The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  “I kind of thought I’d find him here.”

  “Apparently he expects me to unload the goods myself. Whitey didn’t show either, but I expected that. He went on up to Laughlin to have breakfast with his daughter. She’s a blackjack dealer at the Riverside.”

  “I’m worried about my uncle.”

  “He’s too damned stubborn and tough for his own good,” Taber said. “He should get himself a real checkup, over across the river.”

  Or something, Calvin thought, replaying in his mind the strange scene he had witnessed last night. There was no way he could mention it to Taber, although he would have liked to have his take on it. His own take on it involved things that he didn’t have the capacity to believe.

  “He didn’t put on the coffee this morning like he usually does, so I figured he was still in bed when I went out about eight,” Calvin said. “Nettie was up, though. She’s having another good day. She had me get her sewing machine out of the cabinet and set it up on the kitchen table. She was actually talking about going into town to buy yardage.”

  “Good for her,” Taber said. “If you’d have seen her last week, you’d call it a miracle. Probably it is a miracle.”

  The man from the steakhouse finished loading up a little Pullman electric cart, small enough to navigate the footbridge, and whirred away, and so Taber and Calvin walked up the gangplank, Taber pushing the cart ahead of them. Calvin was struck with the intensity of the heat rising from the deck. He was already sweating like a pig. “Bear a hand with this crate,” Taber told him. “Lymon must have ordered a couple of sacks of concrete and some fence block. No wonder he left it for me.”

  With the pilot’s help, they muscled the box onto the cart and set off, maneuvering down the gangplank and along the dock with Taber hauling and Calvin steadying it. It was a tight squeeze through the door of the bar, and Calvin had to heave on the cart to bump the rear wheels up over the threshold. There were half a dozen other boxes sitting in the middle of the floor, waiting to be opened. One of them had already been emptied out, and there was a pyramid of toilet paper rolls and other paper products sitting alongside.

  “Suds?” Taber asked, drawing himself a glass of beer.

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “Should I open this thing up?”

  “Be my guest. Might as well empty it out right there on the cart. It’s a little like Christmas, isn’t it?”

  Calvin picked up the box cutter and slit through the several layers of tape, folding back the cardboard and exposing a heap of foam popcorn. Taber came around from behind the bar, setting the glasses on a table and hauling the emptied-out carton alongside.

  “Shovel it into this,” he said. “We recycle the packaging material down at the Bullhead Mailbox.”

  Calvin dipped out a double handful and then another, but when he shoved his hands into the box for a third, his fingers bumped into something that made him jerk his hands back out—what felt like human hair, attached to a human head. “Jesus,” he said faintly, nodding at the box. “I don’t know what it is, but …”

  Taber took over, bailing out foam. He stopped for a moment when they saw what it was, and then he kept bailing until the man’s head and shoulders were exposed. It was Lamar Morris, stuffed into the crate, hunched over in a sitting position. Shakespeare looked up at them from the back of his T-shirt. Probably they had gotten to him yesterday, Calvin thought, after he had babbled to Postum about being a Fourteen Carats collector.

  “Poor son of a bitch,” Taber said.

  “What do we do?” Calvin asked. “Call the cops?”

  “Yeah, we’ll phone out to Essex. There’s a substation out there. Shirley Fowler’s son. He’ll take care of it.”

  Calvin stared at him. The implications of “Shirley Fowler’s son” were enormous. It meant that this would be covered up, and he’d be complicit in it. Did he care?

  “That would be your girl Donna’s uncle.”

  “Okay.” His girl? There it was again.

  Calvin stared at the dead man. Right now the smartest thing he could do was get out—climb down off this merry-go-round before it picked up any more momentum. “You know those books that Morris sent over yesterday?” he asked. Taber nodded. “Well, I called back to thank him, and there was a strange message on his phone.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Taber said. “Ring the number right now.”

