The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  He wondered what he should do. Stay? That seemed presumptuous to him—to hang around the foggy meadow when no one was home. He would feel like a sneak. And it was very possibly pointless, too. Graham might easily be gone for the night. Howard would drive into Mendocino and find a hotel room, after all. In the morning he would wash his clothes, then call Fort Bragg to announce his arrival to Uncle Roy, explaining that he happened to be in the area a couple of days earlier than he had thought, and … It was weak, but it had the advantage of taking Sylvia by surprise and therefore not scaring her off. Howard could easily check into a local hotel if things weren’t looking up at his uncle’s house.

  He was still watching the ocean when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around, expecting to see Graham, after all. A stranger stood there, though, smiling slightly. Surprised, but not wanting to seem to be up to something, Howard stuck out his hand, salesman-like, and the man immediately shook it very heartily, one big shake before dropping it.

  “Mr. Jimmers,” the man said, introducing himself. He didn’t look happy as he waited for Howard to explain what he was doing there, prowling around the premises. But then he didn’t really look like trouble, either. His face was broad and fleshy, like a comical drawing of a gentleman toad, and he had a mess of salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a comfortable-looking wool sweater, a pair of old dungarees, and down-at-heel bedroom slippers, as if he had just been reading by the fire. He was short and squarely built, although not really fat, and might have been sixty or sixty-five.

  “Howard Barton,” Howard said. Then there was a silence. “I’m looking for Mr. Graham, actually. I’m from the museum, down south.”

  “About the Orientalia?”

  “That’s right.” Howard was happy at that. The man knew about him. He was expected. “Roy Barton is my uncle, up in Fort Bragg.” There wasn’t much chance that Mr. Jimmers would know his uncle, perhaps, but it made Howard sound a little less dubious, his having an uncle in Fort Bragg.

  “You don’t say! Roy Barton of the spirit museum? The ghostly automobile Barton?”

  Howard nodded. Apparently there was no escaping his uncle’s reputation.

  The look on Mr. Jimmers’ face suggested that he found the whole business suspicious. He turned his head, fixing Howard with one eye and looking him up and down, as if taking his measure. “Haven’t gone into the shed, have you?” Mr. Jimmers drummed his knuckles against the wall of the red and white metal shed. The car must have come very close to taking it out when it went over the cliff. In fact, there was a big crease in the side of the thing, about bumper height. It had a pair of cockeyed sliding doors, half rusted by the weather and secured by a ridiculously big lock. The idea of Howard’s having “gone into” it was foolish, although a burglar with a can opener could have done it in an instant.

  “Not me,” Howard said. “Is Mr. Graham at home?”

  Mr. Jimmers was pretty clearly off his rocker, an eccentric rustic. But despite that, Howard instantly wondered what was in the shed that he wasn’t supposed to have meddled with. It sat dangerously close to the crumbling edge of the bluffs, resting up on wooden skids in the weeds. Surely they wouldn’t store anything but garden tools in such a run-down shed.

  A flurry of raindrops plinked down onto the metal roof, the sound reverberating hollowly inside, and for a moment it sounded as if voices could be heard within—the voices of surprised ghosts, maybe, arguing with each other. It must have been a trick of the echoing raindrops. Abruptly Mr. Jimmers squinted at Howard again, as if vaguely surprised and seeing him in a new light. Then, shading his face against the rain, which had already ceased to fall, he turned around on the path and trotted off toward the house, gesturing for Howard to follow.

  When they got around to the front, Howard discovered that the truck door on the passenger side was ajar. He pulled the door open and saw that the glove box was open, too, and nearly empty. His paperweight was gone along with almost everything else: a box of fuses and odds and ends of spare change, nuts and bolts, an air gauge, pencils, an unopened package of Mr. Zog’s surfboard wax, and ten years’ worth of useless kipple—most of it completely worthless to whoever stole it. He’d very nearly been cleaned out, although none of it was valuable except the paperweight. They’d left him the brownie and the decals—most of them, anyway; the pelican was gone.

