The Search for Middle Earth

Written by:jules14
You can read the original here:
All credit goes to the original author

You’d have to be mad to come to live in Muress.

At least that was what seventeen-year-old Alex Kerr thought, whenever he wrapped himself up in a coat on an icy, mist-shrouded winter day. Who would want to stay in this tiny fishing village out in the middle of nowhere? Even in the summer the weather was cold and rainy, and winters were thoroughly unpleasant. Sleet and snow fell from November almost to April, burying the houses and making the streets slippery. No sun ever pierced the pewter-gray sky; the clouds and mist seemed both tangible and heavy, as though they would crush anyone who ventured out into the open air. To top off everything, there was nothing to do and practically nowhere to go; it seemed that the only people who ever passed through were tourists coming in for the fishing season.

Yet in Alex’s short lifetime, two people, an old man and a schoolgirl, had come to Muress not to fish, but to stay.

--

It had been ten years since old Mr. Rowley had moved into town. Yet Alex remembered his first sight of the eccentric, white-bearded old man. The man had stridden purposefully down the road, never slipping on the ice, appearing blissfully ignorant of the few cars that passed him. People were confused by his appearance, for what was he doing, coming here in the wintertime, about as far from the tourist season as you could get? And had he hitchhiked all the way to this remote piece of land? For what purpose?

Rowley never answered this question. He bought a rather run-down old house—really an upscale fisherman’s hut—and lived there, keeping to himself mostly. Whenever he walked into town, he nodded and spoke in a friendly fashion to everyone he met, but most of his time was spent sitting alone outside his hut, smoking a long-stemmed pipe such as no one had ever seen before. At least this was all that Alex had ever seen him do. Since Rowley kept himself apart from most of the villagers, there were many people who were slightly in awe of him. As for the children, he became a sort of otherworldly being, half-frightening, half-fascinating—though mostly frightening to Alex, who had accidentally met him on his tenth birthday.

“Interesting,” the old man had said, as Alex passed his hut. “That combination of gray eyes, fair skin, and dark hair…very striking, and very rare. Does the coloring—the hair, the eyes—run in your family?”

His voice was not an old man’s voice; it was as deep and rich as that of a strong man in his prime. It didn’t fit, coming from that white-bearded, wizened face. And his accent seemed…not exactly foreign, but different in a way that Alex couldn’t explain at the time.

Stunned into answering, the boy stammered, “Er…yes…er, I mean, my grandfather had it last, and I…”

Rowley seemed to sense that he had made the boy uncomfortable. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said, smiling slightly and slipping the pipe back into his mouth. “It’s just that a minute ago, you reminded me of an old friend—someone I knew years ago.”

It was a harmless statement, typical of an old man reminiscing about his youth. Yet Alex was frightened, not so much by Rowley’s words as by his powerful voice and his piercing stare. In his ten-year-old way, Alex had sensed that the man, somehow, was more than he appeared. He had run away from there and in seven years had not returned to Rowley’s hut.

--

Katie Laurence had come to Muress in the fall. At the time, Alex was not sure what it would be like to host an American exchange student in his family’s home, but he hoped that she would be interesting and friendly, fun to be around.

Only, when he and his family met Katie at the airport, he was somewhat disappointed. She was quiet and introverted, she had nothing friendly to say to her host family, and, as soon as they had reached the house, she pulled a book out of her backpack and buried her face in it, seeming to forget her surroundings. And for a month or so, reading was all that Alex had seen her do. At times he wondered if she would forget to eat or sleep if nobody reminded her. She was not Alex’s idea of a good friend, not only because of her shyness and apparent dullness, but because of her interests. Half of her book collection appeared to be works by Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth. Alex had watched The Lord of the Rings on film and enjoyed it too, but he had not even been able to finish the first book of the trilogy when he'd started reading it. As he watched Katie plowing through these large tomes of fantasy literature, he had to shudder, even as he admired her concentration.

Moreover, Katie seemed to actually like Muress. Many times Alex saw her outside, even in the most freezing weather, taking walks along the road and smiling. Well, he supposed that the chilly, wild atmosphere of Scotland would seem quite exotic to her after her seventeen years in Indiana, but still…

And lately she’d started talking to Rowley. This was such a shock to Alex that he wondered if he was dreaming the first time he’d seen it. Yet there the American girl was, sitting next to Rowley on the stone step, chatting away in a manner that Alex had never seen or heard before, as he and his family could only get about ten words out of her per day! What had drawn her to him? What common interests did the two of them share? Or was the only common bond between them insanity?

Alex shivered, not only from the cold, as he pondered this question. He was nearing Rowley’s hut now, and he saw Katie sitting outside, quite oblivious to the frigid winds that ruffled her mousy hair, her gloved hands tucked into her coat pockets for extra warmth. The old man looked the same as usual, in his long coat with the hood pulled up, the smoke from his pipe mingling with the mist.

Shaking his own head, Alex strode on toward his own house and warmth. Madness. That was all there was to it.

It was January before Alex finally had the time and the desire to talk with Katie. As a result of a brief and ridiculous argument with his mates, he had decided not to go with them to the club that Friday night, but to arrive straight at home. He grumpily slouched into the living room, intending to turn on the television. Katie was already sitting in an armchair, reading, as usual, every now and then raising her hand to push a strand of hair behind her ear or her glasses up onto her nose.

“What are you reading? Is it still The Silmarillion?” Alex asked. Not that he was expecting an answer; for a month his efforts to be friendly with her had been met with either silence or a simple, noncommittal response.

In this case, it was to be the latter. “Mm-hm,” Katie mumbled, without deigning to lift her eyes from the pages.

Alex was suddenly irritated with Katie’s taciturnity. Perhaps it was his irritation over staying home alone on a Friday night, but he felt, all of a sudden, the need of some company and conversation right now. So he plowed on:

“Must be a really interesting book; I’ve noticed you can’t put it down.”

“Yeah,” she answered, turning a page.

“So, what’s it about? Anything interesting?” Alex asked after a brief pause.

He had chosen the right question to ask…or maybe not. Katie finally marked her place with a plastic bookmark and closed the book, eager to chat about the subject that seemed to be her passion. After about a minute of listening to a monologue about gods, wars, elves, light, and darkness, Alex wished he hadn’t asked; he could not understand a word that Katie was saying.

He didn’t say this, though. Instead, he asked the questions that had been bothering him ever since he had discovered Katie’s interest in Tolkien:

“Why do you like this so much? How do you keep track of all these weird names and places? I mean, even after watching the films I was confused…”

“Oh, the movies,” Katie said with a shrug. “They were pretty good, but they’re definitely not as good as the books. You really have to read the books to understand the story.”

“I tried,” admitted Alex, “but I couldn’t even get through the first one. I never liked reading all that much…and The Lord of the Rings just seemed to go on and on about stuff I didn’t even care about. I did like the films, though. You said you’ve seen them?”

Apparently, Katie wasn’t interested in discussing the films. She continued, “I like this because it seems so real. You can’t help feeling that Middle Earth and all the characters and magic really did exist at some point…or still does somewhere. I first read The Hobbit when I was seven, and I used to go around in my backyard looking for evidence, for remains of what happened in the book. I thought about how great it would be if Gandalf came up and knocked on my door and invited me to come on an adventure. Well, now, I guess I know better…but I still like to imagine it’s real.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Alex replied, feeling as if he wanted to end the discussion right now. “I haven’t played make-believe since I was about ten.”

“And besides, it’s so much easier to read about another world’s problems instead of this world’s problems. I mean, think how easy for the world it would be if all our problems could be solved by one war or by destroying some ring. Have you ever thought about that?”

No, Alex had never thought about it. He said as much. Katie continued, “Anyway, that’s why I like it so much. People at school used to say I was a geek, but I guess I don’t care.”

What was a geek? Alex had never learned the meanings of many American slang words. But he was feeling a little bit sorry for Katie, and this prompted him to say, “Well, if you ever get bored—I mean, if you ever come to a stopping place or something—you can come out with me and my mates if you really want to. I wouldn’t mind, and I can take you along to the cinema, or to the pub, or some place else.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Katie replied with the first smile that Alex had ever seen from her. “Going out and that kind of stuff was never my thing. I’m just anti-social, I guess.” With that, she buried her face in The Silmarillion again.

Shaking his head, Alex decided to go watch TV in his parents’ room instead. He didn’t know what to make of Katie, and therefore, he wanted to put her out of his mind.

--

Many years later, Alex would try to remember exactly how he’d become involved with the old man, Rowley. He supposed that, technically, it had all started with the game he and his friends were playing, back when he was ten, when Rowley had looked at him and asked him about his heritage. Yet he still thought of the beginning as the time, that same January when he was seventeen, when he passed by the man’s hut to see Rowley sitting outside, as usual.

And, as usual, Alex was passing by, trying to avoid Rowley's eyes, when it suddenly dawned on him that the old man was singing. No, he was chanting something, in a language that the boy didn’t know. At the time the words seemed to be nothing but gibberish, but he would find out later what they were:

Ai Elbereth, Gilthoniel;
Silivren penna miriel
O galadhremmin ennorath,
Gilthoniel! Ai Elbereth!

Then he stopped chanting and began humming, too loudly to be ignored. The few other people in the streets took one look at him and hurried on their way.

Alex, however, was not so lucky. In a split second, Rowley opened his eyes and turned to look long and unblinkingly at Alex. The boy shivered, wishing he’d turn away. Those dark eyes were as creepy and unnerving as they’d been seven years ago.

Feeling that he had to do something to break the awkward silence, Alex blurted out, “What was that?”

The old man asked, simply, “What was what, lad?”

“That song you were singing,” Alex answered. “And that language…that doesn’t sound like any language I ever heard.”

There was a pause. At the moment, Alex was not truly curious about the song or the language. As he tried to think of a polite excuse to leave, the man answered his question.

"That was a song from long ago, from a long-vanished world. I heard it quite a few times when I was young, you know, and for some reason, this particular afternoon, it came back to me. Not surprising that you haven’t heard of the language; as far as I can tell, no human beings speak it anymore.”

“Oh.” Alex couldn’t think of anything else to say. The part about a “long-vanished world” had caught his attention. For some reason, Katie’s discourse about Middle-Earth came back into his head. “What do you mean by ‘long-vanished world’? You mean like a lost civilization? Like Atlantis or something like that?”

“Yes,” Rowley replied with a smile. “That is exactly what I mean.”

Alex frowned for a minute, crossing his arms over his chest. His mind wandered to the anthropology class he had taken a year ago.

“But Atlantis never really existed. It was just a legend. Anyway, how could anybody ever learn a song from that place?”

To his surprise, Rowley’s smile grew even wider and he started chuckling deep in his throat. “Your friend Katie and I were having a discussion about this yesterday, actually...”

“She’s not really my friend,” Alex protested, surprised. “She’s an American exchange student: she’s just staying at our house this year.”

Rowley seemed not to have heard. “We agreed that to call something ‘just a legend’ seems inappropriate, as legends are almost always based on facts. Who knows how distorted facts and history may become over millennia?”

Well, Alex knew very well, after his brief study of anthropology. But he was still wondering what Rowley was talking about.

“Please,” he said, growing more curious by the minute. “Tell me about this civilization that you keep talking about. If it’s not Atlantis, then what is it?”

The old man picked up another book and lowered his eyes, deep in thought. He seemed to be considering not only what to say, but what he could remember. From time to time his eyes seemed to lose focus, as if he were daydreaming.

Finally, he turned back to Alex and said, “Unfortunately, this ‘civilization’ as you call it—though this was not all it was—has such a rich and complex history that it would take a great deal of time to tell you everything about it. All I will say for now is that here—in what you call Europe—there was a world, not just a city or an empire, but a whole world, full of different races of…people, different cultures, many different ways of life. And at some time, thousands of years ago, this world disappeared completely.”

For a while there was silence. When Alex could finally speak, he began to snigger, as much as to calm the sudden chill that rose in his heart as because he believed Rowley’s words to be nonsense. “But…that’s insane. I mean, anthropologists and historians have studied ancient civilizations, and there weren't any in Europe at that time. Wouldn’t somebody have found the remains of this—world—by now, if it ever existed? Bones or ruins or pottery or writings, something like that?”

“Perhaps,” acknowledged Rowley. “But, mind you, I said ‘disappeared completely’. I have reason to believe that, by the end, there were no remains left for people to find.”

“What are you trying to say?" Alex asked, almost in a whisper. "Cities and people don’t just vanish from the face of the earth.”

Rowley didn’t respond, and Alex wondered if he’d finally seen the logic of the boy’s explanation. He turned away again, saying in an almost dreamy voice, “Part of the reason I came here was to find the last remnants—if there were any—of this lost world. I’m more well-traveled than you might think, lad. Over the years I have passed my time in Europe and the Middle East, even in places more remote such as Africa and the United States. The rise of men was deadly for them; the fall of men may destroy them completely."

Alex was growing more intrigued, more amazed and, for some reason, more nervous. “But…who are ‘they’? What do you mean by ‘destroy them completely’? And I thought you said this place was in Europe; why would you have traveled to the States? You’re talking in riddles; I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I,” Rowley said gently. “But I hope that the picture will become clearer to me—and to you as well—once some clues have been discovered that may answer my questions. I’ve often found in my experience that time and fate bring new counsel, and so I shall wait here in Muress for a while and see what happens. In the meantime, you and young Katie may come and visit if you like. I will not deny that the life I lead is quite lonely and difficult, lad.”

--

Alex woke up with a start, sweating and shaking, his heart pounding so that he thought it might burst through his skin. For a while, he stared wildly around his darkened bedroom, trying to get his bearings. Yes, there were the windows, there was his bedside table, his desk, his closet…it had only been a nightmare.

Wiping his forehead, Alex picked up his digital alarm clock and checked the time. 3:19 AM, it said. He sighed and set the clock back down. The dream was still fresh in his mind; it still made him shudder to think of it. He’d never get back to sleep at this rate.

He wandered barefoot downstairs into the kitchen and flicked on the lights, squinting as the brightness momentarily blinded him. Still, he managed to go to the fridge, get out the milk, and pour himself a glass of it. He found a box of biscuits in the pantry and ate a few, hoping the food would drive the unpleasant images of the nightmare out of his head.

He had not experienced the dream in the usual way, for he had not been in it. It was as if he’d been watching a film or a show on TV. He had found himself looking at a city, all built of white stone, with a tower rising up from the center of it. The sun sparkled off the buildings, and he imagined that he could hear the voices of people, the vibrant hum of a metropolis going about its daily business. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen the city before—or at least a place that looked like it.

Suddenly, the whole scene was plunged into pitch blackness, as if the sun had suddenly gone out. Almost before Alex had time to feel shocked in the dream, the blackness lifted, and the scene was exactly the same as it had been, with one marked difference: the entire city was gone.

It was not as if it had been knocked down. Not even a second ago it had been there, and now there was nothing but grass rippling in the wind, no sign that any human being had ever existed in that place. Alex thought that if the city had been in ruins, its people screaming in pain, he would have felt better than he had on seeing this sudden, unreasonable emptiness. Had the darkness removed the city and all the people in it? How could mere darkness do such a thing? And yet, beyond the noonday sun, the freshness of the air, and the loneliness of the place, Alex sensed a foul presence, someone—or something—that was darkly pleased.

Alex shuddered. No, he wouldn’t get worked up over the dream; it was the atmosphere that was frightening, after all, not truly what occurred in it. It had probably been brought on by old Rowley’s discussion of cities vanishing from the face of the earth. It was a creepy idea; Rowley was obviously just making it up, though. Half of what he’d said that afternoon had been riddles and the other half pure rubbish. Feeling much calmer after the milk and food, Alex tiptoed back to bed, where he fell into a restless but dreamless sleep.

Katie never knew why it was so difficult to talk to people. It wasn’t as if she minded it that much; she could always find something to do by herself alone. Still, her parents and few friends back home always found it odd that she’d prefer to read than go out with friends and to think than socialize.

While Katie inwardly thanked Alex for being kind enough to talk to her, what she had told him had been, in effect, the truth: she was antisocial, a fact that her parents, for all their love and tenderness, could not truly understand. “Make some new friends,” they had advised her before she’d left. “Relax and have fun!”

But what an effort it was to make friends. How could she start conversations with the awkward phrases, Hi, my name is Katie, blah blah blah, what’s yours? The thought of it made her wince. And anyway, her parents’ idea of relaxing and having fun was quite different from her own. In short, the only person with whom she got along well since coming to Muress was Rowley, though she never even talked much then. Most of their conversations consisted of her listening intently while Rowley told her the most amazing stories. He knew Tolkien even better than she did, apparently, and could tell a story every bit as well. He would spin tales for her that she never remembered reading in Tolkien’s books, and she would listen appreciatively, wondering if he was making them up, or if she’d simply missed reading about them in her books.

The man did bear a striking resemblance to Gandalf, though, or at least to how she pictured Gandalf. Just put him in a robe and a pointed hat and he could have auditioned for the role in the movies. If she were younger, she might have believed that he was Gandalf.

Ridiculous, of course; she’d stopped believing years ago that Tolkien’s world was real. Sure, she still used it to take her mind off the horrors of the real world, but that was mainly because the news that she read in the paper and heard on TV chilled her with fright. Global warming, possibilities of nuclear warfare, and terrorist attacks, over and over again. Why was it that whenever she heard or saw something scary, the thing would continue to haunt her and frighten her long after the initial shock had worn off? She realized she was a coward; she was afraid of the dark, heights, storms, and horror movies, plus incredibly shy of strangers. And yet when she was little, she could always imagine she was brave. She was an adventuress, a warrior. Was it possible that she could even pretend such nonsense again?

--

Was it even nonsense?

By April, she had listened to Rowley’s strange and fascinating stories for so long that she could no longer be sure. And one Saturday evening, she realized that what might once have been nonsense was, in fact, all too real.

She was not even going to visit Rowley. She was on her way to the library, when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, pipe clenched in his teeth. At the same time, the man muttered a few words—and the pipe lit itself.

For a while, Katie wondered if she had imagined it. Yet Rowley was smoking, and there was no sign of a match or a lighter anywhere. She stopped and stared, her eyes wide. In the light from the pipe, she could see his face clearly: white beard and hair, wrinkled face, and busy eyebrows, but those dark, burning eyes that seemed younger, and yet wiser, than his years.

Before she could bite it back, the word escaped her lips: “Gandalf.”

He heard her. He turned and saw her sitting by the steps. If she had had any doubts left, they were gone when he frowned in annoyance, abruptly extinguished his pipe, and took it out of his mouth. Looking almost defeated—or was she imagining it?—he walked slowly over to where she was standing beside the road.

Breathing heavily, Katie stumbled, as if the weight of what she had just learned was too much to support her. “My God,” she whispered. “You are him. Gandalf, for real and true. How can…I mean…”

Rowley—Gandalf—gave a little sigh, shaking his head almost ruefully. “Gandalf? That name hardly seems to belong to me anymore. I have not been called ‘Gandalf’ in years. Over the years I have taken many names for myself and quite a few forms, more than ever. Since the age of men began, the world has changed faster than it ever has before.”

“Okay,” Katie said, still breathless. “But…is it okay if I call you Gandalf? I mean, it’s just so hard for me to think of you as Rowley the eccentric old man, after what you told me and what I’ve read…”

“Gandalf is fine, if that’s the way you feel about it,” the man replied nonchalantly. Despite his tone, he seemed none too pleased that Katie had discovered his secret. “I would ask you not to call me so around anyone else, however.”

“Oh, sure, fine,” Katie said. She hardly heard her own voice, for new questions were popping into her head, demanding to be asked. Like an inquisitive child, she blurted them out as they came to her: “Why did you come back from the Undying Lands? How did you come back? Why are you in the old man shape again? What happened to Middle Earth, anyway? So Tolkien wasn’t making it all up? How did he find out about it? Are there still hobbits and dwarves and elves on Earth? Why haven’t I ever seen them?”

By now Gandalf was smiling warmly, though he looked a little taken aback by the barrage of questions.

“I cannot answer all your questions at the moment, though I shall try. There are still hobbits and dwarves—and elves—on earth, and I came back from Valinor because of them. As men were multiplying and spreading around the world, the remaining free races of Middle-earth were murdered, or driven from their homes and forced into hiding.

“I returned to Middle-earth four hundred years ago to search for them, but perhaps it might have been better if I had begun my search earlier. For Gondor disappeared from the Earth about four or five thousand years ago, and the men to the east and south rose and built their empires soon afterwards. I could find no traces of any hobbits, dwarves, or elves even four hundred years ago, and now it has become nearly impossible to search. I fear that, if there were any left then, they were all slaughtered in the last two World Wars, or they died breathing the ash and soot in the air, or they were killed because of their own ignorance and carelessness of the world of men: run over by automobiles, torn apart by dogs, poisoned by toxic chemicals.”

