they persist in calling it in rude defiance of dear George II, Columbia University. They’ve offered to help pay my way and insist on the importance of my personal review. So what the …”
“Yes, but what about the rock?”
“Well, I suppose ‘Elvish runes’ on a two-ton rock native only to the island of Britain, found buried in an undisturbed barrow, or ‘mound’ as they say there in Connecticut, and carbon-dated to one thousand A.D. is a bit of a strange affair. If they wish to catch up with me in the city, I shall oblige them.”
“Aye, and we’ll give you ale as wages for your report.”
“I’m afraid, on that topic, I don’t wish to over-commit. I carry another errand to America, one founded on a deep urge to tidy things up. Unbear some burdens. This journey is part of that, I suppose, especially the unbearing part.”
“Now what burden could you have?”
“I would rather not speak of that quite yet, or perhaps ever. I am thinking of leaving some papers in America where they may be better off than here.”
“Rubbish! Papers? They should be here, at Merton!”
“These papers are, I’ve decided, best left at a distance. They will not be still.”
“What is that? They move around?”
“Worse, Charles, you missed one of our prior discussions about these. As I said then, they are a trove of Elvish texts. Unfortunately they have a kind of voice — almost as if some … demonic energy was reaching through them.”
“I would make light of it Tollers, but you seem genuinely troubled.”
“This little I will say. Like my dwarves, I delved too deep. Something stirred. Documents unbidden, and more mysterious than I first imagined, came to me some years ago.”
“But enough! Wish me well. I hope to return to sit at this very oak table that we have so profoundly educated these many years.”
“Tollers, I won’t let this go just yet. You are on edge about this.”
“More than I can say. But then, we are all haunted as old men. Swirlings of unease hover about our elder years, when there is more in the past than in the future.”
“Well, I wish you safe passage, good fortune, and a quick return. We all value your presence.”
“Thank you, Richard. And I feel the same about each of you. Even you, Jack!”
“Hah, you rump!”
Chapter 29
OCTOBER 29. 7:15 A.M
Standing in the lobby in the Algonquin there was a grandfather clock, a staid Edwardian sentinel with a gleaming brass pendulum. It had faithfully kept its watch, ticking and tocking and chiming, since the grand opening of the hotel over a century earlier. If one listened closely, the arc of its pendulum to the right sounded a distinctive clunk. Like Os, there was a hitch in the old man’s gait.
Cadence sat in the lobby across from the embered fireplace and listened. She couldn’t help it. The swinging pendulum signaled to her the remaining days of her own watch. Two more days and her stay would end with a long, black train ride back across the fading autumn of America. She had done all she could for a thin skein of hard information and no results on her search for Jess.
She checked on Osley at seven. He was already fully at it, scribbling, hunched over on his desk, uncommunicative and haggard. As she started to slip out the door, she paused and looked back.
There was no doubt about it. The man’s circuits were frying. Soon, perhaps before she left this town, he would crash. He wouldn’t blow. He would just frizzle out in a fitful spray of sparks and sputters and stinky blue smoke, like that old Emporia mixer her mom once had.
As she poised there, still looking, she saw more. Her inner sketch-artist framed him in charcoal, his hand holding up his head, the desk lamp spilling soft chiaroscuro light on his face and the curious papers spread before him. The imagined sketch was titled.
She would give him another hour and then go up and insist that he take a break. Until then, she would sit down here and commiserate with the clunking grandfather clock.
Across from her, on what she guessed was his own reserved chair, Heraclitus nestled. The hotel mascot regarded her with passing interest, then blinked and turned away, a rude dismissal that seemed to say, “Dog- Person.”
She watched him and thought of graymalkin, the cat named by the strange creeker man in Topanga. That seemed ages ago.
Heraclitus was right, though. Growing up, her household did favor dogs. Nonetheless, the neighborhood felines secretly parlayed with the canines to achieve first an uneasy truce, and then entry into the house.
The terms were direct: dog sovereignty and primacy in all things that matter: food, attention from the humans, first passage down hallways, and guaranteed periodic and unexplained absence of all cats.
Of course, right from the start, the cats breached these terms as often as they honored them. Once they were in, they were in. Like many a sovereign that bought such peace, the dogs rued their bargain and saw their position steadily erode over time. At a notable low point, one really dumb family dog got relegated to sleeping outside on the porch as the cats gloated at him from inside the windows.
One day her father brought home an ocelot kitten acquired through some carnie black-market connivings. It had never seen a South American jungle. It grew to fifteen pounds of amiable human companion and pure dynamite-wild tomcat to others. It took no part of dog-cat treaties. Then one day it disappeared. They never saw it again, but for years there thrived in the canyon obvious crossbreeds whose ferocity, size, feral instincts, and hybrid vigor began a reign of terror over local dogs. These cats were a rare, stand-up match for squads of coyotes that had grown fat on tabby dining.
The topic of “Cats in History” came to Cadence as a paper in her high school World Civ class. She discovered the Great Cat Disappearance of the Dark Ages. As Christianity evolved, cats were viewed as demonic agents. They were rounded up and dispatched as surely and cruelly as Romans undid Christians. Tortured, eviscerated, burned alive, thrown from towers, cats became all but extinct in the growing towns and feudal kingdoms of Europe. And at just that time, rats and mice found the two requisites of vermin paradise: easy food and,
A plague of rats came, carrying a cargo of fleas, ushering in the Black Death.
So, after experiencing a forty-per-cent mortality, people lost interest in persecuting cats. They become tolerated, albeit with lingering suspicion, and things got better.
Cadence read these echoes in Shakespeare, who, keen to our basest human superstitions, had cat-loving witches and suspect cats to have fun with. He knew the deep disquiet occasioned when cats go forth lean and high-shouldered, posing as black-paper cut-outs arched on picket fences before a full moon. He knew our suspicion that cats slither through cracks in brambled gates to congregate in unholy rituals, there to flow as outlandish shapes malevolent beyond fantasy. Thus do cats conspire with evil where none can bear witness.
As if reading her thoughts and impatient with them, Hera-clitus looked at the fire and blinked. The fire erupted in green and purple flames. Cadence looked at him and said with raised eyebrows, “Did you do that?” Heraclitus yawned and licked his paws. But in that blink Cadence thought she saw a multi-hued fire of warning.
Whatever it was, she would heed it. She got up and took the elevator. When she got to Osley’s room she knocked. He let her in. He was holding two pages in front of him, gazing first at one then the other. He looked like a man who had rolled the bones and seen his death sign.
“Os, are you OK?”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
