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An hour after the meeting with Mel, Cadence drove home with the Belvedere’s breakfast special, “Halibut Sous de Mar” drying on her blouse and flopping in her stomach.
Under the spell of Mel’s eye she had told him almost everything she knew about her grandfather, which, all in all, wasn’t a lot.
For instance, she told him about sitting in the still, muggy, old-peach-crate smell of the hidden attic on that hot, never ending afternoon of Indian Summer. She told him about opening one journal after another. How she would note a place, a famous name, or a strange word. She told him how, looking at the brittle yellowed pages of his personal journals, she realized her last flesh-and-blood relative had traveled a very, very long way.
For reasons obscure even to herself, she didn’t tell Mel one fact: that her grandfather’s story involved a secret riddle.
Cadence had noticed it as Everett wrapped up the paperwork of declaring her the administrator of the estate. There was a poem in her grandfather’s handwriting, scrawled across the outside of the same envelope that contained his rudimentary will and named her executor:
Cast in truth, stolen early
Hidden well from yearning eyes
Bears the tale of Ara’s role
Thieved by hands that shun them all.
It was as enigmatic as the man himself.
Her current road however, was plain and practical. She needed to come up with some serious money, and she was driving on empty. There wasn’t a gas station until the Topanga turn.
Her cell phone beeped. She answered. It was Bruce, her sometimes boyfriend.
She was flanking the shore and approaching the turn into the canyon mouth. The signal would be lost as soon as she turned. The southern reach of Topanga Canyon, before it spilled out into the estuary and beach, was one of the few dead spaces for cell phones in the five hundred square miles of the city of Los Angeles. Vertical canyon walls barred all radio signals in the canyon for a six-mile stretch.
Bruce’s voice warbled. She half listened as Mel’s insistent questions kept replaying in her head.
Where’d this stuff come from? So find out.
She multi-tasked, downshifting, steering into the turn lane, thinking of where those documents actually might have come from, trying unsuccessfully to say something to Bruce.
“Helloo? Cadence, you still there?”
“Yes, sorry.”
“That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? What’s with you?”
“I’m … worried.”
“About what?”
She caught the green light. Second time in a row. Lucky on the small stuff. She crunched the transmission into second and accelerated through the turn.
Now she could talk. “About everything, Bruce, every damn thing. My job is ending. I’m out of school and I can’t get a permanent job. I send in my resume and they ignore it or they laugh. ‘Art’ or ‘American Culture Studies’ I don’t even know where to begin in L.A. You have to have connections, relationships.”
“I’ll tell you a quick story. I was raised by foster parents. No easy gig. When I was eighteen I used to gripe and whine a lot. Cars, job, school, you name it. One day the old man, who was really old, pulled me down by my ear. He said, ‘You little shit. You know what I was doing when I was eighteen? I was inside a Higgens Boat with thirty other scared bastards, headed for the first wave on Omaha Beach. So shut up the damn whining.’ I never forgot …”
The first missed bits of digital signal.
“Anyway, speaking of relationships …”
“Listen, Bruce, this thing with my grandfather. It’s hard to explain. He’s all I’ve got. And the Forest. I have a court-ordered sale notice on the seat next to me.”
“Cadence, get out of yourself. Let go of the dead and missing. I’m here, alive and accounted for.”
“You don’t know what I’m trying …”
“I know it’s not about us. That’s a problem.”
They had stepped into terrain they’d been avoiding. Still, his response was a little quick. “I’ve been think … out us.”
She held the phone closer to her ear, twisting to get some signal. Then she heard, “So … think we … through.”
“Bruce? You’re breaking up. Hey …”
Dead air, their conversation was over. You’re breaking up. Did she really say that? She’d laugh if it weren’t true. She’d both delivered and received Dear John’s before. His tone, even the dropouts, said it all.
“Damn!”
She realized she had missed the gas station.
“Double damn!”
She gritted her teeth and prepared for the S-curves, pissed off at the uncertainty of the meeting with Mel, and now the drama with Bruce. Her mood spawned the unwelcome thought that had been swirling on the edge of her mind. It came forth, a dark metaphysic, fully formed and dreadful.
Erasure.
This is how it happens, she thought. Nothing dramatic, just a string of deducts until there’s nothing left. She mentally checked them off. My dad, my mom, now my grandfather and the answers only he knew. These documents, the Forest, Bruce, my so-called career. Me.
Since her mom passed away, the dilemma of self-discovery that every twenty-something faced had taken a dark turn. A term kept creeping into her thoughts, one used by the dwindling sub-cult of fans of the Disney movie Tron. The few new recruits in the subcult being occasional film students. The term was “de-res”, meaning de-resolution, ultimate elimination. But it wasn’t just that. The crueler fate was never really being someone in the first place. Aside from fire, this was her greatest fear.