Katie shuddered, picturing it. Run over, poisoned, torn…the images that came into her head both disgusted and saddened her. Yet she was surprised—and reassured—when Gandalf patted her shoulder and said gently, “Don’t be alarmed. I cannot make myself believe that all hope is lost. When left to themselves, hobbits always had a great deal of common sense, and you must remember reading that they could avoid being seen by men when they wished. As for the dwarves, it is quite possible that they were able to find hiding places underground, out of the reach of humanity. No, there must be some left alive somewhere.

“But time is short now, as you can see. I can feel the Age of Men passing faster than ever, perhaps toward a violent end, though not even I can foresee it. Though it is too late to save mankind from its fate, I mean to save something from long-forgotten, happier times, and that something is the last of the forgotten races of Middle-earth.”

During this entire narrative, Katie had sat silent and still, her eyes widening as Gandalf spoke. Her heart was pounding…in fright, because of Gandalf’s gloomy prediction for humanity, or in excitement, because of the idea that some races of Middle-earth might still exist? She didn’t know. Spellbound by Gandalf’s words and thrilled that the cherished imaginary world had, indeed, existed, she blurted out the first thing that came into her head:

“Can I help?”

Gandalf had not expected this. He raised his eyebrows as he looked at her.

Katie hastened to explain. “Look, I know how awful things have gotten in this world, and I hate it too. I know the US is behind a lot of it, and I’m kind of ashamed of that, and…uh…I guess…well…see, I always liked to imagine Middle-earth was real, and now that I know it is…it’s like…like a childhood dream come true for me. So…um…if you need any…anything I can do…I mean, I…” she blushed as she blundered on. She’d never been particularly good at expressing herself, and she found it harder now, with Gandalf staring at her with that penetrating gaze. And no matter how hard she tried to imagine Gandalf as the batty old man that he’d first seemed to be, she couldn’t forget that he was actually a Maia: in effect, a minor god.

Gandalf, however, looked neither exasperated nor amused, as she had expected, but thoughtful. “Well, you may conduct your own search if you like, and who knows? Perhaps you may find something that I missed. If there is one thing I’ve learned here on Arda, it is that the most unlikely people may sometimes be the ones to change the world.”

He smiled at Katie, who, for the first time, smiled back, relieved that Gandalf had understood. For the first time, she felt the compassion and warmth that had set Gandalf apart from the other Maiar from the very beginning, and she was comforted by it.

--

However, as Gandalf had said, time was short. Katie had only a month left in Scotland, and so the push was on to find some clue to Gandalf’s search before she had to return to America. She began the search half-heartedly, feeling, despite Gandalf’s reassuring words, that it would be hopeless. After all, if he, so much more than a human being, couldn’t find anything, how could she ever hope to?

She had no clear idea of where to begin, but she did try searching the internet. Not that she expected to find anything, and she was right. Her search queries: “hobbits”, “hobbit history”, “Middle-earth”, and “Middle-earth+modern world”, all brought up the same Lord of the Rings fan sites, whether of books or movies, or reviews of Tolkien’s works, or questions for reading discussion groups, asking the readers to find parallels between Middle-earth and the modern world. For that matter, Katie herself was not sure of Middle-earth’s connection to the modern world; Gandalf had not explained it clearly.

But he had said that Gondor had disappeared from the Earth. How? Why?

More unanswered questions.

Alex seemed curious about what she was doing, but whenever he asked, all she would tell him was “Rowley’s looking for something, and I’m helping him.” He would obviously never believe the truth if she told him.

--

When Katie wouldn’t come down for breakfast one morning, Mrs. Kerr sent Alex up to find her, which he did. She was lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling.

When asked what was wrong, Katie answered as if she were speaking from far away: “Nothing’s really wrong. I just had a bad dream last night, and I couldn’t sleep.”

Afterwards, Alex would never know what prompted him to ask this question:

“Was there a city? And then pitch-blackness?”

At that, Katie rolled over in bed and stared at him, her eyes tired but alert. “You had it too?”

“About a month or so ago,” Alex whispered. “I don’t know why, but it came back to me this morning…I didn’t remember it until today.”

“Well, did you see it?” Katie said hoarsely. “That city was Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor, from Lord of the Rings.”

“Oh, is that what it was? I thought it looked familiar, like something I’d seen in a film somewhere. Weird, though; I haven’t watched Lord of the Rings for a long time.” Alex could not figure out what Katie was so upset about. Yes, they’d both had the same dream, and it had been scary, but it was only a dream, only a strange coincidence. He said as much.

Katie shook her head so slowly that Alex wondered if he’d imagined it. “Anyway, it upset me so much I don’t feel like getting up today. Do me a favor: just tell your parents I’m sick. I don’t want many people to think I’m getting too worked up over a dream.”

“Whatever you say,” Alex answered with a shrug, before starting down the stairs. Well, he told himself, Katie was a Lord of the Rings fan; naturally she would find more significance in the dream than he had. If only he didn’t feel that somehow Rowley and his odd mystery were connected to all this.

As soon as the boy had left, Katie, despite her tiredness, got out of bed and dressed. She was going to tell Gandalf about the dream. Maybe he would find it significant and maybe not, but she was sure that it was no ordinary dream stemming from her subconscious.

Gandalf welcomed Katie inside the hut with a smile. Katie was almost bursting with what she had to say, but only after the wizard had motioned for her to sit down and had asked her why she had come did she tell it.

“I had a bad dream last night,” she began, “about Gondor and its fall. I wouldn’t think anything of it, except apparently Alex had the same dream a month ago.”

She paused at this point, unsure of how to go on. Gandalf was staring intently at her, and coaxed her on with the words, “Tell me everything.”

“Well,” Katie started, trying to find words that would evoke the horror of the nightmare. “I saw Minas Tirith in the dream; I wasn’t actually in the dream, you see; I was just watching everything from somewhere. And then suddenly there was this pitch blackness that came…I mean, pitch blackness, darker than anything I’d seen before, but it only lasted for a second. And when it was gone, Minas Tirith just wasn’t there anymore. Everything was the same, but the city was completely gone; there was nothing of it left, not even ruins. And that was the scariest part; it was like the place had disappeared into thin air.”

“And then?” asked Gandalf.

Katie shrugged. “Then I woke up.”

By now Gandalf was frowning, looking both troubled and thoughtful. “Are you sure that it was Minas Tirith that you saw in your dream?”

“Positive,” answered the girl. “It looked just like how I imagined it; it hardly resembled the movie version at all…and it just felt real. So I’m thinking that some dark power…you know, like Sauron…caused the fall of Gondor.”

There was a silence for a while. Katie couldn’t help feeling disappointed with Gandalf’s reaction; surely this was the answer to his question.”

Finally, Gandalf spoke: “I shall keep your dream in mind, though I have my doubts about your interpretation. After all, what ‘dark power’ could have brought about the city’s fall, as Sauron had finally been defeated?”

Katie opened her mouth to say, “Morgoth,” but she stopped when she realized how little this would make sense. Gandalf continued,

“There have been cases of dreams providing help and council to one’s mind, but no dream has ever given a direct answer to the one who has it. Dreams are symbolic, you know, and what occurs in them is often distorted.”

Katie had an answer ready almost immediately:

“Remember Boromir, son of the steward of Gondor? What about his and Faramir’s dream? The one with the riddle that told them to look for the sword-that-was-broken in Rivendell, and what was about to happen?”

Gandalf replied, “This dream guided Boromir, giving him hints and riddles. It never provided him with any concrete information; this he had to find out for himself. I believe that your dream is the same; it has told you and Alex that Gondor fell and was forgotten in a short period of time, but nothing specific about the fall. Darkness in dreams does not only symbolize evil, after all, or if it does, it does not mean that Sauron or the Great Enemy himself were behind it.”

Katie, still disappointed with Gandalf’s skepticism about the dream, was not finished with her argument. “Well, Alex had the dream too, didn’t he? That ought to count for something.”

“It does,” Gandalf answered patiently. “If he had not had the dream, I would have dismissed it as an ordinary dream.”

Katie sighed; it seemed there was no use arguing with the wizard. Now that he had spoken to her, it seemed that even she was noticing flaws in her previous judgment of the dream: how could Sauron possibly have destroyed Gondor from the Void? And darkness could have been only a symbol; it could be that Gondor had fallen in a more ordinary fashion. She sighed again, before asking:

“Why do you seem so anxious to prove that the dream doesn’t mean anything?”

“I said not doesn’t mean anything, I said that it should not be interpreted literally. Your dream has only told you that Gondor was destroyed, which you already knew. You should be guided by more solid information than what happens in a dream. How has your research been coming?”

By now Katie was so discouraged that she didn’t even wonder how Gandalf knew she was researching his subject. “Not good. I can’t find a single thing online—not that I really expected to. The closest thing I can think of is Flo, that hobbit-like skeleton that was found in Indonesia a few years ago. The one that was, like, twenty thousand years old. I don’t know if that has any connection or not, since you said everything actually happened in Europe.”

“It might,” Gandalf said with a sudden smile. “Do not lose hope; perhaps another dream will come to you that is more helpful than the first. I never meant to discourage you; I only feel that dreams are sometimes dangerous as guides of deeds.”

“I won’t be here much longer,” Katie said hesitantly. “I’m supposed to go back to the US in May. I don’t know if I’ll be able to contact you; do you have a phone number or an email address?”

Gandalf shook his head. “I have never stayed in one place for long; I don’t expect that I shall here either. Still, I am not alone in my work; I have a few other friends around the world who are aiding me.”

“Who?” asked Katie curiously. What did he mean by friends? Had any other Maiar come from Valinor?

“Other human beings like yourself who are interested in my cause,” Gandalf replied, as if reading her thoughts. “Very few, but better than none. As long as I stay here, though, you could, I suppose, contact me through Alex Kerr. I have spoken with the lad, who might be more eager to help us than you think.”

“I’ll talk to him about it,” agreed Katie reluctantly. As Alex had never read Tolkien, she wasn’t sure how she was going to explain everything to him. Yet she was also willing to continue her work, fruitless though it was, in Gandalf’s mission, and she was flattered by Gandalf’s last speech. It was the us in help us: Gandalf was acknowledging her as an aid in his work and a supporter of the cause. She was not completely useless to him, at least not yet; she might still be able to help.

--

A week later, Alex had wandered downstairs into the kitchen and had picked up a newspaper, scanning through it quickly. There was more fighting in the Middle East: some new Muslim fundamentalist group, along with more droughts, famines, floods, storms. Apparently some new ice cap had broken off from Greenland, spreading fear among climate scientists and environmentalists. They were trying to get the US and China to set greenhouse gas regulations, but the United States government wasn’t cooperating. Apparently people in the States were divided over the issue.

“What’s going on in there?” Katie asked, entering the kitchen.

Alex was so shocked by the girl’s addressing him first that he almost dropped the paper. He had to collect himself before answering, “The usual; just lots of bad news.”

“Oh.” Katie, apparently, was back to her monosyllabic conversations. She sat down at the table, staring down at its scrubbed surface. She seemed nervous about something, as if she herself was going to tell some bad news.

“What’s wrong?” asked Alex, folding up the paper.

Katie fidgeted in her chair, twisted her hands together, and took a deep breath before answering. “I told you a while ago that Rowley was looking for something, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Alex said, sitting down across from her.

“And you remember that dream we both had, don’t you?”

“Now I do; I didn’t before that day you had it, though.”

“Well,” another deep breath, “Rowley is looking for something that has to do with that dream.”

Alex was surprised, and not a little frightened; he’d always had a bad feeling about it. “Really? Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” Katie said. “He said that there are…people, who are suffering now because of humans in this world. He’s trying to save those people before…before the world ends.”

“Before the…” Alex began, shaking his head in disbelief. “You know, he talked to me about it, about some world that vanished a long time ago, but I thought he was making it all up; he didn’t tell me any details about it. So he told you the same thing?”

Katie was really not sure if Gandalf/Rowley had told Alex what he had told her, but she guessed that it was, in general, quite similar: “Yes.”

For a time there was silence in the kitchen. Then Alex asked, “So, why are you telling me all this?”

Now came the hardest part. Perhaps if she just went ahead and said it, it wouldn’t be as bad as she thought. Her heart beating in anticipation, Katie answered, “Because he wants me to contact him through you, once I’m back in America. He doesn’t have email or a phone, apparently, and it seems he’s going to be staying here for a little while. So I was wondering: could you by any chance pass on any emails or letters I send you to him? It’s the only way I can contact him, and what he’s working on is really important.”

“Listen, Katie, I don’t understand,” said Alex, shaking his head. “How and why is this idea of his so important? I mean, what’s going to happen if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for?”

“God, Alex, a lot more people will die,” Katie said, almost pleadingly. “Trust me; that’s all I can say for now. If I told you more, you wouldn’t believe me at all. You can ask Rowley about it; he might tell you. But for now, all I’m asking for is your email address. All you have to do is just pass on whatever I say to Rowley; you don’t have to get involved yourself. But I need to get messages to him, and for now, you’re my only way. Please?”

At the time, Alex was a little bit frightened, but after listening to Katie’s mysterious, frantic request, he was starting to become curious and excited as well. He sensed that something more was at stake than people’s lives, and he resolved to ask Rowley about it later on. Anyway, how bad could passing on messages to the old man be? Besides, Katie was more eloquent this morning than he’d ever seen or heard her; he was sure that whatever she was getting excited about had to be important somehow.

And so that morning, he did what he would later regret much later in his life: he gave Katie his email address.

Once Katie had returned to Indiana, though, she would not send Alex any messages for a long time. As her senior year in high school ended, she was busy with final exams and papers, and so she couldn’t continue her research even if she had had any hope of finding evidence. After her graduation, she spent the summer on the computer and in the library; searching through pages and pages of web sites and old books, trying to find some clue related to Gondor, hobbits, dwarves, or Middle-Earth, with, of course, no success.

She had learned by now that such research was useless, for it didn’t seem that anybody on earth even secretly believed that Middle-Earth had existed. Yet she had no other ideas of how to search. Why, she often thought to herself, had she not taken advantage of visiting any historical sites found in Britain, or at least of contacting any historical archives? At least they might have provided her with some clues to her search; God knew she wouldn’t find any by looking around the United States.

She continued to ponder her predicament even after she’d entered the College of William and Mary in Virginia that fall, when her luck refused to improve. And this dilemma was on her mind one Saturday in early October, when she took advantage of her weekend to walk through Colonial Williamsburg. She had never been there before, and though she wasn’t exactly interested in American history, she thought that a place in which it was still re-enacted was worth seeing.

She drifted in and out of buildings, idly watching colonial craftsmen and farmers, listening to a speech by a Thomas Jefferson impersonator, yawning and sweating under her T-shirt. It was the hottest October 3rd on record, said the meteorologists, provoking more panic and fiercer demonstrations on the part of the environmentalists. Global warming and terrorism; that was all anyone thought about anymore, though Katie would have thought that with people’s focus on the two disasters, they could have done something about them by now.

To avoid thinking about such unpleasant subjects, Katie listened to the conversations of the tourists around her. Everyone was buzzing about a musician who was playing colonial tunes to audiences every two hours that day; supposedly he was very good. Katie decided to see him for herself at his last daily performance at six o’clock, but, as luck would have it, she decided to have dinner in a tavern with extremely slow service. By the time she’d finally paid her bill, gotten out of the restaurant, and found the garden in which the performances were being held, it was already six-thirty, and the audience was leaving.

The musician, a pale, thin guy with long black hair tied at the back of his neck, had not yet put away his guitar, and he did not seem pleased that Katie had come in late to listen to him. Yet as he started to play and sing, he seemed to forget about the inconvenience of the hour, and Katie, as she listened, forgot everything else.

The man had the most beautiful voice she had ever heard: a rich, deep, wave of sound that he seemed to pull out of a hidden chasm inside him. He made the prissy, light little Baroque melodies that he played and sang sound like trumpet calls to war, or like sacred praises to a god. Katie, spellbound, found images coming into her head as she listened: waves crashing on shores, dark mountains, starlight on pools of water—and yet he never sang about such things. And when the first two songs were over, she felt an indescribable, inexplicable sadness, as if when they stopped, something was lost forever.

She wished he would play and sing more, but truthfully, he didn’t appear up to it. His skin was not only pale, but almost transparent, the bones stood out sharply in his thin face and hands, and he had slumped down in his seat, as if profoundly tired. Whatever sickness the man had was definitely taking its toll on him. Katie had seen her grandmother die of cancer, yet even in the woman’s last moments she had not looked as horribly wasted and ill as this man did.

“Are you all right?” Katie ventured to ask. “You don’t have to play anymore if you’re not feeling well.”

“I’m fine,” the man replied, in a voice so low and weak that Katie wondered if she’d heard him. “It is nothing I can’t handle.” He appeared, if possible, even more depressed—and depressing—than before.

“You should go home and rest,” Katie said, getting up from her chair. Her natural shyness had been overcome by her pity for the man and her awe for his music. But her words seemed to only make him feel worse: the man’s face clenched at the word “home”, as if the word brought back painful memories. Hastily Katie tried another angle. “I mean, maybe if you left Williamsburg for now and just took some time off, you’d feel better.”

“I cannot,” he said again, in a voice even lower than before. “I cannot leave.”

“Why not?” Katie asked, her sympathy increasing. “I’m sure if you explained to the people who run this place that you need to…” she trailed off as she noticed the expression on the musician’s face. He was clearly annoyed, as if Katie did not understand his problem, could not understand it, and was only making things worse by trying to understand it.

Katie decided that she would make one last stab at kindness. “Where do you live? If you need any help, I’ll go borrow a car and drive you wherever you need to go.”

Now the man was looking at her, and Katie was struck immediately by his gray eyes: keen and piercing despite his illness, and wise. She felt a bit uncomfortable under his gaze. Yet he no longer seemed annoyed. “You said…wherever I need?”

“Yes,” the girl answered. “It won’t take me long to go back to the college—I’m a student there, you see—and borrow my friend’s car, and I’ll meet you by the Visitor’s Center.”

For a while, the guitarist stood still, gazing on Katie’s face, as if weighing and measuring her with that keen gray light in his eyes. Yet finally, he gave his answer:

“If you can take me where I must go, I shall be grateful to you.”

It took only a half hour for Katie to walk back to the campus, find her roommate, receive the keys to the car, and drive it down to the Visitor’s Center, where she found her new acquaintance waiting. He had put aside his colonial clothes and was now dressed in what seemed to be tattered rags, with the result that he looked like a dying beggar. Doesn’t he earn anything from his job in Williamsburg? wondered Katie. And what in hell is the matter with him?

The musician answered neither these questions nor any others, the entire hour in the car. In fact, he and Katie never spoke at all, though she had asked him a couple of times to direct her to where he needed to go. He slumped in his seat, head bowed, limp, papery hands folded in his lap. Was he asleep, or was he daydreaming, or was he praying? Katie had no idea, and in concentrating on the road, she could not risk taking a closer look at him. Darkness was settling, Katie turned the headlights on, and she drove aimlessly through the unfamiliar streets, yet the man never gave her directions, even when, at last, she started snapping at him. Irritably, she entered a town that a sign identified as Colonial Beach, wondering if she would have to throw the guy out of the car in order to return home.

“Stop.”

Katie almost let go of the wheel in shock, looking at the musician sitting beside her. He was now alert, head up, looking ready to jump out of the car and run. Obediently, Katie pulled over to the curb and parked. As she opened the door, she heard the sound of the ocean and smelled the salt air, so strongly that she almost wrinkled her nose.

“Can you find your way to your house from here?” she asked the man.

A nod was the only answer she got, as he climbed out of the car. He turned to face her, hair blowing in the cool winds, and said, “I thank you. I shall remember this.”

With that, he ran to the other side of the road and, without further ado, started to climb over a dune, apparently aiming to reach the shore. To Katie’s startled eyes, he looked like some ungainly water bird, with his hair and rags flapping like wings, his feet sinking into the loose sand. Yet instead of laughter, she felt a pricking behind her eyes and a choking sensation in her throat—she was about to cry. Hastily, she shut and locked the doors and drove back to the college, trying to see the dark road and headlights through her blurred vision, ignoring the tears that spilled from her eyes and the drip from her nose leaking onto her upper lip.

Had Alex been blessed or cursed with his burning curiosity? On the one hand, it had prompted him to poke into everything he saw when he was little, earning him either scolding or minor injuries. On the other hand, it had served him well in school, for the extra research he often did earned him excellent grades. He did not know what it would mean for him as soon as he saw Katie's first message:

I need help and background information. I haven’t been finding anything online or in books, but I don’t know where else to look. Could you please give me at least some idea of how to go about this?

