Down a Lost Road

chapter 10 – Kurtis


Only the sound of tree branches clawing at the window broke the silence. The wind had picked up, and the sky flooded over with grey, blocking out the hideously sharp sunlight. Neither Damian nor I moved, though I kept glancing at him as the minutes slipped by. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking – he had that aggravating talent for wearing an expressionless mask when he was deepest in thought. After about the hundredth time looking at him and seeing him still blank I slouched as deep into the chair as I could.

“You haven’t said a word.”

“Did you want me to?”

“You could at least say something.” I plucked at the chair’s threadbare upholstery. “You could at least say if you believe me.”

“Mer, how could I not? My God, you know I’d never doubt you. It’s just overwhelming. To hear all this.”

I smiled, bitterly. “You think it’s overwhelming hearing it? Try living it.”

He reached over and took my hand. He had a strong grip, like Dad’s, and its firmness was steadying. The rain began to fall, pattering against the glass. Thunder rumbled in the distance. I had always loved our violent Texas thunderstorms, but now all I wanted was the desert, or the quiet stillness of the Branhau. I’d lived on Earth almost seventeen years, but somehow the few days I’d spent in Arah Byen felt far more real.

“Damian, will you help me? I need your help.”

“What do you suppose they want you to do?”

It seemed rather an effort for him to say it. You still don’t believe me, I thought, but I let it pass.

“They need to know what Dad learned. What he came to find out. Yatol said he came to learn about their past.” I got to my feet. “So, how would we know what he was looking for? He always came here, to the library, to do research, but was that just for his work here or for the people of Arah Byen?”

“Or were they the same thing?” Damian asked, sitting up. “What did he teach? Did he teach the very things he was trying to study? I mean, why did he even want to become a professor?”

“To have an excuse to continue his studies?”

We both started pacing, scanning the stacks and probing our memories for some insight into his motives. I went through my most vivid recollections of my dad, and mentally walked through his den and his office here at the university. The details were all vague. I wished I could ask my mom to tell me more about him.

Thinking of that, I said, “Mom met him in college. He must have come when he was about our age, and studied really hard to get into the university. I remember Mom said he was an international student. She said she had a crush on him because of his accent!”

It struck me as funny, and I giggled. And then I blushed, because I remembered what I’d thought about Yatol’s accent the first day I’d met him.

“That’s right, I’d forgotten that!” Damian laughed, shaking his head. “Did she ever find out what country he was from?”

“I think she thought he was from the Middle East. But I wonder if he eventually told her the truth.”

That got Damian thinking. “They called him David. The Bible! Are there clues in the Bible? Like, the Psalms or something?” He pounded his hand on a shelf. “No, no, that’s just dumb. I’m thinking too hard about it.”

“Yeah you are,” I joked.

“Okay, genius, what’s your theory?”

I grinned. I wanted to smack him and hug him at the same time, I was that happy to be back with him.

“My theory is we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back up. What did he study in college? Obviously when he came here, he must have thought he could learn what he needed at college.”

“History! If he wanted to learn about the past, he must have studied history.”

“Yeah…no. It wouldn’t have been history, because we wouldn’t find any clues to Arah Byen’s past in Earth’s history books. Right? Or would we?”

“We never learned anything remotely like it in any of our history classes.” He grinned. “Might’ve been more interesting if we had.”

He paused by one of the stacks, running his fingers over the old bindings. I joined him and began reading titles. Something clicked, and I snapped my fingers.

“He taught literature, right? So maybe that’s what he studied in college?”

“It must have been. Or at least what he got his doctorate in.”

“Doctorate?”

I felt dumb for asking. How did Damian know more about these things than me?

“Ph.D. If he taught at the university, he must have gone through graduate school.”

“Oh. Yeah, it was literature. I just remembered that’s what his diploma said, on the wall in his den. Wasn’t it from Oxford? Maggie and Tony were born in England.”

“Oxford. If he went to Oxford, then how did he ever end up here? And why?”

I shrugged. “Maybe they’ve got a good library here?”

“But…literature!” Damian cried, going back to that frustration.

A grouchy older student just happened to pass by at that moment, and directed a scowl and a “shh!” in our direction. Damian rolled his eyes at the man’s retreating back, but he lowered his voice.

“Why on earth did he study literature?”

“It’s…fiction.” I met his gaze and shrugged again. “We can’t have hit a dead end already.”

“Maybe we’ll have to ask someone.”

“Ask – who? About what?”

“Someone who knew him professionally, maybe. Someone who knew what he studied and taught.”

“That was a while ago. Four years. Are any of the same professors still here?”

“I don’t know. Yearbooks! We can find the yearbooks from when he taught. Look at the faculty pages. Professors usually stick around for years, right? Tenure or something.”

