Read an Excerpt From the Finale of Simon Tolkien’s Historical Fiction Saga The Room of Lost Steps

While author Simon Tolkien’s famous last name is no doubt attention-grabbing—yes, he’s the grandson of that Tolkien—his literary career couldn’t be more different than that of his most famous relative. While J.R.R. Tolkien wrote doorstopper fantasy novels that helped shape the genre for a generation, Simon has taken a different tack. Yet, while his works are predominantly historical fiction grounded in the all-too-real horrors of a world that’s easily recognizable to us, his dedicated worldbuilding is clearly something that his grandfather would almost certainly appreciate

His most recent novel, The Palace at the End of the Sea, was released earlier this spring, and now its sequel, The Room of Lost Steps, arrives just four short months later to bring the story of a young American who finds himself swept up in the violence of the Spanish Civil War to its heartrending conclusion. Full of intense imagery, this coming-of-age saga presents an unflinching image of the horrors of war and the irrevocable way it changes everyone who finds themseles in its path.

Here’s how the publisher describes the story.

Barcelona 1936. Theo helps the Anarchist workers defeat the army that is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government, and he is reunited with his true love, Maria. But all too soon, his joy turns to terror as the Anarchists turn on him, led by a rival for Maria’s affection.

Lucky to escape with his life, Theo returns to England to study at Oxford. But his heart is in Spain, now torn apart by a bloody civil war, and he is quick to abandon his new life when his old schoolmate Esmond offers him the chance to fight the Fascists. He is unprepared for the nightmare of war that crushes his spirit and his hope until, back in Barcelona, Theo is confronted with a final terrible choice that will define his life forever.

As Theo’s tumultuous coming-of-age journey reaches its end, can his dream to change the world―so far from home―still hold true?

The Room of Lost Steps won’t hit shelves until September 16, but we’ve got an exclusive look at the story for you right now. 

Chapter 5

THE BARRICADE

Theo woke to the sound of fireworks, or so he thought—intermittent cracks and bangs that he assumed in his sleepy state to be related to the opening of the Games, except that there were no lights in the night sky, or at least none that he could see from his bed facing the open window.

He got up and looked out. The magic river of light had disappeared, and the palace at the top of the hill was now no more than a gray shape in the light of the half-moon. Below, the Plaça d’Espanya was lit here and there by streetlights, and Theo could see groups of men in the shadows, shooting. There were whiffs of white smoke in the darkness when they fired their guns.

They were standing or kneeling behind trees and lampposts and statues or were running between them and shouting slogans: “¡Viva la República!” “¡Viva Cataluña!” Flocks of birds flew up, screeching to escape the bullets, and then tried to return before they rose again, scattering in all directions.

Some of the men Theo recognized as the Assault Guard police that he had become used to seeing all over the city in their all-blue uniforms with distinctive peaked caps, but others looked like army soldiers in helmets with brown belts crossed over their khaki chests. The same uniform that Antonio had been wearing on the day Theo saw him marching back to his barracks. Was he down there in the melee? Firing and being fired at? Risking death?

Somewhere far away, Theo thought he could hear church bells, before all the noise was subsumed in the wail of sirens—first one and then many, breaking out all over the city, summoning the workers to the factories. Except that that made no sense, because it was Sunday and the sun hadn’t yet risen. The sound sent a wave of fear and excitement through Theo and a flash of understanding to his brain. The sirens were calling out the workers to defend the Republic, which the soldiers down below were trying to destroy.

The radio announcer had been wrong. The army had risen in rebellion, just as it had in Morocco, and the Assault Guards were trying to stand in its way. But they were failing, outmanned and outgunned by the soldiers, who were still pouring into the square. As he looked down, Theo could see some of the guards waving white handkerchiefs, while others were running away.

Theo wanted to stop them. To call them back to continue their resistance. But he was impotent, looking down at what was left of the fighting with tears running down his face. He hated the soldiers and their guns. Hated their arrogant belief that they were entitled to impose their will on their countrymen when they should be defending them instead. Hated their willingness to take away a people’s right to choose, its right to hope. Everything the athletes had marched for in the stadium, singing “The Internationale,” trampled in the dust.

In the room behind Theo, one of the Czechs turned on the overhead light. Immediately bullets cracked and snapped against the surrounding wall, and Theo ducked down below the window ledge.

“Put it out, you fool!” he shouted, forgetting that his roommates spoke no English.

It didn’t matter. A bullet flew through the window; everything seemed to shake, and the light went off.