Katie's request for Alex to transmit messages to Rowley had nagged at him all through the autumn, and after he received this first message at his college email address, he was so curious that he drove home from college only to pass on the message to the old man and ask him what this important cause was.

He met the man walking down the street of Muress and told him. Rowley nodded almost absentmindedly and made as if to go, but Alex, hardly able to bear the mystery anymore, asked him:

"What IS this thing that you and Katie are looking for? Why is it so important? If I'm going to be involved, I want to know more about it."

Rowley stared unblinkingly at the boy for a minute, and then finally said carefully, "It is quite a long story. Come to my hut this evening at eight o' clock and I'll tell you."

--

Rowley filled up his peculiar pipe and lifted it to his lips. The scent of the rising smoke was not unpleasant; it was better than cigarette smoke. He lowered the pipe soon after, sighed, and began in his mellifluous young man's voice,

"Before I even begin to tell you, I must know what I need to say and what I do not. How familiar are you with Tolkien, Alex?"

"Tolkien?" repeated Alex, nonplussed, wondering if he'd heard right. "I—I mean, I've never read...I've just seen the film, that's all. Katie knows a lot about it, though; why don't you try asking her?"

Rowley paid no attention to the question. "And how much do you remember from the films? Do you remember the quest? More importantly, do you remember Aragorn, the heir to the throne of Gondor?"

"Who, the character Viggo Mortensen played?" Alex stammered. "Vaguely. I haven't watched those films in a long time. What do they have to do with this mission that you and Katie are on, anyway?"

Rowley ignored this question also. He had started smoking again, and an almost merry twinkle had appeared in his eye. "Very well, you vaguely remember the story. I shall present you with a hypothetical scenario. Suppose that you found out that something in which you never believed, which you thought of as a story created by men, actually existed? Let's say, for example, an atheist who suddenly spoke with an angel. How would you react?"

Alex wondered if this was going to be a philosophical discussion or if the man was toying with him. Rowley actually looked like he was about to laugh! Alex tried to come up with as dignified an answer as he could.

"I don't think I would believe it actually happened. I'd think of it later as a dream or as a joke someone was playing on me. I mean, if something you've believed your whole life just didn't make sense any more, you couldn't just change your opinion in one minute."

"So I see," Rowley mused, blowing smoke rings. "Then I daresay you wouldn't believe me if I told you that all the world and characters in the Lord of the Rings films existed? Or that some of them might still exist? Or that you are a descendent of Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor?"

"Probably not," replied Alex, not really listening. "You'd probably be telling a story, and..."

His voice trailed off as what the old man had said suddenly sank in. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He glanced at the man's face to see if he might be telling a joke, but the wrinkled, bearded face in front of him was perfectly neutral. His own face was heating up as he realized how stupid he must look, staring at Rowley like a deer staring into a car's headlights, his mouth hanging open. He closed it hastily as Rowley continued:

"That is our 'mission,' Alex. We are searching, in effect, for Middle-Earth, or, more accurately, the last people of Middle-Earth: the nonhuman races that survived to the present time. The dwindling of the planet's resources, the population growth, and the possibilities of deadly war endanger them more than ever. If we are successful, they will survive any upcoming world crises."

When Alex finally found words, he spoke in a rough voice heavy with disappointment: "THAT'S the lost world you're looking for?" At a nod from Rowley, he continued, "Something that can't possibly be real? Something that Tolkien just made up? That's it?!"

"'That's it,'" repeated Rowley, putting his pipe back in his mouth.

Alex scowled, though he hardly knew what he had expected this "mission" to be. But trying to save fictional characters? It was the most impossible, fantastic thing Alex had ever heard of. He figured that the old man was making fun of him; probably he and Katie had planned it out. Those two were insane; he'd been right from the very beginning. With a mumble of, "I have to go now," he got up and turned toward the door, but Rowley quickly said,

"Wait, I need to give you my answer to Katie's request."

Alex turned, feeling rather angry by this time, and retorted, "This has to be a joke. I don't think it's funny at all, though. I've made a fool of myself every time you and Katie have talked to me about this, and I don't know what the hell you're laughing at me for, but I'm not going along with it." He was speaking recklessly now, and he knew it, for it was his own curiosity that had gotten him mixed up in the joke.

Rowley didn't even bat an eye. He raised his eyebrows, remarking, "A joke? It is not my way to joke about the end of the world, or the extermination of an entire race. Humans make such jests readily, even eagerly, perhaps to convince themselves that there is truly nothing to fear, but if there is anything to fear, I believe that it should not be veiled by humor or false reassurances."

Alex grew more irritated, for he thought that Rowley was deliberately changing the subject, and he snapped, "Now you're talking like you're not human yourself." You hypocrite, he almost added, but clamped his mouth shut on these two words.

Now Rowley had lowered his pipe and was staring sharply at Alex, dark eyes boring into the boy's gray ones. "Am I human? Are you sure of this?"

Alex didn't answer, partly for fear of making a new fool of himself, partly because the dark eyes were making him nervous, filling his mind with doubts. Rowley repeated, "Are you sure that I am human?" and with these words, he seemed to grow taller and fiercer, casting a dark shadow over the room. Alex was suddenly fearful, and he almost turned and ran for the door, but just as suddenly, the shadow passed away and the man looked like his ordinary self again. He seemed to be waiting expectantly for Alex's answer.

Alex wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, shocked to find his hand trembling so much. For a while, his throat was too dry for him to speak. After about a minute, he croaked out:

"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore."

The man—or whatever he was—seemed almost friendly again as he nodded his head and began smoking once more. "Here is my message for Katie. She's in Virginia now, I believe? Tell her to contact a Mr. Robert Tilton, a banker in the city of Richmond. She will find his number in the telephone book."

Alex didn't even remember leaving the man's hut. His mind was blank until he got back to his own room. He wasn't even sure if he could remember the message, for his fear seemed to slow his brain down. Now that he was over the initial disappointment about Rowley's mission, it frightened him almost as much as Rowley himself did. If Middle-earth really existed, if what he had previously considered complete fantasy was real, what else that people believed imaginary might exist?

He thrashed on his bed, breathing hard, covering his head with his pillow as though he still heard what the man was saying to him. He tried reading and listening to music, but nothing worked. Nothing distracted him from Rowley's disturbing behavior and message, and when he fell asleep at last, unpleasant dreams troubled him all through the night.

--

The elegant French cafe of Chez Marnier in Richmond, where the man with the slow Southern drawl had asked to meet Katie, was crowded this time of day, mostly with businesspeople taking their lunch breaks. The noon sun shone through the windows, sparkling on polished silver and wineglasses and glass vases. The cafe was as neat and prim-looking as the people who frequented it; just glancing at the spotless white tablecloths, the shiny black and white floor tiles, and the uniformed servers made Katie feel under dressed and frumpy. She surreptitiously smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt, wishing that Tilton would come.

It was not the sort of restaurant at which Katie usually took her meals, but Robert Tilton had said over the phone that it was a perfect place to talk without being overheard. Judging by the crowd, though, Katie rather doubted it, especially as nearly everyone spoke calmly and quietly, and conversation was hushed enough for her to hear the classical music playing in the background.

As these thoughts crossed her mind, a man came up to her and asked, "Are you Katie Laurence?"

"Yes," answered Katie, shaking the hand he offered her. Obviously this was Robert Tilton, and not only because he recognized her name. The tall, elegant, black-haired man was a perfect match to the voice on the phone.

"Well, glad to meet you," he continued smoothly. Katie could not help liking him at once, for he had a friendly air, despite his formal manners. She also felt a curious attraction to his gray eyes and dark hair. He looks like a relative of Alex, that's why. Still, she sensed that there was something more significant about it than its familiarity.

"I'll ask for a table in the corner," he was saying now. "So we can talk quietly." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "It's good to see someone else involved in the whole "Search for Middle-Earth" business; Gandalf hasn't contacted me since he left the US twenty years ago."

Twenty years? It had been that long? Well, it would have seemed like only a millisecond to the wizard, but still...Katie had no time to ask Mr. Tilton, for the hostess was leading them to a table for two over in a corner of the restaurant, with no people sitting at the nearby tables.

In this secluded area, Katie relaxed a bit, for no one was staring at her and most of her dress was hidden when she sat down. However, for a while she sat in a long, uncomfortable silence, for she could not think of any way to bring up the subject of Gandalf's mission. She cursed her awkward shyness, but, she consoled herself, Mr. Tilton seemed as tongue-tied as she.

In fact, he never spoke of Middle-earth until the two of them had ordered their meals. After the waitress had collected the menus and left, he clasped his hands on the table in front of him, as if in an attitude of prayer, and started, in a low voice:

"So, Gandalf recommended me to you. From our phone conversation, I remember you said that you wanted to know more about what we're dealing with, about what exactly we're looking for."

"I do," Katie answered. "I understand what Gandalf's after, pretty much, but I have no idea where to start looking. I doubt any hobbits or other creatures ever came to the United States."

"True," the man agreed. "Tolkien made it clear enough that the Shire used to be somewhere in Britain. But it's harder than you might think to figure out Middle-Earth geography using modern geography. If you look at the maps Tolkien drew, you find that they don't correspond to the modern landscape of Europe or the Middle East. For example, take Mordor. If it's true that it was located where, say, Iraq or Turkey is today, that means that Tolkien left out thousands miles of land and sea between it and Gondor. And we don't even know where Gondor was! On the mainland of Europe somewhere, I would guess—could the White Mountains have been the Alps?—but its nearness to Mordor makes this doubtful. You see what I mean?"

"Sure," Katie replied. She had never really thought about it before, but she supposed it made perfect sense. "But what does Gandalf think?"

"Gandalf seems to think that the land changed over thousands of years," Mr. Tilton answered. "Not much, but enough so that distances might have increased or decreased, seas might have dried up, roads might have flooded. I have to say, though, I don't agree; I never did. He and I would discuss this over and over again—I won't say argued, since he never got impatient or angry—and we'd never come to a satisfactory conclusion. Myself, I firmly believe that land can't change so much in such a short time; it takes millions of years for geologic changes to take place."

"And what do you think happened?"

For a while, there was a pause, as Mr. Tilton folded and unfolded his napkin. Finally, he said slowly, "I believe that Tolkien wasn't completely accurate in drawing those maps. Perhaps he made a few mistakes in telling the story, and the journey to Mordor was more complicated than he wrote. After all, Tolkien would have been recording this journey according to accounts he received, not making it up. Stories always lose something in the telling, whenever they're passed on throughout the ages; I think that in this case, what the story of Arda lost was geography and correct distances."

After this, the waitress came with their food, so Mr. Tilton stopped talking for a time. Only when she'd left and Katie and Tilton had started eating did Katie ask:

"How did you find out about it? Did you figure out that it was Gandalf?"

"I rather think that Gandalf found me," Mr. Tilton said. "It was about thirty years ago, and I was just starting in the banking business. I received a telephone call from a John Weismann who wanted to come in and talk about a 'business proposition,' as he put it. I was surprised, but at the time I didn't see the harm, so I made an appointment with him to see me two days later.

"I won't deny that his appearance took me aback. He didn't look like much to me; I even wondered if he weren't insane. Still, I had made an appointment with him, so, to be polite, I invited him to sit down. My negative opinion of him grew with his attitude; he seemed a bit dazed, to tell you the truth. He kept focusing his attention on my face, as if he'd seen something unusual there. And when he caught a glimpse of the ring on my finger, well...he didn't gasp or start, nothing like that. But he was shaken; I could tell. At the same time, he seemed pleased, almost smug, as if he'd always known something all along and the ring proved it. Here, I'll show it to you, and you can see for yourself."

With that, he raised his left hand for Katie's inspection. On his middle finger he wore a ring in the shape of two emerald-eyed snakes beneath flowers of gold. It was a ring that Katie recognized.

If Katie had not recently been reading The Silmarillion, she might not have known the significance of the ring. As it was, she suddenly felt a chill akin to that she felt when Gandalf revealed who he was. Her palms grew sweaty as she whispered, "Is that...the...the ring of..."

"Barahir?" Mr. Tilton finished wryly. "That was certainly what Gandalf thought. Me, I wasn't sure; all I knew was that it was a family heirloom, brought over to Virginia in 1625 by William Tilton, my ancestor. If Gandalf is right, it's even older than I previously thought."

Katie couldn't speak. She sat still, her eyes wide. Mr. Tilton took advantage of her silence to continue with his story.

"Well, this John Weismann—Gandalf—didn't talk about any 'business proposition.' In fact, strangely enough, he tried to find out about my family history. Oh, he did it indirectly, but he did it nonetheless. I still remember our conversation perfectly:

"'You're a successful banker, that's obvious,' he said to me as he looked around my office. 'Has this company been in your family for long?'

"'Since the 1920s,' I said, without thinking about it. 'Until then, it was a struggle, though; the family plantation was destroyed in the Civil War.'

"To this day, I still don't know what was making me spill out my family background to him. He asked me, 'Before the Civil War? Your family has been in America for a long time, then.'

"'Yes,' I said. 'Since 1625—my ancestor was the second son of an English earl who came to Jamestown. Left our family with written records."

"He seemed more pleased than ever; I almost expected him to rub his hands with glee. Finally, he asked the last question: 'Did your ancestor bring that ring over from England with him?'

"I was still more confused, but I replied, 'Yes—we're not sure, but it seems from the writings he left that his father gave it to him as a token of his love.'

"Gandalf didn't ask any more questions. Finally, I asked him, a bit irritated, 'What kind of "business proposition" did you want to talk to me about? If it's inconvenient, we can put it off for another day.'

"And that's when he told me everything. It was a long story, and so incredible that I only remember shaking my head in disbelief almost constantly when he told it. Elves? An exalted European race of people that built cities and wrote books years before, say, the Egyptians? He even said that I was part of this people, the descendent of a king who ruled about five or six thousand years ago. Said he knew it just by looking at my hair and eyes, if you can believe it. Granted, I realize gray eyes and black hair are not common—they run in my family, though they always skip a generation—but I never thought it was a sign of royalty."

Katie had not touched her sandwich since Mr. Tilton had shown her the ring. She twisted her napkin in her perspiring fingers, feeling the tingling sensation of excitement in her stomach. Her heart was pounding as she thought of the possibilities. Mr. Tilton was a descendent of Aragorn. Alex also had the combination of dark hair and gray eyes. Did that mean that Alex, also, belonged to the Numenorean race? It had to; nobody else, as far as she could tell, had such striking features. No wonder Gandalf had stated that the boy might be eager to help; this very minute, he was probably telling Alex the same story that he had told Mr. Tilton thirty years ago.

"As I said, I didn't believe him at first," the man added. "I asked him for proof, whereupon he just smiled at me and said, 'Read Tolkien's works. You will know of what I speak.'

"Well, eventually I did, one weekend when I was feeling bored. I started with Lord of the Rings and got through The Silmarillion. I even flipped through his other works. And by the end, I was captivated. Despite myself, I believed that what Gandalf had said was true; I found myself mourning the loss of Gondor and the elves, the rise of Men. Luckily, Gandalf was spending some time in Virginia; he revealed himself to me—as an istar, you know, not just a wise man—and he frequently came to talk with me. He told my wife about the situation when she was around, but even when she got over her disbelief, she never was as enthusiastic about it as I was. As a geneticist and an atheist, she simply doesn't believe in the concept of a higher race of people, or of a higher race than people. She never tried to stop me, but I can't say she ever wholeheartedly approved."

Mr. Tilton leaned back in his chair and sipped at his wine, his story and his steak finished. The waitress came to whisk away Katie's half-eaten sandwich and Tilton's empty dish. For a while, there was silence broken only by the hum of soft conversations.

"Well, uh..." began Katie at last. "You...seem to have a lot more experience in this cause than I have. Can you...um...please give me an idea of where to start?"

Tilton sighed and shifted in his chair. "I'm afraid I can't tell you much. I've gone to Europe, trying to find out something, but I feel now that my earlier guesses about the location of Gondor and the Shire were wrong."

"Well, anything might be of some help to me. I mean, I don't even know where or what to look at," Katie said, unable to keep a note of pleading out of her voice. Despite Mr. Tilton's friendliness and her excitement about his discoveries, she felt no more comfortable in this restaurant and among these wealthy-looking people than she had before. She desperately wished to go home, but she could not go home without Tilton's information.

"Okay." Tilton reached into his briefcase and pulled out a small pad of paper and a pencil. "As I said, I may be wrong, but here's what I figured out at first." Quickly he sketched a rough outline of Europe on the pad, including the British Isles and Turkey. He circled the drawing of Britain, saying, "Both Gandalf and I agree that this was where the Shire and the rest of Eriador used to be. If you're looking for evidence of hobbits, that's where you should look. Granted, I searched the countryside many times and never found anything, but maybe you'll have better luck. Who knows?"

He moved the pencil down onto the continent, about where southern France or maybe Switzerland would be. "With Gondor, as I said, it's much more difficult. But, studying the maps that Tolkien left and reading over the brief passages Tolkien wrote on the flora and fauna of, say, Ithilien, I guessed—and still think—that at one point, Gondor extended from France or Switzerland to the Mediterranean, somewhere in Italy or southern France. I don't know where Minas Tirith itself would have been, so I can't help you much there." He circled the area on the map, and then stabbed his pencil into what was supposed to be Turkey. "Mordor was right about here, I guess it goes without saying. I can only assume that Harad and the surrounding area was North Africa."

Katie nodded, trying not to hide her disappointment. She had been hoping for more detailed information, perhaps on any hobbits or other creatures the man had seen, maybe exact locations. But how could he give them to her, when no one knew that the old realms of Middle-Earth had even existed? For all Katie knew, the city of Minas Tirith was buried, waiting for some archaeologists to dig it up, but until they dug it up, she would have a hard time finding any clues about its disappearance. Maybe it had vanished from the Earth, as her dream had implied. In that case, she might as well give up.

However, she thanked Mr. Tilton anyway. It was a start. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she would go to Britain and find Alex and Gandalf again. Then she and they could start by looking for any hobbits that, against all odds, might have survived into the twenty-first century.

"It was no trouble," Tilton said in response to her thanks. He handed her one of his business cards. "Call me if you need any more help or have any more questions."

They shook hands again as they stood up from the table. Katie had just grabbed her purse to go when suddenly Tilton said, "I forgot to ask you something. Gandalf asked me a question once, when he came to see me after our first meeting. He asked me, 'Did William Tilton sail to America with any friends?' I said I didn't know the answer; he never would tell me why he asked the question. I was wondering if he'd mentioned anything about this to you."

Katie, puzzled, shook her head. Mr. Tilton waved a hand. "Ah, well, it doesn't much matter. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I suppose you and I will meet again sometime. Good luck."

Heavy snows fell on Scotland at the beginning of December. On a Saturday, Alex, despite a terrible cold, had driven up to Aberdeen to see an old friend and was late coming home. Somewhere, he had taken a wrong turn and was now driving lost and aimlessly around, looking in vain for a sign. The darkness and cold of the early winter night seemed to press closely around Alex and his car like a smothering blanket: there were no street lights on the road, and it had begun to snow again. The car's heating system was sluggish and ineffective, and Alex could barely breathe or even keep his eyes open. He was dying to get home and crawl into bed, perhaps never to wake up again.

He finally came across a little farmhouse—the first he'd seen in a while—in the middle of nowhere, and, seeing a man outside shoveling snow, decided to stop and ask for directions. He parked the car and reluctantly got out, calling, "Excuse me, could you..."

But his words trailed off when he saw how the stranger was looking at him. The man's expression was that of mixed joy and fear, as if he'd just seen the ghost of a loved one appear. Evidently he was mistaking Alex for someone else.

Alex hurried ahead with his explanation, punctuated by coughs, "Look, I'm sorry to bother you, but I lost my way when I was driving from Aberdeen to..." his words were cut short by a particularly violent sneeze.

The stranger set down his shovel. "You're ill," he said flatly. It was not a statement of sympathy, but of simple fact.

"Just a cold," Alex told him. "If you could please tell me how..." he was now taken by a fit of coughing.

The stranger shook his head. "Come inside for a while," he suggested. "I'll give you the directions there, where it's warm."

Alex was inclined to say no at first—after all, the man was a complete stranger—but such was his fatigue, sickness, and desperation to go home that he followed the stranger into the house, where they shed their coats and gloves.

The man towered over Alex by at least a foot. Dressed in a simple pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, he appeared ordinary, but at the same time, he had a wise, almost a regal air. The boy could not put an age to him: he seemed like a young man of thirty or forty, but his face and eyes seemed to hold the memory of many years. He had the brightest gray eyes that Alex had ever seen.

