The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “And you didn’t call the police, of course,” Howard said.

  Uncle Roy shook his head. “It isn’t worth that.” He fell silent. He studied a fresh pumpkin, scowling at it. “What can we do about it?” he asked, as if he expected the pumpkin to answer. And then to Howard he said, “Sure you don’t know who they were yesterday? Not Stoat?”

  “Not Stoat. Smaller man. Stoat might have been hiding in the other room, but I don’t think so. That’s not his style.”

  “And today they steal Bennet’s truck right off the street, colder’n a duck. The dirty bastards.” Uncle Roy squinted at his pumpkin and then thrust the knife blade into it, up near the stem, cutting out the lid. The knife caught and hung itself up. Cursing, as if he’d had enough trouble already with uncooperative knives and pumpkins, he yanked at it, jerking it entirely free of the pumpkin and lancing the blade across his thumb. “Shit!” he yelled, tucking his thumb into his hand and holding on to it. He threw the knife down onto the table, then peeked at the cut thumb. There was a line of blood on it. He opened his hand all the way, relieved to see that the blood didn’t well out, that it wasn’t much of a cut. “Lucky the damned knife wasn’t any sharper,” he said. “I’d have cut it right off.” Then, apropos of nothing, he said, “Jimmers and his damned machine. I have half a mind …” he started to say, but then he fizzled out and simply sat there looking tired. He stared at his thumb again and then wiped the blood off onto the pumpkin-spattered newspaper.

  “Why don’t we head home?” Sylvia said, putting her hand on her father’s arm. “Give it up for tonight. Let’s eat some dinner.”

  “Only days to go before we open,” Uncle Roy said, shaking his head. “There’s no time for dinner. I’m generating my second wind.” He forced a replica of a smile. “Here, Howard—take a gander at this. This one is a knockout. Stick your hand into this bag.”

  Howard obligingly shoved his hand into the paper sack, while Uncle Roy supported it on the bottom, which was soggy and ready to break through. “Wet spaghetti?” Howard said.

  “Guts,” said Uncle Roy. “Doesn’t it feel like guts? I got the idea at dinner last night. You can buy tripe down at Safeway, but it doesn’t feel like anything at all. Wet spaghetti, though … feels like guts, doesn’t it? Had you going for a moment there. I saw it on your face.” Spaghetti leaked out onto the plywood through a tear in the bag, and Uncle Roy shoveled it back in and twisted the bag shut. “That damned Jimmers,” he said. “I’d hit the son of a bitch myself, if he was here. Sylvia, tell me this doesn’t feel like spaghetti—I mean guts. It feels like guts, damn it. Gopher guts. How does that jingle go? Great big gobs of greemy grimy gopher guts … It can’t be ‘greemy,’ can it? We’ll fill a plastic trash bag with the stuff—shove people in up to their elbows.” Then, cheering up abruptly, as if he’d just then remembered something, he said, “Hey, Howard, I’ve got a couple of cow brains over in the ice chest. The real McCoy, too. Take a gander at them. Bring me a beer while you’re at it, will you?” He wiped his cut thumb on the newspaper again, then picked up his pumpkin and sliced out a triangular eye.

  Howard stepped past the pumpkin pile and pulled the lid off the Styrofoam ice chest. Uncle Roy seemed agitated, unable to concentrate, as if he were bothered not only by the truck being stolen but by whatever conversation he had had with Jimmers. He was avoiding all of it, though, perhaps because Sylvia was there.

  Just then there was the sound of a car pulling up outside the door. It was Bennet, driving the station wagon. The two brains lay inside the ice chest, wrapped loosely in a plastic bag. Howard hauled a can of beer out and wiped it off carefully on his sleeve. “Good-looking brains,” Howard said. “Will they last?”

  Uncle Roy flourished his knife. “No, we’ve got to leave them in the freezer over at the Cap’n England. We’ll cold-storage these pumpkins, too, once I’ve got them carved. Bring ’em in here!” he shouted suddenly toward the door, and he took the open beer from Howard, nodding happily at it. Bennet appeared just then, grappling two naked mannequins around the middle, both of them androgynous-looking males. He set them down on the floor near the pumpkins and then went back out and returned with two chrome-plated supports, propping the dummies up and securing them so that they stood looking at each other.

  “Any word about the truck?” Bennet asked.

