The Paper Grail (24 page)

“I dare say it would. So did Uncle Roy strike back?”

“A couple of times. Nothing very inspired, though—not for a while. Sometime I’ll tell you about his campaigns. I think he was
tired of it right then. The cow incident hadn’t turned out to be very funny. Mother got a little bit shortsighted about his capers, too. You could tell that last night. I’m surprised that she hasn’t put a stop to the haunted house. The only thing that I can figure is that she’s more tired out than he is. She can’t keep up with him anymore.”

“She’s fairly long-suffering, isn’t she? In the best way.”

Sylvia nodded. “In some of the best ways. Not always.”

Then after a moment Howard said, “Let’s make a move on the tin shed before Jimmers wakes up.”

“If you stay up here,” Sylvia said, ignoring what he said and growing suddenly serious, “I know just exactly what’s going to happen to you.”

Howard gestured at her, as if to tell her to go on, to reveal his future. “Read my palm,” he said, holding out his hand.

“You’re going to end up like Father and Mr. Jimmers—spending your life worrying about secret societies and outer space and ancient mysteries. You don’t believe in anything, and what happens when you don’t believe in anything is that you’ve got no defense against all this weird crap when it puts itself in your way.”

“You’re a fine one to talk, passing out mystical pamphlets and selling recipes for sun tea made out of rose quartz and stump water.”

“At least I can take an objective look at it. I’ve got some basis for comparison. You’re utterly ignorant of it, because you’ve never considered it, and when something that doesn’t fit comes along, you don’t begin to know where to put it.”

Howard had the vague feeling that she was right, not because of any particular logic or nonsense about her being objective, but because right at the moment he was faced with a basket full of strange activities that he hadn’t been able to fathom. This business about rivalries and wrecked love affairs put a new coat of paint on the horse, too, or on the cow.

“Thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“For worrying about me. I’m not much on secret societies, though. You don’t have to let that trouble you. There’s good reasons for me to stay up here. That’s what I think.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked at him suspiciously and then out at the ocean, lost in thought.

He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, feeling like a teenager in a darkened theater.

“What are you up to?” she asked, looking him in the face.

“Nothing.” He didn’t let her go, though.

She nodded. “For a moment there I thought you were making a pass at me.”

“Maybe I was.”

“Remember that girl who used to live in the house behind you? Jeanelle Shelly. You were out of your mind over her. And how old were you? About six? You started in early.”

“I didn’t ‘start in.’”

She leaned against him, neither of them saying anything. Howard was struck by the feeling that they were still playing at being in love—him making his fumbling advances and her fighting him off with language, making verbal jokes, diffusing things by poking fun at him. Suddenly she looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get back to town,” she said.

“I’m going to look at that shed. I’ll hurry.”

Sylvia nodded, as if it had to be done in order for Howard and her father to rest easy. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “What I’m going to do is head back to the house and keep Mr. Jimmers company. If he wakes up, I’ll give you a holler so that you know he’s up and about.”

“Good.” Howard whirled the string with the key on it around his finger. “It won’t take a minute.”

“Wait,” she said. “Look at this first. It’s been here for years.” She led the way through brown, waist-high weeds toward three lonesome cypress trees growing in a clump halfway up toward the highway. In between the triangle formed by the three trunks sat a little gluer shrine, very much like the one set up in the woods by Graham’s cabin. It was built of old junk again—perfume bottles, bits of ceramic tile, wooden dominoes, an old rusty fishing reel, a brass doorknob, all enclosed within a pair of arched automobile fenders, rusted and pitted to the point that they were almost lacy.

“This has been here for as long as I can remember,” Sylvia said. “They just add new stuff sometimes and rearrange it.”

“There’s one like it back behind your house, out in the woods.”

She nodded. “That one’s new. It appeared the day Father moved him back there. Nobody was supposed to know where he was, but they knew.”

“You wouldn’t believe what I found in that one,” Howard said, “back in the woods. My paperweight, sitting right there in plain view.”

“And you took it back?”

Howard shook his head. “It’ll be safe enough out there. I had the feeling, actually, that it had been put to good use. Don’t ask me why.”

“Not me. It’s funny, though, the weird sorts of things Howard Barton is learning to take on faith. What’s next? Membership in the Flat Constellation Society?”

“Next is the adventure of the tin shed.”

“You’re sure?”

“Too good a chance to pass up,” Howard said, and the two of them tramped back up to the trail again and then along the bluffs toward the rear of the house. Sylvia went around toward the front, disappearing beyond the hillocks of berry vines.

Where the rear wall of the house became one with the cliff, there was no backyard at all, just a narrow shelf of rock far above the sea. High above was the attic window, beyond which Howard had spent the night, sleeping in a chair. He found that he could pick his way along the slender ledge, just as long as he didn’t look down. The stones of the house wall were rough and the mortar was deep-set, so there were handholds. And someone, ages past, had cemented an iron railing into the rocks in order to prevent anyone from going over, but one end of the railing had long ago rusted through, and it dangled uselessly now like a broken tree root a hundred feet over the water. Even a seasoned rock climber would have found it impossible to scramble down the wet and mossy shale to the beach below.

Safely back on the meadow, he hurried past Mr. Jimmers’ Swiss chard toward the tin shed, hiding behind it finally and peering back toward the house. It looked quiet enough. There was the chance that Mr. Jimmers was simply being subtle again, that he hadn’t fallen asleep at all but was giving Howard a chance to betray himself, but Sylvia would have had time to get back in by now, and she hadn’t hollered …

He crouched at the corner of the shed and took one last look. Then, staying low, he scuttled crabwise to the locked sliding doors. The key slid straight in and the lock opened easily, as if it were slick with graphite. In a moment he had slipped the padlock out of its holes in the door handles. He yanked on one of the doors, and it let out a screech of rusty protest, jiggling along its bent track just a few inches and then jamming tight. He pushed on the opposite door, along the bottom edge, wishing he had a can of sewing-machine oil to spray into the track and expecting momentarily to hear Sylvia yell.

