The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  The television set was turned on in the living room, and sitting on the coffee table lay what looked like a small, theater light board, with a dozen faders and glowing red lights. Calvin realized that the television screen was actually a monitor. At the moment there was a moving picture of the interior of the mint, scanning the hoard of coins, then focusing on the door in the passage. The door still stood open, which still seemed to Calvin to be strange under the circumstances. The camera image winked out, revealing the lamplit passage, looking uphill. It was dark farther up, but he could see the tail end of the rail line set into the stone floor. The image was replaced by a picture of the doors in the far wall of the mint—the riverside doors. Then the mounds of coins reappeared, the open door, and the passage again, except that now, way off in the distance, there were three bobbing, firefly specks of light. “Here they come,” Taber said.

  Shadowy figures appeared in the passage, moving downhill into the lamplight—three men wearing helmets with lamps, two of them walking ahead, holding shotguns. Calvin recognized Defferson and Yorkmint. The third man was Bob Postum, with the brim of his helmet pulled down to shade his eyes. Postum had gotten down the passage fairly quickly, given that he had been up top a few minutes ago. They hesitated outside the open door, looking into the room, the shotguns ready.

  “Go on in,” Taber murmured, his hands hovering over the switches in front of him. “Help yourself. Fill your pockets.”

  After a moment they stepped forward warily, swiveling the shotguns in front of them, evidently expecting resistance rather than the wide-open door. Right inside they stopped again, this time obviously stupefied, staring at the ocean of silver as if they had fallen into a trance.

  “Go farther in” Taber muttered.

  And then, as if in agreement, they moved forward, no longer warily, but greedily, hunched over and staring. The electric light from the string of bulbs played over the mounds of silver coin and ingots, which looked endless from the point of view of the camera: mounds and stacks and hummocks and pyramids of silver—a moonlit desert landscape, stretching on into the shadowed depths of the cavern. Postum stopped and turned his head to look at the open door, as if making sure of the way out. It was impossible to make out his expression in the dim light, whether it was of satisfaction or doubt. It seemed to Calvin as if there was something strange about him—as if he’d put on weight, or was wearing clothes that were slightly too small.

  “One more step,” Taber muttered. “Get on with it.”

  “He’s wary,” Calvin said. “He’s wondering why the door’s been left open.”

  “Greed trumps wariness here,” Taber said, his hand on one of the switches, and sure enough, as if Postum couldn’t help himself, he bent over to heft a big ingot. He turned it over and inspected the writing stamped into the bottom, then looked up, as if he had something to say and was trying to find the words. Defferson was moving around through the silver, lost in the gloom farther back. York-mint had fallen onto his knees and was running his hands through a mountain of coins. Behind Postum the tunnel door dropped down into place, pressing itself into its niche with what must have been an audible noise, because Postum looked back sharply, set down the silver, and strode toward it, saying something back over his shoulder.

  “Heaven help me,” Taber said. He looked at Calvin, his face pale. “Later on, remind me of the way they burned Shirley Fowler’s store, and the way Postum killed Lamar Morris.” His hand moved on the faders. The camera winked away, the scene changing to reveal the doors in the back wall, beyond which the river flowed. The doors began to open, sliding upward, and immediately river water was rolling in beneath them, flooding into the cavern and down across the steeply sloped floor. Again the camera switched away, focusing again on the door into the tunnel, which was still closed tight. Postum and Defferson worked to raise it, pushing their hands against it and leaning into it, trying to slide it upward. Yorkmint searched frantically around the floor, looking for a lever, maybe, but finding nothing but the shotgun he’d brought in with them. He picked it up and tried to jam the barrel under the door. Their mouths worked as they shouted at each other.

  After a moment, when the water was knee-deep, they slogged away, clambering up the heaps of coin. Again the camera cut away. The river doors were fully opened, the arched doorways hidden behind the two torrents of water, which were rapidly filling the cavern, vast as it was. Taber looked at Calvin, whose face must have revealed the horror that he felt. “That’s Bob Postum you’re worrying about,” he said.

