The Paper Grail (7 page)

And who
had
stolen the stuff out of his truck? What had Jimmers called them? Gluers? What the hell was that? And when you came right down to it, who was Mr. Jimmers? Maybe the high priest of some fungal religion. No, Howard thought. That was unlikely. He was clearly too settled in here, with his books and telescope and all. He had lived here for years, and
old Graham wouldn’t have put up with any oddball shenanigans from his boarders.

Howard couldn’t remember having gone into the attic when he stayed in the house fifteen years ago. Maybe Mr. Jimmers had been living here even then, holed up, searching the skies for his unlikely constellation. There had been other boarders at the time, besides him and Sylvia. He remembered an herbalist, very proud of his profession, and the Bay Area artist who drew underground comics—the man Stoat, whom Sylvia had nearly married years later.

Howard hadn’t liked the man even then, before Sylvia had anything to do with him, or at least Howard told himself so. He was artsy and theatrical in the worst way. He had worn a single black glove back then and had called himself by a different alias. What the hell was it? Something idiotic. Morc, that was it. Morc of Fomoria. Black Hand Comics. The adventures of the Kings of the Night. He was a Norwegian, tall and blond and handsome—Aryan to a fault.

Besides him and the herbalist, there had been a crowd of standard-issue coastal hippies who worked for Graham as day laborers, coming and going out of the hills and along Highway One. Hadn’t one of them driven a car that was glued over with something? Howard searched his memory. Clock parts. That was it—gears and springs and lenses. All manner of dismantled clocks and watches. The hood ornament was a brass sundial.

Thinking of his stay there reminded him of Sylvia—her face mostly. Howard had been timid back then, a tendency that was often mistaken for standoffishness. He wasn’t so timid anymore, and couldn’t afford to be if his stay in the north coast was going to amount to anything at all. His hanging around Sylvia certainly hadn’t amounted to anything, although both of them had agreed on the night he brought her the lily that all was for the best. You didn’t carry on with your cousin. Or did you? There wasn’t any law against it, strictly speaking.

He realized abruptly that the passing years hadn’t settled anything at all, hadn’t made anything clear to him. He wondered idly whether she was as pretty now as she had been then, and whether she was still as full of momentary passions. She had been able to find almost anything and anybody interesting and worthwhile—one of those people who were so essentially good and honest that they thought everyone else was, too. Howard always expected to hear that she had bought real estate in a Florida swamp.

Stoat himself had been a sort of Florida swamp, Howard thought. Sylvia was like her father when it came to being gullible. Uncle Roy had been a moderately successful salesman when he was younger because he always believed so completely in whatever he was trying to sell, no matter its flaws. People and things were allowed to have flaws.

Perhaps that’s why Howard had always found it so easy to be around Sylvia. She gave him the same break she gave everyone else. Also, she had always made plain things nice, somehow. She was a knockout in thrift-store clothes. He would have flown coast-to-coast to eat the plainest sort of casserole if she had made it. There would have been a flowered tablecloth on the table, and cut flowers, and there wouldn’t have been any trace of self-consciousness in any of it, or in her cook-with-honey, mother-nature ways that made the simplest chores seem like a sort of dance. He wasn’t the only one who saw her like that, either, and that had bothered him. He had always wished that she was his secret, but she wouldn’t submit to being anybody’s secret.

Howard sighed. He let his mind spin, feeling a little guilty about dredging up old jealousies and passions. All that was water under the bridge, wasn’t it, no matter what he ran into on the north coast? Or who. He got up abruptly and walked across to where the wall plaster was discolored or smudged. It wasn’t just a smudge; it was something set into the plaster, its color showing through.

He rubbed at it, curious, and the thin coat of plaster covering it chipped off. Underneath was a small, convex bit of metal, painted red. He hesitated for a moment and then decided that prisoners were allowed, even expected, to chip away at the walls of their cell. Following tradition, he dug around the metal with his pocket knife, discovering it, strangely, to be the fender of a toy car. There were other objects, too, under the curve of the fender, as if the collection were meant to be a tiny shrine.

