___
Cadence convulsed and gasped and woke up. The demonic Jasper Jowls receded into the gimlet pool of dreams. She got her breathing under control, exhausted from trying to outrun a freight train laden with nightmares.
She got up and walked a few steps and groped blindly for the light in the bathroom at the back of the Forest. The room and wall felt unfamiliar. She clawed the wall until harsh fluorescence filled the room like a gray-tinged sickness.
A horror mask leered out at her from the mirror.
Sunken pits for eyes. Hair astray. A sadness in the mouth and a weight dragging the shoulders to the floor. A being withdrawn and frightened. The face looking back at her in the flat gray-green light at three in the morning was not the Cadence she knew. Some hallucinogenic fiend had obviously entered from the other side—the Anti-Cadence that dwells in the soulless land of flat reflection and eternal doubt. This, she told herself, was not just a precursor to a bad hair day.
And why should it be? The week, commencing with rain breaking the fall heat and so promising of discovery about her grandfather, was already frustrating. What might have been a helpful meeting with Mel turned out to be inconclusive. Then there was the non-conversation and mini-lecture from Bruce. Then the troubling, accusatory reference in the documents to a “steward”, not to mention the scary Banjo Dog. But worst of all was the nightmare that preceded it. The Dream. The one everyone has but never talks about, the one that threatens to open black doors where no sane person voluntarily enters.
She tried to steady herself. I should be able to handle all this better.
She had always managed her way through bright beginnings that turned to disaster. She recalled her freshman year as a member of the crew team. She had rowed her single scull into a morning fog that quickly clamped down around her and would not lift. She knew that roped buoys marked the only dangerous area in the entire six square miles of lake: a great black hole that was the spillway. This round, concrete maw swallowed tons of water along with trees, rowboats and swimmers that got too close and were pulled in by its current.
Soon there was zero visibility. She could not even see the water or her oar tip. She tried rowing one direction, then another, then shipped her oars in the oarlocks and listened as she glided along. Everything was deadly silent. She yelled, but it was like screaming into a feather pillow. The fog did that, muffling everything. The few sounds she heard were hollow and distant, coming from nowhere.
You’re all mine, the fog seemed to say.
Then she did hear something recognizable—the rush and fall of water. It was the full, throaty roar of the spillway pipe somewhere out there as torrents of water poured into the long, dark fall down to something … very bad, maybe a mesh of angular jagged steel leading to a compressed sluiceway far beneath the lake.
She couldn’t pinpoint the direction, but it was getting louder. She readied her oars. Her heart rate jumped as she panicked. Should she row backward? Forward? Was she drifting sideways toward the inescapable current?
The roar grew louder.
She dug timidly, turning her head every direction in the swirl of blank grayness. Then she felt the scull start to move. Her body, imbedded in the hull, was intimate with the slightest nuance of the water—current, waves, temperature. The quickening feeling around her only punctuated the reality that at any second she would see the spillway mouth looming through the fog, and her boat would tip and topple down as the torrent opened up to take her.
She had to guess. All that existed was the roar and this moment of decision. She rotated the bow with her right oar, dug hard and felt the pull of current against her effort. The hull lurched, gaining only an inch with her utmost effort. But that was lost as she was suddenly pulled backward several feet. An enormous tree limb swept past her, one branch reaching up, splayed leaves parading along level with her eyes. She dug again, head down. She had trained for six months, three hours a day on the rowing machine. If there was ever a time for that training to pay off, this was it.
She rowed for a long time, lost in the effort and the blank light that blended perfectly with the water. She was like an airplane pilot that lost sight of the horizon. Forced to go solely by the treacherous instincts of feel. Maybe she was gaining, maybe she was losing.
At the point of exhaustion she checked her stroke. The roar had receded. Her hull was making smooth wake in the glassy stillness of the water. She rested for a moment and an orange marker buoy slid past her. How had she not seen them before or felt their connecting safety ropes drag beneath her?
The fog opened like a curtain pulled away, and she saw her instructor and other crewmates out on the lake looking for her.
The power of decision never left her after that, at least until recently. She could peg the moment exactly: it was her arrival at the doorstep of the Mirkwood Forest, bag and hopes in hand, to find nobody home.
The face in the mirror seemed incapable of choice. It had already entered the anxiety lane, merging toward the panic exit.
