He looked behind him, though, and saw nothing but a wall of murk and trees. He had no idea how far away the city lay or in which direction he had come. He had wanted to go straight on up the path, roughly along the property line—but which of the two paths confronting him now was the main path and which one branched off? Neither one was well traveled. For no reason at all he stayed to the left, going along quickly and quietly for three or four minutes until the path forked again.
Again he angled left. That ought to be safe. If he failed to find anything at all, he could at least make his way back by—what?—taking all the left forks again. Or was it all the right forks?—he would be returning after all. Would there necessarily be any forks at all? He would be coming back, but then he wouldn’t be coming backward, would he? Most of these sideline trails would be leading away behind on his return, anyway, deeper into the forest. It would just muddle him up to pay attention to them.
Somehow it had gotten darker; either that or the forest was more dense. He was sure now that he had come too far, but he went on slowly, anyway, determined to turn back soon. There was something up ahead; he could see it dimly through the mist, a sort of clearing. Just then there was another path, too—this one leading away behind. It couldn’t do him any good now, but it was the one that would cause trouble on the way back. There was a lot of autumn-colored poison oak, he noticed, climbing all over the stump of a tree, right there at the fork. He would remember that easily enough.
He walked on, as if hurrying now would get him out of the woods sooner, and within moments he found himself standing at the edge of the clearing he had seen through the trees. It was overgrown with grass and wild iris and skunk cabbage. The path ended there, just like that. Clearly he was deep into the woods—far deeper than Aunt Edith could have ventured yesterday afternoon. She had been gone for maybe ten minutes and seemed to have made a round trip of it—although now that he studied it out, he couldn’t really be sure that it was her red jacket he had seen through the trees. It might have been anybody, kids maybe. This might easily be a wild-goose chase.
Someone had been using the clearing as a junk pile, too—so much for the primeval woodland idea. There were a couple of old car fenders tilted against each other toward the far side of it, although it was too weedy and misty to make much else out. There was something about the way the fenders were tilted together, though, as if they were meant to form a little shrine …
Suddenly he was both curious and terrified. He ducked back behind a tree and stood listening. There wasn’t a sound. Clearly this was too far out into the forest to be a mere junk pile; no one hauls car fenders into the woods just to throw them away. A child might haul them out there to build a fort, of course, although scrap lumber would have made more sense. He quit trying to make sense out of what he saw. This had something to do with what he had found embedded in the attic plaster night before last. There was no getting around it.
He stepped out from behind the tree, satisfied that there was no one around, and walked to where the two fenders stood, sunk six inches or so into the soft loam. There was freshly dug soil scattered across the top of the weeds. Someone had been working at the thing recently. Beneath the arched, mismatched fenders, someone had built a clever little wall out of odds and ends—small stones, an old glass inkwell, doll-sized lipstick tubes, a broken pocket knife, a rubber puppet head, half a dozen ivory dice, a couple of broken tin toys, and, among more of the same, his stolen paperweight.
Sitting on this junk-pile wall, his short legs dangling, was a ceramic Humpty Dumpty, its paint nearly weathered off and the white of its shell the color of an old meerschaum pipe.
Howard reached down to pick up the paperweight, but then stopped himself. Something in him didn’t want to disturb it, any of it. There was something child-like about the collection—like the careful arrangement of small toys and collected objects, say, on top of a child’s bedroom dresser, arranged just so for reasons that only the child could fathom. He was struck with the certainty, though, that the oddball little wall wasn’t the work of a child. There was a magic in the arrangement and choice of objects. He could feel it in the air of the clearing. He had stumbled into an open-air cathedral, and he felt suddenly that he didn’t belong there and didn’t want to run into anyone who did. To hell with the paperweight.
He was determined now to head straight to the house. He would find a way to slip out that afternoon, maybe, when the fog lifted and the sun shined. He slowed down in order to make less noise. There seemed to be paths everywhere around the clearing, and the fog had settled in so that even nearby trees were ghostly and dim. He stumbled on a root and nearly fell on his face in the grass, dropping the flashlight to catch himself. He sprang up at once, shaking his hand and looking around, half expecting a patchwork zombie to materialize out of the fog. He had wandered straight off the path somehow, out onto another little patch of meadow.
This was no good at all. He was utterly lost, and had been within five minutes of leaving the house. The whole concept of direction, of north, east, south, and west, was imaginary. It meant nothing, had no application. Realizing it made him mad. He would sit down and wait. Wasn’t that what someone advised? Sooner or later they would discover that he was missing and—what? Follow him into the woods, track him with dogs? It wasn’t likely. He could wait out the fog, perhaps—unless it didn’t lift for two or three days. It was almost funny. He was thirty years old and lost in the damned woods. He didn’t feel like laughing, though, or sitting, either, so he found the path and started walking again, searching futilely for his own footprints coming the other way.
The trail narrowed and weeds grew up through it. Clearly it wasn’t very often traveled. There wasn’t any sign of his footprints on it, or anyone else’s, either. A fallen tree loomed out of the fog, blocking the trail and making it certain that he’d gone wrong. He turned around, took ten steps back, and found another trail, this one broader and well traveled.
