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Standing in the lobby in the Algonquin there was a grandfather clock, a staid Edwardian sentinel with a gleaming brass pendulum. It had faithfully kept its watch, ticking and tocking and chiming, since the grand opening of the hotel over a century earlier. If one listened closely, the arc of its pendulum to the right sounded a distinctive clunk. Like Os, there was a hitch in the old man’s gait.
Cadence sat in the lobby across from the embered fireplace and listened. She couldn’t help it. The swinging pendulum signaled to her the remaining days of her own watch. Two more days and her stay would end with a long, black train ride back across the fading autumn of America. She had done all she could for a thin skein of hard information and no results on her search for Jess.
She checked on Osley at seven. He was already fully at it, scribbling, hunched over on his desk, uncommunicative and haggard. As she started to slip out the door, she paused and looked back.
There was no doubt about it. The man’s circuits were frying. Soon, perhaps before she left this town, he would crash. He wouldn’t blow. He would just frizzle out in a fitful spray of sparks and sputters and stinky blue smoke, like that old Emporia mixer her mom once had.
As she poised there, still looking, she saw more. Her inner sketch-artist framed him in charcoal, his hand holding up his head, the desk lamp spilling soft chiaroscuro light on his face and the curious papers spread before him. The imagined sketch was titled. Too Full of Secrets.
She would give him another hour and then go up and insist that he take a break. Until then, she would sit down here and commiserate with the clunking grandfather clock.
Across from her, on what she guessed was his own reserved chair, Heraclitus nestled. The hotel mascot regarded her with passing interest, then blinked and turned away, a rude dismissal that seemed to say, “Dog-Person.”
She watched him and thought of graymalkin, the cat named by the strange creeker man in Topanga. That seemed ages ago.
Heraclitus was right, though. Growing up, her household did favor dogs. Nonetheless, the neighborhood felines secretly parlayed with the canines to achieve first an uneasy truce, and then entry into the house.
The terms were direct: dog sovereignty and primacy in all things that matter: food, attention from the humans, first passage down hallways, and guaranteed periodic and unexplained absence of all cats.
Of course, right from the start, the cats breached these terms as often as they honored them. Once they were in, they were in. Like many a sovereign that bought such peace, the dogs rued their bargain and saw their position steadily erode over time. At a notable low point, one really dumb family dog got relegated to sleeping outside on the porch as the cats gloated at him from inside the windows.
One day her father brought home an ocelot kitten acquired through some carnie black-market connivings. It had never seen a South American jungle. It grew to fifteen pounds of amiable human companion and pure dynamite-wild tomcat to others. It took no part of dog-cat treaties. Then one day it disappeared. They never saw it again, but for years there thrived in the canyon obvious crossbreeds whose ferocity, size, feral instincts, and hybrid vigor began a reign of terror over local dogs. These cats were a rare, stand-up match for squads of coyotes that had grown fat on tabby dining.
The topic of “Cats in History” came to Cadence as a paper in her high school World Civ class. She discovered the Great Cat Disappearance of the Dark Ages. As Christianity evolved, cats were viewed as demonic agents. They were rounded up and dispatched as surely and cruelly as Romans undid Christians. Tortured, eviscerated, burned alive, thrown from towers, cats became all but extinct in the growing towns and feudal kingdoms of Europe. And at just that time, rats and mice found the two requisites of vermin paradise: easy food and, ssshh N-O C-A-T-S.
A plague of rats came, carrying a cargo of fleas, ushering in the Black Death.
So, after experiencing a forty-per-cent mortality, people lost interest in persecuting cats. They become tolerated, albeit with lingering suspicion, and things got better.
Cadence read these echoes in Shakespeare, who, keen to our basest human superstitions, had cat-loving witches and suspect cats to have fun with. He knew the deep disquiet occasioned when cats go forth lean and high-shouldered, posing as black-paper cut-outs arched on picket fences before a full moon. He knew our suspicion that cats slither through cracks in brambled gates to congregate in unholy rituals, there to flow as outlandish shapes malevolent beyond fantasy. Thus do cats conspire with evil where none can bear witness.
As if reading her thoughts and impatient with them, Hera-clitus looked at the fire and blinked. The fire erupted in green and purple flames. Cadence looked at him and said with raised eyebrows, “Did you do that?” Heraclitus yawned and licked his paws. But in that blink Cadence thought she saw a multi-hued fire of warning.
Whatever it was, she would heed it. She got up and took the elevator. When she got to Osley’s room she knocked. He let her in. He was holding two pages in front of him, gazing first at one then the other. He looked like a man who had rolled the bones and seen his death sign.
