The Knights of the Cornerstone E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 404

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Calvin Bryson has hidden himself away from the world, losing himself in his work and his collection of rare and quirky books. But he never meant to let so much time go by without visiting his aunt and uncle. Their tiny town of New Cyprus, California - hemmed in by the Dead Mountains and the Colorado River - isn't the kind of place one just happens upon... Coincidentally, their invitation to visit comes at the same time Calvin is asked to deliver to his uncle a peculiar family heirloom: the veil a long-dead aunt used when she held séances. All signs point to New Cyprus. And when Calvin gets there, he'll discover the town's strange secrets and a mysterious group dedicated to preserving and protecting holy relics - a modern-day incarnation of the legendary Knights Templar...

Leseprobe

THE KNIGHTS OF THE CORNERSTONE

Copyright © 2008 by James P. Blaylock.

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2016 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Cover design by Dirk Berger.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-625672-27-8

For Viki, John, and Danny

And this time for John Ciarcia and Karen King

Cha Cha and Karen: Here’s a book dedicated to the two of you, for years of New York hospitality. The Blaylocks thank you for your love and support. See you soon.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank some people for the help they gave me with this book, starting with my family, all of whom made sensible and useful suggestions when I needed them, and particularly Danny, who gave me the idea of making my main character a hopeful cartoonist and lent me some of his own cartoons to get me going. I’d also like to thank Tim Powers, Lew Shiner, Chris Arena, Paul Buchanan, and Dixie and Bull Durham.

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship*

The Disappearing Dwarf*

The Digging Leviathan*

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams*

The Last Coin*

The Stone Giant*

The Paper Grail*

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles*

Night Relics*

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides*

The Rainy Season

The Knights Of The Cornerstone*

Zeuglodon*

The Aylesford Skull

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms*

In For A Penny*

Metamorphosis*

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide*

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs*

The Adventure of the Ring of Stone*

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

*available as a Jabberwocky eBook

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Also by James P. Blaylock

KNIGHT Errant

FRED WOOLSWORTH

THE DEAD MOUNTAINS

THE TEMPLE Bar

TIME and THE RIVER

At THE COZY DINER

FOURTEEN Carats

LIKE a Mill WHEEL

THE VEIL

THE Quarry

UPSIDE DOWN

BARGE Day

OVER THE RIVER

On THE PAYOLL

THE MEETING OF THE ELDERS

Gas’n’GO

BEAMON’S Yard

THE RESCUE

CLEARING FOR ACTION

ALONG THE RIVER

PHARA’S Army

Finding THE RANGE

THE FOURTH SECRET

TOMORROW

The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

—Lilith, George MacDonald

Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

—The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

KNIGHT Errant

Calvin Bryson read the letter a third time, but for some reason it insisted on saying the same thing it had said the other two times. It was from his uncle, Al Lymon, who lived out in the desert along the Colorado River. Calvin was invited to drop in for a stay—as long as he wanted, the longer the better. He had last seen his uncle and aunt at his father’s funeral three years ago, and since then Aunt Nettie hadn’t been doing well. The letter was cheerful enough, but it had a last-respects tone to it, and its arrival was a little ominous, since he had never gotten a letter from his uncle before, only birthday cards back in his childhood, and then from both of them.

His last trip out to visit his aunt and uncle had been several years back. He had vivid memories of the Lymon house on its shady bend upriver from Needles, where the little town of New Cyprus lay hemmed in by a U-shaped range of barren hills appropriately called the Dead Mountains. Embayed as it was by high cliffs and the green verge of the Colorado, New Cyprus was a half-moon of land isolated from the world, accessible only by boat or by a winding two-lane road through miles of rock-strewn desert wilderness. The house, built of locally cut stone and imported cedar back in the 1920s, had view windows looking out onto the river, and its own little sandy beach on the bay, just wide enough for two or three lawn chairs. He could picture his aunt’s antiques and Oriental bric-a-brac, some of it ancient, including a Saracen dagger supposedly from the Third Crusade and said to have belonged to Richard Lionheart.

He looked out through the front window at the street. Two boys played in the sprinklers across the way, just as he had done when he was growing up in this very house. The Eagle Rock neighborhood had taken care of itself over the years, and the old bungalows and Spanish-style houses, most of them built in the early part of the last century, were painted and repaired, and few of them had been renovated into the kind of characterless houses found in nearby neighborhoods. A big, messy carob tree shaded his yard, and he was struck suddenly with the memory of climbing the tree when he was a kid, of the musty smell of the carob pods and the feel of the rough bark on his hands. But he had no desire to climb it now, only a nostalgic regret for times that had passed away—nostalgia called up by the letter in his hand.