  Calvin fished out Morris’s card again and made the call on the bar phone. He handed Taber the receiver, and Taber listened for the moment that it took, and then hung up again. “Sure,” Taber said. “I could have figured it out for myself. Bob Postum murdered Morris and then sent the books along as a message to you—kind of a double-barreled incentive.”

  “It’s a pretty clear message,” Calvin said, knowing absolutely that it could have been him in the box and not Morris. Killing Morris had been utterly senseless. … “Tell me something. Can Shirley’s son take care of this without me?” he asked, watching Taber shovel out more foam. “I kind of wanted to be on the road tomorrow morning.”

  Taber nodded. “Sure. George is a good man. And this doesn’t involve you anyway. Your testimony is irrelevant. Whatever you have to say, it won’t do Lamar Morris any good. Right now those books don’t mean anything as far as I can see. Go ahead and put the damn things in your suitcase.” He grasped the corpse’s hair and pulled the head back. “Garroted,” he said. “I’ve got half a mind to take the body back into the hills.”

  “Won’t George Fowler want to see it?”

  “I kind of doubt it,” Taber said. “The less evidence the better in a case like this. And anyway, maybe we won’t bother to call George now that we’ve got this figured out. And one other thing,” Taber said. “Lamar Morris lived alone—no next of kin, either. There’s no one to mourn for the man except us, which is a shame, but you don’t have to worry about anybody’s justice here.”

  ‘That’s good to know,” Calvin replied. “Look, I’m thinking I won’t wait for tomorrow morning to leave.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt small, but then he looked at Morris’s body in the crate. He looked away again.

  “You’re right,” Taber said. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and it’s moving pretty fast, too. I can tell you that Lymon and Hosmer didn’t figure you’d be a target when they set you up to bring the box out here. Tell you what: why don’t we have Betty Jessup run you up to Laughlin tonight after dark? We’ll get a party of Knights to go along, as if they were just going up to the casinos to play the slots. We’ll outfit you with a wig and a dress. All you need is to look like someone else from a distance. I’ll phone Whitey and have him rent a vehicle while he’s up there today. You can pick it up in the parking lot of the Riverside and head straight home, call it ten o’clock. Get the hell out of here while the getting’s good. You can cross over the Laughlin Bridge and drive back down along the Arizona side.”

  Calvin’s head was reeling. “Are you serious?” he asked. “About the wig and all?”

  “Damn straight,” Taber said. “Why not? It’s right out of Shakespeare. It’s literary. We’ll make sure you get out of town safe. Maybe you should head down through Needles, though, and stay off I-40 as much as you can. Don’t even think about Henderson and Vegas.”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “I’ve already got a route picked out. What about my car?”

  “We’ll have a couple of the Knights drive it back out to L.A. in a day or two, after this blows over. Postum and his bunch won’t mess with them. They won’t care about the car by then. What’s important is that you get out of here now that Postum’s got your number.”

  Calvin felt deflated. Still, it would be an ironic twist if Calvin ended up like Morris, message and messenger both. …

  “Don’t have too many scruples here,” Taber said to him, dumping foam back into the box. He found a tape dispenser behind the bar and taped the box shut, sealing Morris into his paper sarcophagus. “This isn’t your fight. You’ve done your job. Righ
t now I envy you. You can walk away. It might look a little bit craven to someone who doesn’t know the facts, but I can assure you it’s not. I used to have a tenured position at U.N.L.V., teaching medieval lit, and I gave it up for a Knighthood. Took an early retirement. What I’ve got to show for it right now is a dead man in a box. So quit worrying. Lymon will turn up. He always does.”

  He told himself that Taber was right. He didn’t owe anybody anything here, except maybe Donna. The thought came to him to ask her to come along with him, and for a moment it looked like a perfect plan, and his spirits lifted. She could lock up the trailer and spend some time in civilization, a sort of dual citizenship. …

  But the idea was idiotic. She wouldn’t have any interest in going back with him to Birdland. She had just put the rat race behind her, and of course he had nothing to offer her—nothing at all. Back in L.A. he had nothing to offer himself, for God’s sake, except a place to hide.

