The Paper Grail (27 page)

He leaned back, levered himself against the door frame, and kicked the wall with the bottom of his foot, which chunked through the wall, tearing open a ten-inch ragged hole. He kicked it again, widening the gap, and then grabbed the wallboard with his hands, slamming it back and forth, breaking out chunks and throwing them back through, into the dim antechamber beyond.

Along with the chalky smell of drywall dust, he could smell ocean air drifting up out of the passage. It led to the sea, then, probably to the base of the cliff, a cave through the bluffs themselves. Too bad about Mr. Jimmers’ quilt; there had been no point in scissoring it up. Howard had become a sort of thorn in the poor man’s side. But if he wanted to make up for any of the trouble he had caused Jimmers, then Howard had to hurry, to get back to Jimmers before it was too late to help him.

For a moment he hesitated, though. To do it right, a sort of Huckleberry Finn job, he should knot up the quilt strips, anchor
them to the table, and drop the end out the window. That would throw them off the scent. He should repack the closet, too, and then shut the door behind him when he made his escape. They would take one look into the room, see the tied-together quilt, rush to the window, figure things out wrong, and charge back down to see if he was outside somewhere, skulking around.

Either that or they would suppose it was all fakery and that he was hiding in the closet. They’d find the passage and be after him, if they cared about him, and he would have wasted twenty minutes screwing around being clever.

Without waiting another instant he bent through the hole, stepping on the pieces of drywall in his stocking feet, nearly slipping on them as they skidded across the floor. Jimmers’ hankering after Japanese customs had begun to look something worse than silly, and Howard made a vow never again to give up his shoes. Still, socks were better than nothing, even if they had holes in the toes.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, Howard could see that the tiny chamber beyond the closet was nothing more than the top landing of a spiral stairway. The Humpty Dumpty window hung in the wall adjacent to the first step. A diffused glow showed through it from the hallway beyond, and Howard could see the figure of a man just then moving across the window like a shadow—probably one of the two intruders, sneaking up the stairs. It might have been Jimmers, of course, free and coming to let him out, but Howard didn’t think so. It was more likely that they had found nothing but Swiss chard in the garden and were looking to have a go at the attic. The bolted, barricaded door would hold them up, but not for more than a few moments.

Howard started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, hanging on to the handrail, which was an iron pipe that snaked down into the blackness. Within eight steps the night had closed around him and he couldn’t see anything at all. He gripped the cold railing, stepping down slowly now, thinking of the ruined stairs that led to the high doorway above the meadow. What if someone, Jimmers, had done something to these stairs, too?—pried two or three of them apart with a crowbar so that a person coming along in the blind darkness would …

But that wouldn’t make sense. Clearly the passage had been used, and recently, too. And someone had gone to some little trouble to hide the fact while sealing the passage off altogether. Why? Howard couldn’t say, and didn’t have time to consider the
problem. There was a sudden, muffled banging from above, and then the sound of a voice shouting—the thieves yelling through the attic door, probably. He couldn’t make out the words. The shouting stopped and the banging started back up, a loud, slow
thump, thump, thump
now, as if they were slamming at the door with something heavy, trying to batter it open.

Abruptly he found himself at the bottom of the stairs. Cool, wet air drifted up from below. The smell of the sea was stronger now, mixed with the musty odor of stone and decayed kelp, and he could hear the murmur of breaking waves echoing up through the tunnel. It was still utterly dark, and he felt around himself before going on, running his hands across rough timbers like in a shored-up mine. After a few feet of level ground, the passage ran off steeply again, with wooden steps set right into the dirt and rock. Howard followed them down, gripping the corroded pipe, listening for sound from above.

He just barely heard another distant thump and then heavy scraping—the table and chairs shoving away in front of the door. So now they knew. They could see the closet door standing open, the jagged hole torn in the wallboard. They would see the cut-up quilt, too, and know that he hadn’t gone straight out, that he had wasted time first, that they were right behind him.