Theo felt someone beside him on the floor, reaching a hand up toward the windowsill and then blindly out to pull back the wooden shutter. Theo did the same on his side and pulled the iron bar across to secure the shutters in place.

Behind the thick wood, the darkness in the room was pitch black and the sound of the gunfire was muffled. Theo felt an intense relief that the moment of danger had passed, but this was a physical reaction, quickly replaced by a sense of self-reproach that bordered on shame. Closing the shutters was the same as shutting out Spain. It was like running away. The siren was calling to him, too, to defend the Republic, and he felt that his life would have no meaning if he covered up his ears.

One of the Czechs lit a candle, and in its guttering light, Theo pulled on his clothes. He left his suitcase behind, but at the last moment some instinct made him put on the windbreaker Booker had given him, even though he doubted whether he’d need it with the summer heat so stifling.

At the door he said “Goodbye” and “Good luck” to the Czechs, pronouncing the words slowly in the hope that they might understand them, but they looked at him like he’d taken leave of his senses, which perhaps he had.

He ran to the elevator, pressed the call button, and waited impatiently for a minute until he remembered it was out of order, and then took off down the stairs, jumping them two at a time. Flight after flight with his leaping footfalls echoing off the turning, whitewashed walls of the stairwell, until he burst out into the lobby and was brought to a sudden standstill by the locked front doors of the hotel. He pushed and pulled on the handles, but his efforts had no effect.

He looked around for help, but the lobby was empty and there was no one at the reception desk. Thinking that there might be keys in one of the drawers behind it, he used his hands to vault up onto the mahogany surface and jump down on the other side, where he just missed landing on the clerk from the night before, who had been cowering on the floor in terror and now backed away into a corner with his teeth chattering. Theo didn’t think he had ever seen a man looking more frightened.

“I need to get out. Have you got the keys?” Theo asked, pointing back toward the door.

The clerk shook his head, but Theo wasn’t sure that he had understood his question, so he repeated it more loudly this time, only to get the same result. The clerk looked like a cornered animal, scared out of his wits. Theo couldn’t wait any longer. He raised his hand and smacked him hard across the face. “Give me the keys!” he shouted, holding up his hand, ready to deliver a second blow.

“Don’t. Please,” the clerk whimpered, and Theo was mortified to see that blood was coming from the man’s nose and that he was crying.

He felt disgusted with himself, but he couldn’t let up now. “Where are they?” he demanded, and the clerk pointed with a shaking finger up to a drawer above his head, which Theo immediately pulled out. The keys were at the back, behind a well-thumbed pornographic magazine that obviously belonged to the clerk, because he dropped his eyes when he saw Theo take it out.

“I’m sorry,” said Theo. And he meant it. He wished he hadn’t had to resort to violence, but he’d had no choice. He had to get out.

But now he was frightened himself. He’d had time to think about what he was doing and had to force his shaking hand to fit the key in the lock, and then once it turned, he stood motionless with his hand on the door handle, confounded by the enormity of the moment.

He’d never risked his life before. He looked back toward the stairs. He could go back up to his room and wait with the Czechs until the fighting was over. There was nothing stopping him. But he also knew he couldn’t. His whole life had been defined by taking up challenges. It had made him who he was and he couldn’t stop now, just because the stakes were higher than ever before. He opened the door.

To Theo’s surprise, the previously slackening gunfire had intensified and was snapping on all sides like the cracking of a hundred whips, but this made sense when he saw in the dawn twilight that there were more people out now: not just the soldiers and the Assault Guards, but Anarchist workers in trousers and shirts. Running and falling, and some in cars that rushed by on screaming tires, with the black snouts of guns firing from the open windows.

And there were horses, too, some with riders, some without. All maddened with fear. One charged by Theo with the whites of its eyes rolled back and its sides lathered with sweat, dragging a cavalryman whose foot was caught in a stirrup. He screamed in agony as his limbs broke on the concrete sidewalk.

So many noises. Not just gunfire. Shouting and screaming, car horns and over-revved engines, someone somewhere blowing a bugle. Over to Theo’s left, two horse-drawn gun carriages had entered the square and mounted the grass, headed for the monumental fountain at the center. An officer rode in front on a jet-black horse, sitting erect in the saddle and apparently impervious to the chaos and danger all around.

Theo instinctively moved around behind, making for the Paral×lel, the boulevard that he had gone down with Antonio the weekend before. But before he got to the intersection, he stopped, ducking down behind a shut-up kiosk. There was less firing here, and he felt a compulsion to see what was going to happen.

