___
Cadence put down the last yellow sheet and looked at the bedstand clock. It rationed out barely audible tocks, struggling to hold back what now seemed a breackneck, falling-forward stumble of time.
She looked over at Osley and he nodded back to her. Each knew what day it was. Each could sense in the quiet of early morning a coming change that compressed all the trick or treats, jack-o-lanterns, and Batman and Sarah Palin costumes into the crude ox-horn funnel of an ancient time. A time that might spill forth shadows capering in silhouette before a roaring night fire high and wild, sparks intermingling with stars, fed by the rich fat of a meat-harvest bonepile. A time when walls dissolved and secret gates swung open, creaking and untouched. A moment of passage and peril.
The tocks slowed and stopped for a full second.
Ca-ching!
The both jumped. Ching! … ca-chi— Cadence pounced on the room phone and ripped the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello!”
She listened, then spoke. “Yes. That’s me. … What? … What! … Yes! I’ll be right there.”
Osley stood up, his hands out, palms up. A big “what?” expression on his face.
“Someone broke into my room!”
She stopped mid-stride and they both yelled out loud, “The valise!”
She ran for the door, closing it with a muffled “Osley, don’t go anywhere!”
Sixty seconds earlier, Barren had stood, deeply frustrated. He regarded with a calm and deadly focus the entirety of an overturned hotel room. It has to be here! Pillow feathers still floated in the air. A few graced his shoulders and mohawked hair. A set of drawers from the dresser lay in a shambled heap. The dresser itself was tipped over on its back. Mattresses were askew on the bed frame. Perhaps he had been too intense in his search, too noisy. Too careless, he thought. The insistent knocks on the door continued. “Ms. Grande? Hello, Ms. Grande?” The meddlesome authority of this inn was now present and interference— unwanted, unsought but here—had to be reckoned with. If he could not find the documents he would take care of them otherwise. As for their troublesome steward, Cadence, well, he had tarried too long. There were other emissaries here he could call on, oh yes.
He took from his pocket a simple little box, the size of a coffee cup. In it was a crumple of paper, well soaked in a foul incendiary brew of Barren’s own devising. He put it on the floor of the closet, then put a small candle on it and lit the wick. He walked to the door, released the security latch and waited. The key card lock clicked to green and the door swept open even as he hid behind it.
Framed in the doorway was the officious manager of the Algonquin, his hand poised to knock and his eyes like saucers. To his side hovered his sidekick, the hotel detective. “Ms. Grande?” the manager muttered as his neck craned forward and side to side to better see the destruction.
They stepped into the room, stunned by the disaster, as if an angry tornado had compressed its entire energy into the suite. The manager picked up the phone up off the floor. His eyes wide, cataloging the destruction, he handed the phone to the detective. “Call her other room, 608, and tell her this room has been broken into.” They were oblivious to the barely audible swish of Barren departing the room.
The little candle flame flickered, almost down to the crumple of paper.
It took Cadence one minute to sprint to the elevator and go to the fourteenth floor. As the door started to open, everything happened at once. The doors froze half-open. The elevator gagged to a stop. She piled out of the doors into a smoke-tinged hallway.
A siren klaxoned an idiot, up and down warble followed by three whoops, again and again. To her right, alternating red and white strobes flashed above the open stairwell door. The hotel manager and another man were in the stairwell, coughing and yelling for her to follow. A sign above the door suddenly lit up and flashed a sequence of “Emergency Exit” and “Do Not Use the Elevator.” On and on. The ceiling sprinkler system was dribbling and coughing, ready to burst but somehow stalled. Her room door was open, and from it the fire, fresh and hot, was having its way. It receded for a moment, keeping one tongue on the doorframe as if inviting her in for a visit. She knew that in there lurked the smoking, apocalyptic man, the one that took her father. Now it wanted her. Ara, the surviving remnants of her existence stashed in the valise, was in there too.
Cadence could see from her angle, as smoke rolled out and flames danced around, that the room had been ransacked. Maybe this Barren had already found the valise. Maybe he had simply left his fiery cohort to cover his tracks and entertain pesky Cadence. But maybe not.
She had never stepped toward a big fire in her life. She quailed, adrenaline dumping thousand-volt juice into her raw senses and psyche. The reptilian complex of her brain was screaming over and over. Run! was all could she hear.
And she found herself at the threshold to the room.
