The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “Why would he think it was you?” Howard asked.

  “Because they were driving Bennet’s truck.”

  18

  GRAHAM didn’t sleep much anymore. Sleep didn’t come easy to him, and there didn’t seem to be any great need of it, anyway. The hours of darkness dragged along. He couldn’t fish at night. Getting down the hill to the pond was treacherous enough in daylight. A couple of times he had sat in his chair on the front porch in the middle of the night, watching the moon rise over the trees. But it was cold, and the cold tired him out these days. Sometimes at night he read—the Bible, mostly, a large-print edition he’d had to switch to a few years back.

  How many years? He couldn’t remember now. The years ran together like watercolor paints, and his memories surfaced in confused order, some days clear, some days dull. Most often at night he simply lay awake, letting his mind drift. In the morning either Edith or Sylvia would arrive with his breakfast and coffee. Midmorning he would work his garden, which, although it was new, seemed to be blighted somehow. He had his suspicions, but there was little he could do about it except work. There wasn’t a lot of sun out in the forest there, especially not in the fall. But the cabin and garden were in a clearing, and he ought to have had some luck with leafy things, with lettuce and cabbage, even though there wasn’t enough of the season left for the vegetables to mature. In a month it would be too cold.

  But this trouble wasn’t weather; it was some kind of rot that came up through the soil, which seemed always to be dry, no matter how often he watered it. Nothing at all had grown well for him for a couple of years now. He had expected most of this. He knew it would be so at the end—all the dust and the dying. It was the strange blight, the rot, the tainting and withering of the leaves that he wondered about. They had a bad smell to them, too, even while they were still mostly green.

  This morning in particular he felt heavy and tired. He had awakened twice in the night with chest pains, but they’d subsided now. He had found himself awake a third time. He was out of doors, standing in the moonlit garden and wearing his long underwear and his hat. He couldn’t remember having gotten out of bed. The dark woods stretched away on all sides, and in the clearing overhead the stars shined thick and bright like a thousand promises. He had his walking stick with him, and with it he was drawing wavy-edged circles in the dirt, like clouds in the sky.

  He was filled with the vague notion that he had been dreaming the whole time he was sketching with the stick—a dream about salmon schooling in deep ocean water. And one of the fish, responding to some sort of deep and primitive calling, had turned landward, swimming lazily toward the river mouth where Graham had sat fishing with his pole and line. Someone had stood behind him in the dream, watching his back—a shadowy presence that had begun to fade, along with the dream itself, almost as soon as he hooked his fish.

  IT was just after three A.M. The living room clock had tolled, and in another hour Uncle Roy would be in to wake him. It wasn’t just the looming adventure of stealing back Mr. Jimmers’ shed that kept Howard awake. He sometimes worried about small things in the early morning—unpaid bills, long-avoided errands, elusive rice paper sketches which were pretty clearly not what they appeared to be. At home he got around the problem of insomnia by moving out to the living room couch—the change alone was usually enough to put him back to sleep. But he couldn’t do that here. It would imply that his bed wasn’t comfortable, and Aunt Edith would worry herself ragged over it.

  The bed wasn’t worth a damn, though. It sagged in the middle, and if Howard slept on his stomach for more than two minutes, he woke up in the morning with a backache that threatened to keep him in a chair. He lay on the very edge now, where the rail of the bed frame stiffened the mattress a little, and thought of all the things that he ought to be doing with his time but wasn’t. Tomorrow he would clean up the rest of that pile of barn lumber, maybe steal a half dozen slats to throw under his mattress.

  He had meant to be on vacation here, to sort things out, to discover whether his feelings for Sylvia had changed any. Well, they hadn’t. That much was clear. It had taken him exactly two days to go nuts over her. Meanwhile she pretty clearly had found in him another man who needed looking after, like Uncle Roy—a slightly daft brother who had appeared out of the south, unable to keep out of trouble. And if he did stay in Fort Bragg, if he didn’t return to his job at the museum, what would he do? He could move in with Uncle Roy, of course, and be a burden. When his money was gone, he could hustle food stamps, maybe get a job at the mill and get laid off in the rainy season.

