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

all the leads come up cold?”

“No.”

“You call in a psychic…. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing because it’s funny,” she said, but she was. Only in California. “Not at all. It’s just … Is that it? That’s your plan?”

“Pretty much.”

“I don’t believe in psychics.”

“Well, there’s one other strategy. It’s usually the most effective.”

“Yes?”

“Go home and wait.”

So, that was what she had done. It had been like riding a slow glacier until two weeks ago, when she found a hidden room in the attic. Suddenly, like a roused animal of great size, the world moved with unexpected speed.

For starters, the sheriff’s foreclosure sale was coming up fast. Twenty-eight days to go. You couldn’t miss the big date stamped in red on the foreclosure notice. Every day a huge legal clock slipped another cog, ratcheting a spear-like hand toward the moment of a final outcry sale on the doorstep of the Forest.

On top of that, the anniversary of her grandfather’s disappearance loomed a couple of weeks away. Topanga got into its holidays and gave her plenty of reminders. Pumpkins were piled up and cornstalks arranged at the entrance to the town’s shops, even the Post Office. Next to her, one gnarly, old, leaning streamside oak was robed in outlandishly oversized fake spider webs. It looked like the outlier of some treacherous mythical forest now home to creatures unseen by day, hideous and partial to laying man-snares. No, she didn’t need props to remind her that the season of ghosts and goblins was here. She kept telling herself that none of it meant anything real. So bring it on, she mused, just don’t give me that old black magic voodoo malarkey about strange things happening on the a-n-n-n-i-v-v-v-ersary! Give me facts and proofs. And some money to keep this place afloat. I’m tired of this vigil.

A freshening breeze swept around her table, bearing the fragile promise of long overdue moisture. The pages of the sketchbook riffled open.

She took out her Schlesinger #5 charcoal. The picture before her was almost complete. In its incompleteness, she thought. As an artist, to know someone meant to see and to draw that person. On the page was the image of a man’s back, his face turned away, an old fedora on his head and a worn backpack on his shoulders. In the distance, a startled bunch of kids stood around a motorcycle and looked at him. His telegram had touched something raw and needy. She longed to see his face just once. To behold, as an artist, her last living bit of family. She wanted to carefully study his image, now as indistinct as the little Polaroid. But it was all gone. The sketch before her was the thin essence, the best she could render. Call it Man Leaving. She drew a few lines, none offering a muse, and then closed the book and pushed it aside.

She had her real work to complete. Organized before her were two neat piles: corrected and uncorrected papers. Repeated in similar cycles over the next decade, such piles would order the stars for the lives of children in her South Central Los Angeles classroom.

Her classroom? Funny how easy it was to forget this was the last week of her temporary teaching assignment.

Up on the road, she could hear traffic increasing. The noise of the stream usually washed over the drone of cars at this spot, but the water had dwindled after months without rain. Sunlight waved through tree boughs across the table. The papers continued to move from one pile to another, transformed from unfocused products into solid, red-marked judgments. Grades etched on each two-page research paper. Generous grades, too, sometimes better than they merited, but determined by what would help that half-formed person move one step forward.

With the last paper shuttled to the done pile, she had before her a blank sheet. She thought of her predicament, of being stalled, of looking at unpaid bills, and … and … of the hidden room discovered two weeks ago in the attic of the Forest. Suddenly, without planning it, she scrawled on the paper:

In a pile of papers in the attic hides the key.

She sat and stared at it for a long time, feeling the first breeze of a coming storm.

The discovery had actually been of a second attic, hidden in the ceiling of the Forest. The first was above the front door and conspicuous with its red-painted plywood hatch cover framed by molding. Her first week there, she had gotten on a stepladder, pushed it open, and taken one obligatory 360° peek. That was all she needed. She saw a small, spider web-laced frolic room for squirrels and mice and birds. That checked out, she ducked down and retired from further attic exploration … until a month ago, when she finally started cleaning the back storeroom. Jess had let this space, perhaps once a bedroom, slide into junk collector’s depravity. But it wasn’t a hoarder’s manic nest. Its contents were a wild ruin of flea-market treasure, rising from floor to ceiling, and offering but a narrow and twisting footpath into its core. The path curved to things unseen around a column of boxes. It hinted that it might close behind an unwary intruder, shift and close and blend her into the junk, never letting her go.

Make of you a Watcher. The thought came clear and unbidden.

Drawing on the weighty depths of her twenty-something cynicism, Cadence decided she was too worldly to get the heebie-jeebies from this.

It was just a junk room.

… Until she entered the path and peered around the corner. Standing there was a leering six-foot sentinel. She recoiled even as she recognized him (as would any kid from her generation). There he was. Jasper Jowls, the giant standing Banjo Dog himself, with big, rolling, satanic eyes fixed on her. He was frozen mid-strum, his banjo gone, his skin wrinkly and his hound dog ears drooping.

She imagined he had fled from some long-ago foreclosed Chuck-E-Cheese franchise hidden deep in the San Fernando Valley. He stood there gape-mouthed and menacing. She was afraid to take her eyes off him. She could feel his vibes. Come in further, Cadence. You can be one of us!

Instinct guided her. Cadence carefully stepped backwards and retreated from the room as fast as she could and slammed the door. Later that night she listened for sounds from the room. Shuffling. Murmurs. But there were none.

It took her two weeks of sporadic afternoon work to clear a beachhead into the junk. She found green melamine mixing bowl sets, two dozen line-tangled fishing poles, and a hulking metal-bellied 1920 Pullman motorized washing machine with a bulbous metal top and hand-crank rollers, looking evilly robotic and worse for its fifty years in some roofless Midwest garage. Then, beneath a dust cover that made of it a brooding ghost, she found a freestanding Victorian-era oak and brass coat rack. She disrobed it. On it were slung an array of capes — superhero capes. As if it had once stood inside the entrance to some mysterious lair: a Secret Headquarters where a select group of Marvel and D.C. comic characters came to de-cloak and let their hair down. She fingered and lifted the strange dusty fabrics: red for Superman, light-robbing black for Batman, a ragged burgundy shawl … perhaps for Spawn? There was a dark gray cloak for the Shadow and a yellow garb for Thor. There were others of powers and provenance unknown.

Once the entry was secured and the escape path cleared, she personally freed Banjo Dog. She got a dolly and moved him and set him out at one of the front windows of the Mirkwood Forest, just to the left of the front door. He stood there, looking straight ahead like some veloured Kaw-Liga, leering at startled passerby. She wiped her hands together and put them on her hips and studied her work. She felt satisfied. Here she could keep an eye on him.

She returned to the junk room, expecting it to be cleansed of the creepy atmosphere exuded by Brer Jowls. It wasn’t. Behind and above where he had stood was a second attic hatch, which she now studied. There was a small black hole in the hatch cover that made her wonder if some further presence waited there, watching her. Scores of nails had been awkwardly pounded up to secure the cover to the frame. Some were bent and some were flattened, as if by desperate hammer-strokes.

She got a stepladder and a hammer and pliers and pulled out the nails. She wrapped a clothes hanger around the end of a pole to make a hook for the hole. She stepped back, pulling. The hanger held and the hatch creaked down on unseen hinges and rusty springs.

Within hours she was scrunched over in an attic space that had been covered, every inch, in closely fit