The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  Howard tensed, ready for him as the man took another step forward, gesturing with both hands and shaking his head as if trying to make Howard see reason. Howard didn’t look like a killer; that was the problem. The man could smell it, like a wolf. Howard didn’t have the instinct, and there was no way in the world to hide it. He should have made his move long ago; now it was clear he had no move to make.

  “Give me the sketch,” Howard said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Give me the sketch. I want it. I’m taking it.”

  The man glanced hesitantly over his shoulder, but there was still no sight of his companion. “Sure,” he said then. “Aim the damned gun at the floor, though. It’s not worth killing anyone over. What are you? Friend of the old man downstairs?”

  “To hell with the old man downstairs. He’s out cold. He’ll think you have it, won’t he?”

  The man grinned. “Smart,” he said. He leaned forward, staring into Howard’s face. Howard stepped back again, tightening his grip on the trigger and slide. Sweat ran down his forehead, and he told himself that it wasn’t supposed to have gone this far. People were supposed to live in terror of shotguns. He pushed the stock tighter against his stomach, clicked the safety catch forward with his thumb, and jacked the shell into the chamber. There was a throaty kshlack-shlack as the gun levered away from his stomach with the force of the slide slamming forward.

  And then, as if in a cartoon, without any warning at all, the stock simply fell loose from the rest of the gun, dangling for a moment on the end of the pulled-loose duct tape before clattering to the hallway floor.

  At the sound of the gun being chambered, the man in the wig had jumped backward toward the bedroom door, which right then was slamming shut. The door clipped him in the back, and he sat down hard, knocking it open again. Howard got a brief glimpse of someone’s backside, crawling in behind a pulled-apart bed. Howard gripped the end of the barrel in his right hand, threw his arm back, and flung the useless piece of steel wildly at the open door. The man in the wig ducked against the doorjamb, throwing his hand across his face.

  The piece of metal whirled like a boomerang, slamming into the plaster wall three feet past the open door. By then Howard was running hard, back down the hallway. He heard the steel thud against the wall and then the explosion of the gun going off. He pitched forward, onto his chest on the floor, and slid out onto the landing. Chunks of plaster clattered against the walls behind him, peppering the back of his neck, and something sharp hit his hand and bounced away, leaving a bleeding cut—a fragment of green bottle glass. With a hasty glance behind him, he was up and running before he had time to think about it.

  Howard leaped up the stairs two at a time, toward the attic, thinking that he should have gone downstairs instead, but at the same time wanting to lead them away from Mr. Jimmers for reasons that he didn’t bother to think about until it was too late to change his mind. He heard a shuffling behind him and the thud of a knee hitting the stairs when one of them fell. Then he pushed through the attic door, slamming it shut and bolting it from the inside. He fastened the little panel window shut, too, before he began hauling furniture across in front of the door, panting and gasping and yanking on the chairs and the library table. He threw his shoulder behind a stack of lawyer’s bookcases and inched the heavy cases across the floor, too. Then he heard the outside bolt snap shut.

  He was locked in. For fifteen seconds he had wanted desperately to be locked in, but now that he was, from the outside … He stood up and leaned against the stack of bookcases, trying to breathe evenly. He forced himself to think, willed himself to calm down. He was struck with the blind ignorance of what he had done—capering around with the ludicrous gun, nearly killing someone, himself maybe, out of stupidity. He should have got Mr. Jimmers out of there while the others were occupied upstairs. They wouldn’t have guessed anything fishy was going on below. He could have helped Jimmers to the truck and been gone in minutes, and to hell with them—unless they had come down the stairs and surprised him at it …

  He made himself stop. He had tried, anyway. Dwelling on mistakes wouldn’t help now. When this sort of thing happened in the future, he would remember. Live and learn. If nothing else, at least these people would get the impression that Howard wanted the sketch as badly as they did. He had brought a gun along, after all.

