“Ooo-kay, but …”
“And here’s the catch. After I unlock this door,” he had his hand on the steel cage door that ran almost to the top of the arch, “you’re on your own. There’s a sort of diagram of the place over there on the wall, but don’t trust it too much. When people do come down here, they’re always complaining that they got lost. No one’s scheduled down here through this weekend. Not many people know it exists. Anyway, this door only opens from the outside. Entry, no exit. The only way out is down at the far, far end. You’ll find it.”
She wasn’t so sure. He turned the key and pulled open the door with a disquieting heave. After a squeal of rusty iron hinges, he extended his arm to usher her in.
He shut the gate behind her, wished her good luck, and left.
The diagram was in a dusty frame on the wall and wasn’t very helpful. Several labels had been crossed out and written over. She studied it anyway, especially the long corridor that seemed to lead to a stairs down to a warren of stacks that was a virtual maze. Then she stepped around a corner and saw the corridor. It led off into an indistinct haze. Occasional high windows, mullioned and unwashed for decades, dotted one side of the corridor, filtering a thin, grey light past a barrier of dirt and cobwebs. Dust motes floated lazily in the few intact rays. The shadows of tree branches moved like snakes across the linoleum floor.
She stood and stared. This undulating floor, leading down this mystic hallway, was a crossing. Her heart thudded in tandem with jumpy internal juju drums that talked up and down her spine. As she prepared to move forward, she knew her steps, once taken, could not be retraced.
So here I go! She stepped forward with an explorer’s panache.
She made it all the way to the end of the corridor, and then down the dim stairs into the maze of shelving, before she heard the sound.
Like a doe hearing a fallen branch, Cadence froze. In the waiting silence, she recalled and interpreted the sound: the furtive movement of feet and rustle of clothing by someone sneaking. Now the only sound was the hiss of a radiator. It was as if they were waiting — each for the other — with the infinite patience of the hunting ritual. Cadence the Hunted held perfectly still. She looked carefully and made out the shadow of a bookcase, tilted and surreal, along one wall. There was a silhouette attached to it. Tall and thin and still, as if waiting. A man. No mistake.
She couldn’t wait anymore. She grabbed a heavy book off a shelf and stepped forward. Provoke the thing. It did not move. She stepped again and came around the corner of the bookcase. She was met by an untended cart, laden high with books and boxes and casting an improbable shadow. She laughed out of fright. After a moment she turned around to look at different rows of boxes, squinting at the labels, realizing time was moving on. Q … R … S ….
Tolkien’s box, when she found it, was exactly in place and disappointingly small. It was sealed with masking tape that had long since given up its glue to the dry heat from those creaky radiators standing as derelict sentinels along the walls. The tape fell away as she pulled on the lid. As she opened the box, she smelled, amazingly, the earthy scent of pipe tobacco. She saw clumps of partially burned tobacco scattered over a stack of papers, as if carelessly left there by a harried pipe smoker. On top of the papers was a note, precisely placed and long since yellowed. It was scrawled in an unsteady hand that looked like the Professor’s. She turned and moved over to catch the light from an incandescent bulb that looked like it had burned without interruption since Edison.
She unfolded the note. It began, “To Whom May Follow.” She read the note, uncomfortable as an outsider witnessing a private ritual. She paused over Professor Tolkien’s warnings. A “spell” … take heed … a key … Beware … monsters do not depart.
She fingered down through the other papers. There was an article dated 1967 from the University of Leeds Review:
A remarkable document has been discovered in the collection of antiquities found in the estate of the late Grivendall Thurston, Earl of Haymart, and attributed to the library of his great-great-grandfather, the (at the time) notorious eccentric, and now merely famous, “Mad Librarian,” Sir Robert Cotton.
The document apparently was saved from the great fire at the improvidently named Ashburnham House in 1731. The world’s only original of Beowulf also partially survived, scorched and brittle and mingled with other documents, to be lost again for nearly a century. The particular document in question here has been authenticated as an example of Old English poetry dating from 860 AD.
“These things surface from time to time,” said Allison Mansur, the head librarian at Columbia University. “After all, Beowulf itself, so far as we can tell, lay lost and unread for seven hundred years, from the time of the Norman Conquest until its discovery in a Copenhagen library in 1815.”
“But,” he continued, “this specimen is rather remarkable for both its age and its potential place in Anglo-Saxon studies. Some of the material has yet to be translated, due to the strangeness of its symbols, a system not heretofore seen. In a nutshell, it appears to be a lament written by an ancient king in his own hand. The manuscript, as part of the bequest, is housed at Columbia University, where the Earl maintained close ties since his days as an exchange student.”
Stapled behind the article was a page of notes by the Professor:
The manuscript, which I have now translated, is by all indications authentic. That means that it is well over twelve hundred years old. The unaccountable fact, unless I have misplaced my wits somewhere, is that this poem echoes elements of my forty years of writing. Perhaps my musings and myth-creation have not been far off the mark!
Cadence was hungry to see the actual translation. She found the pages and stepped further down the aisle, directly under the bare light bulb. She whispered out loud the Professor’s rendering of those ancient words, the hushed sound spilling over into the empty stacks:
So, the tale of a King can ne’er better be told than by his song.
I am Pazal and this is the ballad of my bitter truth.
Before victory’s wealth brought to me overfilled stores, and slavery and fear to my foes,
Princes, strong of limb, tall and fair, stood with liege-gifts
before me in this great hall.
She skipped down and started again, reading what seemed to be an important passage:
By the rites of ring-giving and vows attendant did we confirm our just roles.
Oh, even by Valar’s measure, was that mead-hall fit for the clouds.
Taller than the trunks of the greatest fir-trees did its timbers soar,
Smiling ranks did my Princes array, even as they spoke with a mighty voice,
“Hail King! Liege-Lord and Defender!
Generous to us beyond our worth’s measure!”
Thus ran the years, in our Kingdom hard by the Western Sea,
Where stood we our sentinels on rocky crag, at forests edge,
and far to the North
On beaches barren but for the sea-monster’s bleached bones.