The Satanist

by Dennis Wheatley

  But at this hour there was little traffic and the American drove skilfully and fast. At both Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner the lights favoured him; without once having had to pull up they turned north and ran smoothly through the Park. At Marble Arch she had had her chance. If she had been her normal self she would have taken it; but the succession of crises she had been through that evening had left her still half dazed and mentally exhausted.

  As the car slid to a standstill, he whisked out his cigarette case and a lighter. Holding them out to her he told her to help herself and light a cigarette for him. It was then that her mental reactions, having slowed down, betrayed her. Instead of ignoring him and making her bid for freedom, she automatically took the case and lighter. With both hands occupied she was rendered temporarily as helpless as if she had been handcuffed. For a moment she thought of throwing the things back at him or dropping them; but, before she could nerve herself to take the plunge, the traffic lights turned orange.

  She lit a cigarette for him but did not take one for herself. While the car sped up the Edgware Road she lay back and shut her eyes. Tears welled from their corners as she upbraided herself for her lack of resolution. She knew by then that she was beaten; that she was no longer capable of making the violent effort necessary to give her even a chance of getting away. She tried to console herself with the thought that, in spite of all she had gone through that evening, she had been incredibly lucky. She had escaped being strangled by Abaddon, being raped by Ratnadatta, and being made a prize in a lottery for a number of other men after her initiation as a Sister of the Ram. Perhaps her luck would still hold and some unforeseen occurrence prevent the American from having his way with her. If not, he was, anyway, only one man and a fine, clean-limbed, fiercely handsome specimen of manhood at that. Mental fatigue dulled her concern about what might happen to her when they reached their destination, and she resigned herself to the belief that she had now become the plaything of Fate.

  He, meanwhile, thought she had fallen asleep; so he refrained from talking to her. And, in fact, before they were clear of the suburbs of London, nature did take charge. Fears, hopes, memories, all became submerged under the urgent demand of her brain for rest and for the next hour she slept soundly, untroubled by even the suggestion of a dream.

  When he woke her the car was stationary before the porch of a house. It had been raining and she smelt the fresh scent of the wet on grass and conifers. As she got out she glimpsed a stretch of lawn and a big cedar caught in the headlights of the car. He had already rung the bell. After a few minutes lights went on, there came the sound of bolts being drawn back, and the door was opened by a big negro in a dressing-gown. He murmured apologetically:

  'I wern't expectin' you back, boss.'

  'No matter, Jim,' his master replied. 'Rout out Iziah and tell him to take the car round to the garage. Then you can both get back to bed. We'll look after ourselves.'

  In the lighted hall Mary had a chance to get a really good look at the man into whose power she had now fallen. Although she was a little above the average height for a woman, her head came up only to his shoulder. His face had a reddish tan, his eyes were black as sloes and, as he grinned down at her, he exposed a mouthful of strong, ivory-white teeth.

  'Honey, your sleep's done you good,' he told her. 'You're looking fine now, just fine. All you need is an underdone steak and a carafe of red wine to make you feel like the Queen of Sheba. But you'll have to make do for tonight with what we can find in the Frigidaire. Come along now, this way to the cookhouse.'

  He led her down a passage to a twenty-foot square kitchen, with a scullery and larder, both of ample size, beyond it. They were equipped with every modern device that could help to provide good food and easy service: a huge deep freeze, a giant fridge, a double-width automatically-controlled cooker, a double sink, dish-washer, mix and whip, and numerous other gadgets. Waving a ten-inch long hand round, her host said:

  'This place was quaint before I moved in. All of thirty years out of date. But I soon fixed it. What are dollars for 'cept to make life different from dressing in a bearskin and living in a cave. I put things right in no time, and shipped over a team of housetrained coloured boys to look after me.'

