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

by Стив Хиллард

  Tested, the spell would not unclasp its chains. They and the Dark Lord were for a moment rendered still, as a painting might preserve their demeanors for all time. Even then, the air about them swirled with the tumult of contesting wills. Suddenly, as if the chains were but smoke rings created by jesters, their power fell away. The Bearer was himself again. Free to choose.

  He stood up, retrieved Bind from Ara’s open hand, and held it over the precipice.

  “My fate is my own,” he said calmly, looking into the dismayed eyes of the Dark Lord.

  There he held Bind for a moment. All was still. Tensiles of fate adjusted and rearranged beyond the vision of any of the races of Middle-earth.

  The Bearer looked at Ara, then yelled at the Dark Lord to divert his attention, “Red-Eye, your vision and your spells are weak. Like the Source itself. You have no more days.”

  Many things happened at once: Ara moved quickly to stand beside the device that supported the Source. The minions scurried about, oblivious to her and servile to their tasks of adjustment to valve and stem. The great glass bowl at the top shimmered with its precious contents. She saw that, like the Dark Lord’s empire, the contraption was top heavy. She grabbed a wooden strut and pulled. The mechanism wobbled. The Dark One turned around, then looked back at the Bearer, then back to Ara. A ghastly, unbelieving look of dismay crept across his features.

  Ara jumped up on the strut and leaned impishly back. The device teetered beyond its center of gravity. Like a great tree, stiff and solemn in its slow fall, it leaned and then fell in a thundering crash of heavy liquid and exploding glass and splintered wood. Ara, nimble as ever, jumped free at the last second. The broken vials burst forth their contents. The essences, loose and hurried, ran with lives of their own, from ledge to floor to precipice. The Dark Lord danced awkwardly as the metallic liquids of the Source slithered and scurried, shimmering and deft as eels, to pour over the edge.

  Still standing at the precipice, the Bearer opened his hand and Bind glinted forlornly as it fell away, following the Source to oblivion.

  Barren picked up the pages and tucked them in his coat pocket.

  Chapter 41

  RUSH

  Cadence banged her own cell phone with her fist. It was shut down. Dead battery.

  After surfacing from the subway stop, she took a wrong turn, walked three needless blocks and finally swept into the lobby of the Algonquin. Heraclitus bolted from his perch. Guests’ heads turned, the desk clerk stood up straight. Cadence made it to the elevator. Her head was ringing like an in-use anvil.

  First floor. Out of the elevator. The hallway loomed in two opposite and indistinguishable directions. She had to concentrate, holding her plastic key card and remembering the room number. It was fuzzy, like trying to remember the street address where you lived in the fifth grade. She tried several doors and finally one worked.

  She burst through the door and shut it behind her. Safe.

  The room was empty. The bed was made. The room was clean and arranged in impeccable order. Her shoe crinkled on a note on the floor. She picked it up, opened it cautiously.

  M. Lawrence Novell, the manager, was inquiring whether, as her reservation was through Monday only, would she be extending her stay?

  Monday was yesterday, according to the newspapers she glimpsed while running to the subway platform. She held the note like it was heavy. A reminder of an incongruous, alternate world. A place of quiet despair and frozen rivers of indecision, where petty errands sailed haphazardly on the air currents from the seacliff of her inertia. A place that would be a prison where it was always three o’clock in the morning.

  She scrunched the note and threw it aside and looked at the room desk. Her cell phone charger cord was there, neatly coiled. She plugged the phone in. She used the hotel phone to call Jess’s room. A stranger answered, indignant about her questions. She called the front desk. Sorry, he checked out. No, no note left behind for her, nothing in Lost and Found. A Mr. Thornton called. “Oh yes, has madame had a chance to do her shopping?” She said a deflated “yes” and hung up and flopped on the bed, crushed.

  After a moment, she folded over like a collapsing tower of sticks. She took in the world in sideways view. Maybe that would help her think. Something else is missing! She sat up. She crawled under the bed, stabbing her arms up to the hiding place. She groped. Nothing. The documents, the valise, all of her grandfather’s translations and notes — all gone!

  She checked drawers, the closet, inside the shower.

  She repeated the entire search, overturned all the trash cans, and ransacked the couch. She grew still and contemplated a return to that perpetual, pre-dawn prison cell that yawed open in her mind.

  Just me and my ticket home now.

  After a while her room phone rang. “Cadence, Bossier. I’ve been calling your cell and your rooms. I cornered a man, the one who was stalking you. Outside your other room. He got away. I fainted or something. I just blacked out. You were missing …”

  “No, I’m OK, more or less. How did you find him?”

  “I got a call on Monday from a different cell phone. You were talking with someone … like you were in trouble. I heard a man say he was going to the Algonquin. So I went there and saw this guy outside your grandfather’s room. Then I woke up in the maid’s closet.”

  “So, are you sure you’re all right?”

  The second line of the phone rang, the light blinking with idiot insistence. “Uh … hold on.” She punched the blinking button. It was the desk clerk again. Sorry, he’d forgotten. There was a note for her from Mr. Grande, formerly of Room 608. She punched back to the first line. “Gotta go. Yes. Yes. I’m OK. Bye.”

  Counting the elevator time, she was downstairs in thirty seconds. She got the envelope, Algonquin stationary, her name on the front in Jess’ erratic handwriting. She ripped it open and read the wobbly, trailed writing that spoke of adrenaline and haste:

  Cadence only few seconds. I have the docs. Hope we filled in some blanks. Like in that old song, I have to go. So you can stay. I love you. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

  Jess

  Just like that, everything … gone.

  She let the note fall, its wish-wash flutter perfect closure to the yellow telegram flimsy that had ignited this journey. A horde of emotions jostled in her mind, like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked at the opening doorway of Wal-Mart on Black Friday. All her naïve family questions, Jess, Os, the ancient documents, Elvish, belief, cynicism, Ara — everything, at least whatever was left, was being trampled in this mad, mindless roar. She squeezed her eyes shut and jammed her fists against her mouth to keep in the simultaneous screams of fear and loathing and grief. For just a moment, it felt as if her head was pressuring with explosive gas, a mere spark away from blowing completely apart.

  Then it passed. She opened her eyes and let the squeeze-tears fall. Her hands brushed back her hair as she took a deep breath.

  She sank into the big lobby chair and just let the world slowly cave in around her. Like some Hollywood Spectacular set, it fell ponderously, pillar by pillar. She accepted the collapse. It would be all right, even the long noir movie that would be her return trip to Los Angeles. Last Train to Mirkwood it might be called.

  She left New York City the next morning. Just like she imagined, just like in those old-timey movies, the next four days flickered by in grainy black and white.

  The things—the lost documents, the translation notes, the clues — she let them go with each westbound hour, like confetti loosed into the wind. The rest was hard. She mourned for Jess because, somehow, she couldn’t be mad at him. She understood now something of the forces that can sweep people away on journeys that must be taken. Strangely, she grieved also for Ara — her fate twisted to betrayal and her tale so forever lost. Jess was gone but he had left something, a grandchild named Cadence. Ara, even if deservedly so, was erased.

  It was only at the other end, as the cab left her off in front of the Mirkwood Forest, the dus
t settling in motes of slanting, pure California sunshine, that the world returned to full color and Cadence came alive again.

  * * *

  As she stood there in the dusty sunshine in front of the Forest, its door plastered with a foreclosure notice and “Entry Prohibited: LACSO” yellow tape, Barren stood, six states away to the east, alone in wind-whipped rain. His boots were soaked through. With his baseball cap pulled down to eye level, the rain cascaded down the bill and onto his soaked denim jacket.

  Splatters that felt like liquid quarters pelted him. On the pavement they made bonk and splank sounds that threatened golfball-sized hail.

  He stood as still as if he were a hunched tree improbably sprouted from the asphalt shoulder.

