___
Thirty-eight years after Professor Tolkien came to America, the last connecting thread to his visit hummed, taut as a tripwire, across a razor’s edge.
In a canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles, in an unlit room, sat the soulless thing. It adjusted its dark cloak and hood. Its gnarled hands, one bearing a heavy ring dulled by long wear, moved a sharpening stone in a slow, steady rhythm. The stone ground against a steel blade with a sound like teeth grating against chalkboard.
On and on. Screech and scrape. Back and forth.
The Wraith Pazal relished the exquisite sharpness of the blade. He could take all the time in the world.
Eventually, six feet of freshly honed steel gleamed across the kitchen table spread with a worn red calico tablecloth. The sword was notched on one edge, its grain interwoven with ghostly, writhing images. Next to it, Abbott and Costello (in the guise of salt and pepper shakers) observed with horrified mirth. Beside them, a table top chorus line of mint-condition Barbies gestured from their original boxes like game show presenters.
Bud and Lou, the mint-in-box Barbies, the hooded figure, the great sword—all convened in stillness. The clocks—even the owner wasn’t sure how many there were—ticked and chimed and tocked as if in harmony with the dark and rustling woods outside.
This moment waited for Jess Grande to come home to his leaning, weathered, creaky, dusty—in all, very Topanga-like—little business establishment cantilevered over the creek and known as The Mirkwood Forest. In fact, the Forest, as locals called it, was in its very dustiness and leaning and weathered façade, a perfect reflection of Jess.
Almost luckily, he was late.
Because it wasn’t just another fall night.
It was Halloween.
As midnight approached, Jess arrived at the door. He stood and listened for a long time. He wrestled out his keys and struggled in clinks and rattles with the wobbly lock bolt. He opened the door and stepped inside. Even before the door snicked shut, he felt the silence. Every clock had stopped. He quickly reached beside the door and hefted his walking stick, sturdy companion and fearless “equalizer” for thousands of miles and at least a score of brawls in unnamed saloons and forgotten diners along lonesome highways. He stood ready. The moment, timeless and unmeasured, ran on and on, as if a hushed and expectant mist were gathering. Faraway, something bellowed and cursed.
It may have been seconds, perhaps hours, before pain ripped away the fog and he could again think clearly.
The unexplained wound in his leg seeped an exquisite stream of fire. He hobbled in the colorless light of the gallery. A table fell over. Glass broke and pointless knick-knacks clattered across the floor. Like an incongruous yellow night-moth, a telegram flimsy fluttered down to rest briefly in a swath of moonlight that revealed:
Cadence: I would like
Topanga. We have much
won’t leave you.
Jes
The flimsy lifted again, escaping his shambling steps and hiding beneath an over-stuffed chair.
The night of meeting finally had come. Each desperate, lunging step down the hall, each year of the long parade of the last decades, each unexplained late-night sound jerking him awake to a heart-pounding vigil in the dark—all presaged this moment.
A voice spoke, as if far away but approaching fast, “Sharpener, halt!” A glimmering sword point flashed by him.
He stopped, exhausted, leaning against the wall. Outside, to the squirrels hovering in branches, a pale flicker swept through the interior of the Forest.
Inside, Jess sweated and faced his pursuer. The hooded figure was large, standing impossibly there in the prosaic reality of this money losing, two-bit, little nostalgia shop.
The voice came in a low hiss. “You possess a tale not of your hand, entrusted to you by thieves!”
“I … own them. They’re just some old scrolls.” Even as he said this, Jess felt the sinking weight of a long dormant falsehood finally being confronted.
“Do not trifle with me, Sharpener. Give me the Book!”
Jess remembered the grey-and-white haired old man who had given it to him, the promises made, the secrets long kept, the miles and miles traveled since then. He remembered the little wound of the mind, unhealed through the years, that someday, somehow, to someone, he would have to answer for what he possessed.
That moment had come.
“I destroyed it,” he said, summoning a reserve of false courage.
