The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  THE KNIGHTS OF THE CORNERSTONE

  James P. Blaylock

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Knight Errant

  Fred Woolsworth

  The Dead Mountains

  The Temple Bar

  Time and the River

  At the Cozy Diner

  Fourteen Carats

  Like a Mill Wheel

  The Veil

  The Quarry

  Upside Down

  Barge Day

  Over the River

  On the Payroll

  The Meeting of the Elders

  Gas’n’go

  Beamon’s Yard

  The Rescue

  Clearing for Action

  Along the River

  Pharaoh’s Army

  Finding the Range

  The Fourth Secret

  Tomorrow

  Website

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

  —Lilith, George MacDonald

  Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

  —The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

  KNIGHT ERRANT

  Calvin Bryson read the letter a third time, but for some reason it insisted on saying the same thing it had said the other two times. It was from his uncle, Al Lymon, who lived out in the desert along the Colorado River. Calvin was invited to drop in for a stay—as long as he wanted, the longer the better. He had last seen his uncle and aunt at his father’s funeral three years ago, and since then Aunt Nettie hadn’t been doing well. The letter was cheerful enough, but it had a last-respects tone to it, and its arrival was a little ominous, since he had never gotten a letter from his uncle before, only birthday cards back in his childhood, and then from both of them.

  His last trip out to visit his aunt and uncle had been several years back. He had vivid memories of the Lymon house on its shady bend upriver from Needles, where the little town of New Cyprus lay hemmed in by a U-shaped range of barren hills appropriately called the Dead Mountains. Embayed as it was by high cliffs and the green verge of the Colorado, New Cyprus was a half-moon of land isolated from the world, accessible only by boat or by a winding two-lane road through miles of rock-strewn desert wilderness. The house, built of locally cut stone and imported cedar back in the 1920s, had view windows looking out onto the river, and its own little sandy beach on the bay, just wide enough for two or three lawn chairs. He could picture his aunt’s antiques and Oriental bric-a-brac, some of it ancient, including a Saracen dagger supposedly from the Third Crusade and said to have belonged to Richard Lionheart.

  He looked out through the front window at the street. Two boys played in the sprinklers across the way, just as he had done when he was growing up in this very house. The Eagle Rock neighborhood had taken care of itself over the years, and the old bungalows and Spanish-style houses, most of them built in the early part of the last century, were painted and repaired, and few of them had been renovated into the kind of characterless houses found in nearby neighborhoods. A big, messy carob tree shaded his yard, and he was struck suddenly with the memory of climbing the tree when he was a kid, of the musty smell of the carob pods and the feel of the rough bark on his hands. But he had no desire to climb it now, only a nostalgic regret for times that had passed away—nostalgia called up by the letter in his hand.

  But the last thing he wanted to do was to drive out into the desert, especially under these sad circumstances. He picked up his sketchbook and looked at the cartoon he had been drawing when the mail had come in through the slot. It was a picture of two gangly-looking lunatic doctors standing in a doorway, very apparently insane, with tousled hair and with their clothes askew. People on the sidewalk were similarly crazy-looking, with crossed eyes and propeller beanies and their pant legs tucked randomly into their socks. One of the two doctors was pointing across the street at a solitary man who looked like Cary Grant, neatly dressed in a three-piece suit. “That’s the one,” the doctor was saying. A magazine editor with any sense would buy it. So far none of them had exhibited any sense.

  Calvin had gotten thoroughly used to doing nothing during these past months of being alone, unless you counted the cartoons and the book collecting. Elaine, the woman he had been engaged to, had accused him of being aimless, but in fact he wasn’t aimless at all. Tonight, for example, he aimed to finish cataloguing his collection of pamphlets from Futura Press and maybe read a book, and then he aimed to go to bed early. Elaine and he had fallen apart at Christmas—maybe the worst Christmas of Calvin’s thirty-four years.

  He had inherited enough when his father passed away so that as long as he didn’t spend his inheritance like a fool, he could live moderately well, and his only real duties nowadays were to himself, or to his collection of rare books and pamphlets, mostly what was known as “Californiana.” Over the years he had paid questionable sums for pamphlets printed on garage presses by cranks and crackpots, but there was an element of innocent wonder in the era that produced them that attracted him, and wonder was a commodity that had pretty much gone out of the world.

  He didn’t like to think of the things that were going out of the world, but not thinking about them wouldn’t change the truth. You start coming up with excuses not to visit your old aunt and uncle, and then one morning you wake up in Hell, with your pajamas on fire….

  He reread the part in the letter about Aunt Nettie. It was impossible to say for sure what her condition was, but he assumed her cancer was out of remission. Although the letter revealed little about her troubles, it implied a lot about Uncle Lymon’s. Calvin had found that living alone wasn’t easy sometimes, but there were other things that were more difficult. The Lymons had been m
arried for over fifty years, and Calvin could only imagine what that meant—a lifetime of companionship drawing to a sad close.

  He flipped through the Rolodex looking for his uncle’s telephone number. Uncle Lymon was a potentate of some sort in a lodge called the Knights of the Cornerstone, which went in for secret handshakes and strange hats. Calvin half feared that the subject of his becoming an initiate in the order would come up again when he visited, as it had last time. If it did, he would demand a suit of armor and a pyramid hat with an eyeball on it. If they could meet his price, he was in. He took out the Rolodex card and reached for the telephone, but before he had time to make the call, the doorbell rang.

  He parted the blinds and looked out again. It was a UPS driver at the door. Books! Calvin thought, his spirits lifting, but when he opened the door and took the box from the driver it was far too light to be books. The man wasn’t wearing a uniform, just a blue work shirt, and the van at the curb was the right color of institutional brown but was unmarked. The driver apparently saw him looking at it. “I’m warehouse,” he said. “Your box got left behind by mistake, so they asked me to run it out here in one of the out-of-service trucks. It’s an element of customer service.”

  “I appreciate that,” Calvin said, signing his name on a list on a clipboard instead of the usual electronic gadget. He took the box back into the house, watching through the blinds as the van roared away in a cloud of exhaust. Not only was the box too light to be books, it in fact felt utterly empty. The return address was from Orange City, Iowa, from Warren Hosmer, his father’s ancient cousin—his own cousin, of some odd number and removal. This was puzzling, and if it called for him to drive out to Iowa, he would have to put his foot down.

  He fetched a box cutter, and was on the verge of slicing into the multiple layers of tape when he noticed that in fact the box wasn’t addressed to him personally, but rather to Al Lymon, c/o Calvin Bryson. That beat all. It would have been identical postage for Cousin Hosmer to ship it straight to his uncle’s post office box in Bullhead City, Arizona. New Cyprus was unincorporated territory, and his aunt and uncle collected their mail across the river, taking the round-trip ferry ride a couple of times a week and shopping at the Safeway and the big Coronet dime store near the ferry dock while they were in town.

  Then it occurred to him that UPS didn’t ship to post office boxes. But why use UPS at all? Why not just mail it? Calvin shook the box, which made a swishy sort of sound, as if there were tissue paper in it, or some other ethereal thing—a million-dollar bill, maybe, or a chorus line of angels dancing on the head of a pin. He was half tempted simply to cut it open and claim not to have looked at the address till it was too late. Except it would be a lie, and there was no use taking up that vice after having mostly avoided it for so many years. Sometimes it seemed to him that if he eliminated human contact entirely, he could rest easy in regard to that particular crime—unless he counted lying to himself, which was admissible because it had its own built-in justice: later on you were sorry for it, or so people said.

  A curious thing struck him—the coincidence of the box arriving on the same day as his uncle’s letter—and he wondered if he were being invited into a plot perpetrated by the old-timer end of the family, which had always been a mysterious crowd, although there weren’t a lot of them left these days. He recalculated the likelihood of waking up in Hell as he went back to the Rolodex and found the number for Warren Hosmer, which he jabbed into the phone. Being lured into other people’s mysteries didn’t attract him. A couple of well-conceived phone calls would likely solve all problems, or at least shift them to some indeterminate date in the future. The phone rang ten times before anyone picked it up.

  “Hosmer,” a man’s voice said.

  “It’s Calvin Bryson,” Calvin said as heartily as he could.

  “Cal! Good! Good! Good! You got the package?”

  “I did,” Calvin said. “How did you know?”

  “Why else would you call?”

  “Right. Anyway, I signed for it, and it’s sitting on the dining room table. I guess I was wondering whether I shouldn’t just take it downtown to the post office and send it on out to Uncle Lymon’s RO. Box.”

  There was a lengthy silence. “I wanted to avoid that,” Hosmer told him.

  “Ah!” Calvin said. “I see. Okay. Sure. Why?”

  “It’s that damned address of Lymon’s. You never know how many hands the package will pass through or what kind of curiosity it’ll stir up by the time he picks it up.”

  “All right. I guess I can take it out there myself if—”

  “Good. We thought that would be best.”

  “Like I was saying, I’m not sure how soon … Did you say ‘we’?”

  “Lymon and me. He said you’re taking a little trip out to New Cyprus. He and Nettie are looking forward to it like nobody’s business.”

  “It’s in the … planning stages,” Calvin said. This was inscrutable. He picked up Uncle Lymon’s letter and looked at the three-day-old postmark.

  “The sooner the better,” Hosmer told him. “I won’t sleep much till it’s out there safe.”

  “That suits me,” Calvin said. “It’s none of my business, really, but what’s inside? The box feels empty.”

  “Well, it’s an heirloom, a family heirloom. It’s a veil, I guess you could call it. A gossamer scarf. Belonged to your aunt Iris. Maybe you haven’t heard of her. She’s been dead these many years.”

  “That would explain it,” Calvin said. “Like her wedding veil or something?”

  “No. The veil she wore when she was calling up spirits. Her stance veil.”

  Suffering Judas, Calvin thought. He had never heard of any Aunt Iris, let alone that there’d been a spiritualist in the family, and now he was under orders to haul her magic veil out to the desert in a cardboard box. “When did she pass away?” he asked.

  “Nineteen ten. The family got the idea that her ghost was in the veil. It sounds crazy, but things happened with it. It kept rising up and sort of floating in the air. They’d open Iris’s old steamer trunk and it would drift right out, and no way in hell it wanted to go back in. The thing has a mind of its own, apparently. They’d have to snag it with a butterfly net. I can’t tell you much about it, because it was before my time. Thing is, it wouldn’t give them any rest till they boxed it up and tied down the lid of that trunk.”

  Calvin found that he couldn’t speak without laughing, which would insult the old man. Unless of course Hosmer was joking, which he had to be, although it didn’t sound that way.

  “You’re skeptical,” Hosmer said. “That’s good. It’ll keep you from trusting the wrong people. This kind of thing with the veil is a matter of belief, if you follow me—like having surefire numbers for the lottery. Once it comes into your mind to play the numbers, you’ve got to play them. They might as well be a fact. You understand belief, don’t you, son?”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “Like not walking under a ladder, even if you don’t believe—”

  “I’m not superstitious,” Hosmer told him flatly. “I don’t hold with that kind of thing—ladders, black cats. It’s a lot of rubbish. I’m talking about matters of the spirit here.”

  “Of course,” Calvin said. “I was just making a—”

  “Well, cut it the hell out. When can you leave?”

  “What?” Calvin said. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t put it off another minute. We’re all going to be a little bit nervous until Iris is interred in the crypt out there in New Cyprus, God bless her. You feel that way, too, I suppose. You’re family.”

  “Sure I am,” Calvin said, throwing caution into the shrubbery. Clearly he was outgunned here. “I’m happy to help. I was just wondering when to take off when the package showed up. The timing couldn’t have been better. I can leave this afternoon.”

  “Then it wouldn’t have made too much sense for you to mail it on out to Lymon, would it? If you can leave this afternoon, it’ll get it
there about ten times as fast in the trunk of your car. What would be the point of mailing it?”

  “It made no sense at all. I wasn’t thinking. I should be out there before dark if I beat the traffic into San Bernardino.”

  “That’s the spirit. Your dad always told me you were a good man, and Lymon says so, too. You take care of Aunt Iris. Don’t let her out of your sight, and for God’s sake, don’t open the box. If she gets loose in the car and the window’s down …”

  “That won’t happen. Leave it to me.”

  “That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I sent her to you. Like they used to say out here in Iowa, ‘If it was easy they’d have got someone else to do it.’”

  “There’s truth in that,” Calvin said.

  “Damn right there is. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said it. Let me know she arrived safe.”

  “Will do.”

  “One last thing,” Hosmer said, lowering his voice as if leery of being overheard. “You carry a portable horn?”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “A blower?”

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said. “A blower … ? Like a leaf blower?”

  “A telephone, damn it. A cellular phone. A portable.”

  “Sure. You want the number?”

  “That’s right. And keep it charged up. But once you’re out there in the desert, think twice about using it. Assume someone’s listening. If it’s necessary, I’ll call you”

  Calvin reeled off his phone number and the strange conversation was done. He couldn’t remember the last time he had exchanged pleasantries with Cousin Hosmer—probably at an Iowa picnic back in the late Middle Ages. And now this. He hefted the box. A ghost didn’t weigh much. Maybe they actually had negative weight, like helium, which is why they float.

  “Duty calls,” he said out loud. His voice sounded strange in the otherwise silent house. Certainly duty had called in a bizarre way, but who was he to ask needless questions? Like the man in the poem, his was but to do or die. “ ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ “ he said, “ ‘rode the six hundred.’ “ And then he laughed, picturing the cartoon, which would be utterly meaningless to anyone who hadn’t read the poem, and maybe even if they had read it.