The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  Sylvia recited the number. “I’ll stay here for now,” she said after Jimmers made the call. “Someone ought to be near the phone. Mother … I don’t know … Maybe she’ll come back. I’d want to be here. Why don’t you two pick me up on your way back down?”

  “Good enough,” Jimmers said. “But watch out. Don’t answer the door without knowing who it is.”

  “They won’t bother me,” she said. ‘There’s no reason for it.” Then she ushered them out the door as if she wanted to be alone, and Howard very nearly suggested that Jimmers drive back down to the stone house by himself. The night was windy, clear, and cold, and what Howard wanted to do was to spend the next forty minutes alone with Sylvia, just the two of them, before he had to confront Mrs. Lamey at the Sea Spray Motel.

  “We’ll take your car,” Jimmers said, heading for the street. “If they see my car parked out front here, they won’t get up to any tricks. They know me.”

  Howard was swept along by Jimmers’ haste, and the two of them piled into Howard’s truck, driving out to Main Street and turning south. There would be plenty of time to spend with Sylvia later, Howard told himself optimistically. Before the sun rose in the morning he and Sylvia would thrash things out. It was either that, or Howard would go home. There was no staying on the north coast unless his staying involved Sylvia.

  “So Mr. Bennet’s truck is parked downtown now, behind the Tip Top Lounge,” Jimmers said. “We’ll pick it up on the way back. Key’s under the mat.”

  “Mrs. Lamey won’t fall for the fake sketch,” Howard said, pulling his mind back around to a more immediate problem. “Not a second time.”

  “Of course she won’t. I’m betting on that. She’ll make you use the thing, is what she’ll do, and that can’t be done indoors. She’ll take you somewhere—not far, because she’ll be in a sweat to get this business done. My guess is that the two of you will go down to the beach, and she’ll insist that you demonstrate its authenticity right there. You can bet your eyeteeth that she’s aware of your little storm this afternoon. If I’m right, it’ll be a dangerous moment on the beach there, which is where you’ve got to take her. You’ll insist on it. You’ve got to seem desperate to free Roy and Edith. She’ll expect the thing to be a fake, of course, and if you don’t come through with something—a rain squall or whatever …”

  After a moment’s silence he went on. “I’m tolerably certain she won’t kill you, though. Not yet, anyway. It’s Roy and Edith that we’re worried about. She’s utterly capable of any sort of atrocity. Remember that. She’s terribly hungry, though, for what she’s been chasing all these years. Graham’s passing puts everything within her reach, and I’m thinking that she’ll be nearly insane with all her nasty passions. That’ll be to our advantage. You’ll make use of it. She’s got to be convinced that she’s got the real article, though, which is where Sylvia and I play our part.”

  “Do you think she’ll move them out of there,” Howard asked, “like she says?”

  Jimmers thought for a moment before answering. “No, she just wants to scare us away from calling in the authorities. We’ll have to let our friend Bennet watch that angle. We can’t worry about that now. We’ve got to pick up the fraudulent copy and get back up here.”

  Howard accelerated to sixty, checking the rearview mirror.

  “Damn it!” Mr. Jimmers said. “Why didn’t I think to bring it in the first place? I don’t like all this rushing up and down. It propagates confusion.”

  “There wasn’t time to think,” Howard said, watching Caspar hurtle past on their right. “How do you manufacture these fakes? They look awfully good, don’t they?”

  “They look good enough to fool almost anyone. It won’t fool Heloise Lamey, though, not once she gets a chance to study it out. We’re depending on haste and disorder. It’s an easy trick, forgery is. You use a photographic negative to expose a light-sensitive zinc plate, then etch it with nitric acid. Simple printing plate, really. The paper was authentically old. I bought it years ago in San Francisco from a dealer in oriental antiquities. You can fake up old-seeming ink out of common iron gall ink treated with chemicals—hydrogen peroxide, mainly. The process is absurdly simple and cheap for a man with time on his hands. Many a successful forger has used it. The trouble in this case, of course, is that an accurate forgery isn’t enough. She’ll want to see results from it, when what you have to offer her is a scrap of trash.”

  His mind clouded by thoughts of Sylvia again, Howard only half listened to Jimmers’ discussion of the art of forgery. He realized, though, that Jimmers was looking at him with a serious face, as if he expected a response of some sort.

  “Sylvia’s your daughter, isn’t she?” Howard asked him, the question leaping out of him before he had time to temper it.

  Mr. Jimmers said nothing at all, but sat staring at Howard with a stricken face.

  “I found a copy of your book this afternoon,” Howard said, rushing to explain. “I’m sorry we were fooling around down there. We’d locked ourselves into the passage, though, and were trying to find a way back out. Anyway, I found what must be a first printing of the book, and the dedication is different from what Sylvia remembered it to be. You changed the dedication when Edith married Uncle Roy.”

  Picket fences and moonlit hillsides flew past as they sat in awkward silence, and the silence made Howard realize that Jimmers was struggling to say something, but couldn’t say it. Suddenly Howard hated himself. What an insensitive clod he had been just to blurt all this out. Why couldn’t he have been a little bit subtle? He wasn’t the only person on earth who had an interest in Sylvia. “Sorry,” he said then. “I shouldn’t have thrown you like that, I …”

  “You need to know the truth,” Jimmers said shakily, “and so does Sylvia.”

  Howard slowed the truck, turning off the highway and into the shadow of the cypress trees, bumping along up the driveway toward the stone house.

  “I … Back then, I wasn’t well,” Mr. Jimmers said, staring out through the windshield. “I told you about some of it. Sylvia is my daughter, but obviously I couldn’t bring her up. That was clear. Roy Barton could. He was happy to. Roy Barton has a heart like a whale. And I’m not being facetious, either. We’ve had our differences, but I won’t say anything against the man now. He succeeded where I would have failed. There was no reason, back then, to saddle Sylvia with the stigma of having a father who …”

  Howard shut off the ignition, happy for himself but not very happy for Mr. Jimmers, who had apparently finished talking. “It must have been hard for you,” Howard said, the two of them sitting in the quiet truck.

  “Yes,” Jimmers said, and then he opened the truck door and climbed heavily out onto the ground, walking away toward the front door. In the light of the porch lamp, he stooped to untie his shoes, his hands fumbling clumsily with the laces.

  28

  JIMMERS and Sylvia, driving Sylvia’s Toyota, dropped Howard off at the Tip Top Lounge, and from there he drove back up to the Sea Spray Motel in Bennet’s flatbed truck. Leaving the keys in the ignition, he parked so that the truck faced the highway. He climbed out into the night and looked south toward the lights of town. The Toyota was parked near the Gas ’n’ Grub, its front end just visible in the glow of the parking lot lamp. He scanned the dunes along Pudding Creek. There they were, Sylvia and Jimmers, waiting in the darkness beneath the railway trestle. Mr. Jimmers waved slowly at him, and then the two of them vanished back into the shadows.

  The tin shed sat on the truck bed behind Howard, full of garden tools, empty flowerpots, sacks of fertilizer, folded-up aluminum lawn chairs, and Mr. Jimmers’ oddball machine. Holding the fake sketch beneath his coat, Howard walked straight to room 18 and knocked on the door. The light went out inside. The curtain shifted momentarily, and the door opened partway.

  Howard slid through, ducking toward the bed as a man stepped out from behind the door. The light blinked on suddenly. It was Stoat, looking tired and haggard. Mrs. Lamey
sat at a table, her hair pulled back in a tight bun that made her head seem unnaturally small and skeletal. “Produce it,” she said.

  He pulled out the print, still in its case, and laid the case on the table, one by one pulling out the clips and opening it up to reveal the sketch. He hadn’t wanted to bring the case, but Jimmers had insisted. It would lend the fake sketch a certain credibility.

  “There it is,” Howard said. “It’s yours, and you’re welcome to it.”

  Mrs. Lamey picked up the copper case and examined it carefully, running her fingers over the cut-in picture and the words beneath it. Her hands shook, and she seemed to forget entirely that Howard was standing there.

  “Where are they?” he said finally, losing patience with her. “I want to see them now, this instant. I have friends on the beach. You can see them out the back window if you look. They’re timing this whole thing. I’ll call them off when I see Roy and Edith together, here and now.”

  She blinked at him, almost in confusion, as if she were pulling her mind back from some distant place. “They aren’t here, are they?” she said. “I told our friend Jimmers that over the phone. And if the friends you refer to are the two men in false beards pretending to surf-fish on the beach above the trestle, then we’ll go out together to confront them. I thought one of them looked a bit like our Mr. Bennet. Very artistic. I love the idea of your confederates masquerading as bearded fishermen. There’s nothing like a touch of the dramatic to make death seem idiotic rather than tragic. Come along, then.” She stood up and removed the sketch from its case, squinting hard at it. “If this is a false copy …” she said.

  “It’s authentic,” Howard said. “I’ve … made use of it once already. If we’re going out, anyway, I’ll demonstrate it.”

  “Wait here,” Mrs. Lamey said to Stoat. “And leave the television alone. Keep your ears open and watch out the window for foul play. You can’t trust men in false beards.” Then to Howard she said, “If there’s treachery, remember that your aunt and uncle will die. Their lives depend on my making a phone call and uttering a certain phrase that you can’t hope to guess. So you can’t compel me. Violence is useless to you. I’m going to appeal to your common sense here, and say that if this works smoothly, when the sun rises in the morning Heloise Lamey will be gone from your pitiful lives.”

  “I understand,” Howard said. “Let’s get to it.”

  She nodded, picking up a leather satchel from the floor beneath her chair. A bad odor wafted up from it, as if it contained a dead animal. She hung the strap around her neck and shoulders, unlocked the door, and stepped out into the parking lot. Howard followed, hearing the sound of the door catching behind them and then of neon buzzing from the overhead lights. A truck roared past, fouling the air with diesel exhaust. “Fetch the stick,” Mrs. Lamey said. “Mr. Jimmers assured me that you wouldn’t be so foolish as to arrive without it.”

  Howard opened the truck door and pulled out Graham’s walking stick. “Let me get the feel of it,” Mrs. Lamey said, taking it from Howard and hefting it. He was tempted to snatch it back, but there was no use pushing her, no use taking chances—not yet. She set out through a stucco breezeway, carrying the cane and with the leather satchel pushed around behind her back. Howard followed along like an obedient servant, the path being too narrow for them to walk side by side. Whacking the ground now and then with the cane, she angled across a weedy sort of back lot and down a sandy path toward the beach, walking hurriedly. The dark trestle loomed overhead to the left of them.

  Howard could hear the breakers now, and could see Lou Gibb and Mr. Bennet fifty yards north, their fishing poles thrusting up from holders jammed into the sand. The two men stood still, watching the ocean. Pretending to meddle with his fishing pole, Mr. Bennet turned to look at Howard and Mrs. Lamey. “Wave the fool down this way,” she said.

  Howard waved. Bennet stood still, waiting, pretending not to understand, then waved back, as if merely being cheerful. Howard waved again, gesturing him down the beach. The two men talked back and forth, and then Bennet trudged down toward them, wearing an Amish-looking beard not connected by a mustache. It made his face look like a hair-fringed egg, disguising him thoroughly. “Stop!” Mrs. Lamey commanded when he was ten feet away. “Howard wants to tell you to go home. Reel in your lines and go. Be quick about it, because Howard and I have a bit of an experiment to perform, and you’re inconvenient. Isn’t that so, Howard?”

  Howard nodded at Bennet. It was clear that Mrs. Lamey was serious. She was talking in a brittle, forced-facetious tone that seemed about to crack. Howard was pretty sure she was on the edge, running cold and sharp, but with all her margin used up. She didn’t have time to waste. Her whole twisted life had come to a focus on this moonlit beach, and everything about her seemed to suggest that this was no time for false talk or false beards. “We’ve got to trust her,” Howard called, knowing that the word “trust” wasn’t what he wanted, really.

  “Like hell we trust her,” Bennet shouted back. He scowled, standing solidly, his boots sinking in the wet sand. Mrs. Lamey said nothing, but stared at him like a desert lizard until, with a dismissing wave of his hand, he turned and headed back up the beach, apparently having made up his mind. Mrs. Lamey waited in silence until the two men had reeled their lines in, picked up their buckets and tackle boxes, and started up the rise that led to the highway. She stood watching them go, until a wave broke high up on shore, and the ocean swirled in around their feet, sending Mrs. Lamey high-stepping toward dry sand.

  The night was clear and starry and cold, and the wind off the ocean whipped beach sand across Howard’s pant legs as he followed Mrs. Lamey farther down toward where Pudding Creek trickled into the ocean, nothing but a few little rills a couple of inches deep. She seemed to be using the cane now, as if she were truly tired, and she headed straight toward a big driftwood log, where she could sit down and let Howard work.

  The trestle stretched far overhead and threw an immense Crosshatch moon shadow across the beach. Somewhere back in that shadow Jimmers and Sylvia stood ready to play their part. Howard wanted to search the shadows with his eyes, to find a familiar and friendly face even if it was hidden in darkness, but he didn’t dare.

  Right now they would be trying simply to keep him in sight, to forecast his movements. All Howard had to do was make a show of folding the sketch up. Sylvia would work over the real sketch in secret, hidden back under the trestle.

  Mrs. Lamey tiptoed across Pudding Creek, where they would be partly sheltered from the wind. She stopped at the far side of the trestle, sitting down on a big driftwood log. She looked out over the ocean, listening to the night wind. Behind her, the cliffs rose forty feet or so, nearly vertically, the trestle connecting them with the smaller, sandy bluffs at the opposite side of the creek bed, behind the motel. Howard looked hard at the rocky cliff face, cut out of dark sandstone and hung with tough shrubs. A fringe of ice plant grew down from the top. It wouldn’t be hard to climb the side of the cliffs if it came down to it …

  “Convince me,” Mrs. Lamey said, startling him and settling herself on the log.

  Howard nodded. “You want a storm.”

  “I want two inches of rainfall in the next three hours.”

  “I can’t …” Howard began.

  Mrs. Lamey interrupted him. “I know you can’t. You can’t do anything at all. You’re an ignorant, passive instrument, is what you are. Just do something. You called up a storm this afternoon, probably by mistake. Do it again.”

  “I’m warning you that I can’t control it very well.” The truth of this statement occurred suddenly to Howard, and for the first time he began to doubt Mr. Jimmers’ plan. The storm that afternoon had nearly washed out the road, and in the space of only a few minutes. What would it have become if Howard hadn’t stopped it?

  “Of course you can’t control it,” Mrs. Lamey said, abruptly losing patience with him. “It takes a stronger hand than yours. Use the sketch—whatever it is you did to
it this afternoon. You didn’t follow me out here to argue about it, did you? Think of your uncle, your aunt.”

  Howard shrugged. “All right.” He turned to face the trestle, his back to the ocean, trying to look as if he were summoning some sort of mystical power. “Here we go,” he said to himself, and then kneeled in the sand, laying the sketch out on his thighs. Carefully, as if he were following some sort of method, he folded the paper from corner to corner, making a triangle. Then he folded it again, joining the opposite corner, cutting the size of the thing in half. He waited, squinting at it with an artist’s eye.

  Out over the sea the sky remained clear. There wasn’t even the hint of a fog. Rain was impossible on a night like this. He folded it again, turning each of the corners into the middle, and then cocked one corner across and down to make a little tab of it, which he tucked into the opposite corner, creating a sort of circular pointy-fronted crown that might have fit a chicken. Still there was nothing. Mrs. Lamey watched him dubiously. The look on her face suggested that they didn’t have all night, that her temper was wearing thin.

  “All part of the process,” Howard said. He looked up just then, having seen movement at the very top of his vision. There was Jimmers and Sylvia. They weren’t under the trestle at all. They were edging along the cliffside, picking their way through the shrubbery, from rock to rock, and hidden from Mrs. Lamey only because her back was turned. Howard lowered his eyes casually, wondering what in the hell they were up to. He studied the ridiculous hat. Then, laboriously, considering every crease, he unfolded it, opening it up to a full square before folding it in half again, lengthwise this time.

  He risked a look toward the cliffs. Why on earth had the two of them come out of hiding like that? He couldn’t see them now, but he knew they were crouched like cats behind the only bush big enough to hide them both. What did they intend to do, leap out and grab her? They couldn’t be that stupid. Howard was struck with the notion that Sylvia had failed, that her folding of the print hadn’t done anything at all, and he wondered how much power lay in the sketch and how much in himself.