The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

You’d have done better to stay home and waited for
him.”
    Dazed, Howard followed Mr. Jimmers into an ill-lit sort of living room. “You don’t have such a thing as a drink around the house, do you?” Howard asked. This was no time for being polite. His stomach was curiously hollow. His plans had been thrown for a loop, and he was somehow certain that his entire life had altered course on the instant.
    Mr. Jimmers looked a little puzzled about the mention of a drink, as if he couldn’t quite see the point in it, but he nodded after a moment and stepped along, disappearing into yet another room. Howard heard the satisfying clink of glass against glass. At least that sounded right to him—almost the only familiar sound he could remember having heard in a week.
    The house was cold, with a stone floor and roughly plastered stone walls. Candles guttered in little hollows, making the room look like a shrine, but not lighting it up enough to do any real good. The fireplace was built of stone, too, and clinker brick, and all of it, the whole room, was stony cold, despite the hearty-looking fire. Howard stepped up closer to it, wondering if he could remember which of the stones disguised the cavity where the sketch had been hidden fifteen years past. Nothing was visible, though, no cracked joint or missing mortar.
    His feet were nearly frozen, and he held them in front of the fire, wiggling his toes. He would have liked to keep his shoes on or else go out to the truck now for a second pair of socks. It was dark and foggy outside, though, and the truck was invisible through the murk, and there were odd thieves lurking in the woods.
    He thought again about the paperweight stolen from the glove box—a two-hundred-dollar lesson. And now Graham was dead, too …
    He patted his coat pocket, where he had Graham’s letter. Thank God he hadn’t left it in the cab of the truck. He half wanted to show it to Mr. Jimmers straight off, before the probate courts, or whoever it was, hauled Graham’s possessions away and the sketch was forever lost. But then who the hell
was
Mr. Jimmers, anyway? The man was tolerably comfortable there. Or at least he went around with the air of someone who had made himself at home. And then there was the strange business of the shed … Suddenly Howard wanted very much to get a glimpse inside it—just a little peek.
    But that was childish, wasn’t it? If he were caught fooling around in either the shed or the fireplace, it might botch up the whole business of the Hoku-sai sketch, which had already gotten pretty shaky. He noticed right then that the walls were full of paintings and photographs and no end of wall hangings of one sort or another. In the dim light it was impossible to make any of them out clearly. Howard stepped over to have a look at a few of them.
    Most of what hung on the walls wasn’t of any note—reproductions of hunting scenes and of women with flowing hair and dressed in clothes that couldn’t have been worn seriously during any historical era. There were some grisly-looking African masks and some wooden puppets and a wall-hung china cabinet crammed full of depression glass. Where in the world was Mr. Jimmers? Or more to the point, where was the drink?
    He wandered into the next room, taking the direction that Jimmers had taken. This second room was brighter, having an honest-to-goodness electrical lamp burning in it. He wondered what the point of the candles was. Maybe Mr. Jimmers was the atmospheric type. He remembered this room all at once—the oriental carpets, the confusion of oak furniture, the wooden chandelier.
    There on the wall were three badly framed, collodion photographs, antiques, hanging in a vertical row. He remembered those suddenly, from a class in Pre-Raphaelite photography that he had taken in graduate school. The photos had been taken by John Ruskin—when? 1855? 1860? They were very old, anyway, and, if they were authentic, might be worth a fortune to the