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

eyes shut and jammed her fists against her mouth to keep in the simultaneous screams of fear and loathing and grief. For just a moment, it felt as if her head was pressuring with explosive gas, a mere spark away from blowing completely apart.

Then it passed. She opened her eyes and let the squeeze-tears fall. Her hands brushed back her hair as she took a deep breath.

She sank into the big lobby chair and just let the world slowly cave in around her. Like some Hollywood Spectacular set, it fell ponderously, pillar by pillar. She accepted the collapse. It would be all right, even the long noir movie that would be her return trip to Los Angeles. Last Train to Mirkwood it might be called.

She left New York City the next morning. Just like she imagined, just like in those old-timey movies, the next four days flickered by in grainy black and white.

The things—the lost documents, the translation notes, the clues — she let them go with each westbound hour, like confetti loosed into the wind. The rest was hard. She mourned for Jess because, somehow, she couldn’t be mad at him. She understood now something of the forces that can sweep people away on journeys that must be taken. Strangely, she grieved also for Ara — her fate twisted to betrayal and her tale so forever lost. Jess was gone but he had left something, a grandchild named Cadence. Ara, even if deservedly so, was erased.

It was only at the other end, as the cab left her off in front of the Mirkwood Forest, the dust settling in motes of slanting, pure California sunshine, that the world returned to full color and Cadence came alive again.

* * *

As she stood there in the dusty sunshine in front of the Forest, its door plastered with a foreclosure notice and “Entry Prohibited: LACSO” yellow tape, Barren stood, six states away to the east, alone in wind-whipped rain. His boots were soaked through. With his baseball cap pulled down to eye level, the rain cascaded down the bill and onto his soaked denim jacket.

Splatters that felt like liquid quarters pelted him. On the pavement they made bonk and splank sounds that threatened golfball-sized hail.

He stood as still as if he were a hunched tree improbably sprouted from the asphalt shoulder.

He smiled. The elements of rain and lightning and thunder were contesting like petty gods, like the caped and marquee-titled wrestlers he had seen on TV. The display came and went in a moment, and the storm raced on. He stood in the lessening drizzle. He had seen the great storms, the ones that included molten fire and flashing light and soul-breaking thunder.

This world was not ready for the making of a new age. That was part of its quaint charm.

The temperatures dropped and a fast-gathering fog emerged as the storm barreled off to the east. A car came by, its slish of tires advancing almost ahead of its headlights. There was a last note of thunder and the fog enshrouded all.

Behind him was a field of corn. The fog poured like a gauzy, grey-white liquid into the rows. The stalks stood there, ghastly yellow and abused, like ranks of lean and tested soldiers ordered for one last review. Some were already faltering, leaning on their comrades.

A few smeared points of light hovered up ahead where the road disappeared. He would walk into the town and decide.

Chapter 42 NOVEMBER

Time did its thing. The foggy, surreal hangover of New York City and Halloween and the rage and the sorrow, all passed. Cadence puttered and planned and took action. She sold the Jaguar and gave the money to the bank in return for a stay of execution on the foreclosure sale.

She reopened the Mirkwood Forest. She rearranged the merchandise and put ads first in the Topanga Messenger and then in the Los Angeles Times. She built a web site, TheMirkwoodForest.com. She applied for real jobs.

Mostly, for the first time in her life, she felt filled-in. There was no more ice pick hole in her mind’s family portrait. The details might be sketchy, but the hole was filled in. A fleeting hug and squeeze of hands with her grandfather would have to do as the patch for a lot of uncertainty. He was there — marooned, missed, bizarre, eccentric, deeply flawed, but with the one redeeming quality she hungered for. He was real, and he had loved her enough to sacrifice himself. She had enough history to stop the questions.

Ara was different. For awhile, Cadence kept those uncertainties with her like the charm bracelet she had as a little girl. Each precious, glittering doubt jingling with her throughout the day. Was the account of her betrayal, her turn to the dark side, just a piece of misinformation? An odd, easily-misinterpreted fragment from the rubble of history? Did she and the Bearer ever go to that Rock by the Sea? Did any fragment of her existence yet survive to be unearthed by some future Tolkien-like mythologist? Would she ever, however imperfectly, be rendered again?

Cadence realized that the answers were all no. Her elusive grandfather and Ara, along with the mystical, Mirkwoodian magic of Elvish, had all finally winked out of this world.

So that left one more tidying up task, from which some slight perverse pleasure might arise. Getting on his calendar was a snap this time, even though she had to wait for him to get back in town. Monday, two weeks from now, she had an appointment with Mel.

On the next day, Saturday morning, Cadence opened the Forest at ten. A clear morning when the canyon’s first (perhaps only) true frost of the season promised a crisp, mild day. The ocean below would be sparkly and bright, and its clean smell would waft all the way up to Topanga.

The bell over the door tinkled as a first customer wandered in. She was in the back of the store but briefly peered out and yelled “Good morning!” A man was by the front window with his back to her, checking out the shop. He whistled a singsong tunelet as he bent over to inspect the Abbott and Costello shakers in a glass case. Buzz cut, gray hair, Hawaiian shirt. Tourist.

She hibernated the computer sitting on the calico tablecloth. As she got to the front counter the tourist had wandered off to inspect the Vintage Vinyl section she had put in.

She fussed at the counter, looking down through the top glass as her hands re-arranged the perfect boxed Barbies. She saw a man’s hand come to rest on the counter.

“Do you still have Riker’s Island comic books?”

She froze, sensing the image of Barren, his leering wolfen face gathering up like a conjured demon. With one swoop he would uproot her from this soil and send her off to roll like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. How? She thought. Not here.

She looked up. Instead of the gloating face of Barren, a never-before seen version of Jess Grande was there. Clean-shaven, but older, more worn, creases and crags etched deeper into a face previously hidden.

She was stunned. Her eyes took it all in before she could react. “Grandpa!” She screamed, flying around the counter to grab him. “What! How?”

“Shush. Shush. All in good time.” She stepped back and held his hands, old and new entwined, and looked at him. What she saw, even in that first study by her artist’s eye, was a man emptied out. It was as if he had been scraped hard on the inside by some terrible and primitive tool. What was left, she would see.

The first installment of “all in good time” came an hour later. They sat at the kitchen table and he told her what little he could recall, ending with the end.

“So, I had it all along. The document we talked about.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The scruffy piece of leather. It was the Vow. Rings have no power unless the promises that accompany their giving are honored. This was a Vow of Protection and it was a coin that the Dark Lord had given long ago. As the holder, even as I gave up the Tolkien documents, that coin was bound to be honored. I suspect it may have been given originally to Pazal. Or perhaps not. Somewhere in those documents, never found by us, may have been