  “Not a lick. I’ve got feelers out, though. We’ll get it back. The scum-sucking pigs. They’ll regret this one.” Uncle Roy looked at the dummies. “Watch this,” he said. “Where’s that Japanese saw?”

  Bennet disappeared into a back room, and Uncle Roy picked up a felt-tipped pen and drew a dotted line around the dummies’ craniums. “Saw the bastards up,” he said to Bennet, who had returned with the saw. Uncle Roy looked at the dummies with an artist’s eye. “Don’t spare the horses.”

  Bennet slid the little saw past the edge of his thumb, skiving into the head of the first dummy and parting its skull so that the top of its bald head came off like a cap. Uncle Roy fetched the brains out of the ice chest himself while Bennet worked on the second dummy.

  “Watch this,” Uncle Roy said proudly, laying one of the brains into the trepanned head of the first dummy. The hiatus was too deep, though, and the brain nearly disappeared inside, down beneath the thing’s nose and eyes. Undefeated, Uncle Roy crumpled up a page of newspaper, pushing pumpkin innards off onto the floor, and then, removing the brain, he pushed the paper into the dummy’s neck and head, stuffing it full, then laying the brain back in. It rode too high now, perching there like a bird on a nest, so he plucked it out once again and slugged the newspaper a couple of times to smash it down, and then lay the brain back in. “There,” he said, standing back and admiring his work. “What do you think?”

  “That’s—something,” Sylvia said. “Are you going to put clothes on him?”

  “Of course we’re going to put clothes on him—dress both of them up in these silver-glitter shirts we got down at the thrift shop. It’ll be a sort of ‘men from the stars’ display. ‘The Brainiacs.’“

  Bennet finished up with the second dummy, and then, as if in a hurry, said, “Adiós,” and went back out toward the front, past the hanging skeleton. “Got to pick up those plaster-of-Paris cats,” he said, before going out.

  Uncle Roy waved at the back of his head, shouting, “Hit Yum Yum for a dozen sinkers!” Bennet disappeared without answering and drove away in the wagon.

  Howard looked at the mannequins, trying to summon whatever emotion it was that they were meant to evoke—fear? mystery? awe? Maybe when they were dressed and the lights were turned down … Truthfully the place needed something more, and lots of it.

  As if Uncle Roy were thinking the same thing, he seemed to deflate suddenly. Tiredly he sat back down in his chair and studied the face of a pumpkin. “Alas,” he said. Then he smelled his hands, grimaced, and wiped them on the bib of his overalls. “We need something big.” He looked out toward the street, sighing deeply.

  “How about the corpses?” Howard asked, thinking to cheer him up.

  “In there.” Uncle Roy gestured toward the back. “Ready to shoot marbles.” He ran his hands through his hair. “You tell me,” he said, looking at Howard. “What do we need here? What would you do? What is it that kids want to see in a haunted house? What kind of crap puts the fear into them? Jack-o’-lanterns? Skeletons? Back in my day a good skeleton would have sent them screaming. Now they want blood. Sex. Both together, for Christ’s sake. Nothing less. Blood and gore and flesh. I won’t have it, though. I won’t. This damned world’s rotten. Morality’s on the slag heap. Cut a woman up with a chain saw—that’ll fetch ’em in. But a skeleton? That went out with the trash.” He looked up timidly at Sylvia suddenly, as if remembering there was company present, and said, “Sorry to talk dirty.”

  He buried his face in his hands, resting for a moment, composing himself. Howard stood silently, embarrassed for his uncle. In the morning, when Howard was fresh, he would put his mind to it. With a
little imagination he and Sylvia could come up with something.

  “I called down to Jimmers’ place an hour ago,” Uncle Roy said to Howard, sounding beat and resigned. “We’re going to lose our shorts on this venture, me and Bennet both. It doesn’t seem like that—a small show like this. But our shorts aren’t worth much. They were worn pretty thin before we started out. What I did was I called Jimmers after Sylvia told me about the machine, and I flat out asked him for it. Told him it would bail me out. We could get away with any damned trash in here if we could crank that damned machine up as a sort of finale. They’d come in droves. We could give the press a sneak preview. The papers would be full of it, and we’d be rolling in cash. What the hell good is it doing him, rusting away out in that damned shed? Anyway, he wouldn’t budge.”

  Sylvia laid her hand on his arm, trying to stop him from working himself up. “Maybe he’ll come around,” she said. “He’s still remembering all those pranks you two used to play on each other. He’s bound to be touchy when you call him out of the blue asking for a favor like that. Let him sleep on it. He’ll see it different in the morning.”