Her father once said that three o’clock in the morning, a time he embraced and inhabited most of his life, was the time when women and children sleep the sleep of the dead and men’s souls awake to reflect in a bitter pool. He was cribbing F. Scott Fitzgerald, she later realized, but underneath was the truth. It was for him the time to ponder the quiet desperation of a failed life, often with a tumbler of bourbon in his hand.
The real nightmare last night, the zinger, was a visitation from her father.
He was a younger man in the dream.
She knew he had been a roadie, working on tour with obscure 1980s hair bands with names like Twisted Forest and Drop. Promotion of the bands, if any, amounted to grainy Xerox pictures of scruffy longhairs pasted on cheap, three-color flyers stapled to utility poles.
He helped with setups, sometimes also working the sound or the light show. She’d seen the torn and creased posters and the flyers in a box he kept in his closet.
He had also worked as a carnie, which was pretty much the same job. The caravan of battered trucks and trailers would pull into some small, nameless Midwestern city park late on a summer’s night, and immediately start setting up for the next day’s opening. The Ferris wheel was the biggest job. The riggers started on that first, assembling the wheel spoke by spoke, then hoisting it onto the two steel support towers that were mounted into the trailer chassis.
In Cadence’s dream, it was the proverbial three in the morning. Her father was at the top of one of the support tower ladders, connecting the lighting cables to the copper rings at the hub. The whole trembling exoskeleton was held together with spliced, crimped, and frayed support cables; stripped bolts; and big steel bars hammered into place but lacking the cotter pins that could insure they wouldn’t slip out. The Ferris Wheel was a big creaking disaster waiting to happen. Moms and dads would, that very day entrust their children to the swinging gondolas, gaily dangling a hundred feet up in the air.
Standing in the center of the wheel, sixty feet above ground, Arnie Grande felt strangely apart from the others. The work lights below made everything either blinding white or opaquely shadowed. But one of the lights suddenly went out and he could suddenly see everything in surprising detail: trucks like toys, people milling about … and there he saw his father, Cadence’s grandfather, the Scissor Sharpener himself. A man Arnie had last seen five years before, when he was sixteen. The man was walking away from him along the midway. There was no mistaking him, with his old fedora, his valise with the leather shoulder strap, and his solid, steady gait etched into place by years of walking, walking, walking.
Arnie Grande yelled, screamed, and pointed, but no one could hear or cared to see. For just a moment, the man below seemed to pause, as if he thought he heard something, but then kept walking. Arnie tried to keep him in sight. He last glimpsed the man stepping between partially unloaded trucks.
Arnie shot down the tower ladder and hit the ground running. Where’d he go? He ran desperately, zigzagging around the garishly painted horses, swans, and camels that lay like victims of an improbable massacre beside the eerily naked Merry-Go-Round.
The sludgy movement of dreams took over, and the horrible truth emerged: his father never even heard him, and was gone.
She splashed water on her face and looked at her reflection again. It was beat up, but still looking straight in.
Looking at herself, she felt certain there was a misweave in her own tapestry. If only she could but undo the knots and pick out the errant weft and reweave it all into sensible order. If only she could but find the careless hand that moved the shuttle. Yes, her grandfather. Jess was out there. She would find him. Perhaps in a place of refuge, candled window light spreading out to greet her. They would talk dispassionately about life’s hows and whys and she would understand how to set the order of things.
But to find him, if ever, she faced a chartless reckoning. Save for a few clues, she stared, at a whited map. The documents and a reference to New York City on a note from Professor Tolkien were about all she had to go on. In maps of old, such unfilled regions were wastes where monsters thrived.
No matter. Mel’s backhanded encouragement had spawned the idea of taking a trip. She could make it happen or just slink away and surrender.
She searched for the Borunda handbag, wondering if her one unrevoked credit card would finally just dissolve this time, like some prop from Mission: Impossible.
She fished out the credit card and called to check the balance. There was two hundred left on the credit line—not enough. She remembered a clutter of papers on the roll-top desk. She rushed to it, rifling through slots filled with junk. She found a drawerful of aging bills, shocking in number and combustible in their yellowed brittleness. Finally, she found the envelope with the AMTRAK logo, just as she remembered. It was a voucher for travel to Anywhere, USA. She scanned the fine print until she got to the expiration date. She stared at it like it might change.
She swept it up with poetic flourish and sat down with her computer, Googling for AMTRAK.
She made the reservation and organized her bags. The valise, all the documents, the few clues to her grandfather, these would go with her. The rest was incidental. One backpack and a roller bag held all the overflow.
Standing there at that unexpected, six in the morning, deep-breath moment, she wondered what Ara would do. Would she have embarked on this sudden and uncertain journey? Cadence sat down and opened the valise and pulled out one of the scrolls. She unrolled it and looked at an expanse of sweeping, rune-like writings, as unintelligible as the fissured bark of trees—trees that might once have stood in the trackless depths of ancient Mirkwood itself. Scanning rapidly down the scroll, she came across annotations in antiquated English written in a tremulous hand. Etched on the thin leather, next to the runic language, was the now familiar riddle:
Cast in truth, stolen early
Hidden well from yearning eyes
Bears the tale of Ara’s role
Thieved by hands that shun them all
Another turn and a couple of loose pages un-spiraled from their hiding place in the scroll. They were well presented, carefully penned, and readable. She sat down and began to read out loud: “It was, Oruntuft said, a time of great—”
“Haste!” cried the Bearer. The hoof beats of warhorses, powerful and relentless, were already upon the road as it turned from the village gatehouse.
A ragged, chill dawn greeted them. They stood in the lane before the inn, confused, swords drawn, a pale light, like red forge-flames, suffusing their razor-sharp blades.
The Woodsman knelt down and examined the hoof prints. “Steel shorn, with a great point in the front. Only the steeds of the Wraiths,” he spat, took a breath forced upon him by fear, and continued, “have … have their hooves armed such, and bear these runes and tri-faceted nailheads.”
The halflings looked down at the print, saw in its relief the cruel pattern.
One of them turned and gazed dazedly at the east. Another bent over, looking at more hoof prints. The Bearer stood still, closed his eyes, and smelled the terrible reality of this new day. He could feel the raw edge of his life sundered forever from his past. His faithful friend hovered near, looking about with sword in hand, fearful and vicious at the same time. How dare they!
If any others watched—and there were some, both evil and fair—the halflings, with the Woodsman kneeling nearby, were painted in stark tableau. The light of this morning was harsh and unforgiving, casting their faces and clothes in orange and purple. They were wrought in brilliant hues upon a break-of-dawn canvas of deep, textured grey. In the background, the ruined East Gatehouse, now a pyre of fire and smoke, lent a mocking counterpoint.
“Where is she?” he asked to the air about him.
As always, the other halflings hesitated.
“Are there others of your company?” interrupted the Woodsman. “Speak now! We must stay together or perish by the swords of these enemies one at a time. Have you no loyalty?”
The Bearer looked to the gate. “She insisted on staying there.” he said, pointing. The gatehouse was ablaze now, the barriers broken and cast down. A plume of smoke, pink and grey, rose into the lightening sky. The air smelled of smoke.
At that moment, the innkeeper came running up, all sweat and terror, and began to ramble between gasps for breath. “They … took her … grabbed her … up … like a doll”
The Bearer grew still, and then sank to his knees. He pulled his small sword where he fell, and double-handed, stuck it deep into the earth.
The harsh judgment of the wizard—“Do not take this woman!”—echoed in his ears. Why had he not paid heed? He listened again to the now hollow wisdom that had guided him—that Ara, alone among the halflings, knew from experience the woods and Outlands. That she alone possessed the conviction and resources to guide them through the world they were about to venture into. A world beset by war and the conflicts of wizards, men, elves, dwarves, orcs, perhaps even the six-armed brudarks.
Whatever he might say to please the wizard or his dear cousin, how could he, a normal, perpetually hungry halfling, deal with such demands? And so he had chosen Ara to accompany them, to be his confidante and resource. He had even shown her … it.
A lie, he thought, why did I think that?
I even let her keep it, if just for a moment.
And now she is gone.
He looked up. The dawn’s chill raced and swirled about them. They had left their homeland, and everything it had meant, forever. This new day contained creatures of terrible power, creatures whose greatest passion (or, at least, greatest command) was to kill them.
An eddy of dust filled his nostrils. Bitter. It was a taste little known to halflings. The Bearer, for perhaps the first time in his young life, tasted the bile of despair, borne out of the certainty of a long journey ahead that had now gone very bad from the beginning.
