The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “That’s all nonsense,” Sylvia said. “It’s true, maybe. The facts are. I’m not saying you’re lying about what happened. But all these years of locking yourself away, living in your cellar—that’s more a matter of feeling sorry for yourself, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it is. How transparent I’ve become.” He smiled at her, putting on his old theatrical face but making a bad show of it. He looked hard at her for a few seconds before putting his hand on the door handle. For a moment Howard thought of pulling out the book that he had in his pocket, of asking Mr. Jimmers about it outright. But he had already presumed too much, involved himself in other people’s business.

  “We ought to get down to the harbor,” he said to Sylvia.

  “Yes, you should,” Mr. Jimmers said.

  “You’ll be all right?” Sylvia asked him.

  “Right as rain.” He stepped out onto the muddy roadside and half closed the door before pulling it back open. “Remember what I said about Heloise Lamey. There’s trouble on the boil. She’ll see through this storm, too,” he said to Howard, looking grave now.

  “They’ll know you’ve got it, and they’ll know you’ve used it.”

  MUCK-COLORED lilies, soft-throated and with curved, heavy-headed stamens, lay scattered across the bed, which had been partly covered with a sheet dyed red. A thick, milky-pink fluid leaked slowly out onto the sheet. The color of the flowers was nearly indescribable, as was their odor, which reminded Stoat of a pig farm. Their throats were almost black, fading to the brown-ocher of old blood at the outer rim of the petal.

  A small earthen pot half full of muddy, grassy water sat on a little table beside the bed, as did a ceramic tray on which sat a slice of the cane that they had begun to cut up last night, before Howard Barton exploded the clothes dryer and stole the cane back.

  “Those lilies have to be your most startling creation,” Stoat told her, not particularly happily. He sat in a chair near the window, peering out through the curtain at the street now and then. He yawned and rubbed his face blearily. “You get used to the smell, I suppose.”

  She said nothing, and after a moment he said, “Maybe it’s a necessary hazard to the occupation of power broker—living in the middle of bad smells.”

  Still she said nothing, but went about her business humming. He seemed determined to make her speak, to make her acknowledge his existence. “Curious thing about the water, too. I don’t see why we can’t bottle it. Make a fortune.”

  She took a step back and surveyed the bed, looking satisfied with what she had accomplished so far. “Because it’s already stopped flowing,” she said to him. “I found a half dozen indentations altogether—all of them in the backyard of that little hovel halfway down the block. I assume that he ran through the backyard in an effort to elude the three of you, although I can’t for the life of me determine why he bothered at all. Collectively you don’t amount to much of a threat. The other boys sleeping the afternoon away, I suppose?”

  Now it was Stoat who didn’t respond, but looked out the window again instead. After a minute of silence he said, “He’ll be full of regrets before the night is through. You’ll have some satisfaction out of it.”

  “He who?”

  “The fat man. The other one—Howard—what will he be full of? You tell me. Silver or lead?”

  Mrs. Lamey began to hum again as she worked away at one of the lilies, pressing the liquid out of it with her fingers so that it dribbled into the convex hollow of a tautened patch of silk cloth. “Too late for silver,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Pity the water dried up so quickly. The earth behind the house was soft, or the cane wouldn’t have left any indentation at all. It was like six little fairyland springs—artesian water bubbling up through wells the size of a nickel and no deeper than your knuckle, flowing out into the grass. A cat was actually drinking at one of them when I came along and found them. It was a very satisfied-looking creature, quite clearly drunk, too. Dreams of springtime in its eyes. Within ten minutes of my coming all six were dry.”

  “I don’t believe that for a moment,” Stoat said facetiously, letting the curtain drop. “Surely your coming had nothing to do with it …” He fell silent. There was a look on her face that suggested she was in no mood to put up with him. “What interest do you have in—what did you call it? Inglenook Fen? Why not some gesture more grand than that? Why not Lake Tahoe? Why can’t you dry up Lake Tahoe?”

  She shrugged. “I rather like Lake Tahoe. I own considerable interest in a casino at Lake Tahoe. I don’t require grand gestures, anyway. They’re inartistic and they call attention to one, don’t they? If we succeed this afternoon, though, I’d like to see what I can do with some rather large and useful reservoir. Hetch Hetchy, I think.”

