruction.
They stepped into the room, stunned by the disaster, as if an angry tornado had compressed its entire energy into the suite. The manager picked up the phone up off the floor. His eyes wide, cataloging the destruction, he handed the phone to the detective. “Call her other room, 608, and tell her this room has been broken into.” They were oblivious to the barely audible swish of Barren departing the room.
The little candle flame flickered, almost down to the crumple of paper.
It took Cadence one minute to sprint to the elevator and go to the fourteenth floor. As the door started to open, everything happened at once. The doors froze half-open. The elevator gagged to a stop. She piled out of the doors into a smoke-tinged hallway.
A siren klaxoned an idiot, up and down warble followed by three whoops, again and again. To her right, alternating red and white strobes flashed above the open stairwell door. The hotel manager and another man were in the stairwell, coughing and yelling for her to follow. A sign above the door suddenly lit up and flashed a sequence of “Emergency Exit” and “Do Not Use the Elevator.” On and on.
The ceiling sprinkler system was dribbling and coughing, ready to burst but somehow stalled. Her room door was open, and from it the fire, fresh and hot, was having its way. It receded for a moment, keeping one tongue on the doorframe as if inviting her in for a visit. She knew that in there lurked the smoking, apocalyptic man, the one that took her father. Now it wanted her. Ara, the surviving remnants of her existence stashed in the valise, was in there too.
Cadence could see from her angle, as smoke rolled out and flames danced around, that the room had been ransacked. Maybe this Barren had already found the valise. Maybe he had simply left his fiery cohort to cover his tracks and entertain pesky Cadence. But maybe not.
She had never stepped toward a big fire in her life. She quailed, adrenaline dumping thousand-volt juice into her raw senses and psyche. The reptilian complex of her brain was screaming over and over. Run! was all could she hear.
And she found herself at the threshold to the room.
The fire sucked back and she saw him, black and smoldering, almost grinning, with eyes that showed the flickering red flames behind him. He waited for her in the back of the room on the far side of the bed. He made a polite and almost courtly gesture, bowing with his arm outstretched.
The mockery of it all! She lunged forward, knowing that staying low was her only chance. She lizard-crawled to the bed. She squirmed underneath as far as she could, feeling the temperature that here seemed wretchedly, falsely cool. Her feet, sticking out from under the bed frame, felt like they were on a charcoal grill. She stretched for the area behind the headboard, groping, trying to feel anything. Nothing. Just empty space. The heat was growing exponentially. She felt like a stick figure made of tinder wood. In any second she would burst into flame, pirouetting as she rolled on the floor.
Then her fingers felt a leather corner. She pushed herself, reached further. Her hand was getting a grasp when the bed moved. The fire-man was lifting off the mattresses to get her! The bed frame skooched away from the wall and the valise fell into her hands. It was hot and seeped smoke, but it felt intact. She wriggled back, crawdadded out from under the bed, and made for the door.
She looked back and the smoking thing lifted a flaming Hotelier Quality Sleep-Eze King Size Double Coil Top Mattress and flung it across the room like a feather pillow. The thing roared and jumped up and was now astride the bed, standing on the bottom mattress. It was pissed off and coming for her.
Cadence got to her feet and ran blindly. She slammed into the hallway wall and got up and ran for the flashing exit sign. She clutched the valise with both arms, for all the world looking like a somewhat cooked version of the lost Professor Tolkien wandering through Idlewild Airport so many years ago. Behind her, a blast of fire surged out of the room.
She made it three more steps before the ceiling sprinklers came on full force. Then, underneath the sirens, came sounds of elemental struggle, fire and water, heat and cold, vapor and steam, rage and deluge.
Her clothes emitted a smoky steam, her hair felt frizzled, but as she bounded down through the acrid air in the stairwell, she was exultant. She had faced up to her deepest fear, and she was alive. She had beaten the smoldering man! She also had saved Ara, now safely tucked away in the valise under her arm.
Now she was going to get some final answers
She disregarded the evacuation alarms and returned by the stairs to Osley’s room, wired with adrenaline and wanting truth. She threw the valise on the bed as he looked at her, smoky and stinky and wet. His mouth and eyes were big Os and he was dumbstruck … and defenseless. Just what she wanted. She came up close and looked hard at him. Osley, the One-Eyed Jack. It was time to see the other side of that card.
“So, Mr. Osley, now they’re trying to kill me, but I’m not going to let them. And I’ve got some serious questions for you.”
He tried to move away, but the desk and chair and bed hemmed him in.
“You know my grandfather disappeared a year ago today?”
He nodded yes.
“You know these documents, especially this ‘Elf,’ have a power to confuse?”
He nodded again, almost in resignation to the coming third-degree.
“You know that something wants to destroy the documents, and Ara, and if necessary, you and me?”
The nod.
“But you’re not telling me everything, are you?”
