“Heraclitus.”
“Huh?” She looked over at the desk clerk.
He scratched the cat’s neck. “He’s the resident philosopher.”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Got it. I’m dealing with another one upstairs.”
When she came back into the room, Osley was walking around, gesticulating and muttering. He started in as soon as she sat down and looked at him in the cautious way one regards a lunatic. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Professor Tolkien believed that every one of those pages he wrote was a promise of something real.”
“But he made it all up!”
“Hardly. Virtually everything in his stories was already out there. Straight out of Northern Mythology Central Casting. Wily dragons, wraiths, Merlin-like wizards, marching forests — remember Macbeth? Birnam Wood? Rings of Power — a staple of Norse mythology. The ‘Fell Winter’ echoes the historical fact of the Little Ice Age in the twelfth century. So, you see, a name is a covenant, as is a story.” Osley let out a breath and sat down. He suddenly seemed subdued, like a messenger burdened by ill tidings. He looked away from her and held out a handwritten page. “I finished this a few moments ago. The word
She took the page and began reading, involuntarily collapsing to a sitting position on the bed.
He was taken captive. He told them he was no more than a travelling sharpener of knives. They took him before a horrible band of orcs. The chieftain, grim and gaunt, put him beneath a long blade. “Tell me any information you have, tale or stone-cold fact, about a trove of writings. Perhaps it was given to you by others.”
He told them little, save that he was a wanderer who had gone far astray from the stars of his world. The chieftain listened, then nodded to a guard. “He is useless. Kill him.”
“That sounds like Grandpa Jess!”
“Yes, so it would seem.”
“They’re going to …
Osley stood up. “Cadence, don’t worry. Not yet. I don’t know what this means or how it fits, but I’m going to find out. I’m … I’m sure … he’s not there. But I would go there. In a shot, if I could.”
“Now don’t tell me it’s just something on paper. All this bullshit about the word is the promise of the thing. Then how’d he get there?”
For once, and disturbingly, Osley was without words.
The room’s slanting light behind gauzy curtains was spent. She sent him away, telling him to come back the next day. She needed down time to think about the bizarre reference to the itinerant sharpener. She needed to find her own splinter of magnetic ore to match Ara’s, and so make her own compass out of this murky landscape.
She needed a plan.
Chapter 22
OCTOBER 25. 8:30 A.M
The next morning Osley got stopped at the front desk. Cadence came down and, seeing as it was Mel’s tab, rented a separate room for Osley. She was frustrated. Old-fashioned discipline had to be brought to this situation. As she held up the plastic entry card, she said “Os, look at me.” She kept her eyes on his, following them as they shifted evasively. “See this. This is not magic. It is real. As in soap and hot water. Now, I have a plan and here’s your part. I can’t save, even find, my grandfather until we get organized. First thing you do, give me your clothes sizes. Second, go take a shower. Third, order room service. I’m going shopping and I’ll have new clothes brought up to your room. Meet me in the lobby at noon. Lunch is on Mel. Oh yes, here is the translation key and some more pages to decipher. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
He was waiting there at noon sharp, cleaned up with new khaki pants and a simple pastel shirt, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Best of all, no smell.
As they sat down to eat, she decided not to wait. “So, where is he now?”
“Who?”
“My grandfather, come on!”
Osley was caught off guard, “I … I’m sure he’s OK. Don’t believe …”
“Look, your babbling! You are translating this, talking like this imaginary world’s real, so how do you know he’s not caught in …
“Well, I
She ate quickly, and got up. “Keep on working Os. I’ve got things to do.”
“Cadence?” His hands were on his knees. He looked at her like a helpless bystander about to witness an accident. “Be careful.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back.”
She was determined to follow her own action plan, right or wrong. She would cut the Gordian Knot of all this hocus-pocus. Wherever her grandfather was, she now had one solid clue and she was going to follow it. As she walked out of the door, the napkin-map from Tolkien’s archive box in hand, it marked the last time she would consider herself a cynic about what’s real and what isn’t.
The far end of the subway stop at 137th Street had been left unscrubbed for years. The walls were so overwhelmed with black, purple, red and pukey green graffiti that it hurt her eyes. A few stray travelers were waiting for the next train — a Dominican family of five on a jaunt somewhere, an Eastern European immigrant with lunch pail in hand, a bedraggled student, refugee from last night’s partying. Cadence wondered about their stories. The roar and screech of steel wheels straining on steel tracks barreled down the subway tunnel, along with a gusty change of air pressure. She walked to the front of the stop. She would get in at the front of the train. She would watch the view whizz by and try to find the place on the map.
She already knew there was no 130th Street stop on the 1 train. Not on the maps, not in any brochure, not by any indication on the streets. She had walked that entire corner and several blocks around and found nothing but asphalt and buildings and the nonstop blur of life at the intersection with Broadway.
The next train came in all its shabby glory. As it pulled up, she locked eyes with the conductor in his cubbyhole at the front. There was no way to talk to him, sealed in his control room. She got on and sat down in a seat that afforded a good view out the front window of the train. The door rattled closed, and the train began to move into the dark. She got up and looked out of the front window.
There were a few yellow lights ahead, but they quickly gave way to the dark. The train gained speed, its headlamp stabbing into the blackness. Peering through the glass, she saw glimpses of the underground ribs of the city, etched in stroboscopic blue from the rails. Old wooden support beams, rigged with Y-shaped supports at the top, whirred by. The shiny tracks arched ahead, twin curves of reflected light running into a morass of soot and grime from the heaving, breathing metropolis laboring above.
She leaned up to the glass and cupped her hands around her eyes to take away the reflection. The images became clearer. Piles of trash, an old shopping cart, bashed and mangled, lay off to the side. A stream of falling water splayed with a
She saw it from the side, quickly there and then gone. A line of tracks veered away and into a dark maw. The tracks were flat black, unused.
Ahead, the headlamp played for a split second off distant walls of grimy white tile. She tried to take it in, absorb everything made visible in that split-second. A subway stop, old, quaint, turn of the last century. Tiled words in Victorian lettering: 130TH STREET — BLAIN PLACE.. No graffiti. An old mattress laying on the platform.
Her heart pumped hard and fast.
