The Paper Grail (35 page)

“I see it,” Howard said, “but I’m not buying it.”

“I’ve been thinking. Yesterday, when you unlocked the shed—I’m thinking that Jimmers knew you were in there all along. His surprise seems faked to me now, like he was hoping that you’d break in there, see something strange, and come away convinced.”

“Convinced of what? I came away convinced that I don’t know what the hell to think.”

“That’s just his style, isn’t it? That’s Mr. Jimmers in a nutshell. Maybe he saw you as an easy mark, and you swallowed the whole ghost-out-of-a-machine notion and came home and got Father all fired up about it.”

“He didn’t need any firing up. You know that.”

“Mr. Jimmers couldn’t have known that, though, could he? They hadn’t spoken to each other in a year—probably haven’t even seen each other.”

Howard thought for a moment. Mr. Jimmers’ emotions
always
seemed fake. You couldn’t tell with Jimmers, which admittedly gave him an edge over you. But somehow the idea of Jimmers merely fooling them all didn’t satisfy him. There had to be more to it than that. The idea of it all was comical, though. Here was Sylvia talking sense, and he himself talking mysticism. Go figure it, he told himself.

Uncle Roy came back in just then, carrying three cups of coffee, and Sylvia stood up to take one of the cups from him. She pulled her bathrobe tighter and tied it securely, the action reminding Howard of the opportunity that had come and gone. If the morning had accomplished nothing else, at least Sylvia was worrying about him now. He was an actor, finally, in this
strange play, which, if Mr. Jimmers had his way, would maybe turn into a farce.

“Tell me about Jimmers’ machine,” Howard said to Uncle Roy. “What are we going to do with it?”

His uncle sat there for a moment, sipping his coffee and gathering things in his mind, either because he was weighing how much he could safely say to Howard or, more likely, because what he had to say wasn’t entirely credible. “It’s complicated,” was what he said finally.

Howard raised his eyebrows. “I was thinking that it might be. What is it, though?”

“I believe it to be a machine that transports spirits through time and from one place to another.”

“I’ve been through this before,” Sylvia said, heading toward the stairs. “You men thrash this out. I’ve got to get ready for work.”

“The ghosts of dead men?” Howard asked, waving haphazardly at Sylvia. They were getting down to it now.

Uncle Roy shook his head. “Nope. The spiritual essences of live men—the men who built the machine for that very purpose. It’s a device that could transport you and me across astral planes. Don’t laugh when I ask you this, but have you read Burroughs’ Martian novels?”

“John Carter? Thuvia?”

“That’s the ones. They’re a lot of colorful nonsense, of course, but the notion of out-of-body travel isn’t. It’s simple as that. You’re a rationalist, and scoff at it, but since you asked me, I’m telling you the simple truth. Believe it or don’t.”

“You know,” Howard said after pausing for a moment, “I could have sworn that the ghost in the shed yesterday afternoon was John Ruskin—that portrait of him that you see with side-whiskers and with his hair white and ragged and his eyes all rheumy.”

“It was. I believe I can say that with some authority. What do you know about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, besides the fact that they were a lot of Victorian artists collected around Ruskin?”

“A bit,” Howard said. “I know there were a couple of generations of them and that there were as many photographers among them as there were painters.”

“Lewis Carroll was one.”

Howard nodded.

“And Dean Liddell, Alice’s father.”

“I saw the photograph on the wall down at the museum—the visage that appeared on the wall of Christ Church Cathedral. That
was pretty intriguing. Did they figure out how it was done?”

“Done? Do you mean did they discover that it was a hoax? No, they didn’t. It wasn’t
done
at all. It was the real thing, and no mistaking it—the result of an experiment with the machine.” Uncle Roy paused heavily then, letting this sink in.

“I thought all the Pre-Raphaelites were artists of one sort or another. What did Liddell have to do with them?”

“He was a sort of soldier, actually. Carroll was living with George MacDonald at the time. Have you read MacDonald?”

“A couple of fantasies. I don’t know much about him aside from figuring out that he was a Christian writer.”

“First of the great Christian fantasists. Back then there wasn’t anyone writing in the fantastic vein who could touch MacDonald, unless it was Carroll. They got caught up in Ruskin’s web, specifically in the dealings of the Guild of St. George—Ruskin’s efforts to destroy industrial society, which he saw as the Dragon, so to speak.”

