“What did Father tell you was in there?”
“A fabulous machine, actually.”
She nodded. “It figures. What else would Mr. Jimmers have in a tin shed? You know what Jimmers told me was in there?”
“What?” asked Howard. The whole business was beginning to look pretty dubious to him.
“The Platonic archetypes.”
“All of them?”
“That’s what he said. He told me that nearly a year ago. Said the shed was packed with them—the archetypal bottle cap and chair and mustache and who-knows-what-all.”
‘The wing-tip shoe.”
“The archetypal corkboard. Everything. He said he couldn’t explain the physics, but it had to do with the sort of infinity you see in double mirrors, like in a barbershop.”
“I bet it does. I bet he did that trick in the parlor with mirrors, too. Uncle Roy called it a ghost machine. He’s pretty certain that it had something to do with the crowd that stole Graham’s car. I promised him I’d have a look at it if I could. Apparently Jimmers won’t let him anywhere near it. Tell me something—is there bad blood between Jimmers and your father?”
“Well, yes.” Sylvia stood looking out over the ocean, her hair blowing back out of her face. She looked as if she were thinking of how to continue, so Howard waited for her, even though he was itching to have a look into the shed before Mr. Jimmers woke up.
“Mr. Jimmers and my mother were lovers.”
“Jimmers?” Howard asked, trying not to sound too incredulous. He tried to consider Mr. Jimmers in that light, but it wasn’t easy.
“Long time ago—shortly before I was born. You know who she wound up marrying, though.”
“You might have been Sylvia Jimmers.”
“Very damned nearly.”
“You wouldn’t have been as pretty.”
Sylvia blushed just a little, which was encouraging. “Actually,” she said, “he wasn’t a bad-looking man when he was young. It wrecked him, though, breaking up with Mother. She’s still guilty about it—more than makes sense, really. I think she likes carrying guilt around like baggage. She wouldn’t know what to do without it. She told me once that I had Mr. Jimmers’ eyes.”
“Really? I think Uncle Roy has them, in a jar in the kitchen. There was a lot of bitterness, then?”
“I suppose so,” Sylvia said. “Nobody hates anybody, though. Same circle of friends and all—everyone winding up in the same place, finally. Mr. Jimmers had a difficult time of it, though. He was hospitalized in San Francisco at least twice for mental disorders. He was brilliant, too. An engineer until he gave it up and began living in a garage in Fort Bragg. Spent all his time working on a flying automobile.”
“He was a gluer,” Howard said flatly. “I’ll bet you.”
“After a fashion, I guess. The compulsion seems to move people differently. Anyway, he was put away, and when he got out he fell in love again. You wouldn’t believe with whom.”
“I give up. Anybody I know?”
“Heloise Lamey.”
“Not old Landlady Lamey!”
“The very one. Lasted something under two months. Father says that she wanted to use Mr. Jimmers to betray Graham, but that he wouldn’t knuckle under and she dropped him after some sort of scandal that resulted in Jimmers’ disgrace. Jimmers disappeared for a time, back down to San Francisco, and then came back and has lived here at Graham’s since. He came and went in the night, I guess, because nobody ever saw him. It was always assumed he was here, just sort of puttering around, watching the stars. Mother kept track of him. I remember coming out here with her once when I was a little girl, and her telling me that he was on a diet of sprouts and milk and vitamins. He even published a newsletter and started an organization, the Flat Constellation Society, but he was closed down for mail fraud. He was innocent, though. He believed it all.”
Howard nodded. “I like that. An authentic crank is innocent of mail fraud, but a fake crank isn’t. There’s a certain logic to the idea.”
Sylvia gave him a look. “You know what I mean.”
“Actually I do. Was this some sort of religion or something?”
“I’ve seen some of his newsletters. They were full of articles about saucers and the hollow earth and especially about machinery. He had a sort of Jungian slant, though—not your usual nut literature, except that he claimed to be in contact with hundred-year-old spirits. He didn’t capitalize common nouns or put everything inside of useless quotation marks or things like that.”
