The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  Uncle Roy was smiling now, wolfing down big bites of sandwich and talking around them. He had won through again, pulled himself out of another scrape. His army of irregulars stretched down the coast, into Albion. The day had been full of victories, although it was unclear to Howard whether any of the battles had been decisive. “How about the three that walked home?” Howard asked.

  “To hell with them. Maybe they got run over by a lumber truck. And say, that reminds me, thanks again for getting a jump on that barn lumber. I made out all right on it. Bought a little something for Edith and Sylvia and took Edith out to dinner with what was left over. Squandered the hell out of it.”

  “Good for you. Sylvia showed me the sweater. She’s nuts about it.”

  “She’s a good girl. Sees things clearly. She gets her good looks from her mother, but I’ve had a little bit of influence on the way she thinks. I’ve worked hard to knock some of the practicality out of her. What I’ve been doing out back is trying to clean up the scrap that’s left over. I figured to rip out another few feet of one-by-two, but it’s so warped it keeps binding the blade up. It’s firewood, I think.”

  “That was my conclusion. We ought to chop it into lengths and stack it.”

  Uncle Roy changed the subject, as if he’d gotten all the mileage out of the barn lumber he cared about. The practical business of turning it into firewood didn’t interest him. “I hated like hell to give Mrs. Deventer’s money to old Lamey last night, but what could I do?” He shrugged, to show that he’d had no other option. “Anyway, I owe it to Mrs. Deventer now, especially after what I told Lou Gibb.”

  Howard didn’t bother to question his logic, to ask what it was Uncle Roy owed himself and Aunt Edith.

  Uncle Roy shoved down the rest of his sandwich and then washed his hands at the sink. “Time to meet Bennet down to the harbor. What are you up to?”

  “I thought I’d pay a visit to Jimmers’,” Howard said.

  “He won’t be there. It’s his town day.”

  Howard nodded. “I know.”

  Uncle Roy shrugged. “Do what you have to.”

  24

  “WE’RE certain he’s not home, then?” Howard watched the ocean out the window as they drove south. The swell had come up considerably since last night, and the tide was higher than he would have liked. It looked as if he’d be getting wet again if they dawdled.

  “Trust me. He comes up to town, up to the Safeway, once a week to buy supplies, and then he’ll eat a late lunch down at the harbor. You can set your watch by it. He won’t be home until dark. It’s now or wait till next week, though, because if we show up while he’s home, he won’t let you anywhere near that passage. He’ll thank you for bringing his clothes back and try to interest you in UFO sightings or disappearing rabbits or something. He’ll be on his guard now, especially since the shed was stolen.”

  The day was beautiful—sunny and dry, almost warm. Howard wished they were simply going down to the beach for a picnic. There wasn’t time for that sort of pleasure, though—maybe. Mr. Jimmers would be home before dark, carrying his bags of groceries. It wouldn’t do to be confronted in the living room or to be trapped down on the beach and have to swim around the point again, especially if they were carrying the sketch.

  They passed the driveway slowly, not turning off. Howard craned his neck to look back down toward the house, trying to catch a glimpse of Jimmers’ car, just in case he hadn’t made the usual Wednesday trip. He couldn’t see anything at all, the car included. A quarter mile south, Sylvia pulled off at a turnout and cut the engine, and without waiting another moment they were out and walking back up the road just as fast as Howard could manage it. He felt almost spry, but he carried his cane in case he’d need it in the steep passage—and partly, he had to admit, out of superstition. He still didn’t want to be without it. At the mouth of the driveway they held up, making sure there was no one out and about, and then slipped across and started down in the shadow of the woods.

  For once, Howard thought, they could have used a little fog, if only to cover up all this breaking and entering. Abruptly he felt a twinge of doubt, but he shooed it out of his head like a pigeon out of the rafters. What he was going to steal didn’t belong to Mr. Jimmers, and neither did the house he and Sylvia were about to break into. Both of them belonged to a dead man who had summoned Howard north, it seemed, to accomplish just such feats as this.

