The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “Go get it,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “It’ll give me an excuse to drop past her house. Let her wear it home. She needs it on a night like this.”

  “Still waiting for the phone call,” Gibb said to Bennet, and then pulled three beers out of a refrigerator, handing one to each of them. “I’ve locked up for the day. Sent everyone home. Sit down.” He pulled a stool away from the wall, nodding Sylvia toward it. “You take off, Jack,” he said to the busboy, who put the mop back into the bucket, untied his apron, and stepped out the back door.

  “So what’s Father doing down in Caspar?” she asked.

  “She don’t know?” Gibb looked up suddenly at Bennet, who shook his head.

  “He’s not down in Caspar,” Bennet said. “We’re not sure where he is. We think he’s all right. No reason that he shouldn’t be all right.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, standing back up.

  “They’ve got him. I couldn’t say anything in front of the cop.”

  “Who’s got him?”

  “We all know who’s got him, don’t we? It’s her. The old woman. They knocked me on the head, grabbed him, and burned the icehouse. Out of spite, I guess. After last night.”

  “Did they get the machine?” Howard asked.

  Bennet shook his head. “I drove it up to the Georgia-Pacific yard this morning. Turned out to be a good thing. MacDonald’s looking out for it. He’s moved it across town by now. No one knows where but him.”

  “We don’t know it’s them.” Lou Gibb said to Sylvia. “Might have been Jimmers. He was down here this afternoon, snooping around. He ate lunch and then went round back and had it out with Roy. They got pretty hot under the collar. Regular shouting match. Jimmers went off mad as hell. He might have come back and torched the place just as easy as anyone else. Maybe he finally went off the deep end.”

  “We just left him.” Howard said. “He didn’t have anything to do with anything. Last thing he’d do is kidnap Uncle Roy or burn down the haunted house. Take my word for it. It doesn’t matter how mad he might have been this afternoon.”

  Gibb shrugged. “I guess I know that. But it would have made things easier if it was Jimmers, wouldn’t it?”

  Sylvia moved toward the door. “We’ve got to go.” she said to Howard as soon as Gibb had finished talking. “At least I do. We can’t leave Mother alone. They might have gone there, too.”

  “She’s safe,” Bennet said. “I talked to her fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I’m more help there,” Sylvia said resolutely.

  “Call us first thing you hear anything,” Howard said, following Sylvia out into the evening.

  Most of the crowd had dispersed by then. Harbor Drive was empty of parked cars and the only people milling around the burned icehouse were local children from the house trailers, throwing rocks at each other and dodging in and out behind buildings and fences and trees. Two firemen rolled up hoses while a couple more poked through the ashes along with a policeman and a city official of some sort wearing a suit and a pair of knee-high rubber boots.

  Howard looked back at the old icehouse as they trudged silently up the hill. Burned buildings had always seemed lonesome and horrifying to him in some way all their own. There was something final and deadening and dark about them that suggested the worst kind of tragedy, even if, as was true of the icehouse, they were going to be torn down, anyway. It occurred to him that at least now Uncle Roy wouldn’t have to face the failure of another doomed business venture. Except, of course, that the venture might have worked. Or at least if it hadn’t, Uncle Roy ought to have been able to take a stab at it. Perhaps that’s what made the burned icehouse such a sad thing—that one of his uncle’s dreams had gone up with it, and it was dreams, largely, that kept Uncle Roy afloat.

  They were almost to the car when they heard the phone ring, back down on the outside wall of the restaurant. They turned and ran without saying a word, watching Gibb come out of the back door to answer it, followed by Bennet, who cocked his head by the receiver, listening to the call. Gibb had already hung up by the time Howard and Sylvia got there. He stood scowling, deep in thought, and Bennet had sat down tiredly again on the plastic crate. “It’s them,” he said to Sylvia. “They contacted your mother. She just hung up. They want the sketch in a swap for Roy.”

  “We don’t have the goddamn sketch,” Bennet said.

  “Yes, we do,” Howard said, closing his eyes. “And they know we do.”

