Ritual

by Graham Masterton

  There was no reply. The ravens croaked amongst the rooftops, the trees shushed and rustled like the sea. Bob climbed back into the car and Charlie followed him.

  Robyn said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘They locked the doors. Come on, we’d better get out of here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Robyn. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  They drove back to the gates, and exited on to the Quassapaug Road. As they did so, however, a huge Mack truck appeared, as suddenly as a nightmare, bellowing down the hill from the direction of Bethlehem. Charlie yelled, ‘Go!’ and Robyn slammed her foot down on the gas so that the Cobra slithered away from Le Reposoir with a shriek of tyres and a cloud of dust and rubber smoke.

  Charlie twisted around in his seat. The truck’s front grille filled up the entire rear window. Robyn kept her foot hard on the gas, steering the Cobra from one side of the road to the other as she negotiated one curve after another. But the truck held on, tailgating them only two or three feet away. As they reached the corkscrew curve that would take them to Allen’s Corners, the truck bumped them in the back, and Robyn juggled frantically with the steering wheel as she momentarily lost control.

  They slid round the corkscrew with their tyres screaming like strangled cats. Their offside rear wheel jolted against a large stone at the side of the road, and then they were sliding sideways the opposite way. The truck barged them again and again. Charlie heard glass and metal grind, and the whup-whup-whup of something scraping against one of the rear wheels.

  The truck shunted right up close to them, and as they came out of the corkscrew it was actually pushing them along, madly, uncontrollably, like a roller-coaster. Robyn cried out, ‘Charlie! I can’t hold it!’ and then Charlie saw a row of trees rushing at them and the Cobra hurtled right off the edge of the road, flying for nearly twenty feet clear through the air. It collided with two massive pines with a noise like a bomb going off. Charlie was thrown violently against the glove compartment, his head hitting the windshield, and something burst over the top of him and glass exploded.

  Behind them, the truck bellowed around the corner and out of sight.

  Charlie tried to sit up. Robyn was sitting with her head slumped forward but she was wearing her seat belt and he could see that she had been only jolted and shocked. There was a large red bruise on the left side of her forehead, but otherwise she looked all right. It was only after he had looked at Robyn, however, that he realized what had hurtled over him when they hit the trees. Bob – fired out of the back seat and through the windshield. The whole of the upper part of his body had gone through the laminated glass, and he now lay face down on the Cobra’s hood, amidst a slush of broken glass. Blood ran slickly across the metal.

  Charlie managed to kick the passenger door open, and heave himself out of the wrecked car. There was a strong smell of petrol, but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger of fire. He walked around to the driver’s door and tugged it open after three or four strenuous yanks. Robyn was just coming round, and she stared at him with widely-dilated pupils. ‘Charlie?’ she asked him, her voice slurred. ‘Charlie, what happened?’

  He unfastened her seat belt and helped her out of the car. She said, ‘Bob––is Bob all right?’ but Charlie wouldn’t let her turn around and look. He guided her back up the slope to the side of the road and made her sit down on a rock. ‘Give me a minute, okay?’ he told her. ‘Bob’s been hurt pretty bad.’

  He went back down to the car. He had been almost sure that Bob was dead, but as he approached he heard him groaning. He came up close and said, ‘Bob? Bob, it’s Charlie. How do you feel?’

  Bob raised his head from the hood of the car, and Charlie could see what had happened to him. The broken windshield had caught his forehead as he had hurtled through it, and sheared the skin off his face, from his eyebrows right down to his chin. He stared at Charlie with one white swivelling eyeball set in a livid oval of scarlet. His teeth snarled bloody and bare, without lips or gums. What was left of his face hung from his jaw in fatty folds, his cheeks, his nose, and his chin – as if his features had been nothing more than a latex Hallowe’en mask which had suddenly been ripped from his head.

  Extraordinarily––and terribly––he was still conscious.

  Charlie said, ‘Bob? Bob, can you hear me?’

  Bob nodded, and his eyeball turned and glistened.

  ‘I’m going for an ambulance, Bob. You’ll just have to stay where you are for a minute or two.’

