The Paper Grail (18 page)

H
OWARD
awoke in darkness, jarred awake when the iron clock in the living room tolled five. That had gone on all night, and he had finally gotten off to sleep by smashing the pillow over his head and then had awakened two or three more times when the bell tolled. He rolled over, deciding not to get up, after all. Sleep
was more important to him. Then he lay there thinking, waking up a little more each minute, starting to worry about trifles, as he always did when he woke up in the early morning.

Only now what he worried about seemed to be more than mere trifles, and it seemed to be more and more certain to him as the minutes dragged past that he didn’t have very much idle time. He was being locked up at every turn, and his truck had been burgled twice—once by the gluers and now by Stoat and whoever else had gone through Sylvia’s car. They hadn’t taken anything this time, but the act itself was ominous. Things were happening in pairs and in triplicate, and somehow at five in the morning that seemed to signify. He climbed out of bed after another few minutes of mulling things over and pulled on his clothes.

Fog had drifted in during the night. It was gray-dark outside, and still. He went out silently through the kitchen door, trudging through the wet grass around to the front of the house, where he got Sylvia’s flashlight out of the backseat of her car, eased the car door shut, and headed for the backyard again.

When he passed Uncle Roy’s workshop, he hesitated for a moment and then pulled the splinter of wood out of the hasp and opened the door. He turned on the light and looked around, wondering what he could carry with him out into the woods. He only half believed Uncle Roy’s horror stories, but somehow the fog and the early-morning twilight had started to work on him. He found a two-foot length of closet rod in among a stacked-up pile of scrap lumber. He swung it into the palm of his hand a couple of times, deciding that it would do the trick as well as anything. It was a bit of security, anyway—something to balance the fear that was seeping into him even as he stood there.

He went out again, leaving the door unlatched, and headed straight for the misty line of fir trees. The yard sloped up into them, fenced off by berry vines, which had been hacked away along the north edge so that there was a path into the woods. On the other side of the path lay a vacant lot, overgrown with vines and scrub.

Up close, the woods weren’t quite as thick as it had seemed from a distance. Even with the fog he could see a good ways through the trees—far enough so that he was unlikely to come upon anyone unawares. He switched on the flashlight, but the glow was feeble because of the dawn leaking through the tops of the trees. In among the deep shadows the light helped more,
though, and he was happy enough to have it. He suspected that he didn’t have far to go.

He walked along for a time, conscious of the smell of evergreen and fog. You didn’t often get that sort of thing down south. Here he was, up at dawn, trudging through the primeval woodlands. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to make a morning ritual of this—in any sort of weather. He could buy some sort of oilcloth raincoat and a pair of galoshes, too, and try it in the rain, carrying a thermos of coffee.

Just when that pleasant notion occurred to him, the path forked. He stopped and listened to the stillness, a little bit wary now. The fog had thickened and seemed to be settling in rather than lifting. How far
had
he walked? He had been enjoying himself and not paying attention. There was a rustle back among the trees just then, and his heart leaped. He stood still, thinking of Uncle Roy’s bears and lions. It hadn’t been much of a rustle, though—barely enough for a rabbit or bird—just enough so that his hearty, up-at-dawn mood utterly evaporated and he was filled with unease. He told himself that the forest wasn’t any different in the fog and the darkness than it would be in the sunshine. Then he tried to convince himself that surely the fog would begin to burn off as the sun came up.

He looked behind him, though, and saw nothing but a wall of murk and trees. He had no idea how far away the city lay or in which direction he had come. He had wanted to go straight on up the path, roughly along the property line—but which of the two paths confronting him now was the main path and which one branched off? Neither one was well traveled. For no reason at all he stayed to the left, going along quickly and quietly for three or four minutes until the path forked again.

Again he angled left. That ought to be safe. If he failed to find anything at all, he could at least make his way back by—what?—taking all the left forks again. Or was it all the right forks?—he would be returning after all. Would there necessarily be any forks at all? He would be coming back, but then he wouldn’t be coming
backward
, would he? Most of these sideline trails would be leading away behind on his return, anyway, deeper into the forest. It would just muddle him up to pay attention to them.