  Jimmers’ car was indeed gone, and the place was deserted. Where the shed used to be, out on the meadow, there was a rectangle of moldery-looking dead grass and dirt with a few stalky tendrils of Bermuda grass growing up through it. The ground was broken where the comers of the wooden skids had been yanked around, and there were four rusty old bottle jacks left behind that were still lying there in the dirt. It looked as if someone had been surprised in the middle of the theft and had to run for it. They had probably jacked up the comers enough to back the lift gate under the skids, then winched it forward onto the truck bed while they were rolling back up the highway.

  Sylvia wandered off, back to the house, where she was methodically checking the doors and windows. Before joining her, Howard took a quick look over the edge of the cliff, to where the Studebaker sat rusting on the rocks. A pelican stood placidly on the car’s roof, watching the waves break. Howard wondered whether it was his pelican, and just then the bird looked up at him. Howard waved and then headed for the house.

  “How convenient,” Sylvia said when Howard limped up, and she threw open one of the French doors that looked out onto the sea. The wind caught it and slammed it open against the edge of a table. She stepped back and gestured at the open door.

  It turned out that simply walking in wasn’t easy for Howard. Mr. Jimmers’ presence seemed to fill the place, even if he himself was in town, shopping at the Safeway. “How can he be so sloppy?” Howard asked. “We could be anybody. And after he got beat over the head, too.”

  “We are anybody, aren’t we?” Sylvia asked, pushing him through the doorway and into the interior. “You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth. What did you want to do, break something, kick the door in?”

  “Well …” Howard said. “You know what I mean.” The house was cold and musty and dim, lit only by sunlight through the dirty windows.

  “Should we check beneath the rock in the fireplace?” Sylvia asked.

  “It’s not there.”

  “You know that? What if it is there? We could be on the road in five minutes.”

  “It’s not there. I had a dream that revealed where it’s hidden. I told you that.”

  Sylvia grinned at him. “I love that kind of dream,” she said. “I had one once where this enormous brass baby’s head advised me to call a particular telephone number in order to establish contacts. That’s what it said, ‘contacts.’ It was a UFO dream, you know, like I used to get.” She took his elbow as she followed him up the dark stairs.

  “Did you call the number? You must have. You couldn’t bear not to.”

  “Of course I called the number.”

  Howard waited, but Sylvia said nothing more. “Well? Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like a Chinese man, at a laundry, I think, so I hung up.”

  He waited again. “That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

  “Uh-huh. I got busy with something and forgot all about it. I think I had to wash the dishes.”

  Mr. Jimmers had made a small effort to straighten up the attic, or at least to get the closet door closed. Half the stuff Howard had hauled out still sat on the floor, though, and the cut-up quilt lay heaped by the Morris chair. The desk, which Howard had tried to bar the door with, was shoved sideways into the middle of the room, and more of the closet debris lay on top of it. He pulled the closet door open, revealing the arched hole torn into the wall and the dim antechamber beyond.

  “This is it, then?” Sylvia asked in a hesitant voice.

  “The secret passage.”

  “What if Mr. Jimmers di
dn’t go into town? What if he’s down in there somewhere, waiting for us?”

  “Why on earth would he be waiting for us?” Howard asked, alarmed at the notion of Jimmers lurking below them in the darkness. “Don’t say that sort of thing.”

  She shined her flashlight into the interior, and the light glowed dimly down the stairwell. “Maybe he’s got an axe down there.”

  “Would you shut up?”

  “Did you read about those severed heads they found perched on guardrail posts? That wasn’t two miles south of here. They never found the bodies. It’s my guess that Jimmers ate them.”

  “Shine that light in here,” he said, “and drop that sort of talk.”

  “I bet it’s sharp enough to split a hair with, like in the cartoons. Your head goes first.” She pushed him forward, handing him the flashlight.

  “Shut that closet door, then,” he said. “No use advertising that we’re here.”

  Carrying his cane, he bent hesitantly into the passage, playing the light around on the walls. In the yellow glow, Howard could see that the stairwell was paneled and roofed with wooden car siding, painted white, with a raised framework of sticks forming a pattern of circles and crosses on the walls. The wood was scuffed and dented and dirty as if furniture or equipment of some sort had been hauled up and down for fifty years. It had been a well-used passage, not just the scrimshaw of an eccentric architect.

  The corners were hung with cobweb and there were rat droppings and stains along the edges of the stair treads, which were worn in the centers from use. The passage, apparently, had been a regular thoroughfare. Howard almost preferred the utter darkness he had found there two days ago, which had hidden the evidence of spiders and rats.

  When the stairs ended, they followed the tunnel down through the cliff itself. Root tendrils grew through the ceiling, and for a distance of three or four yards after the last stair tread, the walls of the tunnel had evidently been cut away with picks and then had been shored up with timbers. The dirt gave way to stone, though, and the rest of the tunnel seemed to Howard to be a natural cave—wet and dark and cold. Here and there the walls were streaked with veins of whitish crystal, smooth and shiny, almost like heavy snail tracks. They could hear the muffled crash of waves now, and in minutes there was a sea wind in their faces and the smell of the ocean as they wound down around the last curving slope, skirting a pool of dark water left from the high tide, and stepping into the sunlight that poured into the tunnel mouth.

  “I don’t see any Studebaker,” Sylvia said.

  “Not so damned loud,” Howard told her.

  “Who’s going to hear, the sea gulls?” She took his arm, leaning against him and gazing out into the empty sea. A foghorn sounded somewhere to the north, the faint sound of it carried on the wind. “You’re really tensed up, aren’t you?”

  He said nothing, but then nodded. In truth he felt just a little like he had in his dreams—just when they were beginning and the pieces of the dreams were still misty and disconnected and yet he knew, even in sleep, that something was waiting. In contrast, Sylvia seemed fresh and exuberant with her face rouged by the wind and her hair wild.

  “Romantic, isn’t it?” she said. “I love deserted beaches.”

  He nodded, feeling it, too. There seemed always to be such an infernal hurry—four days of it now, always with desperate destinations and the hands of the clock spinning and spinning. They had a good three hours yet before Mr. Jimmers’ return, though—time enough.

  “We should have brought a blanket and a picnic lunch,” Sylvia said.

  “That’s just what I was thinking not a half hour ago. Why didn’t we?”

  The world was utterly empty of anybody but the two of them. There was nothing but the rocky cove and their little comer of beach, mostly sheltered from the wind and from the eyes of people above. The cliffs rose sheer and stark behind them, faintly echoing the sound of lonesome gulls and of breaking waves. The sun shined down on the moving ocean, illuminating the pale green waves that quartered across the reefs, throwing themselves into the air in long sheets of spindrift foam.

  Sylvia stood silently, holding on to his arm, watching the ocean, waiting, maybe, for him to speak or move. There was nothing to prevent him from kissing her, right then and there, except that suddenly he felt like a teenager, his heart fluttering and his mind troubled by what might lie within the glove box of the wrecked car. The dream anxiousness returned, and he looked nervously toward the rock shelf that separated them from the Studebaker.

  “First things first,” she said, and he wondered what she meant, what came first in her own mind just then.

  He stepped up onto the rocks, though, and she followed, the two of them picking their way easily over the top. There sat the Studebaker, as ever, the front end crumpled, sun-dried kelp tangled around the tires. The doors hung open on broken hinges, the window glass shattered, and the hood was torn loose, hanging over the fender and crusted with sea salt. The windshield was a spiderweb of cracks.

  The back windows were unbroken, and the radiant heat of the sun through the glass had warmed the interior. Sylvia clambered over the front seat, which was thrown forward into the dashboard, and settled herself into the back. Howard set his cane across the exposed engine, then pulled the front seat roughly back into place and climbed in behind the steering wheel.

  There was a steering knob on the wheel, just as his dream had predicted. It was an oval of pale Lucite with an ivory ground. There was nothing in it—no symbols, no messages. The sight of it, though, made him hesitate, his hand on the button of the glove compartment. Again the unreality, the dream-likeness of the whole business washed over him. There was something mythological about it, as if at any moment some symbolic animal, a lamb or a kid or a centaur, would descend the rocky cliff above. There was something timeless about the moment, and he turned to look at Sylvia, who lounged on the seat, regarding him silently.

