Sylvia nodded. “I think it ought to be in a museum. Kids would go nuts over it.”
“Imagine riding in it,” Howard said. “Cranking it up and driving it into Fort Bragg at eight in the morning, dressed in a foil hat. What’s the rest of this stuff in here?” Howard gestured around the room, at the heaped pipe and sheet metal. He stood up and moved across to lay his cane and the copper case on the benchtop, and then pulled out one of the blueprints in the box, half expecting to find the plans for a flying saucer. What he found was a diagram of the ghost machine, drawn to scale, covered with symbols and illegibly written notes that he didn’t understand. “Oh-oh,” he said, holding it up for Sylvia to see.
She stared at it until she understood what it was. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything, really. Who cares where the damned thing came from? Somebody had to build it. Did you really expect it to generate ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I guess I did, finally. If you had asked me three days ago, I would have laughed at the idea. Now I’m not laughing.”
“Good. Don’t laugh. Think of the one human being on earth who might build a machine that generates ghosts. It’s Mr. Jimmers, isn’t it? You’re only skeptical because he built it in a basement on the coast. When you thought it was a hundred years old, you were half convinced. I don’t think that anything’s changed. Besides, how do you know who drew those plans? They look old to me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t. I wonder what else is in here.”
“I think we should leave Mr. Jimmers’ stuff alone. It’s nearly six. If we were smart we’d find our way out of here. I don’t feel right meddling with all of this. It’s all private, hidden away down here like this. It’s the last thirty years of Mr. Jimmers’ life that we’re pawing through. I shouldn’t have wound up the flying saucer.”
“No harm done, apparently. And if you hadn’t wound it up, I would have.”
“Let’s go,” she said, standing up. Howard rolled the drawing and shoved it back down into the box, then picked up his cane and the copper box. Together they went out through the next door and down more steps into yet another room, the flashlight illuminating a bed chamber with a single chair against one wall. There was a table with a lamp and hot plate and with open shelves above it lined with books and with cans of Spam and hash and hominy and Postum. A single faucet was piped straight out through the concrete wall. There was a small doorway leading into a toilet and yet another heavy, closed door like the one leading into the attic closet.
“That’s it,” Howard said, stepping across to open it up. Darkness lay beyond. There was no knob at all on the outside of the door. It led out, not in. “We need something to wedge it open,” he said. “No telling where this goes. It can’t go far, though. Shine the light through here.”
It was a tunnel like in a mine, shored up with old railroad ties. The floor of the tunnel seemed to run gradually uphill. “Hold it for a moment,” Howard said, “and throw some light on the shelves there.” He stepped back into the room, grabbed a can of Spam, and set it onto the threshold, letting the door close against it. Then they set out down the passage, through two hundred feet of darkness, until once again they came to a door, this one barred with a heavy piece of wood slotted into the timber of the door frame. An immense garage-door spring hooked the center of the door to the post it was hinged to.
Howard pulled the bar out of its niche and hooked it back into a tremulous sort of clip, like the hold-down of a rat trap. Carefully he leaned all his weight into the door, pushing it open a couple of inches before it jammed against something that sounded like dead leaves and brushwood. Fresh air whirled in around them, smelling of the ocean and evergreen trees and eucalyptus.
“Hold on,” Howard said, handing Sylvia the copper case and taking the flashlight from her. He loped back up the tunnel, put the Spam can back onto the shelf, and closed the door that the can had propped open. He hurried back toward the door into the woods again, anxious to get out.
In the woodsy darkness outside, tree branches swished together in the sea wind. There were no lights visible through the partly open door, no sign of the highway or the house, just the shadow of the woods in moonlight. Sylvia helped him shove the door farther open, skidding it through forest debris, the springs creaking and straining. They slid out, ducking beneath overhanging ferns and brush and letting the door pull shut behind them. The bar slammed down into place.
The door itself was set in the side of a hill, mostly hidden by vegetation and elaborately painted with depictions of twigs and leaves and ferns, most of the paint having been scoured off by weather and the wood beneath discolored to a granite shade of gray.
