___
Time did its thing. The foggy, surreal hangover of New York City and Halloween and the rage and the sorrow, all passed. Cadence puttered and planned and took action. She sold the Jaguar and gave the money to the bank in return for a stay of execution on the foreclosure sale.
She reopened the Mirkwood Forest. She rearranged the merchandise and put ads first in the Topanga Messenger and then in the Los Angeles Times. She built a web site, TheMirkwoodForest.com. She applied for real jobs.
Mostly, for the first time in her life, she felt filled-in. There was no more ice pick hole in her mind’s family portrait. The details might be sketchy, but the hole was filled in. A fleeting hug and squeeze of hands with her grandfather would have to do as the patch for a lot of uncertainty. He was there—marooned, missed, bizarre, eccentric, deeply flawed, but with the one redeeming quality she hungered for. He was real, and he had loved her enough to sacrifice himself. She had enough history to stop the questions.
Ara was different. For awhile, Cadence kept those uncertainties with her like the charm bracelet she had as a little girl. Each precious, glittering doubt jingling with her throughout the day. Was the account of her betrayal, her turn to the dark side, just a piece of misinformation? An odd, easily-misinterpreted fragment from the rubble of history? Did she and the Bearer ever go to that Rock by the Sea? Did any fragment of her existence yet survive to be unearthed by some future Tolkien-like mythologist? Would she ever, however imperfectly, be rendered again?
Cadence realized that the answers were all no. Her elusive grandfather and Ara, along with the mystical, Mirkwoodian magic of Elvish, had all finally winked out of this world.
So that left one more tidying up task, from which some slight perverse pleasure might arise. Getting on his calendar was a snap this time, even though she had to wait for him to get back in town. Monday, two weeks from now, she had an appointment with Mel.
On the next day, Saturday morning, Cadence opened the Forest at ten. A clear morning when the canyon’s first (perhaps only) true frost of the season promised a crisp, mild day. The ocean below would be sparkly and bright, and its clean smell would waft all the way up to Topanga.
The bell over the door tinkled as a first customer wandered in. She was in the back of the store but briefly peered out and yelled “Good morning!” A man was by the front window with his back to her, checking out the shop. He whistled a singsong tunelet as he bent over to inspect the Abbott and Costello shakers in a glass case. Buzz cut, gray hair, Hawaiian shirt. Tourist.
She hibernated the computer sitting on the calico tablecloth. As she got to the front counter the tourist had wandered off to inspect the Vintage Vinyl section she had put in.
She fussed at the counter, looking down through the top glass as her hands re-arranged the perfect boxed Barbies. She saw a man’s hand come to rest on the counter.
“Do you still have Riker’s Island comic books?”
She froze, sensing the image of Barren, his leering wolfen face gathering up like a conjured demon. With one swoop he would uproot her from this soil and send her off to roll like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. How? She thought. Not here.
She looked up. Instead of the gloating face of Barren, a never-before seen version of Jess Grande was there. Clean-shaven, but older, more worn, creases and crags etched deeper into a face previously hidden.
She was stunned. Her eyes took it all in before she could react. “Grandpa!” She screamed, flying around the counter to grab him. “What! How?”
“Shush. Shush. All in good time.” She stepped back and held his hands, old and new entwined, and looked at him. What she saw, even in that first study by her artist’s eye, was a man emptied out. It was as if he had been scraped hard on the inside by some terrible and primitive tool. What was left, she would see.
The first installment of “all in good time” came an hour later. They sat at the kitchen table and he told her what little he could recall, ending with the end.
“So, I had it all along. The document we talked about.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The scruffy piece of leather. It was the Vow. Rings have no power unless the promises that accompany their giving are honored. This was a Vow of Protection and it was a coin that the Dark Lord had given long ago. As the holder, even as I gave up the Tolkien documents, that coin was bound to be honored. I suspect it may have been given originally to Pazal. Or perhaps not. Somewhere in those documents, never found by us, may have been something of that tale. The point is that the Vow was given, a deal was sealed. The rest we’ll never know now.”
“Like a get out of jail free card. Or the Letters of Transit in Casablanca.”
“Except this was real.”
Cadence relaxed her watchful eye and laughed from a depth of peace that surprised her. “Yeah. Real. I believe … for real.”
* * *
That night the man once known as Barren ate somewhere at three in the morning sitting on a stool in a diner called The Eat. After that, he walked out and hitched a ride to anywhere.
Anywhere ended up being Texas City, Texas. He stood at night on a bridge over a dredged canal, beneath a drooping yellow sky.
There it was, a vast world clear to the hazy horizon of interweaving pipelines, tanks sized from hills to horses, valves, gauges, flanges, heat exchangers, absorbers, pumps, containment pits, shacks and metal buildings, all overlaid with soot and black pools of oil and water and crud. Behold a wonder, a hundred, nay a thousand, giant flares whooshing, roaring, lighting anew like a never-ending fireworks display. He stood there, his pupils wide with awe, the flares reflecting in his eyes like a coal sack of troll candles.
The next night he was far away. The sky dark as upon it floated a barnacled moon sculling on a flow-tide of black clouds. He pulled the small leather pouch from within his shirt and opened it as it hung from the cord around his neck. He dug deep with his fingers, as if trying to catch a living thing. Finally he pulled out his hand and opened his fist. There gleamed a simple ring, silver-hued, almost smoky in color. Its only adornment was the restless flow of rich, satiny hues in its surface, like the folds of a wizard’s robe.
He had not looked at it until this moment. He had kept it secure in its pouch. He suspected it had an august heritage, perhaps once intended by the Dark Lord for some unsuspecting king, some future wraith. He knew to wear it was perilous so long as he walked within the reach of that power.
But now he felt beyond that realm. His errand he had acquitted well. The meddlesome fragments of Elvish, including much of the Tale of Ara, were now cast out to their destruction. A shame, but unavoidable if he was to, as they say here, be his own man. He knew that the ring was responsible for the quicksilver increase in his ability to learn and speak their language. Perhaps magic would come of it. He took it from his palm and put it on his left index finger.
He breathed deep and focused on his surroundings.
The night was coming. He stood in the middle of a crossroads over which trees leaned, so massed and drooped with kudzu as to be unrecognizable except as the hulking shapes of night ogres. A few late fireflies played in the boughs and made momentary eyes among the leaves.
Here, he thought, is a place where souls pay an evil tithe or be taken.
He imagined the crunch of gravel, forewarning a legion of his otherselves trudging the road this sultry night, coming to each take back their piece of him.
He looked about, pondering the itinerant’s question: whether some escape, some secret gate lay within these bordering thickets.
He knew that world and those times were gone, and no escape waited in this world.
With that, he chose a direction and began to walk swiftly away. He accelerated to an easy jog, his aspirations high. In his head played the theme from Shaft, the sixteen-note Motown high hat, Isaac Hayes funking up the tempo. “Whoo is the man …”
He had a further errand to attend to. A bit of evening things up. Something he alone had devised.
In a moment he was at a distance from the crossroads, another itinerant disappearing forever into the Great American Night.