  The quilt still lay on the floor. There was the casement window. Hadn’t he just determined that very afternoon that a man might risk climbing down? If the cloth ripped, of course, or if he couldn’t hold on … well … there was precious little chance that he would fall straight down onto the little rocky ledge, merely to break his ankle, say. What he would do is tumble a hundred-odd feet down onto wave-washed rocks.

  They were talking outside the door now, low and indistinct, arguing. The wigged man was accusing the other man of something—chewing him out for having tried to shut the door, probably, back in the hallway. Soon they would unbolt Howard’s door and force their way in. They would deal with him as they had dealt with Jimmers. Probably worse. He was in the way, a dangerous obstacle, and competition to boot. That’s what they were doing outside—deciding his fate.

  He thought again about the quilt and the window. He picked the quilt up and tugged on it, unable to rip it. It was strong enough, certainly, and there was a scissors in the library table drawer. He could cut the quilt into six strips, tie them together. That ought to give him what?—thirty-five feet or so. He’d have to make it eight strips. What would he fasten the whole mess to? Something that couldn’t be jerked through the window, that wouldn’t come apart. The library table would do in a pinch. It would jam up against the open window, and its heavy oak legs would hold up fine.

  It would work. He had determined that. But there was no way on earth that he wanted to try it.

  The two outside were silent now, or had left. He hoped to heaven that there were other rooms for them to rout through, or that better yet they’d made their getaway, content to save the attic for another day. It was possible, too, that they had gone downstairs to murder Jimmers, or to rough him up, to make him talk.

  Thinking hard, Howard strode across to the closet and threw the door open. He was struck again with the strange construction of the thing, built, as it was, into an odd little bit of outward-curving wall. The strangeness of it seemed to signify now, far more than it had two nights ago, when he was comfortable in his chair and eating a sandwich and there were no potential murderers lurking outside the door.

  Clearly the rounded bit of closet wall that faced him now stood adjacent to the stairwell. He thought abruptly of the Humpty Dumpty window. What had been the point of that fishy section of window and wall? It had needlessly narrowed the stairs. Perhaps that window let out onto a room or passage behind the closet, a hidden turret. Clearly it was all part of the same secret structure. The closet itself wasn’t more than twenty-four inches deep. The curve of the wall argued that the turret it formed was something much larger—eight or ten feet across.

  He couldn’t recall having seen it from outside the house, from the vantage point of Jimmers’ garden or from where the back of the house was knit into the cliff. It was a secret room of some sort, and no doubt about it.

  At once he began pulling stuff out of the closet—a boxed telescope, portable file boxes, dusty books, paper bags filled with receipts and scraps, cardboard boxes with the tops woven shut. He pushed it all behind him into the room, working frantically, warming up again with the exertion. He scooped out the last of the litter on the floor, so that the closet was utterly empty, and he stood staring at the walls of the thing, catching his breath.

  There was nothing to see. It was just a closet, set in a round piece of wall. It was plaster on the inside, just like any other closet—dirty plaster streaked yellow with water stains.

  If there was a secret passage of some sort beyond it, it must be accessible from some other part of the house. What was on the opposite side this far upstairs, thoug
h? Nothing. There was only the one attic room. He was certain of that.

  Except there was the exterior door, the one you could see from Jimmers’ garden, the one in his dreams that opened out onto nothing, with the broken stone stairs leading almost to it. That was it. There was a door, all right, and so arguably there was a secret passage, and it was an even bet that this was it.

  But what good did it do him? Even if he was free and standing down on the meadow, without a twenty- or thirty-foot ladder he could get nowhere near the door, which was padlocked, anyway, just like Jimmers’ shed—probably the same key.

  He stepped out into the room again. The exertion had calmed him down. It was the quilt, apparently, or nothing.

  Resolutely he found the scissors and hacked away, cutting as straight and clean as he could along the vertical seams and wondering whether the stitching would hold a man’s weight or would ravel into threads when he was halfway to the ground. Cotton batting fluffed out from between the panels, deflating them, making the strips look flimsy and weak. He would roll it up and knot it in order to fake a little extra strength. He went on with it, growing more and more doubtful, each passing minute increasing his anxiety, the silence outside the room becoming more ominous.

