Chapter 2
Goole, Yorkshire in England...
The three men crossed Calder Street and headed down Aire Street towards The Drake Sports Bar, leaving the green and rose colored exterior lights of The Jailhouse behind. The man in the lead, dressed in dark clothes, was taller than the other two, maybe even by a full head, and had a longer stride than most, reaching the door of the establishment within a few minutes, followed by Jim and Sam who found themselves having trouble keeping up. The man who had called himself "Estel" opened the door politely for the other two and then followed them in behind. He lead them up the brown striped staircase to the guestrooms above the bar and to a nondescript white door which he opened with a key, waving the other two inside before closing the door behind them.
The guestroom of The Drake was not large and spacious like many modern hotels and lodgings. In comparison it felt somewhat cramped, but it was clean and well kept. The building itself had been a bank at one point, and then the Dock Offices for the Goole before it had been renovated and turned into an inn to help accommodate the growing number of tourists to their little town. The maid service had already been in, and the bed was turned down and ready for its occupant.
Estel gestured for Jim to sit or lie on the bed as it suited him, knowing that the book shop keeper was feeling unwell after the experiences he had that night. Jim sat on the bed for a few moments, looking as if he might lie down, but then thought better of it. Sam, his friend, chose to remain standing, keeping one eye on their "host" and one on his mate.
"Alright. We're here. We're in private. Now tell us what's happening, friend." Sam then told their host.
"First, let me ask Mr. Frudd, what did you see when you put on the ring?" Estel replied in his strange, continental accent which neither of the other men could quite place.
Sam's eyes darted to the man sitting on the bed. "What's he talking about, Jim?"
"I- I was about to tell you at The Jailhouse, Sam. I put the ring on and then the world just went… wrong. It went blurry, and I started seeing ghastly shapes, and I felt… I felt…" Jim tried to describe what he had experienced.
"Powerful." Estel finished for him. "Like you could raise up armies with only your will and conquer the world as if it were nothing."
"Yes. I feared I was going mad with delusional hallucinations." Jim confirmed for him.
"Wait, what?" Sam asked. "You can't be serious, Jim. This is what's troubling you?"
Jim was silent at Sam's disbelief. His expression was confused, hurt, and deeply unsettled. "It's why I had a hard time saying it, Sam. I wouldn't have believed it either."
The tall, dark stranger stood silent with his hands clasped in front of them, allowing them this exchange until they both turned to look at him once more for the answers he promised. He took a breath and sighed, imagining how what he was about to say would be taken by any rational individual in the modern age.
"John Ronald Reuel Tolkien did not invent the stories of the ring and Middle Earth," Estel began, having rehearsed this inevitable speech in his head, "he found them somewhere on the continent when he was stationed there during the first world war."
"He found them? You must be mistaken. He spent decades inventing the languages and the world." Jim answered.
"No. He spent decades translating and understanding what he found." Estel countered. "None of us knew about it until his first book was published in 1937, and even then the extent of what he obtained wasn't known until The Lord of the Rings was fully published in 1956."
"None of you. Who are you? Part of some secret organization?" Sam asked, a tinge of sarcasm to his words.
"In a manner of speaking." Estel replied.
"What does this have to do with the ring I found?" Jim then asked. "Even if all that is true, according to Tolkien, the One Ring was destroyed by Frodo in Mount Doom."
"And it was. But not Celebrimbor's ring. The one his specter misguidedly forged with the help of a Gondorian ranger." Estel responded, gesturing with his had towards the outline of a ring visible in the cloth of Jim's trousers.
"That wasn't part of Tolkien. That was something some game developer came up with to make money." Jim told him.
"We don't know how Monolith games discovered the existence of Celebrimbor's ring. It could have been a developer on holiday to France or Germany. It could have been notes stolen from the Tolkien estate which they never released to the public. It could have been an extraordinary coincidence. At this point, it doesn't matter. The ring is real, as you have discovered to the detriment of your constitution, Mr. Frudd." Estel en Aran told them. "And it is sitting in your pocket."