Up the hill above them a car roared past. They trudged along a tiny, disused trail, up onto the highway, and walked the quarter mile back up to their car. The sun was low in the sky, and the afternoon was dim with pending evening. They could see the house now, out on the bluffs. A light glowed downstairs and another upstairs. Smoke tumbled up out of the chimney. Mr. Jimmers was clearly home and had been home long enough to get a good fire going. He had probably been strolling around above them when they wound up the device in the cellar; perhaps he had been there for hours, knowing exactly what Howard was doing downstairs and no longer interested in stopping him.
“Maybe we can just sit here for a moment,” Sylvia said, looking out over the ocean. The sky was clear and the distant edge of the ocean sparkled and danced in the dying sunlight. Howard put his arm around her shoulder, wishing that the Toyota didn’t have bucket seats. “Not just now,” she said, still looking out the window. She turned and smiled at him briefly, then went back to looking out the window.
The copper case sat on the dashboard. Howard picked it up. It was warm, maybe because he’d been carrying it. Its warmth felt like something else, though—as if it were alive in some strange way or charged with barely contained energy. He pulled the plates apart and lifted out the sketch, holding it up in the sunlight so that the paper was translucent. Clearly it had been pressed from a mixture containing leaves and flower petals. A stem of wheat lay outlined like a watermark within the paper, striated by the hundreds of creases.
“Let me see it,” Sylvia said.
For a moment Howard hesitated. He was filled with the notion that the sketch was his in some fundamental, mystical sense and that he shouldn’t be passing it around to satisfy idle curiosity. “Sure,” he said, feeling foolish. “This paper seems so delicate, I can’t imagine how it’s held together through so many foldings. You’d think it would fall to pieces like an old road map.”
“I think it was meant to be folded,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a puzzle. I can see the start of a few different shapes here. I think I can follow these two folds and get the start of a simple balloon.”
“An egg, maybe?”
“I don’t see an egg.”
“What else?”
“Maybe a fish. I don’t know. I’d have to start on one of them in order to see steps farther along. Like following a map again or working your way through a maze. It’s impossible to see connections unless you take them one at a time.”
“Go ahead and fold it.”
She looked at him and shook her head.
“Why not?”
“It’s like Mr. Jimmers’ car in the basement,” she said. “I felt like I was meddling when I wound it up.”
“This doesn’t belong to Mr. Jimmers, does it? It belongs to me.”
“It does?”
“Who else?”
She shrugged. “I’d feel like I was … intruding or something.”
“That’s a strange word,” Howard said. “Intruding on what? What do you mean intruding?”
“I don’t know. What do you think this is, anyway?”
“Your father seems to think it’s the Grail.”
“Then you fold the damned thing up. I won’t have anything to do with folding it up.” She gave it back to him, but kept looking at it, as if she were studying it with something li
ke longing. “It has some sort of effect on you, doesn’t it?”
“Like out on the beach there, in the Studebaker,” Howard said.
“We shouldn’t have done that. We’ve known for years that we couldn’t, or shouldn’t.”
“Now we did. Simple as that. It was nice, wasn’t it?”
“Nice, yes,” she said, “but maybe not good.”
“Maybe it was good. What happens if I fold it lengthwise, like this?” Howard folded it down the center. There was no need to run his thumb and forefinger along the crease. It folded flat by itself, as if the fold were part of its natural state. The car shook in the wind just then and Sylvia jumped.
“God,” she said. “I thought someone had stood on the bumper. That thing makes me nervous as hell.”
“So what have I started? I could fold it into the shape of a diamond, I guess. I can’t see past that.”
“Might be anything. You’ve got to picture it three-dimensionally. Haven’t you ever taken those tests where you have to guess what an unfolded box will look like when it’s folded up?”
“I always failed that sort of test.” Howard said. “To me they always look like crossword puzzles for morons.”
Sylvia pointed out the passenger-side window. The sun was just then disappearing into the sea. “Look at the sun now.” she said. “The sky around it is hazy. The sun’s almost red.”
“Sailor’s delight.” Howard said. “How did that rhyme go? ‘Midget at morning, sailor take warning. Midget at night, sailor’s delight.’”
She stared at the folded paper, concentrating on it.
“Pretty funny, eh?”
“Sure. What did you say? Fold it again, in half. Turn it into a small square. I think I see a cup in it.”
Howard folded it just as the wind shook the car again, sailing up and over the bluffs, bending the dead grasses almost flat and howling around the door frames. Sylvia pulled her coat out of the back and jammed it between the seats, sliding over beside Howard, snuggling up to him. “Now open it up and tuck the two top comers in, diagonally.”
Darkness fell across the car now as if a vast shadow had blotted out any light left over from the now-departed sun. There was the sound of distant thunder, and Howard and Sylvia looked out through the windshield to find that great black clouds were roiling in double time over the water, soaring along madly in the wind, driving toward land. Lightning forked down toward the ocean, which leaped now with whitecaps. Long, black swells drove in to smash against the rocks with a concussion the two of them could hear even above the wind.
For the moment they ignored the partly folded sketch that Howard held in his hands, and they watched the storm sweep toward them, seeming almost to be pulling water upward out of the Pacific and into the clouds. Way out over the ocean a waterspout rose momentarily and then fell, and within seconds rain flailed against the car, obscuring the ocean entirely.
There were headlights on the highway suddenly, and a car swerved toward them, half on the wrong side of the road. It swung wildly back into its own lane, running up onto the right shoulder and glancing off the rock face of the cliff, the driver honking uselessly as he drove past, disappearing through the deluge.
Rain beat down now in vast waves, sluicing sideways into the car. It forced its way past the weather stripping around the doors and windows and ran in rivulets down the inside of the passenger door to pool up on the mat. Sylvia tried to crank the window shut, but it was already tight.
“It won’t last long,” Howard half shouted, squinting to see through the murk and trying to be heard above the roar of rain drumming against the roof. He could see nothing in the sky now, only a black, low canopy. Water poured down the inside edge of the highway in a muddy torrent, wrapping around the cliffside and rushing beneath the car and over the cliff in a cataract. Howard switched on the headlights, but most of the light was thrown back at them, reflected off the heavy curtain of rain. A shower of fist-sized rocks tumbled down the cliff, scattering across the highway in front of them before being swept up in the torrent.
“We can’t stay here,” Sylvia said. “There’ll be slides in weather like this. A few years ago fifty yards of road just fell into the ocean. It was a month before it was open to travel again. You had to drive inland nearly to Philo and then back out to Elk.”
“Fine,” Howard said. “We can’t go anywhere. We can’t see ten feet.” He turned the radio on but there was nothing but static. Three rapid flashes of lightning lit the dark landscape like noonday, and Sylvia screamed, jamming herself back into Howard so that he was crushed against the door handle. An explosion of thunder masked her scream, and in the silence that followed there was a furious knocking at the window on the passenger side and a face peering in at them, its mouth working as if it were shouting something.
Howard lunged for the ignition, instantly remembering every apocryphal story about cult murders and escaped lunatics with hook arms. He twisted the key, wondering how the hell he was going to turn around on the flooded highway. Forget turning around. He threw the car into gear and edged forward, looking wildly at the face in the window. Sylvia was shouting at him, slugging him on the arm.
“It’s Jimmers!” she shouted. “Wait! It’s just Jimmers!”
Howard stepped on the brake, his hand on the key again. She was right. It was Jimmers, his hair wild in the wind. Rain poured off his yellow rain slicker, beating against his back as he held on to both door handles for balance. Howard cut the engine and Sylvia unlocked the rear door, letting Jimmers pull it open as he fought against the gale. Rain hammered in around his shoulders as he crammed himself into the backseat, and the door smashed shut behind him, driven by the wind.
“Unfold the paper,” he gasped.