“Your lie befits your life. Will you grovel now? Will you watch us take the girl, the only precious you have left?”
Jess’s walking stick was inexplicably missing. He stood empty-handed before the intruder, flat-footed and defenseless.
The flashing sword point rose, poised to plunge deep into his chest, and open the throbbing sack of his heart. As the blade readied for the final thrust, he could almost feel the sharp entry, the chill serum of the burning ice of stars pouring in. The hood of his attacker flared, and Jess felt the last staccato tugs of reality shredding free at the seams. It was, ironically, as he had always suspected.
He almost submitted to the trance, but then fixed on the hateful words: “take also the girl”.
No way, he thought, not my granddaughter. She’s on her way! He held on, trying to think of a plan. Any plan. In the end it wasn’t elegant but it would do.
He fell back through the doorway into the next room, scrambling to find an iron handle set flush in the floor. His hands, blind as moles, found the heavy metal ring and pulled hard. A cover lurched open and Jess dove head first into the black abyss. The cover fell back with a solid, close-fitting thump.
Pazal stepped into the doorway and paused, searching in the darkness that to him was as the noonday sun. His prey had disappeared!
The great sword swung in an arc and crashed into the doorframe, spraying wood and cleaving a rent inches deep in the cheap doorframe.
Along the creek side beneath the trapdoor, the brush rustled as Jess—once known as the Scissor Sharpener—scrambled for his life. He would again travel the long gray road of anonymity.
Behind him a restless wind, precursor to a coming storm, seethed through the trees. A tide of clouds covered the night. The tiny shop stood silent and empty.
* * *
As fall next returned, the missing man’s granddaughter sat on a pleasantly cool Saturday morning at a creek side table on the grounds of the Topanga Commune Organic Restaurant. The table was a half-mile upstream from the Forest. Cadence Grande smiled at the clusters of birds that sang in accompaniment to the low burble of Topanga creek. She had a bright, happy face, framed with shiny black hair bobbed pixie-fashion. A face attractive, if not beautiful, as much for what it said as for its features. A tailored nose and a wide mouth quick to smile, but it was her green eyes that truly spoke. They were arresting, settling firmly on whomever was talking to her, not flitting away. Normally, they said that here was a studier, a person of confidence and resolve. If they now flashed an occasional beacon of cynicism, it was because nothing had been normal since her arrival in Topanga last fall.
As she arranged her table, a tall pony-tailed waiter approached, doing his best Billy Jean dance steps along the flagstone pathway.
“How’s Miss Pixie today”? He wiped his hands on his apron already floured and spotted with the morning’s bread making. “The usual?”
“Good morning, John. That would be great. How’s business?”
“Not bad, unless you got bills.”
She thought for a second. “Ah, do I know that one. Can’t pay them, can’t ignore them.”
He laughed, left, and returned quickly. He presented her with a scone and the signature coffee procured, so the menu boasted, from a tiny Zapatista village deep in Chiapas.
She sat and had her breakfast. It dawned on her, as it often did these days, that she was sitting alone. Not for lack of friends, great and true friends. Not even counting the seventy-plus on Facebook. Not for lack of men either. She had been in a serious relationship, but it hadn’t worked out. Now she was seeing a pragmatic young man named Bruce.
No, the alone part was a deeper feeling, something that lurked beneath and unbalanced her confidence, like a giant squid brushing the keel of a becalmed sailboat.
The truth was, like many arrivals in Los Angeles (or, in her case, re-arrivals after a long absence), Cadence had begun to see her life as a movie. Ridiculous but true. And it helped. Helped to put into perspective the main scenes. Her father dead since she was fourteen, his interrupted presence somehow still around here in Topanga. A man whose own death he would imagine as an ongoing journey of the soul. Her mother, gone two years now. A woman whose own demise she would hold to be an unaccountable accident disrupting a practical plan. The dreamer and the to-do lister. They couldn’t have been more different.