They wanted the sketch, though; they didn’t want him. If they had already found it, they would profit by getting it out of there, simply taking off. He stopped and held his breath, cocking his head. Someone had come through the wall. He could hear them scrabbling around on the loose pieces of drywall. It was deadly silent for a moment except for the noise of his own heart beating, and then there sounded the thumping of shoe soles on the wooden stairs.

He hurried on, down into the ground, brushing the air above his head to try to find the tunnel ceiling. There was nothing, empty air. And then suddenly the steps ended, and his stocking feet slid on gravel, shooting out from under him so that he sat down hard on the ground, scraping the palms of his hands, his breath whumping out of his lungs. He pushed himself up, dusting the gravel off his hands, and took off again. He went carefully now, stepping gingerly on rocks, feeling his way, trying to hurry along in a sort of high-stepping caper. If he wore shoes, he might have run—the two behind him surely would—but the gravelly tunnel was too rough.

There they were. Howard heard a scuffling and a brief snatch of cutoff talk. In the echoing darkness of the tunnel it sounded
like the disembodied voice of a ghost. There was no way to tell where it had come from. Thank God for the railing; he had something to hold on to, at least, and unless Jimmers was simply crazy, there ought to be nothing obstructing the passage at the bottom end, no boulders to stub his toes on. The sound of the ocean, clear and close now, argued against any sort of door across the tunnel mouth.

The passage leveled suddenly and he saw ahead of him a moonlit section of sand and rocks. He stepped outside, into the evening air, the sand beneath his feet crusty and damp from the receded tide. The cold sea wind blew straight onshore, into his face. The sun was low over the ocean now, almost swallowed up. A wall of tumbled rock on his right cut off the view of the smashed Studebaker and made it impossible for anyone to see the tunnel mouth from the meadow above. To his left the bluffs rose straight up toward the sky, loose and scrubby—impossible to climb. He might have been able to scrabble up a ways in order to drop a rock on someone’s head, but he wasn’t in a rock-dropping mood.

He waded straight out into a big tide pool instead, gasping at the cold water that swirled around his ankles and stepping up onto a dark shelf of rock that was a garden of limp, exposed sea palms. He slid on the slippery leaves, slamming his foot against a jagged bit of rock and then sliding sideways into a deeper pool, soaking his right leg up to the waist. His breath jerked up out of his throat, and he nearly shouted as he pulled himself out of the freezing water and scrambled in behind a table-sized angle of stone, gripping two handfuls of sea palm to hold himself steady.

Right then the two men appeared at the mouth of the passage, looking around themselves warily. One of them carried a stick—a table leg or something—and he held it out to the side, ready to bash someone. They turned to look above them up the bluffs just in case Howard was up there. Seeing nothing, they stood murmuring to each other, one of them shaking his head.

Howard kneeled in the shadow, hidden behind his rock. The ocean swirled in just then, rising to his waist, trying to push him forward. His breath shot up out of his lungs with the numbing cold of it, and he was nearly washed off into deeper water. The ocean rose higher, and his legs slowed around as he kicked to try to find a purchase against the rocks.

Then the ocean receded, leaving him sodden and hanging. He got his knees up under him, creeping toward higher ground,
crouching to stay hidden while the two on shore still looked around themselves dumbly, surveying the cliff face once more and then looking hard out into the ocean—straight past him. They edged out onto the rocks, trying to get a glimpse across to where the Studebaker sat. But that meant taking a swim, or at least a wade out into the ocean, and their tiptoeing around made it seem as if neither one of them wanted to get wet.

They pointed Howard’s footsteps out to each other and looked across the little bay. Howard stayed put, watching them between the rocks, thankful that the sun was low and the shadows were long. But if they came his way, they would see him, and he would have no choice but to turn and run—head for deep water and swim straight out to sea. The water was cold, but not cold enough to cause him any serious trouble, not for a little while, anyway.

They stood arguing now. One of them pointed oceanward, and Howard heard the other one say, “Who cares?” very loud, and then turn and walk away, back into the tunnel. The other stood there for another minute, evidently considering things.

The water swirled up around Howard’s waist again, pushing him up the rock, spinning him in a lazy circle. He held on, waiting it out, cursing the man who still stood there hunting him. The ocean was colder than he had realized, and with the wind blowing now he would be colder yet before he was out of it. Then the second man was gone suddenly, back into the darkness.