  When the quilt was cut apart, he stood up and stepped across to the casement, throwing it open, steeling himself before looking down. The tide was low, and the hulk of the Studebaker sat high and dry. The kelp-covered reefs were half dried out in the afternoon sunlight. There was a movement below, on the edge of Jimmers’ garden. It was the man with the wig, working feverishly, digging up the Swiss chard with a spade.

  Damn it, Howard thought. That might be it. What if they’d tortured Jimmers and he’d confessed to burying the sketch and covering the thing’s grave with vegetables? If that was the case, maybe they would take it and leave. Maybe not. One way or another, Howard would be spotted in a second Rapunzeling down the wall. They would wait below and just give him a gentle push with the end of the shovel when he touched down.

  The scissored-up quilt looked like hell to him, lying there on the floor. He stared at the closet again, thinking, for some strange reason, of Mrs. Lamey and her dyed flowers. What was it? The closet still intrigued him, still drew him. He shoved into it again, rapping against the plaster this time, knocking methodically. It echoed thin and hollow beneath his knuckles.

  15

  IT was a piece of wallboard is what it was, thin and flimsy, not plaster at all. Dollars to doughnuts it wasn’t original. Graham wouldn’t have had anything to do with wallboard back when he built the place, even if it had been available, which it probably hadn’t been. Shoving his face nearly against it, Howard could smell the musty, dried mud odor of the recently applied joint compound and the chemical odor of new paint. There were brush marks where someone had painted-on the stains, probably with rusty water. It might have been done yesterday, last week. Whoever it was—Jimmers, probably—had made a thorough job of it.

  Howard knocked again, listening close—rap, rap, rap along the entire length of the thin wall. There were studs at either end, with three feet of unsupported wallboard in the center, pretty clearly where a door used to be. It pressed inward half an inch when he pushed on it.

  He leaned back, levered himself against the door frame, and kicked the wall with the bottom of his foot, which chunked through the wall, tearing open a ten-inch ragged hole. He kicked it again, widening the gap, and then grabbed the wallboard with his hands, slamming it back and forth, breaking out chunks and throwing them back through, into the dim antechamber beyond.

  Along with the chalky smell of drywall dust, he could smell ocean air drifting up out of the passage. It led to the sea, then, probably to the base of the cliff, a cave through the bluffs themselves. Too bad about Mr. Jimmers’ quilt; there had been no point in scissoring it up. Howard had become a sort of thorn in the poor man’s side. But if he wanted to make up for any of the trouble he had caused Jimmers, then Howard had to hurry, to get back to Jimmers before it was too late to help him.

  For a moment he hesitated, though. To do it right, a sort of Huckleberry Finn job, he should knot up the quilt strips, anchor them to the table, and drop the end out the window. That would throw them off the scent. He should repack the closet, too, and then shut the door behind him when he made his escape. They would take one look into the room, see the tied-together quilt, rush to the window, figure things out wrong, and charge back down to see if he was outside somewhere, skulking around.

  Either that or they would suppose it was all fakery and that he was hiding in the closet. They’d find the passage and be after him, if they cared about him, and he would have wasted twenty minutes screwing around being clever.

  Without waiting another instant he bent through the hole, stepping on the pieces of drywall in his stocking feet, nearly slipping on them as they skidded across the floor. Jimmers’ hankering after Japanese customs had begun to look something worse than silly, and Howard made a vow never again to give up his shoes. Still, socks were better than nothing, even if they had holes in the toes.

  Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, Howard could see that the tiny chamber beyond the closet was nothing more than the top landing of a spiral stairway. The Humpty Dumpty window hung in the wall adjacent to the first step. A diffused glow showed through it from the hallway beyond, and Howard could see the figure of a man just then moving across the window like a shadow—probably one of the two intruders, sneaking up the stairs. It might have been Jimmers, of course, free and coming to let him out, but Howard didn’t think so. It was more likely that they had found nothing but Swiss chard in the garden and were looking to have a go at the attic. The bolted, barricaded door would hold them up, but not for more than a few moments.