  He smiled. The elements of rain and lightning and thunder were contesting like petty gods, like the caped and marquee-titled wrestlers he had seen on TV. The display came and went in a moment, and the storm raced on. He stood in the lessening drizzle. He had seen the great storms, the ones that included molten fire and flashing light and soul-breaking thunder.

  This world was not ready for the making of a new age. That was part of its quaint charm.

  The temperatures dropped and a fast-gathering fog emerged as the storm barreled off to the east. A car came by, its slish of tires advancing almost ahead of its headlights. There was a last note of thunder and the fog enshrouded all.

  Behind him was a field of corn. The fog poured like a gauzy, grey-white liquid into the rows. The stalks stood there, ghastly yellow and abused, like ranks of lean and tested soldiers ordered for one last review. Some were already faltering, leaning on their comrades.

  A few smeared points of light hovered up ahead where the road disappeared. He would walk into the town and decide.

  Chapter 42

  NOVEMBER

  Time did its thing. The foggy, surreal hangover of New York City and Halloween and the rage and the sorrow, all passed. Cadence puttered and planned and took action. She sold the Jaguar and gave the money to the bank in return for a stay of execution on the foreclosure sale.

  She reopened the Mirkwood Forest. She rearranged the merchandise and put ads first in the Topanga Messenger and then in the Los Angeles Times. She built a web site, TheMirkwoodForest.com. She applied for real jobs.

  Mostly, for the first time in her life, she felt filled-in. There was no more ice pick hole in her mind’s family portrait. The details might be sketchy, but the hole was filled in. A fleeting hug and squeeze of hands with her grandfather would have to do as the patch for a lot of uncertainty. He was there — marooned, missed, bizarre, eccentric, deeply flawed, but with the one redeeming quality she hungered for. He was real, and he had loved her enough to sacrifice himself. She had enough history to stop the questions.

  Ara was different. For awhile, Cadence kept those uncertainties with her like the charm bracelet she had as a little girl. Each precious, glittering doubt jingling with her throughout the day. Was the account of her betrayal, her turn to the dark side, just a piece of misinformation? An odd, easily-misinterpreted fragment from the rubble of history? Did she and the Bearer ever go to that Rock by the Sea? Did any fragment of her existence yet survive to be unearthed by some future Tolkien-like mythologist? Would she ever, however imperfectly, be rendered again?

  Cadence realized that the answers were all no. Her elusive grandfather and Ara, along with the mystical, Mirkwoodian magic of Elvish, had all finally winked out of this world.

  So that left one more tidying up task, from which some slight perverse pleasure might arise. Getting on his calendar was a snap this time, even though she had to wait for him to get back in town. Monday, two weeks from now, she had an appointment with Mel.

  On the next day, Saturday morning, Cadence opened the Forest at ten. A clear morning when the canyon’s first (perhaps only) true frost of the season promised a crisp, mild day. The ocean below would be sparkly and bright, and its clean smell would waft all the way up to Topanga.

  The bell over the door tinkled as a first customer wandered in. She was in the back of the store but briefly peered out and yelled “Good morning!” A man was by the front window with his back to her, checking out the shop. He whistled a singsong tunelet as he bent over to inspect the Abbott and Costello shakers in a glass case. Buzz cut, gray hair, Hawaiian shirt. Tourist.

  She hibernated the computer sitting on the calico tablecloth. As she got to the front counter the tourist had wandered off to inspect the Vintage Vinyl section she had put in.

  She fussed at the counter, looking down through the top glass as her hands re-arranged the perfect boxed Barbies. She saw a man’s hand come to rest on the counter.

  “Do you still have Riker’s Island comic books?”

  She froze, sensing the image of Barren, his leering wolfen face gathering up like a conjured demon. With one swoop he would uproot her from this soil and send her off to roll like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. How? She thought. Not here.

  She looked up. Instead of the gloating face of Barren, a never-before seen version of Jess Grande was there. Clean-shaven, but older, more worn, creases and crags etched deeper into a face previously hidden.

  She was stunned. Her eyes took it all in before she could react. “Grandpa!” She screamed, flying around the counter to grab him. “What! How?”