  The thought of going home left him empty, though. There wasn’t a single thing to entice him back down to southern California except a scattering of friends, who seemed to be more scattered with each succeeding year. His coming north had cut some sort of mooring line, and he was drifting. It was time to put on some sail, to break out the compass and the charts. He looked at the clock for the tenth time. It wasn’t even three-fifteen. The big old house was cold, and he pulled the blankets up around his neck and listened to the wind.

  He began counting backward from one hundred. Sheep were too complicated. After a while his troubles scurried off to the back of his mind, where they winked and waved at him, not quite out of sight. He could see them back there in the shadows, as dream images now, and his counting backward faltered at around forty-five. He started again, but soon slowed and then stopped, and he found himself dreaming about a ship that had gone aground on a rocky shore. He was on the beach, ankle-deep in the rising tide, thinking that there was something on board that he needed or that he wanted. He was a castaway, thinking to salvage rope and timber and live chickens from the staved-in ship. He turned and faced the shore, and above him on the cliff top was the stone house, dark but for a single light in the attic window.

  He could see the silhouette of someone sitting in one of the Morris chairs, reading a book, and he knew all at once that it was him, at home there, whiling away a peaceful evening, impossibly content. A dream wind blew off the ocean, into the dark mouth of the passage beneath the cliffs, and when he turned around again to face the sea, there was no longer a ship on the rocks but the old Studebaker instead, a ruined hulk sitting just above the tide.

  He clambered across the rocks toward it, his pant legs rolled to the knees, the ocean neither cold nor warm nor even particularly wet. The car’s door hung open, its top hinge broken, the musty upholstery smelling of seaweed and barnacles. He climbed in behind the wheel, grasping the Lucite steering wheel knob and thinking that if only he had a chart he would pilot the car out through the scattered reefs and into the open sea.

  Looking deep into the Lucite ball, he was convinced that something was drawn or written way down in there, floating in the depths like clouds in a fishbowl sky. He could make them out now—the constellation of images from the rice paper sketch. Then he perceived them to be words and not drawings at all—a message scrawled in the shaky handwriting of someone old and frail. “Look in the glove box,” it read, and with a feeling of immense anticipation and reluctance both, he reached across and punched the button. The glove-box door banged open so heavily that the entire car tilted sideways, farther and farther until he began to slide toward the open passenger door, looking out and down toward the now-distant ocean, scrabbling to hold on to the rotten old upholstery and knowing that he couldn’t, that he would fall.

  Howard sat up in bed, having waked himself up with a cut-off scream. The gauzy remnant of an idea was fading at the back of his mind. He had the certainty that it was an important idea, and he trapped the tail end of it and fixed it there so that he could study it when he had a chance. There was something in his waking, as horrible as it was, that left him almost satisfied with things. Somehow the worries that had plagued him an hour ago had evaporated. He felt distinctly as if something were pending—that somehow, in some inconceivable way, his course was being partly charted for him. There was a knocking on the door just then, low and secretive. “Ho
ward!” a voice called. It was Uncle Roy.

  A half hour later the three of them, Howard, Bennet, and Uncle Roy, sat in the station wagon, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. The night was dark and silent except for the crash of waves and the sounds of chewing and sipping. They were parked on Elm, on the ocean side of the highway, down near the far end of the Georgia-Pacific yard. Hundreds of acres of stacked lumber lay drying in the night wind, fenced off with chain link and barbed wire from Glass Beach and from the weedy bluffs above it that stretched all the way out to the highway.

  Directly across from them sat a white, flat-roofed wooden warehouse that must have been forty yards long and without a window in the entire length of it. There was nothing around it but weeds and berry vines growing right up against the sides. Around behind was a door with a small transom window above. No light showed through it. A single car was parked beside the door, hidden from the street—the red Camaro that had been at Jimmers’ house yesterday afternoon.