He led Alex into a small kitchen at the back, from which the clatter and banging of metal were emanating. They looked at a rear end and legs sticking out from under the sink, surrounded by wrenches and other tools on the floor. In a minute, the man crawled out from under the sink, revealing himself to be identical to the first man, down to the bright gray eyes. And, like the first man, he seemed shocked to see Alex. He blinked, shook his head as if to clear it, and asked, "What is your name?"

"Alex Kerr," replied Alex, without thinking, and regretted it immediately. Had he not been so ill and miserable, he would have had the presence of mind to give a false name.

"Ah," replied the man. "You see, you reminded me of someone I used to know; an old friend of mine."

Alex sniffled loudly and blew his nose. Who did he keep reminding people of? Something that Rowley—or whoever he was—had told him tickled the back of his mind, but he crushed the idea firmly. If he thought about it for too long, his knees would start quaking with fear.

"Is anything wrong?" one of the men asked him. "You look rather distressed."

Alex had not known that it showed. "I'm fine," he said quickly. "I'm sick, of course, and just in a bit of a hurry, that's all. If you could give me..."

The man did not roll his eyes, but the muscles at the corners twitched, as if they knew it might be possible. "Something is wrong, for you cannot hide your feelings or lie as well as...but never mind that. The point is, if there is anything I or my brother can do to help you...you are our guest, after all, for only a little while."

This was an entirely new experience for Alex: a complete stranger offering to help him, not to mention inviting him in. What did it mean? Shaking his head and sniffling, he answered, "It's nothing, just...well...something really disturbing that happened a month or two ago. It came back to me all of a sudden today."

He coughed again; he couldn't seem to stop. Silently, one of the brothers—it was obvious that they were twins—indicated a chair at the table for him, then handed him a cup of some warm, fragrant liquid.

Alex sat down, took a hesitant sip—and was startled. The drink, whatever it was, seemed to warm him inside and out, as well as pouring strength into his limbs. Even his sinuses seemed to clear. He took another, longer sip.

The drink also seemed to cut through his doubts and hesitation, and the story of what Rowley had done and said spilled out. It was a relief to finally tell someone, though he almost worried that these two men would laugh at him. While they didn't seem to find the tale amusing, their reaction nearly shocked Alex into jumping up and running from the room.

"So," said one quietly. "You have spoken with Mithrandir, with Gandalf. Not many Men can claim to have known him, since he came back here. I am impressed."

Alex nearly choked, spraying his drink. "You know him?! Was everything he said actually true?! You can't be serious!"

"We are," said the other. "He was a friend of our father's long ago and has spoken with us many times since he came back. He was a friend to elves as well as Men."

Alex shivered. "You're elves? But..." His voice trailed off.

The twins looked at each other briefly. Then one of them turned back to Alex. "We do not give our names or true identities to many strangers, but we do not like to hide from someone who has spoken with Mithrandir. I am Elrohir, son of Elrond, and this is my brother Elladan." His brother gave Alex a brief nod. "We are not elves, but peredhil: half-man, half-elven. Unlike most of our kindred, who passed over the Great Sea long ago, we have remained here, living among Men for five thousand years."

Dimly, Alex remembered Elrond from the Lord of the Rings films, but he hadn't known that he had had any sons. For the first time ever, he wished that he'd had the patience to read the books.

Though he felt certain that these men were telling the truth, he did not want to believe them. He couldn't believe them; it had to be a joke. He scrutinized Elrohir and Elladan more closely, but except for their imposing carriage and piercing eyes, he could find no other features that pointed to any elvish blood in their veins. In fact, if he looked at them from far away, they looked like two of the most ordinary people in existence.

Elrohir grinned wryly. "You're not impressed, I see."

Shaken, embarrassed, Alex tried to explain, "No, not exactly, it's just...I mean, I..."

"For centuries we have had to live among Men, blend in with them," the peredhel explained. "Therefore, the English language, the hair, the clothes..." he plucked at his jeans with a look of disgust on his face.

"Well, er, tell me," ventured Alex. "If I'm not being rude, why...why did you stay here, then?"

Elrohir seemed to think for a minute. He said at last, "At the time, we did not wish to leave our sister or our friends, for we had many friends among Men. After Arwen and our friends died, there was no ship to bear us to the Undying Lands. Therefore, we stayed, and now, I do not regret our decision. I was curious to see how Men fared after the Time of the Elves have ended, and even now, after thousands of years, I am still interested. Men have destroyed much, but they have created more—without any help from the Elves. A fascinating race altogether."

Elladan sat down on a nearby chair and explained to Alex, "Whatever happens to them, no matter what disasters befall them, they always recover and start all over again. I have seen it again and again throughout the ages. Few elves have such determination; after all, did not most of the Noldor still in Middle-Earth sail back to Valinor after Morgoth was overthrown? And I wonder: is this courage and stubbornness a gift or a curse from Iluvatar? Or did it develop over time, since Men, unless they die, have nowhere to go when they are weary of Middle-Earth?"

"Er...Iluvatar?" repeated Alex. The twins looked at each other briefly before Elladan answered.

"You may call Him our God, I suppose," he replied. "In any case, every time doom falls on man, he suffers for a while, but he is never destroyed. He rebuilds or recreates what was lost, growing wiser every time. Elves befriended the first men who wandered into the west of Middle-Earth, teaching them lore and craft, but the men to the east had no elves to teach them. And yet, think what they have accomplished! Cities, and letters, and ships, as well as feats that elves never even dreamed of. Your race even visited the moon!" He shook his head. "I was astonished to see Men—lesser men—grow so much wiser and more skilled."

Alex frowned for a minute before speaking. "Gandalf doesn't seem to think so. From the way he talked, you'd think we were going to blow up the planet in a month."

Elrohir chuckled softly. "Mithrandir gave our father and us much counsel that seemed gloomy if not downright pessimistic. Yet he is also the wisest of the wizards; never forget that! If he gives any counsel at all, know that it is always for a good reason, no matter how exaggerated it may seem."

Elladan spoke up now, "Gandalf has never hated the race of Men. Indeed, he loved Men as much as he loved Elves. Yet now, it seems, the earth itself is at stake as well as Men. Gandalf may indeed mourn for Men, but at the moment, his task is not to save them, but others."

"Yeah, what is Gandalf, anyway?" Alex blurted out. This question had been weighing on his mind since the frightening episode back at the man's house. "He implied he wasn't human, and now, listening to you, I believe him. Is he an elf or a per...per...half-elf like you?"

Elrohir shook his head. "He is neither elf nor peredhel," he answered. "He is a Maia, one of the servants of the Valar, sent over the sea thousands of years ago to aid Middle-Earth in its fight against Sauron."

Alex could only stare. He truly could not fathom what Elrohir was talking about. The half-elf hastened to explain.

"Maiar are spirits. You may think of them as gods, but they are less wise and powerful than the Valar, or, of course, Iluvatar."

Alex's eyes widened and he gasped, "So...that old man...he was a god?"

"I would not say god," Elladan told him. "The Maiar and Valar were worshiped as gods only among Men. The Elves of Valinor have seen them and spoken with them, or so our father told us long ago. Unlike what you may call gods,they are not omnipotent; they do not know the fate of any Children of Iluvatar. Only Iluvatar knows all; only Iluvatar has complete power over the Earth."

Alex's mind seemed to be buzzing with the strange names and the strange formal language—and he still didn't know what Gandalf was, not really. "What?" was all he could say, though it sounded stupid to his ears.

However, the twins seemed at least contrite. "Forgive me, Alex," Elladan said. "You do not know the history and lore of our people, do you? Men have forgotten such old tales, it seems." He seemed sad about it.

"I'm a little confused, that's all," Alex replied. "I've never heard of any of these people or elves, but...if you could tell me what they are...?"

"The tale is long and sad," Elrohir said. "It would take a great deal of time to tell you all of it. Did you not say you wished to return home quickly?"

Yes, Alex had. Wiping his nose, he weighed the two alternatives; the story or going home. It seemed that his curiosity was getting the better of him yet again. Anyway, it was a weekend, and the thought of going back out into the cold and darkness, not to mention coughing and sneezing all the way home, was unbearable. Gandalf's talk about Middle-earth was still disturbing and still made his stomach knot with fear, but so far, what Elladan and Elrohir had said was not frightening but fascinating. They both seemed quite a bit gentler and less over-dramatic than Gandalf; he decided he would rather hear the details from them.

"Tell me the story," he finally told the peredhil.

They did so, long into the night. As Alex drove home the next morning, still coughing and sniffling but feeling quite a bit better, he was still incredulous. But the thought of an imaginary world from a book existing no longer terrified him; he could consider the situation calmly and thoughtfully.

Gandalf still disturbed him, however. He decided that unless the Maia proved to be as friendly and comforting as the peredhil, he would no longer listen or speak to him.

Once Alex came home from the university in June, ignoring Gandalf became harder than he had previously thought. Whenever he started to leave the house and saw the old man outside, he immediately went back inside and waited until he could no longer see him. When he passed Gandalf in the streets, he turned his head away, often with embarrassing results, as he bumped into trees and lampposts from time to time. In short, he lived like a shy little boy hiding from a schoolyard bully, and as the days rolled by, he felt more and more ridiculous.

His shame increased once people started noticing, and he wished his behavior had not been so obvious. His twelve-year-old brother Dan teased him constantly about being afraid of the "mad old man". His mother finally asked him in an exasperated way why he was acting like such a coward, and his father pointed out mildly, "If you'd watch where you were going, you wouldn't keep running into things." His old friends were mystified, for whenever they saw Rowley in public, Alex always ran for a bathroom. Luckily for him, they did not connect their friend's odd behavior with the appearance of the old man; Alex was enduring enough shame at his cowardice. Neither the jeers of his brother nor the annoyed questions of his parents bothered him as much as the cruel criticism of his own mind.

For whenever he was alone, he could not help berating himself. In his head he called himself stupid, clumsy, paranoid, and, worst of all, cowardly. Making excuses for himself had become more and more difficult; he knew deep down inside that he looked and sounded like a fool. He told himself that he was doing the right thing, or he would go mad; that claim sounded hollow. He reminded himself of the futility of Gandalf's mission; that reminder seemed foolish. At times he raged at everyone who misunderstood him, for, he argued, how could they judge him when they didn't even know who Rowley really was? Let them listen to the wizard's creepy tales of Middle-earth and his gloomy prophecies and see how brave they would be then.

But at the same time, the idea of spending six months avoiding somebody out of fear seemed shameful now. It meant he was cowardly—and unless he changed his behavior, he would remain a coward. Dan, his parents, and his friends might forget the flights to the bathroom and the collisions with lampposts, but he would never be able to wash away their worry and contempt. In his own eyes, he would remain a coward and a fool.

He gathered courage from his embarrassment and unhappiness. From now on, he vowed, he would stamp down harder on all his fears. And he would begin by speaking to Gandalf.

Such an opportunity came earlier than he expected. The very next day after he had made his resolution, he saw Gandalf passing in the street. This time, Alex did not turn away. Trembling at his own boldness, he strode up to the wizard, who looked mildly surprised, but not astonished.

Before he could change his mind, Alex quickly said, "I'm sorry I didn't believe you...and I'm sorry about how rude I was. If there's anything I can do to make it up..."

Gandalf slowed his babbling by holding up a withered hand, palm out, and saying, "Slow down, Alex. There is no need for an apology. I understood your skepticism perfectly well."

Alex breathed a sigh of relief. He had done it. He had spoken to Gandalf, had apologized for his behavior, and he was still alive and sane. There was nothing to be afraid of after all. Now he could go home and his life could go back to normal; now he could pass Gandalf in the street every day without fear or embarrassment...

"Are you going home?" asked the wizard, interrupting his musings.

"Yeah," Alex replied, looking steadily on his companion's face. How easy it was to look upon him now! Why had he ever been frightened to do it before?

"I am returning home as well," Gandalf said. "Let us walk together; there are a few things I wish to ask you."

He turned into the narrow cobblestone lane that led to Alex's neighborhood. The boy stood still for a minute, his mouth slightly open and his heart beating faster as a tiny spark of fear was rekindled within him. Then he slowly followed the wizard.

"If I may ask," Gandalf said presently, as they strolled through the little cobbled streets, "what has changed your mind?"

Under that piercing gaze, Alex could tell nothing but the truth. "At first I decided I wasn't going to speak to you anymore, but as time went on, I felt like...like such a coward," he finished, saying the bitter word. He did not tell Gandalf the roles that Dan and his parents had played in his change of heart. "Anyway, I believe your story—sort of—I mean...I'm not as against it as I was at first." He struggled to calm himself; he would not be a coward. He would not.

"You do seem less skeptical than you did when we last spoke," Gandalf stated. "Have you had a chance to speak to Katie? Or did you meet someone else?"

"Well, last winter I met two pere...half-elves. Elladan and Elrohir, they said their names were. They told me the whole story about the Sil-Sil-Silmarils. It was pretty unbelievable, but it was a good story."

"Did you indeed speak with the peredhil?" Gandalf said. He sounded approving. "What did you think of them?"

Alex had to think for a moment: for a moment, not even he was sure of the answer to Gandalf's question. Finally, he replied hesitantly, "Well...they didn't look like a noble race of magical beings; they looked and dressed like ordinary people. I guess they've adjusted well to our time. But maybe that's why I liked them so much. As they looked and seemed so ordinary, when they talked about this Middle-earth, they weren't so...erm...alarming."

Gandalf smiled wryly. "You see? Not everyone associated with my plans is odd and frightening. I myself could have taken a different form if I chose."

Alex was rather embarrassed that Gandalf had guessed why he'd avoided the wizard, and he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. Still, a new question came into his head, and he managed to look Gandalf in the face, despite his discomfort, and ask it.

"If you don't mind my asking, why didn't you take a different form? Perhaps if you did, nobody would wonder what you were doing. They'd be more accepting of you."

Gandalf blew several new smoke rings before answering, "It may be easier in many cases if I did not attract as much attention from strangers. But if I looked like an ordinary man, in some ways I would be more conspicuous. If I travel without warning between cities and nations, if I request something unusual from a library, or if I meet with unusual strangers, people can dismiss my actions as those of an eccentric old man who is losing his reason. But if I did the same in the form of a younger or more common man, I would arouse a great deal of suspicion. What is more, as a mad but hale old man, I often command an unwilling respect from those who believe I am wise."

Alex frowned slightly. He did not entirely understand Gandalf's explanation, but the wizard had been speaking calmly and seriously, the way Elladan and Elrohir had. There were no more outbursts of temper and magic; no more tongue-in-cheek explanations and riddles that made Alex feel foolish. For the first time, Alex felt perfectly relaxed speaking with the Maia. So Gandalf can sound normal as well, he thought in some wonderment. He too can put himself on my level.

His surprise increased when Gandalf, putting out his pipe, added, "Perhaps I should have broken the secret to you more gently, but at the time you seemed too curious to wait. I was surprised that Katie told you nothing, and I realized how it must have been for you to agree to be our messenger without knowledge of what we were discussing. I thought perhaps I would be honest with you and let you know all at once, as it would save trouble later."

Though Alex was relieved to hear the wizard's apology, he somehow sensed that there was another reason why Gandalf had decided to reveal everything to him at once. The Istar's brow seemed more creased than before, and his eyes seemed to be looking beyond Alex, as though he were in a daydream.

Now Alex's fear was gone, and he blurted, "Is there something else?"

Now Gandalf was looking at him sharply, and Alex wished he had held his tongue. But in a minute, the wizard's expression changed and he only appeared thoughtful.

"You are observant, Alex," he mused. "At times you can read hearts as well as an Elf-friend, but it is not surprising when I remember who your ancestors were." In a more conversational tone, he added, "There is another reason, Alex. Time is short; I could not have waited much longer to let you know the truth, if indeed you wished to know it. I had already waited seven years for you to be old enough. For when I first saw you in Muress and knew you, I saw I would have to give you the choice of..."

He got no further, for Alex, who had gotten a mysterious creepy feeling in his stomach and legs, interrupted, "You—you came here to Muress looking for me? You knew who I was and everything?"

"No, no," Gandalf reassured him. "I knew nothing of you, and I was not looking for you personally. I wished to find all the surviving descendents of the Numenoreans. I had befriended one, the American banker Robert Tilton. You remember his name, do you not? He was the man to whom I recommended Katie.

"About twelve years ago, I asked Robert if he knew of any distant relations. His immediate ancestors, including his mother and father, had died; his close family is only his wife and daughter. Robert had done some genealogical research and could inform me that except for William Tilton, his ancestor who had gone to America, all the Tiltons had stayed in Britain. Together we traced the lineage until we came to the Kerrs, but all we could find was that they had lived in Scotland for years. It took still more years of wandering and study before I could find whom I guessed to be the last survivors of this family: your parents, your brother, and you.

"But it was still only guesswork, until I filled in the gaps of the Tilton and Kerr family tree, chiefly by looking at the village records of Muress. I had to search on my own, you see. Your parents had spurned me so thoroughly that I deemed it wise not to approach them anymore."

A memory came to Alex now. He had been about twelve or thirteen years old when he'd heard his mother say, "Do you know that Mr. Rowley asked me to come have tea at his house? I refused, of course, but I can't imagine why he asked in the first place. Why, he barely speaks to anyone here!"

And his father had responded, "Seems pretty suspicious to me. Why would he suddenly come out of seclusion? It can't just be for a cup of tea."

At the time Alex had listened with only half an ear. But now the words came back to him, and he felt a chill. Gandalf may not have known of his family at the beginning, but it was certainly not for lack of trying. Twelve years he had been on this search, he had said. And even after he'd settled in Muress, he had been like a bloodhound on the scent, searching records, poking his nose into everyone's business...and Alex had not known or even guessed.

The momentary chill had passed, and now Alex was feeling physically sick, his stomach churning. He seemed to be on a stage, in a spotlight, surrounded by spies and stalkers of all sorts, led by Gandalf. A criminal being executed in public could not have felt more wretched under the stares of the jeering spectators. Heart beating rapidly, he waited for the axe to fall, but Gandalf said nothing. Apparently his story was finished.

"So," Alex rasped, before clearing his throat and trying again. "So, now that you know who I am, what are you going to do to me?"

"Do to you?" repeated Gandalf, raising his eyebrows in apparent surprise. "Why, nothing. I only wished to explain myself completely. However, I am leaving next weekend to investigate something down in England, and I would be glad to have company on the trip."

Alex gazed at him, too stunned to speak. The temerity of the wizard! He frightened Alex, lured him into a false sense of security, gave him the creeps, and now he was asking him to accompany him on a holiday?

Gandalf continued, "If you don't wish to come, I should like it if you emailed Katie for me and told her that I ask her to come at least. She will be interested in this. If we are lucky, we may perhaps have more clues to our search. Do you not agree?"

Alex cringed at Gandalf's use of "we". It was obvious; the Istar was including Alex as one of his accomplices. He was binding Alex into a campaign. And it seemed Alex's curiosity would defeat his common sense again. Already he was wondering what this thing Gandalf spoke of was. He tried telling himself that he would not be interested in it and that, moreover, he wouldn't understand it (especially if Katie was interested in it), but to no avail. Finally, unwillingly, Dan's taunting words came back to him. Was he still afraid of Gandalf? Did he fear to only look at something? His face heated with bitter embarrassment.

Anger and a sense of betrayal struggled with maddening curiosity and shame in his cowardice, and, as usual in Alex's case, curiosity and shame won.

"I'll come," the boy finally agreed, through gritted teeth.

If Gandalf was satisfied, he did not show it. Alex would almost have preferred him to gloat. As it was, the wizard merely nodded, saying, "There shall be nothing dangerous about this journey, and we'll stay for only two days."

These reassurances did nothing to cool Alex's anger. He narrowed his eyes and asked, in the icy tones which had always discomforted his younger brother:

"What have you done to me?"

Sadly, the charm in Alex's voice that worked on Dan did not work on Gandalf. He tranquilly replied, "If I 'did anything' to you, it was not driven by cruelty, you may be assured. After you see what I speak of, you may make your own choices about me and my plans."

Would he really be able to? Alex wondered. The thought gave him a sinking feeling, despite his inward efforts to be brave.

--

If Katie had such reticence, she never showed it when she arrived in Scotland. She was so pleased to see Alex and Gandalf that she fairly bubbled over with talk, the first time Alex remembered her ever to say so much at one time. He greeted her pleasantly and felt a secret relief that he would not be alone with Gandalf on this trip. What other influence would the wizard have on him?

"It's wonderful to see both of you again," Katie said breathlessly, after she had embraced them both. "I've been having such a hard time at school; I wouldn't have gone to college if I'd known. And my parents are just about fed up with me. At first I couldn't even get them to let me come, and when I finally did..."