  HELOISE Lamey drove north up the coast highway, through Fort Bragg. She smelled the tips of her fingers. Soap and water hadn’t begun to eradicate the odor of the lilies. There was the smell of charred wood on them, too, separate and distinct from the lilies, like the smell of pruning fires on the wind. She wondered if the smells would ever entirely go away. She drove through Cleone, pulling off onto Ward Avenue and parking at the beach. From there she walked north on the old logging road until it disappeared beneath the sand. She set off across the empty dunes then, scuffing along through the gray sand.

  The rotten lily smell hovered on the sea wind along with the smell of ashes, as if it had blown that afternoon through the second-story window of her house, drifted out across the bluffs and north along the coast, reaching long and smoky fingers toward Inglenook Fen. Could everyone smell it? Were people remarking on it right then, back in Fort Bragg, wondering what it was, what it meant? There was something satisfactory in the idea of people turning their heads, wondering, sniffing the air. Still, it was vanity that made her think so, and what she lived for was of vastly more importance than any momentary evidence of her power.

  She topped a tall dune, looking for the distant, telltale stand of willows that ran down into the fen. The tiny lake itself was hidden by hills of sand, fed only by rainwater, as it had been since the ice age. Supposedly there were ice age microorganisms still in the fen, too, as well as water lilies and cattails. That was rather nice—the notion of reaching out a hand and brushing away not just any body of water, but this wild little isolated fen that was connected by rainwater to antiquity.

  The dunes were empty of human footprints. Few people wandered out into the miles of rolling dunes, and the sea wind sculpted the sand continually, obliterating the evidence of life. Rodent prints and the splayed tracks of sea gulls stippled the sand in sheltered spots, and occasional clumps of horsetail ran down into the valleys. Here and there lay the scattered, bleached bones of small animals and the dried, white husks of dead plants. In the valleys the wide world round about disappeared utterly. There was only the sky and the sound of seabirds, and she was connected to her past and future only by the odor lingering in the air, more potent now, it seemed to her, as if it were hanging in an invisible cloud over the depression that contained the fen.

  From one comparatively high ridge she could see the willows again, and she corrected her course, starting down into another valley and up the other side. She walked for twenty minutes, topping a little rise no different from all the others, except that below her now, walled in by dunes, lay the fen, protected from the wind and the sea.

  Already the willows lined an empty stream bed in which the mud was drying and cracking. There was no longer any water emptying into the fen. Even as she watched, the cattails in the tiny lake seemed to rise up out of the water along the shoreline, as if they were growing. The smell of lilies and ashes was heavy in the air despite the sea wind. The water receded, emptying away into the surrounding sands, giving the illusion of a speeded-up motion picture. There was a tangle of roots and rotted vegetation around the cattails now, and the broad green leaves of the water lilies lay limp on the drying bed.

  She sat in the sand and watched the fen evaporate, thinking of the central valleys, of the San Joaquin River, the Sacramento River, the Feather River. She pictured their dry beds, white stones hot in the afternoon sun. Farther north lay the Eel and the Trinity rivers and to the east flowed the Colorado, straight through the desolation of the great Southwest deser
ts. She sat picturing what it would be like merely to wiggle one’s finger at this lake, say, or at that river or reservoir, and to see it begin to evaporate like water off a hot sidewalk, just like that into the air. And then she imagined rain in the desert, irrigating the Mojave. She would turn the Coachella Valley to dry dust, wither the grapefruit trees and the date orchards. She would grow rice in Death Valley. They could play golf in Boron and sift sand in an abandoned Palm Springs. Coyotes could have the resort hotels with their broken windows and cobwebby cinder block and empty swimming pools.

  It was an ambitious afternoon, all in all—this small beginning out in the dunes. It made her hunger to possess the Grail, to have the power in full, to make these dreams as clear and solid as ice.

  She realized she was cold suddenly, and the cold brought her up out of her dreaming about water. The fen was empty now. The wind scoured along the top of the dunes, blowing sand down into the forest of willows surrounding the bed of the dry fen. Slowly the sand began to cover the roots of the cattails and water lilies. She wondered how much time would have to pass before there was no evidence of water at all below the broken tops of scattered cattails.

  It would be a long walk back to the car, success or no success, and there was a busy evening ahead. From her aerie atop the dune she could see black smoke rising over Fort Bragg—over the harbor, more exactly. That struck her as entirely satisfactory. Things were coming along. Her minions were going about their humble duties. She sniffed the wind, hoping to catch a hint of burning. That was asking for too much, perhaps. The odor of lilies and ash was faint, as if it had been a sort of magical catalyst that had finally been transmuted into something else, the remnants of it muffled by shifting sand.

  She walked crab-legged down the edge of the steep dune, her shoes filling with sand. At the bottom she stopped and sniffed the air suspiciously. There was the smell of ozone on the wind now, of impending rain. She hurried up the next slope in order to get a view. Miles to the south, out over the ocean and driving in toward land, were heavy, black storm clouds—a clump of them, like someone’s private hurricane. She could hear distant thunder.

  The lily and ash magic had faded entirely from the sea wind now, and the sudden rainwater smell that had taken its place struck her unpleasantly as being its utter opposite, a sort of magical counterpoint. Overwhelmed with the sudden fear that the fen had somehow restored itself, she turned around and trudged back down into the valley, then up again to have one last look at it, to make sure of her work. It was empty—scummed over with a half inch of dry sand. With a growing smile, she watched the storm clouds suspiciously for a moment before starting out once again for the car.

  Surrounded by sand and with the storm invisible beyond the dunes, she was suddenly greedy for dry things, for bringing another body of water into nonexistence—something that would matter next time, that would make people uncomfortable, change the way they perceived the world around them. The fen was gone, erased. It had no further value. The past was of no consequence to her.

  She cursed Howard Barton out loud and cursed Stoat, too, for having been so damned slow about slicing up the cane. And then all of them running downstairs like fools at the sound of the explosion … If only she had more of it, more of the little disks of wood, she could return home now and start to work again, drying the standing and moving water out of the north coast like so many rain puddles.

  27

  “THAT’S Jimmers’ car,” Sylvia said when they turned the corner and drove toward the house. “Jimmers is here with Mother.”

  “Good,” Howard said happily, realizing that he was filled with immense relief but not, strangely, with surprise. Mr. Jimmers had come through, out of nowhere. He would help them. Suddenly it seemed to Howard that they had a chance, after all. Although he couldn’t have explained it easily, Mr. Jimmers had become like a giant to him—an unpredictable force, one of the kings of the night, who watched the weather and stars through his tower window and navigated secret tunnels in the earth.

  Sylvia pulled in at the curb, cut the engine, and jumped out of the car, heading for the house without waiting for Howard. Mr. Jimmers met them at the door. He looked haggard and upset. His hair was wild, and he worked his hands together, forcing air through his fingers and making a sort of squeaking noise while he apologized for being there at all, for having come in uninvited. His clothes were rumpled and damp. Clearly he hadn’t changed since going out into the storm.

  “Where’s Mother?” Sylvia asked, pushing past him into the house.

  “Gone,” Jimmers said at once. “She went after him.” He handed Sylvia a note, hastily written on the back of an envelope.

  “Gone to get your father,” it read, and below that was the address and telephone number of the Sea Spray Motel.

  “Damn it!” Sylvia said, sitting down on a chair and then standing up again. “Why did she go?”

  “Because she loves him,” Jimmers said.

  Sylvia shook her head. “Of course she does. But she can’t do anything at all. Can she?”

  “She couldn’t just sit here, either. Not your mother. She can at least try to be with him. I couldn’t stay away, either. Not after our little discussion in the car tonight. I know what Edith’s thinking, what she’s feeling. She and I, well …” Mr. Jimmers sat down shakily on the couch and stared for a moment before going on. “She called thirty minutes ago and told me what they’d done, where they’d taken him and what they wanted. I rushed straight up here, and when no one answered the door, I let myself in and found this note. Should have waited for you, I guess.”

  “No,” Sylvia said. “Thanks for doing it. There was no telling what sort of trouble …”

  “Exactly.”

  Abruptly Sylvia began to cry, slumping in the chair again. Howard perched himself on the chair arm and put his hand on her shoulder, awkwardly trying to do some good. Edith’s having gone after Uncle Roy made the whole thing about twice as hard, not just because now she was in trouble, too, but because she had set a Standard for them to follow. Aunt Edith had gone straight to the heart of danger and was right then confronting the enemy at the Sea Spray Motel, while Howard was lounging around the living room, unable to reason any of it out.

  “Where’s this motel?” Howard asked.

  “Right up the street,” Sylvia said. “It’s on the ocean side of the highway, right above Pudding Creek. It’s empty—being renovated, I think. There’s new owners, or something.”

  “I bet I know who.” Howard stood looking out the window, chewing his lip. His mind spun. What was called for here? A show of force? Trickery?

  “How serious is Mrs. Lamey?” he asked Jimmers.

  “Deadly. I warned you.” He glanced at Sylvia, who wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “No use mincing words.”

  “They’ll kill him,” Sylvia said.

  “Surely not both of them.” Howard appealed to Mr. Jimmers. It was impossible to believe that things had gotten so desperate so quickly. “They can’t get away with murder. It’s one thing to knock apart Mr. Bennet’s Humpty Dumpty, even to burn down the icehouse, but murder …”

  “Mr. Bennet might easily be dead now if Stoat hadn’t pulled him out of the fire,” Sylvia said.

  “That’s what I mean. Stoat pulled him out. They were anxious not to murder anyone, just to burn us down—and probably steal the truck back if Bennet hadn’t been one step ahead of them.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “What if Stoat didn’t burn the icehouse? What if Mrs. Deventer is right?”

  “You can’t believe that,” Howard said.

  “I do believe it. You can’t, because you’re jealous of him, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Howard said, interrupting her. Mr. Jimmers studied his fingernails, keeping silent. “I’m not jealous. That’s not the problem. Let’s not confuse the issue here.”

  Sylvia looked at him steadily.

  “All right. Maybe a little. Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be? That doesn’t pro
ve anything in any direction, does it? That doesn’t make him innocent of any crimes. Who do you think loosened the lug nuts on Mrs. Deventer’s car? Stoat’s the one who’s always hanging around there. Maybe I am a little jealous, but that doesn’t alter anything.”

  “I just wanted to make you admit it,” Sylvia said, almost smiling for a moment. “And I didn’t say he was innocent of any crimes. I only said that I don’t think he’d stoop to arson and murder. I don’t think he had anything to do with screwing up Mrs. Deventer’s car. I saw him next morning downtown. He’d just heard about her accident. He was pretty shaken up.”

  “Easy to fake,” Howard said sulkily.

  “That’s true, too. Anyway, what I’m saying is that they would be murderers, and that they almost murdered Bennet. Your being jealous of Stoat makes you underestimate them. That kind of thinking is dangerous here.”

  No one spoke for a moment while Howard grappled with this notion. Finally Mr. Jimmers said, “She’s right, you know.”

  Howard shrugged. It was possible. Hell, she probably was right.

  “I’m familiar with this jealousy business,” Jimmers said. “It’s a potent thing. It’ll fill you up with false regrets. Take it from a man well seasoned in it.”

  Howard nodded. “I’ll try to keep things straight,” he said. He smiled at Sylvia, though, rolling his eyes, and got a smile in return. Maybe there hadn’t been any harm in clearing the decks. He could get on with it now. “So what are we talking about here? What’s the stakes?”

  “Higher than you can imagine,” Jimmers said. Then, after a pause, he added, “It was your coming here that brought it to a head. You were bound to come. There’s no blame involved. But all of us knew something was coming, Roy included. Graham was fishing for someone, and out of the blue you called up and volunteered for the post. You were a natural. You can bet it didn’t surprise Roy Barton any when they made their move. He was primed for it. I’m afraid that of all of us, you’re the one who knows the least. So I’ll be blunt. Right now the stakes are high and simple: they want you and the print.”