___
Just as Barren emerged from Riker’s Island, the train carrying Cadence plunged into its last night run before arriving in the city. She fidgeted and worried. She was happy to be getting there and anxious about the strangeness that seemed to stalk her.
She looked at the black glass and cut her eyes away. Don’t stare out that window. Not after last night. She put her head on the Amtrak pillow, relaxed into the gentle rocking movement, and sought the refuge of sleep.
She awoke at five in the morning, stirred by something vague, perhaps only the train jostling, and obscured by an urgent need to pee. She leaned up from her reclined seat and looked both ways down the aisle. The overhead lights were dim and the absence of reading lights meant the few passengers were all asleep. 9-11 Man was a snoring shadow sprawled across his seats. She eased up and looked at her own nest. She shrugged and got up and then stopped. The valise was in plain sight. She leaned over and pulled it up and moved it down two rows and shoved it beneath an empty seat. She pulled a blanket from the overhead and disguised the valise as a dark pile. Now she really did have to go, and she headed for the women’s bathroom in the next car.
As she slid the lavatory door shut, the light flicked on and the mirror over the sink caught her movement. She looked at it. It was blighted from the inside with some amoebic gray sprawl that ate the upper left corner. She sat and her face moved down and stared back from the mirror bottom. It seemed to loom up from the sink, obscenely decapitated and somehow balanced. Just to be sure, she made full eye contact. A woman knows her face, and the one looking back at her was ever so slightly off. She thought about talking to this image but hesitated. Who knows what truths might spill out in such an encounter?
She stared for a long time, then changed her mind. She inquired out loud, “Why are you doing this?”
Her voice answered, “Because if I don’t, I’ll stay like I am now … empty. When you are an orphan, when that full truth dawns on you, all the other truths you don’t know and can never ask about get really big. If Jess is alive, he’s the only shot I’ve got. He’s someone real to ask the hows and whys. Maybe he’s even someone to blame.” She thought for a second and came to her bottom line. “If I don’t do this now, I never will.”
“And?”
“And, there’s something else going on. I can feel it. It’s like … there’s something out there after him …” Then she let it slip out “… and me.”
She stopped, embarrassed but mostly fearing that the image might actually take up its half of the conversation independently. Thankfully, seeing no further response, she retreated to her old cynical refuge. She pursed her lips and raised her hands, palms up, and gave her reflection a taunting “who knows?” shrug. She finished her toilet and her image duly rose as she stood.
She turned her back to the mirror to unlock the door. It was stuck. She jiggered it and then slammed the door with one knee. Beneath the banging and the metallic rattles, she heard a splash of water. This was followed by a liquid, squelching sound, and a soft splish, as if a foot was stepping carefully into water. Her mind imagined that her “second” was crawling out of the mirror and wash basin to meet her. Only it wasn’t anything like her own image anymore. It was some deep-sea gargoyle rising behind her. At any second a pallid, fish-fingered arm would piston out to grip her shoulder. She couldn’t turn to look. Not to see that. Her hands jiggered the lock over and over, like some dumb wind-up toy, until it fell open and she stumbled out. Turning to kick the door closed, she saw only an innocent wet spot on the floor.
Nerves, she thought, just settle down.
As she re-entered her car, she heard the doors at the other end swoosh. A small figure, not a child, looked back from the shadows and disappeared into the next car. She looked at her seat row and began to move fast down the aisle. The train rocked and creaked. She made her way toward her seat, two-arming along the aisle seat backs for balance. 9-11 Man was still snoring. She looked down at her nest, her sanctuary. Something was wrong. Her backpack was now on the seat next to the aisle.
Her hands were like frightened birds as she reached down and picked it up. Makeup and toiletries spilled out of the newly open side pocket. Her pocketbook, still with money and IDs, lay on the floor. Jess’s journal had been rifled, but appeared to all be there. Then she panicked. The valise! For a moment she forgot where it was. She edged backwards to its hiding spot. She tore at the blankets.
It was exactly where she left it. She checked the clasp, then opened it. The contents were just as she’d left them. She blew in relief and took it back to her seat. Just a petty thief, she thought.
She pondered this for a few moments, and then went to the emergency phone and called the conductor. After awhile, he arrived and conducted a desultory and inconclusive search of the train. She didn’t talk about the valise. She didn’t tell him that, just maybe, this was no random snatch and steal attempt. Who would believe such a thing?
Maybe someone who believed in these ancient documents and the Dark Lord’s words. Someone who knew about his goals and his many emissaries. But that’s not me. I’m jumpy, but this is just a storybook, she reassured herself.
At dawn the train, chugging and spent, labored into Penn Station. The platform was packed with day-trippers, commuters and visiting families.
As other passengers began reaching for their bags, Cadence stayed nested in her seat, tidied up now and still opposite 9-11 man. They exchanged knowing nods and smiles in comment on the passengers walking down the aisle toward the exit door.
When it was time, she got up and reached out and shook his hand.
“Julian, it’s been nice traveling with you. I hope you find your place to finally get off the train.”
He smiled in return. “You know, I’m feeling more confident about that. I’m going back to the Midwest. Maybe … oh … Topeka. That seems safe.”
“I think it would be great. Who knows? Take a day and sleep in a bed at a hotel or a bed and breakfast. Let the train just go on without you. Listen to it click-clack and whistle away. Leave your burden on the train. Just let it go.”
He nodded. People were waiting for her to clear the aisle.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
She trundled down the aisle, hesitated at the exit door. Below her was the step stool. New York, here I am! She stepped down and kept going along the platform, her feet already lighter.
Rumbles of other trains and the incomprehensible sounds from the P.A. speakers mixed with the shuffle of the crowd with rollerbags and sneakers and clackety heels. The crowd broke; she saw daylight and headed for it.
She surfaced, bag in hand, to meet a mild Indian summer afternoon. A sweep of fresh air, alive with moisture and carrying the myriad smells of the city, swirled around her. As she breathed in the energy of that wind, she felt the city’s trademark, the palpable, buzzing presence of possibility. Anything might happen here. There would be no easy bargain but there would be commerce. That alone gave her hope. Here, her pent-up energy could be focused. She could get down to the real search.
Her little map from the Algonquin website said the hotel was less than ten blocks away. After four days locked up on the train, this would be easy. She picked up her bags and struck out due north. Once she got there, she would unload her stuff at the hotel and go directly to her first clue.
As the breeze kicked up and the sky darkened with an incoming thunderstorm, she found the hotel. The Algonquin was a spritely, fourteen-story dowager built in 1902. It looked smart and well-taken-care-of. She checked in on Mel’s tab, got organized and immediately left. It took her less than an hour to find the place she had travelled two thousand miles to see.
She stood alone outside the West End Bar.
A raw wind whipped sudden rain along Broadway at the corner of 110th Street. She looked at the yellowed scrap of menu in her hand.
The place right where it should be. Cadence wrestled the door against the wind and stepped inside. The place was busy, shadowy regulars installed on their usual stools. Behind the bar a man with Popeye arms bulging out of rolled-up sleeves, bathed in weird glow-light from under the bar. Gruff and balding, he fit the place.
She felt unexpectedly at home in places like this, where the dark wood-paneled walls had absorbed maybe seventy years of tobacco and beer smells, giving them back in the day, taking in more at night. Gin joint sounds filled the air—small talk, jukebox, clinking and washing, liquid pouring, imported beer bottles gasping into life as their caps tinkled off the opener.
She saw an empty bar stool and claimed it as the door opened again behind her. She could feel the wet street air swirl in and mix with the saloon smells. A figure moved in hitches and starts from the door over to the back corner, melting into a booth.
The barkeep moved towards her. “Yes, ma’am?”
She fidgeted with her bag, ordered a Manhattan, and looked up to see two things. First, the guy’s face lacked a left eye. A deep vertical scar transected the socket. Second, the hands placing the beer and glass on the bar lacked a finger. Left, ring.
“Uh …” is all she could get out for a second.
“Relax, ma’am, I’m not near the ogre I look.” His voice was friendly and low-key, which only lowered her blush to a paler shade of vermillion. He moved off to another customer and she looked at the menu scrap she had pulled from her pocket:
WEST END BAR
14423 Broadway
New York, NY
June 14, 1970
Daily Specials
Meatloaf Dinner, all the trimmings
$1.89
Chicken Pot Pie with salad
$1.29
Hunter’s Stew with salad
$1.49
And there it was scrawled along the bottom:
I must depart for England tomorrow. The burden is now yours. I have helped by hiding the key, the heart of the power that lurks in this trove. This task I completed today. There is little else I can do now. I fear they are coming. Keep it secret.
JRRT
“So what brings you here?” The barkeep had returned.
“Well, can I ask you a question first?”
“Shoot. First one’s free.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Me, on and off for fifteen years probably. What, you writing a book?”
“Close, but not exactly.”
Something dawned on her, looking at his left hand splayed across the bar wood. The missing piece of finger might be tied to the eye scar, like his hand had shot up to ward off whatever happened. Whatever had happened, he must have seen it coming.
Who would mess with this guy? She thought and then answered, someone with a big knife.
“The reason I asked, you came in here like you were looking for something besides a drink. Or company.”
“OK, I’m trying to find out something about this….” She slid the menu scrap in front of him. “It concerns a relative, my grandfather, the person who got the note at the bottom. Probably looked in his twenties then. Any ideas?”
He was clearly charmed by the vintage menu. It was a few moments before he answered. “We still do a Hunter’s Stew special, but otherwise this is way before my time.”
“The owner maybe?”
“Nope, they’re an investment group now, buying up distressed places around the upper West Side.”
“I hear this place was something of a landmark.”
“Still is. Lots of odd folks come in here—me excluded. Students, writers, tattoo artists, Nobel laureates, Columbia nerd-types, retirees, and invalids living in rent-controlled apartments who show up once a week. They order cocktails no one remembers—Sidecars, Old-Fashioneds, you know. They all come in and out. Gets to be a pattern from this side of the bar.”
“So what writers?”
He pointed. “Kerouac wrote On the Road right over there by the window. Jay McInerney supposedly wrote parts of Bright Lights, Big City in here. A bunch of music types hang out from time to time. Bono had lunch here with some save-the-world type. Harold Ramis and Bill Murray hung out when they filmed Ghostbusters up the street. Oh yeah, the guys who made up Sha-Na-Na. They were in the Woodstock movie. Definitely before your time.”
Cadence nodded, recalling greasy, juvenile delinquent rockers on stage. She pointed at the note again. “Well, I think the JRRT initials are Tolkien’s, you know, the Lord of the Rings writer.”
“Huh, sure, but never heard anyone say he’d been here.”
“But he has to have been, don’t you think, from the writing on the menu?”
“Yeah, yeah … Hey! You may be right. The bartender that retired from here, Vincent, once talked about how some famous English writer, I think it was Tolkien or Tidwell, was in here. The guy said the place reminded him of his pub back home. Had a regular thing there with a group of writers, I guess. The Inkspots, I think it was.”
“That’s a singing group. How about the Inklings?”
“Dunno. If you say so. I just remember the part about the pub. Which means he probably came in here several times. Vincent always kept track of the quasi-famous types who wandered in here.”
“So, any thoughts how to pick up a trail on this?”
“Colder than that well digger’s ass in Montana. Or a … oh well you get it. Let me think on it.” He drifted away, doing a turn at his job.
Cadence looked around, observing people moving here and there. There was something odd about the place, and the next moment she noticed a dark shadow in the corner that made her neck hairs stiffen.
A sliver of light from the swinging kitchen door played on and off the crumpled figure. He wore a ratty ski hat and old coat. His head was oriented like he was looking out at her. In truth, she realized, he looked to be a homeless person who had come in for coffee. The bartender brought him a glass of water and a cup of coffee, saying a few words. Cadence gazed out the window at a taxi pulled curbside, its hazard lights blinking madly in the rain.
“Ma’am?” She jerked, surprised that the bartender was suddenly back.
“Coats says he can help.”
“Who’s that?”
“You were just looking at him.”
She looked over there again. Same mysterious, neck-hair-raising gaze from a pool of shadow.
“So what’d he say?”
“For you to quit talking so loud and come over there.”
As she slowly got up from the bar stool, she was watched by another.
Since his release from Riker’s Island, Barren’s search for her had taken the remainder of the day and into the night, until this very moment.
Arriving outside a few minutes ago, he knew it was an inn from the mingled smells of alcohol, smoke, and the urine of human woe that swirled at the rain-sotted threshold. He pretty much understood the words inscribed above the door: WEST END BAR. He went in.
He had no need of weapons—not yet, as he was armed with passing command of their language and knowledge of their vanities. His hair was cut short except for the crude ruff striping front to back, like one of the guys in Rikers. He sat down at one end of the bar.