  “I’m not worrying,” Calvin said. “It’s just … is it Postum?”

  “Sure it is. The man’s greed personified. He got those trebuchets up and running and then came down the tunnel with the others. I’ll bet ten dollars he’s got a railcar waiting to come down. One thing, though, if you’re squeamish—if he can tread water, he’ll make it out of there alive. There’s an outlet, and if he doesn’t panic he’ll be swept out in the current. He’s got the advantage of bulk, so he’ll float.”

  “But what if it’s not him? What if it’s someone who looks like him?” Calvin watched the monitor for another moment. The coins were submerged, the water still apparently flooding in through the doors. Then someone swept past at the bottom of the screen. It was a big man—not Yorkmint or Defferson, but not Postum, either. His hat was gone and his beard was half pulled away from his face where the spirit gum had given out. He slapped at the water, struggling to stay afloat, catching the false beard in his flailing hand and pulling it away, his face pudgy and moonlike now, his eyes terrified. He swirled out of view again, and there was nothing to see but dark water.

  Calvin realized that Taber was talking on his cell phone now. “Out by the river gate,” he was saying. “That’s right, three of them.” Then he stopped and looked sharply at Calvin. “Nettie didn’t give you that veil, did she?”

  “No,” Calvin said. “She told me that you sent Doc Hoyle out to get it. She didn’t give it to him, either.”

  “I sent Doc Hoyle out there to see what he could do for Lymon. He’s got no business with the veil. He shouldn’t give any kind of damn about it.”

  Before Taber could say anything more, Calvin was out the door and loping past the wharf. They had sent a fake Bob Postum down the tunnel because the actual Bob Postum had someplace else to be.

  THE FOURTH SECRET

  Calvin ran down across Taber’s little stretch of beach and had just passed the end of the dock when there was a shattering concussion. Something hit him in the head, and he slammed onto his shoulder in the sand. Water and debris rained down around him, and he curled up, shielding his head, his ears ringing with the reverberations of what must have been the fall of a monstrous stone. When he wiped his face, his forearm came away smeared with blood and water. He felt his forehead gingerly and found the wound at his hairline—a flap of skin torn away and hanging. He pressed it back into place, his head beginning to throb, and tried standing. He found that he wasn’t going to pass out, and so stepped toward the dock, where a ragged terry cloth beach towel hung on a nail driven into one of the pier pilings. He yanked it down and dipped it into the river, wrung it out, and blotted the blood out of his eyes again, then pressed the towel hard against the wound, feeling half stupefied.

  He saw what had hit him—a big, jagged splinter of wood blown off the dock in the impact. The dock had been shattered by the falling stone, and the end of it was pushed up out of the water like a broken ski ramp. The fireboat, its starboard side hammered in, was slipping away in the current, the mooring lines dragging dock pieces along with it as it drifted toward the island.

  Taber’s door slammed, but there was no time for idle talk. Without looking back, Calvin waved with the towel and jogged away around the curve of the bay, his head pounding with each step. Taber shouted something after him, but he waved his hand again, watching the scene out on the river where a pontoon boat with a camera mounted on it zipped alongside the slowly spinning fireboat, shooting the wrec
k from the decorated side, the painted plywood and oars still foolishly intact, spared by the stone. Someone on the camera boat tossed a big canister aboard and the fireboat went up in a whoosh of flame.

  On the island Knights were running down the dock, and as the burning wreck drew near, they pushed it away with long poles, but it edged back in, dangerously near the gas pumps. Someone had started up the water cannon engine moored to the ferry dock, but it was so close to the wreckage that when the cannon let go it blasted burning pieces out across the water, nearly taking out the camera boat and its crew, knocking men and equipment into the river and spinning the fireboat safely out toward midstream, a burning wreckage of knocked-apart plywood. A ski boat with a couple of Knights on board put out from the island, angling around into the river to recover the burning fireboat, the whole scene drifting out of sight.

  Calvin took the towel away from his forehead. Apparently the bleeding had slowed down. He used his teeth to tear through the hem of the towel, and then ripped off a long strip, which he tied around his forehead as tightly as he could. He threw the rest of the towel aside and set out again, skirting half a dozen riverside houses, his head still throbbing, and the wound sharply painful now that the initial numbness was wearing off.

  The heightening pain seemed to clear Calvin’s mind, and he thought about the rat Mifflin had told them about. Ten dollars said it was Hoyle. Postum had left his car in the lot at Beamon’s because he didn’t need it: Hoyle was giving him a lift into New Cyprus, probably in the trunk of his own car, which, if it was true, meant that Postum had been in New Cyprus for hours, maybe biding his time, maybe up to something more. The Bob Postum up on the hill with the trebuchets was another fraud.

  Calvin waded through the last of the shallows and pushed through a stand of willow, up onto the beach in front of his aunt’s den. The lawn chairs were folded and leaning against the side of the house, but the den door stood wide open. He stepped in warily, listening to the silence, and saw at once that the place had been ransacked—not carefully, either. Cupboards stood open; books and silver book-ends and chair cushions lay on the floor; kitchen drawers were pulled out. The cupboards beneath the living room bookshelves had been yanked open, the false veil boxes ripped up and pitched aside. He moved up the hallway to the open door of the Lymons’ silent bedroom, darting a glance inside, praying that the room was empty.

  The clothes in the open closets were pushed aside, the blankets yanked off the bed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and dumped. Calvin stepped into the room, not seeing the body on the floor until he had walked past the tilted mattress that was hiding it from view. It was Doc Hoyle, lying on his back, his eyes open and staring, his arm across his chest.

  Calvin stood there listening to the drone of the swamp coolers, looking at Hoyle’s upturned face, and then he turned away, thinking that he should close the man’s eyes. He was staggered by a wave of dizziness, and he grabbed the bedpost to steady himself, seeing then that a scalpel with a bloody, inch-long blade lay on the floor, and that there was a bloody smear, on the lampshade and a spray of drops on the wall behind it. For a stupid moment he thought that Hoyle had somehow murdered himself with his own scalpel, but then he saw the small, bloody hole in his shirt pocket, nearly hidden by the dead man’s wrist.

  Calvin backed away from the body, trying to make sense of things. Postum had ransacked the place looking for the veil, which he knew was in the house because Doc Hoyle had told him it was. Postum had met Hoyle here, Calvin reasoned, and when he discovered that Hoyle had failed to get the veil from Nettie, he had torn the place up looking for it. Had he found it? Or had he come up empty and shot Hoyle out of anger? Or had Hoyle futilely attacked Postum with the scalpel, making a last-ditch attempt to undo his bargain with the devil?

  Calvin hurried back out through the kitchen, heading outside toward the cellar, pushing the door open and looking in carefully. The lights were on, but the cellar was empty and hadn’t been ransacked. The wheelchair was gone. He walked across to the door to the passage, pushed it open, and listened to the hollow silence within the dimly lit tunnel, which stretched steeply away downward, under the bay and out toward the island. The roof in this section was supported by a scaffolding of railroad timbers, the air inside smelling of creosote and dust.

  Had his aunt and uncle gone out through the tunnel, his uncle in the wheelchair? Or had Donna talked sense to Nettie and taken them somewhere safe—down to the Temple, maybe? Calvin set out downhill through the passage and into cool air. Better to find out what lay ahead than to search topside for them. He tried to think of where his uncle and aunt could have been headed if they came this way, but the throbbing in his forehead seemed to knock apart his thoughts. It came to him that he should call Taber to warn him about Postum, and he fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket, but of course there was no signal.

  Turn around? He kept walking even as he was considering the possibility. The supporting timbers abruptly ended, the passage level now, cut out of solid stone. There was a porcelain insulator screwed to the last of the timbers, with the electrical wire running through it. Calvin’s tiki hung incongruously over the outthrust insulator. He stood staring at it, trying to make sense of it and leaning against the tunnel wall for support, feeling dead tired.

  Donna hung it there. There was no other explanation. She had gone down the tunnel looking for the Lymons, or accompanying the Lymons, and she had left this as a sign. Except that if she had wanted to leave a sign she could have left one back in the cellar, in writing, thumbtacked to the door. She didn’t need to leave the tiki, which told him nothing except that she had come this way. …

  He lifted it off the insulator and clutched it in his hand, the obvious answer to the riddle dawning on him. Donna must have left the tiki as a message because she hadn’t had a chance to do anything else. Why? She was with Postum? Maybe having walked into the Lymons’ house when he was ransacking it? Calvin recalled the image of Doc Hoyle lying on the floor, the spray of blood on the wall and lampshade. …

  He tried to unclip the tiki to put it around his neck, but dropped it instead. Clumsily, he bent over to pick it up, feeling himself pass out in a dark rush, and then an instant later aware that he was sitting on the cold stone floor, which felt as if it were moving beneath him. Abruptly it stopped moving, and then shook again before becoming still. He waited another moment and then crept to his knees and picked up the tiki. He rose slowly, his head pounding again with his first tentative step. There had been an earthquake, coincidental with his passing out. A portent? Nothing that Lamar Morris had told him seemed the least bit unlikely now.

  He heard the sound of footfalls, and a shade passed through the air in front of him, a flitting shard of bat-like darkness. Surprised, Calvin swung his hand clumsily, his hand and arm passing through the apparition just as it coalesced into the shadow of a man walking a few steps ahead of him. The figure wavered like a desert mirage, and as it disappeared he heard the faint sound of the footfalls passing away. Then, uncannily, he heard them again, but approaching from behind him this time.

  He turned slowly around, wary of passing out again, and in the semidarkness beyond the nearest hanging bulb, another figure, dim and transparent, appeared to be pacing toward him. It was Uncle Lymon, momentarily nearly solid, looking beyond Calvin as if he weren’t there, and then evaporating and disappearing as he walked into the blighter lamplight, leaving Calvin alone again in the tunnel. He thought of Donna’s ghostly miners, apparently displaced in time, and of the figure in the tunnel near the catacombs, and he seemed to hear a rising cacophony of footsteps around him, and the sound of picks ringing against stone.

  A line of blood ran down his cheek like a crawling insect, bringing him to his senses, and he compelled himself to walk on and to order his mind. He worked through the alphabet backward, resolutely mouthing the letters. Soon the strand of lights ran out, the way turned, and it was utterly dark. He trailed his right hand against the wall of the passage to keep his
bearings, holding his left hand out in front. Flashes of light exploded before his eyes, keeping time with the throbbing in his head.

  He felt the charged air that he had felt in the relics antechamber now. He sensed it again in his spine and along the back of his neck. And at the very edge of audibility he could hear the strange, creaky, antique music that he had heard before. The music rose and fell, the melody mingling with what sounded like the clacking together of wave-washed stones on a beach and the creaking sound of stone against stone, as if the earth were restless, turning over in its bed. The ground shook again, and he stood still, bracing himself against the wall, but almost at once the quake subsided, and he went on blindly.

  Some distance ahead of him there was a feeble glow, like moonlight, which broadened as he moved forward, a natural cavern opening up before him. He could see the tips of stalactites projecting downward, pearl-white and glowing in the light, and he heard the dripping of water, oddly loud against the strange music that seemed now to rise from the stone floor and walls. He couldn’t make out the source of the diffused light, which was more like an illuminated cloud than lamplight.

  At the entrance to the cavern stood the wheelchair, and for an instant he saw his uncle sitting in the chair, and his aunt standing behind it, and then it came to him that he was seeing his uncle through the transparent image of his aunt, but before he could understand what that meant, they had vanished, and on top of the vinyl wheelchair seat sat a cardboard box, clearly not any kind of figment. He picked it up, looking at the familiar Gas’n’Go address. It was empty.

  He moved forward carefully, the cavern opening outward and upward, vaster than seemed possible, although its apparent size might have been an illusion of the glowing mist, which apparently filled the upper reaches, as if the cavern had its own atmosphere. There was the smell of water on stone, and from somewhere came the sound of the river flowing beyond the cavern wall.