by James Lepore
“Why am I here, Franz?” Tolkien said. “Surely not to carry the torch.”
“You are here to bear witness.”
“Bear witness?”
“The world will need to know.”
“What about Trygg, the dwarfs?”
“They will return to their mountain homes. They will never be heard from again.”
“Never? I don’t understand.”
“It will be a thousand years before they mingle again with men.”
Tolkien remained silent. He took a moment to gaze at the old man’s face, in grim profile. The face of a prophet, he thought, or a madman, or both.
“I will start down,” said Shroeder.
“I will come with you.”
“No, John, this task is mine alone. You must stay here. When the dwarfs are done, I will send them here as well.”
“I cannot let you . . .”
“You can and you must,” Shroeder boomed. He turned to face Tolkien head-on as he said this. “This is between me and Satan. Alone. Your presence will weaken me and strengthen him.”
The Englishman looked into his friend’s eyes, which were closed to mere slits. Tolkien caught a glimpse of the old man’s once light brown but now piercing, black orbs floating behind these narrow openings. For several painful seconds, they bore through and beyond the Englishman, forcing him to look away. He’s not looking at me, Tolkien thought, he’s looking into hell, anticipating this thing he must do. The world of John Ronald Tolkien, the world of men, no longer existed for Franz Shroeder. You may not see me, Franz, Tolkien said to himself, but I will stay here. I will not let you die.
Tolkien watched as Shroeder turned away, descended the hill, and walked slowly into and across the small clearing to the edge of the bramble. The dwarfs were now making their way back along the rough paths they had cut, splashing lamp oil to either side as they did. Where this rough growth ended they met Professor Shroeder, who was stabbing his flashlight into the thorny branches all around him. The dwarfs spoke to him for a second and then they began to hack at the bramble with their razor sharp maces. In a few minutes they uncovered a dark, anvil-shaped stone as high as Shroeder’s waste. The professor approached the stone and gestured to the dwarfs, who immediately withdrew the rust-colored pieces of flint and C-shaped pieces of steel they had brought with them. Scraping the flint against the steel, they began sending sparks into the oil-covered bramble. The bramble began almost immediately to smolder, but not burn. Again the professor and the dwarfs spoke and then the dwarfs headed back to join Tolkien on his shelf overlooking the canyon. Above, the wind was not just blowing hard, it was howling, emitting a high, thin, screeching sound, like the sound of souls dying or caught in the throes of agony.
The sound was so bad that Tolkien had to put his hands flat to his ears to try to block it out. He was standing like this when Trygg, Gylfi, and Dagna reached him. He nodded to them and then they all fixed their gazes on the scene below: the brambles smoldering with a dense gray smoke like the floor of hell, the wind screeching and howling, the clouds, dense and black, pressing down on the canyon like a massive lid barring all escape, and Franz Shroeder, standing to his full height, his hair blowing wildly in the wind, holding the amulet before him in one hand and the parchment in the other. Tolkien was astonished to hear snatches of his friend’s booming voice above the unearthly din. Vedo Retro Satana, Vedo Retro Satana, Vedo Retro Satana . . .
“The brambles are not burning,” said Korumak.
“I will go down,” said Tolkien.
“No, you will surely die. Look!”
The dwarf pointed to the Devil’s oak, where, high up, the wind had blown its branches into the shape of a face, the face of Satan. Rain was now falling, one or two large drops at first and then a few more. They could not take their eyes off the face in the giant oak, which now seemed to be grinning, laughing even.
Then from a huge black cloud above the tree came a single lightning bolt. Long and bright and sharp as a diamond, it struck the top of the tree and instantly ignited the smoldering brambles. Tolkien and the dwarfs were thrown back against the stone wall behind them by the heat and force of the lightning. When they staggered forward again and looked they saw Professor Shroeder lying on the ground next to the black stone alter. They watched, mesmerized, the rain falling heavier and heavier, as he dragged himself to his feet, walked a few steps toward the tree, and flung first the amulet and then the parchment into the flames that were licking at the base of its trunk. When the artifacts disappeared the entire tree burst into flames, sucking in an instant all of the oxygen, all of the life, out of the canyon. Suddenly unable to breathe, Tolkien and the dwarfs collapsed to the ground and crawled to the tunnel opening, which was only a few steps away.
When Tolkien was able to breathe again, sucking large drafts of air inside the cave, he gathered himself and crawled back to the shelf. He did not know how or when he decided to do this, but his right hand was inside his tunic. Fingering his Benedict medal, he looked upon the scene below. The entire canyon, end to end, was covered in a foot of thick, black, smoldering ash. The tree was gone, the alter stone was gone, the thorn brambles gone, and Franz Shroeder gone.
“I don’t see him,” he said to the dwarfs, who had followed him out. “We have to go down.”
“No,” Trygg Korumak said. “He’s gone. His death was part of the ritual.”
“No, it can’t be.”
“Yes,” the dwarf replied. “It can be and it is. The Devil took one last human life from this place, but he will take no more. It has been cleansed by fire and blood.”