The fire sucked back and she saw him, black and smoldering, almost grinning, with eyes that showed the flickering red flames behind him. He waited for her in the back of the room on the far side of the bed. He made a polite and almost courtly gesture, bowing with his arm outstretched.
The mockery of it all! She lunged forward, knowing that staying low was her only chance. She lizard-crawled to the bed. She squirmed underneath as far as she could, feeling the temperature that here seemed wretchedly, falsely cool. Her feet, sticking out from under the bed frame, felt like they were on a charcoal grill. She stretched for the area behind the headboard, groping, trying to feel anything. Nothing. Just empty space. The heat was growing exponentially. She felt like a stick figure made of tinder wood. In any second she would burst into flame, pirouetting as she rolled on the floor.
Then her fingers felt a leather corner. She pushed herself, reached further. Her hand was getting a grasp when the bed moved. The fire-man was lifting off the mattresses to get her! The bed frame skooched away from the wall and the valise fell into her hands. It was hot and seeped smoke, but it felt intact. She wriggled back, crawdadded out from under the bed, and made for the door.
She looked back and the smoking thing lifted a flaming Hotelier Quality Sleep-Eze King Size Double Coil Top Mattress and flung it across the room like a feather pillow. The thing roared and jumped up and was now astride the bed, standing on the bottom mattress. It was pissed off and coming for her.
Cadence got to her feet and ran blindly. She slammed into the hallway wall and got up and ran for the flashing exit sign. She clutched the valise with both arms, for all the world looking like a somewhat cooked version of the lost Professor Tolkien wandering through Idlewild Airport so many years ago. Behind her, a blast of fire surged out of the room.
She made it three more steps before the ceiling sprinklers came on full force. Then, underneath the sirens, came sounds of elemental struggle, fire and water, heat and cold, vapor and steam, rage and deluge.
Her clothes emitted a smoky steam, her hair felt frizzled, but as she bounded down through the acrid air in the stairwell, she was exultant. She had faced up to her deepest fear, and she was alive. She had beaten the smoldering man! She also had saved Ara, now safely tucked away in the valise under her arm.
Now she was going to get some final answers
She disregarded the evacuation alarms and returned by the stairs to Osley’s room, wired with adrenaline and wanting truth. She threw the valise on the bed as he looked at her, smoky and stinky and wet. His mouth and eyes were big Os and he was dumbstruck … and defenseless. Just what she wanted. She came up close and looked hard at him. Osley, the One-Eyed Jack. It was time to see the other side of that card.
“So, Mr. Osley, now they’re trying to kill me, but I’m not going to let them. And I’ve got some serious questions for you.”
He tried to move away, but the desk and chair and bed hemmed him in.
“You know my grandfather disappeared a year ago today?”
He nodded yes.
“You know these documents, especially this ‘Elf,’ have a power to confuse?”
He nodded again, almost in resignation to the coming third-degree.
“You know that something wants to destroy the documents, and Ara, and if necessary, you and me?”
The nod.
“But you’re not telling me everything, are you?”
Sideways nod. Head down.
“So what is it, Osley, what’s your secret? And don’t try to get all Shakespeary on me!”
He started to open his mouth.
“And don’t tell me I should pack up and go. I’m not leaving till I find my grandfather, and he’s somewhere, somehow hidden in this murk. I can feel it. So, now, damn it! Talk!”
“I am just … Osley.”
“I know that. That’s not all. The truth!”
“I am a fugitive.”
“Cut the crap. The real truth.”
“I am a wanderer.”
“Damn you, fess up. Did you do something to him?”
“I don’t know.”
She did the unthinkable. She slapped him, hard.
At that instant the fire alarms stopped. The sound of the slap ricocheted through the room.
Osley took the deep breath of the penitent and held it. It sighed out as if, finally in his life, there were no place to go.
“Very well, I will tell you.”
At last, she thought, the card is about to be flipped over.
“OK …”
“I am he.”
“What?”
“Him … Jess … your grandfather.”
Her face went blank. Wheels and gears tried to mesh, to comprehend what he just said. Then the gears clenched together and there were storm clouds in her narrowed eyes. Lightning flashed.
“This is no joke, Osley. Quit screwing with my head. It’s not helpful, especially now.”
“It’s true. Just that simple.”
She tried to pick out his lie. “My grandfather had legs of steel. No limp or hitch in his walk.”