But the last thing he wanted to do was to drive out into the desert, especially under these sad circumstances. He picked up his sketchbook and looked at the cartoon he had been drawing when the mail had come in through the slot. It was a picture of two gangly-looking lunatic doctors standing in a doorway, very apparently insane, with tousled hair and with their clothes askew. People on the sidewalk were similarly crazy-looking, with crossed eyes and propeller beanies and their pant legs tucked randomly into their socks. One of the two doctors was pointing across the street at a solitary man who looked like Cary Grant, neatly dressed in a three-piece suit. “That’s the one,” the doctor was saying. A magazine editor with any sense would buy it. So far none of them had exhibited any sense.

Calvin had gotten thoroughly used to doing nothing during these past months of being alone, unless you counted the cartoons and the book collecting. Elaine, the woman he had been engaged to, had accused him of being aimless, but in fact he wasn’t aimless at all. Tonight, for example, he aimed to finish cataloguing his collection of pamphlets from Futura Press and maybe read a book, and then he aimed to go to bed early. Elaine and he had fallen apart at Christmas—maybe the worst Christmas of Calvin’s thirty-four years.

He had inherited enough when his father passed away so that as long as he didn’t spend his inheritance like a fool, he could live moderately well, and his only real duties nowadays were to himself, or to his collection of rare books and pamphlets, mostly what was known as “Californiana.” Over the years he had paid questionable sums for pamphlets printed on garage presses by cranks and crackpots, but there was an element of innocent wonder in the era that produced them that attracted him, and wonder was a commodity that had pretty much gone out of the world.

He didn’t like to think of the things that were going out of the world, but not thinking about them wouldn’t change the truth. You start coming up with excuses not to visit your old aunt and uncle, and then one morning you wake up in Hell, with your pajamas on fire. . . .

He reread the part in the letter about Aunt Nettie. It was impossible to say for sure what her condition was, but he assumed her cancer was out of remission. Although the letter revealed little about her troubles, it implied a lot about Uncle Lymon’s. Calvin had found that living alone wasn’t easy sometimes, but there were other things that were more difficult. The Lymons had been married for over fifty years, and Calvin could only imagine what that meant—a lifetime of companionship drawing to a sad close.

He flipped through the Rolodex looking for his uncle’s telephone number. Uncle Lymon was a potentate of some sort in a lodge called the Knights of the Cornerstone, which went in for secret handshakes and strange hats. Calvin half feared that the subject of his becoming an initiate in the order would come up again when he visited, as it had last time. If it did, he would demand a suit of armor and a pyramid hat with an eyeball on it. If they could meet his price, he was in. He took out the Rolodex card and reached for the telephone, but before he had time to make the call, the doorbell rang.

He parted the blinds and looked out again. It was a UPS driver at the door. Books! Calvin thought, his spirits lifting, but when he opened the door and took the box from the driver it was far too light to be books. The man wasn’t wearing a uniform, just a blue work shirt, and the van at the curb was the right color of institutional brown but was unmarked. The driver apparently saw him looking at it. “I’m warehouse,” he said. “Your box got left behind by mistake, so they asked me to run it out here in one of the out-of-service trucks. It’s an element of customer service.”

“I appreciate that,” Calvin said, signing his name on a list on a clipboard instead of the usual electronic gadget. He took the box back into the house, watching through the blinds as the van roared away in a cloud of exhaust. Not only was the box too light to be books, it in fact felt utterly empty. The return address was from Orange City, Iowa, from Warren Hosmer, his father’s ancient cousin—his own cousin, of some odd number and removal. This was puzzling, and if it called for him to drive out to Iowa, he would have to put his foot down.

He fetched a box cutter, and was on the verge of slicing into the multiple layers of tape when he noticed that in fact the box wasn’t addressed to him personally, but rather to Al Lymon, c/o Calvin Bryson. That beat all. It would have been identical postage for Cousin Hosmer to ship it straight to his uncle’s post office box in Bullhead City, Arizona. New Cyprus was unincorporated territory, and his aunt and uncle collected their mail across the river, taking the round-trip ferry ride a couple of times a week and shopping at the Safeway and the big Coronet dime store near the ferry dock while they were in town.

Then it occurred to him that UPS didn’t ship to post office boxes. But why use UPS at all? Why not just mail it? Calvin shook the box, which made a swishy sort of sound, as if there were tissue paper in it, or some other ethereal thing—a million-dollar bill, maybe, or a chorus line of angels dancing on the head of a pin. He was half tempted simply to cut it open and claim not to have looked at the address till it was too late. Except it would be a lie, and there was no use taking up that vice after having mostly avoided it for so many years. Sometimes it seemed to him that if he eliminated human contact entirely, he could rest easy in regard to that particular crime—unless he counted lying to himself, which was admissible because it had its own built-in justice: later on you were sorry for it, or so people said.