  “Well, he owes me, doesn’t he? Drove me right out of business with that damned cow. No man likes being a laughingstock. This would have made bygones bygones. But no, he’s a man who holds a long grudge. I’m half tempted to go out there and steal the damned thing, or wreck it, one or the other—just shove it off the cliff along with the goddamned Studebaker. I told him so, too.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Sylvia said. “Now he’s mad at you.”

  “Mad at me! I’ll give him something to be mad about! Look at this damned mutant!” He reached out then and gave the dummy a shove, toppling it over, the brain spilling out onto the dirty carpet. Howard scooped it up, surprised at how rubbery and firm it was. There were hairs and bits of debris and dirt clinging to it now. Uncle Roy sat there with his face in his hands again, nearly in a state of collapse.

  Sylvia set the dummy up, and Howard shoved the brain into its plastic bag and put it back into the ice chest. After that he popped the top on another can of beer and handed it to his uncle. Sylvia put her arm around her father’s shoulder and said, “You’re anticipating things. You always anticipate the worst sort of defeats, and they wear you out. Just last week you were crazy with ideas for this place. Wait till tomorrow; they’ll be there again.”

  He looked up at her, gripping her hand. “Just last week Halloween was about a year away, and there was hope. This is the end, though. I’m going to be living out of the back of the station wagon, down behind the Texaco station, just like Mrs. Lamey says. Hell. I guess … I guess I’m just tired out.”

  A sudden voice interrupted them. “Knockety-knock,” it called playfully from the vicinity of the skeleton.

  “Mrs. Deventer,” Uncle Roy said, standing up and giving her a little half-bow. His remorseful face turned pleasant all of a sudden, as if he didn’t want to burden the rest of the world with his troubles. Mrs. Deventer stood in the doorway holding a pitcher of lemonade. She was short and gray-haired and dressed in thrift-store-quality clothes that didn’t quite match up. A gaudy lot of costume jewelry hung around her neck, weighting down a long red scarf. She had the air of a five-year-old playing dress-up. All of that, along with her wild hair, gave her a naturally batty look. She was cheerful-looking, though, and the red scarf was almost dashing, as if she were geared up for a night on the town.

  “Made in the shade,” she said, winking.

  “By an old maid with a spade,” Uncle Roy said, winking back.

  She feigned horror. “Mister Barton!” she said, stepping forward to set the pitcher and a stack of paper cups on the table. She looked askance at the dummy.

  “Mrs. Deventer,” Uncle Roy said, “meet Brainiac, the man from Mars.”

  “Charmed,” she said, reaching her hand out toward Howard. “Welcome to planet earth.”

  “Wait,” Uncle Roy said, pretending to be confounded, and then both of them, Uncle Roy and Mrs. Deventer, laughed and laughed. “You’ve heard me talk about Mrs. Deventer, Howard.”

  “Yes indeed,” Howard said, remembering. She was the one being squeezed by Mrs. Lamey. Somehow she didn’t look like a very formidable opponent.

  “I’ve brought these cookies for all of you.” Mrs. Deventer produced a sandwich bag full of cookies from the purse around her shoulder. “Leave some for the children,” she said to Roy, and nodded toward Howard and Sylvia. Then to Sylvia she said, “Is this one yours?”

  Sylvia blushed just a little bit. “Stray cat,” she said.

  Mrs. Deventer cast Howard a coy smile. “Pleased.” She shook his hand again.

  It struck Howard that Mrs. Deventer wasn’t anywhere near sober. She wasn’t falling down, but she wasn’t steady, either.

  “My young man is taking me out,” she said happily.

  The statement had a freezing effect on Sylvia and Uncle Roy both.

  “Now, don’t start in,” she said. “He’s pretty nearly saved me from ruin.” She directed this at Howard, as if to assure him that the opinions of Uncle Roy and Sylvia weren’t worth very much. “They’d have the place by now if it weren’t for him, and you know it.” Her nearly giddy attitude had switched to something near anger. Howard was clearly the only disinterested party in the room. “He’s a godsend,” she said to him.

  “Good for him,” Howard said, humoring her.

  “Paid my taxes.”

  “Good man,” said Howard.

  “He’s wealthy, you know. Pays my mortgage, too, when I can’t afford it. He’s looking out for me.”