Alex shut his eyes, letting her chatter wash over him. Keep talking, Katie, he thought, the less I listen to Gandalf's plans, the better. I won't be a coward—I won't!—but I won't let him control me, even after I see the—whatever it is.

Alex was a little surprised to realize that Gandalf was taking him and Katie out into the middle of nowhere. After meeting Katie at the airport, he had hired a taxi to take them to a train station, and then it was off by train to some remote station in the country. Where they were going from there Alex could only guess.

Katie was the one who voiced his query, “Where are we going?”

“To the woods you may know as the Old Forest,” replied Gandalf, after their train had dropped them off. “We are not far now, and we shall rest there tonight and tomorrow as well.”

Katie was surprised. “The Old Forest? It's still around? Does Tom Bombadil still live there?”

“He has never left,” Gandalf said. "He continues to resist the changes that Men have brought to this land—he speaks no English, for example—though daily the outside world presses ever closer. We will not see him today, but he and I prepared a shelter in the woods where we can rest. I feel that we shall need it more than ever now.”

By now Katie seemed puzzled, as well as worried. “What do you mean?”

But Gandalf didn’t answer. He was striding toward the dark fringe of trees that bordered the grassy field around the station. It seemed pretty insane to Alex to be walking nonchalantly into a forest like that, but Katie seemed to accept it, and he doubted that Gandalf would intentionally lead them into danger.

Once under the canopy of trees, Alex stared around him in amazement. Ordinarily he never paid much attention to forests and trees; nature wasn’t his thing. Yet he could tell just by looking at the gnarled oaks and elms that this wood was old, extremely old. As far as he could tell, no human activity had disturbed it; no people had ever hiked its trails. True, some of the trunks were blackened as if by fire or soot from coal-burning, while others looked rotten as if from some disease, but other than that, it seemed fine.

Gandalf turned around and must have noticed Alex’s puzzled frown, for he told him, “This forest has always resisted destruction. No Man has ever been able to clear it away.”

“I can see why,” whispered Katie, nervously twisting the bottom of her shirt. “It’s as sinister as it was in the book—no, I think it’s even worse. Is that because people have tried to cut it down, or have polluted it or something?”

Gandalf answered, “The trees have always hated Men, whom they consider two-legged, moving destroyers. I do not know whether their malice has increased over the centuries, but we had best be wary.”

Without another word, he started off into the woods, followed by his two companions, though Alex was hesitant and almost wanted to turn back. How could a tree hate a person? They didn’t have any emotions—or did they? If wizards and elves and hobbits were real, why couldn’t sentient trees also be real? And could the trees, if they were angry, actually hurt people?

Alex was so busy worrying about the trees that he hardly noticed the change in scenery around him as they walked for an hour. He kept his eye on Gandalf’s brown-clad back and followed him as if in a dream, not daring to look at the surrounding trees.

But Katie was looking around them, and she was the one who called Alex’s attention to the change:

“That’s strange. None of these trees look like they’ve even been touched by pollution or disease. They look so…healthy, like they’re being tended by a gardener or something.”

At that, Alex looked around, and he found it was true. The trees still looked ancient, but they did seem healthier, not to mention more alive and watchful than ever.

Even as he shivered, though, he began to notice a change in the air. What was it? Somehow he seemed to be able to breathe more easily than he ever had in his life. Pretty soon he found he was taking deep breaths, like a choked man suddenly released from a grip around his neck. And with every breath he took, fresh air tickled his nostrils. He wasn’t the only one to have noticed the change; Katie was also inhaling and exhaling deeply, and her eyes were sparkling with joy.

Alex was confused. Why should she be so exhilarated? Of course, the air did smell and feel good; not a single hint of car exhaust, or sewage, or fumes of tar and diesel…

He almost stopped in his tracks as it came to him: the air was actually clean. Apparently no pollution or evil smells could reach this place—wherever and whatever it was. He shook his head in wonderment. Who was this Tom Bombadil, anyway?

Neither Gandalf nor Katie would tell him. They continued on through the forest, and Alex followed them, all his fear replaced by astonishment and a strange sense of relief.

At last they reached a clearing, where Alex received another surprise. When Gandalf had mentioned a "shelter," Alex had pictured a tent, or perhaps a lean-to built of branches. Instead, Gandalf waved his hand almost carelessly at a low, thatch-roofed wooden house that rested at the north end of the clearing. Leafy oaks shaded it, but the ground around seemed carefully cleared of plants and young trees.

"You and this Tom Bombadil actually built a whole house?" Alex asked, shaking his head. He was too startled to ask the question more politely, but Gandalf did not seem to notice his rudeness.

"We never knew when it might be useful," Gandalf replied, his eyes twinkling. "At any rate, I thought that you two would dislike staying with Tom Bombadil instead."

Alex had no answer to this statement, for he had no idea who Bombadil was. Katie frowned thoughtfully for a few seconds, before laughing softly and saying, "You're probably right about that, Gandalf. But at least if he doesn't speak any English, we wouldn't be able to understand his poetry." She giggled, which shocked Alex; he had never heard such a sound from her before. Gandalf cracked a brief smile before leading his two companions into the one-room house.

The furniture inside was negligible: just a few stools around a sturdy wooden table, a cupboard, and a few blanket rolls on the wooden floor. Still, it was more than Alex had expected from a cottage in the woods. How long had Gandalf and Bombadil taken to build it? Why had they built it? For a moment, common sense, as he saw it, was greater than curiosity, and he wished himself back home. He had never liked things that he couldn't explain.

The three of them made a light meal on the bread and butter and cheese that Gandalf removed from the cupboard, before curling up immediately in the blankets. Neither Katie nor Alex was particularly tired, as it was only about seven o'clock, but the way Gandalf sat on his stool, deep in thought, puffing tranquilly on his pipe, discouraged conversation. Alex twisted and turned; the blanket on the floor was not thin enough to discourage sleep, but he had too much to think about to even relax. He tried talking to Katie, but the girl was too busy looking around the room with wonder and delight on her face. Probably it reminded her of something she'd read in Tolkien; it irritated him slightly that she understood something about this trip that he did not. Not that Gandalf had been any more forthcoming with her than with him. Evidently, the wizard was keeping plenty of secrets, and Alex did not like to think what those secrets might be.

He crossly rolled over again, facing a bare wooden wall. There was plenty now that he did not like to think about. What was the point of Gandalf allaying his recent fears if new fears were going to surface?

--

The next morning, the three of them had to leave early. Alex, having slept poorly, was grumpy and listless; not being able to shower or even brush his teeth did not help his mood. Though Katie had slept more soundly, she still wondered with many misgivings what Gandalf had to show them. From his attitude, she guessed it was horrible, but he had never even given her a hint of what it might be.

So it was back through the forest and onto the train, all the way to a large, flat stretch of dirt, surrounded by a housing development. According to Gandalf, the place was originally going to be a parking lot, though with an archaeological dig going on right in the middle of it, this was unlikely to ever happen. Still, the place was surprisingly crowded.

"The archaeologists are allowing people to see what they have dug up," Gandalf explained. He did not sound particularly happy about it.

The site itself, marked off by a wire fence around a pit, was surrounded by a crowd of curious people. Gandalf’s presence immediately found him a space in the crowd, but Katie and Alex had to push through to catch sight of what was going on. Katie found a small space between two women she could squeeze through, but as Alex could not follow her, he did not see what she saw. He didn’t know why she gasped suddenly and clenched her fists, eyes widening in slow horror.

Yet he nearly died from suppressed curiosity, until finally the man in front of him turned around and left, allowing him to move closer to the fence. He peered down into the pit and saw what it was that had attracted so many people and had horrified Katie.

Bones. A whole pit full of bones, some crushed and rotting, some still intact, but all the same size: smaller than average. They looked like children’s bones. Alex shrugged. He supposed that Katie was upset to think of all those children lying dead at once. It was a nasty thought, he admitted, but surely not important enough for Gandalf to show them—then he caught sight of Gandalf’s face, so grim and somber, and a new thought came to him.

He moved closer to the wizard and whispered, “Those aren’t children’s bones, are they?”

Gandalf shook his head, looking more somber than ever. “They are the bones of hobbits. This pit is all that remains of the Shire.”

Alex shook his head in disbelief. These were all that remained of hobbit skeletons? He understood now why Gandalf thought they were important, but what was so awful about them? They’d obviously been dead for years.

He became dimly aware that one of the archaeologists, a woman, was answering somebody’s question:

“No, we don’t know what killed these children off or why they were buried here. We guess that it was a mass grave; radiocarbon dating shows that some of the bone samples taken from this site are about four thousand years old. We don’t know if the samples are all this ancient, but if they are, we might assume that all the children here in this pit were killed at the same time.”

Slowly, Alex put two and two together. If the bones were all four thousand years old, then clearly a mass killing had taken place. He was familiar with mass killings and genocides from studying history in school, but he could not understand why anyone would want to kill a large group of hobbits. From what he remembered, they were peaceful and friendly, doing no harm to anyone, and the Shire was far away from any human habitation. Of course, if human habitation was expanding and space was needed to build more houses, and the hobbits were in the way...but that was no reason to kill the hobbits all at once. Yet people in every culture had been murdered for as little cause. Alex guessed that the hobbits had been slaughtered casually, without any religious beliefs or political message to mask the sin of murder. Just a question of clearing out space to make room for something new.

With this thought, Alex felt an unpleasant twisting sensation in his stomach. He stepped away from the wire fence, and two teenage boys rushed up to take his place, but he could still see the bones in his mind. A part of him wondered why a mass murder of hobbits should upset him so greatly when he knew almost nothing about the creatures, but that part of him was drowned out by the part of him that was outraged at such casual, senseless cruelty. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands against his stomach, trying not to vomit and regretting that he had ever become mixed up in Gandalf's project.

It dawned on him that Katie was weeping. Sobbing, in fact, without bothering to wipe the tears off her cheeks. Alex had never seen her cry before.

--

Gandalf waited until he could hear the regular breathing of the children, which meant they were asleep. He would not tell them about the book yet; they were upset enough as it was. He was sympathetic; they were young and generally unused to the horrors that Men could inflict on a helpless race—or even a helpless world.

By light of a single candle, he pulled out the old, decrepit book and opened it. It was a miracle that it had managed to survive at all. As he found the place where he had left off the last time, he began the long and often painful process of translating the last written words of the Shire-folk from Westron into English.

Since the terrible discovery of the bones, Alex felt a need to talk more with Gandalf whenever he came home from school. During their conversations, Gandalf told him many other stories of Arda, none of which took his mind off the scene of four-thousand-year-old slaughter that he had seen in that pit. Numerous times, he asked Gandalf why he was continuing the search, if all the hobbits had died, but every answer the wizard gave was like a riddle, and Alex could never understand him.

Then one morning, as he passed Gandalf in the street, the Maia beckoned him over, smiling mysteriously. And Alex’s question was answered.

“I have translated a book found at the site we visited two weeks ago,” Gandalf told him. “Perhaps it will lead us to where the few living hobbits reside today.”

“Really?” Alex said, surprised. “But I thought…with all the bones…”

“But a few of them must have escaped,” Gandalf continued. “Whether any of their descendents survive, I do not know. But it is the clearest evidence I have found since I began this search years ago.”

“Well, what does it say?” asked Alex, feeling strangely excited and relieved. “Where does it say they went?”

Gandalf looked thoughtful. “Before I read it, I shall invite Katie here to listen, as well as the others.”

“Others?” Alex repeated, more surprised than ever. “You mean there are other people that know about this?”

“Not many,” the wizard admitted. “Only a few scattered here and there. Katie has spoken with one of them: a banker from the United States. And you, of course, have talked with Elladan and Elrohir.”

Alex was pleased that he would see the half-elves again. He had not contacted them since his accidental meeting with them in the winter, but he remembered their kindness and the stories they had told. “Who else?”

“A young man from Iraq,” Gandalf replied. “At the moment, he is dealing with the…trouble…going on there now. And an archaeologist who is searching the Continent for the remains of Minas Tirith. As I said, not many, but I would guess that the search would go ill with many more people, for I do not want it publicized. We shall meet in a week’s time, if that is convenient, at Foley’s, the pub here in Muress.”

Alex nodded quickly. “Should I go ahead and email Katie again?”

“Yes,” replied Gandalf. “And she will pass the message on to Mr. Tilton, who will pass it on to the others.”

--

“So you say he wants us all to come?” asked Robert Tilton in some disbelief, after Katie had called him.

“Yes,” the girl replied. “At least that’s what my friend emailed me. He’s translated a book that he found at the site, you know; he thinks it might give us some clues.”

For a while there was silence on the other end, before the man breathed deeply and said, “Well, I’d say it’s about time. I wasn’t sure after this pit was discovered if the whole search would be called off. No need to worry; I’ll come. I’ll get word to the others. See you later.”

Before Katie could ask who the “others” were, he had hung up the phone. Yet she felt excited about getting to meet any other people that would help. Robert had never told her that he’d contacted them.

--

After Mithrandir was gone, Elladan and Elrohir only looked at each other for a moment.

“Does he speak the truth?” Elrohir asked his brother.

“He must, but whether it will be of any aid to him is another matter,” replied Elladan, shaking his head. “And I do not know why he came to tell us, for we have not been helping him over the years.”

“I think,” said Elrohir slowly, “that it might be time to begin helping him. I too sometimes wish to find remnants of the old days. Maybe if Gandalf is right, we shall be able to save them.”

“Perhaps,” was all Elladan said, and that was how they left it. But both brothers would travel to Muress that very night.

--

Robert Tilton was packed and ready. He sat in a chair in his bedroom, waiting rather impatiently for his wife and his daughter to finish packing. Though he knew quite well his wife’s disapproval of and his daughter’s misgivings about the entire project, he was grateful that they had agreed to come with him. Perhaps at this meeting, their doubts would be resolved.

He himself had done his work well. He had contacted the other two people to whom Gandalf had introduced him almost ten years ago, and despite their own troubles, they would arrive in Scotland as soon as they could. Whatever was troubling them could wait, most likely.

--

It was a small but mixed crowd that gathered in the private dining room of Foley’s that evening. Katie noticed Robert Tilton sitting beside two women, one middle-aged and one about Katie’s age, whom he introduced as his wife Adele Crisp and his daughter Margaret. A young, brown-skinned man in worn clothes introduced himself as Faris Jaber, while a middle-aged English woman was introduced as Dr. Charlotte Nichols. Last of all were the peredhil twins, Elladan and Elrohir, whom Alex, of all people, had pointed out to Katie.

Nine people, counting Katie, Alex, and the peredhil. Nine people, three of whom were just kids, one of whom, according to Robert, didn’t even wholeheartedly believe in the cause. Katie shook her head. These were the only ones Gandalf could find to help him? Then again, maybe he only wanted a small number of people in on the secret. Still, for the most part they were all ordinary, without any special wisdom or skills. How could they possibly succeed where Gandalf had not?

At the moment, Gandalf seemed to be making small talk with everyone, asking them how they were doing and what had happened since he had last spoken with them. Alex only listened with half an ear, until he heard something that made both him and Katie jump in their seats:

“Tell me, Faris; have you managed to find out what is going on in the Zagros Mountains? I may be able to come and help again if you are having trouble.”

Faris shook his head glumly. “You shouldn’t have left,” he said in perfect English, with the tiniest hint of an English accent. “There is foul play going on in the mountains, and I can’t figure out what it is. Perhaps only paranoia makes me feel that Karim and The’b Ghazeb are behind it, but after all that has happened recently, I doubt it.”

Katie exchanged confused looks with Alex. They knew about The’b Ghazeb; it was a terrorist group that had been in the news more and more often. Each evening brought story after story about villages and mosques blown up and people shot down ruthlessly. But was Faris serious? The members of The’b Ghazeb were planning something? What was it?

It was Dr. Nichols who spoke up this time, saying, “Well, I say we worry about it when it happens, and not before. I take it that Gandalf didn’t call us here to talk about terrorists, though.”

“I did not,” Gandalf replied. “I asked you to meet me here because at last, after years of searching, I have found a clue that may point directly to where the last of the hobbits have been hidden. At the pit, I found a book written by the mayors of Hobbiton, as you might know it, in the Shire. I still cannot tell whether this was a private journal or whether the mayors were chronicling the events, but it provides a wealth of information about what exactly happened to the Shire.”

Everyone in the room waited as Gandalf opened the book and began to read:

“ Trouble brewing down south. Men and their families are heading to Bree and the surrounding villages in droves, so we hear. There is rumor of war down in Minas Tirith, though we’ve never heard of such a thing before. The last great war fought among Men was the War of the Ring six hundred years ago.

“And here is another entry, written some years later, perhaps:

Bree, Archet, and Coombe are now packed with Men from the south. No refugees are coming up from Gondor anymore, but nor is anything else. Trade has stopped. Something worse than we thought has happened down there, but the refugees refuse to say what. Yet as long as it doesn’t come here, we should be quite safe.”

Gandalf stopped reading and flipped through some pages. “The next few pages were too torn and rotten for me to read. Then we come to a new entry, but I don’t know how many years later it was written. It is in a different hand, though, so I suspect the previous chronicler had died and was replaced by a new one. Listen:

This year, Men have started wandering into the Shire. Nobody knows where they came from, for they look like no Men we’ve ever seen. They are neither Breelanders nor Rangers nor the King’s people from down south. Have not been able to observe them closely, but can see that they dress in skins and bring tents and weapons. They’ve recently been setting their tents up in the Eastfarthing. Nothing we say or do can drive them off; they don’t even speak our tongue.

The Men have not moved out of the Eastfarthing. They seem content where they are, for the moment. Can only wait and see what they’ll do next. It would be wise to avoid them if we can, for there are many more of them than us, and they’re armed with many spears and axes.

Some of the wild men—this is the only name we have for them—have left by now. Apparently they are not content to stay in one place for long. We can only hope that they leave the Shire soon. We’ve been able to avoid them for the most part, but when they catch sight of us, they immediately reach for their weapons.

“And now it seems that a few pages are missing,” Gandalf told his audience. “It picks up again; I still do not know how much time after. But it is here that the sad tidings begin:

Old Tunnelly, on a visit to the Eastfarthing, was killed by the wild men today. An axe cut him down as he walked past their encampment. His body was found and buried early this afternoon, and the men have become agitated. They’ve started posting armed guards at their tents; it is dangerous for anyone to walk past.

Two people killed yesterday by a spear. A party of men is now off to try to find an alternate route to the Eastfarthing, one that does not lead past the men’s camp. I am angry that we have now become prisoners in our own land. Some of the younger folk are trying to talk us into fighting. I hope that they won’t decide to take matters into their own hands.

The number of wild men has been growing daily. Tents have been crowding the fields, and from what we can see of the men, they seem impatient. At the moment, there is nothing we can do.

I write this with deep sadness. A band of the wild men came through the Eastfarthing yesterday, overrunning the land and, from what we can tell, killing anyone they found. They’ve plundered the hobbit-holes and are stripping the land bare. I hope that some survivors managed to flee, but doubt it. I fear that they won’t be content with the land they’ve taken and will plan next to attack Hobbiton. We must prepare ourselves.

Have sent a messenger to every village in the Bree-land, asking for help. Now we will try to resist the men, for there is nothing else we can do.”

Gandalf paused for a minute. Alex thought that he saw the wizard blink once and swallow before he continued.

I must write this as fast as I can, as the wild men will be here soon. Our army was slain quickly and easily, cut down like hay in a field. Not a single hobbit was left alive; nothing we could do turned aside the spears of these men. Strange that I still wonder who they are and where they came from. Now we’ll never know.

No help has come from Bree or from the men down south. I fear there were no men down south anymore to come to our aid, and wonder if these same men slaughtered them. The dwarves haven’t contacted us for a hundred years; I have no hope that they will come now.

I’ve gathered together as many survivors as I could find, mostly women, children, and old men, outfitted them with provisions for a journey, and sent them north. To go north is our only hope left; we do not know what we shall find east, south, or west. Though the end of days, at least of our days, seems to have come at last, I’m determined that some of us will be saved. Even if Men chase us to the ends of the earth, some of us will be saved.

Perhaps someone will find this book and…”

Gandalf shut the book abruptly and sighed. “It ends there.”

For a long time, there was absolute silence in the room. Faris was the first to speak.

“Some of us will be saved. Do you believe that these ‘saved’ ones managed to escape? Do you think their descendents are still alive?”

“Yes,” answered Gandalf. “And now at least I have an idea of where they might be.”

