The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  He hung up. What more could he say? Either it was all a bunch of nonsense, or else it wasn’t. And either way he had done his job. It was a little worrying that she didn’t answer the phone herself, but there was nothing else for him to do. Right now he was in a mood to look into the bookstore that Lymon had told him about. It was time to investigate the Fourteen Carats Press.

  He walked across the parking lot and quickly spotted a line of aging cinder-block shops down along the river’s edge. They would be almost invisible from the highway. He saw a couple of carts of sale books out in front of one of the shops and headed toward them, passing an alcove at the edge of the building, a covered parking space. He stopped suddenly, and then glanced around before stepping into the shade of the awning. A pickup truck was parked in the alcove, and resting in the bed was a small aluminum rowboat, shiny-new, with a pair of wooden oars in it, There was river water and sand and dried, muddy shoe prints in the bottom of the boat.

  FOURTEEN CARATS

  Of course there must be a thousand rowboats in Bullhead City, he reasoned.

  But were there? How many people went out rowing on this part of the river? A little outboard motor was cheap, and it would run you back upstream in comfort, whereas it would be impossible to pull against the current in a row-boat. But of course you wouldn’t want the outboard if you were trying to keep quiet.

  He looked past the corner of the building toward the bookstore, making up his mind whether to go in. The man lurking on the island last night might have gotten a look at him—although it had been dark despite the starlight. And if the man wasn’t one of Uncle Lymon’s crowd, which clearly he wasn’t, then there was a good chance that he was one of Postum’s, if Postum had a crowd, which he apparently did. But Calvin couldn’t have been any more than a moving shadow last night. And anybody from New Cyprus might have been crossing the bridge, heading for the Temple. The man wouldn’t put two and two together—the math was too obscure.

  He paused to browse over the books in the carts, as if he had all the time in the world. He glanced up through the glass door but saw nothing inside except the shadows of ill-lit wooden bookcases. What the hell, he thought, and he pushed open the door and went in, waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The place smelled of old paper and pine shelving. A man sat behind the counter working at a computer. There was a window behind him that looked out onto the river and the ferry dock. Without glancing up, the man asked, “Can I help you?”

  “Just browsing,” Calvin told him, moving toward the counter while he scanned titles. Certainly this might be the same man who he had seen last night on the island.

  His hair was right, same build “Actually I’m looking for

  small press publications,” he said. “Local color stuff.”

  “In the back, along the wall.” He gestured vaguely and then returned to his keyboard. The monitor was turned away. A moment ago, when Calvin had walked in, it hadn’t been. The man bent over to pick up a book from a heap next to the desk, and Calvin saw that his T-shirt had the image of a face on the back—the usual bust of Shakespeare sitting on an open book, with the words “All the world’s a page” printed beneath it. It was highly likely that the T-shirt had a couple of days’ wear on it, with a night or two in between, maybe.

  Calvin glanced down onto the desktop as he passed, at a jumble of scattered papers, pamphlets, and photographs, and what he saw made him pause despite himself. Among the photographs, partly covered, was a picture of Bob Postum. There was no doubt at all. He wasn’t posed for the picture, but was taking mail out of an old mailbox on a fence rail, with the desert and mountains behind him. There were photos of other familiar people also. Calvin recognized Miles Taber walking across a parking lot along with someone who might have been Cousin Hosmer, and also a photo of the rock pile behind the lodge, mostly hidden by willows, taken from a boat on the river, or from the Arizona shore with a telephoto lens.

  The man at the desk straightened up and glanced sharply at him, and Calvin nodded and moved on toward the back of the store, conscious that he had suddenly become conspicuous. For a moment he considered turning around and heading straight back outside. He had the distinct feeling that he had walked into something here, that he was minutes away from giving up his reputation as a decoy. But maybe it would be worse to walk out.

  And anyway, he saw now that the books on the wall were far too interesting for him to leave without taking a look at them. There were half a dozen Saucerian and Futura Press productions that had to do with alien activities in the Mojave. He owned two of them, had coveted two others for a couple of years now, and hadn’t known about the other two. This was a sort of treasure-trove of New Age literature. A Fourteen Carats book caught his eye, the gold pan symbol stamped into the heavy paper cover above a woodcut illustration of the Lost Dutchman’s mine. It looked to be the same vintage as the Templar volume.

  He picked it up and flipped through it with his head bowed, but he sneaked a look through the open door of an adjacent room—a stockroom and workshop apparently, with long countertops, a draftsman’s table, an old printing press, a table saw, and some sort of high-tech machine. It looked like a computerized router attached upside down beneath a sheet-metal table. He turned back toward the counter, taking the book with him.

  The man at the computer was watching him with no expression on his face. Without taking the book from him or looking at the cover, he said, “Eighty-four dollars and thirteen cents.”

  Calvin was mute for a moment. He had expected about half that. “I just wanted to ask about it, actually,” he said. “I bought one of these Fourteen Carats productions yesterday, out along the highway. They’re a local press, aren’t they?”

  “That’s right. Out in Henderson.”

  Calvin nodded. “I heard that they moved out here to Bullhead City.”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Me? I’m just passing through. I can’t drive past a bookstore without stopping in for a look. I was coming out of the Safeway when I saw your sign.”

  “Is that right?”

  The man obviously didn’t believe him, and had no reason to hide the fact. “This is a little pricey for me,” Calvin said. “I was hoping to find the Fourteen Carats Press, actually, and see what they had to offer, maybe if they had any old stock lying around.”

  “I can’t help you there. Like I said, as far as I know they’re still out in Henderson. It’s right on the way if you’re headed toward Vegas. But maybe you’re already familiar with Henderson.” He looked at Calvin expectantly, as if this meant something.

  “I’ll be heading in the other direction, back out to L.A.,” Calvin said. He glanced down at the desktop, where the photo of Postum was still half visible, although the photos had been pushed together into a pile now, so that the rest were hidden. “I’ll be damned,” Calvin said, “isn’t that old King Baldwin?” He pointed at the photo, having no idea where he was going with this rash question.

  The man was silent for a moment, with no particular expression, and then he reached down and slid open the top desk drawer, revealing a black revolver with a wooden grip. “King of what?” he asked, leaving the drawer open. “Big-screen TV?”

  “He just looks like a guy I ran into once,” Calvin said, “a real eccentric. Probably it’s not him.”

  “What can you tell me about him, this guy you ran into?”

  “Nothing much. We had a conversation at a gas station. He lives out here in the desert somewhere. Maybe they call him King because he drinks a lot of Budweiser.”

  “Budweiser?”

  “King of beers, like the commercial.”

  “Could be,” the man said. “I was thinking maybe he was an Elvis impersonator, or maybe Elvis himself, incognito. Lots of impersonators out here these days. Pretty much everyone you meet is really someone else. Take you, for example. What you don’t know is that I saw you come in on t
he ferry about ten minutes ago, from downriver. Nobody comes in on the New Cyprus ferry unless they’re staying in New Cyprus, and nobody stays in New Cyprus unless they have a reason to stay there that’s copacetic with the Knights. Now, word has it that your man the King isn’t copacetic with the Knights. You wouldn’t see him riding on the New Cyprus ferry. So when you walked in, I wondered what you wanted, because I don’t think it’s books.”

  Copacetic with the Knights—that wasn’t the sort of thing Calvin would willingly deny unless it was dangerous

  “What were you doing out on the island?”

  “Trying to take a couple of photos, but you came along and screwed things up. Now tell me what you’re doing in New Cyprus.”

  “I’m Al Lymon’s nephew. I’m just out here visiting. Photos of what?”

  “Never mind that, if you don’t already know, although I think you do. You seem pretty curious for someone who’s just visiting and who doesn’t know anything. A person who doesn’t know anything doesn’t ask questions because he doesn’t know the questions.”

  Calvin shrugged.

  “What put you onto me? I don’t think it was your uncle.”

  “Like I said, I bought one of your books from the Gas’n’Go out on the highway. It involves the Templars back in the fifties—the severed head thing.”

  “That’s my father’s work. He actually used to hand-cut the blocks for the illustrations and set the type on that old press in the back. I’m more of a journalist, so I just tell a computer to do the etching. All I do is clamp the block onto the table and then take it off again once the cutting’s done. Then I rough it up a little with a chisel and file so that it looks hand-cut. It takes virtually no talent whatsoever. But I don’t think there’s any mention of King Baldwin in that Templars book you’re talking about. How’d you hear his name? Al Lymon?”

  Calvin nodded.

  “Well, you know what they say about a little bit of learning: it can be a dangerous thing. You don’t have any idea what you might have been up against walking in here like that. If I was one of them, you’d have been in considerable trouble. Now it’s me who’s in trouble—that is if they’re watching you, which they probably are.”

  “One of whom?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No. Calvin Bryson, by the way.” He put his hand out, and the man shook it.

  “Lamar Morris. Let me give you a piece of advice. Get on the ferry, head back up to New Cyprus, have a nice chitchat with the folks, and go home. The sooner the better. And don’t come back in here, because I sure can’t afford it. Don’t mention any King Baldwin, either, unless you’re talking to your uncle. I say that for your own sake. That ‘king of beers’ thing won’t fly. Not around here, it won’t.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Calvin said. And then he pointed at the computer screen. “Hey,” he said. “That’s the old quarry.” From where he stood now he could clearly see the screen and the photographic image on it. It showed the rusted flatcar and the tracks running downhill through a cleft in the rocky hillside, with several standing stones in the foreground. The image was modified, so that the edges of things were softened, and there was enough added shadow to give it the look of a murky cemetery.

  “Me and the computer are turning it into an illustration,” Morris said.

  “For what? Another pamphlet? What’s the subject?”

  He shrugged. “I’m narrowing that down. Something’s going on, though. Some people would call that earthquake a portent. Allegedly there’ve been a few over the past three weeks. Did it feel like a portent to you?”

  “Felt like an earthquake.”

  “Now why do you suppose you felt it and I didn’t?”

  “You were on the river, I guess.”

  “Could be, unless I was already across the river, in which case you’d think I’d have felt it.”

  “I don’t know what I think,” Calvin said.

  “Could be the quake has a localized effect. There’re a lot of mysteries over there in New Cyprus. If you happen to run into any, and you snap any good pictures, I can work out a trade for some Fourteen Carats stock that I’ve got in the archives. Take a look at this.”

  Morris opened another drawer in the desk and took out an old pamphlet that was more crudely done than the Templars book. It had a buff-colored cover with black hatchet lettering that read War in Heaven. He took it carefully out of its plastic wrapper and opened it to the center, which was covered by a two-page etching of what was unmistakably New Cyprus with the Dead Mountains behind.

  “This here’s the very first Fourteen Carats publication—nineteen forty-eight,” Morris said. “At least it’s the first one ever distributed. You can ask your uncle about the one that wasn’t distributed. Anyway, this is the only known copy. I used to think there must be more copies of it somewhere, although there was no way to find out. My father only printed fifty in the first place. I looked through every bookstore between San Bernardino and Yuma and came up empty-handed. Then I found this one by accident, at a desert museum out in Hesperia. It probably cost me a thousand dollars in gas money searching for it. But now with the Internet you can run down copies of nearly anything you want in an instant, and so I can tell you that there’s not another copy of War in Heaven listed on any relevant site—or at least not this War in Heaven. There’ve been a few of them over the years.”

  “Heaven must get a little tiresome without a war now and then,” Calvin said. “Nothing but harp playing and celestial choirs.”

  Morris obviously wasn’t amused. “What I mean,” he said, “is that there might be a copy or two in some old trunk somewhere, but this is pretty nearly the Grail if you’re a Fourteen Carats collector. I had an offer of eighteen hundred dollars for it, but I turned it down.” He slipped it back into its plastic cover and laid it back into the drawer.

  “What’s the gist of the piece? Trouble in New Cyprus?”

  “That’s another one you could ask your uncle, although he might not have been out here then. There was trouble of some kind—a power play involving a casino owner out in Henderson who wanted to be Grand Master.”

  “That would be de Charney? Of severed-head fame?”

  “That’s right. Only in this case it’s de Charney the elder. He tried to buy New Cyprus outright. I mean the whole of New Cyprus. He challenged the deed that the Knights had been granted, which was essentially a land grant of some kind, written up fifty years earlier. The place allegedly wasn’t worth anything at all outside of the value of the houses themselves. Nothing around here was worth anything till twenty years ago or so. There were rumors, though, that there were mines under New Cyprus. A lot of nonsense, maybe, depending on who you talk to, but de Charney had to be after something.”

  “Was there actually some kind of battle, or is the title just artistic?”

  “According to the book, which was written by my father, there was a battle of some kind, but it was kept on the down-low. The last thing the Knights wanted was the authorities poking around. Neither side wanted that, and still don’t. The Knights are an independent crowd. That’s what got them in hot water with the Pope back when they burned de Molay and the rest of them at the stake.”

  Calvin nodded. “Now you’re talking about the Knights Templar, the historical Knights Templar.”

  “That’s just what I’m talking about.”

  “All right. So let me guess. This challenge of de Charney’s failed, and so old de Charney and his crowd were out, and a few years later de Charney’s son made some kind of magical play for power involving the reenactment of the death of John the Baptist, which in this case was John Nazarite, the preacher from—where was it? Redlands or somewhere?”

  ‘That’s the long and the short of it. Old de Charney disappeared—maybe dead in the fighting, but there were rumors that his son murdered him, although it might have been your man Baldwin. Another story says he was struck by lightning, which is so perfect it might be true. Whatever happened back
then, these people weren’t screwing around. I tell you that for your own good, because they’re still not screwing around. Something’s happening out there now, though. It’s all coming to pass.”

  “And that’s why you were out on the island? You wanted to see what was coming to pass?”

  “You could say that, although I already know what’s happening, or at least part of it. I know what it was they brought in, and I can tell you there’s a book in it—maybe a larger print run. The Templars are big news right now. Ten years ago nobody but historians and conspiracy nuts ever even heard of them, and now housewives know all there is to know, or at least think they do.”

  Calvin found that his mind hadn’t moved on with the conversation, but had remained hovering around the phrase what it was they brought in. … “What kind of photos are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for anything out of the ordinary. Old things, maybe—antiquities out of the Holy Land, let’s say. Whatever. People say they hear things at night from up in the hills, like someone’s still working the stone. Nobody ever sees anyone. I’ve been up there half a dozen times, and I’ve heard things, but then there’s nothing there—just the standing stones, maybe a coyote looking around. Hell of a creepy place when you’re out there alone. Makes you understand what the word haunted means.”

  “I bet it does,” Calvin said, but he was thinking about falling asleep last night, hearing what had sounded like dwarfs chiseling away deep in a mine. This morning it had seemed a lot like an aural hallucination. Now it sounded like he didn’t know what. “I doubt I’ll stick around long enough to take any photos,” he told Morris.

  “Well, that’s the smartest thing you’ve said since you came in here.” Morris got up and walked around from behind the counter, moving across to where he could look out through the tinted-glass door into the parking lot. “If you come up with something, though, give me a call. I’ve got some overstock I can part with. But we’ll find someplace else to meet.” He handed Calvin a business card. “That’s my cell number. I’ll ask you not to share it with anyone.”