Of course, at this point, Cadence didn’t get to ask them any more questions.
She let the movie roll to the next scene. Every time it played, it was shocking. Her mother reaching out with shrunken, bird-claw hands. Sitting bedside, Cadence could feel the hot malignancy, loose and raving, burning through the last timbers of her mother’s life. A conflagration so extravagant, so unconscionable, as to be beyond reckoning.
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.
But up here, far from the metropolis below, her eyes drank in the secret beauty that is Topanga Canyon on a rainy day. Overnight, once-brown vegetation had transformed into every hue of green. It was like driving into another world. Waterfalls tumbling from clefts, high in the sandstone walls, might be showers for sprites, she fancied. The side canyons loomed as places of mystery that no man had ever ascended, their hidden caves fit dwellings for imaginary creatures. Up ahead, the stone cliffs sank into a swirling sea of gray mist.
The road beckoned to her this morning. She hoped to return from her meeting with Mr. Chricter, the for-real agent, somehow a different person. Leaning forward, the wind blowing back her hair, she imagined herself a figurehead on the bow of a ship, bound for discovery. With that questing image, she understood a small part of the faceless mystery that was her grandfather. She understood his sheer wanderlust.
But, of course, he was now her missing grandfather, and in that blunt fact was an enigma somehow related to the battered valise full of documents shoved into the tiny back seat behind her. And, more precisely, with the fragmented “Tale of Ara” that lurked within those documents.
In a moment, she descended into the subdued world of the clouds. She could feel the road approaching the bottom, where it merged into Highway One, the road to Santa Monica or Malibu. The sea that today would be a crashing gray washtub.
The clouds closed around her. They swirled and flowed, revealing roadside encroachments of thick brush. She looked at a tangle of brush and saw it. a long-nosed face was looking back at her. Their eyes locked and then it was gone. She heard a sharp, keening whistle. She peered hard into the rearview mirror.
It could have been anything, she thought. But she knew it wasn’t. Not a person, not a misshapen tree trunk. Maybe a badger or a coyote. Or, well, today, an imaginary gnome.
Out of the mist suddenly loomed a giant dwarf. She stabbed the brakes and the Jag’s tires screeched in protest. The dwarf was plywood, a full-color figure of Disney’s “eighth dwarf,” a clutching, leering “Greedy.” The next sign objected to a proposed development in the canyon by Disney heirs. She took a deep breath and blew it out, settling her eyes on the road and both hands on the steering wheel.
The canyon remained an undeveloped gash in the Santa Monica Mountains, despite being at the shoulder blade of the great city. It had a few homegrown shops, a theater started decades ago by blacklisted Hollywood refugees, a nudist colony, and clutches of “creeker” cabins hovering streamside—at least, until the next fifty-year storm.
The triple threat of natural holocausts—fire, flood, and earthquake—still dominated the canyon’s existence.
Fire, of course, Cadence knew only too well. Mother Nature’s conspiracy of topography, fuel load, and wind, birthed horrific infernos. The names of the recurring beast’s incarnations made headlines: the Hume Fire of 1956, the Wright Fire of 1970, and the Pluma Fire of 1985. But the speed and fury of the Topanga Fire of 1993, slouching its molten hide through the ridgelines and canyon corridors on its way to the coast, was unparalleled in a hundred years.
Downshifting as she approached the ocean lurking ahead, she couldn’t help but see a few of that fire’s hateful scars: blackened, cracked trunks of older trees. These were surrounded by flurries of new growth.
She shuddered and tried for the millionth time to block the images of that night: her father grabbing the spare truck key and rushing out of the house as the red glow in the sky approached— the crackle and whoosh of a wind-driven firestorm—the cries and shouts—the mad scramble down the twisted hillside road as the air prepared to explode into an inferno.
And the insane roar of the unleashed monster.
That was the last time she saw her father.