“But we only know that they went north out of the Shire,” protested Robert. “We don’t know the exact geographic location, and…”

“No, we don’t. But logically, they must have had to move north every time Men overran their homes. I would guess that by now they must be far north of the Shire by now, perhaps even in Scotland. How many are still alive, even I cannot guess.”

At this, Adele opened her mouth, apparently to protest something, but she was abruptly cut off by Dr. Nichols, who said, “And did the fall of Gondor have something to do with these men that overran the Shire?”

“We do not know that answer either,” Gandalf said. “However, I would guess that the two events are, indeed, connected. The only question is how.”

Katie squirmed uncomfortably as she remembered the dream, the nightmare in which Minas Tirith was swallowed up by darkness. Judging from the book, it was not a dark lord that destroyed it, but Men. But how could these primitive men described by the hobbits have wiped a city off the map?

Dr. Nichols sighed. “My colleagues and I have found nothing, no matter where we’ve searched. By now I would guess that the remains of Minas Tirith are under a modern city somewhere, perhaps under a road or a building. And if that’s the case, obviously there’s no way we can find them.”

“We could, eventually,” Elladan spoke up suddenly. “Yet it would take time. And time is running out.”

From the looks on everybody’s faces, not a single person in the room, apart from Gandalf and the peredhil, knew what Elladan meant. Alex glanced around the room in confusion, and Margaret blurted, “What does that mean?”

Nobody answered.

Summer was passing slowly by, and Alex often acknowledged that it was the best he could remember. The weather was sunny and hot, unusual for Muress, and Alex and his old friends spent nearly all their time outdoors: swimming, or fishing, or just hanging out downtown. All of them were relaxing after their freshman years at college, which had seemed appallingly difficult.

Alex no longer passed Gandalf in the street—or if he did, he didn’t notice. Nothing that had to do with Middle-Earth had happened since the meeting. And, truthfully, he was glad. It was much easier to forget history, no matter how terrible it was, and to not worry so much about the future. Anyway, he had started thinking, as he had not thought since the winter, about how bizarre the whole enterprise was—and how bizarre the people involved in it were.

You only had to look at this Robert Tilton, the rich American, to realize that. Though everyone else who had attended the meeting had left for home, Robert and his family had not. He had taken a room at the only hotel in town, and apparently he was hunkering down there for an indefinite period of time. Alex knew it, because he had seen Robert in town sometimes. He had also seen Adele, his wife, looking profoundly angry, pressing her lips together whenever she looked at Gandalf’s hut. And one cloudy afternoon, he found Margaret Tilton, in tears, on a bench outside the hotel.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her, more out of sympathy than curiosity.

She wiped her tears away with a scrap of tissue, startled that he was speaking to her. Then she attempted to collect herself, saying softly, “Oh, it’s nothing really; I guess I’m just homesick, that’s all…” just before a fresh wave of sobs belied her words.

Alex, feeling uncomfortable, made a clumsy attempt at sympathy: “Well, if there’s anything you’d like to tell me…”

“There is,” the girl choked, drying her eyes once more. She fell silent afterwards, staring at the ground. Alex began to think she wasn’t going to say anything, but before he could leave, she blurted out:

“How did you get involved with this whole project? Gandalf’s project, I mean.”

Alex was rather surprised by the question, but he told her about his meetings with Katie and Gandalf, his curiosity, and the fascinating stories the peredhil had told. Margaret listened, looking unhappier with his every word, until he had finished. Then she said, in a voice almost too soft for him to hear:

“So you wanted to help out in this thing too?”

“Well, I don’t know that I wanted to, at least not at the beginning,” Alex hastened to explain. “I mean, I was curious, and by the time I learned who Gandalf was, and about Elladan and Elrohir, I was too into it to pull out.” He smiled ruefully. “Gandalf’s a wizard, after all; maybe he actually put a spell on me.”

But Margaret paid no attention to his feeble attempt at humor. Her tears had dried now, and her words were pouring out of her mouth like a bitter rush of water.

“I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t even want to have anything to do with it. And, you know, for a while, I didn’t have to. When I was little, I’d hear Mom and Dad arguing about some mission, about looking for certain people, and I didn’t even pay any attention. Apparently, this whole thing had been going on since before I was born. Plus Gandalf would come sometimes—I didn’t know who he was at the time—he’d come over, and Mom and Dad would serve him coffee, and they’d send me upstairs to bed. I didn’t question it; I didn’t even try eavesdropping. I just thought he was some old family friend, and he was coming over to chat with my parents about boring grown-up stuff—that’s what I thought at the time. He was a nice guy too; he reminded me a lot of what my grandfather might have been like, if he hadn’t died.”

Margaret paused for breath here, and Alex nearly sighed with relief; he was having a hard time following the train of her dialogue. Yet he was curious about Gandalf’s contact with her parents, and so he asked, “So Gandalf came over to your house?”

“Yeah, for a while, he did,” Margaret answered. “Then he stopped. Mom and Dad didn’t argue anymore, and I just practically forgot about the whole thing.

“And then it all came back recently. I remember it like it happened yesterday. Dad came home from work all excited for some reason. He went into the bedroom and started talking to Mom about something. I didn’t even pay any attention until I heard Mom say, really loudly, ‘This is ridiculous! This can’t go on!’ And then I was so curious I actually listened at the door, and I still remember the words I heard: something about a ‘girl’ and ‘ideas’ and ‘discovery’. I had no idea what any of it meant.

“Then he told me everything later. Mom didn’t want him to, but he did it anyway.” The girl sniffled and went on angrily, “He just dropped the bomb on my head about some lost continent or something, and about how the ‘family friend’ was a wizard, and how they were looking for some race of people, and how apparently he was the descendent of a king. I thought he’d gone crazy. And right afterwards, he told me two things: one, to read Tolkien, and two, that he wanted Mom and me to help with this mission. I couldn’t believe it.”

“And did you? Do what he said, I mean,” Alex corrected. He was rapt with attention now, and a little revulsion.

“No. I’m not into fantasy at all. I don’t care if it all really happened; I don’t like it. But Dad won’t listen. He showed us that newspaper article about the bones, and he’s dragged Mom and me up here. Now he seems set on making us stay here forever. He doesn’t even remember his work or anything, or Mom’s work, or how I’m going to college in the fall. I can’t tell if he’s really insane or just selfish.” Margaret’s tears began again.

For a while, Alex was speechless. Finally, he asked, “Why don’t you and your mum leave without him?”

“Mom’s told me we’re going to at the end of the week,” Margaret replied. “She thinks this whole thing is ridiculous and pointless, and she’s never liked that Dad got involved, but she’s never tried to stop him. But now she’s talking about getting him help when we get home. Because even though we know the whole situation is real, Dad’s getting obsessed with it, and Mom thinks it’s unhealthy. But—but—I love my dad; I can’t stand to watch him going insane.” She covered her face with the tissue and began to sob again.

Alex, feeling more sympathetic than ever, patted her shoulder, saying, in what he hoped was a consoling fashion, “Well, he’s not insane, that’s obvious. I think everything will be okay once you all get home. After all, he can’t force you to do something you don’t want to do.”

Gradually, Margaret’s sobs quieted. “I blame Gandalf entirely,” she muttered. “Who asked him to recruit my dad for his little plans, anyway? Manipulative old bastard.”

For some reason, Alex felt the need to defend the wizard. “Well, after all, he’s striving towards a really high goal. That’s what he came back for, and that’s why he’s getting people to help him.”

“So nothing matters to him outside of his goal,” Margaret retorted bitterly. “Great; so he doesn’t care that Dad’s falling apart, or that I’m ashamed to be involved…”

“Your dad isn’t falling apart,” Alex told her, sounding more certain than he felt. “And I don’t think Gandalf’s as bad as you say he is. I think he’d be willing to help you if you asked for it. It’s just that—I get the impression that he’s just doing what he’s always done. From what Elrohir and Elladan told me, he was always moving people around like pieces of a puzzle. And he wasn’t cruel about it; he liked people and made friends with them, but...well, this is the best way I can explain it; he had a job to do, and he was doing it.”

Margaret seemed not to hear him, as she was staring at the ground again, deep in thought. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, holding none of the bitterness it had before. “What’s your name again? I’m stupid when it comes to meeting new people; I’ve forgotten already.”

“Alex. Alex Kerr.”

“Well, thanks for listening to me, Alex, and I’m sorry about this. Normally I’m not such a baby,” she went on. “And…uh…you can call me Molly, if you want. That’s what all my friends back home call me.”

With that, Margaret—Molly—hurried off down the street, leaving Alex confused, sympathetic—and slightly disgusted.

He and Molly were on the way to becoming friends when Robert finally decided to take his family home, one day before the deadline Adele had set for her and her daughter. Alex watched the family leave for the airport, noting that Robert looked as cheerful as his wife and child did. Was he “falling apart”? Who could tell?

Though Gandalf had greeted her kindly when she came back to Muress, Katie realized that he was wondering why she had come back, barely a month after she had left. She kept her eyes on the ground and shuffled her feet nervously, wondering how the wizard would react.

There was no point in putting it off any longer. With a deep breath, Katie proclaimed, "I'm dropping out of college. I've decided that I want to live here, in Muress, and devote my life to your cause. If it's all right with you," she added hastily.

There was no response from Gandalf. Katie sensed that he was surprised, but he didn't look displeased, merely curious.

She went on, her words tumbling over each other: "I'll get a real job sometime; I will. But I'm sure this is what I want to do. Nothing at college interested me; I couldn't decide what I wanted to major in, and I kept having fights with my parents over it. They wouldn't have even let me come back here, except they realized school wasn't doing me much good. I think they were just plain exhausted."

Gandalf was nodding as he spoke, but he asked gently, "And is there anything more?"

Katie shivered, before finally speaking up, "It's just...I have a bad feeling about staying in the U.S. I don't think anything horrible is going to happen, but I feel like I have no future there."

For a while, she thought Gandalf was going to ask the same question as her mother had—why are you throwing away your chances for a bright future?—but he did not. He smiled at her with—had she imagined it?—a good deal of sadness in his eyes, before embracing her, saying, "I did not expect this, but I am glad. I shall be happy to count you as not only a guardian of our secrets, but as a friend, in the time we have left."

When Alex heard about Katie's decision, he could only shake his head in wonderment. Katiewas mad; he was sure of it. He had agreed to help Gandalf, despite the misgivings still floating around in his mind, but to trade in your entire future to do so? It was not natural. What did it mean?

--

Robert sat on the deck of the beach house, absentmindedly flipping through a newspaper, looking for something interesting to read. He was tired of reading and hearing about global warming and war, about populations decimated by sickness and violence. He would have been glad to read any new developments on The’b Ghazeb and Iraq, but, unfortunately, there were none. Of course, such new developments would only mean more bad news, but Faris Jaber had thought that whatever The'b Ghazeb was planning might ruin Gandalf's plans, and so Robert liked to be on the alert for it.

For a moment, he looked out at Colonial Beach, at the waves crashing on the shore, at the sea of tanned bodies and beach umbrellas on the sand. It was not an expensive vacation, or a very long one. In fact, the Tiltons were staying relatively close to their home, but his family had stayed in Scotland so long that there had been no time for one of the family's usual summer trips out of the state, or out of the country. At least Molly and Adele seemed cheerful and relaxed. Yet he did not. In fact, it seemed that no matter what time of day it was or how well he had slept the night before, his limbs dragged with fatigue. Nothing could lift his spirits, for he had tried his best to convince his wife and daughter of the importance of Gandalf's cause, and he had failed. They still did not want to be involved, even after hearing the sad words that the Maia had read from the hobbits' book. Well, he would stop bringing the situation up around them and dragging them along for the ride; he burned with shame whenever he thought of his hasty actions, the clumsy way in which he had revealed the secret to Molly, and even the extra work he had done on his own: the genealogical studies of his distant family in Britain.

Absentmindedly, he watched an ungainly, ragged figure trudge slowly along the shore, stopping every so often to stare out to sea. It occurred to Robert that he had seen this ragged man every day that he and his family were at the beach. What this man was and what he was doing, Robert could only guess: perhaps he was just some eccentric beach-comber, trying to find some comfort in the sound of the sea.

--

Now that Katie was living near Gandalf in Muress and was at hand to aid him, Alex was quite content to let the two of them continue the mission alone. As his work at college became more difficult, he began to retreat into his studies. If not for the updates that Katie sent him by email, he might have forgotten about Gandalf's project.

But during the summer when Alex turned twenty-one, he remembered it all clearly one afternoon. Oddly enough, his memories were brought back by a monotonous, unrelated event: his brother Dan deciding to clean out his closet. Alex, who was studying in the kitchen, ignored him as he brought down various curiosities and junk in his hands. Dan used to have a passion for collecting when he was younger, and the Kerrs had been used to seeing him bring home rocks, acorns, and leaves, and store them in his room. Three articles, however, were unlike those he had usually collected, and Alex looked up from his physics textbook to gaze at them curiously. They were a comb with most of its teeth missing, a knife with a bent blade, and a frayed bit of rope, all dirty and ancient-looking, as if they'd come from a rubbish bin somewhere.

"Where'd those come from?" Alex asked absentmindedly, as Dan came into the kitchen with his arms full of papers.

For a while, Dan looked confused. Then, noticing the three odd objects, he laughed in an embarrassed sort of way and answered, "Oh, these? These came from Grandad's house. Remember when we stayed there every spring, back before he died? I used to go exploring around those big holes in the sand-banks, in the back of his house, and I found these there. I don't know who put them there; maybe an animal took them. Anyway, I had no idea I had them hidden away so long."

As Dan spoke, Alex felt his stomach churn. Was it from excitement, fear, or sickness? For a while, his throat closed, and he could not speak. However, when Dan scooped up the comb, knife, and rope, and headed for the dustbin, Alex croaked out, "Don't throw them away!"

He barely noticed Dan's startled look. He barely registered how odd his order must have sounded. He heard the question come out of his mouth as if someone else were asking it:

"Was anybody living in those holes? Anyone at all?"

Dan frowned in confusion as he answered. "They were empty, as far as I can remember. I mean, it was some years ago, but there weren't any animals there."

"Did you find any bones?" Alex persisted, his heart pounding so loudly that he swore he could hear it.

"Bones? What are you talking about?"

The only answer Dan got was a wild, almost fearful look from his brother, before the latter grabbed his car keys and ran to the garage. Alex ignored Dan's yells of "Where are you going?" He never even stopped to consider what he was doing. As if in a dream, he got into the car and soon was on the road, to the village where his grandfather used to live. The steering wheel grew slippery under his sweaty hands, and his mind was filled with images of death and slaughter, of small bones in a pit. He ran a red light and did not consider the consequences. He barely registered the horn that blared at him when, as he was switching lanes, a truck nearly hit him. In fact, he barely noticed the world outside the car at all, until, at last, he arrived at the village, smaller even than Muress. There was his grandfather's old house, looking just as he remembered it.

Slamming the car door and locking it, he ran up the slope behind the house, forgetting that his grandfather no longer lived there, forgetting everything but the holes in the sand-bank.

The first hole was dry and earthy, and it smelled of animal dung. Though it appeared empty at first glance, Alex got down on his hands and knees and crawled inside it, dislodging chunks of earth from the ceiling. He ran his fingers over the sandy floor, even feeling in the back; he was careful not to move too much, in case there was something still living in the hole. Yet he might as well have thrown himself violently into the hole from the beginning, for it was completely empty. Slowly, feeling slightly disappointed, he backed out of that hole and tried another one.

There were only five holes in all, and so it did not take Alex long to check all of them, and to realize that Dan had been right. There was nothing in them, not even any bones. The hobbits must have moved out of them ages ago, leaving only a few artifacts for Dan to pick up. Or had hobbits even lived here?

Not knowing how to answer that question, Alex sank down against the bank, worn out with worry. His fear was gone, and now he did not know whether to feel relieved, disappointed, or embarrassed. His eyelids fluttered, and he could not stifle a yawn. Now, for the first time, he realized his foolishness in trespassing behind a stranger's house, but he did not care if anybody saw him. He didn't even care if the strangers chased him away. Was his pointless trip even worth telling Gandalf about?

Books and papers surrounded Alex constantly now. Books and papers and exams, along with searing heat in the summer and cabin fever in the winter. He wondered if the degree he was trying to earn was worth it, bitterly wishing he'd studied an easier field than physics. He often complained to his friends that he hadn't had a decent sleep in two years and that his eyes were tired from reading.

But one pleasant event kept his spirits high: Molly Tilton wrote to him. She wrote to him about a month after her visit to Scotland, surprising Alex. He had not realized that she had gotten his address. Her letter was strange anyway; she thanked him for offering her sympathy and told him, with ill-disguised delight, that her father had not mentioned the search for Middle-Earth since her family had arrived back in the States.

The correspondence between the two college students began then, almost by accident. Alex, without knowing why, sent Molly a letter in return, stating that he was glad both she and her father were feeling better. After that, they became pen-pals, sending each other letters regularly.

Though they were careful never to mention Gandalf or Middle-Earth—in fact, Alex's contact with Katie grew less and less as she sent fewer emails—there seemed to be a bond between them, judging by the length and regularity of these letters. It was a strange friendship, for neither of them met each other face to face for four years. For some reason, they did not exchange email addresses; they never thought of it. Alex could not have said himself why snail-mail was satisfactory to send messages to his new friend.

This correspondence continued until Alex had graduated from college with both his degree in physics and—or so he said—his brain worn out from hard studying. Though his mother wanted him to attend a graduate school, he balked at the idea of more schooling so soon after he had graduated. He argued constantly with her, until she suggested that perhaps after a holiday to clear his mind, he would come to see the wisdom of her words.

"Take a good long holiday," she told him, "anywhere you want."

Amazed at the freedom his mother was allowing him, Alex made plans to do so. He read travel brochures, trying to find an exciting yet inexpensive trip to take. His letter to Molly that week read thus:

Believe it or not, I've got the whole summer free to go where I want and do what I want. I've been thinking about going to the U.S.—maybe I'll see you somewhere!—but I'm not completely sure. What do you think about that?

And Molly sent an answer back to him:

I've got an idea: come on vacation with me and my family. I know it's kind of sudden and random, but I'd like to see you again too. I'll ask my parents if it's okay, but I don't see why they should say no; they'll remember you from four years ago. We're just going to a beach near home this year, but I think you'll like it.

Alex was stunned as he read it. Wasn't it a bit forward, to invite a friend whom you hadn't seen for four years on vacation? He'd known from Molly's letters that she, poor, flighty girl, often heedlessly acted before thinking, resulting in numerous sticky situations, but he was still shocked that she would take it for granted that he'd visit her.

Yet why not? Molly wasa friend, and a friend would be comforting to have, three months in another country. Once again, Alex felt that his misgivings were unreasonable.

At the beginning of June, Alex stepped off the plane in Washington, D.C. As Molly's letter had promised, she and her parents were there to meet him. Though he'd been dreading this meeting, it wasn't as awkward as he had feared. Mr. Tilton recognized him immediately, greeting him with a friendly shake of the hand. Dr. Crisp only gave him a smile, but at the time, he took it for a welcome. If he had been more skilled at reading people's faces, he would have seen that her eyes were not friendly at all, and that her smile itself was lukewarm.

That very night, Alex learned just how unfriendly she was. After he and the family had finished unpacking and settling into the beach house, she proposed a walk on the beach. "I'd like to get to know you a bit, Alex," she said, rather stiffly but not unkindly. "All I know is what Molly told me about you."

Alex shot a quick glance at Molly, but she had her face buried in a magazine. At the time, he did not blame her; if his mother ever asked to meet personally with his friends, he would be extremely embarrassed. Yet, being the family's guest, he thought it impolite to refuse.

Within five minutes, he and Molly's mother were strolling down Colonial Beach in silence. If Dr. Crisp had wanted to "get to know" Alex, she wasn't showing it. She never spoke until they were far away from the last beach umbrella. Her head jerked almost comically around on her neck as she looked behind her, stared suspiciously at a decrepit man in rags wading in the surf. By now, Alex was growing anxious, and he was just about to suggest returning to the house, when Dr. Crisp suddenly spoke.

"Did you hope to speak to Rob or anyone else about that project? Gandalf's project?"

It wasn't the question Alex was expecting. He collected his scattered thoughts before answering, "No. I haven't even heard from Gandalf from a long time. Why?"

"No regular email correspondence with him?" Adele Crisp persisted. "You haven't been helping him lately?"

"No," Alex said again. "I don't even know what he's up to now. But why do you ask?"

Adele shot a quick, sharp glance at him, as if she suspected he was lying, but said nothing. She stared out at the crashing waves, speaking in a low voice, as if out of her thoughts.

