“Ah, a shame, really. Anyway, times being what they were, I accepted. At the table — at the very booth in the West End where we sat the other night — Mr. Tolkien was sitting. ‘You look a wreck!’ he said to me. We all ate and talked.”
Steps echoed down the corridor, heading their way.
“Silence!” he whispered. The steps stopped, then continued. A student, complete with backpack, came around the corner. He stared, bug-eyed, obviously surprised to see two such dissimilar people huddled in conversation. He hurried on, his steps echoing away.
“Now we must hurry to the heart of it. Tolkien was afraid, but as he said, not afraid enough.”
“‘Jess,’ he told your grandfather, ‘As you know well from our discussions these past few days, I am an unexpectedly successful author. I invented languages. I toiled to wrest a history from the barest artifacts of language. But underneath, something beyond and older than me or my father’s father was stirring. It far eclipses my modest tales. It …’”
“Stop just a second. Before this second lecture gets going, tell me at least the simple stuff. What’s your name?”
“They call me Coats on the street. My real name I’ll save for now. Anyway, I remember that, like you have done, your grandfather stopped him there. He said something like ‘Professor, you look, well, flat-out scared!’”
“Then Tolkien sighed and said, ‘Yes, perhaps I delved too deep. There are many forms of good and evil, and there are many things that render our definition of those words irrelevant. I thought evil in my time had grown beyond measure or hope of redemption. I saw its hand when my closest friends were killed during our first month at the Front. I saw it drag its loathsome, dripping form up, not just in Grendel’s dam, but in a million acts of atrocity, until it no longer had a face. And then, as I struggled to explore it in these stories … this I fear you will have trouble understanding … something began to stalk me and demand changes in what I had to say.’”
“Was he really afraid?”
“Yes, and don’t interrupt now. Tolkien was saying ‘Then an … event occurred. A trove of documents came to me unbidden. Some in the form of an Elvish writing that, while superficially similar, was far deeper than those which I had been inventing. Like a pool of true deep water compared to a rain-filled pothole. Elvish, as you know, is a powerful language, of much depth and misdirection. It often whispers to you things which it does not literally say.’”
“He was visibly shaken at this point, and Jess told him to just say what he wanted to say, and to take his time about it.
“Then Tolkien nodded sadly and said, ‘This, Jess, is where you come in.’ He then grabbed your grandfather’s hand and whispered hoarsely, ‘I want you to keep them. These documents. All of them. It is you, traveler, whom I ask for help.’”
“Your grandfather was as startled as I was. He laughed and said it was a preposterous suggestion, but Tolkien was insistent. He said, ‘Many of the stories were not mine to begin with. Take them away, you must! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? These forces beckon me to their service. They urge me to edit away a truth. It has all gotten to be too much for me. I feel like a character in my own books, baffled at the end or just wanting it all to go away. Enough, I’ve told my tale as best I can. Let others pick up the clues where I have left them. Save this!’ And here he drew himself up, closed his bushy eyebrows together like twin hedgehogs, and talked as a man resolute in actions.
“‘There are many kinds of hidden gates’, he said, ‘and for these documents there is a special one. A key. An Elvish ‘Rosetta Stone’ in a way. But it is more. It is the beating heart of this trove. Through its powers I have unlatched this gate. Yet its true power and purpose remain obscure to me. The very use of the key draws this presence, as yet but a shadow, which would rob the world of all these tales! Thus I have resolved to hide this key away. Still and separate and secret. As for the rest of the documents, let them now be swept away with your travels, my Sharpener friend! May they and their key be long separated, and their meeting, if ever, not be an accident!’”
“And that’s pretty much where it was left. Your grandfather chose his own way.”
“What about Tolkien?”
“We’ll get to that later. Now I have to go. I will be back tomorrow. Meet me at the Archives desk. Heed my warnings until then. Good day.”
Struggling to get his balance, he heaved himself up and departed in a hitched, painful flourish, leaving behind a scent of damp coats and body odor that reminded her of a wet dog.
She stayed for a while afterwards, staring at the scars etched across the table’s oaken back. The cracks in it were deep: they ran in long lines that joined together in tight fists of knots, like crossroads. She put her hands on the whorls and closed her eyes. Her grandfather, gone by a year and untold miles, had once vectored to this crossroads, sat at the West End, met these people. He seemed almost … here. Just a few more puzzle pieces and some picture would appear.
Tonight she would concentrate. She would read more of the documents. She would find some new element. Maybe, she would sketch.
She opened her eyes and stood up, weightless as an elf, and almost ran for the library exit.
In no time, Cadence was at the Algonquin. The valise sat empty on the floor. Her bed was covered with documents. She made piles of rough categories: stuff she’d already read or tried to read, then stuff she would look at more carefully. From there she separated stacks into readable English (small), non-readable stuff like Old English and maybe Norse (medium), and a pile of what she thought might be Elvish scripts (large).
The latter included the scrolls, seven of them. They were brittle and resisted unfurling, as if they did not wish to be read. One or two had clever locks on the spindles, which she finally figured out. She regretted that she had not fully organized the documents before. She noticed again that some of them had little marks, not exactly numbers, but small symbols in one corner or another as if made by some monkish archivist. They sure looked like symbols for moon phases. After all, Ara’s journey had been set by a kind of moon-clock that metered her unknown fate. The archival effort was touch and go, as if it had been started but was never completed.
She cleared a spot for one of the scrolls and slowly began to unroll it. It resisted like the others at first, but then its tension relaxed. She gently led the finished hide back to reveal … a wonder. It was inked in perfectly beautiful script, long, elegant traces that led into and among the lines above and below. If ever there existed true Elvish writing, here it was, so precise and composed it seemed to glow in its balance of form.
She unrolled another turn and gasped.
There, in a huge hand that dominated the page was an elaborate runic “A”. She knew instantly that this was the sign of Ara.
Her muse was hovering there, anxious and eager. She took out her sketchpad and began to draw. She had to capture this moment. When it was completed she wrote at the bottom:
She unrolled the scroll another turn. Tucked inside the curves were separate sheets. They seemed to be a working translation in English, perhaps of this very scroll. The notes spoke haltingly, of Signal Hill and the Dark Lord, and then picked up strength as they recounted more of Ara’s journey:
Beneath a moon that now nightly shed more of its rind, hidden in the deepish woods into which she fled from the Dire Wolves, Ara curled in a rugged burrow in a tree trunk. Taking warmth from a fire barely the size of her own cupped hands, she thought of returning home.
Slow and bitter came the truth. Her home, the small village of Frighten, would be all the more mocked if she straggled back in failure. She heard the shrill cries of other children when they had visited the Great Fair: “Frighten, Frighten, weird and wary.”
As all halflings know, if the truth be straight and fully told (as it is sometimes not, out of politeness), the residents of Frighten were viewed by the rest of their kind as eccentric and “keeping to themselves.” Whatever the positive traits of her own clan— resilience, persistence, and natural inventiveness — they were as nothing against the harsh judgments the residents of Frighten mete out to their own. The failure of her quest would be regarded as a folly, a black mark against them all.
She spent the night watching the darkness, the waning moon spent, and Narcross glowing its red dusk across the land. The bloody hue of night became one with the embered glow of her campfire, the smoke mingling with her doubts. As she fell asleep, she knew that here, at this moment, was her last chance to turn from this