The two cannons had been quickly taken off their limbers and were now facing west down the Gran Via toward a ramshackle barricade that the workers had built, blocking part of the road. The officer on the horse was behind the guns. He had his arm raised and he was wearing a white glove.

Theo couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. He’d seen cannons in movies. They were battlefield weapons. They had nothing to do with city streets where people went shopping and sat outside cafés, drinking coffee and reading the morning newspaper. The juxtaposition of the two made no sense. It couldn’t happen.

But then it did. The officer’s arm dropped and the cannons exploded one after the other, violently recoiling back toward the fountain. Theo clapped his hands over his ears too late, feeling like his eardrums had burst. Up ahead, the billowing smoke cleared, and he saw a scene of carnage that nothing in his life up to that moment could have prepared him for. Plane trees growing along the sidewalks had been sliced apart, and severed arms and legs and other nameless chunks and strips of flesh were hanging in the leafy branches, mixed up with colored metal from cars that had been blown to pieces by the shells. Trolley cables hung down beside twisted lampposts and, in the middle of the dusty road, a decapitated head with braided black hair lay resting against a piece of fallen masonry, with no body parts anywhere near to which it might have belonged.

Theo bent over and was violently sick. He stepped back, away from the vomit, and felt a rush of wind that almost knocked him over as a truck raced by within feet of where he was standing, headed toward the fountain. There were men in shirtsleeves standing on the flatbed behind the cab, and at the last moment they jumped down, hurling hand grenades at the soldiers beside the cannons.

Gunfire erupted all over the square, including the unmistakable takka takka rattle of a machine gun. Terrified, Theo turned and ran.

Down the Paral×lel with the images of what he had seen seared across his brain and taking root in his memory, from where they would return to haunt him at unguarded moments for the rest of his life.

 A man in pajamas with his hair standing on end rode past Theo on a bicycle, swaying from side to side. He was shouting over and over again at the top of his voice: “The soldiers are coming! The soldiers are coming!” The few people walking on the pavement turned and began to run like Theo toward the sea.

But the soldiers weren’t coming. Not yet. And apart from the cyclist and the panicked pedestrians, the great wide road was almost deserted, in stark contrast to the hubbub of the previous weekend. The streetcars had not yet started to run, and on the sidewalks the shops and cinemas were shuttered and the outdoor chairs and tables were stacked up inside the locked cafés. It seemed like a different place, and Theo felt a jolt of surprise when he glanced up and recognized the Broadway de Barcelona sign that had so excited him when he’d passed it before.

Up ahead, everything had changed. A vast barricade stretched across the Paral×lel from the sidewalk outside the Moulin Rouge over as far as the roadway in front of the Café Chicago. As he got closer, Theo could see that its line bent away from there to run alongside the bretxa, or opening of the road, on the Chinatown side before it turned back across the Paral×lel to complete its irregular rectangle shape below the Moulin. It was like a stockade and Theo could immediately see its strategic importance, cutting the connection between Plaça d’Espanya and the military barracks at the port, and commanding access to the narrow routes through Chinatown to the Ramblas.

He was astounded by the size of the barricade. The builders hadn’t yet finished, but they must have been working all night to have got as far as they had, which meant that they had to have known what was coming, all the while that he was parading around the Olympic Stadium and looking out of his hotel window at the river of lights flowing down from the golden palace, full of his fool’s dreams. Living in his fool’s paradise.

“You there! Olympic boy! What are you doing?”

It took Theo a moment to realize that the man standing on the parapet with the rifle was shouting at him, and then he couldn’t think of a good answer, so he just stammered, “I was running away” and felt his legs turning to jelly because he thought he might be shot.

But the man kept his rifle by his side. “Who from?” he asked.

“The soldiers. They had cannons. They fired them up the road . . .”

“Which road?”

“The big one to the west. There were people in the trees. Bits of them. It was terrible. I can’t explain.” He was stuttering again, and he thought he was going to break down completely until he sucked in the air and obliterated the memory.

“Bastards!” said the man, spitting out the word with venom, and Theo nodded his head, because that was exactly what they were. “But it’ll take more than cannonballs to stop us this time,” the man went on. “It’s not going to be like two years ago when the army only needed to fire one shell at the Presidential Palace before Companys and his cronies ran up the white flag. This time we’re prepared.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said Theo, looking admiringly at the barricade.

“So, are you part of that?” asked the man, pointing with his gun toward a round kiosk standing in the center of the road between them.