"Rob agreed we shouldn't talk about it anymore. I said to him that I didn't care if he worked on this thing alone, as long as he kept Molly and me out of it. Ridiculous theory, anyway; it's not as if these—hobbits—are an endangered keystone species. If they're extinct, that's that; if there are any left alive, we'll let evolution do its work, since the low numbers are probably impossible to bring up again."

"Sorry?" Alex ventured, understanding only a few of Adele's words. Even the most basic biology was hard for him to understand.

It was as if Dr. Crisp was waking up from a deep sleep. She turned her eyes on Alex again, almost as if she'd forgotten his presence. "Never mind all that. The point is, I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention Gandalf, the project, or anything to do with Tolkien while you're here. Rob is still getting over his obsession, I think; I don't want any more problems in this family, if he hears about it again. Anyway, Molly's as relieved as I am to stop thinking about it; you should be able to talk to her without worrying about her bringing it up."

"I wasn't planning on mentioning it," replied Alex, mystified. Was this all that Adele had called him down to the beach for? "She told me back in Scotland that she hated it—and I wasn't lying when I said I'd practically forgotten it. I won't say anything about it."

Dr. Crisp, for the first time that day, gave him a genuine smile. "That's fine, then. I think we'll get along well, Alex. Now, what do you say we head back now?"

Alex was too confused to answer. Adele seemed to take his silence for assent, as she turned around and started back down the shore, describing the many recreational opportunities at the beach. Alex barely listened. He was thinking about Molly's worries that her father was crazy. Judging from Adele's dialogue and behavior, he thought that she should be more concerned about her mother's sanity.

He kept telling himself that he was exaggerating, but he still felt uneasy. He had the feeling that Dr. Crisp would have sent him home immediately if he'd been contacting Gandalf regularly. Or was Alex just surprised that she was much tougher and sterner than her daughter?

--

But he had no time or desire to worry about Adele. After two days he already felt much more relaxed than he had been earlier this summer, and his friendship with Molly grew stronger. She introduced him to a group of American college students staying in the beach house next door. Alex wondered why she'd gone on vacation with her parents instead of going alone, but she never told him, and he didn't ask.

Instead, he sunbathed and swam, went to parties down on the beach and in town, and enjoyed himself. By the end of the first fortnight, all the stress left over from college had disappeared.

That night was a party night for him, Molly, and the students next door. Beach towels, chairs, and umbrellas spread out on the beach under the stars, loud music, bottles of beer and hard liquor spilling over the sand. As usual, the crowd grew more raucous as the night went on and the alcohol flowed freely. Alex had already refused a slurred suggestion about skinny-dipping, broken two CDs, and kissed Molly entirely by accident (though judging by her giggles, she didn't seem to mind). His actions were nothing compared to what many of the others were doing, and he might have gone unnoticed by everyone except Molly, had he not decided to drink more.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in a crowd of inebriated students, all of whom were laughing and applauding, as he related his somewhat-skewed version of Gandalf's mission and what the wizard had told him.

"Mad ol' bloke. Tol' me sum'fin 'bout Mi'l Earth an' said the worl' was endin'. Gandalf th' lizard, savin' th' habbits."

As he imitated Gandalf's voice and attitude, the roars of approval grew louder, even from Molly. The circle of admirers drew closer around Alex. If they had not, he might have noticed the gray eyes watching him from the darkness, out of an emaciated face. He might have marked the abrupt change in attitude of their owner: head suddenly snapped up in rapt attention, breath quickened, and limbs trembling with fear or eagerness.

--

The next morning, Alex, with a terrible hangover, wandered slowly down to the beach again. The very thought of food made him nauseated; he had decided to skip breakfast that day. Clutching his forehead, he stumbled closer to the shore, cursing as he nearly stepped on a piece of broken glass left over from last night's party. The bright sun, which hurt his eyes despite his sunglasses, did not improve his mood.

Since his eyes were half-closed, he had no idea what the dark shape was that was moving towards him, until it was barely two feet away. He then realized that it was a skinny, pale young man dressed in rags, shuffling across the wet sand. Alex remembered seeing this man often over the past two weeks, but he had no desire to speak with him. He turned his face away—and nearly jumped as he felt ice-cold fingers close on his arm.

He whirled around to see the man standing right next to him. Strange that he hadn't heard him sneak up behind him. Up close, Alex could see that the stranger's gray eyes and dark hair were just like his own, and that his skin seemed to be wasting away, exposing the sharp edges of bone underneath. His eyes were sunken, his cheekbones prominent. Alex tried in vain to jerk away from his grip. A poor, ragged beggar, probably with some contagious disease—but the man hung on more fiercely than before.

"I wish to speak to you," said the stranger, breathing heavily. Clearly, he was not an American; his accent was like none that Alex had ever heard, including Gandalf's. "Can you spare a few minutes?"

"No," Alex replied, trying to pry the fingers loose. "I'm in a hurry now, and I'd really like..."

"Do not lie!" the man said, with surprising vehemence. "You are in no hurry; I watched you this morning. I would not shame myself so if this were not important." His voice softened again. "I will do you no harm; indeed, what harm could I do? I wish only to talk."

"All right," Alex snapped, "just let go of my arm, will you? I feel a bit uncomfortable now...okay, that's better. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?"

The man said one word Alex didn't recognize:

"Olorin."

Alex's confusion must have shown on his face, for the stranger continued, "Gandalf...Gandalf, you called him. I desire to speak with Gandalf; will you tell me where he is?"

Alex was too stunned to speak. The man went on, "You spoke of him last night. I heard. Has he come back here?"

So that was it; Alex might have known. He felt himself growing hot with embarrassment as he muttered roughly, "I was drunk last night; I didn't even know what I was saying..."

"Yet you have spoken with him," the stranger persisted, "or you would not have mentioned him at all."

"What do you want with Gandalf?" Alex asked, trying to recover his dignity, and at the same time, growing curious. "Is it something about his mission?"

"I know of no mission," the stranger replied bitterly. "I did not even know that he was back in Arda before last night. I have passed four hundred years in Virginia; I have passed thousands of years away from home. The world has changed beyond recognition..."

It took a while for Alex to make sense of what he was saying. It dawned on him that this man had said thousands of years. Immediately, he remembered Elladan and Elrohir, and new understanding came to him—as well as new questions.

"You're an elf," was all he could say. His throat seemed too choked to let more words out.

"Maglor, son of Feanor," the man said, with an undertone of bitterness that Alex did not understand. "I knew Olorin—him you call Gandalf—years ago. Wisest of the Maiar, merciful to all. That is why I must speak with him."

"He's back in Scotland at the moment," Alex said, unable to hide his fascination with the elf. "I can send him an email if you want...but why is it so important that you speak with him?"

"Has he told you nothing?" the elf—Maglor—asked in disbelief. "Of the Silmarils, and Morgoth? You do not recognize these names; I can see it in your face."

Actually, Alex vaguely remembered the stories that Elladan and Elrohir had told him, but he had forgotten the details. He didn't even remember an elf by the name of Maglor in those stories. Slightly ashamed, he shook his head.

"You know nothing of it," Maglor sighed, "and Olorin is in Scotland. I must wait longer, it seems."

Alex, despite his shame and rising pity, decided to ask one of the questions that was bothering him at the moment.

"What happened to you, anyway, if you don't mind my asking? How are you here, on this beach, and how...how did you get...like this?"

"I do not mind your asking," answered Maglor, squatting down on the ground and beckoning for Alex to join him. "I came to America as a friend of a William Tilton." At Alex's start of surprise, the elf asked sharply, "Do you know of him?"

"Not him specifically," Alex replied, "but I'm staying with the Tiltons for the summer holidays here."

Maglor now appeared thoughtful. "Then this is a stranger chance than even I thought at first," he said slowly. "His forefathers were of the race of Numenor; his family was one of the most powerful in England at the time. Yet as a second son, he could not inherit his father's land and title. He wished to go to this new land of America, to 'try his chances in the New World,' he told me. And...at the time, I wished to go with him.

"It was a New World indeed, for I had known nothing of the lands that lay beyond Valinor. Until then, when I had given up hope of returning home, I had had no wish to see them. But I sailed with William out of friendship and curiosity."

Maglor paused here, staring down at the sand. A gull cried overhead. Alex felt compelled to ask, "So what happened?"

"We...quarreled, many times," Maglor said. "It began after we landed at Jamestown. We found nothing in this New World but wild land, a mere settlement of Men, savages in the woods. America was like to Beleriand before the Noldor came in exile to Middle-Earth."

He noticed Alex's confusion, and hastily continued, "I wished to explore the land further; I wondered why these Men did not found new kingdoms in America, as we did in Middle-Earth. But William only wished to serve his own ends, to stay behind the stockade and never go forth. He feared the wild beasts and the wild men, and he had not expected his life in America to be so full of toil. We argued many times, he and I, but for his sake, I stayed with him. I built my home near his and rested at Jamestown, though it was little to my liking.

"As time passed, he farmed and grew rich and, by marriage, became one of the wealthiest plantation owners in Virginia. He lived in great splendor, and he owned great tracts of land and many slaves to toil in his fields for him, beneath the lash. We hardly met any more, and when we did, we were always angry with each other. For he had become over-proud, hungering ever for money and slaves and land; I know not whether this pride was born of his wealth in America or whether it was always within him."

Maglor stopped talking again. Alex asked, "And the ending? How did you end up...well, what happened to you and William?"

"Attacks by the wild men, the...Indians," Maglor said slowly, grimly. "They slew five hundred people, some say, in one day—including William, though his wife and children managed to escape. So did I, though it shamed me to flee; I had no weapon of my own. Much later, I would wish I had stayed and been slain with William and the others."

There was silence for a while, as Alex pondered Maglor's strange story. Finally, he asked, "But how have you been getting on since then? How do you live? Do you stay in touch with the Tiltons?"

"I have worked over the years," Maglor replied. "I had to, when the woods were destroyed and I needed money to feed myself. I have begged for money, food, and shelter many times. I have been a street-musician; Men still appreciate my singing. Four or five years ago, I played colonial American music to tourists in Williamsburg."

"So you've been barely getting by, it sounds like," Alex said, shaking his head in wonderment.

"It is enough," Maglor said shortly. "I have toiled for millennia in Arda. I have suffered more hardship than I even dreamed of in the Elder Days. That cursed oath has followed me for so long that I am weary of it, as weary as I am of the ever-changing world. Now I wish to return to Valinor. After so many lives of Men and all I have suffered, will not Iluvatar and the Valar allow me to come home?"

Adele could not ignore it, no matter how hard she tried. She heard what the strange, ragged man—Elf—named himself, heard what he and Alex discussed together every day. At times she wanted to stop her ears. She was not Alex's mother, of course; she had no say in the friends he made or the things he talked about. Yet now she wished that Alex had not come to Virginia. It was as if Gandalf had followed her family across the ocean again.

Had he not done enough? From high school to college, she had been a strict atheist, thoroughly convinced that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was true, confident that as a biologist, she could know for sure how life worked and how evolution occurred. She had suffered no challenges to her beliefs—until Gandalf had entered her family's life, and, with his new ideas about "Middle-earth," put doubt in her confidence for the first time. The arguments with her husband, the unhappiness of her child, the nagging uncertainty about the world that bothered her constantly—all of these she blamed on the wizard.

After all, what more could she do but plead and argue? Her husband was a free man; she was not going to tyrannize over him and force him to change his opinions; she was not going to leave him when she still loved him and worried about his sanity. Her daughter had reached the age at which she could make her own decisions: if she wanted to devote her life to a useless cause, Adele wasn't going to stop her.

She was certainly not going to either nag Alex about his association with the elf, or put him out of the house. It would be hasty, rude, and embarrassing for her to do either, and anyway, he was not talking to Molly, her, or Rob about it. So for the rest of the summer, she suffered in silence, hiding her anger and disgust and trying to ignore Alex when he ran down to the beach, met the ragged man, and walked off with him.

--

"Therefore, my brother was lost forever," Maglor was saying to Alex, the day before he had to take the plane back to Scotland. "The last of my brothers to reach Mandos.

There was a moment of silence, as Alex stared at Maglor in mute sympathy. Words would be useless, he felt; they would not comfort the elf at all. He wished there was something he could do, and, rather lamely, he said so.

Maglor's shoulders lifted ever so slightly. "Actually," he said, "there is something...I don't know if you will wish to do it...but I must speak with Olorin. I wish to come home with you, and I would like you to take me to him."

"Oh!" gasped Alex, out of pure shock. He was not expecting this. "I—I don't know. See, I'll have my ticket, and it's kind of short notice—I'll be going home for a while before I start looking for a job, and, well...I guess I wasn't counting on coming back to my parents with a complete stranger."

"Please," Maglor said. Now there was a note of pleading in his voice; despite his bedraggled, beaten appearance, it sounded odd coming from a High Elf. "I have never asked for such a favor before. I would not have asked it, but when I heard that Olorin was back in Arda, in...Britain...I knew that I must return there at any cost. Please let me come back with you. I have given up all hope of returning home, but I wish to speak with him."

The pleas of the Elf struck Alex to the heart. Already moved by Maglor's account of the hardship he had endured throughout his life, especially these last four hundred years in Virginia, he was filled with pity and wonder at the Elf's plaintive tone. The affair with the Silmarils and Feanor, of which Maglor had told him over the past few weeks, meant nothing to him; why would it still matter, as it had happened so long ago? Something tickled his memory at that, but he ignored it. Instead, he told Maglor impulsively, "You'll come home with me tomorrow; in fact, why don't you come to our beach house now and sleep on the deck? We'll go to the airport together, I'll buy you another ticket, and we'll be back in Britain before you know it."

"I thank you, Alex," Maglor replied. It was a simple answer, but it expressed all of the Elf's gratitude.

--

Molly, sad and sleepless, wandered out onto the deck, thinking of Alex and how much she would miss him when he was gone. Perhaps she could visit him later on, but who knew how much later? And would he still remember her?

She was so engrossed in her thoughts that at first she didn't notice the man slumped against the railing of the deck, sleeping peacefully. When she did, however, she jumped, stifled a scream, and hurried back into the house as fast as she could.

--

Alex's alarm clock went off at six AM, just the time he had set it for. Yawning, he dressed quickly and brushed his teeth, before hurrying onto the deck. "Maglor, are you awake? It's time..." he began, before his voice trailed off.

Maglor was gone. The deck was completely empty.

Alex was puzzled. Hadn't the elf promised to wait for Alex in the morning, so that they

"Looking for your friend?"

Alex whirled around to face Adele standing in the doorway in her bathrobe, a coffee cup in her hand. The woman's facial expression was carefully neutral, but Alex detected a faint glimpse of triumph in her eyes.

"Yes," he answered. "Where is he?"

"Gone," said Adele shortly. "He left about two hours earlier."

Alex clutched his stomach and staggered a bit before catching himself. At the moment, he was more confused than horrified, though. Why had Maglor left? Did he think he could go to Britain without Alex? Had he misunderstood somehow?

And then Alex noticed the triumph in Adele's eyes, and he knew. For a moment, he couldn't speak, and he just stared at the woman with wide eyes. Finally, he spluttered, "Why? Why'd you send him off?"

Adele sat down and took a sip of her coffee. "Do you want the truth? I'm not in the habit of allowing random strangers in my house; I never have been. Molly told me about it last night, and I can tell you, I got a real shock, seeing him sleeping out there on our deck. Luckily, he left as I started to call the police. I'm sorry to have disappointed you, Alex."

"But he was going in the morning!" cried Alex, hardly believing what he was hearing. "He was coming back to Scotland with me!"

"Well, I never knew that," Adele replied tartly. "I wasn't willing to wait until I was robbed or kidnapped to find out, either."

Overcome with horror, and irritated with Adele's short answers, Alex continued babbling, "He was my friend! He wouldn't have done anything like that! He was a..." he stopped suddenly before blurting out Maglor's secret.

"An 'elf'?" Adele said, sneering slightly. At Alex's look of shock, she continued, "I overheard the two of you talking. And that's the second reason why I drove him off. I told you that our family had agreed I not /I to mention this useless Middle-Earth project again. I told you I didn't care who you talk to or who your friends are, as long as you kept us out of your plans—or the plans Gandalf put into your head. And last night I find you'd invited one of these people in?"

Alex kept his eyes wide and gulped down air like a fish out of water, not bothering to answer. Adele went on, "I don't know what to think. You see, I trusted you; I thought you understood what trouble we've been having with this."

Alex didn't wait to see her go back into the house. He ran down the steps onto the sand, calling for Maglor. Only the ocean answered him. Almost close to tears, he looked desperately up and down the beach for the missing Elf, to no avail. Apparently, Maglor was miles away by this time.

--

Molly peered into the dining alcove. Yes, Alex was there, hunched over the table, his head resting on his arms. Slowly, guiltily, she crept towards him. Alex didn't see her, or if he did, he didn't look up.

"I'm sorry, Alex," she said softly. "Believe me; I didn't know who he was. I just saw a man sleeping outside on the deck, and, well...I panicked. I thought he was just an ordinary homeless guy, a stranger. If I'd known it was Maglor, I wouldn't have..." she stopped abruptly. The damage was done, and there was no sense in making excuses. Alex still didn't look up.

Moving closer to her miserable friend, she put a hand on his forehead. Alex did not acknowledge her touch. "I'll find him again," she told Alex earnestly. "I'll tell Dad about this, and we'll find him together. He'll be able to come home; I'm sure of it."

Molly wiped the sweat from her brow, watching the tourists, looking half-asleep, drifting past her like figures in a nightmare. She regretted her rash promise to find Maglor. For three days, since her family had returned from the beach, she had searched all the nearby towns, with no success. She realized that it would make matters worse to contact the police, and that it would be utterly useless to search online.

The detour to Williamsburg was her last resort. It was the only clue she had left, for Alex had told her that the elf had been a guitarist there. Yet he wasn’t playing the guitar; in fact, he was nowhere to be found. Anyway, why would he have come back?

In the meantime, it was about four o’clock in the afternoon, the August heat was reaching its peak, and the mosquitoes were buzzing around Molly, driving her nearly insane. With an irritable slap at a pesky fly on her arm, she turned the corner near Vobe’s Tavern, passing a man in rags, wondering if she should just give up…

She halted suddenly. A man in rags.

Hardly believing her luck, she retraced her steps and found him huddled in the garden surrounding the tavern, hidden in the hollow space in a tree trunk. She knew him, even though he kept his face turned away from her.

Now that she had found the elusive elf, Molly had no idea how to go about speaking to him. She had no idea how such people liked to be addressed, or what was polite, or even how to explain the situation to him. She wished Alex were there.

Yet he was not, and Maglor still had not noticed her yet. She had to make the first move.

“M-Maglor?” she began timidly.

For a moment, she thought she saw his sunken eyes flicker in her direction, but when she blinked, he was looking away from her again.

Deciding that she might as well get the hardest part over with, Molly took a deep breath and plunged into her explanation.

“You know, Alex Iwas/I going to take you back to Scotland with him. He didn’t even know until the next morning that Mom…um…ran you off. Actually, Mom didn’t even know; it was my fault, because I saw you out on our deck and told her without thinking. So I know Alex had to leave, but I came back to give you a plane ticket and help you find Gandalf. You can come back with me and Dad; ever since Alex left, he’s been wanting to talk to Gandalf again.”

For a while there was silence, so long that Molly wondered whether Maglor had heard. However, he slowly turned his head toward her and said bitterly, “Indeed? So you will call the police, then. There is no need; I shall rest here for the night and then be on my way.”

“I’m not going to call the police,” Molly said, thoroughly nonplussed. “I have your ticket here, and I’m going to take you home, since Alex couldn’t do it.”

“Alex Iwouldn’t/I do it, you mean to say,” Maglor retorted, in a tone even more bitter than before.

“What do you mean?” asked Molly, growing irritated with the elf and his unreasonable anger.

“I humbled my pride enough to ask Alex for aid,” Maglor said. “He ensnared me with his lies about Olorin and then tricked me, so that I was forced to flee from the sea. I shall not allow it to happen again.”

“But…he’s not lying! And I’m not either!” cried Molly.

“Yet here I will stay,” insisted Maglor, “until the next morning. Return home and torment me no more.”

Humiliated and disgusted, Molly took the plane ticket out of her pocket, tossed it to the ground in front of Maglor, and ground it into the dust with her heel.

“Fine, then,” she snapped. “I’ll leave you alone, and I don’t give a shit whether you starve or get killed. I’m sorry I ever saw you in the first place.”

She turned on her heel and strode away from the tree, her face flushing when she noticed several people staring at her. She’d driven around for three days and embarrassed herself, all to be spoken to and sent away like an annoying child. Maybe she hadn’t expected Maglor to be cheerful, but surely he could have made a politer refusal.

