Ritual

by Graham Masterton

  They tiptoed along the verandah and down the steps, checking from right to left with almost every step they took. Robyn clung on to Charlie’s sleeve, and kept nervously coughing, a little dry cough of sheer fear. They crossed the yard, and there was a sudden gush of wind which made the dust sizzle against their ankles. Robyn said, ‘Is that somebody singing? I’m sure I can hear somebody singing.’

  Charlie listened, and when the wind died down he could hear the high quavering voice of Eric Broussard still lying on his back in the field where his own dog had brought him down, singing ‘Laisser les Cajuns Danser’. There was something infinitely sad about it, a man lying dying in a field, singing his own requiem, but there was something infinitely eerie about it too.

  The crouched their way along the back fence until they reached the path which led to the jetty. The sky was light enough now for them to be able to see Eric’s skiff outlined black against the bronze surface of the bayou. Frogs croaked, katydids chirruped, and steam rose from the surface like a graveyard scene in a horror movie. ‘Come on,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t think they’ve managed to figure out where we are yet. They’re probably still watching the car.’

  Running now, they headed for the jetty; but just as they did so they heard the roaring of a car engine, echoing around the side of the house, and a pale-coloured Buick came sliding around the corner in the dry black dirt, its headlights full, cutting them off from the entrance to the jetty.

  ‘This way!’ Charlie shouted, and took hold of Robyn’s arm and dragged her away from the jetty and back towards the house. They ran in between the outbuildings, their footsteps thudding, while behind them the Buick revved up its engine again and came slewing around the yard. Charlie pressed Robyn against the wall and then breathed. ‘They have to go all the way around the house. Come on – let’s get back to the bayou.’

  They could hear the car’s tyres sliding and howling as it circuited the house once more, hunting for them like an enraged beast. They ran without a word towards the jetty, along the wooden duckboards, and out on to the rickety wooden structure itself. They were only halfway along it when the Buick reappeared, its headlights blinding them, its engine screaming. It headed straight towards them, the duckboards clattering and thundering under its wheels.

  ‘Dive!’ yelled Charlie, and they tumbled off the jetty into the water. The Buick flashed past them with its brakes shrieking like strangled pigs. Although there was fifty more feet of jetty to go, the Buick’s driver must have been heading towards them a fraction too fast, and the boards were slippery with moss and early-morning damp.

  Charlie, tossing his head up out of the water, saw the huge car go flying off the end of the jetty in a bloody blaze of brakelights, and crash into the bayou. Immediately, weighted down by the engine, the front of the car dipped under the water, and the trunk reared up like the stem of a sinking ship. A wave of chilly brown water slapped against Charlie’s face, and he felt as if he had swallowed half of the bayou. He frantically trod water, then mud.

  ‘Robyn!’ he shouted. ‘Robyn! Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m here!’ Robyn called back. ‘I’m right by the boat!’

  Charlie touched the oozy bottom of the bayou, and managed to wade a little way closer to the shore. Grabbing hold of the tough grass that grew on the bank, he pulled himself hand over hand toward the jetty, and at last managed to climb back up on to the planks, where he lay chest down for a moment, panting with effort, his trouser legs glistening black with mud from the knees down. After a few seconds spent getting his breath back, he stood up and squelched along to the end of the jetty, and looked down into the water. Robyn was clambering into Eric Broussard’s skiff, tilting it sideways as she did so.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’ he asked her.

  ‘What about those men in the car?’ said Robyn.

  Charlie looked towards the bayou. Already there was nothing to be seen of the Buick but its red taillights glowering under the surface. Charlie wiped his hands across his mouth to clear away some of the mud, and said, ‘Fuck them.’

  ‘But they must be still alive.’

  ‘They wanted to run us down, didn’t they? They were trying to kill us!’

  But before Robyn could say anything else, Charlie took a deep breath, ran a short distance along the jetty, and dived back into the bayou. He knew just as well as Robyn that he couldn’t leave the car in the water without making at least a token effort to save the men inside. Fighting for your life was one thing. Letting people die was another.

  He felt his clothes clinging heavily around him as he swam below the surface towards the submerged car. The water was so murky that he found it impossible to see anything except the vehicle’s lights until he was almost on top of it. It was tilted downward, with its nearside bumper already buried in the ooze, its passenger compartment still half full of air, giving it a lumbering buoyancy. Charlie could hear the blurting of bubbles, however, as the air steadily poured up to the surface, and he guessed that it couldn’t be more than a matter of seconds before the car filled up completely. He swam around it, short of breath now, staring as wide-eyed as he could.

  He heard thumping, and something that must have been a shout for help. He kicked himself around to the car’s offside, and saw M. Fontenot, his white face pressed against the driver’s window, a mask of absolute terror. In the passenger seat, the big-shouldered man called Henri was sitting, his face equally strained, but making no effort to open the Buicks’ doors. Charlie tried to snatch at the driver’s door handle, but he was out of oxygen now, and he had to thrash himself up to the surface.

  Robyn was sitting in the skiff watching for him. Charlie gulped for air, and doggy-paddled around in a circle. ‘Did you find them?’ called Robyn. ‘Are they still alive?’

  ‘They’re alive all right. But they don’t have long. It’s that Fontenot guy from the Célèstines, and the other one, the big one. But they don’t seem to be making any effort to get themselves out.’

  ‘Can you open the doors?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie gasped. ‘I’m going back to give it a try.’

  He took two more giant breaths, then plunged back under the surface of the bayou once more. He had never been a good underwater swimmer, and it took him several strenuous strokes of his arm to get himself back down to the car. Even then he had to tug himself further down by holding on to the drip-rail around the car’s roof.

  M. Fontenot and Henri were still sitting where they had been before. The water had already filled up to M. Fontenot’s chest. His eyes were bulging and his teeth were clenched, as if the skull that had been hidden inside his head for so many years had caught the scent of freedom. Henri’s expression was extraordinary, and even more frightening because it was so resigned. Charlie wrenched the door handle, but the door was either locked or jammed, or too heavy to open because of the water pressure. Charlie banged on the window, and gestured frantically that M. Fontenot should try to open it from the inside. That way, the pressure inside and outside the car would equalize.

  But M. Fontenot shook his head, and screamed, ‘I’m trapped! I’m trapped behind the wheel! My legs are trapped!’

  Charlie realized with cold dread what he was witnessing. M. Fontenot refused to open the Buick’s doors because he was unable to get out; and obviously he had ordered Henri to remain where he was, too, so that he could have just a few more seconds of life. Henri’s lungs must have already been bursting for air, but obediently he remained where he was, drowning for the sake of his master. Because the car was tilted towards the nearside, the water would reach Henri’s face first. It was already filling up to the side of his chin, but he made no attempt to lift his mouth clear of it.

  Charlie banged on the door again, and gestured towards the door locks. But M. Fontenot did nothing but stare at him in desperation. Charlie couldn’t stay down any longer, and he released his hold on the car and kicked himself up to the surface.

  Robyn had untied the skiff and brought it cl
oser. Charlie, coughing, spitting up water, clung gratefully on to the side of it. ‘Tried,’ he choked. ‘No damn good. Fontenot’s legs are trapped.’

  Robyn leaned forward and took hold of his hand. ‘Just get on board, Charlie. If there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do. I don’t want you to drown too.’

  ‘One more try,’ said Charlie, but just as he was taking his second deep breath, there was an abrupt and noisy rush of bubbles from below the surface, and the Buick’s lights went out.

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Robyn. ‘God knows you did your best.’

  Charlie trod water for a few minutes, waiting to see if Henri had managed to get out, but after a while the bayou returned to steamy stillness, and the frogs took up their regular chorus as if nothing at all had happened. ‘Okay,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m coming aboard.’

  With Robyn tugging at his soaking shirt, he clambered into the wildly rocking skiff, and sat on the plain plank seat, with water running from his clothes, his head bowed, trying to cough up as much of the Normand Bayou as he could.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we licked them, didn’t we? And all that’s going to look like is accidental death. Come on, let’s get back to the jetty. I want to see if Eric’s okay. Then we can take the car and get the hell out.’

