The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock

Author:James P. Blaylock [Blaylock, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575117624
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-09-29T06:00:00+00:00

18

GRAHAM didn’t sleep much anymore. Sleep didn’t come easy to him, and there didn’t seem to be any great need of it, anyway. The hours of darkness dragged along. He couldn’t fish at night. Getting down the hill to the pond was treacherous enough in daylight. A couple of times he had sat in his chair on the front porch in the middle of the night, watching the moon rise over the trees. But it was cold, and the cold tired him out these days. Sometimes at night he read—the Bible, mostly, a large-print edition he’d had to switch to a few years back.

How many years? He couldn’t remember now. The years ran together like watercolor paints, and his memories surfaced in confused order, some days clear, some days dull. Most often at night he simply lay awake, letting his mind drift. In the morning either Edith or Sylvia would arrive with his breakfast and coffee. Midmorning he would work his garden, which, although it was new, seemed to be blighted somehow. He had his suspicions, but there was little he could do about it except work. There wasn’t a lot of sun out in the forest there, especially not in the fall. But the cabin and garden were in a clearing, and he ought to have had some luck with leafy things, with lettuce and cabbage, even though there wasn’t enough of the season left for the vegetables to mature. In a month it would be too cold.

But this trouble wasn’t weather; it was some kind of rot that came up through the soil, which seemed always to be dry, no matter how often he watered it. Nothing at all had grown well for him for a couple of years now. He had expected most of this. He knew it would be so at the end—all the dust and the dying. It was the strange blight, the rot, the tainting and withering of the leaves that he wondered about. They had a bad smell to them, too, even while they were still mostly green.

This morning in particular he felt heavy and tired. He had awakened twice in the night with chest pains, but they’d subsided now. He had found himself awake a third time. He was out of doors, standing in the moonlit garden and wearing his long underwear and his hat. He couldn’t remember having gotten out of bed. The dark woods stretched away on all sides, and in the clearing overhead the stars shined thick and bright like a thousand promises. He had his walking stick with him, and with it he was drawing wavy-edged circles in the dirt, like clouds in the sky.

He was filled with the vague notion that he had been dreaming the whole time he was sketching with the stick—a dream about salmon schooling in deep ocean water. And one of the fish, responding to some sort of deep and primitive calling, had turned landward, swimming lazily toward the river mouth where Graham had sat fishing with his pole and line.

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