The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  The stillness didn’t make Howard feel any better. That was just the trouble, wasn’t it?—that there was nothing at all out there. He would have been more comfortable surrounded by the familiar noises of a southern California suburb.

  He picked up the rock and tossed it back into the pile, calming down enough to be embarrassed at having thrown it like that. Sylvia went back into the darkened museum, playing the flashlight around on the walls. Howard followed, expecting—what?—ghosts, maybe, the Studebaker crowd in their top hats playing chess.

  The place was dusty and deserted. It looked as if even in its heyday it had never amounted to much. He had expected some kind of fun house—with a mysterious cellar, maybe, and with different rooms and passages—but there was only the one big room and what looked to be a tiny office and bathroom off to the side.

  Because of the darkness, nothing was particularly visible. Faint moonlight shone through the open door, but there was almost no light at all through the shuttered windows. Only the little beam of Sylvia’s flashlight illuminated the room. She shined it across low tables built of redwood planks, like picnic tables. They were covered with dust, but nothing else.

  “He used to sell literature on the supernatural,” she said. “All kinds of stuff, some of it serious, some of it completely nuts. It was all over two of these tables. I used to keep it straight, which wasn’t hard, since there were hardly any customers to mess it up. There was a wonderful model of the Studebaker, too, with the ghosts sitting in it. Mr. Bennet built that. It had a table to itself. I kept it dusted. Father’s got it somewhere, in a closet at home or something.

  “Wait,” she said, “there’s a picture.” On the wall was an enlarged photograph, out of focus, of a Studebaker on the highway. In it sat a trio of half-evaporated men. One of them was looking out the window at the camera, his face indistinct.

  “Uncle Roy took this?” Howard asked. “I thought he was out picking mushrooms when it drove past.”

  “He was out photographing them, actually. It was pure luck. There he was with the camera in his hands. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  Truthfully it looked to Howard like a bunch of dressed-up guys in a car, driving through the fog. “It’s weird, all right,” he said, not wanting to cross her. “I wonder who was driving. This crowd would be more at home in a coach-and-four.”

  Sylvia shrugged. “I was always so astonished just at their being there in the car that I never worried much about who was driving.”

  There were a number of other photographs on the wall, mostly bad ones in dime-store frames. Most were faked-up pictures of ghosts with a couple of paragraphs alongside by way of explanation. Sylvia shined the light on each in turn. There was a photograph of the ghost dog of Tingwick and another of the ghost dog of Garden Grove. Farther along was the Brown Lady of Raynham, descending a set of stairs, just like Uncle Roy’s ghost woman, except that his was more convincing.

  There were several artist’s renderings of ghost cars and carriages, along with a dim photograph of a sort of Gumby vehicle parked behind a barn. Howard was happy to see that ghosts were as up-to-date as anyone, that early in the century they’d given up carriages and horses and taken to the highways in what were usually very fashionable cars—Daimlers and Austins and Rolls-Royces—all except Uncle Roy’s ghosts, who had stolen a shabby old Studebaker. Beside a drawing of the ghost bus of North Kensington there was a photograph of the ghostly image of Dean Liddell, which had mysteriously appeared on the whitewashed wall of Christ Church Cathedral sometime in the early 1920s.

  “Dean Liddell …” Howard said. “Wasn’t that Alice Liddell’s father?”

  “Might have been,” Sylvia answered, giggling just a little. “They have the same last name.”

  “Ssh!” Howard cocked his head and listened.

  “I was just joking …” Sylvia started to say, but he clutched her arm and held it, and she was instantly quiet. They stood listening to the faint sound of the wind. “What was it?” she whispered after a moment.

  “I heard someone walking—on the gravel outside.”

  “Just a squirrel,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. They could see nothing through the shuttered windows. Both of them listened, but there wasn’t a sound that there shouldn’t have been. Sylvia started to giggle again. “Where’s your rock?” she asked.

  He relaxed a little. It was his imagination again. He forced himself to ignore it, and then he wondered suddenly what he was doing out there in the woods in the middle of the night. Clearly he wasn’t there to discover anything about the place. Daylight would be necessary for that.

  Sylvia stood about a foot away from him now, still shining her flashlight on the sketchy visage of Dean Liddell. Howard put his hand on her shoulder and immediately felt a little less jumpy. She let it lie there, saying nothing and holding the light steady.

  “Alice Liddell was Lewis Carroll’s Alice—Alice in Wonderland,” Howard said.

  “Really. And her father’s face appeared on a wall? The family hogged more than its share of fame.”

  “This is the only one of the ghost photos that doesn’t look fake, isn’t it?”

  “How about Father’s?”

  “I mean besides his. Neither one of them looks like trick photography, anyway.”

  “I’m ready to believe it,” she said. “You’re the doubting Thomas, remember?”

  “Listen!” He had heard it again—the scuffing of shoe soles, the crunch of gravel. They stood absolutely still, but there was only silence again, as if something were waiting. And then, whisper-quiet, the back door of the museum swung closed.

  “The wind,” Sylvia said as Howard stepped toward it, following the beam of her flashlight.

  But there was a quick metallic clicking and the sound of the padlock snapping shut. There were clear footsteps outside now—someone hurrying—and low voices talking, maybe arguing.

  Howard had a quick insane notion that it was Mr. Jimmers, come around to lock him in for the second night in a row. Crazy as it had to be, the thought made him furious. He banged on the locked door, and then, in a rage, kicked it with the bottom of his foot. “Hey!” he shouted at the darkness, but no one except Sylvia was paying any attention to him.

  “Shut up and listen,” she whispered, grabbing him by the arm now. “Someone’s going through my car.”

  It was true. They could hear a car door close, followed by the sound of the trunk slamming shut. Howard went from one window to another along the wall, trying to see out past the edge of the shutter, but it was no good. Through one he could see a sliver of moonlit ground, but that was all. Another door slammed.

  He slid one of the windows open. “I can kick the shutters out,” he whispered. “They’re just held in by a screw or a nail or something.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You’re being robbed. What if they’re going to steal your car?”

  “What are you going to do, chase them up the road? Let them have the car and everything in it. Who cares? It’s insured. Don’t be a hero. This isn’t worth getting beat up over.”

  She was right. He saw that right away. He was still smarting from when she’d scared him outside, when he had thrown the rock into the dirt, and it seemed to him that kicking out the shutter would redeem him somehow. He listened again, to the sound of someone walking, probably two people. The footsteps receded now, fading into nothing. They hadn’t stolen the car.

  “Where are your car keys?” he whispered.

  “In the ignition.”

  That was puzzling. Why hadn’t they taken the car? Clearly because they weren’t garden-variety thieves.

  “Are they both gone, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why wouldn’t they be? Probably someone on the road, looking to steal a jacket or a blanket or something.”

  He wondered. Somehow it felt as if it were something more sinister than that. “What if they light the place on fire? With us locked inside?”

&nbs
p; “Will you shut up about that!” she said, talking out loud. Then she whispered, “Why would they do that? Don’t invent things. This is bad enough. And if they do, then you have my permission to kick out the shutters—all of them.”

  “Wait!” He held his hand up. There was the sound of a car engine trying to catch—except that the starter was bad, and it whined for a moment before the engine rumbled and the motor noise evened out.

  “Stoat!” Howard said, and leaning back, slammed the edge of his forearm into the bottom of the shutter. It popped loose, but it was hinged at the top, and so it flopped back down into place, a nail in either comer bumping against the window casing. Hurrying, he bent the nails over sideways and then pulled one of the tables across. “Come on,” he said, climbing onto the table and holding the shutter open. Sylvia climbed up next to him and handed him the flashlight.

  “Careful,” he whispered. “Check first.”