A curious thing struck him—the coincidence of the box arriving on the same day as his uncle’s letter—and he wondered if he were being invited into a plot perpetrated by the old-timer end of the family, which had always been a mysterious crowd, although there weren’t a lot of them left these days. He recalculated the likelihood of waking up in Hell as he went back to the Rolodex and found the number for Warren Hosmer, which he jabbed into the phone. Being lured into other people’s mysteries didn’t attract him. A couple of well-conceived phone calls would likely solve all problems, or at least shift them to some indeterminate date in the future. The phone rang ten times before anyone picked it up.

“Hosmer,” a man’s voice said.

“It’s Calvin Bryson,” Calvin said as heartily as he could.

“Cal! Good! Good! Good! You got the package?”

“I did,” Calvin said. “How did you know?”

“Why else would you call?”

“Right. Anyway, I signed for it, and it’s sitting on the dining room table. I guess I was wondering whether I shouldn’t just take it downtown to the post office and send it on out to Uncle Lymon’s P.O. Box.”

There was a lengthy silence. “I wanted to avoid that,” Hosmer told him.

“Ah!” Calvin said. “I see. Okay. Sure. Why?”

“It’s that damned address of Lymon’s. You never know how many hands the package will pass through or what kind of curiosity it’ll stir up by the time he picks it up.”

“All right. I guess I can take it out there myself if—”

“Good. We thought that would be best.”

“Like I was saying, I’m not sure how soon . . . Did you say ‘we’?”

“Lymon and me. He said you’re taking a little trip out to New Cyprus. He and Nettie are looking forward to it like nobody’s business.”

“It’s in the... planning stages,” Calvin said. This was inscrutable. He picked up Uncle Lymon’s letter and looked at the three-day-old postmark.

“The sooner the better,” Hosmer told him. “I won’t sleep much till it’s out there safe.”

“That suits me,” Calvin said. “It’s none of my business, really, but what’s inside? The box feels empty.”

“Well, it’s an heirloom, a family heirloom. It’s a veil, I guess you could call it. A gossamer scarf. Belonged to your aunt Iris. Maybe you haven’t heard of her. She’s been dead these many years.”

“That would explain it,” Calvin said. “Like her wedding veil or something?”

“No. The veil she wore when she was calling up spirits. Her séance veil.”

Suffering Judas, Calvin thought. He had never heard of any Aunt Iris, let alone that there’d been a spiritualist in the family, and now he was under orders to haul her magic veil out to the desert in a cardboard box. “When did she pass away?” he asked.

“Nineteen ten. The family got the idea that her ghost was in the veil. It sounds crazy, but things happened with it. It kept rising up and sort of floating in the air. They’d open Iris’s old steamer trunk and it would drift right out, and no way in hell it wanted to go back in. The thing has a mind of its own, apparently. They’d have to snag it with a butterfly net. I can’t tell you much about it, because it was before my time. Thing is, it wouldn’t give them any rest till they boxed it up and tied down the lid of that trunk.”

Calvin found that he couldn’t speak without laughing, which would insult the old man. Unless of course Hosmer was joking, which he had to be, although it didn’t sound that way.

“You’re skeptical,” Hosmer said. “That’s good. It’ll keep you from trusting the wrong people. This kind of thing with the veil is a matter of belief, if you follow me—like having surefire numbers for the lottery. Once it comes into your mind to play the numbers, you’ve got to play them. They might as well be a fact. You understand belief, don’t you, son?”

“Sure,” Calvin said. “Like not walking under a ladder, even if you don’t believe—”

“I’m not superstitious,” Hosmer told him flatly. “I don’t hold with that kind of thing—ladders, black cats. It’s a lot of rubbish. I’m talking about matters of the spirit here.”

“Of course,” Calvin said. “I was just making a—”

“Well, cut it the hell out. When can you leave?”

“What?” Calvin said. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t put it off another minute. We’re all going to be a little bit nervous until Iris is interred in the crypt out there in New Cyprus, God bless her. You feel that way, too, I suppose. You’re family.”

“Sure I am,” Calvin said, throwing caution into the shrubbery. Clearly he was outgunned here. “I’m happy to help. I was just wondering when to take off when the package showed up. The timing couldn’t have been better. I can leave this afternoon.”

“Then it wouldn’t have made too much sense for you to mail it on out to Lymon, would it? If you can leave this afternoon, it’ll get it there about ten times as fast in the trunk of your car. What would be the point of mailing it?”

“It made no sense at all. I wasn’t thinking. I should be out there before dark if I beat the traffic into San Bernardino.”

“That’s the spirit. Your dad always told me you were a good man, and Lymon says so, too. You take care of Aunt Iris. Don’t let her out of your sight, and for God’s sake, don’t open the box. If she gets loose in the car and the window’s down . . . ”

“That won’t happen. Leave it to me.”

“That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I sent her to you. Like they used to say out here in Iowa, ‘If it was easy they’d have got someone else to do it.’”

“There’s truth in that,” Calvin said.

“Damn right there is. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said it. Let me know she arrived safe.”