  Bob tried to say something but his mouth had been too badly mutilated for him to do anything but grunt and gargle.

  Charlie clambered back up the rocks to the road. Robyn was still sitting there, white-faced and tearful. ‘I couldn’t hold it,’ she sobbed. ‘I tried so hard, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘We have to call an ambulance,’ said Charlie. He felt weak at the knees and almost on the point of collapse. The day seemed to crowd in on him as if the clouds were determined to press him down into the ground and the trees all around him were trying to entangle him and choke him.

  ‘Is Bob badly hurt?’ asked Robyn.

  ‘As bad as anybody I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘It looks like there might be a house down there,’ said Robyn, pointing further downhill. Charlie peered through the trees and he thought that he could make out the angular grey gable of a house or a barn.

  ‘I guess it’s worth a try,’ he told her. ‘Why don’t you stay here, just in case somebody drives past, and you can flag them down?’

  ‘What if that truck comes back?’

  Charlie wiped the chilly sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know. He was deliberately trying to run us off the road, wasn’t he?’

  Robyn held his arm. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll duck down and hide if I see it. You go call that ambulance.’

  Charlie began to jog down the hill. He had only gone about a couple of hundred feet however, when he heard a bursting, crackling roar from the hollow where the Cobra had crashed. He turned around and saw an orange fireball roll up from the trees and vanish like a conjuring trick. The car was already blazing from end to end.

  He ran slopewise through the whiplashing bushes and the drifts of dried leaves. By the time he reached the car it was too late for him to do anything at all. The flames were so fierce that he couldn’t get within twenty feet. He couldn’t see Bob at all.

  Robyn came running down the hill to stand beside him. They stood together, helplessly watching the fire gradually die down, leaving a hulk of an automobile burned brown and rainbow mottled. Bob’s body still lay on the hood, but it had charred and shrunk into a little black figure no larger than a nine-year-old child. Charlie could see white bones gleaming through charcoal flesh. He could see something else, too, although he didn’t mention it to Robyn. The metallic shine of a cigarette lighter, tightly clasped in Bob’s burned-up hand. He must have ignited the car’s leaking gasoline himself.

  ‘We’d better get out of here,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s nothing we can do now.’

  ‘We can tell the police, can’t we?’

  ‘I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.’

  ‘But we can’t just walk away!’ Robyn protested.

  ‘I think we can,’ said Charlie. ‘In fact, I don’t think we have any other alternative. Not if we want to stay alive ourselves. That truck was waiting for us. I told you what the sheriff and Mr Haxalt told me: M. Musette doesn’t suffer trespassers gladly.’

  ‘I have to get to a phone,’ said Robyn.

  ‘What? To call your office? Come on, Robyn, think about it. If the Célèstines have as much of a hold on the media as they appear to, then the best thing we can do is disappear for a while, try to work this out undercover.’

  ‘Do you really think they were trying to kill us? Maybe that truck just had brake failure.’

  ‘Brake failure my rear end. They want us dead. And they’ve succeeded with Bob, haven’t they? A poor uncomplicated guy who was only t
rying to help me out.’

  Robyn was shaking. They were both so shocked by what had happened that neither of them really knew what they were talking about. At least bickering seemed to be real.

  ‘We can cut across country,’ said Robyn. ‘If we keep on going downhill, we’ll get to the Quassapaug River. Then we can follow it all the way down to Allen’s Corners. That way, nobody will see us.’

  Charlie took her arm. ‘Let’s go. As soon as they find out that we’re still alive, they’ll go straight to Mrs Kemp’s, and then I’m going to be in really serious trouble.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They killed Mrs Kemp, too. That dwarf did it – the one they call David. Before he attacked me last night, he broke into her bedroom and chopped her up.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Robyn demanded, staring at Charlie in disbelief. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this morning?’

  ‘I didn’t want to scare you out of driving for me.’

  ‘God, I wish you had... Did you report Mrs Kemp’s murder to the sheriff?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Charlie retorted.

  They made their way along beside the Quassapaug River for almost a mile. It was quite narrow here, splashing busily down between the rocks, sometimes disappearing under layers of russet-brown ferns. Occasionally, they heard a police siren wailing along the road from Allen’s Corners; and once they saw a police helicopter heading at top speed for Bethlehem, or maybe towards Le Reposoir. Charlie had to assume that Sheriff Podmore was looking for them now; and just in case the police brought in tracker dogs he made sure that they crossed and recrossed the Quassapaug whenever it was shallow enough for them to take off their shoes and wade. The clear-rippling water was intensely cold, but after each crossing they rubbed their feet with Robyn’s pale blue sweater to dry them and warm them up.

  It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon by the time they reached the outskirts of Allen’s Corners. The small community was almost completely deserted, but Charlie took the precaution of approaching Mrs Kemp’s along the narrow alleyway which ran along behind the back yards of most of the houses on Naugatuck Street. David must have used this alleyway when he had come to visit Martin during the night; and escaped along it, too.

  All the yards were empty and silent. Robyn stayed close behind Charlie, but she was growing increasingly nervous, and kept glancing over her shoulder. ‘What are we doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘First of all I want to find out if they’ve discovered Mrs Kemp’s body yet. If they have, then I’m going to be wanted for questioning – if not for actually doing it, if I’ve learned anything about M. Musette. Second of all, we need Mrs Kemp’s car. We’ll never make it anywhere on foot, not if they get dogs out. She keeps her car keys in the hutch in the kitchen.’

  They reached the back of Mrs Kemp’s house, and Charlie eased open the gate. There was nobody to be seen in any of the other yards, except for a woman hanging washing about eight houses away, and there was no sign of police – not even barriers or warning notices or seals on the door to protect the evidence inside.

  ‘They haven’t found her yet,’ Charlie whispered; but Robyn said, ‘Look!’ and pointed up to the back bedroom window.

  At first, the window simply appeared to be dark. But then a faint wash of early-afternoon sunlight came out, and Charlie could see a dull blue light reflected from it, as if the glass were tinted. But it was only when the blue light began to ripple and swirl that he understood what he was looking at. Inside the bedroom, blowflies were swarming, thousands of them, and scores of them had settled on the window. The dull blue light was the shiny colour of their bodies catching the sun.

  Charlie said nothing, but ushered Robyn up to the back of the house. He tried the kitchen door and it was locked; but he picked up an edging-stone from Mrs Kemp’s flower-bed and used it to crack open one of the panes of glass. The key was still in the door, so he reached in and turned it.

  ‘God,’ he said, as they stepped cautiously into the kitchen. ‘You can smell it even down here!’

  ‘Do I have to come in?’ Robyn asked.

  ‘No, you wait there,’ said Charlie. ‘But keep your eyes peeled, okay? And don’t let anybody see you.’

  Charlie crossed the kitchen, trying not to breathe in too much of the cloying, sweetish smell which now permeated the entire house. He opened up the hutch, and found Mrs Kemp’s car keys straight away. Underneath her keys was a roadmap of Litchfield County, two bank books, a spare pair of spectacles, and a half-finished embroidery sampler with the message ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’. That’s ironic, thought Charlie. Not only the heart, but the lungs, the spleen, the liver, and the stomach, not to mention twenty-eight feet of intestine. He was about to close the drawer, however, when his attention was caught by two leaflets which had been stuffed into the back of it. He coaxed them out, and unfolded them, and held them up to the light so that he could read them.

  One was cyclostyled on yellowish paper, and bore a drawing of Christ crucified. Beneath it, Charlie could make out the words L’Église des Pauvres, Société des Gourmands, Acadia, LA. There was a lengthy text underneath in that curious Cajun mixture of French and English. Most of it seemed to be an exhortation to love God avec votre esprit et avec votre corps and to serve him avec all your heart.

  The other leaflet was almost incomprehensible, but seemed to be something to do with Le Recreation. There was a New Orleans address at the bottom of it: 1112 Elegance Street. But it was what was pencilled on the back of the leaflet that interested Charlie the most. Norman, for information. M.

