Stewart opened his mouth to reply, looked at his elders and turned his own head slightly.
The boy got up and shuffled dishes. “Go git you some coffee,” he said.
“Give you a hand,” said Stewart.
“Well,” said Allbright, “I got your letter, where did I put that shoe box?” He rummaged among the many shoe boxes and other things on the table. “Put it — Florsheim Shoes — here.” He took up the shoe box, turned it over. A sheaf of typescript settled down on the table. Inasmuch as the width of the average shoe box is somewhat less than that of the average sheet of typing paper, someone had neatly trimmed the papers. The idea had something of the simplicity of genius.
“Here ‘tis,” Allbright said, “Here ‘tis. A True Account Prepared From The Original Testimony, of the Capture and Death of a Paper-Man on the Lands and Domains of Jim Oglethorpre Allbright, Esquire, as edited by his Grandson, Professor Robert E. L. Allbright. With Notes and Commentaries. — Sorry I don’t have a clear copy to give you. Like to look at it?”
“Well,” said Vlad, slightly bowled over. “I’d like to. yes. I’d like to talk with you about it. I’d like you to tell me about it, if you don’t mind.”
Allbright said there was mighty little to tell. “He was located, as my diagram shows, my map here, he was found in one of the old tobacco barns we used to have. And it was set fire to, and he was seen as he ran off, and he was tracked down. My Great Grandmother was at hand, and she rallied the Negras, and they behaved very bravely, yes sir. My Grandfather was at war at the time, and his old mother guarded the fort, so to speak, and gave them courage. Because generally speaking they would have fled like deer from such an apparition; who could blame them?”
Who indeed, thought Vlad bleakly.
“As it was, they stoned him with stones until he died.”
“What?”
Old Allbright slowly nodded his massive, mottled head. “It is what happened, Professor Smith. To be sure.” He looked at Vlad directly. “There were skeptics, aren’t there always? Some of them said he was a Union prisoner, escaped from Andersonville Prison. Prisoncamp, we would call it nowadays. Some said that was why he was so gant. Well, no one denies that Andersonville was very bad. What comes of putting a Dutchman in charge of things. A Switzerdutchman. Starved his prisoners, the scoundrel. Went back to Switzerland during the war, went and returned by running the blockade. How much you want to bet he put a lot of money in one of those banks over there?”
Jack Stewart and the younger Allbright returned, carrying a tray with coffee and mugs, which they set on the table.
“As for the other skeptical account, why, some said that the creature killed was a Confederate deserter who had stripped off his uniform so as not to be identified, and had taken up some rags of old clothes from who knows where, maybe from a farmhouse in the middle of a battlefield. You know there was an old farmhouse right in the midst of the Battle of Bull Run, and an old lady died in that house during the battle, and who knows what went on in there. And as for the creature’s gant condition, maybe he hadn’t eaten well while he was hiding and skulking. He was discovered in the tobacco barn and tobacco is a filthy weed. I like it, but it’s notnourishing, which might explain his extreme thinness, and if hunger left him too weak to bathe in a creek, his extreme filthiness — if the explanations of the skeptics be true. I have offered this fully-documented account to no less than fourteen publications, and would you believe that ten of them decisively declined, and that four did not even reply?”
Jack said, rather abruptly, “If you tell it, sir, I would believe it. Otherwise I would not.”
Vlad also looked surprised. “I should think that such an account of the myth in action would be very acceptable, considering the historical period, and from someone of your stature in the field.”
“My stature in the field. Well, well.” Blink. Blink. His reddened face grew redder yet, but his voice remained flat. “If you had spent as much time in the Groves of Acadeemee as I have, it would perhaps surprise you less.” He poured coffee.
Later in the car Vlad said, “I don’t mind telling you that I was feeling just a bit spooked.”
The kudzu vines sped by, sped by. There seemed to be hardly anybody around, and the few people they saw didn’t seem to be doing anything. Surely they did not, could not, eat the damned stuff.
“Know what you mean,” Jack Stewart said. “What’d you think of that boy, buried alive out here, no wonder he couldn’t think of anything except grass.”
“Well, you can’t smoke kudzu.”
“He said a funny thing, we were sort of rapping about that and this. Well I did most of the talking about old Paper-Man, and he said, ‘You know Larraby’s got one locked up, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘No, who’s Larraby, and what’s he got?’ And then he took a loooong toke, and he said, ‘Well, if you don’t know who Larraby is, then I don’t know what he’s got.’ “
Vlad said, “We can ask Ed Bagnell at Sumner Public College.”
And then conversation faded away in the face of endless green tangles of kudzu. kudzu.
Dr Edward Bagnell was on the telephone: “Dr Claire Zimmerman, please. Claire? Ed. Do you have your little slate and pencil there? Okay, Listen. On whatsoever excuse, I want you to go to Rhode Island and see Dr Silas Abbott Selby of the Providence Plantations Museum; this refers to the Paper-Man Project. It’s of gross importance and intense confidence; you will go and question Selby about a rumor that he has a Paper-Man’s head. Don’t scream into the phone, for God’s sake. Heard it from Curator Luke Larraby of the Carolina Coast Museum, who has Selby in the sights of his Parrott guns — that’s confidential. I doubt if one visit will get you a peep, but be prepared to keep at it. It may require a slightly less severe costume and manner; that’s up to you. That’s all. Kiss, kiss.”
Silas Selby had another view of the matter. He sipped Fundador, and looked at Claire over the rim of the glass. Her cropped dark hair framed her round face. They were in the W. Waldo Brown Room, endowed by the philanthropist of that name, some said in order to have a quiet place to drink brandy without his wife.
“Larraby has no training as a museum specialist whatsoever,” he said flatly. “He was an architect, and sort of a house doctor for old houses, patching them up, I mean. By and by he began to do work for the old museums down there in Carolina. Well, they were short all kinds of trained people, and he was a quick study, enthusiastic and willing to turn his hand to anything, willing to read up and become the local authority on anything; just the sort of man they needed when the curatorship fell vacant.” Selby sipped his brandy, gazed at Claire, and let his eyebrows rise and fall.
“Well, somehow or other Luke had acquired a local mummy. Ante-bellum, post-bellum, or just plain bellum. There are places throughout the world where the soil tends to preserve bodies laid to rest, and such bodies sometimes turned up down Luke’s way in places unexpected. I think they became sort of cult objects, who can say why? People went mum when one asked, and people looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Local name for them was ‘Paper-Men’ or ‘Paper Doll,’ because the local lovers of grue and ghoulishness had been in the habit of padding their wasted bodies with old newspapers under the clothes, which made them look less gant and skeletal, chests less fallen in, stomachs less shrunken and so on. The ancient Egyptians used small sacks of cedar sawdust for the same purpose, after all. It is reminiscent of old Jeremy Bentham, stuffed and mounted and in his best clothes, attending the annual meetings of the. whichever society. - Now perhaps I should not be telling you all this, Doctor Zimmerman, may I call you Claire? But I feel I can count upon your —?”