Tenure, right. I felt dumb again – it was only a year or so ago that I realized “tenure” wasn’t Texans’ way of saying “ten-year.”

Damian had already sauntered off, so I stumbled after him as quickly as I could. We eventually found the archived yearbooks, not in the library at all but in the Admissions Office of the university, where they had several decades worth decorating the bookshelves. We pulled the last five and divvied them up. I could feel the secretary watching us as we sat on the couch thumbing through the pages, and felt sorry that she had nothing better to do than sit staring blankly at us through thick red-rimmed glasses. I sent Damian to ask her for paper and a pen, and she wordlessly handed them to him and went on watching our efforts.

“Here,” I whispered, trying to ignore her. “This professor has been in all three of the books I’ve checked.” I grabbed the latest yearbook from the stack and flipped through it.

“Is he in there?”

I slammed the book shut and tossed it aside. “Of course not.”

He picked it up and started searching for other names. I got an idea and started working backwards, looking for the names of current professors in the older yearbooks.

“Hey Damian,” I said. “Check it out. This professor, Dr. Hurtsinger, was a student when Dad taught. And he teaches literature now.”

“Do you suppose he took any of Dad’s classes?” Damian asked, peering over my shoulder.

I shrugged, copying down his name. “Worth a visit to find out, don’t you think?”

“Why not? And there’s one other professor I found who was here with Dad. Might see if we can’t meet with both of them. I just hope they’re around for the summer.”

We piled the books backed onto the shelves, nodded our thanks to the still apathetic secretary, and darted out into the pouring rain. Luckily the School of Literature was close to the student center, just across the mall with its fountain and brick walkways. It occupied the greater part of Gorley Hall, a sprawling hollow building of weathered stone that seemed to go on forever.

Damian and I had been inside it often enough, but the hallways with their dark wood paneling and worn oriental carpets still brought a halt to our mad dash. As we stood dripping and disheveled in the entryway, I stared toward the staircase, not sure if it was the strength of memory or some sort of foreboding that held me rooted where I was. Against my will a memory flashed through my mind of the last time I had come through those doors. I’d run ahead of Dad, through rain as heavy and bleak as today, and bolted through the door to wait for him. He came up the walk with his umbrella, handsome in a tweed jacket and cap, just like an English gentleman.

At that moment the door swung open behind us and a young man sauntered in, shaking off his umbrella enthusiastically. I managed to uproot myself enough to jump out of his way.

“That storm blew up in a hurry, eh?” he said, grinning at us.

I could only nod. Keep walking, I kept thinking. I couldn’t even imagine how pathetic we looked – Damian, who probably hadn’t slept in a week, and me… I tugged on the hem of the tunic, cheeks burning.

“At least you had an umbrella,” Damian ventured lightly.

“True enough!” He peered at us through his thin-rimmed glasses. “Are you two looking for anyone or anything in particular?”

We exchanged glances. Well, he wasn’t going to go away on his own, so I might as well ply him for info.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “We were trying to find Dr. Hurtsinger.”

“And Dr. Balson.”

“Eh,” he said, giving a little shake of his head. “Well, you’re in luck, partly. Professor Hurtsinger here. Not doctor yet, but almost.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Guess that was lucky.”

Then I thought that sounded kind of stupid, and I stared intensely at the floor.

“I’m Damian,” Damian said, holding out his hand. “And this is my twin, Merelin.”

He shook our hands warmly, and I mumbled something about being pleased to meet him. An awkward silence followed. I shifted my weight and stared harder at the carpet. Finally Professor Hurtsinger clapped Damian on the shoulder.

“Guess you two have something you wanted to ask me about? How about we go up to my office where we can sit down?”

Damian nodded and we followed him to his office in silence. I paused just outside his door, unable to keep myself from gazing farther down the hall. I counted the doors, like I always had, down to the third door from the end, on the left. My heart filled my throat. I didn’t want to see what nameplate was on the door now. It didn’t matter if it didn’t make sense, if hundreds of other professors had come and gone before. That was Dad’s office. They had no right to give it to anyone else.

My eyes stung with tears, but then Damian’s touch on my shoulder called me back to our task. I swallowed the grief and trailed him into Professor Hurtsinger’s office.

I could tell he was a new professor. His bookshelves stood only partially filled, and his desk spread out bare and lonely. Unlike Dad’s office he had no pictures or souvenirs anywhere, only an untidy stack of students’ essays sitting precariously on the corner of the desk. Professor Hurtsinger flipped on the light and tossed his satchel on the floor.

“Here we are! It’s not much, but it’s home.”

He waved us to a pair of rickety seats in front of the desk, then dropped into his own creaking desk chair and propped his feet on the file cabinet.

