Free The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock Page B

from the sea wind blowing in through the open window.
    He passed the first turnoff into Mendocino and looked back into town, and there was Sylvia standing next to a yellow Toyota parked at the gas station. In an instant he lost sight of her. That’s where her store was, on Main Street in Mendocino. He had heard all about her opening it up, running it on a shoestring, half her stuff selling on consignment. On impulse he turned back down Lansing Street, driving toward Main.
    The gas station was empty now, which was just as well. He didn’t really want her to see him and think he was skulking around, spying on her. He was just curious about her shop, about what her life had become during the years that he hadn’t known her. He drove slowly down Main, surprised at the number of cars on the street. It was as if Mendocino had become a sort of shoppers’ amusement park. There was the yellow Toyota, parked along the curb. He slowed, wondering which store was hers. Toomany of them qualified as “boutiques.”
    Suddenly there she was, standing on the sidewalk in front of an ice cream store. She saw him and widened her eyes, starting to wave, actually looking happy and surprised to see him. Howard grinned, made a waving gesture of his own, and then looked away stupidly, pretending he was just passing through. He would have stopped, to explain to her that he was curious to see what she was up to, to thank her for having come to rescue him from the clutches of Mr. Jimmers. But he couldn’t. Standing next to her, shaking his head and gesturing, was a tall, blond man, nicely dressed, fit-looking. He didn’t wear a single black glove anymore, but Howard knew who he was.
    “Shit,” Howard said out loud, mad at himself for having been so utterly incapable of dealing with things. Intending to circle back toward the highway, he turned right down Albion and nearly drove straight into an oncoming car. The driver honked, shouting incoherently out the window. Shaking, Howard pulled to the shoulder, staring in disbelief at the roof of the house across the street. Fixed to the shingles, gazing placidly down at him, was a tremendous wooden egg man with a by-now familiar face. After a moment the thing waved at him. Howard drove slowly away, looking back at it once in the rearview mirror just to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
    His hands shook on the steering wheel, and not entirely from the near accident. He had never before felt so cut adrift, so entirely out of his element and broken off from everything he was familiar with. He had fallen among pod people. Yesterday he had whistled a tune while he fed that pelican his fish bait and then innocently followed it up the coast. He possessed dependable road maps drawn up by the Triple A. And in his pocket, folded like a passport, was a signed letter from Michael Graham. The headlights on his truck were new and so was the battery. He had the receipt from the Pep Boys to prove it.
    So what the hell had happened? He had apparently turned up the highway to Loonyville by mistake, because he was watching the pelican instead of the road map. His worries and his troubles hadn’t vanished into the landscape, after all; they had merely taken new faces, and for a few idle days they had been harder to see because of the shifting shadows of north coast vegetation. He watched the cars whiz past on the highway, thinking that with a flick of his hand he could trip the right-turn blinker instead of the left and simply go home.
    Opening the nearly empty glove compartment, he pulled out the Sunberry brownie, unwrapped it, and bit the corner off, unprepared for the dirt-and-ground-weeds taste of the thing. There was nothing at all in the flavor that suggested food. Even the pelican wouldn’t eat such a brownie. He bundled it back up in plastic wrap and dropped it onto the floorboards. This was it—the last insult he would take. He had half a mind to drive back into town and throw the brownie at Stoat, take him