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

lush scene in a D. H. Lawrence novel, although she would never admit this to anyone. They were easily susceptible to mutation, too, and color alteration. Their odor, when they had any, was most often intense and repulsive, as if they were dense with the stuff of decay, of excretion and death.
    Her front-yard garden was laid out in orderly rows. It wasn’t the sort of garden she would have chosen to lay out if she were gardening for the mere enjoyment of it. She did almost nothing, though, for the mere enjoyment of it. She had come over the years to lead a life of purpose, void of mere entertainment.
    Across the street, nailed to the roof of a house, sat a plywood Humpty Dumpty the size of a man. It was still and inanimate in the windless morning—a small blessing. Onshore breezes wouldstir it up in the afternoon, and it would undertake its eternal waving, along with all the other wind-driven gewgaws in her neighbor’s front lawn. Movement for the sake of movement, that’s what it was. His wooden gizmos had no object that she could fathom, other than simply to drive her mad. They were utterly frivolous. She would contrive to deal with them, though, and with him, sooner or later.
    For the moment she concentrated her energies on her garden, which was a geometric copy, row for row, of the vegetable garden planted somewhere by her half brother, Michael Graham, a man with an authentic green thumb. Lord knew where his garden lay. She hadn’t actually seen it, just as she hadn’t ever seen his garden at the cliff house. But she had understood the design of that garden, too. She had felt it in her joints, as a person with arthritis feels pending rain. She had never felt it so clearly, though, as she had since her recent trip to San Francisco.
    She had planted eight rows of flowers, all hybrid tubers and bulbs. There was still more to plant. On her porch sat a half dozen pots of dye, all of it mixed up out of things of the earth—berries and roots, autumn leaves and iron filings and blood. Two sea hares nosed around in a bucket of clear ocean water. She had hauled them out of a tidal pool a half hour ago. Carefully she picked one of them up, holding it by the head over a clean glass bowl, and began to squeeze it, gingerly at first and then harder when it wouldn’t give up its ink. A rush of viscous, vivid-purple fluid gushed out into the bowl. She let it drip for a moment, then tossed the creature into a clean ceramic jar. She picked up the second sea hare and milked it of its ink, too, pitching it into the jar along with the first.
    Then, very carefully, she unstoppered a jar of hydrochloric acid, sizzling the liquid in over the writhing bodies of the two sea hares. Within moments they were still, their soft flesh disintegrating in the shallow pool of acid. She had no idea at all what would come of cooking the two creatures down, but the acid was already turning an interesting color of greenish brown. Traces of the purple ink trailed out of the things, deepening the color nicely.
    Nearby lay the two forearm bones she had brought back from San Francisco. When she told the Reverend White, very truthfully, that she was going to turn them into a dowsing rod, he had shrugged. He hadn’t understood it, but he knew her too well to doubt her. The bones were connected now at the elbow end, lashed together with strips of animal hide and ivy vine. Hehad supplied some of the animal hide, too—the more interesting fragments—although necessarily in strips too small to do any real tying up. She had contrived to weave them into the lashings, though, along with the rest. The result wasn’t pretty, and for a week it had smelled worse than almost anything she could think of, but the awful smell had faded as the object dried out.
    Picking up the V-shaped dowser, she limped into a clear spot in the garden, focusing her concentration on the earth, on dirt and humus and worms and percolating rainwater. She closed her eyes and pictured the