The Paper Grail Read online

  “People don’t know from ghosts.” The man switched on a portable television behind the counter. A game show appeared on the screen—a family of six wearing funny hats and jitterbugging furiously in front of a washer and dryer hung with enormous price tags.

  The sound of the television ruined the atmosphere, and Howard was suddenly desperate to leave. He set his credit card down on the counter along with the decals and made one last try at the bumper sticker. “I’d be glad to buy the sticker,” he said.

  “Won’t do you no good.” The man stared hard at his credit card, as if Howard had handed him something inexplicable—a ham sandwich or a photograph of the Eiffel Tower. He read the name several times, looking at Howard’s face, and then checked the number against a little book of bad-risk numbers shoved in alongside the cash register. “Barton,” he said. “You ain’t any relation …” He looked closely at Howard’s face again and then smiled broadly. “Sure you are!”

  “He’s my uncle,” Howard said. “On my father’s side.” It was no good to lie. Now he would have to pay triple for the bumper sticker. Howard’s Uncle Roy had founded and owned the Museum of Modern Mysteries and then had gone broke with it. Howard had never even been there, although he had always loved the idea of it. And now, these years later, here was a long-lost bumper sticker advertising the place. Clearly he had to buy it as a memento. The man knew that now. He sat there as if thinking about it, about soaking Howard for the rectangle of sun-faded paper.

  “Roy Barton,” he said, shaking his head. “That old son of a gun. Hell, take the damned thing. You going up to his place now?”

  “That’s right,” Howard said, surprised. “I’m up here on business, mostly.”

  “Roy Barton’s, or your own?”

  “My own, actually. I haven’t seen Roy for a few years. I don’t know what kind of business he’s in now.”

  The man gave him a curious look, as if Uncle Roy were in some sort of business that didn’t bear discussion. Then he said, “Roy Barton’s pretty much in business with the world. Nobody’d be surprised if your business and his business didn’t cross paths down the line. He used to call himself an ‘entrepreneur of the spirit.’ And by God he ain’t far wrong. He’ll liven up your day.”

  “I hope so,” Howard said. “I could use it.”

  “Give him a howdy from me, then, will you? Tell him Cal says hello. He used to come in here pretty regular when he was working the ghost angle up to the museum. He had a lot of idle time. It wasn’t but a half mile up the road. Building’s still there, sitting empty. Ever been up there?”

  “Never was,” Howard said. “Always wanted to, but I put it off. Then he went under and it was too late.”

  “Too damned bad, too. He’s a character, Roy Barton is. He seen some things out in the woods …” The man laughed, shaking his head, remembering something out of the past, some sort of Roy Barton high jinks. “Hell, I believe him, too. I’ll be damned if I don’t.” He turned around to a glass-fronted drink cooler, opened it up, and pulled out a six-pack of Coors. “Take this along for him, will you? Tell him Cal Dalton says hello and why don’t he stop in.” He handed Howard his credit card along with the beer, and Howard signed for the gas and decals. Cal shook his hand. “Look for it on the right, three or four bends up. You can pass it easy if you aren’t looking out.”

  Howard thanked him and left. Fog had settled into the campground below, making it look inhospitable and cold. Somehow the man’s carrying on like that had lifted Howard’s spirits, making him feel less like an outsider. The idea of having a look at the abandoned spirit museum appealed to him. There was a couple of hours of daylight left.

  He had heard all about the museum from his mother, who had done her best to make the whole cockeyed thing sound reasonable. His mother was fiercely loyal to Uncle Roy, who had looked after them, in his way, in the years following Howard’s father’s death. Howard had picked up bits and pieces of family gossip lately about the museum’s sad decline and about how Uncle Roy had borrowed himself into lifelong debt to make a go of it. The rotten thing about it was that his poor uncle had believed in it, in the ghosts. Despite the gimmicky bumper stickers and decals, he had been convinced that he had seen a carload of spirits appearing out of the north coast dawn and gunning away up the highway, dressed in out-of-date clothes and driving a Studebaker.