She held the transmission in third and felt the rpm’s rev as she accelerated up the canyon. To hell with the gas. The tires squealed as they bit hard to edge away from the yawning canyon rim. Her head roared in tandem. Gravel sprayed off the canyon edge. Her clenched hands put squeeze marks on the steering wheel and she thought, get off your ass. Do something, like Ara.
As if fanned by the wind, pages of the strange documents whiffed before her on a mental screen. She thanked good ole Colorado State for her last semester, throw-away elective class in “Cursive History.” It helped as she tried to read the antiquated, almost Elizabethan, English scrawled in secretary hand on a few readable pages stashed in the peach crate. The sharp up and down marks finally revealing simple words like ‘is’ and ‘the’. These built into phrases. Then, as if coming alive, they formed whole sentences that gave up their meaning, despite strange spellings and word orders. She still felt the thrill of reading something that may have been secreted away for centuries. The show-stopper had read:
Gatherad here is all that remains of the Accounte of Ara, the Saviurre of All from the clutches of the Dark Lourd. May peace find her Soule
Her intuition concurred. The valise contained the entire surviving record of Ara, gathered up and secreted away for some unknown purpose. The tale was exquisitely fragile, one step away from total de-res. And yet Ara, her story, seemed determined to live.
She wants to be.
She fought through the built-in barriers, the warnings that whispered, “Be careful what you wish for! Don’t believe in fairy tales!”
The wind roared through the convertible as she punched the accelerator. The car cat-pounced forward, fishtailing dangerously and pushing her back against the seat. She surprised herself as she suddenly unleashed an exultant scream into the din.
The wind ripped the sound away. Embarrassed, she felt like a YouTube replay of Howard Dean, red faced and screaming without reason. She slowed down to a controllable speed. Her mother’s voice-over, cover for all the admonitions in the world, regained the upper hand for now. Cadence resolved to go back to her default mode. Slow and steady. She would start by figuring out the truth about this Ara.
When she got to the Forest, that warning feeling, subtle but still jangly, came back. Like delicate, neck-walking fingers. As if far distant juju drums portended an unknown danger. Something bad. Something hidden.
She looked around the Forest and knew something had changed. Something small and elusive, but there. It took her an hour of bustling about to notice it. She was sitting in the back of the store at the battered roll top desk that had served as her grandfather’s office. She had cleared a small working space in the clutter of expired catalogues and aged receipts. A coffee-stained Amtrak voucher peaked from under the pile. She happened to glance up toward the front of the store.
Jasper Jowls had moved. She was almost certain. He was on the right side of the entrance. His head, which she was almost sure had previously stared out the window, was turned slightly to the left, as if trying to overhear her doings back in the store. She was sure no one else had been here. The store was closed. Only Everett had another key. Maybe he had stopped by. He kept bugging her for an inventory of anything she found that was really valuable. She said she’d get it done, but she hadn’t. There was nothing really valuable here, except, just maybe, the documents. Still, he might have come by and poked around and shuffled things, looking for the list.
She regarded Brer Jowls with suspicion, but then let it go. She would ask Everett later and go from there.
That night she unwrapped one of the first documents she had taken from her grandfather’s valise. It had been bundled in linen, as if especially dressed to draw attention. She had set it aside until the right moment, which perhaps wasn’t now but now would have to do. She sat up in bed and opened it carefully, unfolding the stained coverlet to reveal pages ripped at the edges, as if torn in haste from an antique binder. They were the compliment to a dubious late-night strategy of white wine and lemon pie with whipped cream. Threading through passable cursive, she read:
His spoken name was Barren. Like others of his kind, he had secret names, seldom uttered words that evoked his origin among the ancient animals and their spirit hosts. He had come to this place fresh from hunting Woodsmen. They were an entertaining quarry. Their pride oft betrayed them. To one of his night-stalking skills, they were clumsy.
He knelt, head glistening with oil, eyes like black marbles. He bowed deeply before the Dark Lord. Estimable captains, Morath, Baldagis, Lacklin, were arrayed in similar poise beside him. Their tunics blended in seamless weave with the shadows.
Lacklin spoke first. “What errand, Master, would have you draw us to this hidden dell and save these slinking Woodsmen from our sport?”
“My loyal shadow-stealers. Your service is now of most timely need. I would have you deliver one in particular of your chosen prey. As Brothers in Darkness you have left the numbers of these far-seeking rangers, these meddlers, greatly dwindled. There is one, of descent most irksome, who craves power and pretends to a throne that has stood empty since the time of my … interruption. You know him well. He goes by the name of Quickstep, apt for one who flees at the very rumor of your approach.”
Morath responded. “He is elusive, and yet his trail tends now to one direction. He consorts these days with a lesser wizard and the two of them conspire to grow their heads to great size. So bloated is his with dreams, that now perchance he will slow his flight from me and let my snare of dark-within-dark take him. Do you wish him alive and able to grovel before you in confused and drooling pleading?”
“Bring him to me, and you shall each have the reward of watching my special treatment for this bothersome pretender.”
They bowed their heads in assent.
“All save you, Barren.” The hunter looked up in surprise.
“For you, a different quest. With aid of the token sealed in this small pouch, are you prepared to burrow deep, wiggle and squirm into the constraining rock and there transform yourself in appearance and time to emerge long hence as one with the tasteless mien of your quarry’s heirs?”
“I … am.”
Barren reached up and took the pouch from the Dark Lord’s spindly fingers.
“In your retreat from this world, my servant, you shall find in that pressing cleft a pool which you shall enter and from whence you shall emerge. There you shall retrieve a clutch of writings and rid them of a young woman that is their steward. She plucks and worries at them in search of some fantastic truth. A truth that is best left to those of a higher realm”.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“And, a further direction.”
“Yes again.”
“Others have been sent before you. Many of my emissaries now people that world. Some I have sent and brought back, including the bumbling Wraith, Pazal. They have all failed their quest. They perhaps have been stiff and ill-suited to their task. You, Barren, are the quick learner and the quiet hunter that blends with all. You shall not fail me, nor be turned by the petty distractions of that realm!”
“Neither minstrels nor sweet fare nor drink shall unsteady my hand from the pull of the bow nor my eye from the gaze that has ever been death to my quarry. This I swear!”
“Go then, and return to me with these scribbles entire and bloody showings in hand.”
An unease settled on Cadence as she read, the vague sense that this was not just a story book. Who was the “young woman” that was “steward” to “scribblings”? Ara? The words, cracked and distant, muttered through time and places long lost and pointed a finger right at her chest. If so, what “fantastic truth” did they hold? She turned to the remaining pages as her mental juju drums echoed, dim and far away. The first page had a short passage, almost like an entry in some ancient encyclopedia:
The one known as Barren was originally called Seax, which means “knife.” As we all know, only free men may possess knives. Thus should his later actions be judged.
He was eleven years old that spring. As soon as the muddy wagon roads became passable there came into his village a carnival, an itinerancy of rude apothecaries, alchemists, and jesters. In their train came a circus of caged beasts not of these parts. Great short-nosed bears, immense lime-green vipers with huge yellow eyes and hissing mouths that were obscenely white or light-robbing dark. Four legged serpents and talking birds from southerly climes. Monkeys that resembled little, angry caged men.
Within two days there dogged the carnival a parade of penitents, scabbed and feverish, moaning of some great god that had forsaken them. The villagers blockaded the roads with bonfires and barred all they could. But it was too late. The Great Itinerant, the Plague, had arrived.
The strange circus, rushing in fear ahead of the pestilence, swiftly moved on. With its passing it took the boy.
The next page, in a close-scrawled hand she hadn’t seen before, returned to the previous parley with the Dark Lord:
As always, Barren did the Dark Lord’s bidding without question. It was not that he lacked the will, but that he lacked the questions.
Once, early, he displayed temerity. Just a slippery step down the path toward questions. He had walked forth on a rocky promontory overlooking a vast and wooded wilderness. The morning, much like this one, all gray and clammy, a predawn full of imminence of change. There he felt through the very soles of his feet the intimate, slow mechanical grind of all being. Deaf to questions. Just the unanswering grind.
He took that for what it was, and he did not again think beyond what he understood. His was the pursuit and the kill. Since leaving his village as a strange and troubling child caught up in the throng of a minstrel troupe, hunting was his skill consummate, and so that he became.
He was naked save for a small leather pouch tied on a cord around his neck. Fog lay close about him; earth and moss clung to his skin from the narrow clefts in which he had spent a score of moonless nights. Foodless, drinking dew that beaded on the granite that rooted and contorted down and down to the center of everything. He lay bent and still until he was ready.
Before him beckoned a pool. From its depths he could smell his prey.
With sound less than a limb falling far away in the pre-dawn forest, he cut the water like an otter and disappeared from Middle-earth.
She reread parts of it, then put it away and fell asleep. The drums stopped.
Except that something made her get up to check on Jasper. In the blue light that flowed like glowing liquid wax through the front windows, she approached him. His back was to her and head was still cocked as if to hear her sneaking up on him. She reached out to touch his shoulder. His head turned mechanically to greet her, big evil-doll eyes and bigger teeth. His body pivoted and his clubby-fingered over-sized paws came up and closed around her neck. She tried to scream. The worn velour of his paws felt itchy and harsh as they shut off her air.