52.
The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, 1:45 a.m.
“They have been gone too long,” said Dowling. “We should go in after them.”
“No,” said Fleming. “We’ll wait.”
The remaining members of the fellowship were posted in positions around the tunnel entrance; Fleming, Dowling, and Billie behind the Roman wall, Vaclav, Hans, and Jonas on the ledge above. Except for Billie, who was given a pistol, they all had machine guns slung around their shoulders, along with hand grenades on shoulder or web clips, and ammo belts crisscrossed over their chests. If the Germans attacked, they might eventually get into the tunnel, but they would pay a heavy price.
“Listen,” said Dowling. “The planes are coming back.” Ten minutes earlier they had heard the roar of large aircraft. They had looked up and within a few seconds could see the silhouettes of eleven planes approaching from the west under a thickening cloud cover perhaps a thousand feet above their heads. Fleming, using what he called his “blacklight” glasses, had identified them as Junkers JU 390 cargo planes.
Now Fleming put these experimental binoculars to his eyes again and after a moment said, “Yes, it’s the same group.”
“Cargo planes,” said Dowling, “why cargo planes?”
“Because they carry paratroopers,” Fleming replied. “Here they come.”
“Christ,” said Dowling. “How many?”
“I’d say two hundred,” the Englishman replied, “twenty or so per plane. Look, you don’t need glasses.”
Dowling came over from his post to join Fleming and they both gazed through a gap in the treetops at the night sky filled with the silhouettes of soldiers drifting to earth under canopies of silk. Many were being blown far off course by gusts of wind. Some of these crashed into others, entangling their chutes and lines.
“They’re crazy,” said Dowling. “In this weather, this terrain. One in ten will make it to the ground alive.”
“I agree,” Fleming said. “Himmler must want these magic objects awfully badly. There are nothing but tall trees shoulder to shoulder for miles around.”
Before Dowling could respond, the rain, at first in isolated, heavy drops and then almost immediately in torrents, began
to fall, and the wind that had been blowing in sporadic gusts for the past fifteen or twenty minutes began to suddenly blow with almost tornadic violence. That should take care of those parachute chaps, Fleming said to himself, smiling. Then, before he could form another thought, he heard a sharp cracking sound on the hillside where Vaclav and the Kaufman brothers were stationed. He looked in the direction of this sound, and saw that a group of boulders above the tunnel entrance had been struck and unmoored from the earth by a felled tree, and that these boulders were now rolling downhill directly at him and his colleagues.
The five men and Billie froze for an instant at this sight, then scrambled madly to the left and right, as the rocks, perhaps twenty or thirty of all sizes, began caroming off the ledge in front of the tunnel entrance, breaking off chunks of earth and rock as they hit. Their next stop was the Roman wall thirty feet below.
Fleming caught up with Billie as he dashed away from the cascading boulders and dragged her with him to safety, covering her with his body as they hit the ground. When the last rock landed, he waited a second or two and looked up. The avalanche had smashed a large swath of the Roman wall to unrecognizable bits, which were strewn everywhere. The boulders themselves lay in a large pile where the wall had been. Visibility beyond the immediate area was almost zero in the rain and the dark. He stood and slipped in the mud underfoot to his knees, stood and slipped again, and then crawled through mud and water up toward the ledge. At the top he was jolted to see a body slumped over its stony outcrop. Hans. A few feet away, Vaclav was kneeling over a prone body. “Jonas. Dear God,” Fleming said out loud, the closest he had come to a prayer since he was a boy.
“Ian,” Billie called out, “what is it?”
“Hans and Jonas,” he shouted back. “They’re hurt. Stay there.”
Fleming climbed onto the ledge on his belly, then crawled through the howling wind and pelting rain to help Hans. With strength he did know he had, he dragged the war veteran back onto the ledge and turned him on his back. The top of Hans’ head was a bloody mess. When Fleming attempted to clean the blood away with his hand, he felt something hard and gritty. Bone. He pulled his hand away and saw Hans’ brain exposed through a large crack in his skull. Dead, he said to himself.
“Jonas is dead too,” a voice behind him said.
Turning, Fleming saw Dowling crouching behind him, muddy rainwater mixed with blood streaming down his face.
“Are you okay?” Fleming asked.
“Yes. Billie?”
“Okay.”
They both turned to look over at Vaclav, who was standing on the ledge with his hands pressed against a large boulder. He was also covered in mud and blood.
“The tunnel,” Vaclav shouted. “The tunnel. It’s gone.”
Before they could respond, the hillside was lit to incandescence by the light from a lightning bolt striking somewhere nearby, a strike that caused the very earth under them to tremble, the jolting force of which tossed Fleming, Dowling, and Vaclav off the ledge like they were rag dolls.
53.
The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, 2:00 a.m.
“We could throw hand grenades at it,” said Dowling.
“That would probably make things worse,” Fleming replied. “Not to mention drawing any paratroopers who survived to us.”
“It’s a matter of simple physics,” said Vaclav.
They turned in unison to look at the Czech.
“We wedge it out of the way,” he said.
“With what?”
“The felled tree,” Vaclav replied, pointing.
At their feet, among the rubble that was once a section of the Roman wall, lay what was left of the tree that had started the boulder avalanche. Its branches and most of its bark ground off as it had rolled along amidst the wildly tumbling stones, one end sheared raggedly where it had broken in half, the other end a ball of muddy stump. It was perhaps twenty feet long and two feet in diameter. They then turned their collective gaze to the boulder that was blocking the tunnel entrance.
“It could be done,” said Dowling.
“Let’s give it a lift,” Fleming said.
They spread out along the tree and, at the Englishman’s count of three, lifted it with relative ease to waist high.
“Down,” Fleming said.
They put it down and again looked up at the boulder.
“The ground is all mud up there,” said Vaclav. “We could undermine it on one end, while wedging the tree in at the other.”
54.
The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, 2:15 a.m.
“We could go back,” said Professor Tolkien. “Climb out. Franz found a way.”
“That was sixty years ago,” said Korumak. “Besides, none of us could make it an inch up those sheer walls.”
“Do you hear something?” Dagna asked.
“What?” the others said. “No.”
“Listen.”
They had made it, after a long, slow uphill trek, back to the tunnel entrance, only to find it completely blocked by what looked like one large boulder, and had been discussing their limited options ever since. Now they stood mutely and listened for whatever Dagna had heard, but nothing but stony silence reached their ears.
“Nothing,” said Korumak, who had made a small pitch torch—from what materials Tolkien did not know—which he now raised nearer to the boulder and then above it and down both sides.
“Not a crack,” he said. “Not a breath of air.”
“Do you know of any other caves or tunnels that would get us out?” Tolkien asked. “You’ve been in this part of the world before, that much is obvious.”
“There were many caves and tunnels in this forest when I first explored it,” the dwarf said. “But that was long ago, and I remember nothing but this one that leads in and out of the Devil’s Canyon.”
“How long ago was that?” Tolkien asked.
“Before you were born, Professor.”
“How long before?”
“If we ever meet again,” Korumak said, “I will tell you my age, but not now, not tonight. The mountain gods would not approve.”
“The mountain gods. I see.”
“You don’t of course.”
“I don’t.”
“You are writing a book, Professor, are you not?” Korumak asked. “A trilogy.”
“A trilogy?” Tolkien answered. “No such thing. A novel.”
“There is magic in threes,” Korumak said, his eyes twinkling. “Like the three dwarfs who helped defeat Lucifer tonight in his own backyard. Perhaps I am three hundred years old . . .”
“Hush!” said Dagna. “I do hear something.”
55.
The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, 2:30 a.m.
“I think it moved,” said Dowling.
“It did,” said Billie.
Three of them—Dowling, Fleming, and Billie—were standing on the ledge on alternate sides along the length of the tree, which was wedged at its broken end under the boulder. Vaclav, who seemed inexhaustible to the others, was standing at the far end holding the muddy stump on his shoulder. They had first used rocks and branches to scrape away a great deal of muddy earth from beneath one end of the large rock and then the other. At the second dig, they stuck the tree end in and began to push and lever, push and lever, slipping often in the mud at their feet. All of the force they applied was human, coming from the muscles of their arms and chests. All were bruised and bloody from their frantic scraping at the ground and from using their arms to scrape away rubble. All were covered with mud.
They stopped now to breathe and to take in what Billie and Dowling had just said. Could it be?
“One more heave,” said Vaclav.
They obeyed and g
asped when the boulder inched forward.
“One more!” said Vaclav.
This time the boulder, which they had estimated weighed a thousand pounds, inched again, paused for a long second, and then rolled, very slowly at first, but eventually with great speed, down the hillside where it came to an unclimactic stop among the boulders and rubble where the wall had been.
Watching the boulder, they had all forgotten to look inside the tunnel, but there was no need. Out stepped Tolkien and the three dwarfs. All were smiling, happy to be saved, until they saw Billie’s face.
“He had to die, Miss Lillian,” said Korumak. “There was no other way.”
56.
Metten Abbey
October 9, 1938, 3:00 a.m.
The gates of Metten Abbey were wide open. In the courtyard a hulking Daimler sedan sat like a prehistoric creature under the portico that protected the front door from the elements. It had stopped raining, but a German soldier in a poncho was standing under this cover, leaning against the car, smoking. His back was to them.
“That’s a staff car,” said Fleming.
“It’s Kurt Bauer’s,” said Billie. “I recognize it.”
“What’s a lieutenant doing with a staff car?” said Dowling. “Or a staff, for that matter.”
They were crouched behind the abbey wall at the gate. The courtyard remained strewn with rubble, wet now and muddy from all the rain, but the bodies—Father Wilfrid, the German gunner, the German sergeant—were all gone. The wind had died to nothing. Moonlight shone through clouds that were rapidly breaking up overhead.