  Mr. Jimmers held the arched door of the house open, and Howard slammed out of the truck and hurried up the curving walk toward the porch. “Shoes not allowed,” said Mr. Jimmers. Howard took his off and left them by the door, sitting neatly alongside three other pairs.

  “Someone stole everything in the glove compartment,” Howard said, “including a glass paperweight that cost me nearly two hundred dollars. Can you believe that?” It occurred to him for the first time that Mr. Jimmers himself was suspect, but he took another look at the man and gave the notion up.

  Mr. Jimmers wasn’t paying attention, though, but was looking out at the evening sky. “I thought you’d brought rain with you for a moment,” he said, sighing afterward and giving Howard one of his shrewd, sideways glances. “My advice is to keep your car doors locked. They’ll rob you blind—like crows. They’ve got a fearful appetite for any kind of junk, especially little things. Steal the buttons off your coat if you let them. They go through the local parks carrying paper sacks, picking up all manner of stuff—bottle caps, bits of colored glass, anything they find on the ground. They’ll steal your kitchen utensils right off the table, too.”

  “Who?” asked Howard.

  “The whole damned crowd of them,” Jimmers said, polishing his glasses on his vest. “They stay away from me, though. I’m a mean outfit, and they know it. ‘Give Mr. Jimmers the road’—that’s what they say when they see me coming. ‘No quarter,’ that’s my motto. It’s a good one, too. I recommend it to you. You’re from down south, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Howard said, wondering what in the hell the man was talking about and whom he didn’t want to give any quarter to. “Who is it again?”

  “Gluers is what they’re called. They work a couple of communes back in the woods, up above the fog line. They put out the Sunberry products, natural foods. Very healthful. Always building, too. They built half of this house.” He gestured at the stone walls and the open beamed ceiling. “They were … fond of Graham, you might say. Very nearly worshipped him. Looked after him like he was royalty. You won’t see much of them, though. They don’t come into town much. But leave your car door unlocked and see if they don’t rob you blind. They’ve got a crow’s eyesight for any damned kind of bauble and nut.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Howard said.

  “Well …” Mr. Jimmers shook his head darkly. “You’ve got a lot to learn, my boy. You people from down south … It’s not like that up here. My advice to you is to learn it quick, too, because there’s those up here that will give you less quarter than I will. Gluers aren’t the worst of them, either. Far from it. You might find friends among them before you’re through, depending on who you really are. Take me, now. I’ve got a wooden keg, down in the shop. I toss in any old thing—the odd screw and washer, bent nails, the broken-off heads of tin toys. First Sunday of every other month, starting in January, I leave it out on the meadow. Next morning it’s empty. They respect me for that. I’m hard, but I treat them right if they let me.”

  Howard nodded. “I think I see,” he said, although he didn’t, really. The heads of tin toys? It wasn’t like what up here?

  Mr. Jimmers put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “You’ll see a lot more before you’re done. You can take my affidavit on that. You can put everything you know into your hat, and still have room for the rabbit. And don’t for a moment think you can swindle me, either. Did I tell you I was an astronomer? I believe there to be a flat constellation—two-dimensional—made up of five stars in the shape of a chalice. Nobody’s made out the shape of it because it’s tilted exactly perpendicular to the rotation of the earth. The dog star
, Sirius, is at the base, and points the true direction of the celestial mill wheel. There’s a cosmic wind, though, that’s about to blow it around edgewise, and when it does …” He shook his head. “Do you believe me?”

  “Of course,” Howard said, thinking to himself that the man was pretty clearly a fourteen-carat loony. Mention of the celestial mill wheel might have thrown Howard pretty hard, except that it was too mixed up with nonsense. That’s what was in the shed, probably, the two-dimensional constellation. Mr. Jimmers didn’t seem dangerous, though. “Is that your observatory? Out in the shed?” Howard smiled, thinking to humor the man, but realizing too late that what he had said might be taken for an insult.

  “What do you know about the shed?” Mr. Jimmers asked, suddenly wary. “Did you go into it?”

  “No,” Howard said. “I don’t know anything. Not a thing. I just got here.” The conversation had gone off down a foggy tangent. He decided to take a stab at changing it. “So where is Mr. Graham?” he asked again.

  “Dead,” Mr. Jimmers replied.

  3

  “DEAD?”

  Mr. Jimmers nodded seriously and sadly, but still with an air of suspicion, as if to suggest that Howard, maybe, knew more about the business than he was admitting. “He went over the cliff just a couple of weeks ago. That’s his car down on the rocks. A man can’t survive such a fall as that. Body was never found. It’s my notion that he was thrown clear of the wreckage. Longshore currents probably swept him down south by now. You’d have done better to stay home and waited for him.”

  Dazed, Howard followed Mr. Jimmers into an ill-lit sort of living room. “You don’t have such a thing as a drink around the house, do you?” Howard asked. This was no time for being polite. His stomach was curiously hollow. His plans had been thrown for a loop, and he was somehow certain that his entire life had altered course on the instant.

  Mr. Jimmers looked a little puzzled about the mention of a drink, as if he couldn’t quite see the point in it, but he nodded after a moment and stepped along, disappearing into yet another room. Howard heard the satisfying clink of glass against glass. At least that sounded right to him—almost the only familiar sound he could remember having heard in a week.

  The house was cold, with a stone floor and roughly plastered stone walls. Candles guttered in little hollows, making the room look like a shrine, but not lighting it up enough to do any real good. The fireplace was built of stone, too, and clinker brick, and all of it, the whole room, was stony cold, despite the hearty-looking fire. Howard stepped up closer to it, wondering if he could remember which of the stones disguised the cavity where the sketch had been hidden fifteen years past. Nothing was visible, though, no cracked joint or missing mortar.

  His feet were nearly frozen, and he held them in front of the fire, wiggling his toes. He would have liked to keep his shoes on or else go out to the truck now for a second pair of socks. It was dark and foggy outside, though, and the truck was invisible through the murk, and there were odd thieves lurking in the woods.

  He thought again about the paperweight stolen from the glove box—a two-hundred-dollar lesson. And now Graham was dead, too …

  He patted his coat pocket, where he had Graham’s letter. Thank God he hadn’t left it in the cab of the truck. He half wanted to show it to Mr. Jimmers straight off, before the probate courts, or whoever it was, hauled Graham’s possessions away and the sketch was forever lost. But then who the hell was Mr. Jimmers, anyway? The man was tolerably comfortable there. Or at least he went around with the air of someone who had made himself at home. And then there was the strange business of the shed … Suddenly Howard wanted very much to get a glimpse inside it—just a little peek.

  But that was childish, wasn’t it? If he were caught fooling around in either the shed or the fireplace, it might botch up the whole business of the Hoku-sai sketch, which had already gotten pretty shaky. He noticed right then that the walls were full of paintings and photographs and no end of wall hangings of one sort or another. In the dim light it was impossible to make any of them out clearly. Howard stepped over to have a look at a few of them.

  Most of what hung on the walls wasn’t of any note—reproductions of hunting scenes and of women with flowing hair and dressed in clothes that couldn’t have been worn seriously during any historical era. There were some grisly-looking African masks and some wooden puppets and a wall-hung china cabinet crammed full of depression glass. Where in the world was Mr. Jimmers? Or more to the point, where was the drink?

  He wandered into the next room, taking the direction that Jimmers had taken. This second room was brighter, having an honest-to-goodness electrical lamp burning in it. He wondered what the point of the candles was. Maybe Mr. Jimmers was the atmospheric type. He remembered this room all at once—the oriental carpets, the confusion of oak furniture, the wooden chandelier.

  There on the wall were three badly framed, collodion photographs, antiques, hanging in a vertical row. He remembered those suddenly, from a class in Pre-Raphaelite photography that he had taken in graduate school. The photos had been taken by John Ruskin—when? 1855? 1860? They were very old, anyway, and, if they were authentic, might be worth a fortune to the right collector. He peered at them, unbelieving. He knew what they were now, although he hadn’t known when he saw them years ago—three of Ruskin’s Tintern Abbey photographs.

  Ten years ago Howard had eyes for nothing but the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he had struggled through Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture and his rambling lectures on the Pre-Raphaelites. He was fascinated at least partly by his knowledge that Michael Graham himself was the great-grandson of James Graham, the Pre-Raphaelite photographer. But there had been more to his study than that. John Ruskin had been a curiously enigmatic figure—a sexually impotent genius surrounded by a cabal of artistic zealots who were strangely loyal to him and to his fierce esthetic desire to embody nature in art.

  Anyway, it made sense that Michael Graham possessed these photographs. He had probably been willed them. Fancy them having hung on the wall all these years, gathering dust. The house was a treasure trove of collectible stuff.

  He was suddenly aware that Mr. Jimmers was regarding him from the doorway. He held a glass in one hand and a wine bottle in the other. Howard would rather it was a beer bottle, but right now that didn’t seem to matter half as much to him as did the letter in his pocket. “I was wondering about the Japanese sketch,” Howard said, getting straight down to business. Mr. Jimmers knew why he had come; he might as well say what he meant.

  “So was I,” Mr. Jimmers said. “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing. Not beyond Mr. Graham’s having offered it to the museum.” He pulled the letter out of his coat and held it up.

  “And you’ve come up after it, have you? After all this time? What compelled you? Was it greed, or something else? I’ve always been a student of compulsion, and I see something in your eyes that intrigues me.”

  Howard gave him a look that wasn’t meant to be intriguing. What was this? Suddenly he was being interrogated. Suspicions were being aired.

  “This thievery nonsense,” Mr. Jimmers continued, “this imaginary glass bauble gone from your pickup truck—that could easily be a clever ruse, couldn’t it? An effort to throw suspicion elsewhere, to make it look as if you, too, were the victim of these thieves.” He nodded shrewdly and then nodded again in the general direction of the wall. “It’s been stolen, hasn’t it?”

  “What? My truck?” Howard took a panicked step toward the door before realizing that Mr. Jimmers wasn’t talking about the truck or the paperweight. He meant the sketch. “Stolen? When? I’ve been a week on the road …” Howard found himself speaking in a tone of denial, explaining himself, laying out an alibi.

  “A week? Driving up from L.A.? A day would have done it. Eleven hours, say. What if, my mysterious stranger, you’ve been skulking around up here for days?” Mr. Jimmers raised his eyebrows theatrically. “I’m
thinking that you might be the one to shed some light on the business of the missing sketch, and perhaps on poor Graham’s murder, too.”

  “Murder!” Howard almost shouted.

  For the space of twenty seconds Jimmers stared at him, letting the idea soak in. Then suddenly he laughed out loud, bending a little at the waist and slapping his knee. Apparently he had only been fooling, playing a little game with the bumpkin from down south. He was suddenly cheerful. He ran his hand through his hair, frazzling it, and then strode toward Howard, holding out the glass, his face stretched into a toad-like grin.

  “Cheer up,” he said. “You can’t trust anyone nowadays, can you? They’ll rob you from east to west if they get a chance. ‘Beard them in their den,’ that’s the byword around here. And if you can’t, then beard them somewhere else.” He winked like a conspirator and pulled at the strap of his suspender, letting it snap against his chest. “Come along upstairs,” he said, taking the bottle and glass with him. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  Howard wondered if he’d ever get a chance at the wine. He was vastly relieved, though. The sketch must be all right, after all. Mr. Jimmers had hidden it upstairs, fearing thieves. The man was a crank, a joker, but he was wily. There was no use getting mad at him or trying to second-guess him. But how about this business about old Graham? Had he been murdered? And if he had, why? Who would bother to murder a ninety-year-old?

  He followed along up the stairs, winding around past a second-story landing and then onto a third, where there was a stained-glass window looking out into the darkness. The window depicted what might be a wall built of salmon-shaped stones, or else a dry river littered with flopping fish. In front of it lay a broken Humpty Dumpty, and racing down out of the wooded hills beyond were two strangely shaped automobiles, pieced together with delicate ribbons of copper foil and jeweled with bits of faceted glass.