  Howard started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, hanging on to the handrail, which was an iron pipe that snaked down into the blackness. Within eight steps the night had closed around him and he couldn’t see anything at all. He gripped the cold railing, stepping down slowly now, thinking of the ruined stairs that led to the high doorway above the meadow. What if someone, Jimmers, had done something to these stairs, too?—pried two or three of them apart with a crowbar so that a person coming along in the blind darkness would …

  But that wouldn’t make sense. Clearly the passage had been used, and recently, too. And someone had gone to some little trouble to hide the fact while sealing the passage off altogether. Why? Howard couldn’t say, and didn’t have time to consider the problem. There was a sudden, muffled banging from above, and then the sound of a voice shouting—the thieves yelling through the attic door, probably. He couldn’t make out the words. The shouting stopped and the banging started back up, a loud, slow thump, thump, thump now, as if they were slamming at the door with something heavy, trying to batter it open.

  Abruptly he found himself at the bottom of the stairs. Cool, wet air drifted up from below. The smell of the sea was stronger now, mixed with the musty odor of stone and decayed kelp, and he could hear the murmur of breaking waves echoing up through the tunnel. It was still utterly dark, and he felt around himself before going on, running his hands across rough timbers like in a shored-up mine. After a few feet of level ground, the passage ran off steeply again, with wooden steps set right into the dirt and rock. Howard followed them down, gripping the corroded pipe, listening for sound from above.

  He just barely heard another distant thump and then heavy scraping—the table and chairs shoving away in front of the door. So now they knew. They could see the closet door standing open, the jagged hole torn in the wallboard. They would see the cut-up quilt, too, and know that he hadn’t gone straight out, that he had wasted time first, that they were right behind him.

  They wanted the sketch, though; they didn’t want him. If they had already found it, they would profit by getting it out of there, simply taking off. He stopped and held his breath, cocking his head. Someone had come through the wall. He could hear them scrabbling a
round on the loose pieces of drywall. It was deadly silent for a moment except for the noise of his own heart beating, and then there sounded the thumping of shoe soles on the wooden stairs.

  He hurried on, down into the ground, brushing the air above his head to try to find the tunnel ceiling. There was nothing, empty air. And then suddenly the steps ended, and his stocking feet slid on gravel, shooting out from under him so that he sat down hard on the ground, scraping the palms of his hands, his breath whumping out of his lungs. He pushed himself up, dusting the gravel off his hands, and took off again. He went carefully now, stepping gingerly on rocks, feeling his way, trying to hurry along in a sort of high-stepping caper. If he wore shoes, he might have run—the two behind him surely would—but the gravelly tunnel was too rough.

  There they were. Howard heard a scuffling and a brief snatch of cutoff talk. In the echoing darkness of the tunnel it sounded like the disembodied voice of a ghost. There was no way to tell where it had come from. Thank God for the railing; he had something to hold on to, at least, and unless Jimmers was simply crazy, there ought to be nothing obstructing the passage at the bottom end, no boulders to stub his toes on. The sound of the ocean, clear and close now, argued against any sort of door across the tunnel mouth.

  The passage leveled suddenly and he saw ahead of him a moonlit section of sand and rocks. He stepped outside, into the evening air, the sand beneath his feet crusty and damp from the receded tide. The cold sea wind blew straight onshore, into his face. The sun was low over the ocean now, almost swallowed up. A wall of tumbled rock on his right cut off the view of the smashed Studebaker and made it impossible for anyone to see the tunnel mouth from the meadow above. To his left the bluffs rose straight up toward the sky, loose and scrubby—impossible to climb. He might have been able to scrabble up a ways in order to drop a rock on someone’s head, but he wasn’t in a rock-dropping mood.