Excerpt from THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS by Simon Tolkien
Text copyright © 2025 by Simon Tolkien, Published by Lake Union Publishing
They edged along the sidewalk, keeping under the trees, and stopped as soon as the church came into view. Tall ogival windows above the big arched doorway faced out onto the Diagonal, and a round dome surmounted by a cross emerged from the invisible monastery buildings behind. The church’s east wall curved and ran north up a narrow tree-lined street, the Carrer Llúria, and ended in a tall bell tower in which the soldiers had sited their machine guns.
Nothing was moving, and the guns were quiet now after their recent flurry of fire. Anarchist fighters were densely gathered in the doorways on both sides of the Diagonal, and some had got into the houses. Theo could see them lying on the roofs and behind piled-up furniture in the open windows. White sheets hung down from under the balconies to demonstrate the occupiers’ loyalty to the Republic.
The bodies of several Anarchists shot in the earlier fighting were lying out in the road and on the sidewalks around the church. They lay haphazardly here and there, as if they had fallen from the sky, with blood seeping out from under their clothes and congealing in dark pools on the ground. One of them wasn’t dead. He twitched, regaining consciousness, and cried out for help and water. Two men dashed out from a nearby hiding place to rescue him, and immediately, the guns in the tower sprang back into life, sending bullets spattering across the roadway so that they had to turn back. The cries stopped, although it was impossible to know whether this was because the fallen man had been hit again or had just relapsed back into unconsciousness.
Later, a government biplane descended out of the clouds and circled the tower, firing its guns through the open arches. The machine guns responded but then fell silent, and the Anarchists cheered the pilot as he leaned out of his cockpit, shaking his gloved hand in the familiar clenched-fist salute, before he flew away. But their hope that he had knocked out the tower’s defenses proved short-lived as the soldiers started shooting again immediately after a fighter had dared to venture out into the road.
The standoff continued with sporadic firing until the Civil Guard arrived, and Theo felt a sense of déjà vu as he watched the same commander as at the Colón walk up to the church alone, showing the same calm bravery he’d displayed on the evening before. He carried no weapon except his baton, with which he rapped on the door three times.
Silence. So many eyes inside and outside were focused on this one lonely man, but nothing moved except the leaves on the trees, gently rustling in the light midsummer breeze. A minute passed and the door opened slightly. In the narrow gap, Theo caught sight of an army officer wearing a cap with eight-pointed stars. He talked with the Civil Guard commander for several minutes, and then the door shut again and the waiting resumed.
Suddenly Maria grabbed Theo’s arm and yelled “Look! Look!” pointing up at the bell tower, where a white flag had been run up. Everyone around them was shouting, too, surging forward out of their hiding places toward the church door, which had opened again.
Just as at the Colón, the Civil Guards had formed a cordon in front of the church buildings, running around into Carrer Llúria, but Theo was alarmed to see that there were far fewer of them than there had been at the hotel, and that there were almost no Assault Guards present this time to provide support. They were heavily outnumbered by the Anarchists, who were shaking their fists and baying for the soldiers’ blood. Some began throwing stones at the church windows, lobbing them over the guards’ tricorn hats, and the sound of breaking glass was added to the mayhem.
“Where are the fucking friars hiding?” someone shouted. And another voice answered: “They’re down in the crypt.” Looking around, Theo saw that Primitivo had disappeared, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been thinking that it was quite possible Primitivo would plunge a knife in his back if the scene descended into chaos and gave him an opportunity to do the deed unseen.
With great difficulty, the guards succeeded in maneuvering one of their motorized wagons close to the door of the church, and a group of soldiers came out through the cordon, climbed inside, and were driven away. Theo began to hope that the evacuation might succeed despite the disparities in numbers, just as it had at the Colón, but the Anarchists quickly filled the space left by the departed wagon, and the next one could not get anywhere as close. Now, fatally, the military changed their tactics and began to send out their wounded, carried by soldier stretcher-bearers over to ambulances that had parked farther up the Diagonal.
Fools! Theo thought. Can’t they see that there isn’t time? The crowd was growing in size by the minute, and it was obvious that the guards would not be able to hold them back for much longer. The soldiers and the friars needed to make a run for it, while they still could, carrying their wounded on their shoulders if they had to. But instead, the stretchers continued to come out one by one, as if they had all the time in the world, and as each one passed, the Anarchists pressed closer, leaning through the guards to spit on the wounded and their bearers.
The breaking point came when a badly injured man, writhing in delirium, threw out his arm from under his bloodstained blanket, revealing gilt stripes on his sleeve. He was a captain! One of those who’d given the orders to kill! The Anarchists surged forward and broke the line, beating the stretcher-bearers and the captain onto the ground and kicking them where they lay.
Theo instinctively pulled back as the crowd rushed forward, and he lost contact with Maria. Some of the Anarchists were flinging lit torches through the broken windows of the church. And farther to his right, someone was running on Carrer Llúria, shouting, “We’ve smoked them out. They’re coming out. Look!”
Theo did. Up past the bell tower, a side door had opened in the wall and friars were stumbling out, coughing and spluttering. They had taken off their habits and put on civilian clothes, but the disguise was fooling no one. An old man at the front was wearing black trousers that flapped around his ankles and a yellow shirt that couldn’t fit across his chest because he was too fat. His hair stood up on end, and he looked like a clown.
“Now!” a voice shouted and a machine gun opened up. Rat-a-tat-tat; rat-a-tat-tat. Theo could see it set up on a tripod wedged in by sandbags, facing up the side street toward the friars, less than fifty yards from where he was now standing. Someone he didn’t recognize was firing the gun, but Primitivo was the one feeding the ammunition. Without thinking, Theo took off running and threw Primitivo to the ground, and he’d raised his fist to punch him when he got hit himself. With what he didn’t know, but stars exploded in his head as he fell, crashing down on the cobblestones, and it was this second cranial impact that knocked him out.
He came to, looking out across the wide expanse of the Diagonal. His vision was blurred, but he could make out the yellow-shirted priest crossing the road with a soldier beside him, holding him up. An oddly matched pair, they tottered together as if they were drunks returning from a night on the town, not fugitives from a massacre.
Theo willed them forward. The mob were fully occupied inside the church and monastery, and each stumbling step the priest and soldier took edged them closer to safety.
They had almost reached the far sidewalk when the soldier fell. Whether it was a lucky shot or a marksman’s bullet, Theo had no way of knowing, but the old man was now alone. He staggered into a large doorway but was pulled back out onto the pavement by two Anarchists who had run across the road and now used the butts of their rifles to force him to walk.
The priest held his palms together as he shuffled forward under the arching branches of the poplar trees, and his lips were moving, so Theo knew he was praying. He wanted to go to the old man’s rescue, but he knew at the same moment that it was too late. One of the Anarchists had raised his rifle and taken aim, and the old priest fell.
He crawled a little way farther and then collapsed beneath a fractured lamppost, whose top leaned down over him, as if in an iron sorrow. His dead face looked back toward his church, etched with a final expression of petrified terror.
Theo summoned all his strength and got unsteadily to his feet, stumbling away down the Diagonal. He was expecting a shot like the one that had killed the soldier, but nothing happened. He looked back once and saw that the white flag in the tower had been replaced by a red one and that crimson flames were licking up the church walls toward it. He couldn’t escape the thick gray smoke that was billowing out from the burning church and monastery in all directions, but the cries and screams diminished in volume the farther he moved away, until at last they were no more than remembered echoes in his mind.
THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS by Simon Tolkien
A Novel
An American boy with impossible dreams is thrust into the cauldron of the Spanish Civil War in this arresting and thrilling historical coming-of-age epic and sequel to The Palace at the End of the Sea.
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?
Thriller Political | Fiction Literary | Fiction Family Life [Lake Union Publishing, On Sale: September 16, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781662528651 / ]
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About Simon Tolkien
I live in Santa Barbara, California where the sky really is as blue as the deep blue sea most days, and I love the roar of the ocean, the majestic mountains, the white Spanish adobe architecture, and the twisting oaks and carpets of flowers in my yard where I walk with my beloved pug, Sadie, twice a day. It’s a long way from the sleepy Oxfordshire village where I grew up and the Catholic boarding school where I spent my teenage years.
I studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford and then reluctantly went to law school. I thought that I was putting my life in a straitjacket, but criminal law was a revelation. In the London prisons and police stations I met people from every walk of life, and I became a barrister because I wanted to represent them in court, rather than just prepare their cases for trial. I loved the drama and responsibility of the work, but then at the age of forty-one, I decided to reinvent myself as a novelist, even though I had never written a word of fiction before! I am the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien and I think that his immense literary achievements had inhibited me up to then. I started with what I knew and wrote courtroom dramas, and then this developed into crime thrillers with historical settings, and finally character-driven historical fiction. I loved history as a child and my novels have enabled me to recapture the sense of wonder I felt about the past as being another country just as real as our own. My focus has been on the turbulent first fifty years of the 20th century and my settings have included the London Blitz, the Battle of the Somme, and now, in my forthcoming duology, New York in the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.
I have been so lucky to have been married for forty years to my wife, Tracy who has encouraged me in all my creative endeavors. She is a writer herself and an expert on vintage fashion and jewelry, and we have two wonderful children, Nicholas and Anna.
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