  Robyn balanced her way to the middle of the skiff and picked up the paddle. She leaned forward and kissed Charlie’s wet tangled hair. ‘You were fantastic,’ she whispered. ‘You were better than Lloyd Bridges.’

  Charlie gave a wry, slanting smile. ‘Can’t you ever love me for myself?’

  They began to paddle their way back toward the jetty. As they did so, however, they heard the warbling sound of an ambulance siren in the middle distance. They heard something else, too – the whip-whipping of a police siren.

  ‘Shit,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Do you think we can make it to the car in time?’ Robyn asked him.

  ‘Oh sure. But there’s only one way out of here by road, and what do you think the police are going to do when two fugitives from justice come steaming toward them in a stolen vehicle? Come on – we don’t have any choice. We’re going to have to paddle our way out of here. Eric said to keep heading south-west.’

  Charlie quickly checked the contents of the skiff. At the prow, there was a heap of clumsily folded rubberized sheeting, which Eric had presumably used to cover himself up with when it was raining. There was a broken fishing basket, a collection of baling-hooks and rusty screwdrivers and some piece of machinery that looked as if it had once belonged to an outboard motor. There was also a spare paddle and a bottle that contained about half a pint of clear liquid. Charlie uncorked it and sniffed. ‘Bad Eric,’ he remarked. ‘This is raw corn whiskey.’ He wiped the neck, took a cautious swig and swallowed it.

  ‘Benedict Arnold,’ he swore, as it soaked down his throat like lighted kerosene.

  They took up their paddles, nudged the skiff around, and began to splash their way south-westward along the bayou. They bayou was nearly sixty feet wide here, but Charlie could already see that it narrowed up ahead. The steam enveloped them in mysterious swirls, floating over the brown surface of the water like the ghostly hands of all those who had lived and died on the Normand Bayou. It seemed to clutch and cling at their paddles, and then whirl away as they splashed into the water. The sound of the police siren soon became muffled and distant. After a while they could hear nothing but the frogs and the watery guttural noise of their own paddling. They didn’t speak for a long time. They were both tired and shocked, and Charlie was beginning to feel chilly and uncomfortable in his soaking wet clothes. He thought of Eric dying in his field. Perhaps Eric’s spirit was travelling with them now, in the skiff from which he had fished so often, with his bottle of raw corn whiskey and his broken basket full of catfish. Charlie began softly to whistle ‘Laisser les Cajuns Danser’, although he had never realized that he had picked up the tune.

  The morning passed and the steam thickened and then began to clear; so that by eleven o’clock they were paddling on water that was livid yellow-ochre in colour, and sparkling with sunlight, in between high levees where catalpa and willows draggled their roots, and mud-turtles basked at the water’s edge. Charlie in his damp-dry clothes suddenly lowered his head and said, ‘I’m just going to have to rest up for a while. Why not let’s pull under that bridge?’

  About a quarter-mile up ahead of them was a wooden bridge; not much of a bridge, because here the bayou was comparatively narrow, but closely surrounded by water oaks, thick with dangling vines, so that the underneath of the bridge was curtained off like a dark, private room. They gently bumped the skiff into the cool shadow, stowed away their paddles, and sat for a while in the gloom looking at each other. A few chinks of sunlight penetrated the wooden walkway of the bridge above them, and played on the water and on Robyn’s hair. Turtles splashed and plopped; catfish finned by in swirls of grainy silt. They felt so far away from the rest of the world that they could have been children again.

  ‘Today’s Thursday,’ said Robyn, as if to remind them both of the urgency of what they were doing, and why they were here.

  Charlie nodded. ‘It shouldn’t take us very much longer to get to Acadia.’

  ‘Go on rest up,’ Robyn told him soothingly. He smiled at her, she smiled back and he realized without any fear whatsoever that he loved her.

  He eased himself down into the well of the skiff, resting his head on her lap. She straightened his tousled hair with her fingers. ‘We’re not exactly the world’s best dressed couple, are we?’ she said.