  According to Uncle Roy, Mrs. Lamey owned the warehouse, which was empty, he was willing to bet, of everything except Bennet’s truck with Mr. Jimmers’ shed on it, which they were going to steal back before the sun rose or know the reason why. Howard realized that he was in the company of committed men. What did that mean? he wondered. Probably that he’d be committed himself before the sun rose—to a cell in the county jail.

  So now his vacation had taken a serious turn. His adventures at Mr. Jimmers’ place had been dangerous enough, but compared to this they hadn’t been anything but play—guns or no guns. Here he was setting out to break into a warehouse, to steal back Mr. Jimmers’ shed, to steal a car, for God’s sake. And what for? For Sylvia? Well, hardly. For Uncle Roy? Not entirely. What he ought to have done was try to talk his uncle out of this venture. Aunt Edith would think he was a hero if he could squash it. This was called aiding and abetting. He was going to help Uncle Roy go to jail, too, and the whole haunted house caper would be in the trash can. Sylvia would kill him.

  Uncle Roy patted him on the knee, as if he sensed that Howard was uneasy. “Want to wait it out down at Winchell’s?” He said it matter-of-factly, as if there were no shame in it.

  Howard shook his head. “It’ll take both of you to get the truck out of there.”

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with it,” Bennet said, pitching half of a doughnut back into the white paper sack. “This ain’t convenience we’re talking about. Nobody owes anyone any favors. There won’t be no turning back when you start up that car engine.”

  Howard was silent, but not because he was thinking of turning back. He couldn’t “wait it out at Winchell’s.” He was either in or out. There wasn’t any in between—no choosing not to choose. He couldn’t be a fair-weather conspirator. And somehow, sitting out there in the old station wagon, getting set to strike a blow against the enemy, he felt for the first time in months, years maybe, that something mattered. It was as if one of his eyes had been shut for a long time, and now it was open, and things had dimension to them at last. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a pair of thin goatskin gloves, and put them on, flexing his fingers. Then he pulled his stocking cap down over his face, adjusting it and looking out through the eyeholes.

  “God almighty,” Uncle Roy said. “You look like an IRA assassin. If the cops come anywhere near you, ditch the mask and the gloves both. They’ll shoot you on sight looking like that. You’ve got the name of the foreman up at the yard?”

  “Jack MacDonald.”

  “That’s it. He’s a good man. You’ll be safe there. He’s ready with an alibi, but I don’t want to make him lie if we don’t have to. He’ll say that he sent you down to the Gas ’n’ Grub for a couple of boxes of crumb doughnuts. He gave you three dollars.”

  “In my front pocket,” Howard said.

  “You need to look at his picture again?”

  “Nope.”

  “What is it you do at the mill?”

  “Run a stroke sander.”

  Uncle Roy was silent for a moment. “In general, don’t cross the highway if you don’t have to. Leave the car at the other side of the train yard and look for us at the old library building. Make sure the bastard chases you, though. He won’t think it’s us making a move on the shed, not this quick, so it ought to be possible to draw him away for a couple of blocks or so. Farther if you can. Play hide-and-seek with him. We just need enough time to break in there and get the door open. My hunch is that he’ll come back finally looking to call the old lady on the telephone. We’ll have cut the wire, and he’ll have to head down to Gas ’n’ Grub to use the pay phone.”

  He fell silent again. The time to talk was past. They had gone through it a half dozen times, and all of them knew that the plan was full of optimism.

  “Let’s go,” Howard said, opening the door and sliding out. He eased the door shut. Uncle Roy fired up the engine and backed away a half a block down Elm, where they would wait. Howard loped across into the weeds, patting the bulge in his coat pocket where two cherry bombs lay along with a throwaway lighter.

