The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “You can’t talk if I can’t,” she whispered to him, and put one hand gently over his mouth while the other hand worked deftly at his belt. There was no sound after that except breathing and the swish of fabric on skin and of the rising and falling of the ocean. The world around them, outside of the wrecked car, ceased to exist, and the whole notion of time disappeared with it.

  He lay beneath her finally, gazing through the rear window at the afternoon sky. They didn’t need to hurry. There was still time. And even if there wasn’t, even if Mr. Jimmers was right then descending the coast road with his groceries, so what? The world had changed in the last hour, and couldn’t be changed back.

  He wondered if Sylvia was asleep now. She was breathing softly and regularly, like a contented cat. He had found her and the sketch both, in one languorous afternoon. The museum and his life down south were fast becoming little more than foggy memories, like the hazy recollection of a past life.

  Puffy little clouds drifted slowly through the deep sky. Still half drugged with the smell of her hair and skin, he watched the clouds curiously through the rear window. There was something about them, about their shapes, that was deeply mysterious, like the five sketches on the paper in the copper case, like the suggestive pattern of a constellation in the night sky.

  Two of the clouds floated above the three, all of them slipping slowly together until, for the space of a long moment, they formed the exact pattern of the clouds in his dream.

  Startled, he half sat up, nearly tumbling Sylvia off onto the floor.

  “Hey,” she said. “You’re pretty romantic.”

  “Sorry. I must have fallen asleep.” He watched the clouds drift apart, his heart hammering.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, brushing back her hair and looking at his face.

  “Nothing. I thought for a moment that I was dreaming, that I dreamed this whole thing …”

  “What thing, exactly?” She grinned at him, hooking her hands over his shoulders and pulling herself up along him so that her breasts brushed his chest. “This thing? You’re not dreaming,” she said, “I guarantee it.”

  He moved toward the edge of the seat so that they could lie side by side, and she kissed him on the lips and cheeks, running her left hand up and down his chest, kissing his neck, shutting his lips before he could say something about Mr. Jimmers’ return, about the hour. And suddenly once again there was nothing to say, and time disappeared as they shifted positions, kneeling on their clothes, their body heat warming the car as the sun descended the sky.

  “Time to be practical, maybe,” Sylvia said later, as they lay quietly together again at last. “How come you wear two pairs socks?”

  “My feet get cold in the winter, especially when I’m in the same house as Artemis Jimmers.” He took his socks from her and pulled them on, one inside the other. Now that they had decided to go, to get on with their lives, he was impatient to dress and be out of there. He felt both conspicuous and late. “What time is it?”

  “Only four,” she said. “No rush. I told you he probably wouldn’t be home until after dark.”

  “Famous last words.” He poked his head out of the car and surveyed the top of the surrounding cliffs. There was no one. He stepped out onto the rocks and pulled on his pants, holding the cuffs up out of the water in the shallow pools and watching the ocean. A wave surged up out of nowhere, rushing toward him, and he sat back down on the car seat, lifting his legs so that his feet rested on the floorboard. The tide had risen farther, and the ocean washed across the undercarriage of the car now, lapping at the open door. It swirled out again. “Better hurry. Either that or leave your shoes off. You’ll be wading.”

  “Get out of the way, then,” she said. “You’re the slowpoke. I’d have been on the beach by now.”

  He pulled his own shoes on, and then his jacket. Then he reached in and picked up the sketch, checked to see that it was tightly sealed, and waited once more for the ocean to recede. “Bye,” he said, stepping down onto the rock, grabbing his cane off the engine, and loping toward the shelf that ran out along the tunnel mouth. He clambered atop it and waited for her, giving her a hand up, and then they climbed down the other side and stood for a moment on the little slice of beach that was left dry, shaded entirely now from the sun. He kissed her one last time, and they stepped into the darkness of the tunnel.

