Inside his room, Jess hunched over and translated feverishly. Elvish nuances flowed as if they sensed that time was dear. A familiar figure emerged:
The Wraith Pazal, standing poised on a precipice, steadied himself. Before him was an open shaft, falling to a deep river of lava that boiled beneath Fume.
He had spent a long day assisting his master’s armies as they assembled and departed for battle. Even now, the horns were blowing, summoning him and his brethren.
He had failed as a king. Likewise, he had failed to do his master’s bidding, to find the documents in that other world, or to secure the halflings here in this one. The female halfling had escaped once before, only now to be caught, almost by accident, in the very midst of the marshalling armies. Her capture was an exclamation of failure.
The Dark Lord, his ring-liege, the one who had bestowed this existence upon him, was beyond fury. His very essence flamed and then brooded in smoky coils. His bellow had perhaps been tinged with fear, “The same halfling that you let slip away, now in the center of my hold?” Days of confusion and fruitless disarray had followed.
This but engraved the Wraith’s disgrace deeper in the lore of the Land of the Source — perhaps as deep as the well before him. He had long ago failed as a man governed by his own will. He had abandoned even the nobility of his own mortality.
Across the black land, the horns blew forth, filling every breast with fire and calling the wraiths to war. Criers exhorted the assembled army:
“Come forth and slay the Unbelievers! Wreck and lay havoc to their homes! Burn down their sacred holds! Punish their arrogance! We are the People of the Source!”
Pazal’s ring, Greypoint, clasped his finger as it had for long centuries. It could not be removed from his left hand, though it was now well worn from long use.
In his right hand he held forth Arac, ancestral sword of his house, notched deeply but still gleaming and fearfully sharp.
He let it drop.
It twirled in its descent, its mirrored edges reflecting blood-red gleams. Moments later, there was a single flash as it thrust into the boil.
The final lines of the poem he had written long ago came to him:
For the first time since the ring had grasped his finger, he smiled a genuine smile, without the puppet’s smirk of malice imposed by his master.
He stepped forward into the void, slowly rolling as he fell. Red gleams played out from the ring as it slipped from the finger that hosted it for centuries, and together they passed into the maelstrom of fire.
Jess put down the pen and massaged his cramped hand. He had to keep going. The Elvish tale of Ara’s fate boiled and rolled in the cauldron in which he and Cadence had been cast. Peril weighed their lives on the same scale as the Tolkien documents.
This was his state of mind as he sat in the room at the Algonquin and completed the last chapter of the Tale of Ara.
There was a knock on his door.
Three hours later, Jess Grande cursed Murphy’s Natural Law of Flashlights. His flashlight wavered. Bright. Dim … dim … Shake. Brighter … dimmer … dim.
The soot-covered tracks to the abandoned 130th Street— Blain Place subway stop were strewn with the debris from a flood of time. They led through a smoky junkyard of incongruous objects: grocery store carts, beams of wood, twisted tree branches, lunch boxes, street signs, railroad tools, clothing, loose strata of ancient glass pop bottles and beer cans topped with the froth of plastic beverage containers. And gruesome pod-like trash bags.
Nothing would stop him now.
So he progressed, the light dimming with every fateful step, catching still-life images of cracker boxes and a mangled pair of sunglasses staring back with one dark, all-seeing eye.
He and the dimming flashlight were one, for there would be no return journey.
An hour later, when the flashlight was exhausted, Jess shook it and then let it fall from his hand.
He sat on a wooden box in the storeroom. The thin, purpled light was jeweled with intermittent greasy drops falling from the ceiling grates. He listened to far distant rumbles, car sounds like the cawing of crows.
The pool lay before him, fanning with ripples from each drop. It waited, implacable in its own small completeness.
He waited there, dressed once again and now forever as the homeless man in cast-off clothing, holey socks inside heel-less boots with knotted twine for laces.
Hours passed and the deep breath before the plunge would not come.
The choir of selves that had long peopled his soul came and berated him. The buzz-cut young Osley catching fly balls and overjoyed with the promise of a long summer mocked him. The crew-cut freshman Osley from Los Gatos stood at the Berkeley Gate looking in with disbelief. The white-coated chemistry student Osley glanced up from the lab table, regarded him sadly and shook his head. The drug entrepreneur Osley, riding shotgun in the tractor cab as they barreled through the night, turned to him and said, “How?” The radical assistant professor Osley, sitting impudent and cigared at President Grayson’s desk, as Columbia seethed with tear gas and angry shouts. Even the scissor sharpener Jess, sitting across from Professor Tolkien, who was swearing him to the fealty of preserving these precious writings. They were all there. Along the way, a thousand road signs betokened the long highway of his life as it twisted into a far distant vanishing point. Each sign pointing at him with long fingers of silent accusation.
More images came in stately procession — family, friends, mentors. Their garbled voices began to chime together, “Look at you, living out the end of your wasted life in fear.”
Still, the deep breath of true belief would not come.
At last the voices became simply his own as he spoke aloud in the dark room, “How did you think this would end?”
The valise with all the original documents, plus the archives materials and the translation key, sat at his side. He fished in its contents for a while, then plucked out a single leather scrap, which he rolled and put in his pocket. Then he sat. He finally picked up a broken yardstick from the debris underfoot. He could just make out the inscription: Holland Hardware 143rd and Broadway. On the back side was etched a calendar for 1948. The year he was born.
He poked the stick in the pool, felt the scratchy rough concrete an inch underneath. Felt it again, confirming the absurdity of the real.
Go away now. Turn your face from Cadence. Find your way to the surface and let the street take you and finish you off in some pee-saturated doorway squalor, furnished with rags and cardboard, the other street people picking through your things like night vultures.
Die, Gutless Wonder.
He realized he hadn’t believed in himself, or anything else, for decades.
He had this one last chance, and he couldn’t measure up.
The certainty of his failure angered him. He poked the stick hard. It hesitated, and then it went in. He stirred and felt the stony firmness give to mush and then thin liquid. He pushed harder, and the yardstick went in two feet.