“Will do.”

“One last thing,” Hosmer said, lowering his voice as if leery of being overheard. “You carry a portable horn?”

“I’m not sure—”

“A blower?”

“I don’t know,” Calvin said. “A blower...? Like a leaf blower?”

“A telephone, damn it. A cellular phone. A portable.”

“Sure. You want the number?”

“That’s right. And keep it charged up. But once you’re out there in the desert, think twice about using it. Assume someone’s listening. If it’s necessary, I’ll call you.”

Calvin reeled off his phone number and the strange conversation was done. He couldn’t remember the last time he had exchanged pleasantries with Cousin Hosmer—probably at an Iowa picnic back in the late Middle Ages. And now this. He hefted the box. A ghost didn’t weigh much. Maybe they actually had negative weight, like helium, which is why they float.

“Duty calls,” he said out loud. His voice sounded strange in the otherwise silent house. Certainly duty had called in a bizarre way, but who was he to ask needless questions? Like the man in the poem, his was but to do or die. “ ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ ” he said, “ ‘rode the six hundred.’ ” And then he laughed, picturing the cartoon, which would be utterly meaningless to anyone who hadn’t read the poem, and maybe even if they had read it.

He put in the call to his uncle Lymon. “I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ve got Aunt Iris.”

“We’ll have dinner waiting,” his uncle told him. “I cooked it yesterday. And can you do me a favor? There’s a little market fifty miles this side of Ludlow out on I-40, the Gas’n’Go. They’ve got grape Nehi soda in bottles. Pick me up a couple of six-packs, will you? I don’t get out that way much, and I can’t find it in Bullhead City. I’ll pay you back.”

“My treat,” Calvin said.

“Then make it a case,” his uncle said, and both of them laughed.

FRED WOOLSWORTH

The barren peaks of the Dead Mountains loomed ahead, off toward the horizon on the north side of the highway, sharp against the desert sky and bunched together along the Colorado River where California, Arizona, and Nevada merged, and where lay the magical, invisible line that marked the time zone. Calvin looked into the rearview mirror, unpleasantly startled, as he most often was, at the sight of his own face. Elaine had told him once that he looked like a young Jimmy Stewart, and he reminded himself of that from time to time. He was the right build anyway, and he could see the resemblance, but there was some essential quality he lacked—the endearing manner of speaking, maybe, or the twinkle in the eye.

He looked past himself, deeper into the mirror, at the gray hills of the Bullion Range, diminished and hazy but still visible behind him. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t a lick of difference between the two dry ranges—one in front and one behind—except that one was associated with gold and the other with death. Probably the names were the quirk of a geological survey team that had come out from the west and lost its sense of humor along the way, which wouldn’t be any more difficult than losing a penny if you were out here in the desert for more than a few days.

He tossed his road map onto the passenger seat and considered the strange fact that a person forfeited an hour merely by crossing into Arizona—a purely imaginary hour, of course, but an hour that could only be regained by turning around and heading back west. Except if one never returned west, then one was an hour closer to the grave, if only in some mystical sense. There was something unsettling in it, although he was unsettled by any number of things these days—a consequence, probably, of some variety of looming midlife crisis, although he was a little young for that sort of thing, which was . . . unsettling.

A vehicle appeared on the highway ahead of him now, shimmering in the heat haze until it solidified into an old green pickup truck with a bad muffler. It roared past, the sun glaring so brightly on the windshield that it might have been Elijah rattling away in a glowing whirlwind, bound for the Promised Land. Some fifty miles past Ludlow he spotted the grape soda connection, and he turned off the highway into a solitary two-pump gas station, lunch counter, antiques store, and market rolled into one. The sign on the big window read “Gas’n’Go Antiques and Cafe.” The place sat adjacent to a dry lake that wasn’t dry. Over the last few weeks, late summer storms had strayed in from Arizona and left a few inches of water in the lake bed, which cheerfully reflected the blue sky, tinged with gold from the declining sun.

A gust of wind ruffled the surface of the lake, breaking up the reflection, and Calvin climbed out of the Dodge and into the searing heat, nearly staggered by it after the air-conditioned trip out from Eagle Rock. A hand-painted sign on the gas pump read “Pay First!” in order to ward off bolters, so he went inside, hauling two twenties out of his wallet. He shut the door behind him to keep out the heat, and a little bell jingled, although no one came out. There were the sounds of a swamp cooler working on the roof and a distant radio playing country-western music, but the place was apparently empty of customers.

He smiled approvingly and glanced around, taking in the junk food on the shelves, the groceries, the sign over the lunch counter that advertised chili fries and cheeseburgers. Maybe on his way back out he would stop in for a bite to eat, generate some serious heartburn for the long drive home. He could grab a roll of antacids to keep his aura on the necessary sublunar wavelength. Cases of beverages lay piled on the floor beyond a picnic table with benches, including, conveniently, an unopened case of grape Nehi soda.