Sam looked back and forth between their host and his best mate trying to wrap his head around what was happening. The whole conversation was surreal, and he didn't know what to make of any of it except both the man towering over them both and his friend were both stark raving mad. It was nonsense, all of it. But it was nonsense Jim was taking with a deadly seriousness. Sam sighed wearily in response to all of it, but continued to listen for his friend's sake.
"Alright." Sam then said, trying to bring some semblance of reason to it all. "There's a lot you know about this that we don't. Maybe you should start from the beginning and bring us up to speed."
Estel looked at Sam and replied, "Fair enough." He then looked around and spied two modern looking chairs crammed against one of the walls of his guestroom and pulled one of them to where he could sit facing them both and gestured for Sam to do the same.
"As I have told you, my name is Estel en Aran. I am one of the last surviving descendants of King Eldarion of the reunited kingdom of Arnor and Gondor eight thousand years ago. Two hundred years after the reign of my ancestor, the waters from the ocean flooded Eriador, destroying most of the north and leaving only what is now the British Isles in its wake. That upheaval changed coastlines and mountains, and finished the destruction of Numenor's civilization that Sauron had begun. It was a terrible dark age. Some of the survivors took what knowledge of those times which remained and moved on into the south and east into what is now called the Middle East and the regions around the Mediterrainean which were warm and fertile. Some, like my ancestors, remained behind to attempt to rebuild. When that failed, they turned to preserving our history, language, and culture. It was during this time that those tasked with preserving our ancient records and histories discovered the existence of the second ring carried by the elf woman, Eltariel, after the fall of Barad-Dur. My ancestors took it upon themselve to finish what the fellowship of the nine started and see to it that this ring too was destroyed if at all possible. I can't trace the exact history of the ring after it passed out of Eltariel's hands, but I can tell you that my people tracked it to ancient Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, India, China, France, Germany; anywhere the ring went, a would be world conqueror arose. Sennacherib, Alexander, Darius, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napolean Bonaparte and others. But the ring always remained one step ahead of us. The last would be world conqueror to possess it committed suicide in a bunker in Germany in 1945. We think it came into the possession of a U.S. soldier after that who gambled it away to a British army officer where the trail went cold until last year when the North Yorkshire police discovered it among a cache of stolen property during a raid in York. Being the good public servants that they are, and not having a clue what it was they held in their evidence lock up, they put out a public advertisement on social media for the rightful owner to come and claim it. I was astounded that it might finally be secured so easily after so many centuries. Like millions of other people, I saw the BBC's news report on it, but when I arrived at the station to attempt to claim it, the ring had somehow disappeared once more."
"How did you know to look here, in Goole of all places?" Jim asked.
"Call it a hunch." Estel responded. "Goole is downriver from York, and from centuries of my people observing the ring's movements, I knew it had a habit of following river currents, and tended to show up in the most unlikely of places. I've been watching the river for the last several days for anything unusual until I spied you, Mr. Frudd, pluck something out of the water."
"But how could you know it was this ring?" Jim pressed. "It could have been anything, a pretty stone I fancied perhaps."
"Because I saw you put it on, Mr. Frudd, and I saw you vanish from sight under the lamp post when you did." Estel en Aran replied. "Only one trinket that I know of is capable of that."
"Hang on." Sam interrupted. "You're saying Jim here disappeared when he put it on, just like Frodo and Bilbo in the movies?"
"Yes." Estel replied. "And then he reappeared moments later, standing in exactly the same spot with a terrified expression on his face. It's the effect Sauron's ring had on any mortal who wore it, and it stood to reason that Celebrimbor's ring would have the same effect. But there are no records from that time about it because those who first bore it were not mortal."
Both Jim and Sam absorbed this new information for several moments. Finally, Jim asked, "You said there were others who saw the same advertisement. You don't seem keen on them finding it."
