The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  “Hello,” a voice said. It was Uncle Roy, standing now in the doorway, Sylvia no doubt having untied him. He looked a mess, his hair riled and the side of his face black and blue. “Where’s the landlady?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Howard said. “Drowned.”

  “I knew it!” Touchey shouted at Stoat, so full of fury that he could barely speak. “Traitor! Stinking … pig!” He picked up a handful of gravel then and threw it at Stoat, cocking his arm back as if he were swatting flies on a tabletop. The gravel sprayed across Stoat’s chest, and Stoat, suddenly furious, stepped in and clutched Touchey by the front of his shirt.

  “That’s enough!” Uncle Roy hollered. “There’s no point in holding on to him. He’s old news now. Let the bastard go. We won’t see him again.”

  Stoat immediately pushed Touchey away, and the man sprawled back into the shadows of the eucalyptus trees. He stood there sputtering, looking hard at Stoat, as if he would gladly thrash Stoat then and there except for some very damned good reason. They waited for him to speak, but instead he stomped away, following in the wake of Gwendolyn Bundy, walking straight past his car toward the highway and looking back at them over his shoulder. At the corner of the building he turned briefly and, with almost lunatic intensity, made an obscene gesture so violent and wild it must nearly have broken his wrist.

  “That’s right,” Roy said to him, waving.

  “He deserves more,” Howard said in a low voice, watching Touchey disappear beyond the edge of the building. He felt relief, though, at seeing him go, as if he were watching the departure of an irate door-to-door magazine salesman.

  “All of us deserve more,” Uncle Roy said. He flexed his hands and worked his shoulders back and forth. “I deserve a drink.” He took a step forward, out onto the little stoop, but nearly fell over and had to catch himself on the railing. “My damned rear end is asleep from sitting on that bench for three hours. What the hell took you?”

  Right then, though, before anyone could answer, there came the sound of pounding feet from the direction Touchey had taken. A man shouted. Then, weirdly, the voice of Gwendolyn Bundy piped up in a high-pitched hen’s cackle. “That’s him!” she yelled. “He’s the one who shot the fat man! He tried to kill the old Dutch lady, too!”

  Howard sprinted across the back parking lot, followed by Jimmers, Stoat, and Uncle Roy. There, coming along past the picket fence and the vigilant cow skulls, Bennet and Lou Gibb swarmed toward Glenwood Touchey. Ms. Bundy stood behind them, her hands over her mouth, watching excitedly. Touchey ran right into them, as if confident that his righteous fury would bowl them down.

  It was Bennet who hit Touchey first, a roundhouse punch that caught him in the chest. Almost simultaneously Lou Gibb hit him in the stomach, and for a moment Touchey seemed to levitate there in a sort of airborne somersault crouch, before flopping to the ground, the two men closing in on either side.

  “Hit him again!” Ms. Bundy yelled, dancing on the shoulder of the road next to Gibb’s car. Howard sprinted toward them along with Stoat, shouting, “No one’s been shot! No one’s been shot!” Howard pulled Bennet away, shaking his head wildly to make him understand. Uncle Roy limped up then, yelling things himself, but it wasn’t until Mr. Jimmers honked Lou Gibb’s car horn three times that the two men stepped back, shrugging their shoulders and looking as if they would happily hit Touchey again and not ask overtime pay for it.

  Touchey lay curled up on the ground, with his knees tucked up and his hands over his head, sobbing and shouting unrelated and purposeless obscenities.

  “Roy!” Bennet said, grabbing his friend’s shoulder. “You ain’t dead!”

  “Not a bit,” Uncle Roy said.

  “Then why are we beating this man up?” Bennet backed off another step, huffing and puffing, and Gwendolyn Bundy pushed past him, sinking to her knees next to Touchey. Tenderly she petted him on the back of his head.

  “It’s over,” she cooed softly. “I’m so sorry. I thought … I thought … I was mad at you. I didn’t think they’d … They won’t hit my baby boy any more.” She helped him to sit up, pushing his face into her chest and hugging him, rocking him back and forth gently.

  “Cripes,” Gibb said, a look of repulsion on his face. “This kind of crap ain’t natural.”

  Gwendolyn Bundy turned on him furiously, her eyes pinched up. “You’re brutal!” she said, pulling Touchey to his feet. A thin stream of blood ran out of his nose. He gave everyone what was meant to be a hard look, his mouth a quivering slit, but then Ms. Bundy touched his cheek with her hand, and he howled and swatted at her. Together they walked off across the gravel, back toward their car. Ms. Bundy stroked Touchey’s back as he leaned heavily against her, whimpering like a small animal, his hand stroking her thigh. They could hear her talking a sort of baby talk to him, and he yelped once more, as if she had touched his cheek again.

  “I didn’t mean to be beating on the man,” Bennet said apologetically. “The woman said …”

  Uncle Roy gestured at him. “What that woman says would make you sick. It was him that burned the icehouse and worked over Mrs. Deventer’s car.”

  “Maybe we ought to hit him some more, then,” Lou Gibb said.

  But it was too late. Touchey and Gwendolyn Bundy roared past just then, Ms. Bundy driving, their car kicking up dust and gravel as she slewed around south onto Highway One. Then Mr. Jimmers held out his hand to Uncle Roy, who pumped it heartily, clapping Jimmers on the back. Jimmers looked at Roy’s face and shook his head. “Did they beat you?”

  “Beat me? Certainly they beat me.”

  “The same lot as usual?” Jimmers asked, breaking into a grin.

  “How does that go?” Uncle Roy asked. “‘Jesus, they beat me stupid.’”

  “That must be from a different book,” Jimmers said. “You never could keep that sort of thing straight.”

  “No, I couldn’t. But it’s tolerably good to see you. I’ve got that much straight.”

  Aunt Edith and Sylvia appeared from around the side of the museum then. The moon shone over the treetops, lighting the road and the parking lot and illuminating Edith’s face, which was full of relief. It was apparently over. No one was hurt. The crisis was past. She regarded Stoat, who stood a few feet off, leaning against the side of the museum.

  “Timothy,” she said. “Welcome back. Sylvia’s been telling me about things.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stoat said. He looked haggard and worn out, not particularly happy. Howard wondered what it was he regretted the most.

  Uncle Roy stepped across and shook Stoat’s hand. “Who’s not sorry for something?” he asked. Then, to Edith, he said, “Stoat here wrestled the gun away from Glenwood Flounder, right out back in the gravel. Saved everyone’s life probably.”

  “Well,” Edith said. “It’s over, isn’t it? Everyone is saved. The night is full of heroes.”

  Bennet began to jabber at Uncle Roy just then, telling him about the road being washed away, and Mr. Jimmers hugged Edith, talking very earnestly. Howard looked at Sylvia and smiled with pride. Her jeans were streaked with crushed ice plant and her hair was windblown and wild. He wanted to grab her right there on the spot and kiss her, sweep her right off her feet—the perfect end of a not-very-perfect day.

  But the whine of an engine and the squeal of tires shut everyone up. Down the highway, from the direction of town, came a paramedics’ van, weaving insanely from lane to lane but without any lights or siren. It drove straight toward them, the driver’s face hidden in shadow, like the faces of the men in Uncle Roy’s ghost car.

  Howard stood there stupefied, unable to comprehend the meaning of the van’s sudden appearance. Had someone innocently driven past and seen the commotion and called for help?

  The van braked in a hard stutter, a half dozen jerks, as if someone were stamping the brake pedal into rubbish. It swerved into the lot, nearly clipping Bennet, who leaped out of the way when he saw who it was that was driving.

  “God almighty,
” Uncle Roy said softly.

  The van door opened and Heloise Lamey very nearly fell out onto her face.

  Uncle Roy and Mr. Jimmers both stepped across to help her, Jimmers gaping in disbelief. She recovered before they got to her, though, sitting up very straight and fastening the two of them with a cold and wintry gaze. Slowly she opened her clenched fists, as if she had asked them to guess which hand held the colored bean, and with a triumphant laugh she displayed two water-soaked fragments of the fraudulent sketch.

  31

  THE night was tremendously quiet, as if nature had been struck dumb. Even the wind had been stilled by Mrs. Lamey’s unlikely appearance. The only sound was the ocean muttering faintly in the distance, like a great, sighing ghost. The headlights of the paramedics’ van lit up the woods behind the museum, and Howard half expected the luminous cow to wander out of the trees, chewing its phantom cud. It was Mrs. Lamey who spoke first.

  “Artemis Jimmers,” she said in a voice meant to be commanding, but which was shaking, and was too highly pitched. “I’ve come for the machine and for John Ruskin’s bones.”

  She breathed hard, as if she had been running from something, or else was so agitated that she was hyperventilating. The leather satchel still hung around her neck, and she hunched forward as she stood there, as if weighed down by it. Her hair was startling—full of twigs and leaves—and her face and hands were smeared with muck from her pilgrimage up Pudding Creek. She turned and pulled a dry, clean, hospital-issue blanket out of the open door of the van and wrapped herself in it, clutching the blanket shut with the same hand in which she held the shredded fragments of the sketch. Her eyes glowed with light that was the result of a private, newly discovered wavelength.

  “I have swum with the salmon,” she said, and then fumbled beneath the blanket, reaching her fingers into the satchel and pulling out her magical divining rod, which she waved in Jimmers’ direction.

  There was dead silence again as everyone stared mystified at the tied-together forearm bones—in stupefaction now rather than fear or wonder, since the bones didn’t command the same respect that they might have earlier in the evening. Most of the debris that knotted them together had washed away, and aside from a few threads of bird feather hanging from a bit of adhesive tape, they might have been something scavenged from a garbage heap. Their terrible odor and their power to repulse people seemed to have been lost along with their nasty trimmings. She shook them in the air, though, back and forth in the manner of someone carefully salting a pot of stew.

  “Of course,” Mr. Jimmers said to her, watching the bones doubtfully. “The machine. Yes. I’m not sure that you’re any longer in a position to—”

  “Position?” she gasped, her voice cracking. She took a step toward him, pointing the bones at him specifically. He flinched just a little, not liking the look of them suddenly, even in their declined state. But he held his ground, ready to parley with her like he would parley with a creature from the stars. She had come to menace them with her mere presence, which was very nearly enough.

  “I was told by this man that the bones of John Ruskin were entombed within your device,” she said, cocking her head with great dignity and gesturing at Uncle Roy, who smiled, nodding at Jimmers.

  “That’s right,” Roy said. “Ruskin’s bones. All except for the fingers of his right hand. Those were ground up and used to seed clouds out in Iowa. That’s what the machine is—a rain-making device built on the spiritual principle.”

  She nodded slowly, as if this were reasonable.

  “She’s off her chump,” Uncle Roy whispered to Jimmers. “Swum with the salmon?”

  “I was promised the device in the tin shed,” she muttered, looking down at her hands, “but I was given this.” She cast the watery bits of paper at their feet, snorting in disgust. “Its power has been taken back. You’re nothing now,” she said to Howard. “You’re a pitiful weak thing.”

  “Christ!” breathed Uncle Roy, who obviously recognized what it was that she had thrown onto the ground. He stooped to pick up the pieces and looked at Howard with a horrified face.

  Howard winked at him, and Uncle Roy relaxed.

  “I’m damned if I’ll give her the machine,” Jimmers whispered. “Is there a phone inside? We’ll call the hospital.”

  Uncle Roy shook his head. “No phone. Don’t be so damned tight-fisted with the machine. Let’s crank it up. Give her a taste of it. She’s come a long damned way to see it, poor old thing. Look at her.”

  Mrs. Lamey began jigging the bones at them again, casting some sort of spell. Her mouth worked as if she were reciting something that would confound them all, except that right then one of the bones fell away from the other one and landed in the gravel. Howard was reminded of his adventure with the shotgun in the stone house. He felt suddenly sympathetic, and he bent over to retrieve the bone for her. She warded him off, though, and snatched it up herself, peering at it wonderingly and clutching the two bones in her hand, like chopsticks now, a look of uncertainty in her eye, as if she were watching her power literally fall apart. Like an insane orchestra conductor groping to remember a tune, she began to wave them at Jimmers again, taking up where she had left off.

  It seemed to Howard that there was a horrible timelessness to her antics now, that she had forgotten what she was doing and so could see no reason ever to stop. The thought of her going on like that was unspeakable. The tension in the air broke, the tree branches stirred in the wind, and Mrs. Lamey began to cry—a watery snivel at first, which gave way to shuddering and sobbing and wheezing as she pressed the bones to her chest, looking around her with pitiful, vacant eyes but apparently seeing nothing. There was no threat left to her, no magic or power.

  Howard felt little satisfaction in that. He felt only the need to restrain her, and then to find her shelter from whatever empty thing it was that her world had become.

  “For God’s sake,” Uncle Roy said to Jimmers, speaking out loud, “let her have a look at the machine. I think you owe it to all of us.”

  Edith stepped across then along with Sylvia, and they took Mrs. Lamey by either elbow, leading her toward the back door of the museum. No longer sobbing, the old woman glared at Edith, but without any real recognition. It didn’t matter who Edith was. There wasn’t a living human being on earth, Mrs. Lamey’s face seemed to say, that was of any interest to her.

  The rest of them followed, Roy and Jimmers still arguing about the machine. But by the time they had gotten around back, and Edith had led Mrs. Lamey into the museum, Jimmers apparently had made up his mind.

  “I won’t be responsible for it,” he said to Roy.

  “I will,” Roy told him. “Full responsibility.”

  “It may have serious consequences on the spiritual existence of a very superior human being. There’s no telling what will come of it …” His warning was lost on Uncle Roy, though, and Jimmers could see that, and fell silent. Then, tiredly, he waved a hand at Howard, Bennet, and Lou Gibb. Uncle Roy stepped across to the paramedics’ van, fired up the engine, and angled the van around so that the headlights illuminated the truck bed, where the tin shed sat with its doors gaping open.

  Howard climbed up onto the lift gate and then turned to give Mr. Bennet a hand up. Lou Gibb, Stoat, and Uncle Roy followed, although there wasn’t room for more than two of them inside the shed. All of them, though, craned their necks to see through the doorway, where the machine sat as ever, half hidden by the fallen aluminum lawn chair. Together Howard and Stoat pulled bags of mulch out, laying them on the truck bed and clearing the doorway. Then they hauled Jimmers’ machine out so that the others could get a grip on it, too, all of them easing it across to set it on the lift gate. Bennet lowered the gate to the ground, and they picked up the machine again and lifted it up onto the wooden porch, getting into each other’s way.

  “Too many Indians,” Uncle Roy said, stepping aside and letting the others wrestle with it. They had to tilt the device up sideways, holding on to it a
wkwardly and bumping their knuckles on the doorjamb. Mr. Jimmers waved his arms and made valuable suggestions, grimacing at the pinging and ponging sounds echoing out from inside the machine.

  In the museum, finally, they heaved it up onto one of the redwood tables, which creaked under the machine’s weight. Uncle Roy held a propane lantern over it, and everyone except Mrs. Lamey gathered around to inspect it. Free of shed debris now, it looked like a strange hybrid of sewing machine, harmonium, and vine-entangled shrub. It was studded along the back with what might have been crude vacuum tubes designed to look like bell jars. The frosted glass of the jars was cameo-carved with vines and oak leaves.

  There were delicate cylinders, like metal reeds, sprouting from among the bell jars, and India-rubber squeezo bulbs dangling like kelp bladders along the back, making a sort of sighing noise, as if they were breathing.

  The entire device was mounted on springs that were tied into what looked at first glance like claw-and-ball feet. Howard was only partly surprised to find that they were actually carved into the semblance of trees, with heavy, twisted root balls at the base, the springs twining out of their upper branches like foliage.

  The case of the machine was decorated with more vines and leaves and with the logo of the Guild of St. George. Even the springs and rivets were minutely decorated, so that as he stared at it in the silvery light of the lantern, Howard’s vision was confused, and it seemed to him that he wasn’t looking at a machine at all, but at something living and growing, like an ancient, tangled garden in miniature, or a carefully contrived archetype of all gardens and deep woods everywhere.

  Howard realized that he had seen almost nothing in the darkness of the shed two days ago, when he had foolishly spun the thing’s wheel.

  Now he saw it clearly, though, and from a better angle, through eyes unclouded by doubt. It was obviously a Victorian-era, gluer-built machine. There was something in the heap of decoration and unlikely gadgetry that suggested, against all reason, a carefully ordered chaos—cosmically arranged doodads mixed up with a deep-woods thicket. Clearly this was the culmination of John Ruskin’s work, the great masterpiece of the St. George’s Guild, the end product and object of the shadowy Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself.