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

one or two renegade types, who got drummed out of New Cyprus before this nonsense came to pass. We don’t traffic in severed heads.”
    “It looks like the story of Salome and John the Baptist, except set locally. What’s the
real
story, then?”
    “It’s too long to tell it all, but there was a casino owner from up in Henderson, named Geoff de Charney, who claimed to be a descendant of the old French family. There’s a long line of Geoffrey de Charneys, dating way back. One of them was burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay when the Templars were betrayed. Anyway, he set himself up as Grand Master of a little crowd of would-be Knights in Henderson—young men, mostly. They had more money than sense, which can be a dangerous thing. He studied the old books and came up with the idea that if he reenacted the legends, he could generate some variety of alchemy and conjure up God knows what—a link to the spirit world that would lend them…
vitality
of some sort. Maybe ‘authenticity’ is a better word. There’s an apocryphal old story that the Templars possessed the head of John the Baptist back in the days of the Crusades and used it as some sort of oracle, and that’s what de Charney was aiming at. They all took on French names and wore the regalia,but they were no more Templars than the man in the moon, least of all in spirit. More casserole?”
    “Sure.” Calvin passed his plate across. “Don’t skimp on those crushed chips.”
    “I told you it was good.”
    “Is Aunt Nettie doing okay out there?” Calvin asked. “I could take her seconds.”
    “She won’t finish the first helping. And she’s right where she wants to be. That view hasn’t changed in all these years, so she can sit out there and reminisce to her heart’s content. She loves a storm, too. We’ll just let her be.”
    Calvin nodded. “So you were saying about these Templars?”
    “I was saying that that’s what they were
not
The Templars were put down centuries ago, although I guess you could say they were down but not out, since remnants of what they had are still—what do you want to call it?—
alive
in the world, maybe. De Charney’s crowd had
pretensions
along those lines, because of his illustrious lineage. But you can’t make book on your ancestors’ deeds.”
    “Why didn’t they just start their own organization? Call themselves the Crusaders or the Wildebeests or something?”
    His uncle looked at his plate for a moment, pushing his food around with his fork, and then said, “That wasn’t what they had in mind, you see—some kind of
service
organization, like the Moose or the Elks. They wanted to step into something that’s been around a little longer, something a little higher octane and with a deeper connection to things. Partly it was greed, but that wasn’t all of it. Anyway, long story short, they arranged for the murder of a preacher from out in Redlands named John Nazarite, who wasn’t doing anyone any harm and a few people a certain amountof good. He used to have big tent revivals out along the Mojave River, and every Easter he’d baptize people at a natural spring out there near Desert Center. The rite, or the murder, or whatever you want to call it, involved de Charney’s niece, a girl named Paige Whitney, who was a dancer in one of his casinos. You’re right about the John the Baptist connection, too. De Charney was rumored to be having an affair with his brother’s wife, who was Paige Whitney’s mother. I don’t know whether de Charney contrived all this baloney by setting it up, or whether he fell into it by chance, realized the biblical parallels, and it put ideas in his head. Ultimately, though, there was a lot of claptrap and mumbo jumbo—a cult ceremony, like I said—a re-creation, and at least one dead man.
    “They never did find the head, and nobody got prosecuted for the crime, because old de Charney had enough money to make it all disappear. The Fourteen Carats sensationalized it in