  She stuck her head out, looking up and down the building. The parking lot was deserted. “They’re gone,” she said, and climbed through, dropping easily to the ground below and then standing up to grab the shutter. He gave her the flashlight and then climbed out himself, heading for the car. The keys were lying on the seat. The thief had taken them out to open the trunk and then tossed them back into the car. He could as easily have tossed them into the bushes, and Howard and Sylvia would have spent the next hour walking up the highway into Little River. This was very slick—carried out like a business venture, without any malice or larking around.

  “Wait,” Sylvia said, hurrying back toward the rear of the building again. Howard went with her, watching carefully, trying to be ready if someone was hiding in the shadows. There was no one—only the scattered rocks and the door locked shut. Sylvia put the key in among the rocks and built the pile back up on top of it. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, sounding frightened now.

  “Gladly.”

  “How did you know it was him?” she asked. “It might not have been Stoat. What do you have against Stoat?” She gazed at him evenly, and he had the notion that she was baiting him, being playful.

  “His car engine,” Howard said. “His starter’s bad. It sounded just like that down at Sammy’s this afternoon. You’d think a guy like that would be on top of things, would worry about being identified. Either he’s sloppy or he doesn’t care. Why should he? Apparently he didn’t steal anything.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing that I can see. What the hell was he after?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. And quit looking at me like that.” She climbed into the car and started up the engine.

  “I’m not looking like anything.” He shut the door and sat back in the seat, feeling easy at last. “Let’s go.”

  “So what was he after?” she asked again. “Can’t you tell me? Is it a government secret or something? What are you, CIA?”

  “No, I can’t reveal my true identity. You can call me Agent X.”

  “I’ll call you brand X if you don’t tell me what in the hell he was looking for.”

  “They,” Howard said. “They wanted the Hoku-sai sketch. The one that I came up after.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  “You tell me,” he said, “and we’ll both know. Could be that Jimmers has it. He’s about the most suspicious person I’ve ever met.”

  “He’s pretty shady, all right,” Sylvia said. “But he’s just an eccentric. He’s not up to anything—what?—illegal or something. Is this trouble with the sketch illegal?”

  “I don’t know. It may have something to do with Graham’s murder.”

  She looked at him, driving carefully along the dark highway, past the Little River Inn. “Maybe Graham wasn’t murdered,” she said. “Word has it that he committed suicide.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Who told you he was murdered?”

  “Mr. Jimmers … I think.” But had Jimmers told him that? Or had he only been joking? Jimmers had laughed like a prankster after saying it—hardly the response of a mail who believed his friend to have been murdered. “I don’t know, really. Anyway, you mean he wasn’t murdered?”

  “They found a suicide note in the car.”

  “He wrote a suicide note and left it in the car? Then drove the damned thing into the ocean? What did he want, for the fish to read it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you that they found a suicide note—Mr. Jimmers did. He gave it to the police in Fort Bragg. It was Mr. Jimmers that found the car and all.”

  “How’d he get down to the ocean, by boat?”

  Sylvia shrugged. “He got down there, that’s all I know. The tide was up and the car doors were open—the fall knocked them open, I guess. Graham’s body was gone, washed out with the tide, but the note was still in the car, clothespinned to the rearview mirror.”

  “Uh-huh.” Howard realized that he didn’t half believe in Graham’s suicide. He didn’t believe in murderers, either; what he believed was that he still knew almost nothing about what had gone on. But he had an idea, though, that he could find a way in the morning to learn more, and he determined to get up early, before the rest of the house was awake. “I might as well tell you that Stoat threatened your father at the bar this afternoon. He pretty clearly was after something—the sketch, I think. And he implied that the problem of your lease could be fixed if Uncle Roy could come up with it. He offered him money for it, too. A lot, I think.”

  “Father doesn’t have any sketch. At least I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.”

  “That’s what he said. Stoat didn’t believe it, though.”

  They drove in silence into Fort Bragg. It was almost midnight, and he was tired out. Sylvia was, too. He could see it in her face, which, this late in the evening, revealed her age just a little bit. He could see the strain of the passing years in the lines beside her eyes. “Thanks for holding it together like that out there,” he said. “I was pretty shaken up.”

  “I was, too.”

  “You were thinking. I was lurching around.” He patted her knee, not really meaning anything by it except that the physical contact, the warmth of her leg through her jeans, made him feel a little more solid. The world had been too full of ghosts.

  “It’s late,” she said, answering an unspoken question.

  “Yeah, and I’m beat.” He moved his hand away, as if he had to in order to rub his eyes. They turned up Barnett Street, angling toward the curb in front of the house, in behind Howard’s truck. Abruptly he sat up straight in the seat, peering out through the window. “Shit,” he said.

  “What, what’s wrong?”

  “The camper door’s open. I left it locked.”

  10

  HOWARD awoke in darkness, jarred awake when the iron clock in the living room tolled five. That had gone on all night, and he had finally gotten off to sleep by smashing the pillow over his head and then had awakened two or three more times when the bell tolled. He rolled over, deciding not to get up, after all. Sleep was more important to him. Then he lay there thinking, waking up a little more each minute, starting to worry about trifles, as he always did when he woke up in the early morning.

  Only now what he worried about seemed to be more than mere trifles, and it seemed to be more and more certain to him as the minutes dragged past that he didn’t have very much idle time. He was being locked up at every turn, and his truck had been burgled twice—once by the gluers and now by Stoat and whoever else had gone through Sylvia’s car. They hadn’t taken anything this time, but the act itself was ominous. Things were happening in pairs and in triplicate, and somehow at five in the morning that seemed to signify. He climbed out of bed after another few minutes of mulling things over and pulled on his clothes.

  Fog had drifted in during the night. It was gray-dark outside, and still. He went out silently through the kitchen door, trudging through the wet grass around to the front of the house, where he got Sylvia’s flashlight out of the backseat of her car, ea
sed the car door shut, and headed for the backyard again.

  When he passed Uncle Roy’s workshop, he hesitated for a moment and then pulled the splinter of wood out of the hasp and opened the door. He turned on the light and looked around, wondering what he could carry with him out into the woods. He only half believed Uncle Roy’s horror stories, but somehow the fog and the early-morning twilight had started to work on him. He found a two-foot length of closet rod in among a stacked-up pile of scrap lumber. He swung it into the palm of his hand a couple of times, deciding that it would do the trick as well as anything. It was a bit of security, anyway—something to balance the fear that was seeping into him even as he stood there.

  He went out again, leaving the door unlatched, and headed straight for the misty line of fir trees. The yard sloped up into them, fenced off by berry vines, which had been hacked away along the north edge so that there was a path into the woods. On the other side of the path lay a vacant lot, overgrown with vines and scrub.

  Up close, the woods weren’t quite as thick as it had seemed from a distance. Even with the fog he could see a good ways through the trees—far enough so that he was unlikely to come upon anyone unawares. He switched on the flashlight, but the glow was feeble because of the dawn leaking through the tops of the trees. In among the deep shadows the light helped more, though, and he was happy enough to have it. He suspected that he didn’t have far to go.

  He walked along for a time, conscious of the smell of evergreen and fog. You didn’t often get that sort of thing down south. Here he was, up at dawn, trudging through the primeval woodlands. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to make a morning ritual of this—in any sort of weather. He could buy some sort of oilcloth raincoat and a pair of galoshes, too, and try it in the rain, carrying a thermos of coffee.

  Just when that pleasant notion occurred to him, the path forked. He stopped and listened to the stillness, a little bit wary now. The fog had thickened and seemed to be settling in rather than lifting. How far had he walked? He had been enjoying himself and not paying attention. There was a rustle back among the trees just then, and his heart leaped. He stood still, thinking of Uncle Roy’s bears and lions. It hadn’t been much of a rustle, though—barely enough for a rabbit or bird—just enough so that his hearty, up-at-dawn mood utterly evaporated and he was filled with unease. He told himself that the forest wasn’t any different in the fog and the darkness than it would be in the sunshine. Then he tried to convince himself that surely the fog would begin to burn off as the sun came up.