“Os, are you OK?”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Tell me what you’re seeing or I’m going to bonk you with this lamp!”
He put the papers down solemnly and looked over at her. “We’re in trouble, Cadence. More than I thought.” Then he again stared at the pages. “I’m going to read you the first one. It’s short. It’s in beautiful Elvish, by someone that seems to have the power to see at least some of the future. I may stumble a little, but here goes:
The fate of the tale of the hobbittess lies at a time and place distant even to my eyes. The world changes now with breathless speed, and much will be sundered from our influence and concern. But this I have seen: Holder will be the Hunted. Alansis!
“I think,” he interrupted, “that last word is a colloquialism, an imprecation like a ‘God Be With Them’ sort of phrase. So then it finishes with:”
May they sense the monsters that follow.
“What is that about?”
“It’s a warning beacon. Buried right in these texts. Putting the documents back together with the translation key just upped their power to attract these, what did it say, monsters. I think this is real. This isn’t shadows in the subway or a fairy tale or a video game. There may be no second chance, no restart.” “So what’s the other page say?”
“Here, you read it. It’s a note, probably from Tolkien, probably never sent. It was paper-clipped to the piece I just read.”
She picked the page up. It was undated, but in the familiar scrawl of the Good Professor Tolkien:
Jack,
Your point on the lectures is well taken, though some may not take it well. We shall see. As we discussed last Tuesday at the Bird and Baby, the approach of All Hallows Eve increasingly fills me with a dread that isn’t about Hollywood monsters.
It’s about something both ancient and unsettling. I have found a translation tool for much of this trove of documents. Use of it has unnerved me, for I fear that some, at least, of this Elvish must be the work of Dark Elves that make merry with caprice and ill-luck to others. It may be far worse; they may seek to forge a portal into our own time, into our very midst. The crux is this. The intensity of this damnable pile increases every fall, peaking on All Hallows, that ancient pre-Christian time, like the rise of some marauding fen-beast from the wastes below the keep.
Let’s hope I am just imagining things again. More when next we see each other.
JRRT
As she put the page down, he said out loud, “Don’t you see? We’re the Holder. We’re the Hunted!” He was losing it. She could almost smell the fried rotors in that old Emporia mixer.
She decided to stop the madness, at least temporarily. “Os, you’re at burnout. Put down the paper and pen. Stand up and walk out the door. We’re going to sit down and have a nice, civil lunch. As usual. On Mel.”
They convened in the Round Table Room. The same waiter fussed agreeably over them. They munched on designer bread, and didn’t begin to talk until the soup came. She waited until they agreed that the bean and ham soup was quite nice.
“Os, what do you think is going on? You know something.”
As usual, he deflected. “I can tell you the big picture as I see it, and then the situation we are in right now. And, Cadence …”
“What?”
“After I say my piece, will you agree to return home, go somewhere? Leave?”
“I’ll think about it. Now tell me.”
Chilled forks carried by unobtrusive hands came in from the side, along with icy plates of asparagus spears.
Osley began, “Here it is. All boiled down. Let’s indulge the assumption, one held by the majority of people—including Professor Tolkien in his own heart-of-hearts—that all sorts of fantastical things and places do exist, right here in our midst. Indulge, also, the thought that maybe there was once an embodiment of power — a wand or ring or pointy hat or something like that. The name of it—‘Bind’—keeps coming up. Maybe it was evil. But for every ounce of malevolence there was an equal measure of magic bound to it. With its loss went much of the magical power of our little corner of the universe. The twinkle went out.”
He took a swig of iced tea to bolster his pace. “This left a vacuum. The loss of this object did cost the world much. Into that vacuum, evil once again crept—not the evil that bears a capital letter in its name, but evil that is diffuse and cannot be wholly cornered or pegged down. It lives everywhere and compounds the petty and tawdry into horrors that are unnamed and often unnoticed. You can see this everywhere.”
“Try right here. Give me a for-example.”
He held up both hands to form an oval window the size of a football. “Fume, Narcross, the Great Eye that sees all …” then his right hand closed to a smaller circle, “… has been replaced by the little eyes. First TVs, then computer screens, now these phones. They are everywhere. They communicate to all. They speak the perfect hidden language of the pedestrian evil that is the lot of the Fourth Age. This manuscript, and all those who consort with it, are in danger. Someone is uncomfortable with it, not merely for the tale it tells, but with its very physical existence!”
“You think this Elvish keeps some of the original twinkle alive?”
“Most certainly, even though the hands that wrote it will never return.”
“But Ara, her story and her existence …?”
