The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  “Sounds like the Shroud of Turin.”

  “It’s been confused with it, along with a couple of other things, although there’s no reason to confuse any of them, since the transference of visages of one sort or another is common throughout history.”

  “Even on tortillas,” Calvin said.

  “I don’t know about that, but I don’t see that it necessarily makes a lot of difference—a tortilla or a piece of cloth. The thing is, the Knights Templar took the veil out of Constantinople after sacking the city in the thirteenth century and brought it to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, which was a Templar church. Later, no one knows when, it was stolen. Long story short, it surfaced a few years back and stirred up some people’s interest, particularly your man de Charney.”

  “And so that’s the Veil of Veronica? In a cardboard box?” He realized that he wasn’t as surprised as he sounded. He had seen the thing unveiled last night, so to speak, and although he wouldn’t call himself a believer, really, he could understand the nature of the belief. The easy wisecrack about the tortilla had been stupidly thoughtless.

  “It’s the very same veil,” Lymon said. “I’d tell you that it’s said to be the same, but that’s not accurate. It is what it is.”

  Calvin nodded. The thing was clear now. Uncle Lymon was convinced of it and apparently his father had been certain enough to die over it. Where that left Calvin Bryson, he couldn’t say. “Postum’s crowd wants it because of its value, then?”

  “Not its monetary value. Money is only a means to an end. It’s not the end itself. The value of the thing is a little bit more esoteric. It requires that you believe in magic.”

  “Magic? They want it for some kind of ritual, like with the man’s head? What was his name? John Nazarite?”

  “Like that, but that’s not what I mean. Turning water into wine—that’s magic. Talking snakes in the garden. Drawing water out of a stone. There’s good in that kind of magic and there’s bad in it, depending on who you are. That’s Postum’s downfall—who he is. If he heard of a talking snake, he’d want to own it and put it to some kind of use—have it tell fortunes or something. But you can’t own a miracle. It doesn’t belong to anyone or anything on earth. The Knights have an ancient, vested interest in the veil. We’ll give it a rest and give it a home. Maybe we can take it home. Our interest in it isn’t open for assessment, by the way. Comes a point where you either believe or you don’t. I wouldn’t blame you for not believing any of it. That kind of doubt won’t keep you out of Heaven when the time comes, at least as far as I know.”

  They drank the rest of their 7UP while sitting in silence. Finally Uncle Lymon nodded a couple of times and said, “That’s about it.”

  THE QUARRY

  The smart thing would have been to wait until later in the evening before venturing out into the desert, but Calvin wanted some time to think, and that meant getting away. And anyway, the folks were resting, and it was a convenient time to slip out without explaining where he was going. He had a small ice chest packed with bottles of water, a ham sandwich, a box of Cheez-Its, and a slice of the Safeway pie—exactly what he needed for a desert adventure. There was something about the old quarry that had stirred his curiosity, something that had come out of the discussion he’d had with his aunt earlier that morning. The entire idea of Hugh Blankfort working the quarry had sounded more than half mystical, and so did the odd night noises that Calvin had heard, or thought he had heard, when he was falling asleep. He reminded himself that there was no reason to go overboard here. If you hung around with eccentric people long enough, you ran the danger of becoming one yourself.

  He turned off the road to take another look down at the river before the hills swallowed him, and, just like yesterday, he was swept away by the view and by the strange existence of a swift-running, cold-water river in the desert. New Cyprus, lying along the river’s edge, was stranger and more alluring than it had been when he had first sighted it, and his uncle’s offer of a house of his own was like a door opening on another realm and another life.

  Or at least a potential door. In a single day Calvin had decided to turn down a pillowcase full of cash and a house on the river. In the future he would look back on this day from a safe distance and marvel. But this just wasn’t his fight, and he missed the comforts of home. Whoever had coined the word “homebody” had people like him in mind. He swung the car back onto the road and headed up into the Dead Mountains.

  It seemed to be slightly cooler as he rose into the higher elevations, but maybe it was the deep shadows of late afternoon that made the difference. He rolled down the windows and shut off the air-conditioning. The heat seemed to have actual weight to it, and for the moment it wasn’t unpleasant. Just when he’d had enough of it, the landscape opened up, and he was in the quarry, where he pulled off the road and parked in the shade of a steep little hill. He sat for a moment listening to the unearthly silence, watching a thin white vapor trail appear as if by magic in the sky, marking a momentary highway on a map of the heavens, a highway that was fading like invisible ink even as it was being drawn. The quarry had the air of an ancient ruin, the work of people long passed away, and Calvin was overcome with a lonesome emptiness. It came to him suddenly that he had just retrieved his lost hour, and that he could keep it if he simply kept driving west, but instead he shrugged off the inclination, got out of the car, and opened the back door to grab a bottle of water from the ice chest. He set out around the edge of the hill, heading toward the railroad tracks.

  Only fifty feet or so of tracks remained. It was apparent where they had lain years ago, just the vestige of a path now, descending into the valley toward Interstate 40, obscured by sparse undergrowth but with a ghostly imprint on the desert floor here and there. Why anyone would have gone to the trouble to dismantle the rail line was a mystery. Perhaps once the quarry was played out the Knights wanted to further disconnect themselves from the world. He walked down to where a litter of enormous rectangular stones lay broken in the mesquite, like a cemetery after an earthquake, and then climbed uphill toward a cleft in the rock, where he had a broad and ethereal view toward the west, with the highway laid out like a ribbon, transecting the desert flatlands. Behind him, far below, his car sat in the sun, the windows rolled down, and it came to him now that he had left the keys in the ignition.

  “So what?” he muttered. If there was ever a place in the world where it didn’t matter … He headed downward now, out of sight of the car, walking between steep rock walls and thinking again about his conversation with Lamar Morris and his aunt’s reference to a “passage” and the “Fourth Secret.” There were shadowy holes in the scattered heaps of rocks, but none of the holes were large enough to qualify as a potential tunnel. He opened his water bottle and drank half of it before he stopped himself. He was mummifying in the dry heat. He should have shoved an extra bottle into his back pocket.

  He saw something then—a place where someone had apparently shifted a number of rocks aside to reveal a dark little hole in the ground. There were empty beer cans tossed around, and the litter looked very recent, the cans shiny and clean. Someone had been at work here. He took out his camera and shot pictures from half a dozen angles. He pitched a rock into the hole, listening as it clattered away downward and then was silent. He had no idea if it had fallen five feet or fifty feet. If this was the Fourth Secret, it was of interest mainly to rabbits and rattlesnakes.

  He took another swig of water, which nearly finished off the bottle, and realized that he was either going to have to head back down to the car for another one or die of thirst, but before he had taken three steps back along the trail he heard the sound of an engine—a car coming up the grade. He hurried back to the hilltop, where he looked down again at his own car parked below. There was a white compact pickup truck just rounding the bend now, ascending from the highway. It entered the quarry, slowing down, then turned off the road twenty feet in front of his car and sat there with the motor idling.

 
He crouched down, well hidden by boulders. There were two men in the cab of the truck, sitting still and looking at his car. They shut the pickup engine down, climbed out, and glanced around into the surrounding hills. One of them was rail thin and tall; the other was stocky. He couldn’t swear to it, but the thin man appeared to be the same one who had been waiting outside the Coronet store earlier. He wore the same hat, John Deere green. Postum had warned Calvin about “poking around” up in the hills, and now he had driven straight on up here.

  The two stood in front of the truck talking, and then the thin one turned and walked in Calvin’s direction, scanning the hills intently. The other man walked toward Calvin’s car. It occurred to him now that leaving his keys in the ignition had been moronic, slightly more moronic than leaving his cell phone on top of the bureau in his bedroom back at the Lymons’ house. He half stood up and aimed his camera at the pickup truck, pushed the little zoom button, and clicked off several pictures of the truck and the boxes and tools that littered the bed. He heard a shout, and realized that he had been spotted. The thin man took off running up the hill toward him, his John Deere hat flying off his head. Calvin headed back down toward the rocky defile where he had been just a few moments ago. He had seen a trail leading downward from there in the general direction of the river, although how far it went and where it ended up he couldn’t say. Without water he wasn’t going far in any event.

  The trail angled downward more steeply, and he found himself slipping and sliding on loose rock, the scree clattering, making a perfect racket. The area had seemed to be full of hiding places, but now that he needed one, no place was available. He looked for a weapon, but aside from getting into a rock fight—pinned down, probably, from above—nothing suggested itself. And if the man was armed …

  He angled downward across a broad, flat rock, feeling the heat through his shoe soles and burning his hands when he clambered down off a ledge. He found himself in a little box canyon with nowhere to go but down into open country, where he could do nothing but keep running. He waited, listening hard, hefting a grapefruit-size rock in his hand. Footsteps passed by above him, and he waited until there was silence again, then counted to thirty before scrambling out from behind the outcropping, following the hillside back around toward the quarry, climbing back up the rocky slope.

  He reached the top of his little hill, finding himself fifty yards or so above the litter of beer cans and rock. Another hundred yards below that sat his car, with the front door open. The heavyset man was sitting in the driver’s seat now, and as Calvin watched, he climbed out of it, dangled the ignition keys on his finger, and then pitched them into the nearby brush. Calvin tried to fix the brush in his memory—maybe ten feet from the car, a stand of mesquite. …

  There was nothing to do but wait, and it wasn’t long before the thin man walked out of the rocks below and turned to look back, shading his eyes with his hand. He picked up his fallen hat and put it on his head. The heavyset man opened the rear door of Calvin’s car and took out the ice chest, opening it up and handing his friend one of the waters. Then he fished out the foil-wrapped slice of pie and unwrapped it. Together they ate the pie and Cheez-Its, and then dumped the trash onto the ground. Then they both returned to the pickup, grabbed a pick and shovel out of the truck bed, and started off in Calvin’s general direction, no doubt heading toward the work site.

  There was no point in sticking around. Calvin made his way downward as silently as he could, leery of being caught in the open, and soon he heard the two coming up toward him. He edged behind a rock and waited for them to pass.

  “I don’t know,” one of them said, “but a couple of extra sticks and what you end up with is rubble. We want to open it up, not bury it. That well out in Oatman that Henry blew just about took out the farm.”

  “There’s no farm here, so who gives a damn?” the other one said. Calvin could hear the scuffing of their feet now. “The thing about blasting is you use enough dynamite to blow the hole clear. If you don’t use enough you get the rubble. Where do you suppose that asshole went?”

  “Henry? I heard he was working out in Henderson again.”

  “Not Henry, dipshit—that other asshole. The one you couldn’t catch.”

  “Oh, him. I don’t give a damn. He’s just a complication. It’s too late in the afternoon for a complication. We just have to dig that hole out enough to get a good look, and then it’s Miller time.”

  “It won’t be Miller time if he’s up to something out here and Bob finds out we let him walk away.”

  ‘Then you look around for him. I damn near died of heat stroke trying to chase him down. Who cares if he’s up here?”

  After a moment Calvin heard the sound of pick and shovel work. He picked his way downward among the rocks, keeping out of sight. At the bottom of the hill he kept walking, straight across to the stand of mesquite, but saw absolutely no sign of the keys anywhere. He crammed himself in among the low branches, looking down into the gravel and dead weeds, pushing branches aside, but there were apparently no keys.

  He hunched out of the bushes and headed toward the pickup truck. He had no compunctions about stealing their car. The Knights would know what to do with it—how to return it, if that’s what they were inclined to do. As far as he was concerned, they could push it into the river as a fish habitat. But of course there were no keys in the ignition. He opened the door and felt under the mat, and then bent across the console and checked the other mat before opening the console itself, which was a litter of snuff cans and rolled-up smut magazines.

  He backed out and straightened up, looking into the hills, where the thin man was coming down the trail again. The man saw him, stopped abruptly, whistled twice, and then headed down toward him at a sprint. Calvin bent back into their pickup truck, released the brake, yanked the gearshift into neutral, gave the car a good shove backward down the hill, and headed straight down the road toward New Cyprus at a dead run. It would be close, but if he could get far enough ahead of them, there was no way they’d catch him without a car. The heavy one would have a seizure before he had run a hundred yards.

  Calvin looked back, elated to see their truck picking up speed, rolling deeper into the desert, the thin man hanging on to the front bumper now, trying to slow it down. With any luck it would roll itself right off a cliff or into soft sand. Calvin hadn’t run ten feet farther, though, when he heard a crash, and he glanced back again to see that the truck had smashed to a stop against something. The heavyset man had reappeared. In a few moments they would simply run him down in the truck.

  He picked up the pace, around the bend in the road and out of sight. The ruse with the truck would gain him about a hundred yards if he was lucky. Clearly he had to get off the road and hide again, because otherwise the sun and heat were going to kill him. They’d find his bones by the roadside.

  A car came around the bend fifty yards ahead, bearing down on him, just like that, appearing out of nowhere—a car from New Cyprus. He waved his arms and ran straight down the lane toward it. The car slowed and stopped, and he ran to the passenger side and threw open the door, climbing in uninvited. Donna sat in the driver’s seat, staring at him. “Turn around,” he said, interrupting whatever she had been going to say. “They’re after us.”

  Without a word, she swung a U-turn, the tires spinning on the loose gravel of the shoulder before getting traction. He looked back—no use trying to hide—and there was the truck behind them, picking up speed.

  “Did you say something they didn’t like?” Donna asked him. She was smiling, but only faintly, and she glanced into the rearview mirror and sped up, taking the turns in the road with an abandon that shocked him. He gripped the grab bar overhead and held on, his right foot working an invisible brake.

  “I was out looking around in the quarry, and they showed up. They’ve been working out there—something involving dynamite. They probably recognized my car.”

  She looked into the rearview mirror again. “They’
re persistent.”

  The pickup had run up to within twenty feet of their bumper now. “I wish it wasn’t you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Really? Thanks. Who would you rather it was?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean I think we’re in trouble. Both of us now, instead of just me.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. Another couple of miles, though, and they’ll turn back. They won’t follow us down into town.”

  There was a crash and the car slammed forward. Calvin straight-armed the dashboard and jerked around to see the cab of the pickup directly behind them, the pickup’s engine revving as the truck swerved and shot into the adjacent lane, half on the shoulder, and tried to pass, but Donna stepped on the accelerator and surged ahead again, the pickup swerving back over, nearly clipping their bumper. Calvin half expected a pistol to appear in the big man’s hand or for a tire to blow out or for the car to spin off the road. The tires squealed, and they shot past the roadside viewpoint, nearer to the edge than was comfortable, and Donna accelerated again, throwing Calvin halfway across the seat. He hauled himself back, fastened his seat belt, and turned around in time to see the pickup skidding sideways behind them.

  It took him a second to see that the pickup was out of control, slowly starting to spin, falling farther behind, the faces of the two men appearing and disappearing and then reappearing. Donna rounded the next curve without slowing down and pulled out onto a straightaway, picking up speed again. The seconds passed and the pickup didn’t reappear.

  “A pickup truck is no good for high-speed curves,” Donna said, watching the rearview mirror. “They’re a little better if you’ve got half a ton of sandbags in back.”

  Calvin nodded his head in response and forced himself to calm down. “Thanks,” he said. “They’d have had me for sure if you hadn’t come along. Where were you headed? Not that it’s any of my business.”