Just as a stag in Mirkwood will twist its ears and raise its antlered head above the oak brush to satisfy its curiosity at an interloper, so did these people twitch before the threat of his very presence.
The young black-haired woman at the end of the bar fidgeted and looked behind her anxiously. She was in all likelihood the one. She talked to a scarred innkeeper and then they both looked at a bearded figure hidden at a table in a dark corner. He was different, not one of the moon-faces, but no threat.
Barren bent his head slightly to eavesdrop on their discussion. Satisfied, he got up and went back out in the rain and entered a waiting taxi. It was time to learn to drive.
As Cadence approached the booth in the corner, the fragrant derelict reached out and literally yanked her into the seat beside him.
“Understand that you will be watched!”
Whether it was the words he whispered or the overwhelming stink that startled her, she kept her composure. She could see his face better now, even with the ski hat pulled down. He was a caricature of the Big Apple Homeless Man—unshaven, his face deeply fissured, hiding within layers of dank old coats—with barely enough money rattling in his pockets to get by, even if the city shelters were his home every night.
“I …”
“I know what you seek.” He quickly leaned to the side, peering at her from tabletop level. “Acoustics. Sitting here I can listen to every conversation in this room. That’s why this is my spot!”
She nodded in vague understanding, following his darting, conspiratorial eyes.
“Your grandfather I knew. Tolkien I knew. Not since those days of chaos and revolution have I spoken of this.”
“Yes?”
“Listen carefully, for if you have come here with this clue, you are no doubt in possession of a tale that will stretch and entangle with its root and branch. Beware of this: there are things evoked by lost stories, by words even, that have a life and a will of their own. Seek out a tale’s origin and you are likely to find another. Keep searching and you may stumble upon that realm where the word and the beast mingle as one.”
She was torn between the crackpot ramblings and the rational look in the man’s eyes. She decided to sit for just one more minute.
“The Eye and the Shadow may have been vanquished, or like the swirl of smoke that enwreathed all ere it passed, may have diffused into new form. Like the banal evil that accumulates in our time. But other eyes remain, many with places and powers that have not yet come into focus. I perhaps know something of these documents you possess, and I know also that their rediscovery, even after so long a time, will not go unnoticed.”
Now she was surprised. “But how could you know?”
“Quiet! You know so little, you will bring them here again just by your blundering questions! Be still and learn! Your grandfather was but an errand keeper picked at random. He was sent away with it, precisely because even he didn’t know where he was going. He was, however, a respecter of both ancient lore and secrets of his times. Thus he was entrusted with the last remnants of the tale. Perhaps only by chance, he came to play a role far beyond his natural destiny. Beyond that I can say little of his path, save that your presence here tells me much. Perhaps not enough, however. Tell me why you have come here.”
“I …” She paused to swallow; her mouth had suddenly gone dry. “I want to know where he is, and whether some documents he left, sort of a missing account of a famous heroine, are authentic.”
“Authentic? You mean real? If it’s a tale, it has a truth of its own. We are all sent down paths and live in worlds that we can only know as ‘real’ by what our heart says. We can’t exist except by believing. What you mean by your question is, I fear, something more … base. Something smelling, perchance, of profit?”
He stopped and stared at Cadence. His insinuation made her even more uneasy than his lunatic ramblings.
“Perhaps you have these documents? Are they in your possession?”
Her guardian senses were up. She felt, could smell, the low-grade fear that was enveloping him.
He went on, “Time works against us. You must trust me this much. Go out of here now. Do not walk around. Come to the library at Columbia tomorrow at the second bell. It is my day house. Then I will tell you more. Nights of swift rain and lightening claws are no place to risk encounters with the creatures of this realm or any other. Now go!”
Cadence got up. She glanced briefly at the bartender. He nodded knowingly, and she walked out to face the hawk, the swooping wet wind.
The rain and whipping gale had gotten worse. Luckily—amazingly, she thought—a taxi still waited at the curb, its hazard lights blinking, its wheels resting hubcap-deep in water that threatened to flood the sidewalk. She ran to it, opened the door, and piled in.
With a lurch, the taxi took off. It surged into southbound traffic, heading for midtown. No questions, no hellos. She wondered if the driver even knew she was in the backseat. Through the scarred Lexan partition and the erratic light flickering across the smeared windshield, she could barely make out the figure hunched over the steering wheel.
“Hello!” she said, knocking on the partition. No response. The cab swerved left and right through the traffic as if, plausibly for New York City, the driver was hired fresh from a country without cars. Water cascaded on either side as the taxi boated and crashed through the overrunning street and deep-pooled potholes.
It slammed to a sideways stop at a red light at West Seventy-fifth Street. Cadence knocked again and the figure turned, fumbled with the partition, and slid the window open.
“Yes?” he said.
“Do you want to know where I’m going?”
“Yes.”
“Algonquin. Forty-fourth between Fifth and Sixth.”
“Yes.”
Approaching headlights played over him in flowing bands of light. His hair was cut down to the scalp, except for a low rough mohawk cresting over his head to a peak that accented the cross-strip of his opaque Wayfarers.
“I’m … Travis. Just relax now.” He looked to be in his mid-twenties, despite his creased features and mature demeanor. Military maybe, she thought. The problem was, the picture that stared back at her from the driver ID pocket was of a man who looked, if she had to take a wild guess, Ethiopian. She looked at the meter. He hadn’t turned it on. At West Fortieth Street the taxi finally had to stop. She didn’t say a word, just threw a twenty at the driver and jumped out.
The light turned green and the cab lurched forward, kicking and swerving like a whipped horse.
By the time she stumbled into her room at the Algonquin, the cold and wet had seeped down into her skin to unleash rounds of shivers. This wasn’t the first day she had expected. The cab ride, the loony people at the West End, the sudden change of weather, all foretold some fever settling over her body and her search.
She left her drenched clothes in a pile on the floor of the room, turned on the hot water in the tub, and poured in the entire mini-bottle of complimentary lavender bubble bath.
A froth of bubbles began to grow, and she went to the closet. There, behind the extra blanket and pillows on the top shelf, she had stashed the valise. She pulled it down and put it on the bed. She sorted through a few of the documents and stopped at a page filled with baroque Spencerian flourishes. With some concentrated effort, this was readable. She got in the tub and relaxed, holding the page above the bubbles as she read.
In a flash she sat up again, the bubbles splashing over the tub’s edge. She thought about the story gleaned from the scroll a few days ago. Days that now seemed distant and wasted in that vigil-land of grading papers, hanging out at the Forest, and waiting for the impending foreclosure sale. Her heart galloped as she read and heard the rising din of horns and hoof beats …
As the ancient warning horns blew, Ara cast a torch upon the signal fire outside the gate, drew her sword and leapt to the center of the lane. Turning to face the darkness out of the east, she felt vindicated. Just as she had at the foot of the Capturing Tree. The others had eaten too much, no doubt drunk too much, and fallen asleep in the inn. And now the Wraiths, or some group of them, had come to this crossroads hamlet.
Suddenly she heard them behind her. They had entered the village! She turned to see them approaching.
A black cyclone, a wall of shadow and thundering hoof beats came up the lane. Sparks ignited from the clash of iron shoes on cobblestones. Streaming manes emerged from the dust and she quickly backed away to the gate bars, holding her tiny sword in two-fisted defiance before her.
On they came, a torrent slashing at village folk who stumbled out from their homes as the great horns blared.
As clear as full moonlight, she saw a skeletal hand emerge from the blackness of the foremost Wraith, marveled at the radiant, jeweled ring heavy upon one finger, and saw a power of angry red light emerge from that hand to blast the gates asunder. She was thrown aside, tumbled and rolled, and only regained her feet to face the Wraiths as they swept past. “Halt!” she cried.
To her amazement, the last of the Wraiths suddenly reined his horse and turned to her. The horse’s nostrils poured plumes of smoky breath in the chill air. The Wraith spurred and came before her. He bent over, long robe flowing down, his face obscured in the shadow, and hissed, “A halfling-lass, is it?”
She tried to take a swipe with her sword, but her arm moved like honey in a Frighten January. She felt herself being lifted by some force, like a cold, grasping cloud all about her. The power drew her to the cowl beneath which hid something she did not want to see. She stared into that blackness as the bony hand slowly pulled back the shroud.
She had no voice to give release to the terror she saw.
The bubble bath slowly collapsed and the water grew still. Cadence sat thinking about the unspooling mystery of Ara. Who was she? Did she survive? After what she’s facing, who am I to fret at storms and cabbies?
