The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

“Essex,” she said. “It’s on the way out to Amboy. My grandmother’s house.”

  “Then I owe your grandmother an apology.”

  “She’ll understand,” Donna said, looking at him and smiling. “I guarantee she’ll understand. You look like you could use a drink.”

  ‘That’s a fine idea,” he said. “I’m buying, unless you’ve got to turn around and head back to Essex. I’m worried about your going back out that way by yourself, though.”

  “I’ll give Gran a call. But I could pretty much pay for the drinks with that tip you left me this morning.”

  “I hope that didn’t look crazy. I didn’t mean anything by it. I could have waited around and got change, I guess.”

  “I’m not complaining. I love an overtipper.”

  He glanced at her, and she smiled at him. “Is that sunburn,” she said, “or do you embarrass easily?”

  The Fates had apparently dealt him an ironic hand. He had nearly been murdered—or something—by Laurel and Hardy, only to be delivered out of potential death to … whom? To a highly competent, cheerful waitress who drove like a madwoman, and who, he was reminded again, was beautiful, and who had kissed him in his youth—his first kiss. The Pippi Longstocking comparison had been apt, but it was only half the story. “Why doesn’t your grandmother live in New Cyprus?” he asked. “It’s got to be an improvement over Essex.”

  “Business,” she said. “She owns the Gas’n’Go out on 1-40. She’s been thinking of selling out ever since my grandfather passed away.”

  “That would be Shirley Fowler?”

  She looked at him skeptically. “You’ve met her?”

  “We go way back. I stopped in for gas on my way out here and ended up spending sixty bucks. It turned into a small adventure.”

  “She can’t bring herself to sell out. She and my grandpa ran the place for thirty years.”

  “So it’s Donna what? Fowler?”

  “Brewer. Fowler is my mother’s side of the family.”

  “Have you always lived out here?”

  “Off and on,” she said. “Currently on. I moved down to San Diego, went to school at U.C., then lived in Leucadia for three years, two blocks from the beach.”

  “What degree? Waitressing?”

  “Business,” she said. “I’m a market analyst. Waitressing is a sideline. Two mornings a week. Breakfast and lunch. Kind of a hobby.”

  “Otherwise you work online?”

  “Yeah. I do a little traveling when I need to. I like it, living out here. I thought I’d get island fever after a while, but that hasn’t happened yet. There’s more to this place than meets the eye.”

  He nodded, not needing to ask what. They rolled out onto the flatlands now, and Donna turned up Main Street into New Cyprus. He realized then that he was immensely relieved to be home, and then he was slightly surprised that in his mind he had worded it just that way.

  “I’ve got a trailer in the park,” she said, turning down through the trees and pointing to a big Airstream sitting in the shade of a cottonwood. There were flowerbeds surrounding it and a little lanai off to the side built out of redwood lath and with a corrugated tin roof. “It used to belong to Henrietta Blankfort, but I bought it when she passed away.”

  “Related to Hugh Blankfort, I guess.”

  “His great-granddaughter.”

  “Hey,” he said, “I took photos of the stuff in the back of those guys’ truck—dynamite, I think, and tools.”

  “Dynamite? How do you know?”

  “I got a good look at a steel case that was back there, and I overheard a conversation they were having about blasting.” She turned down toward the Lymons’ house, pulling into the driveway and shutting the car down. “You coming in?” he asked hopefully.

  “You said you were buying the drinks. You think I’m going to let you sneak away?”

  He smiled at her and climbed out of the car, happier than he could have imagined being just twenty minutes ago, except that his car was still up on top of the hill … They pushed inside and found the place apparently empty. “Aunt Nettie’s probably out in back,” he said, looking out through his aunt’s den. She sat as ever, contemplating the river, and he went out to check in with her, waving Donna along. He hoped that this morning’s good health was still with her. “Hello, Aunt,” he said. “Let me introduce Donna Brewer.”

  “Hi, Nettie,” Donna said, rolling her eyes at him. “You look great. Feeling better?”

  “Yes, indeed,” she said.

  He felt like a fool—as if they could have lived a stone’s throw from each other in New Cyprus all these years and not been acquainted. He realized that his aunt was smiling at him with raised eyebrows, and he was suddenly embarrassed. “Is Uncle Lymon around?” he asked.

  “He’s lying down. You can roust him, though.”

  He walked off toward the bedroom, feeling suddenly awkward when he was outside the door. He hesitated, and then knocked. “Hello,” he said. The door opened and his uncle came out, walking with an effort. He looked beat—pale and done-in. “Did you run into Doc Hoyle?” Calvin asked.

  “Not yet,” his uncle told him. “He was across the river. I’m feeling a little better, though. I took a good nap. What’s up with you?”

  Calvin told him the story on the way into the kitchen. “So we don’t know whether they wrecked their truck or not,” he said. “They might be out there bleeding to death. And my car is still up there.”

  “We’ll have a look,” Lymon said, picking up the phone. “Miles,” he said into the receiver, “round up some of the boys, would you? There was some trouble up to the quarry. Calvin ran into a couple of guys with blasting gear.” He listened for a moment and hung up the phone. “You say you threw your keys into the bushes?”

  “I didn’t throw them into the bushes. One of the others did. I looked for them, but I had about a minute before they came back down out of the hills and saw me, and I had to take off fast.”

  “We’ll bring a metal detector. He looked out through the den to where Donna and Nettie sat by the river. ‘That Donna’s a good girl,” he said. “You two get to talk much?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, leave your car to us. We’ll get the keys, and Miles can drive it back down here. If these two characters in the pickup are hurt, I guess we’ll be a while, because we’ll have to transport them to the hospital in Needles. I’ll bet they’re long gone, though, if either of them was in good enough shape to use a cell phone.”

  “I can go along,” Calvin said. “I can drive my own car back down.”

  “No need,” his uncle said. “You need to back off a little bit, not that you did anything wrong. But it’s not really your fight. It’s your car, but not your fight. You just happened to get in the way of it. It’s lucky you went up to the quarry, if they’re up to something with the blasting gear. Leave this one to me, though. You all right with that?”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said. “I understand.”

  “Good. You’ve got more important things to do anyway. Why don’t you take Donna out for a bite to eat? And not the Cozy Diner, either. Take her over to the steakhouse and buy her a steak. Here.” He pulled out his wallet, took out four twenties, and handed them to Calvin. “My treat,” he said. “Tell her I said thanks for saving your worthless hide like that.”

  “Of course I’ll tell her,” Calvin said, following his uncle back up the driveway. Miles Taber pulled in then, in a GMC Jimmy, with two other men in the backseat, as if they’d all been waiting at the firehouse for his uncle’s call.

  Uncle Lymon got into the passenger side carrying the metal detector, and they turned out onto the road again and roared off, and just like that Calvin found himself standing in the driveway alone with eighty bucks in his hand. He had never had a chance at his lunch, and the idea of dinner at the steakhouse was brilliant. He stood there for a time, though, asking himself how he was going to play this—what he would say to Donna. Would it be a lie if he failed to mention th
at he was leaving New Cyprus? The crime of omission had a lot of ugly guises when you looked hard at it, which you most often didn’t want to do. That had been one of the problems with Elaine—what hadn’t been said. Over time what wasn’t said had pretty much written the history of their relationship. Go into this thing with a little honesty, he told himself flatly, or don’t go into it at all. For the space of about five seconds he felt pretty good, but then he asked himself, what thing, exactly, was he going into?

  UPSIDE DOWN

  So how about you?” Donna asked him. She ate like a trooper, putting away pieces of filet mignon and steak fries like they were going out of style—which they probably were, everywhere but in New Cyprus.

  “Literature degree,” he said. “U.C.L.A. In graduate school I specialized in the work of New Age writers and small press publishers in the L. A. area. So it was more like pop history than literature.”

  “New Age? Like Shirley MacLaine? Auras and pyramid hats and things like that?”

  “Things like that, although what you’re talking about is the eighties’ version, which isn’t as interesting, at least to me. I’m pretty much mired in the past. Back in the early fifties it was a different world. The canals on Mars hadn’t been drained yet. There were lost worlds at the center of the earth. Explorers built spaceships in the backyard, with onboard greenhouses for oxygen.”

  “Those were the days,” she said. “Now we’ve got, what?—tanks of air? Factory-built spaceships?”

  “Don’t get me started about what we don’t have,” he said. ‘The New Agers were a very earnest crowd. They had conventions, printed pamphlets, made purification treks out to Mt. Shasta. They did a lot of communing with space aliens out here in the Mojave—called them ‘the brothers upstairs.’”

  “I like that. I wonder if there were sisters upstairs.”

  “Back then there were whole families upstairs—alien ships with white picket fences around them and a mailbox on a post. The sisters wore aprons and stayed on board with the kids, but they were the secret movers and shakers, like Donna Reed and June Cleaver. Then the world turned upside down, and most of that vanished along with what passed for wholesome TV. All that canal land on Mars turned out to be a real estate fraud.”

  “I sense a Nickelodeon fan here. In fact, is that a tiki around your neck?”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said. “I used to collect them. This one’s carved out of an old beef bone and dyed with coffee.” He took the tiki out from under his shirt and showed it to her—a tiny, stretched-out head with a long nose and goggle eyes. “There’s serious mojo in these, but only if you’re a believer.”

  “I still have my troll dolls,” she said.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. Give me that old-time religion.”

  “What do you do with a degree in tikis? Teach classes in nostalgia?”

  “I taught a class or two for a couple of years, but there’s not a lot of demand for my kind of expertise, you might say, so I mostly taught composition and literature survey courses to students who would rather be dead. Then when Dad passed away, I didn’t have to teach anymore. Now let me ask you one,” he said, putting down his fork. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a town like this? I can picture myself here, because I’m attracted to the place’s … aura. It’s like things haven’t turned upside down here yet. Maybe they never will.”

  “They won’t if the Knights have anything to do with it. They’ve pretty much stopped the clock, or at least slowed it down. Anyway, how come I can’t be attracted to the place’s aura? You’ve already got that territory staked out?”

  He shrugged. “I’m considered an eccentric back where I come from.”

  “Then you’d fit right in here.”

  “So I’m told. One thing I was wondering, though, is where does everybody work? The ferry must be busy come Monday morning. I can’t imagine anyone commuting through the Dead Mountains.”

  “Mostly they work right here in town. There’s a few that take the ferry up to Bullhead City and Laughlin. And some of the Knights are Knights pretty much full time.”

  “They draw a salary? That’s the job I want if I grow up to be a Knight.”

  “The Knights have what is called the Blankfort Endowment Fund, which pays good dividends, but lots of people would rather work, and they bank their dividend. When you’re living in the desert, doing nothing gets old pretty quickly.”

  “So they say. I’m kind of an expert at it, actually. But tell me something else. I’m a little bit worried about the mysteries of the place, if you know what I mean. There seems to be a lot going on. Sometime I’m going to buy one of the Knights a beer and pry some secrets out of him.”

  “Him? You’re talking to a Knight now.”

  He stared at her stupidly for a moment. “Really … you’re a Knight?”

  “What did you expect? A Dame?”

  Witty responses flickered in his mind, but he needed a pen to sketch them out. “Another beer?” he said.

  “No, thanks. I might get silly.”

  “How am I going to pry anything out of you if you don’t get silly?”

  “Pry something out of me? Is that some kind of romantic euphemism?”

  “My favorite romantic euphemism is ‘pitching woo,’” he said evasively. “That was my mother’s term. You can’t use ‘making love’ in that sense anymore.” He realized he was blushing.

  “Are you any good at it?” She smiled at him, putting him on the spot.

  “At what?” he asked. It sounded a little bit like a brazen overture to him, which was another of his mother’s terms.

  “At pitching woo,” she said. “You seem a little rusty at it, like the Tin Man. I sense a tragedy involving a Munch-kin maiden.” She smiled at him, but she seemed to be serious. “Are you waiting for someone to pick up an oilcan?”

  He searched his mind for something to say, but came up absolutely empty. He couldn’t remember ever having run into a woman much more forthright. The waiter appeared, setting plates of apple pie and ice cream on the table, which they hadn’t ordered.

  “On the house,” he said, and moved away.

  “Heck of a nice place, New Cyprus,” Calvin said. “Everyone’s got your best interests in mind.”

  “Remember that,” Donna said. “Now I’ve lost track of what I was saying.”

  “You accused me of being rusted,” he said, throwing caution to the wind. “There’re things that can do that to you, I guess. This one’s name was Elaine.”

  “Elaine—very romantic name. You still think about her?”

  “Not too often these days.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with thinking about her. What’s the value in having a disposable past?”

  He shrugged, and they sat in silence for a moment. Then she asked, “What were you doing up there alone, anyway? At the quarry.”

  “Nothing, really. Just taking a look around.”

  “It probably wasn’t smart. What possessed you?”

  “Just curious, really.”

  “Curious about what? You said you wanted to talk to a Knight, and now you’re talking to one, and she’s been plied with drink. All of a sudden you’ve got nothing to ask?”

  “All right,” he said. “Here’s one for you. The last couple of nights when I was falling asleep I thought I heard a pounding noise, like someone hammering on stone. Lamar Morris at the bookshop over in Bullhead City had told me about that—that it came from up in the quarry. Maybe the conversation put the idea in my head, and then I just dreamed it or something, although it didn’t seem like a dream.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said.

  “So what is it? Ghosts?”

  “Why not? You don’t believe in ghosts? You’re okay with space aliens but you draw the line at ghosts?”

  “Do you think it’s ghosts?” Calvin asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me. I’m not in the mood to ridicule anyone.”

  “I’ll tell you about
something that happened to me about a month ago. I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know what time it was—late, though. Past midnight. I was lying there in bed trying to figure out whether to get up and work for a while, or shut my eyes again, when I heard a kind of clanking outside, and voices talking, really low. New Cyprus is maybe the safest place on earth, but it creeped me out a little bit, which made me kind of mad.”

  “It made you mad?“

  “At myself. I just hate fear. I just want to poke it in the eye, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Me, too. Fear lives in fear of Calvin Bryson. You can ask anyone. So who was it outside the trailer?”

  “I don’t know, really. I looked out the window, and there were half a dozen men walking across the park in the shadows, carrying tools. They were nobody I recognized, which wasn’t right, since I’ve seen pretty much everybody in New Cyprus about a thousand times. And they were dressed in antique clothes, too, like they were going to a costume party as miners or something.”

  “Maybe they were,” Calvin said.

  “Except they were transparent. They walked straight through a picnic table and a barbecue without slowing down. Then they walked into a patch of moonlight and disappeared entirely, and then I saw them again farther on, in the shadows again.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it. I asked my grandmother about it, and she wasn’t surprised at all. Her idea is that there are things about New Cyprus that … interfere with time. That’s how she put it.”

  “So you think you were looking at something that happened in the past—that you were seeing some kind of temporal discontinuity?”

  ‘That’s very fancy. Now you’re talking like you earned that degree.”

  “But that is what you’re talking about?” Calvin said.

  “I guess it is. Turns out my grandmother was right. Everyone in New Cyprus has stories to tell. If you want to call these things ghosts, then there’re more dead people walking around New Cyprus than live people. We’re thinking of giving them a day-old breakfast discount at the Cozy Diner. Yesterday’s food for yesterday’s people.”

  She smiled at him, but he knew she was serious. All of this was serious. But what did that mean to Aim? How serious was he?