The Paper Grail Read online

  That’s where I got the Humpty Dumptys from, Howard thought, relieved just a little bit. He had no doubt seen the window years ago and had carried the Humpty Dumpty around with him since, hiding back in the shadows of his mind. He reminded himself that there was almost always some reasonable, day-today explanation for even the weirdest aspects of one’s dreams. The notion satisfied him for about fifteen seconds, and then it occurred to him that this window might just as easily be another mystery and not any sort of explanation at all.

  He hadn’t any time to study it out, though, because Mr. Jimmers opened a door into the attic right then, and leaned in to switch on the light. He stepped back to let Howard into a broad room with exposed rafters and roof sheathing and the undersides of shingles. Two big leaded windows were boxed into the roof, serving as skylights, and there were two more windows in the wall that looked out on the ocean. There was a seven-inch telescope on wheels in the corner and star charts on the wall around it. An oak desk and a couple of comfortable-looking Morris chairs with low footstools sat in the center of the room. Books lined the walls, stacked up sideways and endways and ready to tumble off the edges of shelves. The room was heavy with the smell of pipe tobacco.

  “Keep the bottle,” Mr. Jimmers said.

  “Sorry?” asked Howard, turning around.

  Mr. Jimmers still stood outside in the hall. He had set the wine bottle and the glass on the floor just inside the room. He waved, wiggling his fingers by his ear, and then shut the door. Howard heard the click of the lock being thrown before he’d taken half a step forward. A tiny panel opened in the door, and Mr. Jimmers peered back in. Howard could just see his nose and eyes. “Ham sandwich suit you?” Mr. Jimmers asked.

  Howard didn’t answer. He stood there mystified and furious.

  “Think of this as a credentials check,” Mr. Jimmers said. “Imagine that you’ve just made a border crossing into eastern Europe and you’re being detained while the authorities have a look at your papers. Is everything in order, they wonder, or do we beat him with rubber hoses?”

  Laughing, Mr. Jimmers shut the panel, and there was the sound of his footsteps descending the stairs. Then there was silence. Howard waited for him, expecting the door to open again at any moment. Certainly this was another joke. Mr. Jimmers had a sense of humor that had been honed in outer space.

  When the panel opened again, though, ten minutes later, Mr. Jimmers clearly wasn’t in any mood to let Howard out. He shoved a ham sandwich through the hole, and then a bag of Fritos and a too-ripe banana. Then he poked the comer of a quilt through, and Howard gratefully enough hauled the whole thing into the room, like a magician pulling an immense scarf through the mouth of a tiny bottle. “Watch the heater,” Mr. Jimmers said. “Might blow a fuse if you’re not careful.” Then the panel slid shut and he was gone.

  Apparently Howard was being kidnapped. He had been kidnapped. That part was over and done. What should he do? Threaten? Scream? Bang against the door with a tin cup? He didn’t have a tin cup. And anyway, the entire adventure was so monumentally crazy that he almost certainly didn’t see the whole picture yet. Mr. Jimmers was up to something subtle. Surely in a few minutes …

  He waited, but Mr. Jimmers didn’t return. The man was gone. Howard was kidnapped, shut up in an attic in an old stone house perched on a lonely cliff. Abruptly he was stricken with fear. It washed over him like a sea wave, and he walked across to the door and pounded on it. “Hey!” he shouted. “What the hell!” His voice was loud and foreign-sounding, and he immediately fell silent, not liking the noise. He listened, but could hear nothing except the pounding of the waves out on the reefs. He strode back and forth, furious with Jimmers, clenching and unclenching his fists at the utter irrational helplessness of things and wishing in his heart that he was home again, sitting in his own living room with his stereo going. He wondered why on earth he had left; what had possessed him?

  He tried shouting again, but it was no good, and after a half hour passed and Mr. Jimmers hadn’t reappeared, Howard resigned himself to his fate. There was no dignity, anyway, in screaming and flailing and demanding things. His best bet was to play the role of someone utterly confident but getting a little tired of it all. Surely Jimmers wouldn’t keep him prisoner long. There was no point to it. But then what point had there been to anything lately? He was starting to feel a little like Alice, lost in a north coast wonderland.

  He stood up suddenly and tried the two doors in the east wall. One was a half-full closet; the other was a bathroom with a toilet and a sink. He turned the water on and off. There were soap and a drinking glass on the sink and an electric space heater on the floor, which he pulled out and plugged into the only wall socket he could find. To hell with blowing a fuse; it was better than freezing to death.

  The attic was well equipped, anyway. A man could pass many a pleasant month there, what with Mr. Jimmers pushing food through the door panel and all. Howard walked hurriedly to the windows, pulling one open. Foggy air blew in, smelling of wet rocks and the ocean. It would be easy enough to slide out through the window, except that it was a hundred and fifty feet to the rocks below. The back edge of the house was a mere continuation of the rocky cliff. In a pinch he could cut the quilt apart, using his teeth, maybe, and fashion a rope ladder. He would contrive to steal a spoon and would sharpen it on the stone walls, devising a weapon. Of course if he were only fed sandwiches, he would never get hold of a spoon …

  He laughed out loud, shutting the window and then wrapping himself in the quilt. This was too bizarre to be believed. He shuffled across to the door. Thank heaven for small comforts, he thought, picking up the wine bottle and examining the label. Almost instantly his spirits plummeted again. “Wild Blackberry Wine,” it stated proudly, “Sunberry Farms.” Below that was a Norman Rockwell-like drawing of a woman in a patchwork gown picking blackberries from vines that grew out of the engine compartment of a Studebaker turned into a sort of garden. Roses sprouted from the backseat and daisies grew out of the roof. The fenders were spiked with the suggestive tips of asparagus, thrusting from the tires. A peach tree shoved up out of the trunk, its branches heavy with fruit. Below the drawing was the legend “Natural and Healthful.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Howard said out loud. Then, steeling himself, he tilted the bottle back and tasted the wine. He grimaced and put it back down by the door again, his mouth filled with the sour taste of weeds and unripe berries. Clearly this was another of Jimmers’ little gags. This wasn’t wine at all; it was some sort of fluid used for polishing pan bottoms.

  He went into the bathroom to fill his glass with water. Then he sat down on one of the Morris chairs to think things through. Even then he half believed that the door would swing open and Jimmers would let him out.. His plans had disintegrated at a startling rate, only to be replaced by oddly disconcerting patterns and implications and dreamlike suggestions, and he felt a little like a fish swimming in a dark river and just getting its first startled glimpse of the slowly encircling net. He thought up explanations for Mr. Jimmers’ behavior, abruptly remembering the oceanic Volkswagen bus and how weirdly compulsive it had seemed. Along with everything else—the stained-glass window, the wine label, the ubiquitous Studebaker, the glove-compartment theft—it argued that the north coast was its own universe, hidden by weather and isolation and mist, and working according to its own set of natural laws. Thinking about it was unsettling.

  Years back there had been a lot of serious cult activity along the coast—severed heads perched on guardrail posts, disappeared hitchhikers, blood rituals on deserted beaches. He wondered uneasily what had happened to all of that, whether the cultists had gotten day jobs and were working at the pulp mills now, or whether they were still out there, lurking in the deep woods.

  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 thou
ght. 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

  THERE 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.