  Why a Studebaker? That’s what had torn it, had wrecked the museum, just as surely as if the Studebaker had driven through the wall. It was a car that lacked credibility. The ghosts might as well have been pedaling unicycles and wearing fright wigs. If only it had been some sort of generic Ford or Chevy, people might have bought the idea.

  For Uncle Roy, though, the ghost museum had been a scientific study in the paranormal. He didn’t care what sort of car the ghosts drove. He didn’t require a ghost to follow fashion. The public ridiculed a Studebaker, largely because it had a front end that you couldn’t tell from the rear; it was a sort of mechanical push-me pull-you. But if such a vehicle was good enough for the ghosts, then to hell with the public; it was good enough for Uncle Roy, too. That’s what made it about ten times as sad when the museum closed down—Uncle Roy’s sincerity.

  Realizing that he wasn’t very hungry, Howard opened the glove compartment in order to put the brownie away. A glass paperweight lay inside, dense with flower canes and ribbons that looked like Christmas candy. He meant it to be a gift for Sylvia, who had always loved pretty things. It had cost him a couple hundred dollars, though, and it might seem like an ostentatious gift. He would have to be subtle with it.

  A half mile north of Albion there was a turnout on the land side of the highway. Howard slowed the truck and bumped off onto the shoulder, which widened out behind a line of trees into a gravel parking lot that had been invisible from the road to the south. Sitting at the far edge of the lot, overhung by fir and eucalyptus, was a long bunkhouselike building, empty and boarded up. There was a fence of split pickets running along in front, with three or four cow skulls impaled on random pickets. A painted, weathered sign over the front porch read, “Museum of Modern Mysteries.”

  He cut the engine and sat on the edge of the lot, just able to hear the muted crash of breakers through the rolled-up windows. So this was it. He had known it was out here somewhere, sitting lonesome and empty along the highway. Somehow he had expected more, although exactly what he had expected he couldn’t say. He was tempted at first to climb out and have a look, but the windows were shuttered, and the longer he sat there, the sadder the place seemed to be. Some other time, maybe. He was planning on spending a couple of weeks; he could always get Uncle Roy to drive him back out and show him around, if his uncle was up to it and still had a key.

  Howard thought about the Hoku-sai sketch, hanging on the wall of Graham’s house, back down the road. It was time to have a look at it. To hell with laundromats and appointments. He had waited long enough. It was almost two years ago that he had written a letter suggesting that Graham give the sketch to the museum in Santa Ana on what was called permanent loan. Graham could write it off on his taxes. Howard would use it as the focus of a new wing of oriental artwork.

  Two years ago that had sounded enterprising—something new. But for nearly a year after he sent the letter he hadn’t heard anything in return, and had almost forgotten about the sketch. Then, unexpectedly, he had got a letter back, agreeing to the permanent loan business. Graham wouldn’t ship the piece, though; Howard would have to come after it. He had done nothing about it for most of a year. Then a month ago something shifted in him—the dreams, the accidental rediscovery of the origami lily—and he began to feel like a man whose spirit was beginning to recover from a long dry spell.

  He came up with the idea of going up north, of taking a slow, zigzag route, driving back roads out of obscure beaches and primitive campgrounds. It would be nothing less than a matter of sorting out his life. He would visit Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith in Fort Bragg, get to know Sylvia again. He would take a month
to do it, just like in the old days. Mrs. Gleason, his boss, hadn’t liked the idea of month-long vacations, but Howard showed her Graham’s letter, and that had done the trick. He had kept his thumb over the date.

  Fog settled around the pickup truck as he sat on the roadside now, and water dripped onto the roof of the cab from an overhanging tree limb. The sea wind gusted around the doors, and Howard started the truck in order to fire up the heater. Once the engine was idling, his sitting there seemed pointless, so he rolled up to the edge of the asphalt and peered downhill into the gloom. A pair of headlights swung around the curve of highway below, the car itself still invisible in the fog. It was impossible to tell how far away it was, so Howard waited it out, letting it have the highway to itself.

  Howard recognized the characteristic cheese-grater roar of a Volkswagen engine before the microbus actually materialized out of the wall of fog. It was moving slowly, even for a Volkswagen, like a deep-water fish prowling through submarine canyons. One moment it was a ghost, obscured by mist; the next it was solid. Howard thought suddenly about his uncle’s Studebaker, full of top-hatted spirits, and on impulse he shifted the transmission into reverse, as if he would escape it by hurtling backward into the forest.

  As it drew near, it appeared at first to be covered with sticks and leaves, like something that had driven up out of the deep woods. But it wasn’t leaves; it was stuff from the ocean that had been glued onto the body of the bus in layers, so that only the front windows were clear. Dried kelp and sea fans, starfish and barnacles, clumped mussels and fish skeletons and seashells covered the bus in layers so that it looked like a tide pool on wheels. It was impossible to be sure it was a car any longer, except that it ran on tires and had a windshield. Even the rumbling engine might have been a cobbled-together mechanism of tube worms and starfish gears and pumping seawater. It growled uphill, lit within by the strange green glow of the instrument panel. The driver’s face was a shadow.

  Howard shifted back out of reverse, realizing that his mouth was open in disbelief. He watched the bus disappear into the fog around the curve of the hillside, noticing that a big patch of stuff had evidently fallen off the outside of the engine compartment—too much heat, probably. The effect was suddenly one of shabbiness, something like a ghost story ruined by missing paragraphs.

  Still, something about the bus, about seeing it, reminded him of his uncle’s museum and of Michael Graham’s stone house, with its passages and turrets. The very atmosphere of the north coast was compulsive—the overgrown countryside and the perpetual mist, the strange appeal of a wire rack full of gaudy decals. It struck him that there was something right and natural about the deep-sea bus, as if it stood to reason. He laughed uneasily, reminding himself that eccentrics were common on the coast. They must issue cards, like a Mensa ID. After another week of solitude and fog he would be ready to apply for one himself.

  No wonder Uncle Roy had been possessed with notions of ghosts. The foggy air seemed to be thick with them. For the first time since he’d left home a week ago he wanted company—even old Graham’s company. He rolled out onto the highway, heading south again. He would make it to the stone house with an hour’s worth of daylight to spare.

  2

  THE limousine crept along through the San Francisco traffic, down Grant Street, through Chinatown toward North Beach. It was July, and the streets were full of tourists, the heavy stream of cars barely moving in either direction and people cutting warily back and forth between bumpers. Why the fool of a driver had missed his offramp and tied them up in crosstown traffic, Heloise Lamey couldn’t fathom. Stupidity, maybe. Some sort of smart-aleck malice—wasting the time of a poor old woman out alone, at the mercy of the world.

  She said nothing, though. It was already spilled milk. She could rant and rave and it wouldn’t get them to their destination one moment sooner. And the hired driver wouldn’t care anyway. She could buy the limousine service and have the man fired and he wouldn’t care. Her insisting on justice would simply provoke abuse. Despite his snappy uniform, he was sullen and dull and false-looking. She could see it in his eyes. She could take the measure of a man in an instant. In her sixty-eight years on earth she had learned to do that with a facility that she was proud of. It was the key to her success as a businesswoman.

  People weren’t what they used to be. The tradespeople didn’t keep to their stations. Duty was a thing of the past. Everywhere she went people were full of abuse. There was trouble of some sort from almost everyone she ran into. She seemed to remember a time in the distant past when that wasn’t so, when people and life were simple and direct. When that had changed, she couldn’t at all say.

  Before the war she had almost married a sailor. She remembered how handsome he had looked in his uniform on the day he shipped out. On the night before, they had danced to Benny Goodman. Now his bones were on the bottom of the ocean somewhere, and that’s what life had to offer you ultimately—death and disappointment. The world hadn’t changed in that respect. People had, though. Now there was nothing but grasping, people clawing their way through life at your expense. A person had no choice but to get in ahead of them. There was no middle ground. She stayed home as much as she could, but even there she was forced to carry on a war with a lot of backwoods hicks who didn’t know progress when they saw it, or destiny, either.

