The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  There was the rumble of thunder, and then the sound of rain, quickly growing heavy, and the two men sat in silence, listening. After a couple of minutes Aunt Nettie came inside carrying her half-empty plate, her face and hair wet with rainwater. Although she was moving slowly and probably painfully, there was a look of intense joy on her face, as if she had been waiting out there all this time for the sky to open up. “My land!” she said, setting the plate on the counter. Then she passed out of the kitchen without another word, heading toward her bedroom at the back of the house.

  “She likes the weather,” Uncle Lymon said, “more than just about anything.” He continued to gaze in the direction that she had taken. There was sadness and worry in his face, and again it came into Calvin’s mind that the old man loved his wife with a weight that had decades behind it. The realization made him regret what he himself had missed out on. Yesterday he would have bet money that a man couldn’t feel honest regret for the loss of something he had never gained in the first place, but that’s just what he felt at this moment. He was struck with the certainty that he had been marking time, watching the world through the front window of his house just as his aunt watched it from her chair on the river.

  He stood up to help his uncle clear the plates. The kitchen curtains moved now, catching a breath of air with the smell of the river and rain on it.

  “There’s your ghost,” Uncle Lymon said, “blowing in from Arizona.”

  THE TEMPLE BAR

  After supper, Calvin found himself restless and at loose ends in the quiet house. He could hear water dripping from the eaves and the muted sound of the television from down the hall in his aunt’s bedroom. He stared out the window for a time, watching the lightning flickering in the east, and then he aimlessly began to look over his uncle’s books, which filled dozens of broad cedar shelves book-ended with cylinders of what appeared to be solid silver, stamped on top with the Knight’s cross. He hefted one of the cylinders, which must have weighed several pounds. How many were in the room? Forty? He had heard of people putting their money into gold and hiding it under the floorboards, but silver had to be a ponderous way to squirrel away wealth.

  He found that he was drawn in by the hundreds of arcane volumes, mostly on historical subjects, some of the books so apparently ancient that he didn’t dare touch them. Uncle Lymon had invested heavily in histories of the Crusades, the Grail, the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers, and other holy orders and movements and legends. Many of the most ancient books had titles in Latin or French. De Antichristo was easy enough to translate, and the same was the case with the Histoire de la Papesse Jeanne, written by a Frenchman named Lenfant. The contents, however, which the titles made sound so promising, were unreadable, French and Latin both being Greek to him, as was Greek.

  He found books on the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Assassins, the Mormons, and an array of books on Masonic lore. He took down Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which looked to be full of mysteries, and sat down to read it. But he was quickly bogged down in a mathematical account of the marvels of the number nine, which apparently could be broken up in a heap of different ways and then multiplied and re-added and cooked at a high heat with parsley and butter and still taste just like the number nine. It was evidently the great mystery number of the universe, but he couldn’t fathom what the mystery portended. That was the problem with secret societies, he thought—the secrets too often led down the garden path, finally revealing a view of a birdbath or a head on a plate.

  He returned the books to the shelves and then, out of curiosity, he opened the doors of a low cabinet beneath them, expecting to see more books, or manuscripts, maybe—something worth keeping free of dust. What he saw were two cardboard boxes, identical to the two he was familiar with. Both of them had the usual Hosmer address, and both of them were taped shut. He picked one of them up, and then the other. They were either empty or contained—what? Another veil? If there were four of the boxes, he wondered, why not six? Why not eight? Veils crisscrossing the country in the trunks of automobiles, flying out from Iowa in biplanes or floating down rivers in baskets like Moses among the bulrushes. A man like Bob Postum wouldn’t be able to tell an artifact from a doodad under the circumstances. It seemed like a fancy way to throw him off the track of poor Aunt Iris’s veil.

  He became aware that the rain had stopped, and he returned the boxes to the cabinet and stepped to the window. The dark river flowed past in a terrible hurry, bound for the ocean, with its own manifold mysteries. He went into the kitchen, found a grape soda in the refrigerator, and took it outside into the warm night, pulling off his shoes and socks and sitting down in his aunt’s chair, letting the river water swirl the unfathomables out of him, right out through the ends of his toes.

  It was a moonless night, pleasantly warm, and the stars shone where the clouds had retreated back into the east. He could see the Temple out on its island, illuminated by parking lot lights, and he imagined himself a Knight, sitting on a stool out there in the old building, drinking twenty-five-cent beers and talking with the Brethren. Last time he had visited he had gone over there a couple of times. The Knights all seemed to answer to Whitey and Red and Woody and other adjective names. Immediately he had become Cal instead of Calvin and had fallen into a conversation about the virtues of fishing for striped bass below the dam in low water and about the sad fate of the two-stroke outboard motor, neither one of which subjects he knew anything about, although he wished he knew more. Out here in the desert those kinds of things seemed fundamental, although fundamental to what, he couldn’t say, because he was an out-of-towner.

