The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  “Just like we’ve got loudspeakers under the floor. There’s never been but the one decanter. Its origins are pretty cloudy, but the Knights Templar took it out of Constantinople with the Veil of Veronica and other holy relics. It’s what Hugh Blankfort called ‘the Second Secret.’”

  “You’re telling me it mends itself?”

  “I’m not really telling you anything. It does what it does. We don’t ask how it does it, or why. We’re not scientists. If it repairs itself, then that’s what it does. It’s not that farfetched, Cal. Every creature born of man and woman can put themselves back together again if they really want to. If you don’t want to think of it as a living miracle, then think of it as a living metaphor. Let’s walk on a ways. I want to give you a couple of more things to think over.”

  They left the cart behind and headed deeper into the passage. Other tunnels angled away into the darkness now and then. After walking for maybe a hundred yards Calvin could feel that they were moving uphill. “Here’s where the river flowed in the old days,” Taber said. “You can see the mineral discoloration in the rock. That was back before the quake.” He pointed at the ceiling of the tunnel, which was streaked with glittering veins of white.

  “Nettie told me something about it,” Calvin said.

  “No reason you shouldn’t know. What happened was that Blankfort and his Knights brought the Cornerstone right out across the desert after Blankfort had some kind of vision, or so the story goes. They camped along the Colorado, and when the sun rose in the morning there was an earthquake that turned the river out of its course and broke open the Temple Bar so that they could see down into the earth, into a sort of grotto. Blankfort took it as a sign that they’d reached the Promised Land, and they laid the Cornerstone down in what they called the Deep Cellar. And right when they had the last shim set, and the stone was square and plumb, there was another quake, and the river flowed out around the Bar on either side, turning it into an island. They built the Temple and cut this passage over the years that followed, and of course they built New Cyprus in the new land along the mountainside.”

  “What cornerstone?” Calvin asked. “Why haul a big stone all the way out here from New Rochelle and bury it where it serves no function?”

  “The word ‘function’ is a little tough to define. The thing is, that’s what they did. That’s what happened. The Knights Templar brought the Cornerstone into Europe at some point between the First and Second Crusades—the Cornerstone of the Temple of Solomon. It was common knowledge that the Templars were excavating the Temple Mount, and heaven knows what else they found, but they hauled the Cornerstone back into France by ship and hid it. It was Blankfort’s family that brought it on across the Atlantic into New Rochelle, and Blankfort himself who brought it out West along with some of the other relics. What happened when they laid the stone down in the Deep Cellar wasn’t something he anticipated.”

  “And that’s the First Secret?”

  “No. The First Secret’s a secret. All I told you isn’t any kind of secret, except the origin of the Cornerstone, which doesn’t really have to be kept secret because it’s too farfetched to be true. And anyway, the Vatican claims it’s got the Cornerstone, which makes way more sense than its being out here in the desert. The unbelievable secret is the best kind—it pretty much keeps itself.”

  “The Vatican doesn’t have it?” Calvin asked.

  Taber shrugged. “They’ve got something. We’ve got something else.”

  Calvin was distracted now by movement farther up the passage—a shadow, strangely shaped, like a man hunched over a wheelbarrow or cart. For the space of an instant it seemed to flesh out, and Calvin saw a man leaning over a cart full of something—rock, maybe—and then he vanished utterly when he moved into the lamplight. Then he saw it again: the identical movement, shadow to flesh to nothing. No mistake. He watched for it to return. “What is that?” he asked Taber.

  Taber turned to look, and they both stood silently for the space of twenty seconds before the vision renewed itself, like a loop of film endlessly repeating. “Move forward,” Taber told him. They started along the passage again, watching carefully, but the vision didn’t return. They came upon iron tracks laid into the stone floor, but there was no need to ask about them; their purpose was obvious.

  “Now it’s gone,” Calvin said. “Why? Matter of perspective?”