  Throwing open one door of the fridge he went on: 'Now, what'll you have: jellied eels, smoked salmon, cold fried fish Yiddish style, prawns in aspic, Russian salad, stuffed tomatoes? And in the larder there'll be a raft of other things: cold meat, onion pie, gherkins, pickled walnuts and lots else.'

  They selected several dishes and put them on the kitchen table. He showed Mary where the plates and cutlery were kept, so that she could lay up two places, then took from the other side of the fridge a bottle of champagne and two of stout, by mixing which in a big jug he made up two quarts of Chancellor Bismarck's favourite tipple, usually known as Black Velvet.

  Mary had had no dinner, so as soon as they sat down she suddenly felt hungry. He encouraged her to eat and drink, and himself ate with obvious enjoyment a supper that three normal-sized men would have found more than enough if shared between them. In less than half an hour, the jug that held the Black Velvet was empty.

  Meanwhile, between great mouthfuls of food, and often while still chewing noisily, he talked and laughed, as gaily as a schoolboy at an end-of-term dormitory feast. There was nothing about him to remind Mary that he was a Satanist. Temporarily she entirely forgot that and, infected by his enormous zest for life, found herself talking and laughing with him.

  When they had finished eating, she instinctively suggested that they should wash up; but he roared with laughter and said, 'My! so you're a good squaw too! Guess you've got everything. But you don't have to bother, honey. No ma'm, not in my menage. What do I hire my team of boys for?'

  Stooping suddenly he threw a great arm round her, low down under her behind, and pitched her, as though she had weighed no more than a child, over his right shoulder. With his left hand he switched off and on the several lights as he carried her upstairs, singing cheerfully meanwhile a couple of verses of that favourite American bawdy song, 'Frankie and Johnny were lovers'.

  When he had set her down in the bedroom with the olive-wood furniture, she had made no attempt to get away. Such an attempt would, in any case, have been utterly futile; but her sound sleep on the run down from London had had the effect of forming a psychological barrier in her mind between all that had happened earlier that night and the present. She no longer felt any fear, the good food and Black Velvet had recruited her strength, and either the potency of the latter or the delayed effects of the aphrodisiacs she had been given earlier expunged from her mind the awareness that the wickedly handsome man who towered above her was a Satanist and, perhaps, a murderer.

  Twelve hours later, as she lay in the big bed, now completely sober and again the prey of anxious speculation about her future, she thought of that; but she had to admit that she could not plead as an excuse to herself that she had been raped. That he would have raped her had she resisted she had no doubt at all; but she had not resisted. On the contrary, at his first kiss she had suddenly let herself go and, apart from intervals when he had twice gone downstairs to fetch up champagne and a cold duck that they had eaten in their fingers, she had spent half the night meeting his seemingly insatiable passion.

  She felt now that she ought to be ashamed of herself. Not for having enjoyed, after several months' abstinence, having again slept with a man, but because he was the sort of man he was. Although she had been prepared to submit, if need be, to the embrace of some Satanist during an initiation ceremony, she had expected that to be swiftly over. That, too, could have been excused as necessary to the furtherance of her plan to ferret out the secrets of the Brotherhood. But the way she had spent the night had brought her no nearer to doing that than she had been the previous evening.

  At that moment her companion woke, gave her a slow smile, then suddenly thrust a huge arm beneath her and pulled her towards him.

  'No!' she gasped
. 'No! Please! I'm feeling awful. Please let me sleep a little longer.'

  Her protest was useless. He only laughed and cried, 'Lots of time for sleep later, honey. It's Sunday. We'll stay put here all day.'

  She tried to thrust him off but, as his black eyes bored down into her blue ones, her will became as weak as water. With a sigh of mingled self-reproach and resignation, she let herself respond to his kiss.

  When he released her he lit a cigarette, took a few puffs at it, then jumped out of bed. Striding to the door he threw it open and, a bronzed olympian figure, marched out on to the landing. From it he bellowed, 'Jim! Buster! Breakfast! And make it plenty. I could eat a horse. Get moving!'