  “I guess I don’t have to tell you that nothing good will come of talking about this murder,” Taber said, looking at him seriously.

  “Will anything good come of not talking about it?”

  “By ‘good’ you mean will Bob Postum be paid out for the crime?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “He might be. We don’t go in for revenge, though, like some folks would—even if Morris had been a Knight. Postum and his people would be ecstatic if they could move us to violence, and we don’t want them to be ecstatic, although we won’t let our people come to harm, either. And for sure we won’t let a man like Bob Postum define the rules of engagement. When the time comes, we’ll define the rules ourselves.”

  “It seems to me like the time has just about come,” Calvin said.

  “Yes, it has. That’s why it’s important you’re on the road tonight after the sun goes down. Take my advice and don’t look back.”

  Calvin nodded. But under the circumstances Taber’s admonition sounded like more than a mere piece of advice, as if Calvin’s ignoring it would turn him into a pillar of salt as he fled into the hills, or as if Taber were about to offer him a handful of pomegranate seeds.

  “Why don’t you take the afternoon off?” Taber said. “I’ve got a nice little boat, a Boston Whaler. Take Donna out for a spin on the river. Put some lunch and a bottle of wine in an ice chest. It’ll be a last hurrah.” He smiled at Calvin, but the smile was thin. He looked like a man in a hurry now.

  “I never really drove a boat before,” Calvin said. “I’m not sure …”

  “You’ll like the Whaler. It’s a humdinger—unsinkable foam hull, almost no draft. You’re right down on top of the water. Donna’s a crackerjack in a boat. She knows every sandbar and turn in the river. She can teach you a thing or two. Meanwhile, I’ll look into what you’ve been telling me. You’re done with all of it. You might as well relax.”

  Calvin nodded at him, half stupefied.

  “Help me roll this into the back,” Taber told him.

  “All right,” Calvin said.

  “Do you mind if I take a look at those books that Postum took out of Morris’s shop? Then I’ll call Whitey and set up that rent-a-sled, and then I’ll head on up myself.”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. He steadied the cart again as Taber wheeled it toward the rear of the building.

  “Since you’re leaving town, I’d like to show you a little something that’s usually reserved for Knights—something we call the ‘relics antechamber.’ You’ve got the right to have a look, after what you’ve been through. Who knows if you’ll ever be back out here. I’ll have to ask you to look away for a moment, though.”

  Calvin did as he was told. There was the sound of ratcheting iron, surprisingly loud in the small building, and then the grinding and creaking of iron gears and stone sliding over stone. He felt a cool whoosh of air, and smelled stone dust and a cold cellar odor—what he would imagine King Hit’s tomb to smell like. Of course, he thought, a secret door. He should have foreseen a secret door. Lamar Morris would have turned this into a first-rate illustration.

  “Through here,” Taber said.

  Calvin helped maneuver the cart through the head-high opening that had appeared where several big stones had slid aside. Inside was an antechamber maybe twelve feet square. It was dim, and it took his eyes a moment to make out the details of the stone corridor leading away downward on the other side of the room, which was lit by wall lamps connected by heavy black cord strung from porcelain insulators, as if the place had been wired in about 1915. The floor was wet, probably from the river seeping in, and in one place the water pooled up deeply and ran through a long crack between the stones of the floor. Against the wall, a heavy, dark chest stood on carved legs alongside the Communion table that Calvin had seen through the window two nights ago. There was no sign of any leaves growing out of the legs now. What that meant, he didn’t know.

  On top of it sat the decanter and the goblet on the silver plate—except the decanter wasn’t broken. It was whole, and once again there was wine in it. An exact replica of the decanter that broke the other night? It didn’t make good sense that they would have a case of the things in storage. It was evidently handblown, the glass cloudy and heavy and with streaks of what must be minerals. But the shards that Taber had swept onto the plate had certainly looked like pieces of this decanter, and the red pool had looked a lot like wine. …

  There was something in the heavy, silent air that was distinctly strange, and Calvin realized that the hairs on his arms were standing up straight. It wasn’t just static electricity; it was something he could almost hear, like antique music playing at some low-level frequency—as if the stones themselves were the instruments. It was deeply resonant, and he thought of the planets turning in the void, setting up a harmony of vibrations. For a moment he picked out an actual melody, but as soon as it came into his mind he lost it again. Abruptly he was dizzy, and he leaned against the wall for support. Taber watched him closely.

  “That’s the Cornerstone you’re sensitive to,” Taber said in a low voice. “The Cornerstone level lies below us, but it’s off-limits unless you’re an Elder. Some people can hear it, and some people see things—lights and shadows, ghosts. First time I was in here, twenty-five years ago now, I was still wearing a wristwatch, and the thing went wild, hands moving all over the place. Then it died. I had a watchmaker look at it, but it had permanently lost its mind.”

  Calvin nodded. The idea would have been crazy a couple of minutes ago, but now it seemed plausible. The effect of the Cornerstone—if that’s what it actually was—diminished just a little bit, as if he were adjusting to the pressure.

  “Now that table there,” Taber said, “that’s built with wood from the Holy Thorn, out of the very same tree that was planted at Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea, or at least that’s the story that’s been following it around for the last eighteen centuries. It’s a living miracle—capable of growth, putting out limbs and leaves pretty much instantly. You ever see any thing like that?”

  ‘The other night, actually. Through the window.”

  Taber nodded at him. “I thought that was you,” he said. I couldn’t be sure, but thank you for coming clean. So tell me, what do you think of miracles?”

  “I’ve never thought much about them at all,” he said evasively.

  “Until you came to New Cyprus, and looked into the right window? From now on you’ll have plenty of reason not to think about them. Or the opposite, if you see what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I mean that once you’ve witnessed one or two, you can’t occupy that middle ground anymore. You’ve either got to accept them or deny them. It’s simpler to deny them, just like being asleep is simpler than being awake. Take that music you’re hearing … You are hearing it?”

  “Yes,” Calvin said.

  “It would be easy for us to put a couple of speakers down below and generate it ourselves. Even the table putting out leaves and branches—you can see that k
ind of stage effect in any decent theater. This whole thing might be a fraud set up in order to lure you in. You sell your house out there in Eagle Rock and move out east to New Cyprus and throw in with us. You could have the hat and the handshake after you put money into the offering plate.”

  “It’s not all that uncommon.”

  “No, sir, it’s not. A person wants a healthy dose of doubt. Keep your hand on your wallet. The thing is, you’ve stumbled into a den of believers here, Cal. It’s hard not to see that when you talk to a woman like Nettie Lymon. But let’s move on. We can talk while we walk. That is, if you want to take a walk … ?”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “Now that we’re here.”

  They wheeled the cart around a corner where the passage turned inland toward the Dead Mountains, straight as a desert highway. “We’ll park him here,” Taber said. In the distance, no telling how far, the floor seemed to rise, but the tunnel was a perfect illustration in perspective, narrowing to a vanishing point. “You look like a man with unanswered questions,” Taber said to him.

  “Not more than about a dozen.”

  “Go ahead and ask. I’m in an expansive mood.”

  “All right. I thought that maybe you spotted me through the window night before last. I came out to the island and found Morris sneaking around, trying to get photos through the blinds. He took off when he saw me, and I had a look myself. I had too much curiosity after bringing out the veil and all.”

  “I’d have done the same when I was your age,” Taber said. “And I don’t mean to be condescending. Go ahead and ask what you’re thinking.”

  “Okay. That round decanter on the table back there—I saw it break when it fell off the table during the earthquake. You picked up the pieces. Now it’s whole again. Or else you’ve got more than one.”