“I’ve read a little about them. Didn’t they build a few workers’ cottages or something? It wasn’t a crafts guild so much as a political action group—failed efforts, mostly. That’s what I remember, anyway.”

“Well, that’s right, mainly. They never destroyed industrial society, and they didn’t produce much that was worth a damn when it came to art or furniture or any other typical crafts guild stuff. But then, as you say, the Guild of St. George wasn’t any typical crafts guild, and they did manage to skewer a dragon or two while they were at it. What do you know about James Graham?”

“Only what I found out after I looked into this sketch business. He was a photographer, mostly. Michael Graham’s … what? Grandfather?”

“That’s it. He’s the
connection
. He was a member of Ruskin’s crowd, very pious and dissipated both. He spent a long time in the Holy Land, taking photographs in the name of God. Lived in a tower overlooking Jerusalem. Holman Hunt lived there off and on, too, along with a couple of other Pre-Raphaelites who had gone native. Now, what were they looking for? What sort of pilgrimage were they on? It was Ruskin that sent them, and it was a long damned way into a desolate country. They were all engaged in a search, a quest. What were they looking for, though, really? The answer to that question is the key.”

Howard shrugged. He didn’t have the answer. “History has it that they were painting and taking photographs, that it was an artistic expedition.”

“History,” Uncle Roy snorted. “You can have history. Don’t pay more than a dime for it, though, or you’ve been cheated. This Holy Land quest was
passed off
as an artistic expedition, but what it really was, was a modern-day crusade, and nothing less. And I’m not talking metaphor here. I mean what I say.”

“What?” Howard said. “A crusade? In what sense? They were looking for the Grail?”

Uncle Roy widened his eyes and blinked, laying his hands out in front of him, palms up, as if to say that he couldn’t be blamed for their pursuits; he was only relating what he had heard.

“Did they find it?”

“They found something, and brought it back, too. And let me clarify a few things. It wasn’t just industrialization that the Guild of St. George wanted to annihilate. They weren’t pitted against a generality or an abstraction. History has seen these lads as political and social failures—Ruskin and Morris and all the rest of them—and it’ll see us as failures just as surely. The work we do will have to be its own reward.”

“I’d be surprised to find that history can see us at all,” Howard said.

“Who can say? Anyway, and more to the point, half of their story has never been told. It’s too fantastic, too many high mucky-mucks brought low. Most of it was suppressed by people in power, who stayed in power, and later mapped out history in their own invented images.”

“What did they find, then, Graham and Hunt and all of these people who went East? The machine?” Howard was anxious to drag the conversation back down to earth. He thought he knew the answer to the question, but he wanted to hear it from Uncle Roy himself.

“The piece of paper. The sketch.”

“The Hoku-sai?”

Uncle Roy gestured. “There’s some that guessed it was a Hoku-sai. I don’t think so.” He squinted at Howard, like a man who had secret knowledge, smiling just slightly, like a moon man with a Mona Lisa grin.

“You don’t think it’s a Hoku-sai? That’s what I understood it to be. It’s pretty clearly one of his sketches of the Takara-mono, the luck charms. And that’s what Graham told me nearly fifteen years ago, too, when I was staying up at his place. That’s what the hell I came up here for, to bring back a Hoku-sai sketch. Now you’re telling me it’s not a Hoku-sai at all? What is it, then? An imitation? A piece by someone nobody’s ever heard of?”

“That’s a good way to put it. Exactly that Someone nobody’s heard of, just like you and me. Although the one who made the sketch wasn’t the imitator, he was the originator. And if Hoku-sai was influenced by it, well … what great artists aren’t influenced in one way or another? As for why Graham lied about it, he’ll have to tell you that much himself. That’s not my duty.”

“Is it valuable, then?”

“To a museum? How do I know? You’re the expert. It’s old—predates Hoku-sai by a long damned time. So it has a certain value as an antiquity. Now, you wouldn’t guess it to look at him, but Bennet is something of a scholar, in his way. He’s looked into this, gone to …
sources
. Bennet says this piece of paper was folded into the shape of a cup. Legend has it that it was inked with blood—not painted on, mind you, but splashed on. At Golgotha. It was smashed flat and smuggled out in someone’s robe, probably. Later when it was unfolded, it was found to have been … sketched, so to speak, with fundamental shapes. It could be folded again to derive other shapes, other pictures—a changeable pictograph, if you follow me. A sort of paper kaleidoscope inked with blood, entirely randomly. And yet the images that fall together are perfect representations of essential order.”