  He opened the glove box. Inside lay a hammered-cooper rectangle about a half inch thick. He lifted it out and examined it. There were two rectangles, actually, pressed together, like a book without a spine. They were old-looking and etched with verdigris, and were sandwiched very tightly over a rubber flange. Four silver clips, cut into the shapes of tiny swords, were thrust through each of the corners, somehow fastening the two halves of the case. Cut deeply into the top plate was a rampant dragon with a knight on horseback before it, burying a lance into its heart. Below were the words “The Guild of St. George.”

  Howard hesitated half a moment, wondering how the sword clips were meant to work. They appeared to be corroded into place, almost fused to the metal plates. When he pulled at them, they slipped out impossibly easily, though—so easily that they might have fallen out if he had turned the case over.

  The two halves parted just as easily, revealing the rubber flange laid into a channel inside as a seal. The sketch lay loosely on the bottom plate. It was almost translucent, the paper was so thin, and it showed a thousand creases, as if the paper were of such quality that it could be folded infinitely without any single crease being muddled by the rest. Sketched onto it were the figures that Howard remembered from Mr. Jimmers’ copy.

  “It’s an unfolded piece of origami,” Sylvia said suddenly into Howard’s ear, startling him so that he nearly dropped it. “I wonder what this discoloration is,” Sylvia said, leaning forward and looking over his shoulder. He could feel her breath on his neck. “Looks like coffee stains.”

  “Blood. That’s what your father thinks.”

  “Remember those Mad magazine covers?” Sylvia asked. “Where you fold part of it over another part? Try to fold it the way Mr. Jimmers folded it.”

  On impulse Howard folded it lengthwise so that half the sketch disappeared Lines joined, forming a picture.

  “What is that?” Sylvia asked. “A tower or something?”

  Something blocked the sun just then, throwing the car into shadow. Howard leaned forward and looked through the cracked front w
indshield, surprised to see what looked like a raincloud, and perhaps more on the horizon. “Or something,” he said. A rush of embarrassment colored his face. It was a domed turret, unmistakably phallic-looking.

  Sylvia reached up and pinched his ear, running her hand down the front of his shirt, and he realized that the heat that he felt wasn’t embarrassment at all. “I think it’s the Castle Perilous,” she said, slumping back into the seat and untying her shoes.

  “I think we’re in the Castle Perilous.”

  “Or somewhere. Who cares?” She kicked her shoes off onto the floor and then shrugged out of her jacket. “Warm in here,” she said, tossing the jacket down onto the shoes and pulling her sweater smooth.

  He unfolded the sketch and centered it in its aperture. Then he laid the top plate back over the bottom, carefully sliding the tiny swords back into place with a faint click. He set the case on the dashboard. Sunlight shined onto it through the spiderwebbed window like lamplight through an aquarium full of diamonds, and the hammered copper glowed warmly.

  Howard was filled with the inescapable knowledge that the sketch was his. It had belonged to Michael Graham, and to others before him, but now it was his, Howard’s, for reasons he felt but didn’t understand. The reasons didn’t matter, though. His curiosity was beside the point.

  Something vast—the energy of growing things, of the seasons, of the turning of the earth and of the stars themselves—flowed through him, filling him up like a goblet full of red wine.

  He climbed hastily into the backseat with Sylvia, and she lay in his arms, the two of them sprawled together in the warmth of the autumn sun. She pulled his jacket off and pushed it onto the floor opposite her own and then began to unbutton his shirt. “What do you need,” she whispered, “a written invitation?”

  He put his finger to her lips to quiet her. If he had needed an invitation before, he didn’t now. He was surprised at how easily he slipped her sweater off, how roomy the backseat of the old Studebaker seemed to be. They might as easily have been in a palace. “Remember that dead-end street?” he asked, recalling a shared moment of passion nearly twenty years past. “Near the cornfield? Not as much room in the back of a Dodge.”