The Paper Grail (6 page)

But that was childish, wasn’t it? If he were caught fooling around in either the shed or the fireplace, it might botch up the whole business of the Hoku-sai sketch, which had already gotten pretty shaky. He noticed right then that the walls were full of paintings and photographs and no end of wall hangings of one sort or another. In the dim light it was impossible to make any of them out clearly. Howard stepped over to have a look at a few of them.

Most of what hung on the walls wasn’t of any note—reproductions of hunting scenes and of women with flowing hair and dressed in clothes that couldn’t have been worn seriously during any historical era. There were some grisly-looking African masks and some wooden puppets and a wall-hung china cabinet crammed full of depression glass. Where in the world was Mr. Jimmers? Or more to the point, where was the drink?

He wandered into the next room, taking the direction that Jimmers had taken. This second room was brighter, having an honest-to-goodness electrical lamp burning in it. He wondered what the point of the candles was. Maybe Mr. Jimmers was the atmospheric type. He remembered this room all at once—the oriental carpets, the confusion of oak furniture, the wooden chandelier.

There on the wall were three badly framed, collodion photographs, antiques, hanging in a vertical row. He remembered those suddenly, from a class in Pre-Raphaelite photography that he had taken in graduate school. The photos had been taken by John Ruskin—when? 1855? 1860? They were very old, anyway, and, if they were authentic, might be worth a fortune to the right collector. He peered at them, unbelieving. He knew what they were now, although he hadn’t known when he saw them years ago—three of Ruskin’s Tintern Abbey photographs.

Ten years ago Howard had eyes for nothing but the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he had struggled through Ruskin’s
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and his rambling lectures on the Pre-Raphaelites. He was fascinated at least partly by his knowledge that Michael Graham himself was the great-grandson of James Graham, the Pre-Raphaelite photographer. But there had been more to his study than that. John Ruskin had been a curiously enigmatic figure—a sexually impotent genius surrounded by a cabal of artistic zealots who were strangely loyal to him and to his fierce esthetic desire to embody nature in art.

Anyway, it made sense that Michael Graham possessed these photographs. He had probably been willed them. Fancy them
having hung on the wall all these years, gathering dust. The house was a treasure trove of collectible stuff.

He was suddenly aware that Mr. Jimmers was regarding him from the doorway. He held a glass in one hand and a wine bottle in the other. Howard would rather it was a beer bottle, but right now that didn’t seem to matter half as much to him as did the letter in his pocket. “I was wondering about the Japanese sketch,” Howard said, getting straight down to business. Mr. Jimmers knew why he had come; he might as well say what he meant.

“So was I,” Mr. Jimmers said. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. Not beyond Mr. Graham’s having offered it to the museum.” He pulled the letter out of his coat and held it up.

“And you’ve come up after it, have you? After all this time? What compelled you? Was it greed, or something else? I’ve always been a student of compulsion, and I see something in your eyes that intrigues me.”

Howard gave him a look that wasn’t meant to be intriguing. What was this? Suddenly he was being interrogated. Suspicions were being aired.

“This thievery nonsense,” Mr. Jimmers continued, “this imaginary glass bauble gone from your pickup truck—that could easily be a clever ruse, couldn’t it? An effort to throw suspicion elsewhere, to make it look as if you, too, were the victim of these thieves.” He nodded shrewdly and then nodded again in the general direction of the wall. “It’s been stolen, hasn’t it?”

“What? My truck?” Howard took a panicked step toward the door before realizing that Mr. Jimmers wasn’t talking about the truck or the paperweight. He meant the sketch. “Stolen? When? I’ve been a week on the road …” Howard found himself speaking in a tone of denial, explaining himself, laying out an alibi.

“A week? Driving up from L.A.? A day would have done it. Eleven hours, say. What if, my mysterious stranger, you’ve been skulking around up here for days?” Mr. Jimmers raised his eyebrows theatrically. “I’m thinking that you might be the one to shed some light on the business of the missing sketch, and perhaps on poor Graham’s murder, too.”

“Murder!” Howard almost shouted.

For the space of twenty seconds Jimmers stared at him, letting the idea soak in. Then suddenly he laughed out loud, bending a little at the waist and slapping his knee. Apparently he had only been fooling, playing a little game with the bumpkin from down
south. He was suddenly cheerful. He ran his hand through his hair, frazzling it, and then strode toward Howard, holding out the glass, his face stretched into a toad-like grin.

“Cheer up,” he said. “You can’t trust anyone nowadays, can you? They’ll rob you from east to west if they get a chance. ‘Beard them in their den,’ that’s the byword around here. And if you can’t, then beard them somewhere else.” He winked like a conspirator and pulled at the strap of his suspender, letting it snap against his chest. “Come along upstairs,” he said, taking the bottle and glass with him. “I’ve got something to show you.”

Howard wondered if he’d ever get a chance at the wine. He was vastly relieved, though. The sketch must be all right, after all. Mr. Jimmers had hidden it upstairs, fearing thieves. The man was a crank, a joker, but he was wily. There was no use getting mad at him or trying to second-guess him. But how about this business about old Graham?
Had
he been murdered? And if he had, why? Who would bother to murder a ninety-year-old?

He followed along up the stairs, winding around past a second-story landing and then onto a third, where there was a stained-glass window looking out into the darkness. The window depicted what might be a wall built of salmon-shaped stones, or else a dry river littered with flopping fish. In front of it lay a broken Humpty Dumpty, and racing down out of the wooded hills beyond were two strangely shaped automobiles, pieced together with delicate ribbons of copper foil and jeweled with bits of faceted glass.

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-f 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.