  Mrs Kemp must have taken both of these leaflets out of Sheriff Podmore’s office when she vandalized it yesterday. She had crammed them into the drawer along with her car keys when she came home and locked herself in the kitchen. Charlie frowned at them again. They were definitely something to do with the Célèstines, but right now he couldn’t work out what. Maybe L’Église des Pauvres was another ‘dining society’ like Le Reposoir.

  And maybe the ‘M’ who had signed that note to Sheriff Podmore was Edouard Musette; or even his wife.

  Robyn called, ‘Charlie? Did you get those keys? I’m feeling distinctly nervous out here.’

  ‘I’ve got them,’ said Charlie, ‘and something else besides.’

  He handed Robyn the leaflets. She glanced through them quickly, and then shrugged. ‘I’ll have to sit down with a French dictionary. I’ve forgotten everything I learned at school.’

  Charlie tucked the leaflets into his pocket. Then he led Robyn around to the garage at the front of the house. The street was deserted. There wasn’t even a dog in sight. Charlie eased open the garage doors, and together they climbed into Mrs Kemp’s old Buick station wagon. ‘It smells like lavender,’ said Robyn.

  Charlie started up the engine. It rattled and coughed, and produced a thick black cloud of smoke. ‘Not exactly the ideal vehicle for a discreet getaway,’ Charlie remarked.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Robyn asked him. ‘We’re not on the run, are we?’

  ‘You could say that. I mean––the justice around here may be corrupt, but we’re fugitives from it.’

  They backed out of the driveway, and then headed for the ring road which would take them around by the supermarket and out of Allen’s Corners by the railroad depot and the warehouses, where they were less likely to be spotted by sheriff’s deputies or over-enthusiastic disciples of Le Reposoir. Charlie said, ‘Once we make it out of Connecticut, we have a fair chance of getting away clean.’

  Robyn looked at him narrowly. ‘You know where you’re going, don’t you? You’re not running away from anything; you’re running to something.’

  Charlie said, ‘I’m trying to save my boy, that’s all.’

  ‘Trying to play Rambo didn’t work,’ Robyn commented.

  ‘Does it ever? You can never solve anything with a sweatband and a gun. It was my fault, I didn’t think it out properly and it was totally amateurish. I’m just grieving that Bob was kil
led.’

  ‘So what are you planning on doing now?’ asked Robyn. She touched his shoulder, a small affectionate gesture of communication; a signal that no matter what he wanted to do, she would help him.

  ‘You see these leaflets? All in Cajun French. Well––that’s where this cannibalism started, among an isolated sect of the Cajun French. Sheriff Podmore told me it began in New Orleans, and if that’s where we have to go to find out more about the Célèstines, then that’s where we’ll go. Leastways, that’s where I’m going. You’re not obliged.’

  ‘Do you seriously think that I’ll allow you to leave me behind?’ Robyn told him. ‘And besides, you need somebody to take turns with the driving.’

  ‘Do you want to drop off home and pick up some clothes?’ Charlie asked her. ‘We should be reasonably safe until the police find Mrs Kemp. Then it’s going to be like all hell was let out for the weekend.’

  Robyn shivered, partly out of cold, partly out of anticipation. ‘When you called the Litchfield Sentinel,’ she said, ‘my life changed for ever.’

  Charlie steered the Buick out towards Waterbury. ‘Don’t start blaming me. You could have said no. You can say no now, if you want to. You can see how dangerous these people are.’

  ‘Wild horses couldn’t stop me coming with you.’

  Charlie reached over and switched on the station wagon’s radio. ‘Wild horses I’m not worried about. It’s these Goddamned cannibals.’

  15

  They crossed the state line into New York shortly after four o’clock. There was no sign of any police pursuit, and Charlie crossed his fingers and hoped that they had gotten away. Now he settled himself down for nearly 1,400 miles of driving, all the way through eight states to Louisiana, and to New Orleans. He estimated that if they kept going, taking turns at the wheel, they could reach the Mississippi delta in thirty-six hours. That was if Mrs Kemp’s oil-burning Buick behaved itself; and if they weren’t stopped anywhere along the way by the police.