The Paper Grail (47 page)

“He’s a gluer,” Howard said. “That’s what I said, remember?”

“Yeah. I never knew anything about
this
, though. I knew he went into the hospital that first time because he suffered from some kind of gluer compulsion that had got out of hand, but I didn’t know he’d kept at it.”

“That’s weirdly common around here, isn’t it?”

“Ask Dad. He has a car of his own somewhere that he works on, or used to—I don’t know where. He doesn’t talk about it. It’s like alcohol, I think. Some people get the habit worse than others. Some people glue in public; some of them are closet gluers.”

“Uncle Roy is a closet gluer?”

“I think it has something to do with knowing Graham.”

“With
this
, I think,” Howard said, waving the copper case.

“Father refers to it as the Humpty Dumpty complex, the desire to always be putting things back together.”

“Say,” Howard said, “speaking of that—it was you who glued Aunt Edith’s Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

“Uh-huh. Better to keep things whole.”

“You don’t have a gluer vehicle stashed somewhere, do you? Covered up with origami fish or something?”

“A fleet of them, up in Willits. I sneak up there on weekends with Mrs. Deventer. What happens if we turn this crank?”

“The thing flies?”

“Where to? Do you realize that he’s built this intricate contraption in a cellar? If it did fly, or drive or something, he couldn’t get it out of here.”

“He doesn’t want to,” Howard said. “What’s important is the gluing. Go ahead and twist the crank.”

“You do it.”

“Remember that phone call you made, after the dream? Down to the Chinese laundry? The one where you hung up before you knew what the dream meant? This is a second chance for you. You can make up for that now, play out your destiny.”

Sylvia considered this for a moment, then shrugged, widened her eyes at him, and twisted the crank twice. The works were stiff, and it took both hands to do it. There was an instant clanging of dozens of tiny bells and the whirling of tin propellers. The creatures on bicycles pedaled furiously, the front wheels rotating while the back wheels stayed in place, cemented to the body of the car. Trains tooted and spun their wheels, circus animals beat on drums and banged cymbals, and the Humpty Dumpty waved his baton, orchestrating the whole seething mass of toys. There was a sound like a fan starting up, and the entire plate with the car on top lifted off the ground three or four inches. A gust of air blew out from underneath, ruffling their hair for the space of thirty seconds, until the toys finally wound down and fell still and the ship bumped to the floor.

“That’s something,” said Howard. “Isn’t it? A wind-up flying saucer car. Jimmers is a genius.”

“It’s indescribable. How long do you think it took him to build it?”

“Lord knows. There was a man who cut a chain out of a single toothpick. I saw it at Knott’s Berry Farm once, in a
display of miniatures. Took him years, and he went blind carving it, too.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“Nothing,” Howard said. “I admire that sort of attention to worthless projects, though—doing things for the sheer sake of doing them.”

Sylvia nodded. “I think it ought to be in a museum. Kids would go nuts over it.”

“Imagine riding in it,” Howard said. “Cranking it up and driving it into Fort Bragg at eight in the morning, dressed in a foil hat. What’s the rest of this stuff in here?” Howard gestured around the room, at the heaped pipe and sheet metal. He stood up and moved across to lay his cane and the copper case on the benchtop, and then pulled out one of the blueprints in the box, half expecting to find the plans for a flying saucer. What he found was a diagram of the ghost machine, drawn to scale, covered with symbols and illegibly written notes that he didn’t understand. “Oh-oh,” he said, holding it up for Sylvia to see.

She stared at it until she understood what it was. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything, really. Who cares where the damned thing came from? Somebody had to build it. Did you really expect it to generate ghosts?”

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I guess I did, finally. If you had asked me three days ago, I would have laughed at the idea. Now I’m not laughing.”

“Good. Don’t laugh. Think of the one human being on earth who might build a machine that generates ghosts. It’s Mr. Jimmers, isn’t it? You’re only skeptical because he built it in a basement on the coast. When you thought it was a hundred years old, you were half convinced. I don’t think that anything’s changed. Besides, how do you know who drew those plans? They look old to me.”

He shrugged. “I don’t. I wonder what else is in here.”

“I think we should leave Mr. Jimmers’ stuff alone. It’s nearly six. If we were smart we’d find our way out of here. I don’t feel right meddling with all of this. It’s all private, hidden away down here like this. It’s the last thirty years of Mr. Jimmers’ life that we’re pawing through. I shouldn’t have wound up the flying saucer.”

“No harm done, apparently. And if you hadn’t wound it up, I would have.”

“Let’s go,” she said, standing up. Howard rolled the drawing and shoved it back down into the box, then picked up his cane and
the copper box. Together they went out through the next door and down more steps into yet another room, the flashlight illuminating a bed chamber with a single chair against one wall. There was a table with a lamp and hot plate and with open shelves above it lined with books and with cans of Spam and hash and hominy and Postum. A single faucet was piped straight out through the concrete wall. There was a small doorway leading into a toilet and yet another heavy, closed door like the one leading into the attic closet.

“That’s it,” Howard said, stepping across to open it up. Darkness lay beyond. There was no knob at all on the outside of the door. It led out, not in. “We need something to wedge it open,” he said. “No telling where this goes. It can’t go far, though. Shine the light through here.”

It was a tunnel like in a mine, shored up with old railroad ties. The floor of the tunnel seemed to run gradually uphill. “Hold it for a moment,” Howard said, “and throw some light on the shelves there.” He stepped back into the room, grabbed a can of Spam, and set it onto the threshold, letting the door close against it. Then they set out down the passage, through two hundred feet of darkness, until once again they came to a door, this one barred with a heavy piece of wood slotted into the timber of the door frame. An immense garage-door spring hooked the center of the door to the post it was hinged to.

Howard pulled the bar out of its niche and hooked it back into a tremulous sort of clip, like the hold-down of a rat trap. Carefully he leaned all his weight into the door, pushing it open a couple of inches before it jammed against something that sounded like dead leaves and brushwood. Fresh air whirled in around them, smelling of the ocean and evergreen trees and eucalyptus.

“Hold on,” Howard said, handing Sylvia the copper case and taking the flashlight from her. He loped back up the tunnel, put the Spam can back onto the shelf, and closed the door that the can had propped open. He hurried back toward the door into the woods again, anxious to get out.

In the woodsy darkness outside, tree branches swished together in the sea wind. There were no lights visible through the partly open door, no sign of the highway or the house, just the shadow of the woods in moonlight. Sylvia helped him shove the door farther open, skidding it through forest debris, the springs creaking and straining. They slid out, ducking beneath overhanging ferns and brush and letting the door pull shut behind them. The bar slammed down into place.

The door itself was set in the side of a hill, mostly hidden by vegetation and elaborately painted with depictions of twigs and leaves and ferns, most of the paint having been scoured off by weather and the wood beneath discolored to a granite shade of gray.

Up the hill above them a car roared past. They trudged along a tiny, disused trail, up onto the highway, and walked the quarter mile back up to their car. The sun was low in the sky, and the afternoon was dim with pending evening. They could see the house now, out on the bluffs. A light glowed downstairs and another upstairs. Smoke tumbled up out of the chimney. Mr. Jimmers was clearly home and had been home long enough to get a good fire going. He had probably been strolling around above them when they wound up the device in the cellar; perhaps he had been there for hours, knowing exactly what Howard was doing downstairs and no longer interested in stopping him.

“Maybe we can just sit here for a moment,” Sylvia said, looking out over the ocean. The sky was clear and the distant edge of the ocean sparkled and danced in the dying sunlight. Howard put his arm around her shoulder, wishing that the Toyota didn’t have bucket seats. “Not just now,” she said, still looking out the window. She turned and smiled at him briefly, then went back to looking out the window.

The copper case sat on the dashboard. Howard picked it up. It was warm, maybe because he’d been carrying it. Its warmth felt like something else, though—as if it were alive in some strange way or charged with barely contained energy. He pulled the plates apart and lifted out the sketch, holding it up in the sunlight so that the paper was translucent. Clearly it had been pressed from a mixture containing leaves and flower petals. A stem of wheat lay outlined like a watermark within the paper, striated by the hundreds of creases.

“Let me see it,” Sylvia said.

For a moment Howard hesitated. He was filled with the notion that the sketch was his in some fundamental, mystical sense and that he shouldn’t be passing it around to satisfy idle curiosity. “Sure,” he said, feeling foolish. “This paper seems so delicate, I can’t imagine how it’s held together through so many foldings. You’d think it would fall to pieces like an old road map.”

“I think it was meant to be folded,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a puzzle. I can see the start of a few different shapes here. I think I can follow these two folds and get the start of a simple balloon.”

“An egg, maybe?”

“I don’t see an egg.”

“What else?”

“Maybe a fish. I don’t know. I’d have to start on one of them in order to see steps farther along. Like following a map again or working your way through a maze. It’s impossible to see connections unless you take them one at a time.”

“Go ahead and fold it.”

She looked at him and shook her head.

“Why not?”

“It’s like Mr. Jimmers’ car in the basement,” she said. “I felt like I was meddling when I wound it up.”

“This doesn’t belong to Mr. Jimmers, does it? It belongs to me.”

“It does?”

“Who else?”

She shrugged. “I’d feel like I was …
intruding
or something.”

“That’s a strange word,” Howard said. “Intruding on what? What do you mean intruding?”

“I don’t know. What do you think this is, anyway?”

“Your father seems to think it’s the Grail.”

“Then
you
fold the damned thing up. I won’t have anything to do with folding it up.” She gave it back to him, but kept looking at it, as if she were studying it with something like longing. “It has some sort of effect on you, doesn’t it?”

“Like out on the beach there, in the Studebaker,” Howard said.

“We shouldn’t have done that. We’ve known for years that we couldn’t, or shouldn’t.”

“Now we did. Simple as that. It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“Nice, yes,” she said, “but maybe not good.”

“Maybe it
was
good. What happens if I fold it lengthwise, like this?” Howard folded it down the center. There was no need to run his thumb and forefinger along the crease. It folded flat by itself, as if the fold were part of its natural state. The car shook in the wind just then and Sylvia jumped.

“God,” she said. “I thought someone had stood on the bumper. That thing makes me nervous as hell.”

“So what have I started? I could fold it into the shape of a diamond, I guess. I can’t see past that.”

“Might be anything. You’ve got to picture it three-dimensionally. Haven’t you ever taken those tests where you have to guess
what an unfolded box will look like when it’s folded up?”

“I always failed that sort of test.” Howard said. “To me they always look like crossword puzzles for morons.”

Sylvia pointed out the passenger-side window. The sun was just then disappearing into the sea. “Look at the sun now.” she said. “The sky around it is hazy. The sun’s almost red.”

“Sailor’s delight.” Howard said. “How did that rhyme go? ‘Midget at morning, sailor take warning. Midget at night, sailor’s delight.’”

She stared at the folded paper, concentrating on it.

“Pretty funny, eh?”

“Sure. What did you say? Fold it again, in half. Turn it into a small square. I think I see a cup in it.”

Howard folded it just as the wind shook the car again, sailing up and over the bluffs, bending the dead grasses almost flat and howling around the door frames. Sylvia pulled her coat out of the back and jammed it between the seats, sliding over beside Howard, snuggling up to him. “Now open it up and tuck the two top comers in, diagonally.”

Darkness fell across the car now as if a vast shadow had blotted out any light left over from the now-departed sun. There was the sound of distant thunder, and Howard and Sylvia looked out through the windshield to find that great black clouds were roiling in double time over the water, soaring along madly in the wind, driving toward land. Lightning forked down toward the ocean, which leaped now with whitecaps. Long, black swells drove in to smash against the rocks with a concussion the two of them could hear even above the wind.

For the moment they ignored the partly folded sketch that Howard held in his hands, and they watched the storm sweep toward them, seeming almost to be pulling water upward out of the Pacific and into the clouds. Way out over the ocean a waterspout rose momentarily and then fell, and within seconds rain flailed against the car, obscuring the ocean entirely.

There were headlights on the highway suddenly, and a car swerved toward them, half on the wrong side of the road. It swung wildly back into its own lane, running up onto the right shoulder and glancing off the rock face of the cliff, the driver honking uselessly as he drove past, disappearing through the deluge.