“That’s reassuring,” Howard said. “I don’t mean to be slighting or anything, but it sounds as if he and your father ought to have gotten along fine.”
“Somehow that didn’t happen. They were rivals when they were in love with my mother, and they just carried right on being rivals. They used to play pranks on each other once in a while after it was all settled and over, as if it weren’t really over at all. Mr. Jimmers would have a truckload of manure delivered out to the museum, say, as a joke, and then Father would strike back at him by printing up a fake newsletter from the Flat Constellation Society, full of crazy limericks and psychotic illustrations. Then we moved south, of course, and they pretty much gave it up until we came north again years later. It’s died down again now, but I think that Father is capable of starting it back up anytime.”
“I would have thought that Jimmers was a fan of the ghost museum. What did he think, that Uncle Roy set it up to make fun of him or something?”
“No, not especially.” She hesitated for a moment, pulling her hair back out of her face and tying it into a big knot. “I shouldn’t tell you this, since you’re such a terrible skeptic, but it’s altogether possible that Mr. Jimmers rigged up the entire ghost car phenomenon. That was his crowd of hundred-year-old spirits driving the car. Don’t ask me how. Don’t even ask me how he fooled us with the sketch just now. Right before the museum failed, Father saw a glowing creature walking through the forest after dark. He was just closing up, getting ready to head home. He followed it, but it ran off up one of the lumber roads and disappeared. Father couldn’t keep up with it. He drove straight to the newspaper office, full of excitement, and of course they treated it as a farce. The next morning a cow was reported stolen from a farm near Albion, and that same day it was found, right up behind the museum, sprayed with luminous paint.”
Howard smiled. “Did Uncle Roy paint the cow? I love the idea of that—a glowing ghost cow terrorizing the north coast. That’s good. A canny business move. It would have hauled the tourists in by the busload.”
“Of course he didn’t paint it. If he had, he wouldn’t have been fool enough to let it get away up the lumber road. And he would have made sure a few other people saw it, too. He thinks Jimmers did it, as a prank, to make him look like a fool. It certainly worked that way. The museum was just then going under, and the luminous cow fraud is what broke the camel’s back.”
“I dare say it would. So did Uncle Roy strike back?”
“A couple of times. Nothing very inspired, though—not for a while. Sometime I’ll tell you about his campaigns. I think he was tired of it right then. The cow incident hadn’t turned out to be very funny. Mother got a little bit shortsighted about his capers, too. You could tell that last night. I’m surprised that she hasn’t put a stop to the haunted house. The only thing that I can figure is that she’s more tired out than he is. She can’t keep up with him anymore.”
“She’s fairly long-suffering, isn’t she? In the best way.”
Sylvia nodded. “In some of the best ways. Not always.”
Then after a moment Howard said, “Let’s make a move on the tin shed before Jimmers wakes up.”
“If you stay up here,” Sylvia said, ignoring what he said and growing suddenly serious, “I know just exactly what’s going to happen to you.”
Howard gestured at her, as if to tell her to go on, to reveal his future. “Read my palm,” he said, holding out his hand.
“You’re going to
end up like Father and Mr. Jimmers—spending your life worrying about secret societies and outer space and ancient mysteries. You don’t believe in anything, and what happens when you don’t believe in anything is that you’ve got no defense against all this weird crap when it puts itself in your way.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, passing out mystical pamphlets and selling recipes for sun tea made out of rose quartz and stump water.”
“At least I can take an objective look at it. I’ve got some basis for comparison. You’re utterly ignorant of it, because you’ve never considered it, and when something that doesn’t fit comes along, you don’t begin to know where to put it.”
Howard had the vague feeling that she was right, not because of any particular logic or nonsense about her being objective, but because right at the moment he was faced with a basket full of strange activities that he hadn’t been able to fathom. This business about rivalries and wrecked love affairs put a new coat of paint on the horse, too, or on the cow.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“For worrying about me. I’m not much on secret societies, though. You don’t have to let that trouble you. There’s good reasons for me to stay up here. That’s what I think.”
