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

“Yeah, its Mel. Look, tell Peter I’m onto something here. I’ve been approached with something interesting. Yeah, I know they had to rewrite Tolkien again. Gotta have those ingenues. So this should also be interesting. Heck, maybe there are already clues somewhere. Where? The Narcross scene? I know you only want stuff that puts legs on the franchise. OK, OK, so talk to his people. Talk to Guillermo. I’m on a call.”

He picked up the phone again. “Cadence? Fine, just keep the faith. And don’t get into any strange cabs. This is big-time stuff and who knows who, or what, may be watching you.”

She hesitated for a moment. “OK, I’ll be careful.”

“One more thing.”

“Yes.”

“Since you’re having breakfast at the Algonquin,” and I’m covering your bill, she heard in his tone, “you’re in the Round Table Room. Back in the Twenties, that was the meeting place of the American counterpart to Tolkien’s Inklings group. All the New Yorker magazine hotshots and Broadway luminaries traded jibes there. So it may be a sign, right?”

“Right. Maybe some good will come out of that. If I can’t find the tracks of good ‘ole spymaster Tolkien, I’ll just switch to Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.”

“Chin up. You’re on the right track.”

“Yeah, I guess I need to decide on my next move.”

Mel’s voice hushed. “Remember one word.”

In his pause she thought he was actually going to say “Plastics.”

“Provenance, Cadence, provenance. Is this stuff authentic? Prove that and we can get a deal.”

She wasn’t sure any more that she even wanted one of Mel’s deals. She said good-bye and hung up. What was her next move? She amused herself with the wry image of being marooned in a pathless forest, with discarded road signs leaning askew all about. “Secret Gate This Way.” “Moon Clock Running.” “Provenance and Proofs. Information Booth Up Ahead.” She especially liked the one that read “Homeless Man Advice. Next Exit.”

What she didn’t like was this feeling, like a pair of eyes peering at her from deep in that same imaginary forest.

Barren was studying his prey carefully now. He knew where she grazed. He would let her get comfortable and slack in her vigilance. He walked the streets to lower Manhattan and in time he came to a great excavation.

Instinct told him a great tumult had happened here, a fall of towers and a killing of innocents. From his own experience, he could sense the embers of panic and fear.

Now, however, he had a mission to conclude. The only question was where are the scribbles, the documents his master desired? He felt an easy confidence, having donned their garments and mastered much of their speech.

He walked north up the canyons of steel and glass, and came to stairs leading down into a tunnel entrance. It was just as an oracle’s entryway might be, he mused. This, he knew, was the roadway for their strange, noisy machines. He went to the ticket kiosk and bought a fare card with money he had pilfered from one of the bright- faced people. They never felt the gentle slip of his hand.

As he waited on the platform for the E train to arrive, he assessed his advantage. In his walking about, he had seen things he innately recognized from his past life, vestigial relics, like broken shell bits betokening a once great ocean. Now they were powerless fragments of magic and illusion. The power in the token in the small pouch slung about his neck far outstripped all the remnants here. It had, after all, served its purpose. It enabled him to learn, swift as an arrow.

So, if there was little magic to use here, he would still manage. He first had some distractions to take care of.

As Cadence left the entrance to the Algonquin, passing under the distinctive A’s, she looked for a Starbucks. She found three of them, all visible from the same spot. She chose instead an independent, Grousin’ Grounds, with an angry caffeine addict logo on the door. She ordered a triple macchiatto and handed over her credit card. It felt ever thinner. This time, inevitably, it would be the dissolving prop from Mission: Impossible. She bit her lip, praying it wouldn’t be declined.

The clerk slid it through the reader, and then said, “Hey!” Cadence quivered. “Is it … OK? I can pay cash.” She began to fumble in her purse, jockeying it with the valise that hung from her other shoulder.

The guy held the card out to read it. “No, your name. Grande. You’re named after a size of Starbucks coffee?”

She exhaled with relief and took the card. “Actually, it’s the other way around.”

“Then you should sue them for trademark violation.”

“Yeah, that sort of thing seems to be goin’ around. Thanks.”

Toward the back she found a booth with a big table. She opened the valise and spread out some of the documents at a safe distance from her macchiatto. She wanted to find more about Ara. Was she really the “Her” so detested by the wizard in the earlier fragment? Was she the one who was being erased by ink smears right out of the elderly halfling’s book? And most important, why?

She sipped her drink slowly, thumbing through the documents until, at last, she found a cluster of readable pages bound by some rough sinew. There was a small mark, perhaps archival in intent, in the lower right corner of each page. The annotation at the top of the first page said only, “Found at Delvrose, Year 64 of the Fourth Age.” It read:

Ara’s Rune

The one known as Ara, it was said, was learned of letters and utilized a grand and distinctive rune in the likeness of an A with eyes that watched over all. She was of average height for a lady halfling, but possessed both beauty (as her kind measures it: simply) and wit in full measure. Her eyes are described as large and expressive of thoughts beyond the ken of many a simple country halfling. She had feet more elegant than most halflings, and often wore her long, dark hair tied up in a manner unusual for those times.

She came, it is recounted, from an obscure hamlet known as Frighten. Residents thereabouts were regarded by other halflings as “a tad off” in the way an eccentric but loved relative might be. Even their names were odd. They called themselves by words favoring the fall: Spookymore, Pumpkinbelly, Gourdnose, Fallglint, Catspaw, Heatherlook, Yellowoak, Flameleaf, Firstfrost, Harvestcart, Orangemoon, Mapleflow.

This much is known: Frighten was a village of proper halfling dwellings and husbandry settled among gently rolling hills creased with sudden clefts filled with dark, tangled woods. In the fall the oak and hickory trees turned brilliantly hued, and the land transformed into expanses of hayfields, dotted with ricks guarded by the most notable product thereabouts: the Giant Pumpkins.

These Great Gourds stood man high or more and weighed on average a hundred stone. They were transported by sturdy wains and stood sentinel in every field and on the doorsteps of most halfling homes. As the final gibbous moon of the harvest waxed to fullness, the pumpkins were carved into fantastic, leering faces illuminated from within by beeswax candles. And so, of a crisp autumn night, the land was dotted with these laughing, leering, grinning, Frighten sentinels.

A note is in order here. Along with the few remembered “inventions” of the halflings, such as the cultivation of the enchantment plant, hoernes, and the fine points of their various dwellings, there was another, quite curious matter: the practice, or as they called it, the fine craft, of brewing pumpkin beer. Restricted largely to the region of Frighten, it was originated by the great-grandfathers of Ara (agreed by all to be of an offshoot of the inimitable Flameleafs — or Flameleaves if you want to get picky) and often described by the “outsider” halflings to be a cult of the pumpkin. This practice was not utilized in what we might today call worship, but, as with all their crafts, a happy and complete appreciation and use of the great gourds.

Those visiting the region in the late fall, particularly during the Great Celebration, would oft imbibe the pumpkin beer and declare loudly and with hearty belches, “Best south of the North Downs!” This was invariably met by the exclamation “Puts to shame the dregs they pass off at the Golden Sheaf!”

Those who recall these boasts also recall whispers — of a pumpkin bigger than anyone had seen since warm summers before the Long Winter, of a girth not surpassed by the largest hay wagons of men: a giant, renowned pumpkin known as Johnny Squanto. Its seeds each year produced equal giants, fat, deeply fissured, of a deepest orange, growing by a hand’s width each day in the long, lolling days of summer. To this day the saying