The Knights of the Cornerstone by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

be rich.”
    The coaster on the box suddenly shifted sideways, apparently moving under its own power, sliding uncannily along the top of the box as if it were being drawn by a moving magnet hidden inside. It hesitated at the edge, shuddered slightly, and then rose into the air and fell over the side, like one of the Gadarene swine off the edge of the cliff.
    His uncle reached across and picked up the box. “It’s that breeze off the river,” he said. “It sets up air currents.” He went out through the kitchen door, taking the veil box with him. The door swung shut behind him, and Calvin picked up the fallen coasters. He dropped one of them onto the tabletop, and it clattered down without the least tendency to float or creep around. Then he went across to the open kitchen window and put his face to the screen. The air outside was dead-still now. It had the ozone smell of a pending storm. If there was an air current of any variety, it was subtle—too subtle to float toilet seats. Moments later the kitchen door swung open again and his uncle reentered, heading straight for the microwave. He spooned casserole onto plates, took one of them outside, and then came back in, opened two grape sodas, and poured them into ice-filled glasses. “Get it while it’s hot,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than cold casserole.”
    “Maybe it was Aunt Iris, up to her old tricks,” Calvin said after they had sat down at the table.
    “Maybe what was Aunt Iris?”
    “That floating coaster.”
    “I don’t follow you.”
    “Cousin Hosmer tells me that her veil used to float around the house like a ghost.”
    “Did he? I guess I never heard about that. That’s probablythe Hosmer sense of humor coming out. Let’s eat. And you give some thought to that offer of a house, too. That wasn’t just idle talk.”
    The
offer
of a house
, Calvin thought, puzzling over it. He let it go, however, spotting the book from the Fourteen Carats Press lying on the kitchen counter where he had set it down. He reached across and picked it up, effectively changing the subject.
    “Where’d you get hold of that?” Lymon asked him through a mouthful of food.
    “From a rack of books out at the Gas’n’Go. It was published back in the fifties by a small press out in Henderson.”
    “Fourteen Carats. That outfit’s in Bullhead City now, down behind the Safeway in the back room of the bookstore. They’re a curious crowd, or at least what’s left of them. And I mean curious like in a tendency to pay too much attention to the wrong things.”
    “You know much about them, then?”
    “They’ve been around about as long as I have, although the son’s got the press now. The old man passed away ten or fifteen years ago, under what they call mysterious circumstances. This story you’ve got here involves your man Postum, too, although you won’t find his name in it.”
    “He didn’t mention that at the Gas’n’Go. He had to have seen it lying on the counter.”
    “Let’s just say there were crimes committed—the kind where there’s no statute of limitations. It’s not the sort of thing a man talks about to a stranger. It’s too bad that he saw it, though. You called extra attention to yourself with it.”
    “It’s just that I like this kind of local-color thing,” Calvin said. “I don’t care who was involved in any crimes.”
    “You and I know that.”
    “So we’re talking about murder here?” Calvin flipped open the book and looked at the frontispiece again.
    “It sometimes goes along with the severing of a man’s head. There wasn’t enough evidence to convict anyone, though, and there were some powerful people involved. And of course back in those days, in the desert, things were a little bit … loose, you might say—frontier justice. You read a book like this and you’d think that the whole thing involved the Knights, but that’s not quite the way it was. These clowns weren’t the Knights of the Cornerstone, except for