  The sounds of running feet and cheerful cries came from below in response. Swinging back into the room, he slammed the door behind him, pointed to another and said: 'Go help yourself to a wash if you want, honey. Them coons know I don't stand for being kept waiting. The chow'll be here soon as the stove can fry the eggs.'

  Eggs he had said and eggs he meant. Eight of them, flanked by a plentiful supply of bacon and sausages, arrived still sizzling on a big hot-dish. Beside it, on the travelling table that had been wheeled in while she was in the bathroom, were a great aluminium drum of steaming coffee, a jug of cream, toast, marmalade, butter and fruit. The sight and smell of them suddenly made her feel ravenously hungry; so she did justice to the ample helpings he gave her while he demolished the greater part of what remained.

  She had already noticed that facing the end of the bed there was an outsized television set. When they had finished eating he pushed the wheeled tray out on to the landing and turned on the set. They were just in time for the one o'clock news. Nothing of startling importance had occurred so the alarms and excursions reported were mainly developments of matters that had already occupied headlines. As Mary listened to further particulars of an air-liner disaster that had happened the day before, she could hardly believe that she was not dreaming.

  To her, yesterday seemed weeks ago; yet it was barely twenty-four hours since she had received Barney's roses and been so furious with him for letting her down. She wondered what he would say if he could see her now, and felt certain that the sight of her, propped up against the pillows with the arm of her big companion cast casually round her shoulders, would send him into a frenzy of jealous rage. So she wished that he could see her. It would serve 'his lordship' right for having gambled on her liking him enough to accept any excuse he might cook up as cover for his having gone off for the week-end with some other woman - as she was fully convinced he had.

  For a few minutes she tried to guess what the other woman was like but, having not a vestige of information to go on, she soon realized the absurdity of attempting to do so. Mentally shrugging it off, she thought with sudden vicious satisfaction, 'Anyway, whatever her colouring and vital statistics, I bet she hasn't as much physical attraction as this super-man who has got hold of me'.

  Next moment she was appalled at her own thought. The man beside her was a criminal. As a professed Satanist he must have committed all sorts of abominations and evil deeds. He had even implied, while surveying her and about to rescue her from Ratnadatta, that he was a white-slaver. She was, at the moment, in the position of a white-slave to him. To have mentally admitted that she had allowed herself to be attracted to such a man now seemed a terrible degradation. It was the sort of sin against the higher nature which could be wiped out only by taking the veil. She began to wonder miserably if she would ever again be able to look a decent man in the face.

  But the giant on whose shoulder her head was resting was anything but miserable. With the breakfast, on the lower shelf of the wheeled table, the Sunday papers had been brought up. He had switched off the T.V. and was reading them. Now and then he read extracts aloud to her with either humorous or salacious comment. Presently he came to an article on the British Government's attitude towards Communist China and began to sneer at the British as a dirty lot of double-crossers who would have gone down the drain long ago had it not been for the innocent belief of the Americans that there was something like old brandy about them in that, however much they might cost, they paid for keeping.

  Mary, being full-blooded Irish, shared the political schizophrenia which is characteristic of a great part of that people. She had been brought up to believe that the British were the root of all evil but that the Empire as a whole, to the building of which the Irish had made such a great contribution, was a thing that, if need be, one should lay down one's life for; and woe betide any foreigner who had the impudence to belittle either its past achievements or present power to find the best answer to difficult situations which were constantly arising all over the world.

  She knew little about international politics but enough to tell him that, if Churchill had had his way, and Roosevelt not been a gullible fool, Stalin would never have been allowed to get his claws on Central Europe; so the massacre of the Hungarians and the enslavement of millions of Czechs, Poles and Rumanians lay at America's door. And that if only their sanctimonious moron, Dulles, had not prevented the British from putting in a 'stitch in time' at Suez, hundreds of honest, intelligent Arabs would not since have been murdered and the whole of the Middle East fallen under Soviet influence.