Howard held on. What if they were crouched in the shadows, waiting for him to make his move? They might be more desperate than he thought. It was possible of course, from their point of view, that Howard had the sketch with him, that he had found it in the attic and taken it. He suddenly regretted all the tough talk in the hallway when he had confronted the man in the wig. He shouldn’t have mentioned the sketch at all.

Minutes passed. The ocean rose and fell. Howard’s feet were like blocks of heavy, numb sponge, wrapped in soggy socks that bagged around his ankles. He could see the silhouettes of the two men now, far above him, moving around in the attic, back and forth across the windows. There was no going back up the tunnel, not unless he wanted to hand himself over.

Without wasting any more time, he stood up, balancing carefully. Starting to shiver, he picked his way seaward from rock to rock, his wet pants sticking to his legs. It struck him that the cove must be impossible to navigate, even in a small boat at high tide.
Far outside he could see the white tumble of breakers.

He looked over his shoulder, back at the little bit of beach, where the tunnel mouth lay dark and silent. He could see only a black crescent of it now, and in a moment it was lost to sight completely beyond intervening rocks. He was safe. They would see him from the attic window if they cared enough to look, but by then he’d be too far off to chase. He had only to keep moving. In a half hour, he told himself, he would be in Jimmers’ parlor; the fire would be roaring, and he would have his shoes back. By then, he hoped, the two men would be gone.

His socks were a ragged mess, pulled apart on the rough rocks. He couldn’t feel much at all because of the cold water, which was just as well, because there were a couple of bleeding cuts on the bottom of his feet. He stepped along gingerly, forcing himself to slow down. He was tired and wobbly, and if he hurried he was sure to slip and fall. A twisted ankle would plunge him into deep trouble.

The tide seemed to be creeping higher, too. If he didn’t want to find himself swimming against it, he would have to get out and around the long, rocky promontory that formed the south edge of the cove. It wasn’t much farther to the tip of it—fifty yards, perhaps.

He could see where the water rushed out, leaving the low, kelp-covered shelf of the promontory high and dry, and then rushed back in again to cover it, slamming up against the vertical face of the upthrusting rock cliffs. He would have to avoid that, somehow—wait for a lull in the waves and run for it across the rocks; to hell with his feet. In ten minutes, probably, there would be nothing but ocean there, breaking waves, and getting past it would mean a long swim in rough water.

He set out across a bed of mussels and barnacles, hobbling gingerly on the things like a South Sea Islander across hot coals, his feet pressing them down. A broken shell knicked the soft arch of his foot, and he said “Ouch!” out loud, not caring who might hear him anymore, which was no one. The house sat on the cliff far above and behind him now, lit up from top to bottom. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the stone chimney.

He skirted the tip of the promontory finally, crawling up and onto a dark, stone shelf. The ocean washed through, deeper with each succeeding swell. Waves that had been breaking farther out in shallow water rolled right through now to smash against the ledge that he picked his way across, and he was knocked off his
feet and had to scramble to keep himself from being swept back out with them.

He wasn’t certain where the rock shelf ended and the next cove started but he knew there was another cove there, visible to the south of where he and Sylvia had talked on the bluffs that afternoon. He pictured it in his mind, as if to make it exist for him by sympathetic magic. There was a trail that led down to it from above, switchbacking along the bluffs, through the wildflowers and tall grass, and he imagined himself staggering up that trail, out of the water at last.

Another wave washed through, humping up over the ledge and quartering toward him across the now-submerged kelp and smaller rocks. He braced himself, but it slammed him over backward, pushing him helplessly toward the cliff face where the water roiled and leaped and blasted into the air in heavy geysers. He flailed with his arms, trying to turn himself around, waiting to be knocked senseless. His head scraped sickeningly across a mussel-covered rock, and he could hear his scalp tear for a stinging-cold moment. Then the face of the wave smashed against the cliff, and the wave’s energy turned on itself as the sea rushed back, dragging him along, surging away from the rock wall and hauling him off the edge of the reef and into deeper water before relaxing its grip on him.