“One final warning: their power lies in the Quintessence, distilled and altered from the Source, and hoarded by the Dark Lord. The rings, over which great struggles unfold, are but tokens of its power. It is the acid that will devour the theater stage that is the platform of all mortals. Destroy that, return it back to the Source, and you will save this world and the next. Ara must not fail. Her story must not fail.
They will destroy me soon, along with this account should they discover it.”
Bois-Gilbert intervened. “A tale indeed, should anyone believe it. Now, madam, your conclusion.”
“This now-hidden text, as originally written, was something to be hunted down and destroyed, or erased. My theory, unproven for now, is one of delicious irony: the indecipherable text that is visible may be a history of the victory or defeat of the Dark Elves. Which it is, we may never know.”
Bois-Gilbert cut to the chase. “Madame, your verdict?” “Alas, since on their face they are in what you call ‘Elvish,’ which we are unable to decipher, we are, I say with regret, stymied. The Old English substratum, of course, admits of a clear scientific judgment.”
A long fermata followed.
“I am unable … to declare the documents … false.”
Bleep. A big green check mark flashed on behind her.
Madame Litton now leaned forward, speaking directly to Cadence. “What is more important is where we go from here. There is a mystery waiting to be revealed. I have asked our esteemed host to … what’s the expression? Ah yes, ‘up the ante.’ Present us, Mademoiselle Grande, with the full documentation, all the originals, for our scientific review. Let our television viewers get to the bottom of this mystery. We shall increase … your prize for their delivery to … the amount … of …” She turned to cue Bois-Gilbert, who once more produced the leather bag and finished her sentence in one practiced, masterful sweep, “One hundred thousand dollars!”
The bag plopped to the floor with a louder sound than before. Bricks, probably, Cadence mused. She involuntarily stared at it, letting the cameras around her sniff and feed with gluttonous ravening on what they most craved — a real, unalloyed display of the most fundamental human emotions, fear and greed.
She couldn’t help thinking about giving in. Give up the damn papers. The whole pile. Take the money and go home. Leave Ara to her own fate. Save your grandfather’s estate, maybe look for other clues, but basically call it a day. He’s gone, right?
Time flowed around her like a river sweeping by a rock. It was getting to be too long. They needed an answer, a reaction. They needed dessert after the pig-out.
Bois-Gilbert had a nose for how to get what he wanted. Just a private little chat off-camera to allow the milking of this situation. He signaled the stage manager to call a break.
“Suspendez!”
The crew milled around and the panel of experts all began to smoke.
Cadence could feel a second-hand smoke headache coming on.
She got up, swept the three pages into her bag and picked up her coat by the door. Then she walked out — out the studio door, out the steel door, and straight to the elevator.
“Hey!” A production assistant came running up, followed by Bois-Gilbert. “You cannot leave; we are in the middle of shooting!”
“I’m the one getting shot. Save your televised execution, Brian. You can finish the pilot with the footage you got. You know — me sweating, me biting my tongue, me looking guilty. Just finish her speech and edit it all together. Get to Mel for the details.”
“But!”
“Oh,” she paused as the elevator door opened. “I don’t want the money.”
She turned and entered the elevator. The doors closed as Brian stood there, his mouth widening into a big silent Wait!
She decided not to return directly to the Algonquin. Let Osley do his translating thing for awhile. She found her way to a restaurant called Zimbabwe. She expected some Disney-like images of the Great Harare Temple, but found only a long room fronted with battered tables and chairs, and a kitchen in back that smelled like a village. She ordered a porridge-like vegetable soup. This is perfect, she thought, a break from all the over-wrought English-ness and French forensics hocus-pocus that were clinging to her like competing vines of ivy. With this bit of perspective, she pondered the thin dossier of credibility left to this whole affair. What proofs were there? The documents seemed to be related to Tolkien. Two sources, Les Inspecteurs and Mr. Bossier’s little machine, said that some of them were indeed old. But what was the meaning of it all? Could she count on a few fragments of readable text and, thinnest of all, the translations of an eccentric homeless man — the only person in the world who knows Elf? What kind of case was that? There were, as she considered it, only two things that kept her indulgence going. Her grandfather, his fate hidden but exquisitely close in this maze, and Ara. Somehow they were connected. One would lead to the other. And wouldn’t it be a damn shame if Ara were somehow real and then got erased, just for lack of belief?
She let all the pieces float around like lazy, deflating helium balloons. Today her mind could accept that perhaps the spider was just an illusion down in the dark and confusing subway tunnel. And the feeling of being stalked? Just a case of nerves built upon all this hoodoo pressure.
No matter how hard she tried, the prospect of going home in defeat seemed less like an option and more and more like an inevitable result. A few tantalizing tidbits but basically empty-handed. Her grandfather, Ara, the meaning of the documents, all untethered to any real evidence. Maybe Os was totally right, Mirkwood giveth and taketh away.
She couldn’t just hang out here forever. She thought of the practicalities: money, job, getting a life. OK, I’ll stay four more days. Till the anniversary of his disappearance. Halloween. Then I’ll pick up and go home. I’ll take the documents and Ara with me.
She finished with an exotic tea and milk concoction and headed back to the Algonquin, ready to check on The Os.
Chapter 27
OCTOBER 27. 5:10 P.M
She got to the hotel an hour later. She brought Osley up to speed on Les Inspecteurs — skipping the part about the money bag. She finished with Madame Litton’s revelation of the recovered pleas of Oruntuft.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“It could be important, or just a madman’s metaphysical ramblings, erased because it deserved to be.”
She looked at him; he was oblivious to the irony of who was a madman.
“For now, it all seems way behind the scenes. If you look at it hard enough, anything, everything becomes a conspiracy. People want to know what makes evil. And they won’t hesitate to make something up. Dark Elves, Beelzebub, Cain, Moriarity, Dick Cheney, whatever. Who can tell what fuels the Dark Lord’s ravening, or who controls whom? He is a monster, a world killer in his own right. I suspect Ara is going to have to deal with him. Which may tell us why he, someone, is trying to destroy her. In any case, it brings us back to her journey.” He held up a sheath of yellow pages. “You see, after Ara left the cave she headed into some very … well, here, you read it,”
Cadence took his hand-scrawled notes and read:
Within a half day after leaving the cave and finding the enchanted pool which revealed a young woman’s face, Ara came fully into the southern lands. It was a place fitfully wooded and beset by a wind that moaned tuneless, brooding and fearful. She came to a merestone, its great rock obelisk pointing upward like a craggy finger. Its exclamation seemed to have been long spent. She looked at its ruin and neglect. It seemed an emblem of some long-departed evil whose peculiar roots and seeds perhaps lay still in the soil.