Estel took a deep breath and sighed once more. "Sauron was defeated, but his spirit could never truly be killed. My people believe it still influences people in this world albeit weakly and indirectly, taking advantage of their fears and prejudices. Adolph Hitler and his national socialists were among these so influenced. We think he first encountered the ring when he was a German officer in France during the first world war. It was a secret he confided to a very few trusted lieutenants. After the war, those who survived sought to recover the ring and re-establish the reich under a new Fuhrer, but by the time they could access Hitler's bunker and personal effects, it was gone. From what we know, they dispersed and began new underground fascist groups around Europe and Russia with the idea that once the ring was found, their new reich would finally rise up and reign for the thousand years which their Fuhrer promised. I encountered two of them in York a month ago not far from the police station."
"You speak like you might have been there in 1945." Sam remarked.
"I was." Estel replied. "My brothers and I fought with the Americans when they took Berlin."
"That's not possible. You don't look any older than forty at most." Jim replied in disbelief.
"I was born in 1917. I just celebrated my one hundred and third birthday in February." Estel answered with no trace of deceit in his features.
"You're…" Sam couldn't believe he was saying it out loud. "You're really a Numenorean, then. Aren't you?"
"Yes. There are very few of us left in the world now. The only ones who are left are myself and my kinsmen on the continent. Maybe a few dozen at most. All that is left of that once proud island empire." Estel replied with no little resignation in his voice.
"Tolkien said once, maybe more than once, that he had visions or memories of the sinking of Atlantis. He said that his writing of the destruction of Numenor was his attempt to get them out of his head." Jim remarked thoughtfully.
"I can't speak to that. As far as I know he wasn't one of my kin, though after so many millennia, who can know?" Estel responded.
After a few more moments, Jim dug into his pocket and produced the object which had turned his life and his understanding of reality upside down within the space of a couple of hours. He held it in his left hand for a few moments as though weighing a decision, and then he held it out to the Numenorean who sat in front of him.
"Here. Take it then." Jim told him. "I don't want it, and if what you say is even half true, you're as close to a rightful owner as it gets."
But unexpectedly, Estel shrank back from his outstretched hand. "Don't. I honestly don't want to even touch it."
"What? After that whopper of a story, why?" Sam asked in confusion.
"That ring was forged without Sauron's corrupting life force, but it has passed through the hands of nearly every dictator and conqueror this world has ever seen." Estel told them. "Each time it has changed hands over eight thousand years, the man holding it reaches for more power and is willing to go to further extremes of atrocity to achieve it. The last man to hold it was unspeakably evil, and the result was the death of millions in extermination camps. What could I do with such power? To what extremes could I be driven to achieve it? No. I will take the path of my ancestor Elessar and refuse it. No. I sought the ring, not to claim it, but to destroy it once and for all."
"So what then do you expect me to do now?" Jim asked. "If all this is true, I'd gladly be rid of it. But if you won't take it, what do I do with it? How do I destroy it?"
"That is a good question, and one my people have been trying to answer for a very long time." the Numenorean said. "Celebrimbor's ring, like Sauron's, was forged in Mount Doom. Like Sauron's then, it could be destroyed in the same place except…"
"Except Mount Doom no longer exists." Sam finished his thought for him. "It was destroyed when the ring was destroyed."
"All of Mordor was reshaped into something unrecognizable now. The modern world calls that place 'Hungary', and the nearest volcano to it is inactive in Romania with a village planted on top." Estel told him.
"What about another volcano, then? Like Mount Etna in Italy?" Sam asked.
"And risk the destruction of all of Sicily and southern Italy with it?" Estel returned. "Hundreds of thousands of people would die, and neither I nor my kin are prepared to be responsible for that."
"So what then happens now?" Jim asked.
"If you would be agreeable to it, Mr. Frudd, I would ask that you would come home with me." The Numenorean told him.
"And where is home?" Jim asked with some trepidation and a growing pit in his stomach.