  Amazed and intrigued by her vehemence he entered into a man to man argument with her and, although she spoke more from instinct than from knowledge, he found it impossible to reason soundly against her reiterated assertion that the 'proof of the pudding was in the eating' and that he had only to look at the shrinkage of the territories free from Communist domination, since the United States had assumed world leadership, to realize what a mess his countrymen had made of things. On the other hand, she could not honestly deny his charge that, when Britain had had the leadership of affairs between the wars, she had done little better, and that her refusal to back the French, when they wanted forcibly to resist the re-entry of the Germans into the Rhineland, had been the key error from which had sprung Hitler's confidence that he could tear up Treaties with impunity, and so led to the Second World War.

  This acrimonious discussion occupied them until three o'clock then, by mutual consent, they broke it off and, turning over, went to sleep again. Soon after five they roused up and went into the bathroom. He had a shower while she had a bath and when she had finished, instead of getting back into bed, she began to put her clothes on. Suddenly realizing what she was doing, he exclaimed: 'Hi, what's the big idea?'

  Endeavouring to make her voice sound indifferent, she replied:

  'You said last night that today you meant to take me back to the Temple, and there's not much of the day left; so I thought we would be starting soon now.'

  Actually the last thing she wanted was ever to enter the Temple again, but knowing that the Sabbats took place only on Saturdays she was hoping to persuade him that there was no point in his delivering her there so, instead, he should drop her at her own flat; or, if that failed, once they were back in London she would find a better chance than she had the night before to get free of him.

  'You sound as though you want to go back,' he flung at her with a frown.

  'No,' she lied hastily. 'Of course not. But I thought you had made yourself liable to some sort of penalty for having carried me off, and that the longer you kept me the heavier it would be.'

  His frown deepened into a scowl. 'Yeah. I'll have to pay a forfeit; but not for having snatched you. The Great Ram is quite a buddy of mine, so I can square that one with him. It's cutting the Walpurgis Eve party that's put me in the red.'

  'If you hadn't been so impatient . . .' she began.

  'I know. I know. Sure, I could have parked you at your flat and picked you up this morning. But patience isn't in my make-up. If it had been I'd not have got halfway up to where I am now.'

  She shrugged. 'Well, you've had what you wanted as far as I'm concerned. I hope it's been worth it.'

  'And how!' His scowl gave place to a sudden grin. 'Sure; sure. But mighty few o
f the best-looking dolls have anything inside their heads. And you've got everything, honey. I'm a man who likes to get fresh angles on things, and if the angles come from someone who's got the right kind of curves as well, what more could a guy want? I want to see a lot more of you yet; so how about staying on here with me for a while?'

  At that her hopes of being through with him in a few hours' time sank to zero. But she dared not show it. Although his latest idea had been couched in the form of an invitation, she knew that he would not allow her to refuse it, and that her only chance of getting away now lay in not letting him suspect that she wanted to. It meant that she would have to spend at least one more night with him, but it seemed certain that tomorrow he would have to leave the house to attend to his duties, which would then give her a good chance to escape. Summoning up a smile, she said:

  'Yes, I'd love to do that. I'm sure we'll find lots to talk about.'

  'Fine oh!' He gave her a resounding slap on the bottom. 'Would you like to eat up here or downstairs?'

  'Let's go downstairs, and you can show me the rest of the house.'

  Half an hour later he was mixing Vodka Martinis for them in a sitting-room below the big bedroom. Like the other rooms it had been furnished expensively, but without taste. In the bay window stood another big television set, a separate radio and a walnut gramophone cabinet for long-playing records. As he handed her a drink she said:

  'You know, I don't even know your name!'

  'Among the blessed of our Lord Satan, I'm known as "Twisting Snake",' he replied with a grin. 'But in these parts it's Colonel Henrik G. Washington of the U.S.A.A.F.; though, among themselves, my boys call me "that big bastard Wash".'