  The streets were abandoned and the nearby houses dark. A car sailed past down the highway, bound for points north, but there was no one out and about except Howard, the night wind, and the two in the wagon. Aside from the cold, conditions were nearly perfect. He tucked his hands into his armpits to try to warm them through the gloves.

  The Camaro was unlocked, which was a relief, since he wouldn’t have to break a window. And thank heaven there wasn’t any car alarm. That would have cooked his goose, although it would have made the whole theft more grand. It would have been wonderful if the keys were in the ignition, but they weren’t. Trust to a thief to hold on to his keys. Howard would have to start it up without them, which was just fine.

  He listened first at the closed back door of the warehouse and heard nothing. It was entirely possible that there was nobody at all inside, in which case the elaborate distraction was a noisy waste of time. But surely the car wouldn’t be there if no one was guarding the place. He stepped out away from the building, checking the street for traffic one last time. There was nothing at all but nighttime silence—no pedestrians, no prowl cars. He waved once at the distant station wagon, and the headlights blinked the go-ahead signal.

  Then he climbed into the car, leaving the door ajar. He found the ignition wires under the dash, and, with one last quick look around, yanked the wires out in a clump, mashing the bare ends together in order to jump out the ignition. The motor turned over and he pumped the gas lightly.

  He let it idle for a moment, watching the door for signs of stirring inside the warehouse. Then he shifted down into reverse, checked the emergency brake, and backed away from the building, turning out again toward the street so as to have a straight run for it. He raced the engine a couple of times again, hoping that whoever was inside would simply hear it and come out. He considered honking the horn, but it was such an idiotically doubtful thing for a car thief to do that he gave the notion up at once.

  The cherry bombs, though, would take his man by surprise. He would wake up and hear the car engine and think it was backfiring, and he would wonder who in the hell was fooling around out back. He would take a cautious look out the door and discover in horror that … Howard wound down the window, still watching the door, ready to roll out of there. He pulled out both cherry bombs and held them side by side in his left hand, bending the fuses away from each other. Then, holding them out the open window, he flipped the lighter on with his free hand, lit both fuses, and pitched them toward the door, rolling up the window furiously.

  They exploded one right after the other, slamming out like gunshots. A second passed. A light flipped on inside and then off again, and the door opened. Howard raced the engine a couple of times before hurtling out toward Elm Street, throwing up a rooster tail of dust and gravel. He waited for an instant at the edge of the street, giving his man time to make sense of things. Howard could see him through the dust,
outside now, hopping on one foot while he pulled a shoe on. Howard jammed his foot down on the brake and accelerator both, then eased off on the brake, spinning the tires as if stuck in a hole. The man ducked back in for as long as it took for him to snatch out a coat, and then he was out through the open door again, pulling it shut behind him and running fast across the weeds, trying to catch up with Howard before the car took off again.

  Howard bit his lip, waiting for the last moment, watching him come. In the moonlight, the man’s face was wild with loathing. It was the man who had worn the fright wig out at Jimmers’. He had the same black T-shirt on, and his build was right. He ran at a gallop, one leg working harder than the other, and he wrestled with the coat in his hands as if he were groping after something. Howard spun the tires once more, slammed the transmission into reverse, and backed up a wild ten feet, nearly running the man over before shifting back into drive, the car lunging down onto Elm Street.

  He headed straight toward the ocean, bouncing up onto the dirt road that ran out to Glass Beach. The road went nowhere—dead-ended two hundred yards down. Howard counted on the man’s knowing that and following along behind, thinking that Howard was a nitwit, that he knew nothing of the local streets. He had to draw the man away, down the block, around the corner, out onto the bluffs, anywhere.

  In the side mirror Howard could see the station wagon moving without lights. It angled across and disappeared from view behind the front of the warehouse. His man was still following, running wildly after the fleeing Camaro, which rocked from side to side down the dirt road, throwing Howard back and forth on the seat. The man had dropped his coat, but he held something in his hand now—a gun.