"My people still maintain something of an enclave at my grandmother's property on the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. We can be there tomorrow or the day after if we take the trains." Estel replied. "It's a little more complicated after what you call Brexit, but not by much."
After what seemed like some deep internal debate, Sam then said aloud, "If Jim's going, I'm coming too."
"No, Sam, you can't. I can close my bookshop for however long I like if I want to go on holiday, but you've got your job at the supermarket. You can't just leave without telling them." Jim protested.
"I can talk to Mr. Casey when it opens up first thing in the morning and tell him it's an emergency. That's the truth anyhow. He'll let me do what I need to. He's always been good to us like that." Sam said, referring to the store manager.
"Good enough." Estel told him, seemingly unsurprised at Sam's declaration. "Well then, I suggest you both return to your homes and get what travel documents you need, and pack lightly for the trip; a rucksack at most if you've got one. Meet me back here tomorrow morning. I'll have the travel arrangements taken care of for the three of us."
"Okay." Sam responded, almost in spite of himself. Jim responded with the same.
The Numenorean had only these words more before they parted, "I need not tell you, Mr. Frudd. Keep that ring secret. Keep it safe. We cannot afford to lose this opportunity which has been given to us."
Dimitry watched the three men enter The Drake sports bar with rapt interest from the nondescript blue Volkswagen he had "appropriated" in York after they had just come out of The Jailhouse. After they had entered, he exited the auto quietly, leaving it where it was parked with no fingerprints to identify him with. Waiting just a few minutes, he crossed the street and entered the Drake himself, careful to note the exits, how many people were in the dining room, and where the best place for him to watch who came and went was. He chose a seat near the door and ordered an ale, intending to nurse it for as long as he needed to. Occasionally, he glanced at the wide screen projection of some rugby game which had taken place earlier in the day somewhere in the world as though he was taking a real interest. In reality, he had little idea or care about how the "English" game was even played.
Two short Englishmen and one not had entered. The one who was not he had followed discreetly from York after he lost contact with his brother Ivan, and their other man, Rickert there. The tall man with the ponytail had arrived before them, and had been making inquiries from the English police before they could about the ring which had been found. It was intended to be a clean operation, and made to look like a mugging. They had tapped the CCTV feed to keep the local police in the dark. No one would know what the real target was except the man's wallet and wristwatch.
Dimitry lost contact with them after that. He arrived at the alley which was their predetermined kill box only to find the local coppers swarming all over it and two bagged bodies being loaded into an ambulance. Neither his brother nor the German man had been weak or unskilled, the three of them having served not long ago as mercenaries to do the Russian president's dirty work in Chechnya and later in the eastern Ukraine. No one had ever accused any of them of being "soft" when they worked.
Dimitry had loved his brother. They had grown up on the streets of St. Petersburg with just each other after their father had walked out and their mother had died from too much vodka. They had served in the same unit when conscripted by Russia's military, and afterwards had gone on to be "private contractors" as the Americans liked to euphemize. They had also been part of the same brotherhood, the same dream that saw a new world order on the horizon which put all the races in their proper order. He loved him, but he could not even identify him for the police. He could not identify himself for them either, not unless he wanted MI-6 to pay him a visit while he was filling out paperwork. If they knew he and his brother were in the UK, they would be most interested in keeping them there. That was not an option if their mission for the brotherhood was to succeed.
He did not know if the tall man had ever acquired the Fuhrer's ring from the police, only that they no longer had it. That it was the Fuhrer's ring and not some cheap nerd's toy was clear to the elders of the brotherhood who recognized it from the police photos. It was the deep engravings inside and out which gave it away. Almost all of the fanboy fakes were of a gold color, and laser etched, if they were truly engraved at all. No, this was done by a master craftsman. The light it gave off, even in the photos, was indicative of it as well.
After a couple of hours, the two short men came down the stairs from the guestrooms and left the building once more. They seemed to be nobodies, locals from the small English port town that had probably never traveled more than twenty miles from their home in their lives. Still, he made it a point to memorize their features as best he could in the event that the tall man wanted more from them than just a few beers and laughs. They could have been decoys, or they could have been couriers. Either way, he determined to look into them if he couldn't find what he was looking for with the tall man.
But he did not want to underestimate this dark haired man ever again. Doing so had cost him his brother.
The two nobodies had come from the left of the stairs before they had descended. The tall man's room must therefore have been to the left. The sports bar was not particularly busy that night, and it only boasted ten guestrooms in all. He could find the tall man's room by process of elimination before any authorities were alerted, he was certain.
Discreetly, he finished his ale, and non-chalantly approached the steps and made his way up to the guestrooms as though he belonged there, pausing once or twice to stare at the television with his deep blue eyes for good effect, even grimacing when one of the teams had scored as though truly upset by it. This was not his first time.
There were five rooms to the left, and five to the right. Three of them from the left had their doors left open as a housekeeper went through, taking advantage of the slow night to catch up on her cleaning from less than clean guests earlier in the day. That left two closed doors.
Two doors to choose from. Ten seconds to kick one open and surprise whoever was inside. Another twenty or so to hit the second one if the first was wrong. Possibly two or more collateral damage if the housekeeper was included, not including his primary target. All told, he'd give it three, maybe four minutes to hit both rooms and take out any witnesses before local police arrived. It was doable, if messy.
Dimitry could live with messy.
Just as he was about to carry out his plan with the door at the end of the hallway, the second door opened and a pretty if plump young blond woman exited with a distinctly cheery "Hallo, there love! Come to see that new foreign gent next door?"
in his best British accent, Dimitry replied, "Yeah, he's an old mate of mine from the service. I promised I'd look 'im up if he ever came this way."
"Well there, love. Once you're finished reliving old times with 'im, maybe you'd like to meet me downstairs for a pint. I've nothing better to do all night." She responded with a somewhat sassy tone and a naughty smile as she sized him up with her eyes.
Before he could think it through, he instinctively responded in character, "Oh, you can count on it, there now."
The blond gave a low purr in response, and said, "don't keep me waiting too long then." before she departed for the dining room sashaying just a bit to accentuate her curves.
Dimitry blinked once or twice wondering what made him respond like that, and smiled at her until she was out of sight. Then the smile faded even as he silently thanked the English slut for making his job that much easier. He might even take her up on it if the night proved as fruitful as he had hoped.
He carefully withdrew his nine millimeter from inside his brown leather jacket and attached the silencer he carried to it. Just then, the motor from the housekeeper's vacuum went on.
So much the better. He thought. This night might go easier than I thought.
On a whim, he tried the doorknob first. Quietly and slowly. It wasn't locked. He carefully opened the door, weapon out and leading the way. The main bed chamber was empty, but he could distinctly hear the sound of the shower running coming from the bathroom. He crept quietly to the where the water was running behind a partially open door. Steam was beginning to drift from the brass and glass fixtures inside out into the main room.
Suddenly, he kicked the bathroom door open and aimed his weapon at the glass enclosed shower stall. But he didn't fire. There was no one there. Not in the shower, not on the toilet, and not in the guestroom at all. It was completely empty and swept clean. He ignored the running shower and returned to the main bed chamber.
Frustrated, Dimitry searched through the drawers and fixtures of the room quickly for anything which might have given him a clue as to the tall man's whereabouts, but found nothing. The tall man apparently knew how to play this game too, and how to play it well.
"Govno." He swore in his native tongue.
Estel en Aran followed Jim all the way back to his house that night, having immediately turned on the shower in his guestroom once the bookshop owner and his friend had departed, packing what possessions he had in the room quickly and efficiently, and quickly climbing out the window and down onto the street, being careful to close to window behind him as he did. He didn't know for certain, but suspected that he himself was being watched if not followed. If he was, all his tail would find should he choose to make himself known was an empty room. If he wasn't, then The Drake might have an unusually large water bill from the shower running all night for no reason. He would return in the morning to settle up his bill, and meet his two new acquaintances just as he promised. But first, he would ensure they both made it home.