  “That’s just what it is. And I’m not sure either of us understands all the definitions of the word ‘gone.’ I can tell you this sort of thing isn’t rare, though—not in New Cyprus. Of course it would be easy to fake. …”

  “Sure it would. Just like the rest. Do you think they’re ghosts?”

  “I don’t speculate on it too much, but, no, I don’t think they’re ghosts. I saw one in the relic antechamber once, and I’m convinced it was Al Lymon. But Al was down at the Costco buying paper goods. A man can’t be in two places at one time. Unless he can. There’s always that alternative. Anyway, speculation’s futile. I do know that you can’t strike up a conversation with any of them. They’re a silent crowd, although you can hear footsteps sometimes. Let’s stop here.”

  A chamber opened off to the right-hand side, and Taber stepped into it and felt around on the wall. Lamps came on, revealing a large room hewn into the bottom reaches of the Dead Mountains. Calvin stepped into it, hearing the vastness of the place in the silence and seeing right away, with a shock of horror, that it was a catacombs. It was lined with niches hollowed into the walls and edged with cut stone. Shrouded skeletons lay in many of the niches, scores of them.

  “Everything stays cool and dry down here,” Taber said. “Nothing to disturb anyone.”

  “Do all the Knights end up down here?” Calvin asked in a hushed voice. Somehow he couldn’t imagine Donna choosing to pass away into eternity entombed in a catacomb.

  “Oh, no,” Taber told him. “It’s like anywhere else. Some of them are in the churchyard topside, and lots of them are shipped home—wherever home was before New Cyprus; close to the kids, maybe. Some have their ashes scattered over the river, like your dad. We crated Whitey Sternbottom’s kid brother up two months ago and sent him back to Des Moines. And Hosmer, of course, is strictly an Iowa man. I myself mean to stay. I’ve got a niche over there on the west wall. Better view.” Calvin managed a grin.

  “So this is still in use? I’m surprised it’s legal.”

  “Still in use. And what passes for legal in unincorporated territory like New Cyprus can seem a little bit arcane to outsiders. Anyway, that’s the ten-cent tour,” Taber said. “There’s a two-bit tour, but right now it’s beyond your means. Take a look up there in the back corner though, at that glint of light. Do you see it?”

  “Yeah. Looks like a lens. Camera?”

  “Slick, eh? We’re old dogs, but we’ve got some new tricks. You never know when you need a third eye. We’d better get back up the passage—get you squared away for tonight.”

  They left the catacombs and started back downhill, walking in silence. They hadn’t taken ten steps, however, when it abruptly dawned on Calvin what was wrong with his uncle. “I know why Uncle Lymon’s sick,” he said. Taber stopped and waited, a look of anticipation on his face. “He’s doing it to himself.”

  “Doing what to himself?”

  “He told me a little bit about the Veil of Veronica—what it is and where it came from. He said that when Veronica blotted Christ’s face, and the image appeared, she assumed His pain, or something like that. That’s what was going on last night after you left. That’s what I saw.” He told Taber about the partly open bedroom door, the strange aura that he had wanted to think was a table lamp, and his uncle’s evident pain and his hand resting on the veil.

  “I think you’re probably wrong,” Taber told him. “I don’t mean I think you’re lying. I mean I think you mistook something. Probably it was just a table lamp. Al wouldn’t … employ the veil that way. Even if he was convinced it was necessary, which God knows it would be in
Nettie’s case. He’d have told us what he intended to do. He’s got scruples about that kind of thing. The veil doesn’t belong to him or to anyone else on earth, and he knows that as well as I do.” They walked on now, a little more quickly than before.

  “If it were me,” Calvin said, “I’d toss the scruples into the trash if my wife was suffering.” Immediately he knew that this was a moderately egotistical thing to say. He hadn’t ever been called upon to act heroically, even in small ways, and it was easy to make grandiose claims when you weren’t going to be put to the test.

  Then he wondered whether he might soon be put to the test. He recalled what Aunt Nettie had said to him—when was it? Yesterday? “What are you doing out here in New Cyprus if you weren’t called out?”

  They passed Morris’s cart, Calvin trailing his hand over the cardboard surface of the box that contained the body. The next moment they were back in the antechamber where the Communion table stood. Taber opened the door of the cabinet next to it, looked inside, and then shut it again.

  “It’s not there, is it?” Calvin asked.

  Taber shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

  “How powerful is it? Can he kill himself with it?”

  “I don’t know. The cancer was close to killing Nettie. If he takes the disease away from her along with the pain … literally, I mean.” He shook his head. “This changes things. If Lymon takes himself out, we’ve got to look at things a little bit differently.” He shook his head, as if grappling with possible futures. “It just doesn’t seem gentlemanly to confront him on it. It would shame him, I can tell you that. And if he’s already done it anyway … Damn it, you don’t just use a miracle.”

  “Why not?” Calvin asked. “When Moses got the water out of the stone, everyone had a drink, didn’t they? When God parted the Red Sea, they all went right on across. They didn’t stand around and marvel at it. You don’t waste a miracle, either.”

  “Yes, they did make use of it, but that was thousands of years ago. If you were caretaker of that stone today, you wouldn’t set up to sell bottled water. You would if you were Bob Postum, but not if you’re Al Lymon.”

  Calvin shrugged. “I guess not,” he said. “But your argument is a little abstract. Aunt Nettie’s not abstract. She’s real, and so is the cancer.”

  “Well,” Taber said, obviously composing himself. “It’s something we’ll have to deal with, and by ‘we’ I mean the Knights.”

  Calvin stood still for a moment, listening to the strange sounds in the air around him, thinking about his aunt and uncle. “I think I’ll pass on that offer of a rental car,” he said finally. “I think I’ll stay.”

  OVER THE RIVER

  They flew along atop the river in Taber’s Boston Whaler. Calvin had anticipated something out of Moby-Dick when Taber had first referred to it—something with a front end that flared upward and wooden seats with oarlocks beside them, maybe a harpoon and a tub of rope. But the Whaler was nearly flat, so low to the water that Calvin could drag his hand in the river while Donna piloted them upstream, cruising along near shore in the shade of the Dead Mountains to a little beach she knew about.

  It was a quiet afternoon, the river nearly empty of boats. The ferry had passed them heading back down to New Cyprus, and so had a couple of skiers on the back of a boat, jetting along with music blaring, but there was no one besides themselves along this stretch. In an ice chest he had a bottle of champagne and two glasses as well as assorted goodies to eat. Donna wore a bathing suit top and a pair of shorts, and her hair was tied back into a ponytail. Calvin had to make an effort not to stare at her. By any sane definition it was shaping up to be a perfect afternoon.

  The boat swung in a wide arc now, around a sheer wall of rock that edged the upriver end of the Dead Mountains, which cut off a little still-water cove from most of the rest of the river. Donna killed the engine and ran the boat straight up onto a shady piece of beach, stepping out over the prow and tying up to a clump of willow. “This is it,” she said. “We used to come up here when I was a kid. What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, handing the lawn chairs over the side. He grabbed the ice chest and climbed out, looking up at the tumble of rock towering away overhead, the upper reaches lit by a halo of sunlight in a deep blue sky. He set up the chairs in three inches of water, Aunt Nettie-style, kicked off his flip-flops, and sat down, watching Donna fish the champagne bottle out of the ice chest along with two glasses. She tore off the foil, unwound the wire, and edged the cork out of the bottle without any ostentatious popping and fizzing, and a moment later he found himself holding a glass of champagne that was colder than the river water swirling over his feet.

  “Cheers,” Donna said to him. Her smile was more than a little bit coy, as if she had his number, which of course she did.

  “Over the river,” he said, clinking her glass and taking a sip.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “‘Over the river’? I heard Miles Taber say it once.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I got it out of a Steinbeck novel. It seemed apropos under the circumstances—you know, with the river and all. … Except I think that it probably means another river.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then she said, “You know, I knew Lamar Morris. Back when I was in high school. He asked me out, actually.”

  “Really?” Calvin said. “Now that’s weird. It’s a small world.”

  “Out here it is,” she said, looking steadily at him. “But what’s weird about it? Now and then I get asked out. Sometimes I’ve got to get a little bit pushy, I guess. I’ve got to borrow a boat from a matchmaker like Miles Taber in order to hook the timid ones and talk them into a date.”

  “I didn’t mean weird that way. I meant …” He found that he was completely speechless, and that Donna’s smile had turned into a grin. “I meant that there’s too much synchronicity to things sometimes. I run into one of Lamar’s father’s books at the Gas’n’Go, and then the next day I meet Lamar, and then the next day he’s dead, probably because I met him, and now I find out you dated him, and of course your grandmother owns the Gas’n’Go where I bought the book, and … Well, now here we are.”

  He gestured at the rocks, the river water and willows. Something seemed to be pending. It was definitely pending. He was being given an opportunity here. “You ever go out at Halloween as Pippi Longstocking?” he asked her. “With the sideways braids and all?”

  “Do you even have to ask?” she said. “My grandfather even built me a playhouse behind the Gas’n’Go called Villa Villekulla, and I had an imaginary monkey named Mr. Nilsson, and an old wooden rowboat with a little cabin built in the middle called Hoptoad.”

  “The cabin had a name?”

  “Hoptoad was the name of Efraim Longstocking’s ship—Pippi’s father. Do you want some more champagne?”

  Calvin nodded. “I thought the name of the house was Vena Vena Cava.” He held out his glass and let Donna fill it.

  “You mean like the vein in the heart? That’s really weird. That’s even weirder than me being asked out by Lamar Morris.”

  “That’s what it sounded like in the films.”

  “So you didn’t read the book? You only watched the movie?”

  “I might read the books now that I know they’ve got a ship in them called Hoptoad. I remember she was always going on about her father coming home to take her away to some tropical island. …”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked away.

  It came to him after a moment that the statement had apparently killed the conversation. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I said something I shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t know my father or mother anyway. Just my grandparents. When I was little, though, I used to dream, you know, that my father was out there somewhere, and that he’d come home one day. Then—I don’t know, maybe when I was nine or ten—I figured out that dreams are for babies. I quit reading The Velvet
een Rabbit, too. I got over it, though.”

  “I guess I know what you mean,” he said. “Sooner or later you get over it.”

  “You mean losing the love of your life?”

  “The love of my life? I’m not dead yet,” he said. “But, yeah, something like that. What do you say we paint ‘Hoptoad’ on the side of the Boston Whaler?”

  “We don’t have paint.”

  “I’ve got a felt marker,” he said. “Indelible ink.” He stuck the base of his champagne glass under the river sand and picked up his book bag. “I brought some cartoons,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d show you a couple. I mean, they’re maybe not all that funny, but …”

  “What if they are funny? What if you’re wrong about it? What if you’re wrong about all kinds of things? Like what if you’re actually Mr. Wonderful but this Elaine woman couldn’t see it? She made you miserable, and then you let yourself get into the habit of being miserable and turned yourself into a mope. You know why I brought you out here today?”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “That’s what I’m doing. What I’m telling you is that we’re done with Elaine. She just got written out of the script. Is that all right with you?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Then show me one of your cartoons, and I’ll tell you whether it’s funny or not, and if I say it’s funny, then it’s funny. And quit looking like you’re going to faint.”

  “I’m not going to faint,” he said, staring at her. She actually looked angry. If he had a chance to draw the cartoon, it would be a picture of both of them wearing leopard-skin garments. She’d be wearing the Pippi braids and carrying a club, dragging him off toward a cave, and he’d have a lump on his head. Over the cave door it would read “Vena Vena Cava.” It would be a heart-shaped door. He started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I can’t tell you.” He laughed again.

  “I’ll hurt you,” she said.

  “Later,” he said. “I’ll tell you later, and then you can hurt me. Here …” He took his sketchbook out of his book bag and opened it at random, handing it to her. It was the cartoon of the lunatic doctors in the doorway.