The Woodsman rose up. The same morning chill brought the approach of autumn to his nostrils. Despair he also knew but seldom acknowledged. So ingrained was it in his being after those many years that he bore it like a battle scar from the long past.
The ruby red and deep gold leaves of fall in the northlands swept about them, chattering down the lane in a current indifferent to the cares of mortals.
Going on to nowhere.
Like us, thought the Bearer.
At dawn, Cadence paused one last time in the Forest, standing in the small screened-in porch that had served as her grandfather’s bedroom. Everything was in order. Slanted light played through the creek side oak trees at the back of the building, splaying in odd patterns on the bed like a waving sea fan, highlighting squares of cloth cut from gentlemen’s suits, pajamas, blue jeans, all stitched together in a frayed depression-era quilt. An heirloom, perhaps? A forgotten pattern to forgotten family ties?
On the chest of drawers, next to an old leather jewelry box bearing someone else’s initials, stood the only thing in the room that didn’t look second-hand. It was a faded picture in a wooden frame, probably from J.C. Penny’s or Sears or some other department store photo emporium. As always, Cadence picked it up and studied the subjects. Posed against a stock blue-neutral backdrop, they stared out at her with startling familiarity. It was hard to believe, but there it was, frozen in an incongruous moment as rare as an alignment of stars: her mom Helen, her dad Arnie, and a baby with a pacifier.
In the distance, another world away, she heard a dog barking and a car horn honking out on the road. Time to go. She put the photo back in the same spot and re-hefted her bags.
She hurried through the dimness of the Forest, squeezing along the tight aisles of comic books and retro psychedelic T-shirts. She thought about the police tape and fingerprint dustings, now long gone. It had annoyed her they had left that for her to clean up, but she did and kept everything else intact. On her way through the kitchen in back, she stopped for a final look. On the calico-covered kitchen table, the Abbott and Costello salt-and-pepper shakers stood waiting. So were the mint-condition, boxed Barbies her grandfather might have bought at a yard sale along with miscellaneous collectables, and vintage rock band posters. Banjo Dog had not further strayed from his post. She knew fine dust would settle over all, impossible to stop since it incessantly seeped in from the road.
She sighed as she surveyed the clutter, wondering if the trip she was about to take had an end point.
She checked the lock on the back door and then checked her cell phone for messages. There were two. She punched them up.
“Cadence, Megan. So, I know you say you don’t believe in luck or fairy tales. Well, I’m telling you, missy, I’m counting right now five thousand dollars I won at Vegas! The trip you didn’t want to go with us on Friday? So don’t be a stick in the mud, and let’s go together. All of us girls. Like soon! Let you cut loose and try that old time gospel mystery of the slots. Oh yeah, you won’t believe what else happened! Don’t you not call! Bye.”
The second one was from Mel. “Listen Cadence, I got your e-mail from last night. If you’re going there OK, I’ll help you. Go to the Algonquin Hotel, mid-town. A-L-G-A … anyway, you’ll find it. I’ll make arrangements. Now look, I’ve been scratching my head over this whole thing. I’ve been talking to some of my people, and well, there’s more here than I thought. I’m having research done. In the meantime keep this secret, all right? I suggest you leave the documents with me for safekeeping. At least take them with you. I’ll call as soon as I can.”
She saved both messages, sidled down a cramped aisle to the front of the store, and backed out the front door. The air, already giving up its moisture, felt tired and reheated. A morning bee droned somewhere along with the growing road sounds. Cars clipped by every few seconds. The keys jangled in her hand as she worked the troublesome deadbolt.
“You fear a trial of fire!”
The voice came from nowhere. Not sure if she heard it right, she froze, her hand still holding the key. Then she heard the rumble of a low growl, like a heavy gauge spring being compressed to the point of powerful, uncontrollable release.
She whirled around. A black dog faced her. If it was a dog. It looked pure Pleistocene, the kind of wolfish creature that lurked outside the glow of a Neanderthal campfire. Its long, black fur stood on end as if electrified. Huge, yellow teeth curved like arthritic fingers below yellow-pitted, greenish demon eyes.
Where’s the leash? some part of her mind questioned.
It stopped growling just long enough to breathe, and when it did, saliva roped down its impossibly long red tongue to muddy the dust at its feet. It took a step forward. She tensed, slowly bringing her bags around in front of her. Their eyes locked in stares, no question about who was prey.
Another step forward.
“Docga! Heel!”
The dog stopped mid-step, its eyes unwavering as its master appeared at its side. “It’s OK,” the man said. “He’s never attacked anyone when I’m here.”
Somehow that wasn’t reassuring.
The man seemed at first glance to be a typical Topanga creeker. Black T-shirt. Dirty jeans. Sandles. Black beard and hair. Druggie lean. The kind of man you’d see living in a tent or under one of the rock outcroppings just below town.
He looked directly at her and said the oddest thing, “Beware, Graymalkin. Your soul embarks ill-prepared for your need-fare.”
She was so surprised she laughed. “My what?”
“A journey that must be taken.”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind who I am. You will receive offers.”
“OK, get out of here.”
The man didn’t seem to hear. “Remember, on a journey one always faces temptations to abandon the path.”
“You’re crazy, go back down to the creek.”
“Each offer reveals that which you most desire.”
Now she listened. Not that she understood, but he had her at what you most desire.
“You’ve shipped many an oar I can see.”
“You know nothing of me.”
He paused, and then looked directly into her eyes. “The truth is, caterpillar, there’s not much about you worth knowing. At least not yet. Except for one thing.”
“How about my boyfriend comes out and kicks your ass.” Cadence was not above a bluff.
“Don’t you know that heroines are always orphans, in one sense or another?”
“That’s it. I’m going back inside and he’s gonna come out here and pound you good.”
“Attitude and loud talk can’t help you on this journey.”
She picked up a rock, and the dog leaned forward.
“You still don’t know what this is all about, do you, Cadence? Can’t you smell it? Change is coming. Like smoke borne in advance by a hot wind that propels the fire.”
She just looked at him, wondering how he could know to touch her fear of fire and say just that.
Having said his piece, he turned and walked away, whistling. The dog followed placidly at his side, tail doing happy puppy dog swishes as they moved away.
She knew of graymalkin, a malicious spirit in the form of a cat. It was the familiar of the first witch in Macbeth.
She also knew what time it was. No time, she thought, I’m late. Very late.
She picked up her bags, looked over at the parked and tarp-covered jaguar, and headed down the road for the corner bus stop. The bus was there, the driver impatiently checking fares at the door.
The waiting, at least, was over.
When she finally got to Union Station in downtown L.A., only one ticket window was open and the line would not move.
Cadence was finally next in line, her packed roller bag attending like a faithful companion. There was a lot riding on this voucher. There was no name on it. Just the instructions: “Present to your Amtrak agent by …”
Her backpack was chafing her shoulders so she moved the straps a bit. She had stared at the ticket agent behind the security glass so long that she started composing his life story. How he ended up caught in this glass cage. It depressed her so much that she imagined she was not in the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal at ten in the morning, but in the Getty Museum critiquing a modern art installation behind glass. Maybe one depicting the slow drowning part of hell. It would be titled Gray Tidal Slurry of Boredom.
“Next.”
She stepped up to the window, shoving the ticket voucher into the depressed slot.
The agent swept it up and placed it to his left for a quick study through his wire-framed spectacles. He wasn’t an old guy—just the first wee-sprouts of serious gray in his hair—yet he wore a green eye-shade and leather cuff-protectors, something she hadn’t seen outside of old movies of the thirties or forties.
He picked up the ticket, his finger running along the text. Puzzled, he turned it over, then found what he was looking for.
“This is five years old. Almost expired.”
“Yes. Almost.”
“Tomorrow, in fact.”
“Yes.”
“When do you want to travel?”
“Today. Now.”
He leaned back and looked at it more intently, as if it trying to detect some evidence of a crime. Unconvinced, he got up and spoke to a female supervisor. They talked. The supervisor looked at Cadence covertly, then walked over to the window.
“When and where do you want to travel?”
“Today. New York City.”
Cadence watched the supervisor study the voucher again, and only then scrawl OK on it. The supervisor’s initials followed on the lower left corner. The whole thing was obviously a tremendous inconvenience, requiring extra steps they didn’t want to take. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had actually paid for her ticket. The voucher was the equivalent of Amtrak welfare, and Cadence could damn well wait. The supervisor walked away, the agent again took his seat on the high stool, shot his cuffs in preparation, and gave a sigh that indicated that a long, laborious process was about to begin.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
He was a two-finger typist. As Cadence glanced at the clock, something inside her died.
A clunky printer got to work, spitting out three tickets onto a tray.
The P.A. boomed, “AMTRAK 14, SIERRA SUMMIT, BOARDING NOW THROUGH GATE 10!”
“Is that me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She thought about squeezing her hand under the grate and grabbing for the tickets, but the clerk was not finished. He pulled over a stamping device that looked like a loaner from a transportation museum. Cadence watched in agony as the process ground on. He worked slowly and with great deliberation, as if following instructions whispered through an earpiece: Put the tickets in the little hand-press one at a time. Apply palm sharply. Stamp. Check the stamp. Repeat.
“SECOND CALL, AMTRAK 14 …”
The only other place this slow, she thought, must have been the Bulgarian Railroad, circa 1930.
Stamp. Check stamp.
Now a rubber ink stamp came out.
No better example can be made of the layering of technologies that burdens progress, she thought; just add on—never displace.
“LAST CALL, GATE 10 …”
“Is this going to take—”
The clerk smiled and shoved the tickets into the trough. “Have a great trip.”
“Thanks!” Cadence turned and sprinted down to the platform. People were hurrying, blocking her way with bizarre collections of luggage. Red hard-side Samsonite Travelers, army duffles, BlackHawk Assault backpacks, string-tied boxes, greasy brown paper grocery bags.
She found the right car.
The conductor was ready to pick up the footstool.
P.A. rumbling. “TRAIN 14 DEPARTING …” She stopped and looked very deliberately at the steps.
“Ma’am?”
She took a step, her eyes following her foot as if it belonged to a stranger. She climbed aboard, then turned to watch the uniformed conductor. He looked at her, then smiled and slowly pulled away the stool. He did this grandly, as if his secret job was to create life’s points of no return.
She wrestled down the aisles and found a window seat. With the nesting instinct of travelers embarking on a long journey, she deposited her backpack on the aisle seat. A mark to ward off strangers. She secured the rollerbag packed with the valise and manuscripts on the floor.
She looked down the car and smiled. Not crowded at all. Maybe eight out of thirty seats occupied. But the headrest smelled musty.
Arrival time at New York’s Penn Station was four days away.
The train lurched and the platform outside began to act strangely, sliding backwards from this oddly immobile perspective. Redcaps glided by with empty luggage carts without walking. She closed her eyes to reset her perspective. There followed a slow, accumulative creaking sound as hundreds of tons of metal protested against scores of train couplings.
The world soon reordered itself to the eyes of the mover. In less than a minute the great upside down U of the station mouth opened to spill into an outside world of endlessly parallel and crisscrossing tracks. She squinted at the maze of rails shining brilliantly atop the black lines of metal, as if some monstrous spider had spit out ferrous webs to ensnare some fantastic prey.
She liked this exercise in abstraction—the high contrast, the confirmation of order and art in all systems derived from life. Flowers, whelks, the faces of mites, whale cochlea, sermons, movie genre rules, journeys …
“Excuse me …”
She jumped.
The man in the aisle looked to be in his late twenties, well groomed but in wrinkled clothes, his hand extended toward the opposite row.
“Are these taken?”
“No, feel free.”
The man began to do his own nesting, but with the air of practiced routine. He plumped his pillow, tidied his books and newspapers, adjusted the seatback, stashed his eyeshades just so, and nestled his radio in the open bag down at his feet. The bigger bag went up above, and she somehow knew he wouldn’t have to open it during the trip. She half expected him to wipe his hands together in satisfaction, but he abruptly turned to her and asked, “Want anything from the café car?”
She waved a no thank you and turned back to watch the rail web and the trashy backside of Los Angeles dissipate as the train gathered speed. This was a chance to get some perspective on the rude and strangely fascinating ass-end of the city, and she gorged herself. Vines, trash, dumps, back entrances to seedy shops and bars. Inexplicably, she saw the lost graveyard where a thousand rusted and battered supermarket carts trundle off in the night, squeaky wheels and all, to gather and die.
Finally bored, she rummaged for something interesting in the valise. Clues to Ara seemed to come and go in this pile. Even the documents seemed to shift around. She found a small piece of paper, shaped as if sliced by a knife from a larger page. She pulled it out and held it up to catch the strobe light of a passing bridge. The paper contained a bit of verse:
Down roads long and weary
Past borders high and far
Through gates shut tight
Each to the other vow
Together to spy that dark blue sea!
A rather simple and affected halfling limerick, she thought, barely qualifying as a riddle. Of no magical significance or power whatsoever. All in all, a trifling thing.
Or was it? It was, after all, a vow, something far weightier than a promise. Whoever “each to the other” were, it was theirs. Cadence pondered whom in the world “they” could be. Ara? The one called The Bearer? In this pile of scrap it was doubtful she would ever know.
The train slowed and came to rest in a maze of tracks and warehouses. It lurched and stopped, again and again, as if queuing in an unruly line of racehorses at the starting gate. Liquid metal slams cascaded along its length. It rolled forward and gained speed.
Soon enough, the sun was setting in the ocean, far beyond Topanga and the quiet and shuttered remnants of the Mirkwood Forest. That place receded from her mind as evening shadows swept forward over the shoulder of the train. Her view flew past the dusty tracksides of San Bernardino. The country was thinning out.
The neighbor across the aisle had not returned.
She watched with the pensiveness of one accepting the lockdown of a slow journey while other events ran at full speed. The train rumbled on, finally approaching its maximum velocity. Cadence opened one of her grandfather’s journals, one she had packed after thumbing through it and finding that a part of it had been written on a train. Her attention was diverted, though, with a whoosh of air compression. Looking up, she saw a long row of salvaged doors riffling by, very close by the train. Hundreds of doors, it seemed, were all nailed side by side to make an endless color-chip fence, a bright sampler book of discarded gates to unknown lives.
As she watched the kaleidoscope of doors pass by, she thought of the many houses she had lived in. All the bedrooms and bathrooms … and back doors.
The procession ended abruptly with a de-whoosh and a return to slightly more open spaces. She thumbed through the journal, put a bookmark at one spot, and fell into a ragged, dreamless sleep.
An unwelcome consciousness came to her, stiff and crumpled. Bleary, gray, morning light fused with atonal flatness so that all land and sky were a single-hued haze. The Great Salt Lake stretched off to the north. A porter came by with coffee. It was hot and cheap and surprisingly good. She set it on the next seat’s tray table and opened the journal again. Each page or so had a heading and entries in her grandfather’s jittery script, etched with different instruments—pencils, exhausted Bics, fine-lined points of apparent pedigree. Finally she found the entry she was looking for:
Lakeside Ballroom, June 12 ’74
Hopped off the D&RGW last night. Slept in dry culvert on the ROW. Saw strange building mile or so off toward the lake. Went over and found huge abandoned resort and ballroom, maybe from the 1920s. Then at the shoreline, now stranded half mile inland. Looks funny there, standing on huge pilings. 20 foot ceilings, 3 stories. Grand staircase all gray and forlorn and crusted and scary as hell. Easy to get lost in there. Always sounds going on. Birds fluttering in and out. Wind moving non-stop, like an off-key organ with only a few pipes left. Echoing so the sound is amplified. Old boards clapping somewhere in the wind. Put it all together and it’s like ghost music resonating eternally from past revelry.
Too sad for me. I hoofed back out and caught this westbound. Am huddled inside a firewood boxcar now. Snug here, writing by slats of light. Vienna sausage for lunch.
She watched the lakebed stretch away as minutes and miles clacked by. There! That had to be it! Coming up and passing by in the distance was a pile of burned timbers and a high framework of tottered concrete beams. Those gray-black remnants had to be the ruins of the Saltair Pavilion. It was used as a set in the 1965 cult film Carnival of Souls. That, along with The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari, were her favorite progenitors of zombie movies.
OK, she thought, that right there touches it. Everything so damn academic with me. No substance, just the look, the special effects, the trivia. Life as just a movie to watch. The image but not the touch. The picture but not the danger. The illusion, but not the magic. Her mind wouldn’t stop.
Worse yet, I’m just a trained observer, a student of, what, movie history? Pop art? Comics? God help me, television? I’m really just a librarian, an archives clerk. How far removed from life can you get?
Well, maybe it’s not removed at all because, to quote somebody, that’s all there is. If you don’t believe in magic, all you’ll ever see is the pragmatic, maybe spiced with a few cheap tricks for entertainment. After all, that’s why they call them “shows.”