Every so often, the hard weight of the blades he carried at his back under his fog coat reminded him of their presence. They were little more than long knives in leather sheathes he had picked up locally, but they had done their jobs well in York. A Glock-19 sat comfortably in a nylon weave holster at his left breast as well. He was out to murder no one, but he would not be caught defenseless. He might be long lived for a human being, but he was not immortal in any sense of the word. Not like some of his legendary forebears. That very fact had been tested again and again throughout the twentieth century of this age, and well into the twenty first.
Jim of course was the priority for him to watch. There was no question. He had to be certain the Englishman wasn't followed by compatriots of those he dispatched twenty miles north. When he was safely in his own house, Estel would double back and check on the supermarket clerk who lived not far away in a flat by himself. He knew this because of a quick internet background search for a one Samuel Ogden of Goole, Yorkshire on the prepaid smart phone he had purchased two days before. The young man had lived there on his own since he moved out of his parents' house on the other side of town at the age of twenty three. He'd been a good man, it seemed, having run into no trouble with the law. That was all the information he could find out then and there about him as he tried to stay out of sight while tailing Jim Frudd home. Mr. Frudd's background search hadn't revealed much more of any interest. He'd been at Cambridge for a couple of years when he was younger, and had otherwise lived in the same house since he was ten with his aunt and uncle, now deceased. He also had never run afoul of the police. Both held valid passports. Sam had visited Spain on holiday once a few years back, and Jim had journeyed recently to France, having stayed in Paris for a few nights before returning home. Both were avid players of the MMORPG, Lord of the Rings Online, and held paid subscriptions as opposed to the free to play option. From what he had heard that night as well, Jim Frudd's personal knowledge of what were known as "Tolkien's works" went much deeper than just that.
It was amazing what kind information one could learn with a few taps on a screen in this day and age for just a few hundred euros.
Frudd and Sam. The names themselves were strikingly appropriate to the matter at hand, and that fact was not lost on the Numenorean. It was as if a divine hand were arranging things just so. Time would tell if that were true.
Jim Frudd reached the door of his home, turned the key, and went inside. Estel waited for another ten minutes, listening and watching for anything which might be amiss with the bookish man. When he was satisfied, he left Mr. Frudd to his own devices for the moment and checked in on Sam Ogden at his flat before circling back towards the Drake that night and observing the lit window of his guestroom for over an hour before being satisfied there was no one there to surprise him. Still, if it were him, he would have waited quietly in the room for its occupant to return with the door closed and no one the wiser.
His senses alert and watching for anything, he expertly and discreetly scaled the red brick of the Drake and returned to his still unlatched window, sliding it open quietly and slipping back into the room. The shower was still running as he had left it, but the door to the bathroom had been opened wider and there was a black mark from a rubber boot against the white paint. He scanned the room for other signs, finding little things like the blankets of his bedding being disturbed, drawers not fully closed as he had left them, and the chairs were not in the same positions as when he had first left.
So I am being followed. He decided. That was faster than I expected. And you didn't find what you were looking for, did you, my unknown friend?
He pulled out his smart phone once more, now knowing the truth of the matter, and bought passage for himself and his two knew companions all the way to Dresden in Germany for the following day. Then, satisfied with the arrangements, he sent a text to an unlisted number only he and a few others knew:
It's here. Will be coming home with friends.
He waited a few minutes before he received a reply:
Understood. Be careful, my hope.
He read the reply, then removed the battery from the smart phone, and the SIM card, and smashed both the card and the phone with the hilt of one of his knives until neither were recoverable. He pocketed the pieces of both into his long coat, intending to dispose of them in the river before he met Sam and Jim in the morning.
He also made a mental note to pick up another smart phone before leaving for Germany.