“Wait.”

It was said in a quiet but commanding voice. Molly stopped and turned around before she even realized what she was doing.

Maglor held the dirty, crumpled plane ticket in his hand, staring at it as if he could hardly believe it were real. His hand was trembling, but his voice was quite steady as he said:

“I am ready to return home. Take me with you now.”

--

When Katie answered the knock on Gandalf’s door, she was confused for a while. Why had Mr. Tilton and his daughter come? And who was this strange man with them?

Even stranger, the man recognized Katie. He stared at her in what seemed like disbelief before he whispered, “I remember you. Four years ago, you drove me to the sea in your car. You helped me, at a moment when I needed it greatly. Yet I never guessed you knew of Olorin.”

Now Katie remembered the ragged guitarist she had dropped off on Colonial Beach, what seemed like a long time ago. However, she couldn’t guess who he was, or how he knew about Gandalf, until the wizard himself appeared in the doorway, with a look of recognition on his face.

“Maglor Feanorion,” he said softly. He added something in either Quenya or Sindarin that Katie couldn’t understand, but seemed to affect the stranger—Maglor—profoundly. The elf seemed almost close to tears; as Gandalf laid a hand on his shoulder and led him into the house, he turned his face away from Katie, who could barely move for shock and wonder.

--

Alex hugged and kissed Molly in gratitude and relief when he heard the story. His broken friend would be cared for and redeemed at last, he hoped; he did not consider Gandalf’s quest at all. Yet Katie had told him, breathing heavily in her excitement, that Maglor, in learning the reason for Gandalf’s stay in Scotland, had revealed what might be the most helpful clue of all.

“I only remember this now,” Maglor had said, while Katie listened with bated breath. “It was a few years before I met William Tilton. By chance, I had wandered up the Scottish coast, mourning my loneliness and the Oath that had kept me in Arda. I passed what looked like small, round doors in the rocks. I noticed that they looked like the dwellings of the Halflings, but I did not look at them more closely. That was nearly four hundred years ago; I do not know if they are still there.”

“We will go and look for them,” Gandalf had answered, without revealing any astonishment. “It is possible.”

“So,” Katie went on. “I’m coming along, and he says you and Molly can come too, Alex…if you want to, that is.”

Alex looked briefly at Molly. At a nod from her, he turned back to Katie and said, “We want to.”

The bedraggled, strange-looking party that set out two days later was eerily similar to the Fellowship of the Ring. Maglor and Gandalf led the way. The three young people followed behind, in a nervous, whispering knot. Last of all came Robert, accompanied by Elladan and Elrohir. Eight odd-looking people trekking through Britain to hunt for something whose location was uncertain.

They did not take the train or even a bus. What was the point? All that Maglor remembered about the mysterious site was that it was somewhere on the northern coast of Scotland. So the group simply walked from village to village. Drivers in cars stared at them with suspicion; many pedestrians whispered and snickered behind their hands. Molly wondered bitterly if the suspicious drivers might have been willing to give two or three people a lift, if not eight.

Despite the fact that it was summer, the wind blew chill over their faces, and a drizzly rain fell all day. Alex, Katie, and Molly soon walked silently, the hoods of their jackets pulled over their heads, their eyes fixed tiredly on the ground. Oddly enough, Maglor's strength seemed to have come back to him after returning to Britain and meeting Gandalf; he never seemed quite as tired as the humans in the party.

At about seven o'clock that evening, they had dinner in a shabby little restaurant—luckily, there were not many people around to stare or laugh at them—before continuing on their way. Just as they left the village, Maglor suddenly stopped, causing Katie, who was not watching, to almost run into him. He spoke to Gandalf in what seemed to be Sindarin, gesturing to an ancient fir tree that stood near the road. The tired Men in the group dared to hope that they had reached the end of their trip.

Apparently they had, for Gandalf, looking a trifle happier, and Maglor both turned away from the road, walking faster than ever now. The others struggled to keep up; Katie thought that Mr. Tilton looked nearly as excited as she felt.

They came to a rocky beach, where seawater sprayed the stones and made them slippery. There was not a tree or a blade of grass in sight, not even a shred of seaweed on the shore. Meanwhile, the sky was darkening, and the clouds hid any trace of the stars or moon. It seemed odd that hobbits would choose a place so grim to settle, but, Katie reflected, they had probably had no choice at the time.

Maglor was feeling his way along the stones now, apparently looking for holes. He, the peredhil, and Gandalf moved upon the slick rocks as though they were walking on a carpeted floor. The other four members of the party stumbled and slipped and had to catch hold of each other's hands. Once Alex fell and scraped his hand on a particularly sharp stone. Already tired and annoyed with the dismal weather, he stared enviously at Maglor. Robert turned on a flashlight, illuminating wet rocks and tired faces.

Suddenly, both Maglor and Gandalf stopped. Robert turned the flashlight and noticed it: a little hollow space in a large boulder below them.

As the company scrambled down to have a look, the hissing of the waves against the rocks seemed to get louder and, for some reason, more irregular. It was only when the party stood beside the boulder that they realized that the hissing was not the waves, but shallow, labored breathing. And it was only when they peeked into the crevasse that they realized that the breathing was coming from inside the hole.

Though Elladan and Elrohir immediately bent to have a closer look, Robert and the students hesitated. They looked at each other with a mixture of anticipation and dread. For some reason, they feared what they would find.

In a minute which seemed like an hour, Robert finally plucked up the courage to get down on his hands and knees and crawl into the hole. The three younger people followed hesitantly, crowding him from behind, hardly daring to make a sound. The breathing from the interior was loud in their ears, and it sounded thin and irregular: the breath of someone dying. In the beam of the flashlight, Robert, Katie, Alex, and Molly saw their first real, living hobbits.

Their eyes did not blink in the strange, powerful light. Perhaps they were unconscious or delirious. They were mere wraiths, wispy shadows of skin and bone, naked and blue with cold. Katie could pick out six of them: an older man and woman, a young man, a teenage girl, and two little boys. And that was it. Everyone present realized that these naked, weakened phantoms were the only hobbits left in the world.

--

It was light work to rescue the little people from the crevasse in the rocks. They made no resistance at all and were light enough to carry easily. Alex worried for a moment that they were sick, but Gandalf reassured him that they were only starved and cold. No one thought to ask him how he knew this.

Realizing that the hobbits would probably not survive one more night out in the cold weather, Gandalf elected to take rooms at the only hotel in the nearby village, a decision which made Molly and Alex, in particular, sigh with relief. The hobbits were carried hidden under jackets and, once the rooms were obtained, laid in the beds, with blankets covering them up. There was nothing to feed them but several packets of crisps and a few chocolate bars bought from the vending machines down the hall. Though the children ate ravenously, the adults lay still without touching a bite. They lay so still that Alex wondered if they weren't dead by now.

Everyone except Gandalf crawled into the beds, careful not to disturb the hobbits lying next to them, who looked lost in the mounds of sheets and comforter. Gandalf sat in a chair by the window, deep in thought. The finding of the six hobbits seemed neither to excite nor disturb him. It was as if, despite his four hundred years of failure, he had foreseen it all along.

"What will we do with them?" Katie asked sleepily. She felt too exhausted to display any strong emotions, but she was dimly aware of anxiety for the hobbits' lives.

"We will take them to the house in the Old Forest," replied Gandalf. "Perhaps they will heal faster isolated from the rest of this world."

No one added, "If they heal at all," but everyone, after taking another look at the tiny wraiths sunk into a troubled sleep, thought it.

Years later, Alex could never remember clearly when things started going wrong. Misfortune had befallen his friends after the hobbits had been found and lodged in the wooden house in the Old Forest, but the real disaster could have begun as soon as he had given Katie his email address, that long-ago day in Muress. Or it could have begun when Gandalf had spoken to him when he was a child.

The exact timing did not matter to him. He could only remember the years after the hobbits had been found as the most terrible years of his life.

Molly and Robert Tilton had returned to the States to find a tempest at home. Apparently Adele, enraged about her husband’s and daughter’s latest trip to Britain, had finally decided to act, after years of reluctant silence and cold anger. Without consulting Robert, she had arranged for him to see a psychiatrist. According to Molly, she was checking his emails and poring over the telephone bills as vociferously as though she were reading an exciting novel. Though Molly had moved in with a friend while she hunted for a job, it was still agony whenever she came home, for the atmosphere between her mother and father was colder than ever.

“It sounds like she’s becoming unhinged, not him!” Alex insisted angrily, once when Molly was visiting his house for Christmas. “Why doesn’t he insist that she see a psychiatrist?”

“She won’t go,” Molly replied, wiping away tears. “You know what she’s like. The only reason Dad’s going is that she accused him of deserting her and me. Can you believe it? She’s acting out of control, like a spoiled child or something.”

“Well, can’t your father get around all this?” Alex asked. Surely Robert Tilton was not that spineless.

“He tells me that now the hobbits have been found, he doesn’t care anymore,” Molly said sullenly. “I don’t know whether he’s lying or not, except it really seems like it’s true. He used to read The Silmarillion all the time and he doesn’t now. I even offered to talk to Gandalf for him, and he said something like, ‘Don’t bother. Now it looks like my job is done.’”

“And what about you?” Alex asked, looking steadily into the woman’s tear-filled eyes. “Do you think the job is done?”

Molly swallowed and looked away, coloring slightly. Alex had to bend his head toward her to catch her whispered reply:

“I don’t know.”

--
When Gandalf went away for a month, that summer in 2016, Katie hardly knew what to do with herself. She felt older than her twenty-four years.

For days she waited in the forest, tending the hobbits. They had grown strong and hearty by now. The children laughed and played with each other in the woods, apparently forgetting the hunger and cold they had recently known. The adults ate and drank and smoked quite cheerfully. Maglor and Katie had taught them a passable amount of English and could even carry on short conversations with them. Their relief, happiness, and growing health should have lightened Katie’s heart, but it was constantly heavy with worry for Gandalf.

“Faris Jaber has been shot,” he had told her. “At the moment, he is in a hospital in Sulaymaniyah, and I shall go there and try to persuade him to come to Britain, as soon as he can travel.”

And he had gone, ignoring Katie’s questions and protests. In her most bitter moments, Katie wondered why he had decided to save the Iraqi anyway. It had never been clear to her what Jaber was doing, just that “something was wrong” in the Zagros Mountains. Surely Iraq played no role in Gandalf’s mission, especially now that the hobbits had been found.

On the bright side, along with the hobbits, Maglor was growing stronger and happier with every day spent in the unspoiled woods. For now, it did not seem to matter whether he returned to Aman or not, as long as he could be free from the turmoil of the outside world.

Yet whatever did happen in the outside world affected him strangely. Every time a new coastal city flooded, his countenance grew sad, as if he remembered the drowning of Beleriand, or even Numenor. Though he did not complain, he frequently suffered in the searing heat of summer, which reached even the secluded forest where he now lived.

--
The days—or even weeks—after the shooting were like a nightmare to Faris. That miserable time in the hospital was spent struggling with pain, guilt, and anger. The boy had shot him in the leg, but he wished at times that he had shot him in the heart.

If only they had waited to search the premises. If only Faris had taken better care to hide himself. If only they had said what they were planning. If only he had been armed. If only…Faris shut his eyes tightly, struggling to block out the memory.

He had lurked near a cave of The’b Ghazeb fighters, listening to their plans. Their whispered voices and excited air led Faris to guess that they were plotting something particularly horrifying. Yet he had never learned what that something was. He had heard bitter laughter and a voice saying, “Dead as soon as they come.”

It was then that he heard the gunshot and felt the terrible pain in his leg. He was so shocked by the noise and dazed by the pain that he barely noticed the teenage boy looking down at him. He thought only, Oh, now they’re recruiting children to fight for them? before he fainted.

He had no idea who had found him and brought him here. For all he knew, it could have been the men in the cave, but why would they have tried to save him? More importantly, however, why had the boy not tried to kill him? Was he not worth killing? Was he only a bothersome fly to The’b Ghazeb, a fly that needed to be brushed out of the way?

He drove himself distracted with these questions when he could sleep no longer. For the first time in his life, he was as angry with himself as he was with the terrorists and murderers in his nation. Had not Gandalf sympathized with his desire to eliminate such cruelty? And now he was a victim of this cruelty, all because he had not been careful enough. Because he had not heard what The’b Ghazeb was planning, something would go wrong with Gandalf’s plan—unless he could return to the mountains and to his duty immediately. If only his leg would heal.

When Gandalf came, he felt a tiny ray of hope. Perhaps the wizard would be able to heal him. But Gandalf told him firmly that he was returning to Britain with him, and that he would not go back to the Zagros Mountains again.

He argued with the wizard for days. It made no difference what Faris had heard or not heard; Gandalf remained implacable.

“It does not matter now,” the wizard told him gently. “The hobbits have been found. None of my plans will be upset.”

“But if it will harm others…people I know…” began Faris angrily.

“If there is a risk, I shall know what it is some other way,” Gandalf replied. “If you return, you will certainly be killed. These men will recognize you, for the boy has surely described you to them.”

“I’ll disguise myself,” Faris said desperately. He was still so weak that his mind seemed to be moving slowly; none of his words made sense once they were out of his mouth. “I will arm myself this time. I…”

Gandalf shook his head, frowning at him from under his bushy brows. “I will not let you die, Faris,” he said sternly. “You have been my friend for nearly ten years. You welcomed me whenever my travels took me here. When your parents died, you looked on me as a father. You have done enough for me; now let me do something in return. Let me save your life.”

Faris stared at him, at a loss for words. Never had the wizard seemed so desperate.

The bullet in Faris Jaber’s leg had splintered the bone, and the limb had been incorrectly set at the hospital in Iraq. As a result, when he finally arrived in Britain, accompanied by Gandalf, his leg was twisted in a way that would prevent him from ever walking unaided again—and none of the doctors at the small hospital in Muress could repair the damage.

Other than the injury, he was unchanged outwardly, except for the lines that had developed on his face over the last six years. The shooting and ensuing pain had certainly not tempered his desire to return to Iraq. For days he argued with Gandalf, to no avail, and when he was not arguing, he muttered darkly to himself:

“Fool, fool, why couldn’t I have been more careful…damn, incompetent doctor…if he hadn’t ruined my leg, I would go back…I would…”

In these moods, he seemed as cross and impatient as a schoolboy, and immune to the peaceful forest. Yet after a while, he seemed less frustrated; Katie was not sure whether he was actually resigned to his fate or not.

After a fortnight, Faris was moving around stiffly with the help of a cane. The hospital in Muress had offered him a wheelchair, but the very idea had disgusted him. Neither he, Gandalf, nor Katie had the money to pay for an expensive operation on his twisted limb, but he would have jumped at the chance to walk on his own again. Unfortunately, whether he liked it or not, his healing process was as slow and tedious as that of Maglor and the hobbits.

Though he and the elf were not really on speaking terms, he had become fond of the hobbits. He chattered with the adults by the hour, smoking a borrowed pipe. He smiled whenever the children asked him innocently about where he came from, though he would have acted coldly to any adults who asked him such personal questions. Though Katie still wondered why he had decided to help Gandalf, she began to understand how he and the wizard could have been good friends—and why Gandalf had been so determined to save him.

Faris’s motives and friendship with Gandalf became perfectly clear to her one sunny autumn day. She and he sat under an oak tree next to the house, watching two of the hobbit children digging holes in the dirt. The leaves still changed yellow and red here in the Old Forest, and they trembled on the branches as a light breeze swept through.

“How did you meet Gandalf?” Katie blurted out. She was too curious to dissemble politely about it, and she was feeling rather unfriendly towards the Iraqi. Earlier that day, Gandalf had left for London, with a long good-bye for him and not even a backward look for her.

Faris frowned briefly at her, and for a while, Katie thought he was not going to answer. But he did, staring at the red and yellow leaves on the trees as though he would find inspiration in them.

“He came to my village when I was eight. No one knew what he had come for, and they never cared to ask. But he was kind to everyone, and so they accepted him. He loved to tell the children stories, and he gave friendly advice to the farmers, and he acted courteous to their wives. Before long, we took him for granted.”

“That sounds a lot like how he came to Muress,” Katie said thoughtfully. “Alex said he just strolled into town one day, bought a fisherman’s hut, and settled down there as if he would stay forever. But nobody really liked him; Alex said people thought he was odd.”

Faris looked at her for the first time since he had started talking. “Well, he didn’t stay forever. He went away often and only came back after months, or even years. I would not have spoken with him if not for an accidental meeting.

“On the evening before he was to leave, I think, I met him in the desert outside the village. He was crouched over and looking closely at something, there in the sand; I was curious and stole closer. When he looked up, he did not seem at all surprised to see me; he just beckoned me over, saying, ‘Come, Faris; come take a look at what I found.’

“I was surprised that he knew my name, but I walked over to him. I looked, and I saw a skull there. It looked like a human skull, except it was bigger, shaped differently…of course at the time, I did not know the difference, and I asked, ‘Is that the bone of a real man?’

“ ‘No,’ Gandalf said, looking rather somber all of a sudden. ‘This is not from a man, but a monster.’

“I frowned, crossed my arms, and said, with the skepticism and doubt of an eight-year-old:

‘Mother says monsters aren’t real.’

“Gandalf shook his head. ‘These were real. Long ago, they roamed all over the world, hurting and killing people wherever they went. They murdered thousands of men and women, and they tortured the ones they did not kill.’

“‘But why didn’t anyone try to stop them?’ I asked innocently.

“’But people did stop them,’ Gandalf answered with a smile. ‘That is why they aren’t around anymore. Brave men fought them and defeated them, and they thought evil was destroyed.’

“For a while, I pondered this. Finally, I said, ‘I want to be brave. If they ever come back, I want to fight them.’ I have no idea where my words had come from, but as soon as I said them, I knew that they were true.

“Then Gandalf stood up, placed a hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘They may never come back, but you can still be brave.’

“The next morning, he was gone, but he would come back more often after that.”

“So I guess you and he were fast friends, then?” Katie asked, after a pause.

“It was more gradual than that,” Faris said softly. “My parents died a year later, and I lived with my grandmother, who was my only living relative. During this time, Gandalf was staying in the village for long periods of time. I might not have seen him so much if Grandmother had not kept inviting him in for meals, to visit. She was quite senile; I believe she fancied herself in love with Gandalf.” He half-smiled at the memory. Katie lowered her eyes and scratched her leg.

“I put him in the role of a father or grandfather figure, because I had no one else to fill that spot in my life. Grandmother was certainly no substitute for a parent. And then too, I could tell him anything I wanted, whenever my mind was troubled. As I grew older, as I read more books, I became outraged at the evil in the world—and I poured out all my outrage to Gandalf. Somehow I could never tell my friends at school. And Gandalf seemed to understand—when he was there, at least. It was agony for me when he was away.

“Over and over I said, ‘I wish I could do something! I wish I could do something!’ It was my decision to go into the mountains and keep watch on The’b Ghazeb, though Gandalf wanted someone else to do it. I hated them, hated what they did to innocent people, hated the bad name they gave my country—I still hate them, and if I could kill them all in one fell swoop, I would!”

Faris fell silent, scowling at the ground. By now, Katie had a rather good idea of what he must have been like as a teenager. It was hard to believe that now he was twenty-nine.

As if he were reading her mind, Faris spoke suddenly. “I still haven’t got over my childish ideals. It is one of my biggest faults; I realize it.”

“What happened with Gandalf—after you told him what you wanted to do?” Katie ventured timidly.

“He seemed distraught,” replied Faris. “He told me not to throw my life away, told me that he could keep watch on The’b Ghazeb himself—or find someone else for the job. But I persisted. And when I finally won over him, after I’d just turned twenty-one, he went away again, looking grieved.”

“You’ve been doing it for years, then!” Katie said in wonderment. “How did you manage…I mean…”

“I had help. From Gandalf and from others. But…it looks like my job there is finished.” Faris ruefully indicated his twisted leg. The bitterness seemed to be gone; he sounded only resigned. “I never expected to die comfortably, surrounded by peace and happiness. I suppose I should be grateful for it, but I do not feel like I deserve it. If I had only heard…”

Before Faris could say any more, Maglor came out of the house, making funny faces at the hobbit children. His appearance provoked shrieks of laughter from the children, who clustered around him, jumping up and down. In the uproar of the moment, Katie forgot about Faris, who slumped back on the grass, looking both irritated and uncomfortable.

At times it seemed like a conspiracy, a conspiracy to make him forget about the work he had done for eight years. He should trust Gandalf, who told him over and over that there was nothing more for Faris to worry about, that the worst part of the mission was over. And yet, after immersing himself in his hatred for The’b Ghazeb for so long, he could not let go of it so easily.