“Goddamned Ghouls of Gorgoroth!” he bellowed like a male musk ox in heat. “My secret self, my psychic center, has aroused itself unto the ultimate pinnacle of being!” he exulted, and as he exulted he partially rotated his head, ninety degrees to the left, ninety degrees to the right, on his enormous column of a neck: a neck that Gilgamesh in his prime might have been proud to have possessed.
“Um, sorry to interrupt but, uh, actually, well, I don’t mean to contradict or correct you but…” a diffident whisper lisped out of the darkness that enveloped the far side of the living room. In a gesture of uncharacteristic unselfishness, the Professor handed the blunt over to the darkness.
“Here, hit that, it will bolster the Alluvial Quicksilver in your spinal column and grant you the courage to express yourself without that crippling hesitation,” said he. A skeletal hand materialized out of the gloom to clutch the proffered blunt. The depths of the darkness were faintly illumined by the crimson coal of living flame, and I could see the drawn, haggard, and malnourished face of Bogdan Bogdanovitch. A few hits in rapid succession and the Professor was proven right, for it appeared that Bogdan had acquired a backbone. He spoke, with a half faltering, half swaggering confidence he was wholly unaccustomed to. He said, “There are no ghouls in Gorgoroth.” Upon his lumpy throne, the Professor blinked his eyelids in aristocratic astonishment. “There are no ghouls in Gorgoroth,” repeated Bogdan. This time the Professor collected himself enough to give a contemptuous snort, but Bogdan boldly carried on, emboldened by the cocaine.
“Nope, no ghouls,” he was saying, “orcs, yes, the whole plateau is crawling with them, goblins and trolls, the sun scorning Uruk-hai and the javelin wielding Olog-hai. Hell, there are even Easterlings and Haradrim to be found in Mordor but no, not one, not a single ghoul to be found in all the Land of the Shadow—from the razor peaks of the Ered Lithui to the salt wastes surrounding the Sea of Nurn, there are no ghouls.” For once the Professor had nothing to say. Instead he reached dumbly into the darkness for the blunt and cherished its consumption like an infant cherishes its mother’s breast. His face was dead, expressionless. He had been mastered in the Art of Tolkienic Lore, and that by a cowardly, broken shell of a nihilist.
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