  Uncle Roy looked about to burst, but he kept quiet for another moment, for as long as he could, maybe, while he systematically chopped the latest pumpkin into cubes. “That would be our friend Mr. Stoat,” he said to Howard, not looking up.

  Howard nodded, dumbfounded. Mrs. Deventer was grinning again, though, at the mention of the name of her “young man.” Here was trouble. Howard wondered if Uncle Roy knew just how much trouble. Paying her mortgage and taxes?

  She turned to leave, slightly miffed, Howard thought, as if she had expected enthusiasm and gotten doubts instead. “I’ll just be on my way, then.”

  Howard walked with her toward the door, wanting to be gallant, thinking it best to win her favor in some little way. “Thanks for the lemonade,” he said. “It was a pleasure meeting you. Live near here?”

  “Right up on Dawson,” she said, bumping into the skeleton, which swayed back and forth like a tired pendulum. Outside stood an old two-tone Pontiac, pink and gray, looking as though it had just been waxed. It was gorgeous, not a scratch on it, except for the rear bumper, which was smashed in. “Roy Barton is a good man, but he gets the most amazing ideas sometimes.”

  “Well,” said Howard diplomatically, “he wouldn’t be Roy Barton otherwise, would he? He’s pretty fond of you, you know. He’s told me quite a bit about you.”

  “Has he?” she asked, sounding pleased.

  “Beautiful car.” Howard opened the door for her.

  “My poor old Bob bought it back in fifty-six,” she said, her voice growing instantly husky. “God rest his soul. I don’t take it out much. Just once a month, up to Willits to visit my sister. There isn’t even ten thousand miles on it.”

  “Wow.” Howard ran his hand across the clean pink paint. “Take care of it.” He was vaguely conscious of a telephone ringing nearby, over and over again. Mrs. Deventer nodded, telling Howard through the open window that he was a good boy and looking about half wistful. She made several efforts to shove the key into the ignition, banging it on either side of the keyhole before sliding it in finally and starting the car. It died almost at once and then wouldn’t start. There was the smell of gasoline as she pumped the accelerator. The telephone rang off the hook and then suddenly stopped.

  “It’s flooded,” Howard shouted. She had rolled her window up, though, and she smiled at him and said something that he couldn’t hear. Mashing the accelerator to
the floorboard, she twisted the key again, holding it on until the motor roared into life and a cloud of dark exhaust blew out of the tail pipe. She backed out quickly, swerving in the gravel, and then rocketed up the hill past a startled man in an apron just then coming out of the back of the Cap’n England.

  Howard turned to walk back into the haunted house, working the Mrs. Deventer problem over in his mind. “Hey,” shouted someone from behind, and Howard looked back to see the aproned man hurrying toward him. “Roy Barton inside?” he asked, out of breath.

  “Sure is,” said Howard. “What’s wrong?”

  “Phone call. Artemis Jimmers. There’s been trouble; he’s pretty well worked up.”

  “Thanks,” Howard said over his shoulder. He was in through the door in a second, shouting for Uncle Roy, who was up and past him, hurrying out into the night. Howard and Sylvia followed along behind.

  The pay phone hung on the rear of the restaurant, the empty black cover of a telephone directory dangling against the yellow stucco beneath it. A moth the size of a small bird fluttered wildly around the light overhead.

  “Yeah,” Uncle Roy said into the mouthpiece. “What the hell?” He listened for a moment, his eyes narrowing. “You’re completely over the edge,” he said, raising his voice. “You’re just exactly the nut I always said you were. That’s right. You, too. I wouldn’t touch your goddamn shed with a dung fork. Oh, yeah, well …” He stopped talking suddenly and looked at the silent telephone. Then he listened again and hung up furiously.

  “What on earth is it?” Sylvia asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Somebody’s stole his shed.”

  “His tin shed?” Howard asked, finding it hard to believe. “Stole it?”

  “The whole megillah, lock, stock, and barrel. Jacked it up, slid it onto a truck, and drove off with it. Jimmers got a phone call luring him down to Point Arena. He thinks I put someone up to it. Anyway, he figured out it was a fake call, turned around to head back, and blew out a tire a quarter mile from home. When he pulled in they were just taking off down the highway. He followed them for a mile on the flat. Tore the tire to pieces, apparently. Turned the tube into a sausage, it got so hot. They left him in the dust, of course. Now he wants the shed back along with a new tire. He thinks it was me.”