Theo didn’t understand the question for a moment until he looked closer and saw that the kiosk was plastered with the Olimpiada Popular posters that had gone up all over the city during the previous week. The same wording as on the windbreaker he was wearing.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a runner—on the American team.” It seemed unreal to say it, even though it was true.

The man whistled. “That’s impressive,” he said, and put out his hand. Theo went to shake it, but instead the man pulled him up over the barricade. “I’m Miguel,” he said. “Maybe we’ll need you to run later. But for now, it’s your hands we need.”

Behind the stockade, men stripped to the waist were using pickaxes and crowbars to break up the pavement with the cobblestones being passed down a human chain to the barricade, which was growing higher by the minute.

There was shingle under the stones, and other workers were packing it in sandbags to use on the parapets.

They all worked in rotation, digging until their hands bled and blistered and then exchanging positions with a carrier. Theo did both but kept his windbreaker on despite the hot sweat that the work induced. His conversation with Miguel had made him realize that it was his passport to acceptance by the Anarchist workers, who now all began to call him Yanqui—a name that delighted him after all the hostility he’d met with before when he was looking for Maria.

He kept expecting the soldiers to arrive, glancing over toward Miguel and the other riflemen who were keeping watch both ways through specially constructed loopholes in the barricade, but nothing happened until he was sent back to fetch water from the Tranquilidad Café, located several buildings down from the Moulin Rouge.

He was staggering back up the road, reeling under the weight of the oversize water canisters that he was carrying in both hands. He’d lost all sense of what was happening around him, focused only on completing the task he’d been given, until suddenly he lurched to his left, almost losing his balance. He looked down, wondering if he’d been hit, and saw that the container in his right hand was empty. A bullet had passed clean through it, causing all the water to gush away. He trembled at the closeness of his escape and flung himself forward into the stockade behind the line of Anarchist riflemen who were returning the soldiers’ fire up the Paral×lel.

He was sitting on the ground, and there were others there too. But they weren’t frightened like he was. It was just that they didn’t have weapons, and the leaders like Miguel had told them to stay down until they were needed. If a man on the barricade was hurt, then one rushed forward to take his weapon and take his place, while others carried the wounded man back to the Tranquilidad, which had been transformed into a combination of field hospital and command post. On the return journey, they brought up ammunition and food and more water.

Theo helped with the carrying. He’d never fired a gun, so it was all he could do. Inside the café, neighborhood women tore up bedsheets for bandages and cursed President Companys, who was speaking on the radio to denounce the coup.

“Now he talks!” they sneered. “When he refused us guns yesterday because he fears us more than Franco. We should hang him from the flagpole outside his palace when this is over. Let him swing for what he did.”

It seemed to Theo that they hated the Catalan president more even than the army rebels, but beneath their vitriol, the women took comfort in the broadcast. Companys’s speech meant the soldiers had not yet captured the radio station near Plaça de Catalunya, and that was cause for hope.

Gradually, Theo got used to the crackling and spitting of the gunfire as he passed, hunched over, between the café and the stockade. He’d been frightened at the outset that the soldiers would bring up the cannons from Plaça d’Espanya, but they didn’t even seem to have a machine gun or, if they did, they hadn’t yet found a defensible place to set it up. Instead, they crouched in doorways and around the corners of side streets, unable to mount any concerted attack on the barricade.

In the lulls between firing, the Anarchists shouted to the soldiers, imploring them to switch sides. “Your officers are lying to you!” they bellowed. “They started this. They’re the ones trying to seize power, not us. We’re defending the Republic. Come over! You belong with the people.”

It seemed to work. Two of the Assault Guards who had changed sides to join the soldiers in Plaça d’Espanya took off running and made it over the barricade with bullets whistling around their ears. Everyone cheered, and Miguel stepped back for a moment to talk to them, hoping they might have information the Anarchists could use. Immediately Theo ran forward to look through the loophole Miguel had vacated. Over to the left, across the road from Café Chicago, he could see that the soldiers had broken into a restaurant and had pushed the tables and chairs out onto the sidewalk, piling them up to create a makeshift barricade of their own. They were moving about behind it and Theo could hear their raised voices, no doubt arguing about the desertions that had just occurred. For a moment he saw a head through a gap in the furniture, and then it was gone. But there’d been enough time for him to recognize the face of the captain whom he’d seen on horseback leading Antonio and the other cadets back to the barracks two weeks before. Darnell, Antonio had said his name was. A Fascist bully who called Antonio Rat and took pleasure in making his life a misery, in the same way that Barker had once enjoyed persecuting Theo.