The antiques sat against the wall by the deli case—baloney and bologna side by side. There were roadkill license plates, bric-a-brac, oil lamps, a rack of books, and some dusty souvenirs including a small plastic toilet with multiple removable coaster-seats that read “I crapped out in Las Vegas.” He was sorely tempted to buy the toilet seat coasters as a gift for his aunt, but instead he stepped across to look at the books, which were mostly Westerns and old cookbooks, but also a few likely looking strays. He felt the familiar surge of interest and greed, the off chance that there would be something valuable, or at least strange enough to be appealing.

The paper was dried out in most of the books and was decomposing and fly specked—the eventual fate of everything in the desert—and at first glance there wasn’t much in the racks to interest him. Then he spotted a sort of oversize pamphlet, bound like a book, but with its heavy paper cover stapled on near the spine. It was titled The Death of John Nazarite, Betrayal in the California Desert and was published by something called the Fourteen Carats Press in Henderson, Nevada, in 1956. The logo of the press was a flat-bottomed, panning-for-gold pan with the legend “Fourteen Carats” on it. The price was thirty-two dollars, which had to be cheap. The heavy paper cover was chipped along the edges from heat and sunlight, but for a paperbound book with fifty years on it, it wasn’t in bad shape, especially considering where it lived. There was a frontispiece in it, a wood-block illustration of a woman standing before the mouth of a cave in a fortress-like cliff, holding a platter bearing a bearded, severed head. The wide-open eyes in the head gazed out longingly over what might have been the Dead Sea, and in the distance stood a range of rocky, desert peaks. The illustration was titled “Bring Me the Head of John Nazarite.”

It appeared to be the Salome and John the Baptist story with some geographic curiosities—the Jordan River having become the Mojave, and the Dead Sea exchanged for the Salton Sea. One illustration pictured several men in white tunics with red crosses on the front. One of them held an ornate wooden chest the size of a bread box. The caption read “The Red Cross Knights Receive the Head.” Clearly the book was cultistic, a piece of California crypto-history. Calvin was possessed by the certainty that the Fates badly wanted him to divest himself of thirty-two dollars. He looked at the list of Fourteen Carats Press publications in the back of the pamphlet—books on secret societies, desert mummies, saucer cults, the Lost Dutchman’s mine—nearly two pages of seductive titles, plenty enough to give his life purpose again.

He would add this happily to his growing pile of paper and ink that virtually no one else on earth had the slightest interest in. One nice thing about being a bachelor, he thought as he turned toward the front counter, was that you could do as you pleased, although it wasn’t always clear to him why he was pleased to do as he did, especially when he had no one to please but himself. During the time that he had been with Elaine, he hadn’t nearly as often done as he pleased, but he had often been surprised to find that he was pleased anyway.

He put the thought out of his mind and grabbed the toilet seat coasters on the way to the register. He couldn’t show up at his aunt’s doorstep without a token of his esteem, after all. He recalled that she had a set of salt and pepper shakers that had been owned by a shirttail relative of Elvis Presley, and there was an evident Elvis Presley connection here, too—the King dying on the throne and all—although it was unlikely that he could point it out in to his aunt.

A woman who might have been sixty-five came out of the back to wait on him. She was wide and suntanned and had a naturally scowly look that reminded him pleasantly of Tugboat Annie. She had large arms, as if she wrestled bears and was good at it. “Gas?” she asked him, her voice sounding like gravel on sandpaper.

He considered a humorous reply, and then rejected it. “Pump number two,” he said, handing her the two twenties and then rooting a third out of his wallet. “Take the book and coasters out of it first. And that case of grape soda.” As an afterthought he grabbed a single bottle out of the cooler. “A cold one, too.” He hadn’t had a grape soda in years, and he was full of a sudden nostalgia for the taste of purple.

“You’ve got enough left out of the sixty for about an eighth of a tank,” she said.

“I’m only going a few more miles,” he told her, waiting while she punched buttons on an old cash register. There was a ringing noise when the cash drawer flew open. “I’m looking for the turnoff over to New Cyprus, down along the river. I haven’t been out there for years, and I remember that last time I passed right by the turnoff and drove another ten miles before I knew I’d missed it.”

“It ain’t marked,” she said. “Used to be a red cross painted on the highway right there, but it’s been blacktopped over half a dozen times. That’s their mark, you know, those New Cyprus folks.” She looked at him intently, as if it somehow made a difference whether he knew or didn’t know.

He nodded, wondering abruptly whether Uncle Lymon was one of the Knights who had received the head. There wasn’t a lot to do in New Cyprus, which was isolated even in a land of isolation, and it was a rare evening that Uncle Lymon wasn’t off at the Knight’s clubhouse, the Temple—or else the Temple Bar, depending on its function on any given day—wearing a tunic with a red cross embroidered on it and half covered with badges of rank and retired fishing lures.

“You’d think they’d repaint it,” she went on, “but New Cyprus is homestead territory, so nobody’s in charge of anything. Either that or everybody’s in charge of everything, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a bad way to be, either. My old man used to drive out there for lodge meetings, but he’s been dead these past three years.”

“The Knights of the Cornerstone? My uncle’s some kind of officer in it.”

She nodded her head as if she had known it all along. “You’re Al Lymon’s nephew. That’s what I thought.”

“Calvin Bryson,” he said, putting out his hand.

She shook it and nodded. “Shirley Fowler. I see the Lymons now and then when I drive over the hill to visit my granddaughter, but not as often as I’d like. How’s Nettie? She doesn’t get out much these days.”

Calvin shrugged. “Her cancer was in remission, but it’s bothering her again, although I don’t know how bad. She’s had about all the treatments, and there’s not a lot that can be done about the pain. She spends some time in the past, too, I guess you’d say.”

“Well, the past isn’t a half bad place to visit once in a while. Tell her Shirley Fowler sends her regards.”

“I’ll be go-to-hell!” a voice said behind him, and Calvin turned around to discover a heavyset bearded man, maybe seventy, just then stepping out from behind a rack of Little Debbie snack cakes. Had he been there all along... ?

“I’m Fred Woolsworth,” the man said. “So you’re Cal Bryson? I’m a friend of your uncle’s. He told me his nephew was coming out for a spell.” He was loaded up with Navajo silver—a big squash blossom on his bolo tie and a watchband that must have weighed half a pound.

“Glad to make your acquaintance,” Calvin said. “Wool-worth, like the dime store?”

“Woolsworth, with an s. Like ‘money’s worth’, but wool. My daddy used to say, ‘When you go out to shear sheep, make sure you get your woolsworth!’” He laughed out loud.

Calvin smiled and nodded, trying to think of a gag line of his own involving sheep, but coming up with nothing but “ewe,” which pretty much only worked on paper. If he had his sketchbook he could draw the cartoon. “When did my uncle tell you I was coming? I didn’t know it myself till today.”

“News travels fast out here in the desert,” Woolsworth said. “Believe it or not, I knew your daddy back in Iowa, before he came out West with your mother. Nearly fifty years now. Your daddy moved out on the coast, and I wound up in Bullhead City. Wasn’t nothing there in Bullhead but the river back then, and one bridge downriver across to the Needles side. Lots of water under that bridge over the years. Now we’ve got casinos across in Laughlin, and God knows what next. There’s talk about moving that big English clock out here—Big Ben, they call it. Set it up in that park next to where they put in the new Wal-Mart. You’d be surprised at the stuff that finds its way into the desert, including people. Anyway, I was sorry to hear your daddy passed away.”

“Thanks,” Calvin said. Somehow the Big Ben idea just didn’t sound feasible to him. Next to a Wal-Mart?

“You’re out here on account of your aunt’s sick, I suppose.”

“I’m bringing out a family heirloom, too, but that’s not an excuse for coming out here. I just want to spend a little time on the river. See the folks again. It’s been a couple of years now.”

“Of course,” he said, nodding heavily. “Of course. God bless. I didn’t mean to suggest you needed an excuse to do the right thing. Just making small talk. You can’t be bringing much of an heirloom, though, in that little bitty vehicle of yours.”

“Family artifact,” Calvin told him.

“Artifact?” Woolsworth said. “That’s a good word. It’s got real weight to it. It elevates a thing above the doodad level, if you know what I mean. Now, that plastic toilet you’re buying there, that’s a doodad.” He laughed out loud again.

Calvin smiled politely at the lame joke. Woolsworth was a real card.

“Tell Al Lymon that Fred Woolsworth says hello. Tell him I’ll see him at the Temple one of these evenings real soon. Tell him sooner rather than later. Will you do that? Just them words.”

“I will,” Calvin said. Woolsworth went out through the door, the bell jingling behind him, and he angled across the lot as if he were going to walk back down the highway. Calvin took a step forward to get a better look and saw that there was an old green pickup truck parked at the corner of the lot near the propane tank. Woolsworth climbed into it and a moment later the engine roared to life. The truck pulled out onto the highway heading east toward Needles, its broken muffler making the engine sound like an outboard motor.

“I’ll be damned,” Calvin muttered, remembering the truck that had passed him earlier, not a quarter of an hour ago, traveling west. It couldn’t be the same truck. If it was, then Woolsworth must have turned around after passing him and come straight back east. But there was nothing fifteen miles back down the highway except empty desert. Where had the man been going?

Shirley opened the grape soda and handed it to him, and then put the toilet seat coasters into a bag. “He’s a real character,” she said, referring to Woolsworth. “I didn’t see him come in. Did you?”

“No,” Calvin said.

“Watch out you don’t talk too much to people you don’t know out here in the desert.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Anyway, what you do about that New Cyprus road is to watch for it on your left just about exactly two miles past the Henderson cutoff. If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it, because it runs down across the wash, and it’s usually under a couple of inches of sand. Don’t slow down till you get across the wash and back up onto the pavement, or you’re liable to find yourself stuck. And give this to your uncle,” she said. She reached under the counter and fished out a cardboard box taped shut—a box exactly the same size as the box that contained Aunt Iris’s veil. The address was made out to Al Lymon, c/o the Gas’n’Go. It was from Warren Hosmer.

“Thanks,” Calvin said, taking it from her. He hefted the box in his hands—another ghost-infused veil? He started to say something, but gave up. He wasn’t going to get any answers out here on the highway. He set the box on the case of grape soda and laid the book and the sack on top, then picked the whole lot up, snagged the open soda bottle with his right hand, and turned toward the door, half expecting to see Fred Woolsworth across the road, lurking behind a yucca.

Outside again, he crammed himself sideways against the car, pulled the door latch with his pinkie finger, and set his armload of boxes on the seat. The oppressive heat was a living presence, like the plague or an axe murderer or Woolsworth’s muffler—something that couldn’t be ignored. He started filling the tank and then leaned against the fender of the Dodge while the pump worked. He sipped his soda, looking out over the desert.

The same storms that had filled the dry lake had generated a second blooming of wildflowers, and on the rise above the gas station there were patches of blue and yellow blooms. There was no denying that the desert was a beautiful place, especially near sunset like this, when it was cooling down and when the shadows were long and lent an air of mystery to things, but to live out here would be a different matter—impossible in high summer. Still, people did live here, for some reason, like Shirley Fowler and Fred Woolsworth, or his uncle and aunt, for that matter. It was the solitude, maybe, that attracted them.

The gas pump shut off, and Calvin hung the nozzle back on the pump. “Fred Woolsworth,” he muttered. What a character. The man’s talk had had a vaguely ironic tone, like a veiled insult, although probably it was a mere nutticism, as his father would have put it. He felt as if Woolsworth had been sizing him up, though, and had found him wanting. He finished the soda and pitched the bottle into the trash. Purple tasted pretty much the same now as it had twenty years ago, which was comforting in these times of world turmoil and grim change.

As he was climbing into the car it came into his mind that Woolsworth hadn’t bought anything at the store, not even the Little Debbie cakes he had apparently been fingering. That struck Calvin as odd—the man joyriding in the desert and then stopping at the Gas’n’Go for no reason at all. He had most likely come in while Calvin was looking through the books and had hung around, lurking out of sight behind the snack food, waiting for an opportunity to start up a useless conversation. There was no reason for any of it, which didn’t seem reasonable.

Abruptly he recalled the jingly little bell over the door. If Woolsworth had come in while he was looking at the books, the bell would have rung. But it hadn’t rung. What did that mean? The man could easily have grabbed the bell and silenced it if he knew in advance where it hung. Or he could have cut the truck engine fifty yards up the road, coasted into the lot where he wouldn’t be easily seen from inside, and sneaked in through the back. . . .

Calvin realized that his imagination had gone into high gear. Perhaps his brain was overheated. He turned the ignition key, immediately seeing that the “trunk open” light was illuminated. He climbed back out, and sure enough the trunk was open—not quite latched.

Woolsworth had opened it. He must have. Who the hell else? Calvin looked inside the trunk. Aunt Iris was gone. His duffel was there but the box wasn’t. “That thieving son of a bitch,” he said out loud, and it came into his mind to call the cops. He had his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped open before he imagined the conversation and the cop’s almost certain reaction: “What did he steal . . .?”

Then he thought of Shirley Fowler handing him the second, nearly identical box, knowing who he was as soon as he asked for that case of grape soda, and Hosmer’s telling him to avoid talking on the portable blower out here in the desert. Something was happening, and he had no idea on earth what it was, but probably it didn’t want the police. In an hour the sun would have sunk, the desert would be falling into darkness, and it would be cocktail hour at Chez Lymon, where he could look out safely on the puzzling world from the battlements—or in his case the bafflements. Laughing uneasily at his own joke, he shut the trunk, climbed back into the car, and headed east.

THE DEAD MOUNTAINS

Two miles past the Henderson cutoff, Calvin slowed down to twenty miles an hour and looked hard for the New Cyprus road, which he almost certainly would have missed if it weren’t for Shirley’s instructions. He swung a hard left turn down the embankment, the Dodge banging into a deep rut with a muffler-denting clank and up onto the semipaved track that led into the Dead Mountains and to the river on the other side. He passed a marker farther down, half hidden by greasewood. It was a rock the size and shape of a big headstone with the legend “New Cyprus” and a cross cut into it and then painted red, the paint mostly sandblasted off by the desert wind. It stood like an Easter Island sentinel with no apparent purpose, since it was a couple of hundred yards in—way too far to be made out from the highway.

The narrow road wound upward through craggy hills, and soon he lost sight of the desert floor and was alone in a silent, empty landscape of barrel cactus and yucca and mesquite. After a climb of fifteen hundred feet or so, the road finally began to level out, and he reached a high pass through the rocks that opened onto a broad vista of endless, sun-beaten flatlands, broken here and there by dry ranges.

The river flowed green and swift below, and beyond the river stretched the irrigated fields of the Fort Mohave Indian Reservation. Beyond that, off on the horizon, big thunderheads rose over distant mountains. The city of Needles lay hidden in the southwest, but upriver in the distance, maybe twelve miles, the outskirts of Bullhead City were just visible, and opposite that, on the Nevada shore, the high-rise casinos of Laughlin.

He followed the road downward now, winding through narrow defiles and along the edges of cliffs until he came out onto a sort of plateau several hundred feet above New Cyprus. On either side of the road lay an old rock quarry littered with broken cut stones, many of them immense and set upright like dominoes and reminding him of old Celtic standing stones. A line of narrow-gauge railroad tracks that decades ago must have snaked their way to the desert floor descended into a steep gorge, and an ancient flatcar some twelve feet long stood rusting on the tracks. Greasewood and mesquite grew up around the standing stones and through the tracks and the wheels of the flatcar, giving the place the air of a long-abandoned cemetery.

He rounded a bend, the quarry disappearing behind him, and there was a clear view of New Cyprus along the river below. He could see stands of cottonwood and thickets of willow on the bank, and the roofs of houses and mobile homes as well as a lone building out on an island connected to shore by a narrow footbridge. That would be the Temple Bar, the lodge head-quarters of the Knights of the Cornerstone, where the thieving Fred Woolsworth would allegedly be seeing Uncle Lymon one of these evenings soon. The ferry wharf stood empty at the upriver edge of the island, shaded by a corrugated aluminum roof, blindingly bright in the sunshine.

It occurred to Calvin as the Dodge wound its way downward that he had to be careful of accusing Woolsworth of breaking into the trunk of his car. He had no real evidence of it, and if Woolsworth actually was a friend of Uncle Lymon, that sort of accusation would do nothing but poison the well. Calvin had been in the Gas’n’Go for a solid twenty minutes, and any number of people might have breezed into the lot, opened his trunk, and grabbed the box. The very fact that Woolsworth had walked inside to chat argued that it hadn’t been him. Most thieves didn’t go out of their way to talk with people they’d just robbed. Unless Woolsworth was merely a distraction. . . . Unless he had an accomplice in another vehicle. . . .

A dry stretch of the old riverbed swung into view below, a wide, rocky swath right along the edge of the mountains, and he could see the Y-shape where the new bed had surged away from the old, back when the river had changed course nearly a century ago, shifting a little section of the border between California and Arizona two hundred yards to the east and forming the crescent-shaped piece of beachfront that had become New Cyprus. The land between the old riverbed and the new had remained unincorporated territory, a couple of hundred acres of essentially ownerless land, open to homesteading. His uncle and aunt hadn’t been among the first homesteaders, but they were old-timers by now, and the early homesteaders were long passed away. The sheer cliffs of the Dead Mountains, walling off New Cyprus both upriver and down, killed the potential for further development. Aside from Shangri-la there probably wasn’t another city in the world that was so clearly defined and isolated.

He remembered his uncle having told him years ago that the residents of New Cyprus had taken a vote whether they’d live in Mountain Time or Pacific Standard, but couldn’t decide, and so had given up wearing watches altogether in accordance with the way things were done in Heaven. During the first visit out here that he could remember, Calvin had innocently asked his uncle what time it was, and his uncle had replied, “Not yet,” which had turned out to be a standard New Cyprus response to the query.

The road dipped across the old riverbed, which lay white and sandy in the evening shadows, with scrubby-looking plants growing up between the boulders. On the other side it ended at Main Street near the downriver edge of town. Calvin turned left, upriver, crossing a bridge over a wide wash where storm waters had funneled down out of the hills since time immemorial. It was nearly seven thirty. The sun had dropped below the mountains now, and the town had fallen into evening, gratefully shedding ten degrees of heat. A sign on the roadside read “New Cyprus Town Limits” and beyond that lay a scattering of tree-shaded mobile homes on a surprisingly green, park-like lawn. People were sitting outside on lawn chairs, children and dogs were running around, and there was smoke rising from barbecues. He rolled the car window down, and the smell of the river and the cottonwoods brought with it a sudden childhood memory of playing in this very park, of the cozy interiors of mobile homes, and of sitting on the lawn watching bats flitting through the open spaces between the trees on an evening very much like this one.

Several people looked up curiously as he drove past, and one man waved, as if he knew who Calvin was, which he probably did. Probably they all