The Paper Grail Read Online Free PDF Page B

much it was like the house in his dreams. It was uncanny—troublesomely so. It was fifteen years ago that he had last driven down this gravel driveway, and yet it seemed to him that he could recall even the shapes of individual stones in the walls of the house and the weathered ends of exposed roof rafters.
    He had been climbing the stairs in his dreams, the old mill having turned into Graham’s stone house. The stairs hung to the outside wall of the turret, wrapping around to a landing and second-floor doorway. The steps were built of irregular, chunked concrete, sledgehammered out of a sidewalk and reinforced underneath with lengths of angle iron from an old bed frame torched into pieces. There was an iron pipe handrail along the wall where the steps were mortised into the stones of the turret, but the other three edges of each step hung in the air, and now it made him dizzy just to look at them.
    In his dream he had climbed slowly, looking hard at the wide lines of cleanly troweled mortar between the stones. He had seemed to be looking for something, but he didn’t know what. Abruptly he realized that odds and ends of things had been shoved very carefully into the wet mortar: cheap, colored-glass perfume bottles laid sideways, tiny iron toys, a faded ceramicHumpty Dumpty wearing a polka-dot shirt and a green tie with a stickpin and with a broad, leering, know-it-all grin.
    One moment he had been halfway up; the next he was at the top of the stairs, facing the weathered door; his heart hammering in his chest. He had turned and gone back down, taking the irregular steps two at a time, thinking that something had come out of the door and was watching him, had noticed him for the first time. He had gone straight out onto the bluffs, where the driveway ended in weeds, and had nearly stumbled headlong into an old truck from which two workmen were off-loading straw-stuffed crates of the ceramic Humpty Dumptys.
    It was a ridiculous dream, that part of it was. He could see that clearly in the daylight. At night, though, at two in the morning … Darkness tended to multiply the significance of dreams. Dream mathematics acquired its own logic after dark. And night was falling quickly now. In twenty minutes there wouldn’t be much daylight left.
    Howard watched the house for a moment longer, waiting for the door to open, for someone to peer out. Anyone in the house would have heard him rattle up. Berry vines grew so dense as to nearly cover the west-facing downstairs windows, and had been hacked away to let in sunlight. Split shingles lay in a pile on the meadow, alongside a telephone pole that had been sawed into foot-and-a-half lengths. There were piles of sand and gravel with sun-shredded plastic tarps staked over them, and an old cement mixer hooked up to a rusty gasoline generator on wheels. Heaps of size-sorted stone lay stacked along the wild edge of the vines, most of the stones covered up by new growth. Beyond the open door of a long, low, lean-to barn in among the cypress and eucalyptus trees, a chain-saw mill sat in the middle of a mountain of wood chips.
    The place seemed empty, deserted. He climbed out of the truck, taking his keys with him. There was a heavy odor of cedar and moldering vegetation and fog, and the thick silence was cut only by the low sound of a foghorn moaning somewhere to the north. He walked around the house toward the cliffs, stopping next to a prefabricated tin shed, probably bought out of a catalogue from Sears and Roebuck. The house appeared to be dark.
    The fog cleared momentarily, and there was enough daylight left to see the black rocks nearly a hundred feet below the cliffs. Waves broke across them, surging up the cliffside and then washing back down. On one of the rocks, partly submerged andcrumpled up, sat an old car like a piece of statuary on a plinth. It had obviously gone off the cliff. What was it? Something peculiar; he couldn’t tell at first if he was looking at the front end of