If Darnell was here, then Antonio was too. It stood to reason. And if Antonio had seen the Assault Guards get away, then he might well try to do the same. Theo knew how much Antonio hated the army, and he might think that this was his opportunity to escape. But it wasn’t. It had been little short of a miracle that the two guards had got across unharmed, and Theo knew that anyone who tried it again wasn’t likely to be so lucky, particularly as Darnell and his henchmen would be prepared this time.

But the Anarchists didn’t see it that way, or if they did, they didn’t care. They were calling out to the soldiers again, urging them to come across. “You can make it,” they shouted. “If those two did, you can too. It’s not far.”

“Stay back! Stay down!” Theo could hear his own voice in his head, repeating the same instruction over and over again as he stared unblinking through the loophole, willing his friend not to show his face. But then, as if in direct response, Antonio did.

He was leaning forward just where Darnell had been, in the gap between the tables, and Theo knew from his body shape that he was going to run.

He had to stop him. “Don’t, Antonio! You won’t make it. It’s too dangerous,” he bellowed, standing up above the parapet to make himself heard and waving his hands before he ducked back down again just in time to avoid a flurry of bullets whistling past where his head had just been.

But his foolhardy bravery made no difference. Antonio had already set off, and Theo’s voice was drowned out by the cries of the Anarchists who were yelling at him to run, not stop. “Faster! Faster!” they screamed like they were punters at a horse race, as Antonio zigzagged across the road, headed for the poster-plastered kiosk that Theo had stood beside earlier when he was challenged by Miguel from the barricade.

A moment later and Antonio had reached the kiosk and was crouching down behind it to catch his breath. Now it was only a few yards to the barricade. Nothing in comparison to the distance he’d already covered.

Perhaps he’d been wrong; perhaps Antonio would make it, Theo thought, staring at his friend through the loophole, rigid with a newborn hope that felt like a prayer. But then Antonio took off and fell almost immediately, shot through the throat so that he had to have been dead by the time he hit the ground, and the shaking movement in his body was from the impact of the second and third bullets fired by Captain Darnell, whom Theo could now see, looking out triumphantly over the barrel of his rifle on the other side of the road. Like a marksman in a shooting gallery, admiring his perfect score.

Theo’s hands were on the parapet. He wanted to go out and get his friend. Bring him in and cover him. But he couldn’t, because strong hands were pulling him so hard that he fell back on the ground, hitting his head. He must have blacked out for a moment, and when he opened his eyes, Miguel was standing over him with his rifle aimed at his chest.

“You knew him,” he said accusingly. “You were calling his name.”

“He was my friend. My best friend,” said Theo, forcing out the words between hard, sobbing breaths that wrenched his chest and tore at his throat.

“He was a fucking soldier,” said Miguel with his finger now curved around the trigger.

“He didn’t want to be,” said Theo. “He hated it. That’s why he ran.” He didn’t give a damn in that moment if Miguel shot him. In fact, he’d have welcomed it. Anything to shut out the pain of what had just happened.

Miguel looked hard at Theo and lowered his gun.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said. “But he has to stay out there until this is over, you hear me? I’m not having anyone risking their lives because of the dead. Their race is run.”

Theo nodded. All the energy had gone out of him suddenly, like air from a punctured balloon. He didn’t feel he could get back on his feet, let alone haul Antonio’s body over the parapet.

The firing had almost completely stopped as the soldiers melted away into the side streets above Café Chicago. Behind the barricade, the Anarchists drank water to soothe their parched throats and used their red bandannas to wipe the sweat from their faces. They began to think they might have won until they heard screaming, followed by the appearance out of the side streets of a crowd of women and children and old people half running, half walking down the Paral×lel toward them.

Two shots rang out and the crowd stopped, strung out across the center of the road. Silent now, like their husbands and brothers and fathers and sons twenty yards away on the other side of the barricade.

And then a voice cut through the silence. Hard and even. A voice used to command. “Attention, lawbreakers. You have three minutes to leave this road. Completely leave it. If you don’t, we will start shooting. You have no time to lose; look above you—you can see the clock.”

It was Darnell. Theo knew it was, even though he couldn’t see him. He wanted to run through the crowd and tackle him to the ground and beat his head against the cobblestones. Up and down, up and down, until there was nothing left to smash. But he didn’t. He stayed rooted to the spot, staring up at the ornamental clock high on the facade of the six-story building that housed the Café Chicago. Watching time suspended: the black minute hand like an executioner’s axe hanging over the defenseless people down below.