“I’m afraid, whatever we do, her days may be numbered.”
“Why?”
“Do you not suspect the answer? You are the steward of this document. Surely you must see something. Speak up!”
“Well, I’ve thought for a long time …”
“Sometimes Cadence, behind everything there is a question. It may be so hidden we never see it. It may be at the edge of our mind. It may be a whisper on the sea sounds floating up through the long spirals of a shell held to our ear. But not this question. This one is clear. Tell me the blunt question.”
“OK. What happened to the women?”
“Precisely! There must have been a process of censorship. Tolkien was discovering a myth. But myths don’t stay still. Something wants to erase the story of this once-famous heroine.”
“All right, Inspector Os, who is the culprit?”
Osley looked stymied.
Cadence picked up the inquiry, “OK, let’s look at what’s evident. This manuscript maybe, just maybe, fills in something from the Middle Ages, or Middle-earth or Middle somewhere. Take your pick. Or out of the mind of some writer.”
“Or some translator. Is that it? You think I’m making this up?”
“No, Os. You’re a type, just not that type.” Cadence didn’t signal her lingering doubt.
Osley kept on rolling. “Look, Ara was a mover and a shaker. She must have played a role far bigger than we have read so far. That’s the key!”
Cadence thought for a second. “Fine, I’ll play. We’re here eating. Let’s set the rest of the table, a mystery-story dinner to find the culprit. Who are the guests?”
“Well, not the authors of these manuscripts. They could have been participants in the tale, their descendents, or, more likely, historians in later ages. But that’s missing the point.”
“Ara?”
“Yes, at our own end of the table, at the head, is Aragranessa, the famous halfling, daughter of Achen. And you, my dear Cadence, are the Steward and the Holder. You sit at her right hand. Now who shall be our other guests?”
“Professor Tolkien?”
“Ah, yes. Our special guest. Just to stir things up. Let’s seat him in the middle, on Ara’s left, so he needn’t have to take sides.”
“And you, Mr. Osley, where’s your seat?”
“Consider me the maître d’, standing and attending exclusively to this fine table.”
Cadence laughed for a second, then paused. “My grandfather?”
“Yes, Jess. A place set in his honor. Alas, the chair is empty. My dear, you must accept that he probably won’t show. I’m sure he is, well, somewhere, with important things to do.” Osley briskly moved on, finding a new question. “What of your friend, Mel?”
“Yeah, he should be a guest.”
Osley put a finger over his lips in mock concentration. “I think he is … the bus boy. An errand runner for forces as yet unseen.”
“He doesn’t have bosses. He’s an independent agent.”
“There’s no such thing, my dear. Everyone works for the man. Even I, a derelict of the street, serve some masters. Like the gangs that let me come and go unmolested.”
“He doesn’t act that way. He acts like all his angles are his own.”
“Well, for all his façade, he may yet serve as your tool. I know I’m ungrateful. Look at this French dip and julienne fries he’s paying for. Anyway, as to his ‘bosses,’ I know of them, or at least of their kind, and can surmise the rest.”
Osley sat back, savoring the last morsels of roastbif and au jus. “Name a name. Who had long-term access to these writings? Someone that lives a long time.”
She thought she was in tune with him. “The Elves.”
“No. They left and knew they were leaving. Their writings are but a glowing artifact, priceless and radioactive with their power, but not really them.”
“Wizards?”
“Close, but no cigar yet. Someone who had a particular dislike for Ara and her story.”
“So we’re left with only one other suspect, Sherlock.”
“Precisely, Dr. Watson.”
They both leaned over and whispered simultaneously, “The Dark Lord!”
Osley gave a grand gesture. “Then seat him at the far end of the table and order his favorite meal.”
“Anything that’s not on fire. No Baked Alaska!”
He grew solemn. “You know, Cadence your thing with fire. You can’t take vengeance on a thing. Fire, wind, day and night. They are just dumb things.”
She listened but, deep down, she didn’t buy it. Fire was the enemy. A monster that stalked her. If she could, if she had the courage, she would one day confront that monster.
Os kept on talking. “OK, the fun’s over. At stake here is nothing less than the fate of each of the guests, good Professor Tolkien excepted, bless his soul. That means you, Cadence. You cannot stay. The more you seek to help Ara, the greater your danger. You must leave tomorrow.”
“All right, I’ll go. Just as soon as you finish the translations. There aren’t many pages left. Don’t you want to know what happens to Ara?”
“I’ve learned to be cautious about seeking our fates. But so be it. And for you, no wondering around alone in the subways. If something bad happens before I finish, you must leave immediately. Agreed?”
“Check.”