Her mother’s voice came to her, timbre-perfect: “Two generations of romantic misfits. That’s the men in this family!” That voice was imbued with yearning for a touch of normalcy that marriage never dealt her.
The voice echoed away as the train wailed out a long whistle, decelerating to the station stop in Salt Lake.
She reopened her grandfather’s journal at a bookmark:
Montana summertime with high cumulus ranges and big blue-sky days to knock your eyes out. I’m looking at this good luck charm given to me this week. I did a favor for a man who needed help. The favor’s not important now, though it was important to him. He searched me out and said maybe he’d give me a blanket, but that was too easy. Then he said maybe a beaver skin, which could have magic aplenty but was too heavy to lug around. Then he said he had something that was just right. He knew, he said, because his father was a shaman. He’d been off the rez too long, but he said he still knew what it was all about. So he gave me this thing. Said it was good luck if I used it, but serious back luck if I didn’t use it and keep it sacred. “Not like rabbits’ feet where you can take em’ or leave em’. You got to be one with this,” he said.
I told him I wanted to give it back to him, but he said that was also bad luck.
Then he leaned very close. “Not only do you got to use it, you got to change your ways.” I dreaded what he was gonna say next. “Your spirit is lost. You got to quit wandering like a man with no home.”
Maybe someday I will. But that’s a scarier thought than hitching rides right now. I’ll keep this thing safe and maybe pass it on. If I ever get home again, that is.
Anyway, I’m sitting in a truck stop, just finished eating lemon pie, and I’m looking this thing over. It looks kinda special. It’s ivory and it’s old. Looks like a tooth from a giant bear maybe, back when bears were twice as big as they are now. Maybe like Alaskan bears in the museum except beefed up even more. There’s a spot for a hole to be drilled and a key chain, if I had any keys. I’ll keep it and hope my luck doesn’t sour. I sure as hell can’t let go of it now. I guess whoever has it has to figure out the truth it’s trying to say. Even if, like me, they know bad luck is their own damn fault.
Cadence looked into the mirror of the train window and studied the part of her that were her dad’s features. His, of course, were an echo of the man whose journal she held. She unzipped a pocket on her backpack and took out a tinkling assemblage of keys and chains and little gewgaws, all of it anchored by a polished tooth four inches long and punctured by a hole with a small welded chain, looped though it.
A talisman with interrupted history.
Up till this moment, all she knew was that it had been her father’s. He used it for his truck key, but couldn’t find it that fateful day, so he grabbed the spare off the keyhook. The fire’s orange glow was already spilling over the canyon rim and sending Halloween shadows through the house as he gunned the truck and took off. She knew the story of the fire line and where it happened. She still had videotape of the news reports, including interviews with firefighters who had been there. One of them even spoke at the funeral.
Three years later she asked that man to tell her what really happened. He told her there were two dozen men and three pumper trucks lined up at the narrows at Old Topanga Canyon Road where a cluster of cabins stood. The canyon walls were steep, closing almost to creek side. The fire had already crested behind them so they couldn’t retreat more than a half mile. The fire crew chief said, “This is where we’ll fight.”
The fire was coming fast, the wind shifting and blowing its furnace-breath down the narrow sandstone corridor into their faces. Still unseen, the red monster stalked up around the canyon bend, its shadows dancing clear up the orange-lit walls. Then it turned the corner. It bellowed and raged like a furious living thing, then gathered force and marched forward.
They’d cut a line up the canyon sides, their fire hoses quickly draining a rubber dam placed in the creek. Three pumps sprayed huge plumes of water into the air, challenging the beast.
It stepped into the first plume. Hose-drenched trees erupted like match heads. The water boiled in the air as it arced, steam hissing as the beast thrust out a fiery arm. The spray only angered it, like acid on the back of rippling red flesh. It lashed out another tentacle, and the next moment they were surrounded on three sides by walls of Day-Glo red and orange.
Arnie was there. He had said he was going to help his friend defend his cabin. It was so like him, trying to do right but never getting it together. He was driven by something he could no more discern than a meteor understands its destiny before it flames out in the silent night sky.
Six men died that night—Arnie and five firemen. The fire finally grew impatient or bored, skirting a last piece of canyon and sparing the cabin en route to once again confront its old nemesis, the ocean.
Thinking about it rekindled her utter hatred for fire, the abomination, the true rough beast. The recurrent dragon that stalked her inner landscape.