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

  And it wasn’t the first fire to scorch Cadence’s psyche. The truth was, deep down, Cadence hated fire. As surely and profoundly as Ahab abhorred his whale.

  She combed her hair back with her fingers. It was a new habit, impatient as if trying to sweep away the mental haze that intruded on her since returning to Los Angeles. A brume with a faint tang of burning, like the acrid tinge of smoke from an over-the-horizon inferno. She knew exactly when her inner nose first detected it.

  She let the last real of her movie play.

  Scene Six. Cadence, the orphan, arrives in Los Angeles. She is filled with hope. She finds a big surprise. Her grandfather Jess, her last known family member, is inexplicably gone. It isn’t the shock, or the guilty moment of bitterness. It is the empty feeling. No, a chasm. Hell, it is the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, the Valles Marineris of empty feelings. Maybe melodramatic, but when she looks over that straight-falling edge into the abyss it eats up everything. Just at the moment she found a reason, a foothold, in her grandfather’s urgent telegram, the ground beneath her had fallen away. The owner of so many answers to so many unanswered questions … vanished. Only that tinge of mental smoke hanging in the air.

  Oh Baloney! Cut the drama and get a grip!

  Thank God for the inner voice of her mother’s mops-and-brooms wisdom. That would carry her past all this. She took a deep breath and looked at the table.

  Before her lay her folio sketchbook, along with something new in her life: a pile of fifth graders’ papers. This was good. She relaxed into a smile, thinking of the quirky innocence of her students.

  She picked up her green marking pen (red was so last century and so, well, inflammatory). She wrote a gentle correction in the margin: “Abominable Snowman, not Abdominal Snowman.” Some of her girl students were taller than she was. Cadence was barely five feet, but her stature disguised much. Men and boys liked her, always deferring to her and sensing a coiled strength in her movements.

  She graded papers for a solid hour, but her thoughts kept flowing to the fate of the Forest. The shop, just up the road, was shuttered. It looked neglected from the accumulating roadway detritus of dust, beer cans, and fast-food wrappings. Twice a week she dutifully raked and swept it up, but the road never quit spewing its debris.

  Tomorrow she would be back there again. It was like tending a misbegotten memorial for a lost seaman, a place of vigil with no capstone to a life gone without a trace. Her vigil for Jess had elongated without clear reason, one month following another. She wasn’t going back home to Indiana. Her mother’s ghost, newly-formed and restive, was too close back there. Her grandfather—wherever he was—sure as hell wasn’t coming back here. She sensed that, finally, the waiting part was over.

  “Missing person, consistent with prior history,” was the way the police report had put it. She knew better but couldn’t prove it because the very essence of her grandfather had been a magician’s coin trick. Now you see him, now you don’t. Mostly don’t. Like the same venerable coin, marked and dated, that the illusionist gives to one audience participant and pulls from the ear of another selected at random so that there could be no trick. But the trick, as the magician tells the audience, is the coin; it chooses its destination; the magician is only the emcee.

  She frowned as she recalled the detective talking to her amid the yellow police tape and the fingerprint techs cluttering up the Forest.

  “This is the only picture of him you have?” The detective was holding up a curled and faded little Polaroid, brittle and ancient specimen from a vanished technology. The man in the picture was blurred and distant, tall with a Fedora hat and beard. His face was shadowed. He was standing next to a road.

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?” he asked.

  “I’m … I’m not sure.”

  The detective stared hard at her.

  “Not really. OK, no.”

  “So you came here right after you got this?” The detective reached over and picked up the sender’s flimsy copy of a telegram. “We found this beneath a chair.”

  “Yes. Three days.”

  “Uh humm.”

  “But what about the blood? Prints? DNA? This!” She walked over and put her hand on a three-inch deep cleft in the doorframe.

  “That could’ve been something he did. Sometimes these old loners wig out. I’ve seen it before. Man goes ape and lights out. Anyway, we didn’t find any weapon.”

  She stopped and just looked at him.

  “Look … uh, Ms. Grande, sure there are matching prints and some blood drops down the hall, but then they just stop. It could just mean he cut his finger. There are maybe a hundred different fingerprints in here. Retail scenes are tough.”

  She walked over and crossed her arms, standing next to the now-open trap door in the floor. It opened into a four-foot drop down to the creek side.

  “Look, Miss, a door’s a door. It doesn’t matter which one he chose to leave by. This was closed when we got here. Ms. Grande, let me be candid with you. I’ve seen these cases before. Sometimes a, well, hobo-type never gets it out of his blood. Roadsong. White-line fever. Call it what you want. This man has absolutely no driver’s license history. No fingerprint record. Anywhere. There’s not much for us to work with”

  He paused, thinking, and then went on. “You know the next step on a missing person investigation? When 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 pieces of flat metal, mostly washed and cut ten-gallon oilcans. They were all nailed tight and sealed at the seams with slathers of black caulk. The walls, the floor, the joists, everything was covered. The room was critter and bug proof.

  And in that space was stored a lifetime’s worth of her grandfather’s writings. She spent hours scouring the journals with a fading flashlight. Some of them were stuffed with odd notes and clippings. They were stringtied with dates written on the covers in Magic Marker or pen or crayon or heavy lead pencil. June-September, 1984 and so on. The sheer density of it was impressive. It was an exhaustive codex of what? Stories, thoughts? Excuses?

  Behind the pyramid of journals, like the square box of treasures often found behind the sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, lay a peach crate. Its label read SARHOLE PEACH FARMS. She liked the label, a picture of orchards laid out in perfect order in happy colors, a brilliant yellow-orange morning sun shooting stripes of daylight way up into the sky.

  In the crate was a battered valise, like a barrister’s case. A rude shoulder strap, festooned with bits of faded tie-dyed cloth, had been added to it long ago. In the valise was an odd assortment of documents that were wildly unlike her grandfather’s journals. These were obviously old, not by a few decades, but by scores of hundreds of years. They were written in an array of scripts and by many hands. A few words were annotated in English on one of the yellowed page margins—“Ara”, and “halfling” and the unintelligible “Myrcwudu”.

  As she read through the scattered English in the documents, she sensed a rail spike being mauled into the frozen river of her indecision. From it fractures radiated out, the tiny fissures crackling underfoot as they spider-webbed in all directions. The Yukon-scale ice jam that had been her life this last year started to break up.

  And that discovery also touched something deeper and more elusive. She felt a jangle, a twitch, something suggesting the body comes equipped with secret tools hidden in secret chests. Faculties masked by reasoning but still capable of lighting up unused nerve trackways. Instincts firing on receptors that understand before the conscious mind knows, that hear drums dim and distant. Cold sweat and heartbeat thuds foreshadowing the approach of rough beasts …

  Something quivered against her thigh. She jumped. Her cell phone was on vibrate. She answered. It was Mr. Mel Chricter’s secretary calling to schedule an appointment.

  Cadence listened for a second. “Monday? Yes. Yes! OK.”

  A moving van downshifted and backfired on the road above the creek. The report was like a cannon crack, sending birds in the trees to flight.

  Hell, yes! Here’s the break, she thought.

  She packed up her sketchpad and papers and thought about how she would get to the man’s office in Beverly Hills. Monday morning was only a day away and cab fare was out of the question.

  * * *

  On Monday at 7:30 a.m., Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was on KCAR 83.5. He was moaning raw lyrics at the two million cars stacked into the Los Angeles morning drive.

  I put a spelll on you.

  The green Jaguar, top down, looked smooth and feline as it cat-pawed the slick road. The rich canyon air mixed with wet seat-leather smells. A light drizzle misted over the windshield. The burl wood interior was aged like a fine pipe bowl.

  Cause you’re my-yeen!

  The silver jaguar face snarled back at Cadence from the steering wheel center. A pleasant low engine roar worked its way up from under the hood. After she released it from its tarp, it had been hoarse and coughed for the first mile, but now it purred. Not too shabby for a ’65. Her grandfather, whoever he really was, clearly had a way with fine machines.

  Cadence leaned the car into the steep decline and hard, sweeping slalom S-curves of Highway 92. The tires squealed with delight as she snaked down, toying with disaster, following the asphalt serpent down Topanga Canyon. Shooting a straight line through the curves pumped adrenaline into her veins. Her nose filled with an exuberance of smells deep and dank as she heard something, a pattern beneath the wind and engine roar. Almost like whispered fragments of strange and breathless language.

  This morning the clouds had rolled in and poured down the first rain in four months. The road was treacherous where water mixed with the oily residue laid down by millions of cars, the slick sweat left by the city’s dumb, ongoing toil.