The Knights of the Cornerstone (31 page)

He stumbled, but caught himself, not knowing whether it was the knock on the head or the earth moving again, and not caring.
Jerk the wire loose?
He wondered whether it would explode like a holiday cracker. His ignorance of bomb making was profound. He sank his fingers into the roofing tar and clutched the piece of two-inch pipe, pulling it loose from the wall. Holding it out in front of him, he turned around and walked back toward the entrance to the cavern. The least he could do was carry it away, throw it to hell and gone up the passage. He ran his free hand up the
long looping fuse until he found the end, feeling it burn his fingers. He pressed on it, trying to smother it, heading for the entrance to the cavern.

Donna shouted, and he ducked sideways fast, hearing the gunshot and spinning around, making himself small as he lunged away. Postum was coming straight toward him now, walking hurriedly and shaking his head, half smiling, aiming the pistol. Calvin lurched away, seeing the fuse sparking again. He hadn’t put it out at all.

“You’re going to blow yourself up, son,” Postum said to him, his voice loud and nervous now. “Give me the bomb and take a seat with your girlfriend. Miles is going to come through here and solve this problem. You see if he doesn’t. Do it right now, or I’m going to have to shoot you.”

Calvin backed away, watching Postum’s face. He yanked hard on the fuse, which popped out of the pipe bomb through a plug of roofing tar. They were jolted by another earthquake, hard this time, as if defusing the bomb had silently exploded it. Calvin hunkered down, riding it out, the bomb stuck to his hand. Fragments of rock fell from the roof of the cavern in a shower of dust, the falling debris causing Postum to throw his arms over his head. The walkie-talkie flew out of one of his hands, landing somewhere out of sight and taking Miles Taber out of the equation.

Calvin saw that Uncle Lymon had fallen, and that Nettie knelt next to him now, lifting the veil again with both hands, as if she had business to finish and no earthquake was going to stop her.

Postum recovered, raising the pistol again, and Calvin threw the bomb hard, but it stuck to his hand like a tar baby, the piece of pipe merely falling loose and bouncing on the ground. Postum bent over as if to pick it up, his head
cocked upward so that he could watch Calvin, the pistol ready but aimed slightly wide. Calvin rushed at him without thinking, gripping the long fuse, looking at Donna and senselessly yelling, “Now!”

Postum spun sideways toward Donna, who still sat helplessly on the ground, and Calvin threw a loop of still-burning cannon fuse around Postum’s head, thinking of Lamar Morris dead in the cardboard carton. Postum shoved his hand and arm into the loop before Calvin could yank it tight, and then turned to face him with no apparent effort, slugging him hard in the stomach. Grabbing both of Calvin’s shoulders, Postum cracked his head against Calvin’s forehead, and Calvin fell in a rush of darkness, holding on to the fuse, dragging Postum with him, gasping for wind, his eyes blurred with blood.

Postum pushed himself free and stood up, a bloody mark on his forehead, the pistol in his hand. He picked the pipe bomb up off the floor and wiped a gob of tar off the top of it, then fumbled to push the fuse back in, packing the tar around it carefully, glancing at Calvin but not apparently concerned with him.

There was a sound like ice breaking now, as if the floor of the cavern had split open like a frozen lake, and the undertone of music heightened, the sound of the river playing beneath it, the sighing of the water and the clacking of stones taking on a counterpoint melody. The cavern seemed to Calvin to be slowly spinning, and he braced himself, fighting vertigo, watching Postum shuffle sideways to stay on his feet, cramming his pistol through his belt and heading toward the river wall and the heavy smear of black tar, still working his plan.

Then he stopped abruptly. His attention wasn’t on the bomb any longer. He was staring at the Lymons, who were on their feet again, standing before the Cornerstone.

Postum raised the pistol, but his hand moved wildly from side to side as if drawn by an erratically shifting magnetic source. Calvin stood up dizzily, trying to balance himself. The music was abruptly deeper, a symphony of earthly noise rising out of the bedrock on a draft of cool air that washed past Calvin, raising dust from the floor, the updraft catching the veil and lifting it from Nettie’s hands. The veil fluttered upward, slowly ascending, casting golden rays where the light shone through it, until it was a small wafer of shadow against the misty aura of the ceiling. Calvin wiped blood from his eyes again, squinting upward, watching as the veil disappeared.

Uncle Lymon sat down hard on the ground, which shook again as if he had become so heavy that the earth could barely support his weight. The floor tilted sharply, and Calvin lunged forward, feeling the solid stone moving beneath him. Postum waded toward the cavern wall again like a man fighting against a waist-deep, heavy tide. He bent over the backpack and picked up what must have been a pair of wire cutters, clipping off most of the remaining fuse before throwing the cutters aside and jamming the pipe bomb back into the tar. He fumbled the lighter out of his pants pocket, clicked open a flame, and waved it at the fuse, but then staggered backward, trying to stay on his feet, glancing back at Calvin. Postum looked smaller now, old, worn-out. Fear played in his eyes, as if he had finally figured out that the stakes were higher than he had thought.