“Now, I don’t often get office visits from your age group, so I’m intrigued to find out what you wanted to see me about.”

“Professor Hurtsinger, you were a student here, right?” I asked.

“Indeed. About eight years ago. One of the best decisions of my life. Are you two considering going here for college, perhaps?”

“Undergraduate?” Damian asked instead.

“Right, got my bachelor’s in literature here, went on for my doctorate at Toronto. Still working on the never-ending dissertation. Hence the ‘professor-not-doctor’ thing.”

“Texas to Canada? That must have been a big switch,” I remarked, feeling a little more at ease. Then, abruptly, “Did you ever take a class from Dr. Lindon?”

He regarded me with sudden curiosity. “He was my advisor. Why?”

“Did you know him well? I mean, if he was your advisor, you must have known him somewhat, right?”

“I knew him pretty well. I would have loved to work with him as a peer at this university. He was one of the most fascinating people I have ever known.”

“Could you say what his specialty was?”

He leaned forward, staring intently at both of us. “Would you mind giving me some indication why you want to know all this?”

My gaze flickered to Damian, who nodded subtly.

“He’s our father,” I said.

“Oh, good God.” He put his hands to his head. “I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to tell you.”

“You could tell us what he did,” Damian said. “We need to know.”

“Have you heard any word of him? Do you know where he is?”

“I might,” I said. “But please, Professor Hurtsinger…”

“Just call me Kurtis.”

That would just be weird, so I skipped it. “We know he studied and taught literature. But what was his specialty? Or focus, or whatever you call it.”

Kurtis sat back, folding his hands behind his head. “Mythology. Scandinavian, Greek, even Tolkien’s invented mythology. That was his real passion. He got some static from the other professors for teaching it as a genuine mythology, but he claimed it was as real as any of the others.”

“Tolkien had a mythology?” I asked, my interest sparked.

He leaned over and pulled a book off one of his shelves. “The bulk of it you can find here,” he said, handing it to me. “It belonged to your father.”

I received the worn book almost reverently, running my fingers over the tattered dust jacket. “The Silmarillion,” I read. “The Epic History of the Elves.”

“Do you know why he was so interested in it?” Damian asked.

“What do you know about mythology, of whatever sort?”

“A lot of it is very similar,” I said, absent-minded. “Some are so similar, that you could just change the names and some of the details, and it would be almost the same story.”

“Exactly. Know of any examples?”

I thought a moment, then said, “Well, every culture seems to have an account of creation.”

“The Flood,” Damian added. “I read a bit of Gilgamesh last summer, and there are a bunch of other versions of the same story. And gods or supernatural beings walking on earth with men, things like that.”

I shivered.

“Excellent!” Kurtis said. “And Dr. Lindon – your father – wanted to find those similarities, and then from there see if there was an actual historical source for them. Like a common heritage of all mankind that would make them create these similar stories. Tolkien had done something akin to it, at least as far as the first part goes. He found some of the common threads, but then used them to create an additional mythology, a unique mythology for England.”

“No!” I cried, setting the book down harder than I meant. “Well, maybe that’s what he thought he was doing…but what if he was actually a lot closer to the truth than he realized? Maybe his myth was really almost a piece of history that the world had lost…it just wasn’t quite all the way true. He didn’t have all the facts – because they had been lost. And Dad had the missing pieces! He had what Tolkien needed, but needed what Tolkien had. The other half of the puzzle!” I shut my mouth when I saw the expression on Kurtis’s face. “Sorry. I must sound like an idiot.”

“No, not at all. I’m just curious, because you say your dad had the other pieces. I know he had some revolutionary theories about the ancient myths, but do you really think he had access to some kind of knowledge or facts that Tolkien – or any scholar of mythology – wouldn’t have?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

To my surprise, he didn’t laugh or dismiss my statement. He measured me carefully. After a moment he leaned back, tucking his hands behind his head.

“Your father really was revolutionary, how he taught. He pursued a sort of cross-disciplinary study, melding history and literature. Not just studying literature in history, or history in literature…but literature, or mythology more particularly, as history. He seemed to think he had good reason for it. We never had a chance for a real discussion about it, though.”

“Would Dr. Balson know more about his work, do you think?”

Kurtis straightened up with a frown. “You guys aren’t students here, so you haven’t had any classes with him. Here’s a little heads-up. Balson came to the university the year after your father started teaching, and they never got along. I don’t know why. He isn’t very popular with the students either, whereas most people loved Dr. Lindon. Balson’s the reclusive sort, almost impossible to work with. I just have a bad feeling about it. I don’t think you should talk to him, especially about this.”

The doorway darkened behind us.

“What is this, Kurtis? What should they not talk to me about?”