The Paper Grail (60 page)
Authors: James P. Blaylock
“Caretaker,” Jimmers said, “since Michael Graham’s tragic death.”
The cop nodded. “My father used to lend Graham a hand, back when Graham was putting up the tower. I even hauled stone around out there when I was a kid. Old Graham was something.
I learned to drink coffee there. He used to haul it out in a big ceramic jug with a spigot. I’ll never forget that. Left the place to you, did he?”
Jimmers shook his head. “Just caretaker,” he said. “Holding on to the place until the rightful owner came along. Howard Barton here is the owner now. Lock, stock, and barrel. It’s all down in Graham’s will, giving me power of attorney. We’re all supposing Howard will do the right thing and marry Sylvia, and the two of them can hoe chard out there together. Work the garden.”
Howard sat down hard next to Sylvia on the bench, looking at her in disbelief, his head swimming. Sylvia widened her eyes at him. “Was
that
your proposal?” she whispered. “Did you put him up to saying that?” Before Howard could utter a word, though, she stood up and rushed across to hug and kiss Mr. Jimmers, then turned around and went after Uncle Roy, holding on to Jimmers’ shoulders with one arm and throwing the other around Roy’s neck, hugging them both together.
After a moment she let them both go. Grinning, but full of emotion, Roy picked up the knocked-over lantern and inspected it carefully. “Mantle’s whole,” he said to Jimmers. “Can you beat that?”
“A mystery,” Jimmers said. “Better document it.”
Roy pulled a book of paper matches out of his pocket and lit the thing with a shaky hand, turning up the knob until the room glowed with the light of both lanterns. Then he spotted the arm bones lying one beside the other on the floor, and he picked them up, looking them over.
“Relics,” Stoat said to him. “The genuine article.”
“What?” the cop asked, cocking his head.
“Part of the props,” Roy said to him. “A haunted house has got to be full of bones. It’s standard stuff. Chains rattling in the closet and all.”
The cop looked doubtful, on the verge of speaking, when a voice from across the room interrupted him. It was Lou Gibb, his broad face full of astonishment.
“I’ll be go-to-hell,” he said softly. He and Bennet were both staring at the wall, where the collection of framed photographs had hung.
Uncle Roy, followed now by everyone else, strode across to look closer at the dirty plaster. Two clean white images stood out against it, as if someone had splashed the wall with whitewash. They seemed almost to drink in the light from the propane lanterns. There couldn’t be any doubt about what they were.
Roy touched one of the images hesitantly, as if afraid it would rub off, or would burn him, but it wasn’t paint or charcoal or anything of the kind; it was shadow and light, captured and fixed onto the wall, a spirit photograph developed when the ghost from the machine had flown to pieces.
Roy turned around, smiling broadly at Edith like a little boy who has just recovered some wonderful lost object. It was John Ruskin’s face on the wall, a satisfied grimace tugging at the corners of its mouth. Next to it, like the flip side of a coin from the spirit realm, was the astonished, wild-haired countenance of Heloise Lamey, her face showing jumbled traces of nearly every human emotion, as if her very spirit had departed from her body and was fixed now on the plaster wall.
Uncle Roy gestured grandly at the images, bowing like a maestro.
“Back in business!” he said happily, dusting his hands together before reaching out to clap Howard on the back.
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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
To
viki
and this time,
to
Tom and Venta Streff
Here’s to friendship, food, philosophy, and the future
and to the memory of
Roy Squires
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 1991
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 11762 4
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.
*
not available as SF Gateway eBooks