  After ten minutes his feet were numb and the bottle was empty. He picked up his shoes and socks and walked gingerly along the bank, then up onto a stone path that led back around to the carport, where he leaned against the hood of the Dodge and put his shoes and socks back on. The rain seemed to have abdicated entirely, so he set out walking, up the driveway and out onto the street that led down to the edge of the trailer park. The dark grounds were mostly empty of people now, the trailers lighted, the windows flickering with the shifting images of television screens. Two rangy-looking dogs appeared from behind a trailer, spotted him, and came across to say hello, but they quickly lost interest and wandered off.

  Without having made any conscious decision to do so, he found himself walking in the direction of the river again, down toward the bridge that spanned the fifty feet of moving water between New Cyprus and the Temple Bar. His feet seemed to compel him forward, despite the fact that the Temple itself was off-limits to anyone but the Elders tonight. But the Temple wasn’t his destination, really. He had no intention of knocking on any doors or of crashing the party. He would simply walk out to the island and back again, just to air himself out.

  When he was out beyond the last of the trailers, he was faintly surprised at the quality of the darkness—a darkness virtually unknown in the suburbs. Overhead, though, the sky was awash with stars, bright enough for a space traveler to read by, and it was a marvel to him how little of that light actually reached the earth. He set his sights on the pools of illumination in the Temple parking lot and walked up onto the bridge. Away to his right, muddy rainwater washed down the gully from the Dead Mountains and swirled out into the river.

  The windows of the Temple had slatted shutters drawn across them, and the interior light shone through in bands. It came to him that he could easily peer unseen through a gap in the shutters and have an eyeful of the secret doings of the Knights—the Elders giving each other the wiggly-fish handshake, maybe. He stopped suddenly and crouched down behind the railing. Someone was peering in through the shutters, back toward the rear of the building. There wasn’t much light coming through, and because the man was hunched over, it was impossible to make anything out for certain except that he was heavyset and had either blond or gray hair. He held something up to the window, almost undoubtedly a camera.

  Bob Postum, Calv
in thought. He moved forward warily, crouching along, but almost as soon as he started out, the man turned sharply and looked in his direction. Calvin ducked again, and when he peeked over the railing a moment later, the man was scuttling away toward the river, disappearing into the willows before Calvin could get a good look at him. More boldly now Calvin hurried across the bridge and into the lot, crossing to the edge of the building and looking hard into the darkness along the water, where the willows shifted in the night wind. The Temple was built of heavy rectangular stones, evidently cut in the quarry in the hills. The back wall of the structure buried itself into the natural rock of the island, which mounded up in a castle-like pile to a height of fifteen feet or so. In the darkness it was difficult to see where the cut stone left off and the rock started, because natural rock and cut stone tumbled away on both sides, overgrown by willow.

  He climbed partway up the hill of stone, crouching behind immense blocks and keeping his head low until he could see over the willows down to the river below. He heard an odd noise now, a muted clunk and then a scraping noise somewhere dead ahead—the sound of oars in oarlocks. The river below ran black and swift and reflected a world of dancing stars. Thirty feet out his man was rowing a boat hard toward the far shore, making three times as much leeway as forward movement in the strong current, but drawing away quickly. He rowed backward, facing forward in the boat, so that Calvin could only see his back. It clearly wasn’t Postum. This man had shorter hair. He wore a white T-shirt with a dark blotch on the back, what might have been a face or a logo of some sort, and he rowed the boat like an amateur, jerking the oars out of the river when he was halfway through a stroke and flinging water in every direction. In a few moments he was a mere shadow disappearing quickly downriver.

  Calvin headed back down toward the Temple, hearing talk and laughter from within. He had to admit that the day had moved from curious to ominous: first the mystery of the Aunt Iris veil, then the theft and the second veil, and then Bob Postum needlessly pretending to be Fred Woolsworth, apparently having quit pretending to be King Baldwin, perhaps because of a murder that was half a century old. Calvin was evidently a pawn, entirely in the dark here—literally and figuratively. And of course there was the levitating toilet seat—another variety of mystery—and his uncle’s unconvincing talk about air currents off the river.

  That was the problem, though. So far there had been no convincing talk about anything. He wouldn’t say that anyone owed him an explanation, but surely he couldn’t be blamed for looking for one.

  He stopped just outside the window, where he glanced around, looking back toward the bridge and the trailer park and then out toward the river again. He was entirely alone, and it would be the work of a moment to have one small peek through the window, just so he would know what the lurking boatman had been up to. If nothing was going on except beer and skittles and the mystery of the secret fez, he would go home to bed and sleep it off. Tomorrow he could live the carefree life of the unwitting tourist. On the other hand, if the man at the window had seen something that would put the Knights at risk, then Uncle Lymon would want to know, delicate as the whole matter would be. Half convinced by this rationalization, he peered in through the blinds.

  There were six people inside, including his uncle. All of them wore hats, although not the typical fez sort of hat, but something that looked more like a helmet from an old suit of armor, fish-scaled with silver circles the size of dimes. The people were girded with beaded sashes, and wore white tunics with the red cross on the chest. He recognized Whitey someone, who had an unmistakably large nose and bald head, as well as a portly man in suspenders with wildly bushy eyebrows, a retired college professor whom he remembered as Miles Taber. Two of the people in the room, he realized abruptly, were women—something that had been obscured by the costumes and low light and by the fact that he wouldn’t have expected any women in the Knights. It was difficult to tell their ages, but one was old enough to be his mother, and the other was slightly younger, with bright red nail polish—something that looked incongruous to him under the circumstances.

  The six of them stood around an old wooden table built on a base of slender, gnarled tree limbs topped with rough-hewn planks. Oddly, there were authentic-looking leaves sprouting from the table legs, as if the legs were alive and rooted in the earth. On the table sat the cardboard box that Shirley Fowler had given him. His uncle pushed aside his tunic to reach into his pocket, coming up with a pocket-knife with which he carefully slit the tape on the veil box.

  He shut the knife and returned it to his pocket before opening the flaps and then removing several layers of folded bubble wrap and drawing out the veil that lay beneath it—a piece of yellowed and tattered muslin-looking cloth. Even from Calvin’s perspective it looked to be more like a thousand years old than a hundred. There was a charcoal-like smudge on it that resolved itself unmistakably into a human face as the veil was unfolded, a face that didn’t look anything like anyone’s Aunt Iris. It was the craggy shadow of a man’s visage, seen straight on, as if someone, or the shadow of someone, were looking through the veil from the other side.

  Calvin glanced away, consumed by the feeling that the image was an actual physical presence, and that it had looked straight into his eyes. He peered up at the starry sky, and he knew that he had no business being there, that something was going on that he was unprepared to witness, or was disallowed from witnessing. But the feeling was overcome by a stronger curiosity, fueled by the certain knowledge that he had been taken in lock, stock, and barrel by the Aunt Iris myth, which had sounded preposterous even when Hosmer was relating it to him.

  He peered back in through the window. The two people standing next to his uncle had edged away, as if out of fear or respect, and everyone in the room seemed to relax visibly when his uncle returned the veil to its box and then put the box away in the open cabinet behind them. Lymon returned to the table carrying a basket holding a loaf of bread, a glass goblet, and a clear, doughnut-shaped glass decanter, flattened on the bottom so that it would stand up. Like the veil, the decanter appeared to be as old as Methuselah. It was half filled with red wine—or what Calvin assumed was wine—and was corked with a red glass stopper in the shape of an equal-armed cross. The company cast their eyes downward, and Uncle Lymon began intoning a prayer. “Amen,” Lymon said finally, and the rest of them repeated it, and then after a respectful moment he broke the bread into pieces and handed around the basket, then poured two inches of wine into the glass.

  The six of them took the bread and consumed it, drank from the glass, and then Lymon set the glass back onto the table. Then each of them put both hands on the table in front of them and bowed their heads again. Calvin became aware then of a creaking noise, like the lid of an old trunk being raised, or a heavy cellar door swinging ponderously open. He thought he could make out a deep, sonorous music underlying it, and he was struck with a sudden onset of vertigo, as if he were looking down from a height at moving water. The music seemed to occupy the air around him, leaking up from deep within the rocks that formed the Temple Bar. The ground shook then, mildly at first, and then with an abrupt lurch.

  Earthquake! Calvin thought, and he clutched even more tightly at the windowsill and set his feet. His heart pounded. Rocks on the mound behind him tumbled loose and clattered downhill. The six inside were riding out the quake by steadying themselves against the table, still with their heads bowed, as if this were part of the ceremony and not an interruption. The circular decanter toppled over, and Calvin nearly shouted a warning. But none of them let go of the table, and the goblet fell to the floor with the muted but unmistakable sound of glass shattering.

  The earthquake stopped, the night was silent, and then, as if a tension had been suddenly relaxed, the six began chatting in normal tones, stepping away from the broken glass as if unconcerned with it. Calvin could see a shard of what had been the decanter lying near the leg of the table in a pool of spilled wine. Miles Taber walked across to the ope
n wooden wardrobe cabinet, took out a silver plate, and returned to the table, where he bent over and picked up the piece of glass with his fingertips, laying it on the plate and then picking up other pieces hidden from Calvin’s view. He set the cross-shaped stopper among the pieces and straightened up, glancing in the direction of the window and pausing briefly before turning back toward the wardrobe. After a couple of steps he turned his head sharply and looked at the window again.

  Calvin ducked away, shoving in among the willows, certain that he had been seen. What an embarrassment, he thought wretchedly. What could he possibly say to his uncle that would explain his being there? The crazy idea of swimming for it came into his mind—just sliding into the water and letting the river carry him safely down to Needles where he could take a Greyhound back to Eagle Rock, disconnect his phone, change his name, and retire from the world for good and all.

  But nobody came out of the Temple. The night was as dark and silent as it had been. He gave it another minute and then set out hurriedly toward the bridge, keeping to the dark verge of the island, away from the parking lot lights. When he was near the bridge, he turned around and walked backward, which seemed cunning to him. If they came out and saw him now, he would reverse his step and head back again toward the island, and it would appear as if he was just then coming down from the trailer park—coming instead of going. But no one came out, and, feeling foolish and shameful, he turned around and headed home, going straight into the guest bedroom, where he put on a pair of pajamas and climbed into bed, switching off the bedside lamp and calling it a night.