Bud and Lou, the mint-in-box Barbies, the hooded figure, the great sword — all convened in stillness. The clocks — even the owner wasn’t sure how many there were — ticked and chimed and tocked as if in harmony with the dark and rustling woods outside.
This moment waited for Jess Grande to come home to his leaning, weathered, creaky, dusty — in all, very Topanga-like — little business establishment cantilevered over the creek and known as The Mirkwood Forest. In fact, the Forest, as locals called it, was in its very dustiness and leaning and weathered façade, a perfect reflection of Jess.
Almost luckily, he was late.
Because it wasn’t just another fall night.
It was Halloween.
As midnight approached, Jess arrived at the door. He stood and listened for a long time. He wrestled out his keys and struggled in clinks and rattles with the wobbly lock bolt. He opened the door and stepped inside. Even before the door snicked shut, he felt the silence. Every clock had stopped. He quickly reached beside the door and hefted his walking stick, sturdy companion and fearless “equalizer” for thousands of miles and at least a score of brawls in unnamed saloons and forgotten diners along lonesome highways. He stood ready. The moment, timeless and unmeasured, ran on and on, as if a hushed and expectant mist were gathering. Faraway, something bellowed and cursed.
It may have been seconds, perhaps hours, before pain ripped away the fog and he could again think clearly.
The unexplained wound in his leg seeped an exquisite stream of fire. He hobbled in the colorless light of the gallery. A table fell over. Glass broke and pointless knick-knacks clattered across the floor. Like an incongruous yellow night-moth, a telegram flimsy fluttered down to rest briefly in a swath of moonlight that revealed:
Cadence: I would like Topanga. We have much won’t leave you.
Jes
The flimsy lifted again, escaping his shambling steps and hiding beneath an over-stuffed chair.
The night of meeting finally had come. Each desperate, lunging step down the hall, each year of the long parade of the last decades, each unexplained late-night sound jerking him awake to a heart-pounding vigil in the dark — all presaged this moment.
A voice spoke, as if far away but approaching fast, “Sharpener, halt!” A glimmering sword point flashed by him.
He stopped, exhausted, leaning against the wall. Outside, to the squirrels hovering in branches, a pale flicker swept through the interior of the Forest.
Inside, Jess sweated and faced his pursuer. The hooded figure was large, standing impossibly there in the prosaic reality of this money losing, two-bit, little nostalgia shop.
The voice came in a low hiss. “You possess a tale not of your hand, entrusted to you by thieves!”
“I … own them. They’re just some old scrolls.” Even as he said this, Jess felt the sinking weight of a long dormant falsehood finally being confronted.
“Do not trifle with me, Sharpener. Give me the Book!”
Jess remembered the grey-and-white haired old man who had given it to him, the promises made, the secrets long kept, the miles and miles traveled since then. He remembered the little wound of the mind, unhealed through the years, that someday, somehow, to someone, he would have to answer for what he possessed.
That moment had come.
“I destroyed it,” he said, summoning a reserve of false courage.
“Your lie befits your life. Will you grovel now? Will you watch us take the girl, the only precious you have left?”
Jess’s walking stick was inexplicably missing. He stood empty-handed before the intruder, flat-footed and defenseless.
The flashing sword point rose, poised to plunge deep into his chest, and open the throbbing sack of his heart. As the blade readied for the final thrust, he could almost feel the sharp entry, the chill serum of the burning ice of stars pouring in. The hood of his attacker flared, and Jess felt the last staccato tugs of reality shredding free at the seams. It was, ironically, as he had always suspected.
He almost submitted to the trance, but then fixed on the hateful words: “take also the girl”.
No way, he thought, not my granddaughter. She’s on her way! He held on, trying to think of a plan. Any plan. In the end it wasn’t elegant but it would do.
He fell back through the doorway into the next room, scrambling to find an iron handle set flush in the floor. His hands, blind as moles, found the heavy metal ring and pulled hard. A cover lurched open and Jess dove head first into the black abyss. The cover fell back with a solid, close-fitting thump.
Pazal stepped into the doorway and paused, searching in the darkness that to him was as the noonday sun. His prey had disappeared!
The great sword swung in an arc and crashed into the doorframe, spraying wood and cleaving a rent inches deep in the cheap doorframe.
Along the creek side beneath the trapdoor, the brush rustled as Jess — once known as the Scissor Sharpener — scrambled for his life. He would again travel the long gray road of anonymity.
Behind him a restless wind, precursor to a coming storm, seethed through the trees. A tide of clouds covered the night. The tiny shop stood silent and empty.
As fall next returned, the missing man’s granddaughter sat on a pleasantly cool Saturday morning at a creek side table on the grounds of the Topanga Commune Organic Restaurant. The table was a half-mile upstream from the Forest. Cadence Grande smiled at the clusters of birds that sang in accompaniment to the low burble of Topanga creek. She had a bright, happy face, framed with shiny black hair bobbed pixie-fashion. A face attractive, if not beautiful, as much for what it said as for its features. A tailored nose and a wide mouth quick to smile, but it was her green eyes that truly spoke. They were arresting, settling firmly on whomever was talking to her, not flitting away. Normally, they said that here was a studier, a person of confidence and resolve. If they now flashed an occasional beacon of cynicism, it was because nothing had been normal since her arrival in Topanga last fall.
As she arranged her table, a tall pony-tailed waiter approached, doing his best Billy Jean dance steps along the flagstone pathway.
“How’s Miss Pixie today”? He wiped his hands on his apron already floured and spotted with the morning’s bread making. “The usual?”
“Good morning, John. That would be great. How’s business?”
“Not bad, unless you got bills.”
She thought for a second. “Ah, do I know that one. Can’t pay them, can’t ignore them.”
He laughed, left, and returned quickly. He presented her with a scone and the signature coffee procured, so the menu boasted, from a tiny Zapatista village deep in Chiapas.
She sat and had her breakfast. It dawned on her, as it often did these days, that she was sitting alone. Not for lack of friends, great and true friends. Not even counting the seventy-plus on Facebook. Not for lack of men either. She had been in a serious relationship, but it hadn’t worked out. Now she was seeing a pragmatic young man named Bruce.
No, the alone part was a deeper feeling, something that lurked beneath and unbalanced her confidence, like a giant squid brushing the keel of a becalmed sailboat.
The truth was, like many arrivals in Los Angeles (or, in her case, re-arrivals after a long absence), Cadence had begun to see her life as a movie. Ridiculous but true. And it helped. Helped to put into perspective the main scenes. Her father dead since she was fourteen, his interrupted presence somehow still around here in Topanga. A man whose own death he would imagine as an ongoing journey of the soul. Her mother, gone two years now. A woman whose own demise she would hold to be an unaccountable accident disrupting a practical plan. The dreamer and the to-do lister. They couldn’t have been more different.