  Her mouth set and her eyes narrowed, she sat in the center of the backseat and stared straight ahead out the front window, trying not to see the awful gaggle of people swarming on the sidewalks and in the gutters. She believed that there was a certain dignity in her face, which was long and thin and with a prominent chin and the eyes of a monarch—the sort who saw straight through her subjects and their pitiful little games. There was nothing weak in her face, nothing watery. It was the sort of face that wasn’t easily forgotten. She peered at herself in the window reflection now, refastening a strand of hair that had come loose.

  Her attention was broken by the high-pitched shouting of an old Chinese news vendor, arguing, probably, over a nickel. At the curb the rear door of a van swung open and a man stepped out carrying a flayed goat over one bloody shoulder and a string of plucked ducks over the other. Life, like so much scurrying vermin, went on around her. She thought for the sixth time how necessary it had been to hire a limousine. Then she realized they were stopped again, and she checked her watch. “I’m very late,” she said to the driver, who said nothing in return.

  The traffic cleared just then, as if it, at least, were paying attention to her. The car moved forward slowly, making nearly a half a block’s worth of headway before stopping again. The lights of a tow truck whirled in front of them now, blocking oncoming traffic while the tow truck driver walked around an illegally parked Mercedes-Benz, looking in the windows. He pulled a clutch of flat plastic slats out of his coat and slipped one in along the edge of the front door of the parked car in order to jimmy it open, a policeman directing the cars around it, holding the limousine at bay with an upturned hand.

  Skeptically Mrs. Lamey watched them work. Nothing was safe from them. Even the police would steal your car. “Honk the horn,” Mrs. Lamey said to the driver.

  “At the cop?” He turned and looked at her.

  “Just honk the horn, young man. I’ve been patient with you up until now, but this takes it too far. Honk the horn.”

  The driver squinted into her face. “You gotta be kidding,” he said.

  “I never kid, if I take your meaning. I assure you I’m very serious. Honk your horn. I’ve hired this car, and I demand it.”

  “Why don’t you climb up here and honk it yourself, lady? Then you can talk to the cop.” He turned forward again, ignoring her. Opening the glove box, he found a pack of gum, pulling out two sticks and shoving them into his mouth, settling into his seat contentedly to wait out the tow truck, even if it took all afternoon.

  Mrs. Lamey leaned forward, unable to believe it. She had expected grief of some nature, but this sort of outright impudence fr
om a driver … “I insist. Honk the horn or I’ll have your job.”

  “You can have the fuckin’ job, lady, and the horn, too. Calm the hell down. Where you going, anyway? Just up to North Beach. It’s easier to walk from here. If I was you, that’s what I’d do. I’d get out and walk. You’d have been there twenty minutes ago.”

  “Your advice is worthless to me, young man. Here, look, they’ve gotten out of the way. Pull around these cars, for heaven’s sake.” She waved a limp-wristed hand toward the street.

  He shrugged and edged the limousine past the tow truck, which had straightened out now and was towing the Mercedes out into traffic. They stopped and started a half dozen times down the last two blocks to Portsmouth Square, slowing in the press of cars swinging up onto Broadway and Columbus. Small gangs of youths lounged on the sidewalk along the square, shouting and smoking cigarettes.

  Mrs. Lamey carefully kept her eyes straight ahead. There was nothing here that she wanted to see. She felt vulnerable, even inside the limousine, but with a little bit of work she could ignore the world outside utterly. As they turned up Columbus, though, she saw three young men with weirdly miscut hair bend toward the limousine and make obscene gestures with both hands, all three of them laughing and hooting. Mrs. Lamey concentrated hard on the windshield, on the car ahead of them, on the tip of her nose, blocking out their existence, eradicating the whole brief scene.

  “That’s rich, ain’t it?” the driver said, chuckling in the front seat. “What it is, is the limo. Happens all the time. Can’t go nowhere without people flipping you off. You know what I mean? It’s a social statement is what I think.” He shook his head, clearly pleased, able to take the long view. “You got to admire it, though.” He looked at her wide-eyed in the rearview mirror, as if inviting her to admire it as much as he did, to talk a little bit of philosophy.