Don’t get frantic, he told himself, half out loud. Then immediately he understood that to be evidence that he was getting frantic. He felt the urge to run up this new path, just in order to get somewhere different, and so he consciously slowed his pace and forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings—to remember oddly shaped bushes and trees. It was daylight now, and the fog was ghostly white where the sun shined through. It was wet, too. Water dripped down the back of his coat from overhead branches. Were there bears in the woods? He asked himself that, wishing immediately that he hadn’t thought of it.
Again the path forked, this time to the right—a better path, it occurred to him, although he couldn’t have told himself why. He had to duck beneath low branches, hunching along through the gloomy twilight. There was suddenly an ocean breeze—just the hint of one, as if maybe he had found his way back toward the edge of the woods, after all, and he hurried along, wondering how long he’d been out there—a half hour, anyway, maybe longer.
The path ended at the clearing with the shrine again. He had blundered in a sort of zigzag circle through the woods, coming upon the clearing from the other side. At once he plunged back into the trees, with no idea where he was bound, and stumbled within seconds into a patch of forest partly clear of fog. He found himself atop a ridge, its overgrown slope running down into a weedy little pond, and then another hill beyond it, very steep and grassy. He clambered down the slope toward the pond, standing after a moment in marshy grass at the edge, watching water striders flit across the top of the water while he caught his breath, utterly lost.
Across the pond, floating on the shallow water and tied to a half-submerged tree, lay an old rowboat with a couple of trout poles and fishing tackle in the bottom of it, partly covered in a piece of oilcloth. Leading away from the boat, along the edge of the pond and then through the grass and up the opposite slope, was another trail. Through the trees he could just make out what looked to be the shingled roof of a cabin, the rest of the cabin hidden by the hillside. He picked his way down an
d around the pond, slogging through mud and wet grass until he reached the path on the far side.
He crouched along, moving slowly, watching the back of the cabin appear above the crest of the hill and ready to duck into the bushes at the sight or sound of anyone at all. There was a light on inside the cabin and smoke from a chimney. It occurred to him that he ought to have been happy, stumbling back into civilization like this, but he wasn’t. This was hardly civilization. Likely as not, this cabin had been Aunt Edith’s destination yesterday afternoon. He had come too far not to find out now.
Now that he needed it, the fog had mostly disappeared. He crept forward, toward the rear of the cabin where a long pile of split logs reached nearly to the windows. The intelligent thing, of course, would be simply to knock on the front door and announce that he had gotten lost in the woods and needed directions. Except that there was clearly something secretive about Aunt Edith’s furtive trip, and at the moment he felt like being equally furtive. And there was the shrine in the clearing, too, not a hundred yards away, that lent the whole business a strangely dangerous air.
He peered in at the rear window, into a small bedroom containing little more than an unmade bed. Through the open door he could see into what was maybe a living room, just making out the edge of a stove and the corner of a small wooden table. Shadows moved across the edge of the table, but no one stepped into view. He would have to find a more useful window.
He edged down toward the corner of the cabin, ducking low behind the woodpile in order to take a peek before stepping into the open. He could feel the ocean breeze again, blowing uphill toward the cabin, and it struck him that if the breeze held up he could take a stab at following it toward town. A well-traveled path angled away in that general direction, and although the trees were too thick for him to be certain, that path must surely lead toward Uncle Roy’s house—toward the city instead of deeper into the woods.
His footsteps were noiseless on the soft, weedy ground as he slipped past two curtained windows, neither one of which gave him any view at all of the interior. At the comer of the house there began a broad, wooden front porch, and the ground ran away downhill steeply there, so that in the very front of the porch there were four or five wooden steps. He would have to clump across the porch in order to see in.
He crept back down to the woodpile and from there back down the hill toward the pond, so as to approach the house from some little distance. It wouldn’t do to seem to have been snooping around. Should he whistle? He squashed the idea as too theatrical. He would yell “Hello” instead, a couple of times, and then head up onto the porch and knock heartily so that no one on earth could think him a sneak.
Putting on his best look of pleasant surprise, just for the sake of anyone looking out the window, he cupped his hands over his mouth and stopped cold, cocking his head to listen. He had heard the sound of a door slamming. There wasn’t any doubt. It must be well after six now. He had been mucking around in the woods forever. He jogged away in a crouch again, back toward the woodpile. Inside of three minutes, here came Aunt Edith, carrying a foil-covered plate of food and a pot of coffee. She hurried along, although she didn’t look ill at ease; she looked attentive, as if she wanted to arrive with hot food.
She passed out of sight, and then momentarily he heard a screen door slam shut and then another door shut more softly. This time he hurried around the opposite side of the house, the side that fronted the deep woods, so that if his aunt went back out directly, she wouldn’t catch him in the open.
A red wheelbarrow stood tilted against the house, surrounded by garden tools and piles of mulch and stakes and pots. The nearby garden was made up of moldery little rows of withered cabbages and anemic onions, all of it blighted somehow. He pulled the wheelbarrow away, settling it down onto its bed, and silently climbed up onto it so as to see in through a window just beside the edge of the front porch. Luckily the curtains hung a couple of inches apart—plenty far enough for him to get a quick glimpse inside.
