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

that book you’ve got there, although it had a little bitty print run, and the whole story looked like malarkey to most people. It was just too far-fetched to interest the authorities, but it turned out to be a mistake that Fourteen Carats printed it, because it put them on the wrong side of some powerful people.”
    “What about Bob Postum?”
    “Not much, except he was one of de Charney’s crowd. He was young then, and gambled a little. Made a small name for himself in Henderson and Vegas. He started calling himself Baldwin, after the old Christian king of Jerusalem back in the day, which must have irritated de Charney. That’s what I meant by his pedigree: it’s a lie in more ways than one, although if a man believes a lie long enough he forgets that it’s a lie. He married Paige Whitney a few years later, which put him in the inner circle, but something wentbad there, and for a long time the man kept to himself. Then a couple of years back he came out of retirement, you might say, as if he’d been biding his time until de Charney was on his last legs. Even so, until today I wouldn’t have pegged Bob Postum as a major player. I would have said he was mostly bluff, which is probably just exactly what he wanted us to think. But that’s why we set out that bait, like I said—chum the waters a little, see what comes up out of the depths. Sometimes you get a rock cod, and sometimes you get a sea serpent.”
    There was the rumble of thunder, and then the sound of rain, quickly growing heavy, and the two men sat in silence, listening. After a couple of minutes Aunt Nettie came inside carrying her half-empty plate, her face and hair wet with rainwater. Although she was moving slowly and probably painfully, there was a look of intense joy on her face, as if she had been waiting out there all this time for the sky to open up. “My land!” she said, setting the plate on the counter. Then she passed out of the kitchen without another word, heading toward her bedroom at the back of the house.
    “She likes the weather,” Uncle Lymon said, “more than just about anything.” He continued to gaze in the direction that she had taken. There was sadness and worry in his face, and again it came into Calvin’s mind that the old man loved his wife with a weight that had decades behind it. The realization made him regret what he himself had missed out on. Yesterday he would have bet money that a man couldn’t feel honest regret for the loss of something he had never gained in the first place, but that’s just what he felt at this moment. He was struck with the certainty that he had been marking time, watching the world through thefront window of his house just as his aunt watched it from her chair on the river.
    He stood up to help his uncle clear the plates. The kitchen curtains moved now, catching a breath of air with the smell of the river and rain on it.
    “There’s your ghost,” Uncle Lymon said, “blowing in from Arizona.”

THE TEMPLE BAR
    A fter supper, Calvin found himself restless and at loose ends in the quiet house. He could hear water dripping from the eaves and the muted sound of the television from down the hall in his aunt’s bedroom. He stared out the window for a time, watching the lightning flickering in the east, and then he aimlessly began to look over his uncle’s books, which filled dozens of broad cedar shelves book-ended with cylinders of what appeared to be solid silver, stamped on top with the Knight’s cross. He hefted one of the cylinders, which must have weighed several pounds. How many were in the room? Forty? He had heard of people putting their money into gold and hiding it under the floorboards, but silver had to be a ponderous way to squirrel away wealth.
    He found that he was drawn in by the hundreds of arcane volumes, mostly on historical subjects, some of the books so apparently ancient that he didn’t dare touch them. UncleLymon had invested heavily in histories of the Crusades,