Sideways nod. Head down.
“So what is it, Osley, what’s your secret? And don’t try to get all Shakespeary on me!”
He started to open his mouth.
“And don’t tell me I should pack up and go. I’m not leaving till I find my grandfather, and he’s somewhere, somehow hidden in this murk. I can feel it. So, now, damn it! Talk!”
“I am just … Osley.”
“I know that. That’s not all. The truth!”
“I am a fugitive.”
“Cut the crap. The real truth.”
“I am a wanderer.”
“Damn you, fess up. Did you do something to him?”
“I don’t know.”
She did the unthinkable. She slapped him, hard.
At that instant the fire alarms stopped. The sound of the slap ricocheted through the room.
Osley took the deep breath of the penitent and held it. It sighed out as if, finally in his life, there were no place to go.
“Very well, I will tell you.”
At last, she thought, the card is about to be flipped over.
“OK …”
“I am he.”
“What?”
“Him … Jess … your grandfather.”
Her face went blank. Wheels and gears tried to mesh, to comprehend what he just said. Then the gears clenched together and there were storm clouds in her narrowed eyes. Lightning flashed.
“This is no joke, Osley. Quit screwing with my head. It’s not helpful, especially now.”
“It’s true. Just that simple.”
She tried to pick out his lie. “My grandfather had legs of steel. No limp or hitch in his walk.”
“The night I disappeared, a blade thrust into me. It never really healed. I got out through the trap door.”
Cadence thought of the iron ring in the floor, the open trapdoor showing the creek side brush, the cloven doorframe.
“You don’t look like him.”
He looked up. “How would you know? What picture have you seen? Shave off my beard, cut my scraggly hair. I’m him, your dad’s dad.”
“No one ever mentioned the name Osley.”
“No? What’s a name, and what can be more easily invented, or discarded? Why did I wander and hide my identity for years? Why did I, Jess, never get a driver’s license?”
She felt herself sliding down a slope, struggling between doubting him as an extravagant imposter and wanting to yell, “Why did you leave?” Instead, she heard her uncertain voice saying: “But you were a teacher. Here. All the Tolkien stuff.”
“Absolutely true. All of it. He, Tolkien, was here. He entrusted the documents, the ones you hold, to me. To whom else could he? He left and, given my past and what I held, I knew I had to disappear as completely as possible. I had learned the trade of sharpening from one of the last itinerant practitioners in the Bronx. He gave me my sharpening machine. So I left and never really stopped, except for a few years, which is where you come in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met Brigette, your grandmother. We got married. We had a child. His name was Arnold. Arnie.”
As she looked at him she almost cocked her head, trying to see her Dad. She couldn’t resist making a little jump to belief: “You left them. You were the one who was never there.”
“Yes. I failed. Both of them. I failed the very chance in life I took as my own. I only stopped wandering when I thought I could, when my own demons and those in these papers seemed to rest. I finally stopped and hid out in plain sight. In Topanga.”
“I think you’re a consummate, no … psychotic, liar.”
“Yes.”
“First, your keychain, the tooth. It’s a talisman. I hope its still there in the valise. I received it from a shaman’s son in Montana. Second, your dad had a purple birthmark on the left cheek of his ass. He … he loved fossils. He had a collection of shark’s teeth. He said ‘crik’ instead of ‘creek.’”
Her head swirled. She was slipping toward a tentative “maybe this is all true” stage. “You better not be lying.”
She told him about the fiery encounter in her room.
“Look, Cadence,” he almost said granddaughter, but the word was too awkward. “Time is moving against us. This Elvish is too true, too important, but that’s not the point. I fled from it. To save you. Now you’re here. You’re in mortal danger, more than you know. You must go. Now!”
“Cut and run? Leave? After I’ve found you?” Some part of her wanted to put her arms out, two fragile overtures, but her heart still held them back. He stood there stiff and awkward. Long moments passed.
She couldn’t call him “Jess”. Maybe she never would. Still, she felt a growing calmness. She rubbed away emerging tears. “Whoever you are, this is all too much.”
“Cadence, we don’t have much time now. That … man could come back. He will try again.”
She thought for a second and pointed at the valise. “And what about Ara?”
“Those documents are like a signal fire now. No matter where you go, they will track and find you. They are terrible. Leave the documents here, at least for tonight.”
She stared at him.
“Come on, you trusted me an hour ago. I’m still the same. Take a break.”
She nodded. “OK. For a little while. I’m going downstairs. I’m sure the manager is a whistling teakettle. I bet he’ll have the concierge hook me up with whatever I need. Clothes, new room — first floor this time. They will want to get the fire inspectors in to confirm the flash fire is out. Get them in and out and keep this whole thing low profile. Not great for business. I don’t want to go anywhere else tonight. But hovering around with the documents won’t work. We are both hostages to this. There has to be some other way. Think.”