Somehow it had gotten darker; either that or the forest was more dense. He was sure now that he had come too far, but he went on slowly, anyway, determined to turn back soon. There was something up ahead; he could see it dimly through the mist, a sort of clearing. Just then there was another path, too—this one
leading away behind. It couldn’t do him any good now, but it was the one that would cause trouble on the way back. There was a lot of autumn-colored poison oak, he noticed, climbing all over the stump of a tree, right there at the fork. He would remember that easily enough.

He walked on, as if hurrying now would get him out of the woods sooner, and within moments he found himself standing at the edge of the clearing he had seen through the trees. It was overgrown with grass and wild iris and skunk cabbage. The path ended there, just like that. Clearly he was deep into the woods—far deeper than Aunt Edith could have ventured yesterday afternoon. She had been gone for maybe ten minutes and seemed to have made a round trip of it—although now that he studied it out, he couldn’t really be sure that it was
her
red jacket he had seen through the trees. It might have been anybody, kids maybe. This might easily be a wild-goose chase.

Someone had been using the clearing as a junk pile, too—so much for the primeval woodland idea. There were a couple of old car fenders tilted against each other toward the far side of it, although it was too weedy and misty to make much else out. There was something about the way the fenders were tilted together, though, as if they were meant to form a little shrine …

Suddenly he was both curious and terrified. He ducked back behind a tree and stood listening. There wasn’t a sound. Clearly this was too far out into the forest to be a mere junk pile; no one hauls car fenders into the woods just to throw them away. A child might haul them out there to build a fort, of course, although scrap lumber would have made more sense. He quit trying to make sense out of what he saw. This had something to do with what he had found embedded in the attic plaster night before last. There was no getting around it.

He stepped out from behind the tree, satisfied that there was no one around, and walked to where the two fenders stood, sunk six inches or so into the soft loam. There was freshly dug soil scattered across the top of the weeds. Someone had been working at the thing recently. Beneath the arched, mismatched fenders, someone had built a clever little wall out of odds and ends—small stones, an old glass inkwell, doll-sized lipstick tubes, a broken pocket knife, a rubber puppet head, half a dozen ivory dice, a couple of broken tin toys, and, among more of the same, his stolen paperweight.

Sitting on this junk-pile wall, his short legs dangling, was a ceramic Humpty Dumpty, its paint nearly weathered off and the white of its shell the color of an old meerschaum pipe.

Howard reached down to pick up the paperweight, but then stopped himself. Something in him didn’t want to disturb it, any of it. There was something child-like about the collection—like the careful arrangement of small toys and collected objects, say, on top of a child’s bedroom dresser, arranged just so for reasons that only the child could fathom. He was struck with the certainty, though, that the oddball little wall wasn’t the work of a child. There was a magic in the arrangement and choice of objects. He could feel it in the air of the clearing. He had stumbled into an open-air cathedral, and he felt suddenly that he didn’t belong there and didn’t want to run into anyone who did. To hell with the paperweight.

He was determined now to head straight to the house. He would find a way to slip out that afternoon, maybe, when the fog lifted and the sun shined. He slowed down in order to make less noise. There seemed to be paths everywhere around the clearing, and the fog had settled in so that even nearby trees were ghostly and dim. He stumbled on a root and nearly fell on his face in the grass, dropping the flashlight to catch himself. He sprang up at once, shaking his hand and looking around, half expecting a patchwork zombie to materialize out of the fog. He had wandered straight off the path somehow, out onto another little patch of meadow.

This was no good at all. He was utterly lost, and had been within five minutes of leaving the house. The whole concept of direction, of north, east, south, and west, was imaginary. It meant nothing, had no application. Realizing it made him mad. He would sit down and wait. Wasn’t that what someone advised? Sooner or later they would discover that he was missing and—what? Follow him into the woods, track him with dogs? It wasn’t likely. He could wait out the fog, perhaps—unless it didn’t lift for two or three days. It was almost funny. He was thirty years old and lost in the damned woods. He didn’t feel like laughing, though, or sitting, either, so he found the path and started walking again, searching futilely for his own footprints coming the other way.

The trail narrowed and weeds grew up through it. Clearly it wasn’t very often traveled. There wasn’t any sign of his footprints on it, or anyone else’s, either. A fallen tree loomed out of the fog, blocking the trail and making it certain that he’d
gone wrong. He turned around, took ten steps back, and found another trail, this one broader and well traveled.

Don’t get frantic, he told himself, half out loud. Then immediately he understood that to be evidence that he was getting frantic. He felt the urge to run up this new path, just in order to get somewhere different, and so he consciously slowed his pace and forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings—to remember oddly shaped bushes and trees. It was daylight now, and the fog was ghostly white where the sun shined through. It was wet, too. Water dripped down the back of his coat from overhead branches.
Were
there bears in the woods? He asked himself that, wishing immediately that he hadn’t thought of it.

Again the path forked, this time to the right—a better path, it occurred to him, although he couldn’t have told himself why. He had to duck beneath low branches, hunching along through the gloomy twilight. There was suddenly an ocean breeze—just the hint of one, as if maybe he had found his way back toward the edge of the woods, after all, and he hurried along, wondering how long he’d been out there—a half hour, anyway, maybe longer.

The path ended at the clearing with the shrine again. He had blundered in a sort of zigzag circle through the woods, coming upon the clearing from the other side. At once he plunged back into the trees, with no idea where he was bound, and stumbled within seconds into a patch of forest partly clear of fog. He found himself atop a ridge, its overgrown slope running down into a weedy little pond, and then another hill beyond it, very steep and grassy. He clambered down the slope toward the pond, standing after a moment in marshy grass at the edge, watching water striders flit across the top of the water while he caught his breath, utterly lost.

Across the pond, floating on the shallow water and tied to a half-submerged tree, lay an old rowboat with a couple of trout poles and fishing tackle in the bottom of it, partly covered in a piece of oilcloth. Leading away from the boat, along the edge of the pond and then through the grass and up the opposite slope, was another trail. Through the trees he could just make out what looked to be the shingled roof of a cabin, the rest of the cabin hidden by the hillside. He picked his way down and around the pond, slogging through mud and wet grass until he reached the path on the far side.

He crouched along, moving slowly, watching the back of the cabin appear above the crest of the hill and ready to duck into
the bushes at the sight or sound of anyone at all. There was a light on inside the cabin and smoke from a chimney. It occurred to him that he ought to have been happy, stumbling back into civilization like this, but he wasn’t. This was hardly civilization. Likely as not, this cabin had been Aunt Edith’s destination yesterday afternoon. He had come too far not to find out now.

Now that he needed it, the fog had mostly disappeared. He crept forward, toward the rear of the cabin where a long pile of split logs reached nearly to the windows. The intelligent thing, of course, would be simply to knock on the front door and announce that he had gotten lost in the woods and needed directions. Except that there was clearly something secretive about Aunt Edith’s furtive trip, and at the moment he felt like being equally furtive. And there was the shrine in the clearing, too, not a hundred yards away, that lent the whole business a strangely dangerous air.

He peered in at the rear window, into a small bedroom containing little more than an unmade bed. Through the open door he could see into what was maybe a living room, just making out the edge of a stove and the corner of a small wooden table. Shadows moved across the edge of the table, but no one stepped into view. He would have to find a more useful window.

He edged down toward the corner of the cabin, ducking low behind the woodpile in order to take a peek before stepping into the open. He could feel the ocean breeze again, blowing uphill toward the cabin, and it struck him that if the breeze held up he could take a stab at following it toward town. A well-traveled path angled away in that general direction, and although the trees were too thick for him to be certain, that path must surely lead toward Uncle Roy’s house—toward the city instead of deeper into the woods.