“Uh-huh.” She looked at him suspiciously and then out at the ocean, lost in thought.
He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, feeling like a teenager in a darkened theater.
“What are you up to?” she asked, looking him in the face.
“Nothing.” He didn’t let her go, though.
She nodded. “For a moment there I thought you were making a pass at me.”
“Maybe I was.”
“Remember that girl who used to live in the house behind you? Jeanelle Shelly. You were out of your mind over her. And how old were you? About six? You started in early.”
“I didn’t ‘start in.’”
She leaned against him, neither of them saying anything. Howard was struck by the feeling that they were still playing at being in love—him making his fumbling advances and her fighting him off with language, making verbal jokes, diffusing things by poking fun at him. Suddenly she looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get back to town,” she said.
“I’m going to look at that shed. I’ll hurry.”
Sylvia nodded, as if it had to be done in order for Howard and her father to rest easy. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “What I’m going to do is head back to the house and keep Mr. Jimmers company. If he wakes up, I’ll give you a holler so that you know he’s up and about.”
“Good.” Howard whirled the string with the key on it around his finger. “It won’t take a minute.”
“Wait,” she said. “Look at this first. It’s been here for years.” She led the way through brown, waist-high weeds toward three lonesome cypress trees growing in a clump halfway up toward the highway. In between the triangle formed by the three trunks sat a little gluer shrine, very much like the one set up in the woods by Graham’s cabin. It was built of old junk again—perfume bottles, bits of ceramic tile, wooden dominoes, an old rusty fishing reel, a brass doorknob, all enclosed within a pair of arched automobile fenders, rusted and pitted to the point that they were almost lacy.
“This has been here for as long as I can remember,” Sylvia said. “They just add new stuff sometimes and rearrange it.”
“There’s one like it back behind your house, out in the woods.”
She nodded. “That one’s new. It appeared the day Father moved him back there. Nobody was supposed to know where he was, but they knew.”
“You wouldn’t believe what I found in that one,” Howard said, “back in the woods. My paperweight, sitting right there in plain view.”
“And you took it back?”
Howard shook his head. “It’ll be safe enough out there. I had the feeling, actually, that it had been put to good use. Don’t ask me why.”
“Not me. It’s funny, though, the weird sorts of things Howard Barton is learning to take on faith. What’s next? Membership in the Flat Constellation Society?”
“Next is the adventure of the tin shed.”
“You’re sure?”
“Too good a chance to pass up,” Howard said, and the two of them tramped back up to the trail again and then along the bluffs toward the rear of the house. Sylvia went around toward the front, disappearing beyond the hillocks of berry vines.
Where the rear wall of the house became one with the cliff, there was no backyard at all, just a narrow shelf of rock far above the sea. High above was the attic window, beyond which Howard had spent the night, sleeping in a chair. He found that he could pick his way along the slender ledge, just as long as he didn’t look down. The stones of the house wall were rough and the mortar was deep-set, so there were handholds. And someone, ages past, had cemented an iron railing into the rocks in order to prevent anyone from going over, but one end of the railing had long ago rusted through, and it dangled uselessly now like a broken tree root a hundred feet over the water. Even a seasoned rock climber would have found it impossible to scramble down the wet and mossy shale to the beach below.
Safely back on the meadow, he hurried past Mr. Jimmers’ Swiss chard toward the tin shed, hiding behind it finally and peering back toward the house. It looked quiet enough. There was the chance that Mr. Jimmers was simply being subtle again, that he hadn’t fallen asleep at all but was giving Howard a chance to betray himself, but Sylvia would have had time to get back in by now, and she hadn’t hollered …
He crouched at the corner of the shed and took one last look. Then, staying low, he scuttled crabwise to the locked sliding doors. The key slid straight in and the lock opened easily, as if it were slick with graphite. In a moment he had slipped the padlock out of its holes in the door handles. He yanked on one of the doors, and it let out a screech of rusty protest, jiggling along its bent track just a few inches and then jamming tight. He pushed on the opposite door, along the bottom edge, wishing he had a can of sewing-machine oil to spray into the track and expecting momentarily to hear Sylvia yell.
The door jerked along a bit farther, and suddenly the opening was wide enough to slide through. He took the padlock with him, remembering his adventure at the spirit museum, and wafered himself through, easing the door shut again at once, all but about an inch so as to have some light to see by.
There was light leaking in under the eaves, too, enough to reveal Mr. Jimmers’ device. It was built of wood and brass and copper and leather—a product, pretty clearly, of the Victorian age, of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It had foot pedals and an organ pipe apparatus alongside a broad, spoked wheel, as if from an oversize sewing machine. A wavy-looking, fishbowl lens was set in the top. The whole thing had a sort of Rumplestiltskin fairy tale magic to it, a backwoods cobbler’s notion of what a “machine” must look like. There was a bit of writing carved into the wooden superstructure, which read simply, “St. George’s Guild, 1872.”
John Ruskin again, Howard said to himself, rolling back onto his heels and squinting in concentration. Knowing that it was Ruskin who had established the unsuccessful St. George’s Guild didn’t tell him anything at all about the machine. But the name of the guild itself was powerfully suggestive to him, and abruptly he thought of Sylvia and his just-ended conversation with her. How was it that she saw him and his desires so much more clearly than he saw them himself?
Here he was, hiding out in Mr. Jimmers’ tin shed, turning quite possibly innocent artifacts into fourteen-carat mysteries in the spirit of Jimmers and Uncle Roy. He was infected, and no doubt about it. Knowing that didn’t help at all either, though. And with an almost helpless curiosity he reached across and gave the brass wheel a spin. The wheel revolved effortlessly, frictionlessly, as though now that it was put into motion, it wouldn’t be inclined to stop.
Suddenly there was a shift in the quality of light in the shed. A dim glow emanated from the lens atop the machin
e. Howard spun the wheel faster and the light brightened. The wheel whirred on its bearings, and Howard was momentarily torn between trying to stop it, to end whatever was happening before it had gone too far, and to see it through, into the heart of some deeper mystery. He let it spin. There was the sound of bees humming, which sorted itself out into the low babble of voices like a roomful of mechanical men talking excitedly.
A pale fog materialized in the air over the machine. Particles whirled in it like dust motes. Vibrations shook the shed, and the machine, rocking on its springs, began to bang against the tin wall with a slow, rhythmic pounding, like the spinning of an out-of-balance washing machine. The noise and the spinning made him dizzy, and he was aware suddenly that there were stars on the ceiling over his head, pale and diffuse like stars at twilight.
The mist from the machine congealed into a spinning blur like a tiny human head, and there was the loud sound of footsteps walking down a long wooden corridor. The misty face developed features now, and Howard’s curiosity turned abruptly to fear. The thing blinked, as if vaguely surprised to find itself there. Then its mouth began to work, like the mouth of a ruminating cow. The machine banged away at the wall of the shed, easily loud enough to awaken Jimmers and throw him into a panic. The babble of voices combined to form a single voice, deep and commanding, but mostly lost in the banging and whirring of the machine.
Howard heard his name shouted, and he reached down to stop the turning of the wheel, which thumped against his hand, still spinning heavily and freely. There was a body forming beneath the head now. Howard could see a waistcoat, a dangling pocket-watch chain. The ghostly shape was growing, too, exactly as if it were approaching him from across a vast distance. There was the sound of wind rushing through a canyon and the flapping of bird wings and of pages rustling in an old book. Then, as the wheel slowed, the image began to fade and the light dimmed. The voice ran down until it was nothing but a tired whisper and then the sound of bees buzzing again, and Howard slumped back onto a gunnysack full of mulch, realizing that he was faint with the stuffiness of the shed, with the heavy, dusty air.
The Paper Grail Page 18