There stood Aunt Edith next to an old black potbellied stove. Her plate of food sat on the table. Sitting in a chair, just getting ready to tie into the food, was old Michael Graham, thoroughly alive, although incredibly old and frail-looking. A walking stick leaned against the back of an adjacent chair.
Howard clung to the windowsill, lost in thought. What did this mean? The old man was hiding out here, certainly. That was clear. So he wasn’t murdered and he hadn’t committed suicide. The car-over-the-cliff business had been a ruse, a red herring to confound Stoat and his associates. Who knew that, besides Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith? Jimmers? Sylvia, clearly. Why hadn’t they told Howard? Because he was from out of town—a casual guest. For his own good, obviously, they would attempt to keep it secret. There was no use him getting involved. So where was the sketch? It was a good bet that the old man had it. His mind spun, trying to add things up, to work out the mathematics of the puzzle.
Aunt Edith turned to leave, and Howard dropped off the wheelbarrow and scuttled back toward the rear of the house, hunching along past the woodpile again. In a couple of minutes, after she had plenty of time to get home, he would follow her. There was nothing more to learn—not without breaking into the cabin and searching it, which was utterly out of the question. He was sliding into deep waters, to be sure, and his best bet would be to wade ashore while he still had his feet under him, and give up any notions of being an amateur detective. He didn’t owe the museum anything, anyway, and no one, certainly, owed him the Hoku-sai sketch.
He crouched there for one more moment, just to be safe, and in that moment he felt a tap on the shoulder.
11
FOR a moment Howard crouched silently, knowing that trouble stood at his elbow, but asking the universe for another ten seconds of relative comfort before he had to look doom in the face. He tensed himself and turned around. Doom had taken the form of Uncle Roy, who stood there in a heavy jacket, holding a field guide to West Coast mushrooms and a little basket covered with a handkerchief. He shook his head as if advising Howard not to talk and then nodded back toward home. Howard followed him down the path, feeling sheepish and still shaking a little from the fright.
Uncle Roy ambled along, stopping every now and then like an Indian tracker to examine the ground. He picked up a limp little mushroom and dangled it there for Howard to see. “Panaeolus campanulatus,” he said. “Don’t eat this one.”
“I won’t,” Howard said.
Roy pitched it into the bushes, wiping his hands on his pants. “I’ve got a bunch of crap at the house that I’ve got to haul down to Bennet’s. I figured you’d want to come along. You seemed keen on it last night. We’ll run it over to his house this morning.”
“Sure,” Howard said. “I was out for a walk. You don’t get this sort of opportunity down south. There’s no place to walk to, really.”
“That’s a fact. That’s why we got out of there. These woods, though … You’re lucky you didn’t just disappear into the fog, wander up into the coast range somewhere. It’s a dangerous place. They’ve found the bones of hikers up there, picked clean.” He said nothing for a moment and then, matter-of-factly, said, “You’ve found the cabin.”
This took him by surprise. “Yes, I guess so.”
“I knew you would. I knew it yesterday afternoon in the truck there, when you brought up the subject of the sketch again. “There’s no hiding anything from a lad like Howard,’ I said to myself. And then when I couldn’t find you around the house this morning even though your truck was still out at the curb, I waited for Edith to go out with the old man’s breakfast and I came along after her. Sure enough, there you were. ‘Howard’s a shrewd one,’ I said to myself. ‘We’ve got to come clean with him.’ Look here. Look at this.”
He bent over and pointed at a brown, corky-looking fungus coming out of a rotted stump. “That’s a pretty specimen, isn’t it?”
“Nice color at the end there,” Howard said, pointing to the pale blue edge of the thing
and waiting for Uncle Roy to come clean with him.
“That’s one of the pore fungi. What they call ‘artist’s fungus.’ Believe it or not, it’s tough enough to carve. You can make attractive household articles out of it—matchboxes, candlesticks. Not much market for it, though.”
“Lots of mushrooms out here in the woods, aren’t there?”
“More than you’d suppose. You can just eat the hell out of most of them, too. You wouldn’t want to, maybe. Half of them taste like rotten dirt. Take a look at these.” He lifted the cloth from the top of the basket. Lying in the bottom was a handful of small purplish fungi, misshapen and evil-smelling. “I’ll bet you a silver dollar that these are uncatalogued. Never seen or heard of them. I’ve been finding them over the last few days, growing out around the cabin. I call them witch flowers. Look at the shape.”
Howard peered closely at them. Sure enough, they looked like little disfigured lilies, as if someone had set out to make imitation flowers out of crayons and snail slime but hadn’t seen enough real flowers to get the shape right. “Smell like hell, don’t they?”
Uncle Roy looked shrewdly at him. “You don’t know how close you are to being right,” he said, putting the cloth back over them.
The two of them set out down the trail again, still going slowly, Uncle Roy on the alert for mushrooms. “About the cabin,” he said. “We’re putting up a guest there.”
“Right. Michael Graham. That’s where Aunt Edith goes with the food.”
The Paper Grail Page 14