“So, you see, it’s natural,” she remembered the musings in one of her grandfather’s journals. “Stories of family, of crisis, of achievement—all seek patterns of disaster.” One of many quaint chestnuts he left in his wake. Now the waters of his passing were still. It had been almost a year since that Halloween night when he disappeared. Right after—out of the blue—she got the telegram. Yes, the old-fashioned yellow thing delivered for a price for people that distrusted phones, much less even understand the internet. It read:
Cadence: I would like to see you in Topanga. We have much to catch up on. I vow I won’t leave you.
Jess
It was short and awkwardly to the point. The word— “vow”—was particularly desperate. Like a drowning man yelling for help to the only person left on shore who might listen. And she’d arrived to find a disappearance. No pattern leading to renewal, no cycle to redemption. No answers to any of her questions.
She glided through the last turn before the beach. Dwarves. Spells. Things unstoppable. When there are no clues, everything is a signpost hidden in the overgrowth.
The only sure thing was the blue-margined court document peeking from under the valise in the back seat. “Essentially an overdue bill,” her lawyer, Everett, had told her. “Pay two hundred thousand dollars within thirty days or your grandfather’s estate will be seized and liquidated and the money shelled out to his creditors.”
That would be it for the Forest, this car, his documents, all of it. After foreclosure and one hell of a garage sale, what would be left? Zip. Nada. The man might as well have never existed. The last trace of him snuffed out of existence before she could even get a handle on him. An erased person, she thought, except for me and his bills.
She downshifted catching the green at the light to Highway One, and glanced at the dashboard clock. It told her she risked being late for the lunch she’d pulled every string she had to set up.
Soon she was stuck in traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, at what must be the world’s slowest intersection. The reason was obvious. Huge billboards, upgraded to full digital displays, loomed like monstrous, angry televisions over a sea of gawking drivers. People weren’t driving, they were watching. The screens closest to her advertised the newest, epic remake of Tarzan. It flashed the word “Ju Ju” in immense red letters and she could just hear, over the traffic noise, deep thuds of jungle drums emanating from the screen. She shook her head in disbelief, saw a sudden lane opening, and gunned ahead.
By the time she got access to Little Santa Monica Boulevard, missed the ivied entrance to the Peninsula Hotel, and inched around the block, she knew she’d have to dig deep into her purse and valet park. And still be late.
She pulled to a jumpy stop, handed the keys to the attendant, and opened her purse to deposit the valet ticket and gather her thoughts. She looked at her purse. It was from Macy’s, some obscure brand called “Borunda”, which sounded like a country in Africa. It cost twenty-five bucks. It had never held more than a few hundred dollars. In twenties. This purse that could never save her grandfather’s—her—property. She closed the latch and hefted the valise and tried valiantly to slow her nervous walk. She wanted to run. Her heels clacked as she entered the tiled foyer and saw the restaurant. “The Belvedere Restaurant in Beverly Hills”, to be exact. She tried to gather her thoughts. Everett told her that Mel had recently fallen on lean times, but still had one hell of a Rolodex. He was once a journeyman editor for a publishing house in New York. A description which suggested sepia-tinted days when stacks of manuscripts would wait patiently and whisper: Bide your time. A well-told tale is timeless.
A waiter escorted her to a table flanked by palms amidst the gauzy, canopied white light of the restaurant veranda. At the table loomed Mel. He was twiddling a business card. A hefty amber drink and an iPhone sat by his right hand. He had a face made for print media. Thinning hair, angular features that formed a kind of broken reef, in the middle of which rose a prominent, craggy island of a nose, a great bumpy nose, long-battered by waves of single malt scotch. He had peculiar blue eyes, like the ocean, like salt and wind and sun-fade. They beckoned in the peculiar way of a very perceptive drunk. He looked as if he had squinted and seen some distant light, some rare existential truth, through the bleary long lens of booze and ill fortune.
She recognized the look. From long ago, from her own dad’s eyes. Cadence smiled nervously at Mel across the breeze-rippled tablecloth.
Calmly, he continued to twiddle Everett Marlowe’s business card. Everett, Mel’s roommate at Duke, Class of ’83, was Cadence’s attorney as administrator for the estate of her grandfather, recently declared “Missing, Presumed Deceased.” The lawyer was, as they say out here, a close personal friend of Mel-the-Agent.
Suddenly, like a conductor’s initial baton flourish, Mel tapped the card on the table and poised it in the air. He turned his right side toward her and his right eye gave a peculiar knowing squint, like that of an old conniving pirate. It was a look that offered intimacy and demanded candor. “So … Cadence,” he paused. “Everett told me about you and your … interesting find. But first about you. You’re just out of school?”
“Yes. I graduated last year from Colorado State … University.” She felt more secure adding that last part. “I was an art student, with a film studies minor.”
“I see.” His iPhone came alive and vibrated across the tab-letop. Mel’s hand deftly silenced it. “Cleveland State. Fine school.” She grimaced like a good alum, but held her tongue. He glanced at some text on the screen. “You got family?”
This was awkward territory for her, but that engaging eye made her feel she could confide in him.
“No, not really. My mom passed away two years ago. My dad, he … died when I was younger. So my eccentric grandfather was it. And now he’s disappeared.” Mel put Everett’s card down and took a drink as he studied it, as if there were still some deeper meaning to its sparse information. Cadence looked into the depths of her iced tea for some normal conversational tidbit to throw out. Finding none, she waited until he looked up, again with the narrowed eye, and spoke.
“Everett said you have something interesting to show me.”
She fumbled with the valise, nestled like a Pomeranian on her lap. “Well, yes, I found … my grandfather had these manuscripts, actually.” She dug into the papers in the valise. “I found all this in a peach crate in his attic. I, it, I think it’s … some of it’s by J.R.R. Tolkien.”
“Hmm. You and everyone else wish they could find just that. I’ll share some things with you in a bit. Hmm.”
A cloud passed over the seaswept atoll that was Mel’s face. He looked at her like this fifty-buck breakfast at the Belvedere was a very expensive use of his very valuable time. In other words, The Big Favor was being bestowed. It was time for her to deliver.
She ransacked the valise for a moment, stopped and looked at a small, brittle page with hand-written lines, then thrust it at him. Mel sighed and took the page. He squared in his seat and put on his reading glasses and his eyes began to track down the yellowed scrawl. Ever so slowly, his focus steadied as he read:
I fear that I no longer have the will to withstand their presence. They conspire to have me destroy all that is contained in these writings. Much of it they believed destroyed long ago. Now they will spare nothing. They will return. So that these pages are not snatched from my own hand, I hereby set them, through my new friend and purveyor of sharpening services, into what I hope will be a sea of conflicting currents and untraceable tides. On these shores in New York City, I hereby gift these manuscripts to Jess Grande for safekeeping.
JRRT
Mel’s right eye inquired of the worn leather valise, pondering the raggedy shoulder strap attached with bits of tie-dyed cloth.
“So what else is in there?”
Cadence looked up, her hand already forearm-deep in the documents. She swept out another page, this one torn and frayed as if it had spent years trapped in the corner of a desk drawer. Mel took it and read:
The halfling entered his room, quietly humming the singsong tune of the elderly. The sun slanted in, motes of golden dust in the air and a perfectly halfling-sensible bed looking out of place amongst the draperies and refinements of the chamber. A robed and hooded figure was sitting there. On his bed! With his book! His special precious book. The figure was tearing out pages and smearing others with a sheep’s wool wad of ink.
“I beg your pardon sir, but you are intruding in my quarters!” Anger rose in the halfling’s chest now. Then the figure looked up and pulled back his hood.
“Old friend,” sighed the wizard. “I left you to tell the tale, not dress our fellowship in wasted details.”
“Details? What may those be?”
“We have spoken of this before. Your story will be measured and preserved only if properly told.”
“Told? I have only reported the truth.”
“Not … about her …,” choked the wizard, continuing to tear and smear.
Their breakfasts came. Mel took a call. Cadence ate while keeping the valise on her lap, awkwardly guarding her grandfather’s trove of scribbles, runes, and ornate writings from many hands. Whatever it was, someone, or multiple someones, had gone to extraordinary lengths to create it.
Mel’s iPhone vibrated again and he picked it up, studying the caller’s ID before declining. He held the phone out importantly. “These new touch screens, sensitive as hell. This thing keeps dialing people up on its own. Dangerous, huh?”
She nodded. She didn’t want to talk about her own phone, the rudimentary little freebie Nokia that came with her basic prepay plan.
“Cadence, let’s get down to our business. I understand you need money to save your grandpa’s place. I wish I could help, but this seems like bits and pieces. You got anything that we can frame into a whole story?”
OK, try your last, best card. “How’s this?” Across the table, she slid another ancient-looking manuscript, creased and stained with candle wax, in a readable but archaic script.
He began to read, and then put down his fork as the words unwound before him:
Herein lies the account of the Fourth Book.
In the last days of Middle-earth, when the Ascendance of Man was assured, and many plots wove through the separate ambitions of all races, there was lost a fourth volume to the Red Book of Hertegest.
Unlike the three “known” volumes, of which many copies were scribed and long cherished, the original and the few secret copies of the fourth volume were doubtless destroyed in the hopes of erasing the contents forever. The effort was successful, and little of its tale escaped save as unexplained lapses and obscure references in what readers, now far removed from those elder days, presume to enjoy as truth.
It was only in the deep to the south of the world as it was then recognized, where the dimming of all the other races and their powers was swift and complete, that Azakuul, Third Caliph of the Realm, extracted much of the tale. It came to him from Orontuf, most quiet and humble of the Great Wizards. The Caliph, proud of a long lineage of learning and knowledge, was adept at collecting both information and power—by charm, by the bribe, and, if necessary, by ruthless cruelty.
And so our story has a source, but we know not if the giving of it was willing. The grim circumstances of the Confession of Orontuf are little known now. As he was, by reputation, not inclined to speak to mortals, we may surmise that His Brownness, Master of the Plants and Harvest, was coerced. So also does the unflinching character of Azakuul the Beheader testify that most certainly not all was voluntary.
Such was the time: halflings dwindled, elves fled to their havens, dwarves toiled ever deeper into the mountain fastness, yes, even as orcs became extinct from a noxious plague of their own foul making, and trolls grew smaller and hid under bridges. So too did the Wizards of Old change forever. Gone now was their power. Orontuf, it is said, survived his unfortunate stay with the Caliph, and became a wanderer in the Far Lands. Legend has it that his nature was changed, such that he began to speak to Men and ended his days as a mortal, quietly growing the best potatoes in all the region.
The Caliph, himself beheaded, quite lost his grasp of the tale. Thereafter it passed through paths unknown until it lay, long dormant and unnoticed, in the personal library of an ale merchant that collected, but never read, what were even then ancient manuscripts. Then once again it disappeared into obscurity.
It drifted on tides of ebb and flow for a long, long time.
Mel held up another page, similar in appearance, and read:
It is said by ancient sources that, at its core, the events that came to be known as the Saga of Ara span but thirty days between two full moons before their terrible conclusion. These were marked by a … WONDER.
Her journey began with a full moon that was a great fat coin of harvest time. The next full moon was discolored and bruised, a battered shield of war hanging in a sky fumed with anger and strife.
And in between those so different moons, the great red star Narcross grew large and hove close to the land of Middle Earth. There it grew progressively brighter until it filled the intervening run of dark nights with a deep red gloaming.
Narcross stared balefully over the land like a watchful eye. People fretted, fearful of portents that herald a return to the dark legends of the past. Seers and auguries in multitude arose. Owls in twain crossed that angry red star. Beasts misshapen pulled by night carts laden with unknown cargo that fouled the air for leagues about. Crows cawed in sentences and sat upon the heads of docile children.
People shuttered their windows and barred their doors. Folk of design both fell and fair withdrew to refuge common to their kind. Within keep and hut, smial and cave, underbridge and deepest forest, sheltered eyrie and simple hole, all huddled and hoped. Please, please let this likeness gaze only with harmless envy on lands untouched by its evil purpose.
In the span of a week, the celestial intruder dimmed and receded into the twinkling tapestry of the night.
But something had stirred, great movement was afoot, and events came to pass that shook the world. Ara, as all the world once knew, moved at the very center of this tumult, and by her witness the Long Age ended.
Mel put the last page in his lap and took a deep breath. “You know I’m close to both Houghton-Mifflin and New Line. Bernie Alsop and Maxwell Karis are personal friends. That’s the little morsel of good news. Want the seriously bad news?”
“OK.”
“You’ll probably never get this stuff published.”
“Why!”
“Two reasons. First, publishing as we, as I, know it, is gone. It is the Great Auk. It is going bankrupt. Almost no one will take a chance on an unknown like you.”
She listened, slightly stunned, waiting to finish getting hit with the one-two punch.
“Second, one word. Lawyers.”
She caught the whiff of threat, could see the long unspooling of a tangled thread of hassle and delay before anything got done. It pissed her off. “All right, so tell me first about the publishers.”
“In truth there are only a handful of big houses left, mostly foreign-owned. And they are fragments of bigger conglomerates. I work this street. I know. I haven’t done a decent deal in six months. This industry’s worse than General Motors because it’s broken and it won’t get bailed out.”
“But won’t it all come back soon? This can’t last too long.”
“It will never come back, not the way it was. What’s coming is what you see everywhere else — a digital tsunami overwhelming the old ways. Newspapers? Dying. Magazines? Falling like flies. Big label music and CD’s? Gone. Broadcast radio? So last century. TV. All sliced into bits. Now, clunky old hard-copy paper books that are hauled around from warehouses to dying bricks and mortar emporiums? And then back again. No way. The whole industry is compressing to a few survivors. People are getting laid off, budgets cut, and that’s not a great time for unproven writers. Hell, even I got rejected this year. Totally. My first book.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and I went to Iowa for Cris-sakes!”
His tone opened a little window into his psyche. He suddenly reminded her of a boyish, sputtering Luke Skywalker. “I … I’m not a half-bad pilot myself!”
She started to let it slide, but something told her to push him back while he was in this vulnerable zone. “So, with these Tolkien documents, I guess if all else fails, I could go on Oprah?”
He leaned back, the momentary look was priceless.
“Just kidding, Mr. Chricter. OK, so what about the legal stuff. I’m only trying …”
He recovered smoothly. “Hold on. Just suppose some of these documents are real. Then you’re a threat. Worse, you’re a sinner against the god of money. Forget kindly old Professor Tolkien. He’s wonderful but irrelevant. This is about something unowned, uncontrolled. That’s a threat. That’s where I come in. Without me, you know who you’ll see next?”
“Well …”
“Intellectual property lawyers. They are terrible. They are the bloodless low priests—our friend Everett excepted—who have the sacred access.”
“Access to what?”
“ To the blessing that all stories that want to get told must procure. Copyright. It’s a genie, a jealous little god that can bedevil people like you for a century or more.”
“But I’m not writing a story. I just bet this is the real thing. The Ara that these talk about,” she patted the valise for emphasis, “is a heroine in somebody’s world. A world no one, not even Tolkien, has ever really seen before. She seems to have made a huge difference. It looks to me like this may be all that’s left of her. This … orphaned story.” Cadence bit her tongue. She went on. “It belongs to everyone …”
“Bullshit. Nothing is real and nothing belongs to everyone. This is either nothing or, just possibly, a question of … very precious property.”
She sat back, thoroughly dejected.
“Let me give you a little story, Cadence. You know movies, of course.”
“Yes … I think I do.”
“You like monsters?”
“Not particularly, especially if they’re fiery.”
“Well, you know the movie Alien? You know, ‘acid for blood’?”
She nodded, unsure where he was going.
“Well, you know where Ridley Scott stole that idea from?”
She looked puzzled. “No.”
“You should. Every good story steals something from the past. Anyway,” he shook his head and clucked in disappointment. “Look it up. And one other thing.”
“What?”
“Take some friendly advice: don’t bet your life on a movie trivia contest.”
She felt the growing heat of being lectured to, and couldn’t stop it from slipping out: “Thanks, Dad. I’ll remember that.” She didn’t skip a beat. “So where am I? I do what, just take the peach crate and put it back in the attic? No one ever reads it?”
“It all depends on one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Provenance. Proofs. Is this stuff real, or just somebody’s scribblings.”
She waited, sure he would continue.
“Then, of course, if you’re right, if it’s real, some people will want it and some people will try to stop it.”
“So, I’m stalled.”
He paused. “No. But there is another way.”
“Somehow I knew you would say that.”
He leaned conspiratorially forward, his squinting eye focused on her. She leaned too, her left eye narrowing in rapport, her silk blouse grazing the breakfast halibut on her plate.
His voice fell to a stage whisper. “Look, there is a bigger story. Perhaps a tale of which these fragments are but a part. Use their evil genie against them. The sparse contents of this peach crate are not the real story here. You’re the story.”
“Only one problem,” she whispered.
A moment of unexpected silence, he wasn’t following.
“I don’t have a story to tell,” she said.
“Bullshit, and I don’t mean that about what you have to say. Tell what really happened. Start with the start. Where’d this stuff really come from?”
“I …”
“And if you don’t know, find out.”
Yeah, she thought, as in find my grandfather after a year of a cold trail. I might as well find out who killed JFK and where Jimmy Hoffa is? I’m no good at this.
Cadence looked at him, certain he was following her dismal interior dialogue almost word for word. She steeled herself for a dismissive wave of the hand.
Instead, he softened and said, “Everett told me you were pretty lost about what to do. After you got to L.A. with the disappearance and all.” His demanding eye narrowed. “So, what are you doing now?”
“Keeping house at his property. Ignoring his creditors, and …,” she brightened, “teaching school. Fifth grade.”
“Saints’ praise to you.”
She rushed on. “Yeah, L.A. public schools. Raynor Elementary. I like it. I hope I get hired back. But for right now, I’m here. I’m ready to do something.”
His lean fingers once more tapped the edge of the business card on the table. “Look, Cadence, “I can tell that you really want to find your grandfather or, excuse me if I’m too indelicate, what happened to him. So if he’s the one you gotta find and the one who knows about these writings and Tolkien, then you need to go look for him. What’s an angle you haven’t tried? Tell me something new.”
They were both quiet. Then she said, “Well, you wouldn’t believe all the stories about him.”
“Oh? Try me.”
“Well, here’s the root of it. He was a scissor sharpener.”
“A what?”
“You know,” she held up two fingers and brought them together several times, “for cutting. Meshed single-edge blades? Really hard to sharpen? I’m sure you’d just throw them away, but that’s not how they used to do it.”
He nodded.
“Sharpening them used to be a wayfarer’s trade. Scissor sharpeners travelled all over. Like gypsies.” She was warmed up, talking faster now. “You see, my folks said he had a valise, probably this one, that he carried all his stuff in, a folding grinding wheel, whetstones, a few items for sale. He hopped trains and hitchhiked and walked through all the big towns and half the small towns in America. He kept a journal every day. He’s sort of a family myth.”
“I’d be wary of myths. What’s the real truth?”
“I don’t know … at least not yet. I never met him.”
“OK, take a break and eat your fish. I’ve got a call to make. Then I want to know all about your grandfather.”