The door jerked along a bit farther, and suddenly the opening was wide enough to slide through. He took the padlock with him, remembering his adventure at the spirit museum, and wafered himself through, easing the door shut again at once, all but about an inch so as to have some light to see by.

There was light leaking in under the eaves, too, enough to reveal Mr. Jimmers’ device. It was built of wood and brass and copper and leather—a product, pretty clearly, of the Victorian age, of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It had foot pedals and an organ pipe apparatus alongside a broad, spoked wheel, as if from an oversize sewing machine. A wavy-looking, fishbowl lens was set in the top. The whole thing had a sort of Rumplestiltskin fairy tale magic to it, a backwoods cobbler’s notion of what a “machine” must look like. There was a bit of writing carved into the wooden superstructure, which read simply, “St. George’s Guild, 1872.”

John Ruskin again, Howard said to himself, rolling back onto his heels and squinting in concentration. Knowing that it was Ruskin who had established the unsuccessful St. George’s Guild didn’t tell him anything at all about the machine. But the name of the guild itself was powerfully suggestive to him, and abruptly he thought of Sylvia and his just-ended conversation with her. How was it that she saw him and his desires so much more clearly than he saw them himself?

Here he was, hiding out in Mr. Jimmers’ tin shed, turning quite possibly innocent artifacts into fourteen-carat mysteries in the spirit of Jimmers and Uncle Roy. He was infected, and no doubt about it. Knowing that didn’t help at all either, though. And with an almost helpless curiosity he reached across and gave the brass wheel a spin. The wheel revolved effortlessly, frictionlessly, as though now that it was put into motion, it wouldn’t be inclined to stop.

Suddenly there was a shift in the quality of light in the shed. A dim glow emanated from the lens atop the machine. Howard spun the wheel faster and the light brightened. The wheel whirred on its bearings, and Howard was momentarily torn between trying to stop it, to end whatever was happening before it had gone too far, and to see it through, into the heart of some deeper mystery. He let it spin. There was the sound of bees humming, which sorted itself out into the low babble of voices like a roomful of mechanical men talking excitedly.

A pale fog materialized in the air over the machine. Particles whirled in it like dust motes. Vibrations shook the shed, and
the machine, rocking on its springs, began to bang against the tin wall with a slow, rhythmic pounding, like the spinning of an out-of-balance washing machine. The noise and the spinning made him dizzy, and he was aware suddenly that there were stars on the ceiling over his head, pale and diffuse like stars at twilight.

The mist from the machine congealed into a spinning blur like a tiny human head, and there was the loud sound of footsteps walking down a long wooden corridor. The misty face developed features now, and Howard’s curiosity turned abruptly to fear. The thing blinked, as if vaguely surprised to find itself there. Then its mouth began to work, like the mouth of a ruminating cow. The machine banged away at the wall of the shed, easily loud enough to awaken Jimmers and throw him into a panic. The babble of voices combined to form a single voice, deep and commanding, but mostly lost in the banging and whirring of the machine.

Howard heard his name shouted, and he reached down to stop the turning of the wheel, which thumped against his hand, still spinning heavily and freely. There was a body forming beneath the head now. Howard could see a waistcoat, a dangling pocket-watch chain. The ghostly shape was growing, too, exactly as if it were approaching him from across a vast distance. There was the sound of wind rushing through a canyon and the flapping of bird wings and of pages rustling in an old book. Then, as the wheel slowed, the image began to fade and the light dimmed. The voice ran down until it was nothing but a tired whisper and then the sound of bees buzzing again, and Howard slumped back onto a gunnysack full of mulch, realizing that he was faint with the stuffiness of the shed, with the heavy, dusty air.

Someone tugged at the shed doors. There was a furious rattling and screeching as they skidded open. The machine still banged away, but not so heavily now. Afternoon sunlight poured through the open doors, and the night sky overhead dissolved into the daylight as Mr. Jimmers pushed past Howard’s feet and slammed his hand against the hub of the brass wheel, stopping it dead. The ghost noises evaporated altogether and the foggy head was gone.

Left over, like a negative afterimage on the back of his eyelids, the floating, two-dimensional face still hovered there. Howard blinked, looked closer, and realized that the visage, somehow, seemed now to be painted against the corrugated tin of the shed wall, like an imprint taken with ghost-sensitive film. Slowly it faded and vanished.

14

M
R
. Jimmers’ hair and clothes were mussed from his napping in the chair, and he stared at Howard now like a school-master thinking about birch rods.

“What on earth were you doing?” asked Sylvia, staring past Mr. Jimmers’ shoulder at the now-still machine. Howard could see that she was smiling. She was taking on the job of scolding him before Jimmers had a chance to get going. “The whole shed was
vibrating.
We heard it inside the house. What is that, Mr. Jimmers, some sort of gramophone?” She looked at the device innocently.

“That’s nothing,” Mr. Jimmers said, waving them backward out of the shed. “I mean that’s just what it is. A gramophone. It’s an early sort of television, really, that skims energy out of the ether. It’s a delicate instrument, though. I can’t have people meddling with it. There’s people who would misuse it … How on earth did you get in here?” he asked suddenly, squinting hard at Howard.

Howard handed him the key. “Sorry,” he said. “It was breaking and entering. Curiosity, mainly. Better call the police.”

“Curiosity,” said Mr. Jimmers flatly as he padlocked the shed again and then dropped the key theatrically down his shirt. He smiled momentarily, as if to show that he had nothing against curiosity. “We don’t need the police. Not this time.”