Calvin started toward the wire cutters, the cavern abruptly quiet. He snatched them up, moved to where Donna sat, and snipped through the nylon ties. He saw that his aunt and uncle were walking forward now, having passed through the veil of water, an aura of opalescent light
around them that brightened and brightened until they simply disappeared altogether.

There was a crack like a gunshot, and Calvin saw Postum pitch forward, a hail of stones clattering down around his shoulders, and in the next instant Postum looked upward into the downrushing shadow of an immense, conical stalactite that pulverized him beneath a cloud of dusty rubble.

Calvin felt a hand on his arm, bringing him to his senses, yanking him backward, and a voice shouted “Run!”—a voice he obeyed without hesitation, the glittering dust whirling around him and the sound of avalanching rock filling the cavern. Donna’s hand clutched his wrist, drawing him upward. He looked back into a cloud of illuminated dust, but the cavern disappeared from view as they ascended, and Calvin found himself in the darkness of the passage again, Donna still holding on to his wrist.

C
alvin sat in a lawn chair drinking a grape soda. There were a dozen bottles left from the case—two of which were dug into the river sand at his feet, keeping cool—but that would be the last of it, given what had happened to the Gas’n’Go and Shirley Fowler’s moving out to New Cyprus from Essex. The thought made him consider the things that had come into his life and then had passed out of it again over the past few days, and, more happily, the other things that had come into his life and stayed.

By the time he had gotten home last night from the hospital in Bullhead City, Doc Hoyle’s body was gone, and the bedroom and most of the house had been put right. This morning his forehead was tight with the stitches, and the aspirin hadn’t done much to dumb down the pain, but he had awakened with a feeling of peace that was still with him. Out on the Temple Bar they were taking the fortifications down, eradicating all evidence of yesterday’s invasion, the
little Bobcats and Pullman carts running back and forth, the Knights putting things right. Calvin was reminded of holiday decorations coming down or of a theater set being struck after a show had closed.

He thought again about the strange ascent of the veil, and about the rest of the Knights’ relics, or rather the relics that the Knights cared for. Taber apparently understood them to be symbols of Heaven on earth. His uncle had seen them as a way to change human pain into something bearable. To Bob Postum they had been objects that you bartered at the Coronet store with promises of a pillowcase full of paper money. But for Calvin the relics hadn’t been the issue. New Cyprus was the issue—the ever-moving panorama of the river, the mountains glowing gold with the dawn light, the fall of evening casting long shadows over the trailers in the park

They had found Postum’s body beneath the rubble in the cavern. The Lymons had simply vanished along with the Veil of Veronica. “God took them home,” Taber had told him. “Now and then He does that.” Calvin had no reason to argue, and anyway, he wasn’t in an argumentative mood.

The constant fisherman in the little aluminum outboard had a line out over on the Arizona side now, and beyond him a dust devil rose up from the field where Postum had been casting stones. It spun wildly for half a minute before abruptly falling still.
Dust to dust,
Calvin thought, tossing a stick out into the river and watching it bob away on the current. The water was emerald green even under the blue of the desert sky, and there were thunderheads over the mountains again. A breeze sprang up, carrying on it the promise of pending rain, of autumn and cooler days.

“There’s your ghost,” he said to no one, “blowing in from Arizona.”

He thought about his uncle and aunt and about his father and mother and the inevitable passing away of the things of man. And then, hearing Donna’s footsteps on the driveway, he said a few words on behalf of all of them to the close and holy silence of the desert morning, finished his grape soda, and headed around the side of the house to meet her.

If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

Visit the SF Gateway.

www.sfgateway.com

The Elfin Series

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Stone Giant

Langdon St Ives

Homunculus
*

Lord Kelvin’s Machine
*

Other Novels

The Digging Leviathan

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Paper Grail

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Collections

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

* not available as SF Gateway eBooks

I’d like to thank some people for the help they gave me with this book, starting with my family, all of whom made sensible and useful suggestions when I needed them, and particularly Danny, who gave me the idea of making my main character a hopeful cartoonist and lent me some of his own cartoons to get me going. I’d also like to thank Tim Powers, Lew Shiner, Chris Arena, Paul Buchanan, and Dixie and Bull Durham.

For Viki, John, and Danny

And this time for John Ciarcia and Karen King

Cha Cha and Karen: Here’s a book dedicated to the two of you, for years of New York hospitality. The Blaylocks thank you for your love and support. See you soon.

James P. Blaylock (1950 - )

James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © James P. Blaylock 2008

All rights reserved.

The right of James Blaylock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11769 3

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk