The Paper Grail Read Free Page B

but Howard showed her Graham’s letter, and that had done the trick. He had kept his thumb over the date.
    Fog settled around the pickup truck as he sat on the roadside now, and water dripped onto the roof of the cab from an overhanging tree limb. The sea wind gusted around the doors, and Howard started the truck in order to fire up the heater. Once the engine was idling, his sitting there seemed pointless, so he rolled up to the edge of the asphalt and peered downhill into the gloom. A pair of headlights swung around the curve of highway below, the car itself still invisible in the fog. It was impossible to tell how far away it was, so Howard waited it out, letting it have the highway to itself.
    Howard recognized the characteristic cheese-grater roar of a Volkswagen engine before the microbus actually materialized out of the wall of fog. It was moving slowly, even for a Volkswagen, like a deep-water fish prowling through submarine canyons. Onemoment it was a ghost, obscured by mist; the next it was solid. Howard thought suddenly about his uncle’s Studebaker, full of top-hatted spirits, and on impulse he shifted the transmission into reverse, as if he would escape it by hurtling backward into the forest.
    As it drew near, it appeared at first to be covered with sticks and leaves, like something that had driven up out of the deep woods. But it wasn’t leaves; it was stuff from the ocean that had been glued onto the body of the bus in layers, so that only the front windows were clear. Dried kelp and sea fans, starfish and barnacles, clumped mussels and fish skeletons and seashells covered the bus in layers so that it looked like a tide pool on wheels. It was impossible to be sure it was a car any longer, except that it ran on tires and had a windshield. Even the rumbling engine might have been a cobbled-together mechanism of tube worms and starfish gears and pumping seawater. It growled uphill, lit within by the strange green glow of the instrument panel. The driver’s face was a shadow.
    Howard shifted back out of reverse, realizing that his mouth was open in disbelief. He watched the bus disappear into the fog around the curve of the hillside, noticing that a big patch of stuff had evidently fallen off the outside of the engine compartment—too much heat, probably. The effect was suddenly one of shabbiness, something like a ghost story ruined by missing paragraphs.
    Still, something about the bus, about seeing it, reminded him of his uncle’s museum and of Michael Graham’s stone house, with its passages and turrets. The very atmosphere of the north coast was compulsive—the overgrown countryside and the perpetual mist, the strange appeal of a wire rack full of gaudy decals. It struck him that there was something right and natural about the deep-sea bus, as if it stood to reason. He laughed uneasily, reminding himself that eccentrics were common on the coast. They must issue cards, like a Mensa ID. After another week of solitude and fog he would be ready to apply for one himself.
    No wonder Uncle Roy had been possessed with notions of ghosts. The foggy air seemed to be thick with them. For the first time since he’d left home a week ago he wanted company—even old Graham’s company. He rolled out onto the highway, heading south again. He would make it to the stone house with an hour’s worth of daylight to spare.

2
    T HE limousine crept along through the San Francisco traffic, down Grant Street, through Chinatown toward North Beach. It was July, and the streets were full of tourists, the heavy stream of cars barely moving in either direction and people cutting warily back and forth between bumpers. Why the fool of a driver had missed his offramp and tied them up in crosstown traffic, Heloise Lamey couldn’t fathom. Stupidity, maybe. Some sort of smart-aleck malice—wasting the time of a poor old woman out alone, at the mercy of the world.
    She said nothing, though. It was already spilled milk. She could rant