Howard sat in silence, trying to process this notion, but it was bothersomely schizophrenic to him. Suddenly he understood that there were patterns, whereas before there had seemed to be none—patterns, perhaps, in the random wash of gravel on a roadside, in the placement of leaves on a tree and stars in the night sky. Messages spelled out in hieroglyphics by a flock of birds passing overhead, by the ice fragments in the tail of a comet.

What was most puzzling and troubling was that Howard seemed to have been
sent
for. Finding the paper lily—had that been just a happy blunder, or had it been a mystically contrived step in a centuries-old process? And the dreams, the sketchy clouds full of suggestion, of travel, of compulsion. Even the signifying pelican …

Uncle Roy stood up and peered out through the curtains at the street, as if checking just for safety’s sake before drawing them open. “Let me say that you can no more avoid all this, now that you’ve thrown in your hand with us, than a meteor can avoid the gravity of a nearby planet. And I won’t mince words. I won’t lead you down the garden. Men have died in this struggle. Those were real bullets this morning. Lamey and her crowd aren’t just a real estate cartel or something. What I’m telling you here is that
you’re the innocent pedestrian stumbling into the territory of a feud. You think you’re selling encyclopedias door-to-door, and then there you are one day with a gun in your hand and a bunch of hillbillies spitting tobacco past your shoulder and calling you Brother Howard. Do you follow me?”

“I think so. Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more. If the sketch isn’t what I thought it is, then there’s nothing holding me here. I could drive back south.”

“Nothing holding you here but a car theft and a gimp knee … and Sylvia, I suppose.”

Howard’s face got hot immediately, and he nearly denied it. There was no point in denying it, though. Silence was better. There was too much going on right now, and no room for complications. Uncle Roy looked monumentally grave all at once, and said, “I’m going to ask you once more, nephew. Think everything through before you answer. Are you in or out? You could have sat it out down at Winchell’s this morning, eating glazed doughnuts and thinking about that goddamn museum job of yours. Maybe you still can. Maybe we can rig it to get you out of here. There’s sides drawn up, and when that happens a man’s either in or he’s out. There’s nobody left on the fence except the stupid man when the hurricane blows. What do you say?”

Sylvia came in just then, along with Aunt Edith, both of them heading for the kitchen. Sylvia was dressed for work, wearing a sweater and jeans, her hair combed out and lipstick on. When she caught Howard’s eye, she smiled, glancing down at his knee and shaking her head, as if his shenanigans confounded her. There was a rattling of cups out in the kitchen, and then a moment later the back door opened and closed.

“I’m in,” Howard said, after taking a look at Sylvia’s face. “Of course I’m in.” He felt at once relieved and at the same time like some sort of Secret Service agent heading out into the cold with only bits and pieces of information, because he couldn’t be trusted with the whole business. “So the sketch fell into Michael Graham’s hands, and Jimmers, we guess, is keeping it safe. I understand that. But how about the machine?”

“Built by the Guild of St. George hand in glove with Morris and Company. It was invented by a Morris acolyte named William Keeble, who later became a noted London toymaker. The man had very exotic notions. That was a few years after these sojourns in the Holy Land, when the battle was heating up. The sketch had been hidden at Red House, Morris’ place at Upton, in Kent, which was built for no other reason than to hide it, although
that’s something that the historians won’t tell you, probably because they don’t know it. There was a well in the front yard, a slate-roofed brick well, very pretty. That’s where they put it-down the well, in a bucket. Philip Webb, the architect, designed the whole shebang. Anyway, it’s my belief that the machine finally was used to transport certain … valuable objects out of the reach of the enemy at the time of Ruskin’s death.

‘That was in 1900, of course. The man had been stone crazy for ten years. There was a crowd that tried to stop them from burying him in Westminster Abbey. You can figure out why. He was laid out, finally, at Coniston, in the Lake District, but just between me and you, he didn’t stay there.”