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

It was as enigmatic as the man himself.

Her current road however, was plain and practical. She needed to come up with some serious money, and she was driving on empty. There wasn’t a gas station until the Topanga turn.

Her cell phone beeped. She answered. It was Bruce, her sometimes boyfriend.

She was flanking the shore and approaching the turn into the canyon mouth. The signal would be lost as soon as she turned. The southern reach of Topanga Canyon, before it spilled out into the estuary and beach, was one of the few dead spaces for cell phones in the five hundred square miles of the city of Los Angeles. Vertical canyon walls barred all radio signals in the canyon for a six-mile stretch.

Bruce’s voice warbled. She half listened as Mel’s insistent questions kept replaying in her head.

Where’d this stuff come from? So find out.

She multi-tasked, downshifting, steering into the turn lane, thinking of where those documents actually might have come from, trying unsuccessfully to say something to Bruce.

“Helloo? Cadence, you still there?”

“Yes, sorry.”

“That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? What’s with you?”

“I’m … worried.”

“About what?”

She caught the green light. Second time in a row. Lucky on the small stuff. She crunched the transmission into second and accelerated through the turn.

Now she could talk. “About everything, Bruce, every damn thing. My job is ending. I’m out of school and I can’t get a permanent job. I send in my resume and they ignore it or they laugh. ‘Art’ or ‘American Culture Studies’ I don’t even know where to begin in L.A. You have to have connections, relationships.”

“I’ll tell you a quick story. I was raised by foster parents. No easy gig. When I was eighteen I used to gripe and whine a lot. Cars, job, school, you name it. One day the old man, who was really old, pulled me down by my ear. He said, ‘You little shit. You know what I was doing when I was eighteen? I was inside a Higgens Boat with thirty other scared bastards, headed for the first wave on Omaha Beach. So shut up the damn whining.’ I never forgot …”

The first missed bits of digital signal.

“Anyway, speaking of relationships …”

“Listen, Bruce, this thing with my grandfather. It’s hard to explain. He’s all I’ve got. And the Forest. I have a court-ordered sale notice on the seat next to me.”

“Cadence, get out of yourself. Let go of the dead and missing. I’m here, alive and accounted for.”

“You don’t know what I’m trying …”

“I know it’s not about us. That’s a problem.”

They had stepped into terrain they’d been avoiding. Still, his response was a little quick. “I’ve been think … out us.”

She held the phone closer to her ear, twisting to get some signal. Then she heard, “So … think we … through.”

“Bruce? You’re breaking up. Hey …”

Dead air, their conversation was over. You’re breaking up. Did she really say that? She’d laugh if it weren’t true. She’d both delivered and received Dear John’s before. His tone, even the dropouts, said it all.

“Damn!”

She realized she had missed the gas station.

“Double damn!”

She gritted her teeth and prepared for the S-curves, pissed off at the uncertainty of the meeting with Mel, and now the drama with Bruce. Her mood spawned the unwelcome thought that had been swirling on the edge of her mind. It came forth, a dark metaphysic, fully formed and dreadful.

Erasure.

This is how it happens, she thought. Nothing dramatic, just a string of deducts until there’s nothing left. She mentally checked them off. My dad, my mom, now my grandfather and the answers only he knew. These documents, the Forest, Bruce, my so-called career. Me.

Since her mom passed away, the dilemma of self-discovery that every twenty-something faced had taken a dark turn. A term kept creeping into her thoughts, one used by the dwindling sub-cult of fans of the Disney movie Tron. The few new recruits in the subcult being occasional film students. The term was “de-res”, meaning de-resolution, ultimate elimination. But it wasn’t just that. The crueler fate was never really being someone in the first place. Aside from fire, this was her greatest fear.

She held the transmission in third and felt the rpm’s rev as she accelerated up the canyon. To hell with the gas. The tires squealed as they bit hard to edge away from the yawning canyon rim. Her head roared in tandem. Gravel sprayed off the canyon edge. Her clenched hands put squeeze marks on the steering wheel and she thought, get off your ass. Do something, like Ara.

As if fanned by the wind, pages of the strange documents whiffed before her on a mental screen. She thanked good ole Colorado State for her last semester, throw-away elective class in “Cursive History.” It helped as she tried to read the antiquated, almost Elizabethan, English scrawled in secretary hand on a few readable pages stashed in the peach crate. The sharp up and down marks finally revealing simple words like ‘is’ and ‘the’. These built into phrases. Then, as if coming alive, they formed whole sentences that gave up their meaning, despite strange spellings and word orders. She still felt the thrill of reading something that may have been secreted away for centuries. The show-stopper had read:

Gatherad here is all that remains of the Accounte of Ara, the Saviurre of All from the clutches of the Dark Lourd. May peace find her Soule

Her intuition concurred. The valise contained the entire surviving record of Ara, gathered up and secreted away for some unknown purpose. The tale was exquisitely fragile, one step away from total de-res. And yet Ara, her story, seemed determined to live.

She wants to be.

She fought through the built-in barriers, the warnings that whispered, “Be careful what you wish for! Don’t believe in fairy tales!”

The wind roared through the convertible as she punched the accelerator. The car cat-pounced forward, fishtailing dangerously and pushing her back against the seat. She surprised herself as she suddenly unleashed an exultant scream into the din.

The wind ripped the sound away. Embarrassed, she felt like a YouTube replay of Howard Dean, red faced and screaming without reason. She slowed down to a controllable speed. Her mother’s voice-over, cover for all the admonitions in the world, regained the upper hand for now. Cadence resolved to go back to her default mode. Slow and steady. She would start by figuring out the truth about this Ara.

When she got to the Forest, that warning feeling, subtle but still jangly, came back. Like delicate, neck- walking fingers. As if far distant juju drums portended an unknown danger. Something bad. Something hidden.

She looked around the Forest and knew something had changed. Something small and elusive, but there. It took her an hour of bustling about to notice it. She was sitting in the back of the store at the battered roll top desk that had served as her grandfather’s office. She had cleared a small working space in the clutter of expired catalogues and aged receipts. A coffee-stained Amtrak voucher peaked from under the pile. She happened to glance up toward the front of the store.

Jasper Jowls had moved. She was almost certain. He was on the right side of the entrance. His head, which she was almost sure had previously stared out the window, was turned slightly to the left, as if trying to overhear her doings back in the store. She was sure no one else had been here. The store was closed. Only Everett had another key. Maybe he had stopped by. He kept bugging her for an inventory of anything she found that was really valuable. She said she’d get it done, but she hadn’t. There was nothing really valuable here, except, just maybe, the documents. Still, he might have come by and poked around and shuffled things, looking for the list.