  “Shush. Shush. All in good time.” She stepped back and held his hands, old and new entwined, and looked at him. What she saw, even in that first study by her artist’s eye, was a man emptied out. It was as if he had been scraped hard on the inside by some terrible and primitive tool. What was left, she would see.

  The first installment of “all in good time” came an hour later. They sat at the kitchen table and he told her what little he could recall, ending with the end.

  “So, I had it all along. The document we talked about.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The scruffy piece of leather. It was the Vow. Rings have no power unless the promises that accompany their giving are honored. This was a Vow of Protection and it was a coin that the Dark Lord had given long ago. As the holder, even as I gave up the Tolkien documents, that coin was bound to be honored. I suspect it may have been given originally to Pazal. Or perhaps not. Somewhere in those documents, never found by us, may have been something of that tale. The point is that the Vow was given, a deal was sealed. The rest we’ll never know now.”

  “Like a get out of jail free card. Or the Letters of Transit in Casablanca.”

  “Except this was real.”

  Cadence relaxed her watchful eye and laughed from a depth of peace that surprised her. “Yeah. Real. I believe … for real.”

  * * *

  That night the man once known as Barren ate somewhere at three in the morning sitting on a stool in a diner called The Eat. After that, he walked out and hitched a ride to anywhere.

  Anywhere ended up being Texas City, Texas. He stood at night on a bridge over a dredged canal, beneath a drooping yellow sky.

  There it was, a vast world clear to the hazy horizon of interweaving pipelines, tanks sized from hills to horses, valves, gauges, flanges, heat exchangers, absorbers, pumps, containment pits, shacks and metal buildings, all overlaid with soot and black pools of oil and water and crud. Behold a wonder, a hundred, nay a thousand, giant flares whooshing, roaring, lighting anew like a never-ending fireworks display. He stood there, his pupils wide with awe, the flares reflecting in his eyes like a coal sack of troll candles.

  The next night he was far away. The sky dark as upon it floated a barnacled moon sculling on a flow-tide of black clouds. He pulled the small leather pouch from within his shirt and opened it as it hung from the cord around his neck. He dug deep with his fingers, as if trying to catch a living thing. Finally he pulled out his hand and opened his fist. There gleamed a simple ring, silver-hued, almost smoky in color. Its only adornment was the restless flow of rich, satiny hues in its surface, like the folds of a wizard’s robe.

  He had not looke
d at it until this moment. He had kept it secure in its pouch. He suspected it had an august heritage, perhaps once intended by the Dark Lord for some unsuspecting king, some future wraith. He knew to wear it was perilous so long as he walked within the reach of that power.

  But now he felt beyond that realm. His errand he had acquitted well. The meddlesome fragments of Elvish, including much of the Tale of Ara, were now cast out to their destruction. A shame, but unavoidable if he was to, as they say here, be his own man. He knew that the ring was responsible for the quicksilver increase in his ability to learn and speak their language. Perhaps magic would come of it. He took it from his palm and put it on his left index finger.

  He breathed deep and focused on his surroundings.

  The night was coming. He stood in the middle of a crossroads over which trees leaned, so massed and drooped with kudzu as to be unrecognizable except as the hulking shapes of night ogres. A few late fireflies played in the boughs and made momentary eyes among the leaves.

  Here, he thought, is a place where souls pay an evil tithe or be taken.

  He imagined the crunch of gravel, forewarning a legion of his otherselves trudging the road this sultry night, coming to each take back their piece of him.

  He looked about, pondering the itinerant’s question: whether some escape, some secret gate lay within these bordering thickets.

  He knew that world and those times were gone, and no escape waited in this world.

  With that, he chose a direction and began to walk swiftly away. He accelerated to an easy jog, his aspirations high. In his head played the theme from Shaft, the sixteen-note Motown high hat, Isaac Hayes funking up the tempo. “Whoo is the man …”

  He had a further errand to attend to. A bit of evening things up. Something he alone had devised.

  In a moment he was at a distance from the crossroads, another itinerant disappearing forever into the Great American Night.