  “Why my neighborhood?”

  “The East Bay is so utterly dependent on that one source, isn’t it? Imagine what two years of absolute drought would do to them? They would begin to think differently, and that’s appealing to me. I would love to have been in Los Angeles in the thirties and forties and had a hand in draining the Owens Valley. For today, though, I’ll concentrate on Inglenook Fen. It’s always been one of my very favorite places—a remnant of the ice age. Did you know that?”

  “Fascinating,” he said. “Kill it as quick as you can.”

  “I used to go out there to walk on the dunes. I’ve come to think of it as my own, I guess. I’m just a nostalgic old fool.” For a moment her face was overcome with a wistful, faraway look, as if she were remembering a distant, more pleasant time—days, maybe, when she could see some point in walking on the dunes, or perhaps when she had gone out walking with someone else, before that had all been spoiled for her. Just as suddenly as the wistful look had appeared, it was gone, and she applied herself to her work.

  She finished with the lilies, having pressed all the juices out of them onto the silk, and she picked up a knife and swept it back and forth across the surface of the cloth, forcing the heavy juices through it, collecting the sieved liquid drop by drop on a circular mirror. “Water is everything, you know. Money is nothing. Would you own north Africa, or would you own the Nile? And imagine the billions of gallons of water flowing south through this state right now, through the California Aqueduct alone, irrigating tens of millions of acres of orchards and vineyards and cotton and rice fields. What if one could shut off the flow, like water out of a sink? Imagine two or three snowless years in the Sierra Nevada. No ice pack. No rain at all across the Northwest. Water is power. It’s more than that. It’s life and death.”

  Stoat had fallen silent again. There was no arguing with her about that. She wasn’t talking to him, anyway. She was talking to hear her head rattle. He wondered uneasily just how badly she needed him. An organization was necessary, perhaps, when you were in the real estate business, bleeding small animals like Mrs. Deventer or Roy Barton, or when stalking bigger game—meddling with oil drilling rights offshore, lobbying the Coastal Commission. But this talk about water was something else. He had no intrinsic stake in that. In a moment she would simply dismiss him. There were secrets that she wouldn’t reveal to him, and that was dangerous and tiresome. He hadn’t bought in to that.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s nearly time for me to be about my business. I’ll see you at the motel later this evening?”

  He nodded, putting on a smile. He was being invited to leave. There was no answering her, really—just obedience.

  HE closed the door after himself, and she waited, listening to his footsteps on the stairs. Through the gap in the curtains she watched him drive off. Then she dialed the phone. “Glenwood,” she said into the receiver. “It’s time.” She listened for a moment and then said, “Good. We want it all, this time—Jimmers’ device, all of it. We want to put an end to all their shenanigans Do you understand me? Be thorough, but don’t be foolish.”

  HOWARD and Sylvia had to park up the hill and walk down to the harbor, past Mrs. Deventer’s house, where the half-wrecked Ponti
ac sat in the driveway. The road was cluttered with cars full of people who had come down to watch the fire and who were maneuvering now to get back out. Down below, fire trucks and equipment had blocked Harbor Drive, and firemen were spraying the burned-down remains of the old icehouse with hoses. A crowd of people milled around talking and speculating.

  Sylvia started running, and Howard followed her, carrying his cane. There was no ambulance, no evidence that anyone was hurt. The haunted house had been burned pretty much out of existence, though. The walls were nothing but blackened studs and the roof had caved in right through the first-floor ceiling. The stairs were still there, leading nowhere, and with tendrils of white smoke curling up through them from where a fireman mopped up the last live embers with a fine spray. The wind off the ocean was full of the smell of wet, charred wood.

  A squad car was parked behind Lou Gibb’s fish restaurant, where old Bennet sat on an upturned plastic crate, pressing a bloodstained handkerchief across the back of his head. His hands and arms were smeared with ash, and his khaki pants were nearly black with it. He nodded in response to something a policeman asked him, and the man jotted notes in a spiral binder. Sylvia headed straight for them.