“¡Viva la anarquía! ¡Vivan los anarquistas!” cried an old, gaunt woman at the front of the crowd, raising her clenched fist in the air. But Darnell didn’t respond, waiting to see if his ultimatum would succeed.

Behind the riflemen at the front of the barricade, the Anarchists were quickly withdrawing down the side streets. The clock’s hand moved, and at a signal from Miguel, the riflemen turned and ran as well, and Theo was left alone as the panicked crowd broke, surging away to both sides with the soldiers advancing behind. They trampled Antonio’s body as they clambered forward up onto the barricade, and now Theo was running too. Back down the Paral×lel and away into Chinatown. Behind him, the shooting had begun again and he rushed blindly through the winding streets, until he soon had no idea where he was.

He stopped to catch his breath. He was alone on a narrow road, looking through iron railings toward the long, peeling-stucco wall of a building lined with Moorish horseshoe-shaped windows. Beyond its red-tiled roof, an octagonal stone tower rose to two arches open to the sky.

It was old and beautiful and entirely out of place among the tumbledown tenements, and appeared at that moment to Theo as a magical sanctuary, offering an escape from the horrors of the morning, at least until he was ready to go on.

He pushed open a gate in the fence, which swung back on rusty hinges, and quickly crossed a patch of rough ground dotted with several untended palm trees. Dead fronds hung down like knotted gray beards beneath the living foliage.

Around the side of the building, he found a locked door honeycombed with woodworm. He bent down to look through the empty keyhole and saw dappled light and a gray stone column. Somewhere, out of sight, beneath the sound of the gunfire, he could hear water dripping, and the thought of it so close and yet so out of reach made his parched throat unbearable. He pounded his fists uselessly on the door, expending the last of his reserves of energy.

He was exposed. Alone, in full view of the deserted street with the hot July sun beating down on his weary head. The ground seemed to rise and the sky to fall, and his legs gave way beneath him as he slid down, knocking away a dustbin in an alcove by the door with his feet.

He opened his eyes after a moment and the first thing he saw was a key, lying on the ground where the dustbin had been. With trembling hands, he fitted it in the lock and stumbled through the door into another world.

He was in the ancient cloister of what had once been a monastery. The sunbeams shining through the exquisitely constructed trefoil arches were golden lines cutting across the dark shadows in the walkways, and the capital of each column was decorated with sculptures of fantastical beasts. In the center, water seeped down over a stone fountain that Theo clung to with both arms as he knelt and drank.

Once he’d slaked his thirst, he retreated back into the cool shadows, running his hands over the gray stone, trying to feel it was real, instead of a dream that he had conjured up to block out the images of the morning: the maddened horse dragging its rider, the severed limbs in the trees, and the decapitated head, Antonio running and falling—his body on the ground, jerking this way and that as Darnell’s bullets found their mark.

He could still hear the gunfire. That was real and louder now than before: not just the crack of rifle shots but the telltale rattle of machine guns. He needed to escape it, leave it behind. There was another door in the far corner of the cloister. Not the one he’d come through. He pushed it open and entered the church, and when it closed shut behind him, the gunfire was muffled and far away, swallowed up in a vast silence.

Theo had never been in such a place. The immense weight of the barrel-vaulted ceilings and the absence of windows, except for small stained-glass medallions high in the thick stone walls, made the church seem subterranean, even though it was aboveground.

There was almost no decoration. Wooden pews, a stone altar and font. Nothing to distract from the sense of antiquity that was the church’s essence. It had stood here when all around were fields. Before Columbus, before the world was round. Unchanged, while generations fought and toiled.

This was not his mother’s church, peopled with gaudily dressed saints and bloodstained martyrs. Don Vincente would have no place here, railing from his pulpit against the godless Reds. This was the other church that Father Laurence had once shown him, and which he had forgotten: shadowy and twilit with the vespers chant of the monks rising and falling on the still air. Outside of time. Closing his eyes, Theo heard voices echoing in the corridors of his memory:

“Why did you bring me here, Father?”

“So you could see that there can be beauty and peace in the world if you choose to look for it.”

Beauty and peace: Father Laurence’s answer comforted Theo. He folded up his windbreaker for a pillow, lay down on a pew at the front of the church, and slept.

Excerpt from THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS by Simon Tolkien. Text copyright © 2025 by Simon Tolkien. Published by Lake Union Publishing         

 The Room of Lost Steps will be released on September 16, but you can pre-order it now.                     

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB