The Knights of the Cornerstone (30 page)

Calvin waded through the last of the shallows and pushed through a stand of willow, up onto the beach in front of his aunt’s den. The lawn chairs were folded and leaning against the side of the house, but the den door stood wide open. He stepped in warily, listening to the silence, and saw at once that the place had been ransacked—not carefully, either. Cupboards stood open; books and silver book-ends and chair cushions lay on the floor; kitchen drawers were pulled out. The cupboards beneath the living room bookshelves had been yanked open, the false veil boxes ripped up and pitched aside. He moved up the hallway to the open door of the Lymons’ silent bedroom, darting a glance inside, praying that the room was empty.

The clothes in the open closets were pushed aside, the blankets yanked off the bed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and dumped. Calvin stepped into the room, not seeing the body on the floor until he had walked past the tilted mattress that was hiding it from view. It was Doc
Hoyle, lying on his back, his eyes open and staring, his arm across his chest.

Calvin stood there listening to the drone of the swamp coolers, looking at Hoyle’s upturned face, and then he turned away, thinking that he should close the man’s eyes. He was staggered by a wave of dizziness, and he grabbed the bedpost to steady himself, seeing then that a scalpel with a bloody, inch-long blade lay on the floor, and that there was a bloody smear, on the lampshade and a spray of drops on the wall behind it. For a stupid moment he thought that Hoyle had somehow murdered himself with his own scalpel, but then he saw the small, bloody hole in his shirt pocket, nearly hidden by the dead man’s wrist.

Calvin backed away from the body, trying to make sense of things. Postum had ransacked the place looking for the veil, which he knew was in the house because Doc Hoyle had told him it was. Postum had met Hoyle here, Calvin reasoned, and when he discovered that Hoyle had failed to get the veil from Nettie, he had torn the place up looking for it. Had he found it? Or had he come up empty and shot Hoyle out of anger? Or had Hoyle futilely attacked Postum with the scalpel, making a last-ditch attempt to undo his bargain with the devil?

Calvin hurried back out through the kitchen, heading outside toward the cellar, pushing the door open and looking in carefully. The lights were on, but the cellar was empty and hadn’t been ransacked. The wheelchair was gone. He walked across to the door to the passage, pushed it open, and listened to the hollow silence within the dimly lit tunnel, which stretched steeply away downward, under the bay and out toward the island. The roof in this section
was supported by a scaffolding of railroad timbers, the air inside smelling of creosote and dust.

Had his aunt and uncle gone out through the tunnel, his uncle in the wheelchair? Or had Donna talked sense to Nettie and taken them somewhere safe—down to the Temple, maybe? Calvin set out downhill through the passage and into cool air. Better to find out what lay ahead than to search topside for them. He tried to think of where his uncle and aunt could have been headed if they came this way, but the throbbing in his forehead seemed to knock apart his thoughts. It came to him that he should call Taber to warn him about Postum, and he fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket, but of course there was no signal.

Turn around?
He kept walking even as he was considering the possibility. The supporting timbers abruptly ended, the passage level now, cut out of solid stone. There was a porcelain insulator screwed to the last of the timbers, with the electrical wire running through it. Calvin’s tiki hung incongruously over the outthrust insulator. He stood staring at it, trying to make sense of it and leaning against the tunnel wall for support, feeling dead tired.

Donna hung it there.
There was no other explanation. She had gone down the tunnel looking for the Lymons, or accompanying the Lymons, and she had left this as a sign. Except that if she had wanted to leave a sign she could have left one back in the cellar, in writing, thumbtacked to the door. She didn’t need to leave the tiki, which told him nothing except that she had come this way. …

He lifted it off the insulator and clutched it in his hand, the obvious answer to the riddle dawning on him. Donna must have left the tiki as a message because she hadn’t had a chance to do anything else. Why? She was with Postum?
Maybe having walked into the Lymons’ house when he was ransacking it? Calvin recalled the image of Doc Hoyle lying on the floor, the spray of blood on the wall and lampshade. …

He tried to unclip the tiki to put it around his neck, but dropped it instead. Clumsily, he bent over to pick it up, feeling himself pass out in a dark rush, and then an instant later aware that he was sitting on the cold stone floor, which felt as if it were moving beneath him. Abruptly it stopped moving, and then shook again before becoming still. He waited another moment and then crept to his knees and picked up the tiki. He rose slowly, his head pounding again with his first tentative step. There had been an earthquake, coincidental with his passing out. A
portent?
Nothing that Lamar Morris had told him seemed the least bit unlikely now.

He heard the sound of footfalls, and a shade passed through the air in front of him, a flitting shard of bat-like darkness. Surprised, Calvin swung his hand clumsily, his hand and arm passing through the apparition just as it coalesced into the shadow of a man walking a few steps ahead of him. The figure wavered like a desert mirage, and as it disappeared he heard the faint sound of the footfalls passing away. Then, uncannily, he heard them again, but approaching from behind him this time.

He turned slowly around, wary of passing out again, and in the semidarkness beyond the nearest hanging bulb, another figure, dim and transparent, appeared to be pacing toward him. It was Uncle Lymon, momentarily nearly solid, looking beyond Calvin as if he weren’t there, and then evaporating and disappearing as he walked into the blighter lamplight, leaving Calvin alone again in the tunnel. He thought of Donna’s ghostly miners, apparently
displaced in time, and of the figure in the tunnel near the catacombs, and he seemed to hear a rising cacophony of footsteps around him, and the sound of picks ringing against stone.

A line of blood ran down his cheek like a crawling insect, bringing him to his senses, and he compelled himself to walk on and to order his mind. He worked through the alphabet backward, resolutely mouthing the letters. Soon the strand of lights ran out, the way turned, and it was utterly dark. He trailed his right hand against the wall of the passage to keep his bearings, holding his left hand out in front. Flashes of light exploded before his eyes, keeping time with the throbbing in his head.

He felt the charged air that he had felt in the relics antechamber now. He sensed it again in his spine and along the back of his neck. And at the very edge of audibility he could hear the strange, creaky, antique music that he had heard before. The music rose and fell, the melody mingling with what sounded like the clacking together of wave-washed stones on a beach and the creaking sound of stone against stone, as if the earth were restless, turning over in its bed. The ground shook again, and he stood still, bracing himself against the wall, but almost at once the quake subsided, and he went on blindly.

Some distance ahead of him there was a feeble glow, like moonlight, which broadened as he moved forward, a natural cavern opening up before him. He could see the tips of stalactites projecting downward, pearl-white and glowing in the light, and he heard the dripping of water, oddly loud against the strange music that seemed now to rise from the stone floor and walls. He couldn’t make out the source of the diffused light, which was more like an illuminated cloud than lamplight.

At the entrance to the cavern stood the wheelchair, and for an instant he saw his uncle sitting in the chair, and his aunt standing behind it, and then it came to him that he was seeing his uncle through the transparent image of his aunt, but before he could understand what that meant, they had vanished, and on top of the vinyl wheelchair seat sat a cardboard box, clearly not any kind of figment. He picked it up, looking at the familiar Gas’n’Go address. It was empty.

He moved forward carefully, the cavern opening outward and upward, vaster than seemed possible, although its apparent size might have been an illusion of the glowing mist, which apparently filled the upper reaches, as if the cavern had its own atmosphere. There was the smell of water on stone, and from somewhere came the sound of the river flowing beyond the cavern wall.

He heard someone speak, and he peered into the recesses of the cavern, trying to orient himself before moving farther in. Illuminated like figures in a painting, the Lymons stood in the distance near a shoulder-high, rectangular white stone. Calvin was astonished to see that his uncle stood there unsupported, when only a couple of hours earlier he had been near death. Clearly Nettie had made use of the veil, as she had threatened—or promised. The white stone was the Cornerstone of the Temple of Solomon—the Fourth Secret. His aunt held the Veil of Veronica in her hands.

Water leaking through fissures in the floor above fell like a brightly beaded curtain between the Lymons and the stone. Other cut stones rose beyond the Cornerstone in an immense pile, pyramiding up and filling the end of the cavern, supporting the floor of the Temple. The glowing light clearly emanated from above, as if from an interior sun—light that seemed to Calvin to be alive with flitting
dark figures like giant birds in a painting of a prehistoric world, or like angels in an antique illustration of Heaven. The figures coalesced out of the mist, glowing briefly like burnished gold in the light, and then became shadow again and disappeared altogether, back into the misty ceiling of the cavern as if into the vast, open sky of another world.

Calvin saw Postum now, standing some distance away near the far left wall of the cavern—the river wall. Water ran through the rock behind him, trickling down in little mineral-streaked rivulets. Postum’s arm hung at his side, his hand holding a pistol. He wasn’t moving, but was talking into a walkie-talkie, staring at the Lymons and at the falling curtain of water. Calvin edged toward him, keeping well out of sight, seeing Donna now, who sat on the floor of the cavern, apparently unhurt, her hands behind her, her ankles held together with a nylon zip-tie. A backpack lay on its side ten feet from her, spilling out hand tools, water bottles, assorted junk.

The ground shook again, and Calvin staggered, but caught himself, listening to the creaking of the restless earth, the ground trembling, and he told himself that if he wanted to see the sunlit world again, he’d have to do something besides stand and wait—something that wouldn’t prompt Postum to start shooting up the place. His aunt and uncle stood stock-still, Nettie holding the veil up and out before her now as if it were an offering. The mist overhead dimmed and glowed, still alive with shadowy movement.

“That’s right,” Postum said, talking loudly. “Are you hearing me clear now? Good, because I’m getting a little nervous about these quakes. Like I was saying, it’s old-school. Black powder, a piece of PVC pipe from down at the hardware store, and some cannon fuse I ordered out of the Estes Rockets catalogue. It’s a foolproof,
thirty-dollar deal. All I want to do is breach that wall.” He gestured with his left hand, which held the pistol.

Calvin spotted a heavy smear of black tar on the river wall, water trickling over and around it. Pressed into the middle of it was a foot-long piece of PVC pipe with the ends capped off. Several feet of fuse looped away from it. Calvin knew nothing about explosives, but he knew that Postum didn’t have to use theater props down here where there was no audience. The bomb wouldn’t be a fake.

“The river’ll do the rest,” he was saying. “How high it’ll rise is a good question, but it’ll sure drown anyone down
here,
which amounts to three people, me being the fourth. What I want is twenty-four hours. Then we’ll be out of your hair for good and all, and no more collateral damage.

“Wait … you hear me out. I’m looking at the veil as we speak. Right now it’s in the hands of an old woman who won’t give me more than a moment’s grief before she drowns. As for the silver, I’m banking on the water rising past the entrance to that passage that comes down out of the Temple there, which means that the
only
way into what you call the
mint
is down from the hills, and from your point of view that’s enemy territory now. Whether that mint’s underwater or bone-dry, we’re going to take that silver right out of there in a trolley car. You all can come on up the Khyber Pass and gamble with us if you want, but I don’t think you’ve got enough chips to see the bet. That’s the end of my pitch.”

He listened again, and then said, “You sure can try a man’s patience, Miles. Give me just a second to up the ante here.”

He walked across to the coil of fuse, took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, lit the flame, and touched it to the fuse, which immediately sparked and burned. Calvin
stopped himself from lurching out of the darkness right then and there, which would only end in him being shot—no doubt about it this time. He wiped his face with his forearm, then yanked off the saturated piece of beach towel and tossed it aside. The misty light around him seemed to have intensified, and sounds were strangely clear—the undertone of music, the sound of the river.

“It’s done,” Postum said. “Fuse is lit. Anybody shows his face at the mouth of the cavern is a dead man, according to my pistol. This cannon fuse burns at a steady rate, and you’d best believe I’ve timed it to the inch, so I know just how much time I’ve got to walk out of here, and it ain’t long. All my chips are on the table now. You want to call my bluff, Miles, you go right ahead. Meanwhile, I’m going to secure that veil before the river looks in on us.”

Move,
Calvin told himself, and this time he didn’t hesitate. He stepped out into the open and strode silently toward the burning fuse. Donna was looking straight at him, but her face didn’t change. The Lymons were facing away, paying no one any mind. Nettie was talking out loud, what sounded like prayer, still holding the veil out before her. Postum paced toward the Lymons, intent on the veil, his back to Calvin.
Bomb first,
Calvin thought.