  Howard saw Mrs. Deventer herself just then, standing at the edge of a group of onlookers. Her right arm was in a sling and in her left hand she carried a closed umbrella. She wore an apron, too, as if she’d been baking cookies and the fire had interrupted her.

  “Howard!” Bennet said when Howard and Sylvia strode up. Then to the policeman he said, “This is Howard Barton. Roy Barton’s nephew.”

  “Where’s Father?” Sylvia asked.

  “He’s fine. Went down to Caspar before this all started.”

  The policeman stroked his mustache and sized Howard up suspiciously. Then he seemed to recognize Sylvia and brightened a little, growing chatty. “You work at the boutique down in Mendo don’t you?”

  “That’s right.” she said. “I’m the owner, actually. I’m Roy Barton’s daughter, Sylvia.”

  “I bought my wife a shawl in there about a month ago. Bright green …”

  “With big red paisleys. I remember it. Very Christmasy. Weren’t you in with a little boy who wanted an ice cream?”

  “That’s it! That was me. I’ll be damned.” he said, then turned to Howard, less suspicious now. “And you’re Barton’s nephew?”

  “Howard Barton. I’m visiting from down south. What’s happened.

  Mrs. Deventer’s voice answered from behind him. “There’s been a fire,” she said.

  Howard turned and nodded politely. “Hello, Mrs. Deventer,” he said. “You must be freezing, out in this kind of weather without a coat.” He took his jacket off and held it out to her. Without protecting she slipped one arm into it, and pulled the opposite shoulder around, clutching it shut across the plaster cast on her left forearm.

  “Young men are so attentive.” she said to Sylvia.

  The policeman looked suddenly irritated, as if he had work to do and it wasn’t being done. He ignored Mrs. Deventer’s remark about the fire and said to Howard. “Looks to me like the old icehouse has burned down. It and a couple of trees. Mr. Bennet here claims that he and Mr. Barton were putting together some sort of fun house for Halloween.”

  “We pulled a temporary license,” Bennet said. “Didn’t we, Syl?”

  “That’s right,” Sylvia said. “I turned in the application myself.”

  “Mr. Barton was particularly proud of his store window mannequins,” Mrs. Deventer said. “He had some notion of filling their heads with noodles. I’m the one who cooked the noodles for him, aren’t I?” She addressed the question to Sylvia, but clearly in order to set the policeman straight.

  “Fine,” said the cop. “The license isn’t the issue. The license doesn’t figure into the picture anymore, does it?” He waved at the smoking building. “Mr. Barton along with Mr. Bennet here were involved in a little imbroglio late last night down in Mendocino. Don’t know anything about that, do you?” He looked as Sylvia.

  “Not a thing,” she said. “Father sometimes has a little too much fun, I guess. He’s harmless, though.” She cast the policeman a winning smile and he smiled back.

  “We’d had a couple of drinks on the way back up from Albion,” Bennet said. “Roy got a little loud with his landlady, that’s all.”

  “And today someone burns him out.” The cop’s smile vanished.

  “Where is he?” Sylvia asked, looking at Bennet.

  The policeman spoke first. “That’s it, isn’t it? We don’t know where he is. Down in Caspar is what Mr. Bennet says. We’d like to ask him a thing or two when he surfaces.”

  “Surfaces?” Howard asked. “What’s he suspected of? What’s he done?”

  “Clear case of arson,” the cop said.

  “You think he burned his own place down, his own haunted house? He’s been working on this for weeks. Why in the hell would he do something like that?”

  “Lou Gibb owns the place,” Bennet put in. “They figure that he hired Roy to burn it down. Worth more burned to a cinder than turned into a haunted house. That’s the logic. But who gave me this sock on the head? That’s what I want to know. It wasn’t Roy Barton. Thieves, that’s what I think. I described the man that did it. Sneaked right up behind me. I stood up and saw him clear enough before he hit me, and it wasn’t Roy Barton, not unless he was wearing a skinny-man costume. Unless of course Lou Gibb hired Roy to hire this man to hit me. If I’d have been thinking, I’d have hired him to hire me to hit myself, and we could have all kept our money and went home.”

  The cop frowned. “There’s no call to get worked up, Mr. Bennet.”

  “I don’t like all this hitting,” Mrs. Deventer said. “Why does everyone have to be hitting each other all the time? The television is full of it.”

  “That’s the truth,” Bennet said.

  Mrs. Deventer smiled suddenly. “It was my young man who pulled Mr. Bennet from the flames.”

  “Stoat,” Bennet said.

  “Was it?” Howard asked, not knowing exactly what this meant.

  “Yes, it was,” Mrs. Deventer said. “He ran straight in and hauled Mr. Bennet out of there. And very grateful for it Mr. Bennet was, too.”

  Bennet gave Howard a look. “The boy ought to get an award,” he said.

  The cop squinted at Bennet. “You know,” he said, “I can’t figure your tone here. Your attitude. Man pulls you out of a burning building and you get hostile about it. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  “No,” said Mr. Bennet. “I don’t guess it does.” He looked sheepish for a moment. “It’s this knock on the head. It’s been a rough night. Where’d that young man of yours go?” he asked Mrs. Deventer. “I’d like to thank him personally, give him a little gift.”

  “He’s not the sort to bask in glory,” she said proudly. “It’s not in his nature. He did what he could and went on his way. He’s so thoughtful.”

  “He’s a prince,” Howard said.

  The policeman waited Mrs. Deventer out, smiling widely and nodding his head. “Thank you for your insights,” he said to her. “I’ll see what I can do to get the boy a written commendation of some sort.” Then to Sylvia and Howard he said. “You’ve got to admit that there isn’t much motive for robbery here, regardless of what Mr. Bennet says.” He gestured toward the wall of the restaurant, back into the shadows. “No thief in his right mind wants this kind of trash.” There in a charred heap lay the remains of the two Brainiacs alongside the partly melted ice chest, which stood open now, the cow brains inside cooked white and standing in a half inch of milky water. Pieces of blackened skeleton lay in a pile, too, along with a half dozen jack-o’-lanterns that somehow had survived the blaze.

  “My God,” said Mrs. Deventer, covering her mouth with her hands. “It’s the dummies. And Mr. Barton was so proud of them, too.”

  “That’s all that’s left,” Bennet said sadly. “Just the stuff that was sitting in the fro
nt room. I managed to get that much out. Rest of it’s charcoal. The bastards pretty much wiped us out. Thank God Roy hadn’t brought the eyeballs down yet or the equipment for the ghost woman on the stairs. If it hadn’t been for that freak storm, the fire would have torn through the whole damned harbor in a wind like this. Rain put it right out, though. It was an act of God.”

  Mrs. Deventer nodded.

  “That’s true enough,” the cop said. “First rain we’ve had, too, in months.” Just then there was a blast of static on the patrol car radio followed by someone chattering. He nodded at the three of them and hurried across to the car, climbing in and talking back to the radio. He slid entirely in and fired up the engine, then shouted through the open window on the passenger side, “Tell Mr. Barton to come downtown when you see him. Either that, or we’ll be around to pick him up. Thanks a lot, folks.” With that, he drove off up the hill.

  “They don’t believe that nonsense about Uncle Roy and the insurance,” Sylvia said flatly.

  Bennet touched his forehead gingerly. “Of course they don’t. Icehouse wasn’t even insured. Gibb put up the money for liability insurance for a month, just until after Halloween. Then the place was coming down. A phone call or two would blow a hole in the whole theory. What they probably think is that we were up to something else here—hustling dope, maybe—and a deal went bad. That would make more sense, except that there’s people swarming through here all the time—tourists, locals. Door stands open all day. We haven’t kept any secrets here. What I think is that they’ll end up writing the whole thing off to a nut. Come on inside.”

  “I’ll just be walking back up the hill,” Mrs. Deventer said, starting out in that direction.

  Bennet waved at her and then stood up and opened the back door of the fish restaurant, leading Howard and Sylvia into the kitchen, where Lou Gibb filleted fish at a long steel counter. A busboy sloshed a mop around the floor. Through the dining room door Howard could see that the restaurant was empty of customers. “My doggone coat,” he said to Sylvia.