To Whom It May Concern by Anne Wolfe

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Chapter Four

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To Whom It May Concern

Chapter Four

Tulsa, Oklahoma

 

‘I will travel wherever will be most convenient,’ he had replied. ‘Please send a location, date, and time in your next message.’

 

‘Tulsa City-County Library, noon, February fourth,’ she said back. Hoping to sound more obliging, she added, ‘If that isn’t too soon.’

 

‘It is not too soon. Which branch?’

 

‘The one right in downtown Tulsa.’

 

‘I see, thank you. I will be there at the appointed time.’

 

‘Do you need directions?’

 

‘I do not, but I appreciate your cooperation.’

 

The last message gave her such a warm and fuzzy feeling as to almost overrule the voice in the back of her head screaming, ‘You idiot! You’re talking to a stranger on the internet, and worse, giving him your location! This goes against everything you were ever taught about responsible internet usage!’

 

Regardless of personal misgivings, she stuffed the Silmaril in an oven mitt, to muffle the light, then drove herself to the library on February fourth, and started so early for fear of heavy traffic that she reached it an hour before the appointed time. Across the freezing parking lot she made her way, then spent fifty-three minutes roaming the various aisles.

 

At the fifty-fourth minute, her phone softly pinged. She had an email.

 

Ethel set the Silmaril in its Tupperware container on a nearby shelf. Setting her laptop on her left forearm and bracing the back with her hand, she typed the password right-handed. She had a message from the-last-of-his-house, it seemed.

 

‘I am here. You have the Silmaril, I hope.’

 

‘I do.’

 

‘Good. Where are you?’

 

‘In nonfiction. I’m the one looking nervous and holding a laptop and a Tupperware container.’

 

He replied no more, so she shut the laptop and stepped out into a main aisle.

 

A tall, dark-haired man— well, elf, she supposed— stood in the entry. He held a laptop, and was asking a librarian something. The librarian, as he replied, pointed toward the nonfiction section.

 

He turned around, and Ethel quite forgot that breathing was necessary for life. Not from something as petty as attraction, but from the sheer fact that this— this was a living being, to be sure, but he was history, had seen it and shaped it. The very air around him seemed weighted with an unspeakable age.

 

Maglor looked right in Ethel’s eyes. She quaked, but shifted the container into her left hand to give a small wave of recognition with her right. He nodded in response, then turned back to the librarian, who was not done talking.

 

The librarian finished. The elf turned, and walked over to her. He set his laptop on a nearby table. “Are you the stubbornest shoelace?”

 

Her face flushed. “Um, yes. It’s kind of a dumb username, but, uh…” She set her laptop and the Tupperware container on the same table, then held her right hand out to shake. “Um, you can just call me Ethel. It’s shorter.”

 

He smiled (though it didn’t look happy) and shook her hand. “I see. I suppose you already know my name.”

 

His presence seemed to fill the whole library— and what was she supposed to do with her hands? “Ah, yes, sir.” She settled for clasping them behind her back. “Well, I know how it’s written, in the Roman alphabet at least. I’m not sure exactly how it would sound out loud.”

 

“Hmm.” He raised his eyebrows as he looked about the room. “You said you had the Silmaril. Did you speak truly?”

 

“Yes…” She pulled a folded piece of blank printer paper from her pocket. “If you don’t mind my asking, the… um… the Eldar heal faster than humans, right?”

 

“Yes…” He crossed his arms, the smile gone. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Well, how long would you take to heal from, say, a paper cut?”

 

“What…” His brow furrowed, but, after looking at the piece of paper for a few seconds, it went back to normal. “Ahh, you mean to test me. Very prudent.” He held out his hand. “Here, give me the paper. I do not think it should take more than a minute to heal.” He unfolded the paper, then swiftly slashed the edge across his left thumb. As Ethel watched, almost forgetting to breathe, the unbleeding gap closed, then the skin knitted together, leaving no scar.

 

She looked at her watch. No more than thirty seconds had passed. “Well. I guess, uh…” She grabbed the container that held the Silmaril and held it out to him before she could have second thoughts. “Here.”

 

He took it. “There is naught in here but…” He held it up, close to his narrowed eyes. “An oven mitt. Do you mean this to be some sort of joke?”

 

“No, no! It’s inside the mitt!” She held her hands out in front of her, as if surrendering. “I didn’t want it glowing everywhere and attracting attention, and that’s just what I had on hand. That’s all. It’s inside there, I promise.”

 

He twisted it open, then gingerly removed the oven mitt. He looked inside it, and a beam of light struck him in the face.

 

He looked at it for some time before stuffing the oven mitt back into the container.

 

“You can keep the Tupperware and the oven mitt,” Ethel ventured. “I don’t need them, really. My mom keeps buying things like that on sale then giving them to me. I’ve got an overabundance of them.”

 

“I see.” He closed the lid. “I thank you for your cooperation.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a dark leather wallet. “You will want some sort of compensation, I suppose…” he said as he looked through the uncreased bills.

 

She was just glad to be alive, really. “Well, I’d not refuse it, but of course I don’t wish to impose-”

 

He pulled out multiple hundred dollar bills, folded them in half, and handed them to her. Good gracious, at least a thousand dollars sat in her hand! So caught up was she in trying to count the cash without dropping any that she forgot to politely insist she couldn’t possibly take so much.

 

This smile was faintly reminiscent of that smile her parents used to get, back when she was very little and still did funny things. He returned the wallet to his pocket. “Are you familiar with any good restaurants in this area?”

 

“I’m afraid the most high-end I ever really go is Cracker Barrel, sir.” She picked her laptop up again, just to have something to do with her hands. She hugged it close. “The food is good, at least I think so, but… um…” Where had she been going with that? She frowned at the floor.

 

“Hm.” He briefly grimaced, then set the Tupperware next to his laptop and began stretching his fingers as he spoke, as from a cramp. “So long as they have food other than hamburgers, their fare would seem as the very finest, after the trip here.”

 

She snorted with laughter, but hastily backtracked. “I don’t mean any offense, sir, but it’s just the strangest mental image-”

 

“Roast boar is in short supply in these latter days.”

 

“Of course- I didn’t mean it in reproach. I just thought-” She stopped. “I don’t know what I thought.”

 

“Few do,” he said, whatever that meant. He stretched his hands before him, and performed an odd series of motions, almost as if- Oh, he was pretending to play a harp. A bit strange, but she had known pianists who did much the same thing. Apparently satisfied with whatever he had been testing, he picked up his laptop and the Silmaril. “As I said before, I thank you for your cooperation.” He turned to leave.

 

“Wait! I- um…” She fumbled her phone out of her coat pocket. “I- would you be willing to take a picture?”

 

He turned back, half-facing her. “Why?”

 

“Um- well, I wouldn’t be putting it on the internet or anything, I promise, it’s just- this is a bit extraordinary, and I’m not used to extraordinary things happening. Not to me, at least. And I don’t know if anything else extraordinary is ever going to happen to me again, and I’d like to have something to remind me. Even if I go all forgetful when I get old.” Seeing he still appeared skeptical, she continued, “If I wanted to go around publishing that all… well, all that actually happened, I would have done it already. I’d just have gone around talking all about it the instant I had the slightest shred of evidence.”

 

“I do not need to be told that.” He stood still for a long few seconds. “Very well,” he said, dumping his possessions back on the table, “but be quick. I have a long drive ahead of me.”

 

Ethel hurriedly decided on a facial expression that she hoped was neither too gleeful nor too glum, ran her tongue over her teeth to verify that no bits of her breakfast remained stuck between them, and turned the phone onto inside camera mode.

 

The picture was of course slightly blurry, but it was a picture.

 

He left as abruptly as he had arrived, after some generic farewell.

 

Ethel stood in the library, every foolish instinct stirring inside her. She wanted to run after him, to beg for— something. She didn’t know what. Knowledge, maybe. A chance to become history in her own right.

 

An old daydream returned to her. She had seen herself on a battlefield, falling in service of an honorable war—

 

Ethel blinked, firmly, and put all her facial features back where they belonged. She did not at all want to die, or to do the sort of thing that would put her in a history book. It was all leftover delusions, and she never should have gotten into Romanticism as a teenager, or Classicism, or whichever -ism it was that set all these yearnings in her heart.

 

She went home. She had promised to paint a vase of daisies for a senior citizen in Wyoming.

 

Whether she was content with her life thereafter is another thing entirely. By the time she turned forty I have it on good authority that she had nearly managed it. But she was never satisfied. None can be, who have glimpsed one remnant of that high, fey world that was.