26
HOWARD looked at him, not understanding what he meant.
“The sketch. Unfold it.” He pointed at Howard’s hand, which was still closed over the folded paper. Howard opened the paper up so that it lay flat again. Almost at once the storm began to abate. There was a flash or two of distant lightning but only the vague echo of thunder now. The wind fell off and the rain lessened to a sprinkle. Out over the ocean the starry sky shone through torn apart clouds that seemed to sail away in all directions at once, leaving the windswept sky clear again.
“Perhaps you’d better quit fiddling with it and put it away.” Mr. Jimmers said slowly, as if he were talking to a man with a loaded gun.
Howard laid it back into its case, clipping the thing shut and setting it onto the dashboard again. “What did I do he asked.
“Very simply, you called up a storm. Or started to at any rate.”
“Started to?”
“It was nothing alongside what it might have been. It was the lemon next to the pie.”
“The pie?” Howard said.
“It was my fault,” Sylvia said. “I was the one who wanted to fold it.”
“Fault doesn’t enter in.” Mr. Jimmers wiped his hair back, wringing water down his raincoat.
“How did you know?” Howard asked. “I’m just curious. Were you home all afternoon?”
“I went up to town to buy groceries and got back about a half hour ago. I spotted your car through the attic telescope and so knew it was you two banging around down below. And then when the storm rose out of nowhere like that, I went upstairs again, and there you were, sitting in your car on the roadside, meddling with the … sketch, oblivious to the danger.”
“And you let us have the sketch, then, when you knew it was us in the cellars.”
“You knew where it was,” Jimmers said.
“What difference does that make?”
Mr. Jimmers stared out of the window. Suddenly he began shivering, and Sylvia said, “Start up the heater.”
“That’s the stuff,” Mr. Jimmers said. “A cup of Postum would be nice, wouldn’t it? I’m going to pop back up to the house and brew one, but you won’t want to come along. There was trouble down at the harbor. I saw it from the road on the way
back down here. You’ll want to have a look. Fire department was there. It looked like a fire in among the trailers, maybe. A couple of eucalyptus trees were burning like torches.”
He paused for a moment to contemplate before going on, and then said tiredly, “A week ago it wouldn’t have mattered what you wanted. It wasn’t mine to give, was it? But now poor old Graham is dead and someone’s got to carry on. I believe that’s you. It certainly isn’t me.”
“Why isn’t it you?” Howard asked softly.
“Because I’m a pawn,” Mr. Jimmers said sadly. “You’re the king, aren’t you? Promise me you’ll remember something that I once forgot. Heloise Lamey is a dangerous adversary. The people who surround her are thugs and morons. She uses them as easily as she once used me. I thought I loved her once, years ago, and betrayed poor Graham by giving the sketch, as you call it, to her. I simply gave it away. I did it out of love, mind you. No one can say that I didn’t. I had good intentions in some ways, but as they say, the road to hell is paved with that sort of brick. She threw me out when she thought she had what she wanted, and I knew I had betrayed my friend for nothing. Then it turned out that Graham had manipulated all of us by manufacturing a spurious sketch, and she had got nothing, after all.
“I was furious with him. He had seen the truth all along, seen straight through both of us, and yet had allowed me to betray him, and because of it I lost everything. I moved north and was living in the old Vance Hotel, on Second Street up in Eureka, when he found me at last and brought me back, saying that he was sorry to have used me to fight a battle in a war that I hadn’t signed up for. He hadn’t used me, though. I was sharp enough to see that. I had used him, and for purely selfish reasons. It’s been my perpetual shame. I’m … unworthy. I won’t be the man to pretend to protect the thing I once betrayed.”
“That’s the worst sort of rubbish,” Sylvia said. “Tell it to the prodigal son.”
Mr. Jimmers looked vaguely startled, as if he hadn’t expected her to disagree. It had sounded like he was reciting an apology that he had worked out over and over for twenty-odd years. “Pardon me?” he said.
The Paper Grail Page 36