  Charlie closed his eyes. All that diving into the bayou to try to rescue M. Fontenot – on top of the shock of seeing Gumbo burn and Eric Broussard lie there dying began to overwhelm him, like a cloak of lead. He could feel the skiff dipping and bobbing beneath him. He could feel Robyn’s fingers stroking his forehead. He wasn’t sleeping, but he was already in that strange anteroom to sleep, where reality and illusion intertwine, and so he didn’t pay any clear attention to the slight shifting sound in the back of the skiff, where the rubberized sheets were stored.

  Nor did he open his eyes when the sheets were gradually nudged back, and the dull blade of a machete appeared from underneath them, like the claw of some monstrous crab.

  21

  Charlie began to dream about the dark monkish restaurant again, although this time the dream seemed to be subtly different. He was sure that he could hear chanting, from the direction of the kitchen doors. It sounded like a Gregorian chant, disciplined and sweet, and yet he could also hear the dull erratic thumping of a primitive drum.

  He left his seat and began to walk between the tables towards the kitchen. Other diners turned to watch him as he passed. All of the men were dressed in formal evening wear, although not all of them appeared to be real. Some of them had faces that were as smooth as wax, and others had eyes that burned in their heads like coals. The women wore decorative masks, covered with mother-of-pearl and gleaming peacock feathers and glass jewellery; as well as heavy bodices embroidered with gold and silver thread. From the waist down, however, almost all of them were naked, and they sat with their thighs wide apart in order to expose themselves to whoever was passing. They giggled and tittered beneath their masks as Charlie walked towards the kitchen. He had a terrible feeling that they knew something he didn’t – something frightening and dire.

  The kitchen doors came nearer and nearer – as if they were gliding towards him instead of him walking toward them. They were stainless steel with circular porthole windows in them. The windows were totally black, impenetrable, like tunnels to nowhere at all. As he approached, Charlie’s heart began to tighten with fear, and his feet began to drag on the carpet, as if his shoes where soled with Velcro. Don’t go inside, his sense of survival cried out to him. It’s the ritual kitchen, don’t go inside!

  He stopped walking, but the kitchen doors continued to glide nearer, until he was standing right up against them. He put out his hand. The
stainless steel was utterly cold. He knew there were faces watching him through the porthole windows, but he didn’t dare to look at them. They were blind faces – faces with eyes like the eyes of freshly boiled fish.

  Don’t go inside! his sense of survival screamed. It’s the ritual kitchen, don’t go inside!

  One of the women approached him. She wore a mask like a hawk, with a solid silver beak and glossy black feathers. The eyes that looked out at him through the apertures in the mask were Velma’s. Her breasts were covered in a sleek black bodice with silver fastenings. A plaited cord of black silk was pulled tight between the lips of her vulva, so that they pouted vivid pink with shining black pubic hair. She reached out and touched his lips with her fingers, and whispered, ‘You’re one of us now, my darling. You’ve tasted the holy bread now. You’re one of us.’

  Then silently, her fingers dropped off, and fell pattering on to the floor, leaving her with nothing but a mutilated paddle instead of a hand. Her eyes smiled at him through the mask, ‘You’re one of us now,’ she repeated, and screeched with laughter. ‘One of us now! One of us!’

  And then...

  ...with a sinister swishing sound, the kitchen doors swung open. Charlie screamed. But instantly, he understood that it wasn’t he who had screamed at all. He was splattered all over with something wet, and the skiff was rocking wildly, and then Robyn tumbled over him, still screaming, and fell heavily into the stern.

  Charlie glimpsed a dwarfish, hooded figure, and eyes that stared malevolent and pale. He glimpsed a curved upraised machete, strapped to a stunted arm. He twisted around, tried to get up, overbalanced, and then the machete sang like a bird and hit the plain plank seat. Charlie stood up, crouched, breathing hard, facing the dwarf with both hands held out in front of him. His good right hand, and his left hand, from which one finger was missing.

  ‘Robyn!’ he snapped. ‘Robyn! Are you okay? Did he hurt you?’

  The dwarf cackled and danced, deliberately rocking the skiff from side to side. ‘Stupid bastard! Stupid bastard! Running away! Running away!’