He cleaned the plaster away carefully, like an archeologist at a dig, exposing first a carven Japanese god. Howard recognized it. It was Dai-Koku, the god of luck, carrying the tools that he used to dig out the treasures of the earth. There was a steel dog, too, out of a Monopoly game, and a clay marble and a little stoppered perfume bottle, stained purple by the sun and containing what looked like a sprig of dried violets.

Hastily he considered what he knew about Michael Graham—not very much, obviously. Plastering these odd miniatures into
the wall couldn’t have been his work, though, not unless Howard had misjudged him wildly. Graham hadn’t been frivolous in any way at all. He worked from sunup to sundown, ate plain food, read his Bible, went to sleep. Howard had seen him fish once, off the rocks in the cove, but that seemed to have been the only lighthearted sort of activity he allowed himself. There was no way on earth that he would have been so full of momentary fun as to plaster toys up in a wall.

And if they hadn’t been so near the surface, they would have remained hidden forever, until the house fell down. They weren’t meant as decoration; they were meant as something else entirely.

Howard ran his hand across the wall below them, suspicious that there might be more buried there. There was a suggestive bump, and immediately he chiseled away at it, scraping the plaster off in a little dusty cloud. Underneath, still half hidden, were the red-glazed soles of Humpty Dumpty’s shoes.

4

T
HERE
was something about lilies that was attractive to Heloise Lamey—their heavy, fleshy flowers, perhaps, or the way the flower stalks thrust up through the earth, reminding her of a certain kind of lush scene in a D. H. Lawrence novel, although she would never admit this to anyone. They were easily susceptible to mutation, too, and color alteration. Their odor, when they had any, was most often intense and repulsive, as if they were dense with the stuff of decay, of excretion and death.

Her front-yard garden was laid out in orderly rows. It wasn’t the sort of garden she would have chosen to lay out if she were gardening for the mere enjoyment of it. She did almost nothing, though, for the mere enjoyment of it. She had come over the years to lead a life of purpose, void of mere entertainment.

Across the street, nailed to the roof of a house, sat a plywood Humpty Dumpty the size of a man. It was still and inanimate in the windless morning—a small blessing. Onshore breezes would
stir it up in the afternoon, and it would undertake its eternal waving, along with all the other wind-driven gewgaws in her neighbor’s front lawn. Movement for the sake of movement, that’s what it was. His wooden gizmos had no object that she could fathom, other than simply to drive her mad. They were utterly frivolous. She would contrive to deal with them, though, and with him, sooner or later.

For the moment she concentrated her energies on her garden, which was a geometric copy, row for row, of the vegetable garden planted somewhere by her half brother, Michael Graham, a man with an authentic green thumb. Lord knew where his garden lay. She hadn’t actually seen it, just as she hadn’t ever seen his garden at the cliff house. But she had understood the design of that garden, too. She had felt it in her joints, as a person with arthritis feels pending rain. She had never felt it so clearly, though, as she had since her recent trip to San Francisco.

She had planted eight rows of flowers, all hybrid tubers and bulbs. There was still more to plant. On her porch sat a half dozen pots of dye, all of it mixed up out of things of the earth—berries and roots, autumn leaves and iron filings and blood. Two sea hares nosed around in a bucket of clear ocean water. She had hauled them out of a tidal pool a half hour ago. Carefully she picked one of them up, holding it by the head over a clean glass bowl, and began to squeeze it, gingerly at first and then harder when it wouldn’t give up its ink. A rush of viscous, vivid-purple fluid gushed out into the bowl. She let it drip for a moment, then tossed the creature into a clean ceramic jar. She picked up the second sea hare and milked it of its ink, too, pitching it into the jar along with the first.

Then, very carefully, she unstoppered a jar of hydrochloric acid, sizzling the liquid in over the writhing bodies of the two sea hares. Within moments they were still, their soft flesh disintegrating in the shallow pool of acid. She had no idea at all what would come of cooking the two creatures down, but the acid was already turning an interesting color of greenish brown. Traces of the purple ink trailed out of the things, deepening the color nicely.

Nearby lay the two forearm bones she had brought back from San Francisco. When she told the Reverend White, very truthfully, that she was going to turn them into a dowsing rod, he had shrugged. He hadn’t understood it, but he knew her too well to doubt her. The bones were connected now at the elbow end, lashed together with strips of animal hide and ivy vine. He
had supplied some of the animal hide, too—the more interesting fragments—although necessarily in strips too small to do any real tying up. She had contrived to weave them into the lashings, though, along with the rest. The result wasn’t pretty, and for a week it had smelled worse than almost anything she could think of, but the awful smell had faded as the object dried out.

Picking up the V-shaped dowser, she limped into a clear spot in the garden, focusing her concentration on the earth, on dirt and humus and worms and percolating rainwater. She closed her eyes and pictured the symphony of movement in the soil—roots unfurling, creeping downward; billions of grains of earth shifting, settling, giving way; rock decomposing; leaves and dead roots rotting; seeds opening and pushing toward the surface; ants and moles and gophers and earthworms creeping along in the darkness; the entire surface of the dry world stirring, crawling, heaving with motion just as steadily and surely as the surface of the sea.

The tip of the dowser bent downward, drawn toward the soil, twisting in her hands so that she could barely hold on to it. “Cabbages,” she said out loud. It was as if she had seen them herself, like slide film played against the back of her eyelids. He had put out cabbages. She opened her eyes and swayed there, nearly losing her balance and blinded by the bright sunlight. With an effort she managed to clear her mind, bringing herself back around to her own garden. She marked the spot with a piece of stick, and then using the dowser again, she traced out the row, some twelve feet of it, wondering what to plant there, what sort of maleficent vegetation might wither his cabbages.

She worked by instinct. Someday soon she would know where his garden was hidden, where
he
was hidden, and she would have a look at her handiwork. It struck her as funny that she was engaged in a vegetable war, probably the first in the history of the world. It was a war she must ultimately win. He was old and feeble and dying, and his power was dying with him.

She fetched a trowel from the porch and began to dig holes in the dirt, humming now and laying a tuber in the bottom of each. A sea breeze ruffled her hair, and she scowled, looking without wanting to at the thing on the roof across the street. Its plywood arm caught a gust and slowly straightened out in a long, sardonic salute, jerking upright in order to repeat the gesture, probably over and over for the rest of the afternoon. She hummed louder, drowning out the world, pausing to pour sea hare ink over each tuber in turn and then filling in the holes with dirt.

* * *

H
OWARD
woke up stiff. Sleeping on the Morris chair had required a certain degree of exhaustion, and it had taken him half the night to attain it. He had slept hard in the early hours of the morning, though, and now he felt disheveled and drooly and wrinkled, and his neck was kinked and stiff.

Abruptly he knew what had awakened him—his name had been called. A key rattled in the lock, the door swung open, and there stood Mr. Jimmers and, for God’s sake, Sylvia. Howard pulled himself up and hurriedly wiped his face and ran his hands through his hair. He unwrapped himself from the quilt and stood up, the pain in his spine nearly arching him over backward. “Sylvia!” he said, trying to sound cheerful and robust but actually just croaking. He tried to clear his throat. Like a proud father, Mr. Jimmers stood beaming at Sylvia, the look on his face seeming to assure Howard that although he had waited a long time for this moment, the wait must clearly have been worth it.

He was right. Sylvia seemed not to have aged. Her skin had the same pale cast to it, almost a translucence, and her hair was full and dark and an absolute sculptured mess. She wore red lipstick, too, which was gaudy, but right at the moment she seemed custom-built for gaudy, even though it wasn’t what Howard remembered or expected. And her eyes were larger than he remembered them, too. She reminded him of a woman out of a Rossetti painting, modernized with twentieth-century makeup and natural, handmade-looking clothes. She would have looked terrific even in a flour sack or a mu-mu. Almost laughing at him, she said, “You look awful.”