“The night I disappeared, a blade thrust into me. It never really healed. I got out through the trap door.”
Cadence thought of the iron ring in the floor, the open trapdoor showing the creek side brush, the cloven doorframe.
“You don’t look like him.”
He looked up. “How would you know? What picture have you seen? Shave off my beard, cut my scraggly hair. I’m him, your dad’s dad.”
“No one ever mentioned the name Osley.”
“No? What’s a name, and what can be more easily invented, or discarded? Why did I wander and hide my identity for years? Why did I, Jess, never get a driver’s license?”
She felt herself sliding down a slope, struggling between doubting him as an extravagant imposter and wanting to yell, “Why did you leave?” Instead, she heard her uncertain voice saying: “But you were a teacher. Here. All the Tolkien stuff.”
“Absolutely true. All of it. He, Tolkien, was here. He entrusted the documents, the ones you hold, to me. To whom else could he? He left and, given my past and what I held, I knew I had to disappear as completely as possible. I had learned the trade of sharpening from one of the last itinerant practitioners in the Bronx. He gave me my sharpening machine. So I left and never really stopped, except for a few years, which is where you come in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met Brigette, your grandmother. We got married. We had a child. His name was Arnold. Arnie.”
As she looked at him she almost cocked her head, trying to see her Dad. She couldn’t resist making a little jump to belief: “You left them. You were the one who was never there.”
“Yes. I failed. Both of them. I failed the very chance in life I took as my own. I only stopped wandering when I thought I could, when my own demons and those in these papers seemed to rest. I finally stopped and hid out in plain sight. In Topanga.”
“I think you’re a consummate, no … psychotic, liar.”
“I am totally that. But not just now. Do you want some ironclad proof?”
“Yes.”
“First, your keychain, the tooth. It’s a talisman. I hope its still there in the valise. I received it from a shaman’s son in Montana. Second, your dad had a purple birthmark on the left cheek of his ass. He … he loved fossils. He had a collection of shark’s teeth. He said ‘crik’ instead of ‘creek.’”
Her head swirled. She was slipping toward a tentative “maybe this is all true” stage. “You better not be lying.”
She told him about the fiery encounter in her room.
“Look, Cadence,” he almost said granddaughter, but the word was too awkward. “Time is moving against us. This Elvish is too true, too important, but that’s not the point. I fled from it. To save you. Now you’re here. You’re in mortal danger, more than you know. You must go. Now!”
“Cut and run? Leave? After I’ve found you?” Some part of her wanted to put her arms out, two fragile overtures, but her heart still held them back. He stood there stiff and awkward. Long moments passed.
She couldn’t call him “Jess”. Maybe she never would. Still, she felt a growing calmness. She rubbed away emerging tears. “Whoever you are, this is all too much.”
“Cadence, we don’t have much time now. That … man could come back. He will try again.”
She thought for a second and pointed at the valise. “And what about Ara?”
“Those documents are like a signal fire now. No matter where you go, they will track and find you. They are terrible. Leave the documents here, at least for tonight.”
She stared at him.
“Come on, you trusted me an hour ago. I’m still the same. Take a break.”
She nodded. “OK. For a little while. I’m going downstairs. I’m sure the manager is a whistling teakettle. I bet he’ll have the concierge hook me up with whatever I need. Clothes, new room—first floor this time. They will want to get the fire inspectors in to confirm the flash fire is out. Get them in and out and keep this whole thing low profile. Not great for business. I don’t want to go anywhere else tonight. But hovering around with the documents won’t work. We are both hostages to this. There has to be some other way. Think.”
“I’m not sure Barren and his types behave by the rules we’d like. He has been sent here, through that pool. He won’t stop until he has retrieved all the documents. Maybe there’s something that we can use against him, it. I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it.”
“Grandpa”—it sounded so weird—“I can’t think anymore. I gotta try to unwind. Lay down, get some sleep.”
“Sure. Police and firemen are all over the building. He won’t come again tonight. I’ll be out early in the morning to attend to some things. If I decide to leave as well, to go with you, there are people to see, things to do before I depart. Be careful and let’s meet in the lobby. After you get some rest.”
“OK.” She looked at him, but her eyes glazed and her mind couldn’t find a forward gear. She was exhausted. She left to go downstairs and he shut the door. Even bone-tired, some heretofore unknown part of her felt lighter.
Cadence awoke with a start. She was in her new room. God! It was only five a.m. She felt Ara’s destiny ticking away. Whatever she and her grandfather decided, it only seemed to forestall Ara’s destruction. As she lay thinking on the bed, the noise of the sleeping city combined with the hotel’s vintage plumbing. Car beeps, sirens, hums, gurgles of something she’d rather not think about flowing through pipes in the walls inches from her head. Something, somewhere, tapped on the pipes. Whose that trip-trapping on my bridge? She let her ears search for sounds. Someone was walking down the hall. Creaking floor joists and carpet shuffles.
The creaking sound stopped outside her room. A shadow lurked at the bottom of the door, followed by that unmistakable quieter-than-quiet sound, when you know that someone is listening.
The shadow moved. She rose and watched in horrified slow motion as an envelope slid under the door. This was not the hotel bill.
She stepped quietly to the door and looked through the peephole. There was only the fisheye view of an empty hallway, and no creaking sound of anyone walking away. Making sure the chain was hooked, she partially opened the door. Looking out as far as she could without opening the door any further, all she could see was the long, empty hall. There was no sound of the elevator bell, no muffled footsteps padding down the fire exit.
She closed and relocked the door and picked up the envelope. Tasteful stationary. Expensive. Vanilla-colored finish. Immaculately sealed. Unmarked except for:
An Invitation for Cadence
She rubbed sleep from her eyes and sat down on the bed and opened the envelope. It held one page, newly folded. On it was written in fine script:
Cadence,
It is my pleasure to extend to you a request to join our society. We believe we share many interests in common. Our name is the Society of the Rings, but we are so much more. Do you yearn for that luminous, greater truth, and have not found it in family, friends, education, religion or career? Our search is not based on the demeaning, ritual insistence of “proofs,” but on the certainty that there exists a truth to match this inner yearning.
Visit us, if you please. We await your arrival.
Sincerely,
The Talisman Store
Riverside Drive
There was no street number. On the bottom, written in rough blockish letters, was a last inducement:
“We have the power to save both of you.”
Jess … Os, she thought. They will track each of us down if we don’t give all this up.
She was still too tired to think. She forced herself to lie back down. If sleep would not find her again, she would search for it. As it finally crept toward her, she put her fear to the side.
She got up five hours later and called Bossier Thornton. She explained what happened, in simple terms. Just the facts. The fire. The note. The new room. As they talked he tried online to find the “Talisman Store” and an address, but came up with nothing.
He put her on hold for a moment, and then came back. “Cadence, I just checked. The Algonquin night clerk is off duty and can’t be reached. The staff could’ve delivered the note. I know you will be talking with the assigned police and fire officers, but I want to sit down with you. I can’t get there till early evening. Say six. I could buy you dinner.”
“Thanks, you got a date, Officer Thornton.”
By one o’clock the fawning concierge had definitely hooked her up—swagged and fed and clothed and spa’d. She had on a brand new Chrome Hearts exercise outfit and Adidas running shoes. More important, she had open accounts, courtesy of the Algonquin. One was waiting at Macy’s—another of those purses? Another account waited at—all right! Bergdorf’s.
She would get a new purse, some hot shoes and, hell, a complete new wardrobe.
But before that, she had to take a mental break. A short fog-clearing vacation from everything. A freewheeling run might work. Let it take her wherever it might lead. She hadn’t jogged since she discovered the stacks of journals in her grandfather’s attic, in what now seemed to be another world, long ago.
She recalled sitting there in the attic with the yellow circle of the flashlight, feeling the ebb and flow of a tide of family questions that demanded answers. Now she had the start of some answers. Time might fill in details if they had that luxury. She had to decide her next steps, think about returning to Topanga with her grandfather, think about how to protect Ara’s story. More than that, how to keep Ara alive.
Time for practical action, she thought. I’ll take a run and get control of all this.
An hour later her feet had taken her to West Seventieth and Broadway. A slight breeze freshened the air that still felt cleansed by overnight rain. It was one of those days when sunlight showed off a bit, splaying broad stripes on buildings and dappling the pavement through leafy tree branches.
She kept jogging. A diner loomed in front of her. Big, steam-fogged windows and patrons posed like an afternoon version of Night Hawks.
She turned right and Broadway opened up, gently curving, lined with buildings leaning toward uptown like a Robert Crumb comic.