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

Px4 9mm pistol was pointed dead center at the back of Barren’s head. The man pointing the pistol was Bossier Thornton. He cocked the trigger. He had just come out of the elevator to find the man from Riker’s Island. The man was now standing stock still, senses alert, assessing every detail of the situation. Bossier had, as they say, most definitely gotten the drop on him. It was a first in Barren’s life. He assayed the hallway, the lighting, the footing on the carpet, the distance of the man behind him, his age, his breathing, his fear.

Bossier spoke in quiet tones. “Don’t move. Stay still. Hands and palms up and away from your body.”

Barren didn’t move. And then he moved quicker than any cat ever. Bossier sensed a blur sweep past him and then felt his head being pulled back and a knife-edge rest cool and competent against his neck. The touch of steel on his skin, the presence close behind him, all were exquisitely delicate. They were so effortless, so silky. He dropped his gun; it bounced softly on the carpet. The voice next to his ear was soft and familiar. “If you resist in the least, my meddling friend, you won’t even feel the cut. So be as still as a spring dawn. How did you come to be here? Quick and quiet your answer.”

Bossier swallowed and gulped. His throat twitched, every pore and follicle testing the blade. “The call from your cell phone. You were talking to Cadence. You said you were coming here.”

It was meaningless to Barren, but enough to complete his decision. Finish this, he thought. He could complete the task here, but it would be messy. Besides, he had not yet killed in this world. His master was far, far away, and the completion of his single task was within his grasp. His place in all the rest of this world, in all its details and decisions, was his alone to define.

Bossier’s heart thudded so heavily that he could hear nothing but the boom and roar from inside. His only feeling was cool metal on the skin of his neck. The knife lifted away. He felt a hand push hard below his ear. No icy line along his throat. He felt almost a relief at being lucky as the hand pushed harder and the world fell into compressing grayness. I actually may live, was his last thought as he passed out.

Inside his room, Jess hunched over and translated feverishly. Elvish nuances flowed as if they sensed that time was dear. A familiar figure emerged:

The Wraith Pazal, standing poised on a precipice, steadied himself. Before him was an open shaft, falling to a deep river of lava that boiled beneath Fume.

He had spent a long day assisting his master’s armies as they assembled and departed for battle. Even now, the horns were blowing, summoning him and his brethren.

He had failed as a king. Likewise, he had failed to do his master’s bidding, to find the documents in that other world, or to secure the halflings here in this one. The female halfling had escaped once before, only now to be caught, almost by accident, in the very midst of the marshalling armies. Her capture was an exclamation of failure.

The Dark Lord, his ring-liege, the one who had bestowed this existence upon him, was beyond fury. His very essence flamed and then brooded in smoky coils. His bellow had perhaps been tinged with fear, “The same halfling that you let slip away, now in the center of my hold?” Days of confusion and fruitless disarray had followed.

This but engraved the Wraith’s disgrace deeper in the lore of the Land of the Source — perhaps as deep as the well before him. He had long ago failed as a man governed by his own will. He had abandoned even the nobility of his own mortality.

Across the black land, the horns blew forth, filling every breast with fire and calling the wraiths to war. Criers exhorted the assembled army:

“Come forth and slay the Unbelievers! Wreck and lay havoc to their homes! Burn down their sacred holds! Punish their arrogance! We are the People of the Source!”

Pazal’s ring, Greypoint, clasped his finger as it had for long centuries. It could not be removed from his left hand, though it was now well worn from long use.

In his right hand he held forth Arac, ancestral sword of his house, notched deeply but still gleaming and fearfully sharp.

He let it drop.

It twirled in its descent, its mirrored edges reflecting blood-red gleams. Moments later, there was a single flash as it thrust into the boil.

The final lines of the poem he had written long ago came to him:

No king will leave the sword of his ancestors,
Nor can he betray his lineage.
Legends of his falling, preserved in all time, matter not.
It’s his own assay, that of a man of himself,
That yields strength in the end.

For the first time since the ring had grasped his finger, he smiled a genuine smile, without the puppet’s smirk of malice imposed by his master.

He stepped forward into the void, slowly rolling as he fell. Red gleams played out from the ring as it slipped from the finger that hosted it for centuries, and together they passed into the maelstrom of fire.

Jess put down the pen and massaged his cramped hand. He had to keep going. The Elvish tale of Ara’s fate boiled and rolled in the cauldron in which he and Cadence had been cast. Peril weighed their lives on the same scale as the Tolkien documents.

This was his state of mind as he sat in the room at the Algonquin and completed the last chapter of the Tale of Ara.

There was a knock on his door.

* * *

Three hours later, Jess Grande cursed Murphy’s Natural Law of Flashlights. His flashlight wavered. Bright. Dim … dim … Shake. Brighter … dimmer … dim.

The soot-covered tracks to the abandoned 130th Street— Blain Place subway stop were strewn with the debris from a flood of time. They led through a smoky junkyard of incongruous objects: grocery store carts, beams of wood, twisted tree branches, lunch boxes, street signs, railroad tools, clothing, loose strata of ancient glass pop bottles and beer cans topped with the froth of plastic beverage containers. And gruesome pod-like trash bags.

Nothing would stop him now.

So he progressed, the light dimming with every fateful step, catching still-life images of cracker boxes and a mangled pair of sunglasses staring back with one dark, all-seeing eye.

He and the dimming flashlight were one, for there would be no return journey.

An hour later, when the flashlight was exhausted, Jess shook it and then let it fall from his hand.

He sat on a wooden box in the storeroom. The thin, purpled light was jeweled with intermittent greasy drops falling from the ceiling grates. He listened to far distant rumbles, car sounds like the cawing of crows.

The pool lay before him, fanning with ripples from each drop. It waited, implacable in its own small completeness.

He waited there, dressed once again and now forever as the homeless man in cast-off clothing, holey socks inside heel-less boots with knotted twine for laces.

Hours passed and the deep breath before the plunge would not come.

The choir of selves that had long peopled his soul came and berated him. The buzz-cut young Osley catching fly balls and overjoyed with the promise of a long summer mocked him. The crew-cut freshman Osley from Los Gatos stood at the Berkeley Gate looking in with disbelief. The white-coated chemistry student Osley glanced up from the lab table, regarded him sadly and shook his head. The drug entrepreneur Osley, riding shotgun in the tractor cab as they barreled through the night, turned to him and said, “How?” The radical assistant professor Osley, sitting impudent and cigared at President Grayson’s desk, as Columbia seethed with tear gas and angry shouts. Even the scissor sharpener Jess, sitting across from Professor Tolkien, who was swearing him to the fealty of preserving these precious writings. They were all there. Along the way, a thousand road signs betokened the long highway of his life as it twisted into a far distant vanishing point. Each sign pointing at him with long fingers of silent accusation.

More images came in stately procession — family, friends, mentors. Their garbled voices began to chime