  25

  THEY walked along through the musty darkness, neither of them speaking, listening to the scraping of their shoes on the rocky floor of the tunnel. The flush of comfortable optimism that had filled the sun-warmed Studebaker had disappeared utterly, flown off like a wonderful bird in the few yards of their ascent back into the old house. As he wearily climbed the stairs, Howard’s mind was full of a confusion of memories and rationalizations, excuses and half-built plans.

  He leaned on his cane tiredly now and carried the copper plates with the sketch while Sylvia played the flashlight onto the stairs ahead of them. He imagined himself explaining to Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith that he and Sylvia … What did it mean? He would move out of the house; that was the first thing—maybe take a room at a bed-and-breakfast for the time being.

  The closet door wouldn’t open. Sylvia shined the light on it while Howard turned the doorknob, which twisted uselessly in his hand, clearly a dummy. Unbelieving, he pushed in on it and pulled out on it, turning it left and right, thinking that it was simply worn out, that something would catch and the door would open.

  “It’s useless,” he said at last. “The knob just spins. We’re trapped down here. Why the hell did I close the closet door?”

  “Because we found it closed and you thought you could open it again.”

  “Do I break it down?”

  “I don’t see why you should.”

  “Do you want to swim, or pound like hell on the door and hope that Jimmers will hear us and let us out?”

  She looked at him steadily. “There has to be another way out. You’re the one who broke this hole in the wall. What did people do before that?”

  “It was only recently walled up—maybe just a week or two ago—after the car went over the cliff, I’d bet. Before that there was probably a door in the back of the closet, but Mr. Jimmers wanted to make it all less obvious, so he took out the door and walled it up.”

  “Did you look for another way out?” Sylvia asked.

  “No.”

  “Think about it—Mr. Jimmers has lived here for years, most of the time invisibly. You’re the one who said that you didn’t know he was here back when you came up in seventy-five. That’s why I called him a mole man. He was living in secret rooms, probably beneath the house. It wasn’t any big secret.”

  “How did he get in and out?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, isn’t it?”

  “The stairs outside,” Howard said, suddenly remembering. “That door’s locked, too, and the stairs are broken off. No use trying to find our way to it.”

  “That can’t be it. If Mr. Jimmers had come and gone through that door, you would have seen him, wouldn’t you?”

  Howard shrugged. “Maybe, unless he hardly ever used it. Maybe he avoided coming and going when there was company in the house.”

  “There was always company in the house—at least a few locals helping Graham build things. Father was out here himself half the time, along with Mr. Bennet.”

  They turned around and Howard followed Sylvia back down the dark stairs. What she said made perfect sense. Of course there must be another exit, what with all this tunneling, all the excavation. The place was riddled with secret passages, and apparently with secret rooms, too, if this had been Mr. Jimmers’ hideaway for so many years. He knocked on the paneling with his knuckles, hoping for some sort of telltale hollow sound. Sylvia shined the flashlight methodically, up and down the panels.

  “Here it is,” she said suddenly. They were halfway down, on the top landing of the final flight, where the stairs doubled back at the level of the second floor. There
were handprints on the dirty white paint, visible in the flashlight beam. Above the handprints, recessed into the wall so as to be invisible unless seen from straight on, was a light switch. Howard pushed it and light glowed down from overhead, shining through a muslin shade hidden in the design of the ceiling panel and lighting the stairs all the way down to the mouth of the underground tunnel.

  He pushed at the paneling tentatively, and when nothing happened he rapped on it with his knuckles again. It thumped hollowly. “This has got to be it,” he said, pressing again. “Probably some sort of spring latch.”

  Sylvia stood studying the design of the paneling for a moment while Howard tapped and pushed. Then she reached out and pulled on one of the circles of wood laid on over the top of the panel. It rotated beneath her hand. There was a click, and the panel swung open an inch or so, revealing a head-high opening into a small dark room. Howard pushed the panel open gently, standing back out of the way, half expecting something to leap out at them.

  Half a dozen wooden stairs led down into the room. Sylvia shined her flashlight down them, playing it onto the floor. A rat scurried away, out of the light, disappearing behind a tumble of cardboard boxes. The room smelled of damp wood and moldering paper. Howard leaned in and felt around on the wall, opposite where the passageway light switch was recessed into the panel. There was another switch. He pushed it and a bare bulb blinked on, hanging from a cord in the center of the ceiling.

  “Storage room of some sort,” Howard whispered, pointing out the obvious. There were dusty shelves of old books and piles of wooden crates and cardboard cartons. The room was windowless. They could hear the rat scratching in the comer near an old mimeograph machine that sat on a banged-up desk alongside an almost empty bottle of printing chemicals and a half dozen books. Pinned above it on the wall were dozens of star maps, overlapping each other and yellowed and drooping with age.

  The pine floor was covered with a heavy layer of dust disturbed only by the footprints of rats, except for a clean, scuffed trail leading across toward a door surrounded by bookcases.

  “This must be where he put together his publications,” Sylvia said, pushing past Howard to the desk and picking up one of the scattered books. “Look, it’s all flying saucer stuff. Flying Saucers on the Attack, Aboard a Flying Saucer, Flying Saucers Uncensored, The Saucers of December. Saucer on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  “Let me see!”

  “So what if I’m a liar? Hey, look. Here’s Mr. Jimmers’ own book, The Night of the Saucer People.”

  “You are a liar!”

  “I swear. Here it is. Look at it.”

  Howard stepped across and took the book from her. “You didn’t tell me he’d written a book. What a great title. What is it, fact or fiction?”

  “Fiction, sort of. It’s a novel about something that happened to him back in the forties. He worked on it forever, apparently, and finally had it self-published. It’s dedicated to my mother even though it didn’t come out until years after they parted—when he was out of the hospital for good, in 1958, 1 think.”

  “Really? Let me see it.” He flipped through the first few pages, looking for a moment at the frontispiece illustration—a sleeping neighborhood beneath a night sky full of stars and with three lit-up saucers spinning in out of deep space. It was published, it said, in an edition of two hundred, in 1952 from the Phoenix Restaurant Press in San Francisco, priced at two dollars.

  “You’re way off on the date.”

  “It might have been fifty-seven. I can remember it, though—I was in Mrs. Webostad’s class at that school in Lakewood we went to. That would have been second grade. It was my birthday and Mother had brought cupcakes to school. That’s how I remember. Anyway, Mother found a copy of his book in the mail after school that day and started telling me all about this man named Mr. Jimmers, whom she’d known before she married Father. It was the first time she’d said anything about him. We’ve still got the book at home. When I was a kid I used to look at it all the time because of the pictures in it.”

  “Sorry,” Howard said. “What about the pictures?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything about the pictures. You weren’t listening.” She turned toward the door in the bookcases. “C’mon,” she said.

  He stared at the dedication page, which said simply, “For Edith,” and then below that, “And for Sylvia.” His thoughts leaped ahead, too quickly to keep up with. “Why,” he started to ask, but then stopped himself and flipped back to the title page to check the publication date again. Mystified, he slipped the book beneath his coat, into an inside pocket.

  “Look at this,” Sylvia said, already gone on into an adjacent room.

  Howard followed, down another flight of a half dozen stairs and into a room larger than the last. Along one wall was a heavy, scarred workbench with tools hung above it. On the floor sat an arc welder and drill press and grinder and heaps of brass and copper pipe and sheet metal. Rolled-up blueprints stood in a deep wooden box, crammed in together.

  On the floor along the opposite wall, in an area otherwise clear of debris, crouched what was either an automobile or a vehicle from the stars. It appeared to be built around the chassis and body of an old Buick, with the top chopped and lowered to streamline it and the interior gutted and replaced with a single reclining, leather-covered seat. The whole car rested on a circular plate, with vents cut through the running boards and bent pipes running into and out of the sides of the vehicle.

  It was old and dusty, most of the steel rusted and the chrome corroded. It looked like a nearly finished project that had been abandoned and then had sat in place for twenty or thirty years. The exterior of the vehicle was the weirdest part of the thing. It was covered with a profusion of tin toys, gaudily painted in bright primary colors—hundreds of toys, cemented on randomly like a confused army.

  There were great-headed babies riding wind-up tricycles past lunatic birds with whirligig hats. There were cross-eyed elephants driving automobiles alongside ape-driven zeppelins, train engines, biplanes, and hot-air balloons carrying entire tin families. Tiny tin soldiers and zoo animals, circus acrobats and strolling couples dressed in wedding clothes were glued among the windup toys as if wandering between giants. In the center of the crowd, towering above them, sat a big-eyed Humpty Dumpty with a crown on his head. His arms apparently rotated and he held a baton as if he were leading an orchestra. At the side of the car, as if it were an immense wind-up toy, was a square brass key.

  “He’s a gluer,” Howard said. “That’s what I said, remember?”

  “Yeah. I never knew anything about this, though. I knew he went into the hospital that first time because he suffered from some kind of gluer compulsion that had got out of hand, but I didn’t know he’d kept at it.”

  “That’s weirdly common around here, isn’t it?”

  “Ask Dad. He has a car of his own somewhere that he works on, or used to—I don’t know where. He doesn’t talk about it. It’s like alcohol, I think. Some people get the habit worse than others. Some people glue in public; some of them are closet gluers.”

  “Uncle Roy is a closet gluer?”

  “I think it has something to do with knowing Graham.”

  “With this, I think,” Howard said, waving the copper case.

  “Father refers to it as the Humpty Dumpty complex, the desire to always be putting things back together.”

  “Say,” Howard said, “speaking of that—it was you who glued Aunt Edith’s Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

  “Uh-huh. Better to keep things whole.”

  “You don’t have a gluer vehicle stashed somewhere, do you? Covered up with origami fish or something?”

  “A fleet of them, up in Willits. I sneak up there on weekends with Mrs. Deventer. What happens if we turn this crank?”

  “The thing flies?”

  “Where to? Do you realize that he’s built this intricate contraption in a cellar? If it did fly, or drive or something, he couldn’t get it out
of here.”

  “He doesn’t want to,” Howard said. “What’s important is the gluing. Go ahead and twist the crank.”

  “You do it.”

  “Remember that phone call you made, after the dream? Down to the Chinese laundry? The one where you hung up before you knew what the dream meant? This is a second chance for you. You can make up for that now, play out your destiny.”

  Sylvia considered this for a moment, then shrugged, widened her eyes at him, and twisted the crank twice. The works were stiff, and it took both hands to do it. There was an instant clanging of dozens of tiny bells and the whirling of tin propellers. The creatures on bicycles pedaled furiously, the front wheels rotating while the back wheels stayed in place, cemented to the body of the car. Trains tooted and spun their wheels, circus animals beat on drums and banged cymbals, and the Humpty Dumpty waved his baton, orchestrating the whole seething mass of toys. There was a sound like a fan starting up, and the entire plate with the car on top lifted off the ground three or four inches. A gust of air blew out from underneath, ruffling their hair for the space of thirty seconds, until the toys finally wound down and fell still and the ship bumped to the floor.

  “That’s something,” said Howard. “Isn’t it? A wind-up flying saucer car. Jimmers is a genius.”

  “It’s indescribable. How long do you think it took him to build it?”

  “Lord knows. There was a man who cut a chain out of a single toothpick. I saw it at Knott’s Berry Farm once, in a display of miniatures. Took him years, and he went blind carving it, too.”

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “Nothing,” Howard said. “I admire that sort of attention to worthless projects, though—doing things for the sheer sake of doing them.”