Ritual (25 page)

‘I will murder
you, I promise!’ the dwarf shrieked at him, all teeth and spittle. Then he
snatched at his robes, tearing them out of Charlie’s grasp, and hopped off into
the shadow of the trees.

Charlie stood
where he was, breathing deeply. His left trouser leg was stained dark with
blood, and glistening in the moonlight. He picked up the dwarfs machete, and
limped slowly up to the house.

The front door
was slightly ajar. Charlie knew straight away that something was wrong here,
because Mrs Kemp had always been security conscious. He pushed open the door
and hobbled inside, hefting the machete in his right hand. ‘Mrs Kemp?’ he
called. ‘Are you okay? It’s Charlie, Mrs Kemp! Charlie McLean!’

There was no
reply. Charlie listened for a few seconds,
then
limped
into the kitchen to see if Mrs Kemp was there. He switched on the fluorescent
lights. They flickered and jolted and then came on full. The kitchen was
deserted, but there was a smear of blood across the worktop, next to the rice
jars. ‘Mrs Kemp?’ He went back to the hallway and climbed the stairs. The moon
looked in through the window. One by one the casements catch /
Her
beams beneath the silvery thatch.

Charlie reached
the landing and hesitated, listening, listening, but there was no sound to be
heard except a gurgling in the plumbing, and the faraway drone of an aeroplane.

‘Mrs Kemp, it’s
Charlie,’ he said, although his voice was so hushed now that nobody could have
heard it.

He said ‘Mrs
Kemp’ for the very last time as he opened her bedroom door and saw what the
dwarf had done to her. After that, there was no point at all in calling her
name.

Mrs Kemp’s
brass bed was a grisly raft of blood and chopped-up flesh. The stench of bile
and blood and faeces was stunning. Mrs Kemp’s head had been almost completely
severed, and was wedged between the side of the bed and the nightstand, staring
wildly at nothing. All that connected her head to her torso was a thin web of
skin, like the skin of a chicken’s neck. Her chest had been hacked apart, her
breastbone broken, and her heart and her lungs and her liver chopped into
glistening ribbons. Her arms rose stiffly up on either side of her ribcage as
if she were still trying to protect herself from the frenzied blows of the
dwarfs
machete.

Charlie
couldn’t quite work out what had happened to the rest of her, and didn’t want
to try. He could see heavy loops of pale intestine wound around the brass
bedhead, and he could see one of Mrs Kemp’s feet lying on its side by the
bureau, severed, but still wearing its pink slipper. He closed the door and then
he stood on the landing and closed his eyes. He told himself that he was
probably entering a state of shock; but that he had to keep on functioning, no
matter what. The machete dropped out of his fingers on to the floor, and of
course it didn’t occur to him that the handle now bore his fingerprints; and
that the last person who had been seen in Mrs Kemp’s house, by no less a
witness than Sheriff Norman Podmore, was him.

All he could
think of was the Celestines; and the fact that they were prepared to kill people
in order to protect
themselves
.
Mrs
Kemp, and him, too.
And nobody would protect him against them, not even
the police.

He stumbled
downstairs, and went out of the front door, slamming it hard behind him.

Somehow he
found himself sitting in the driving seat of his car. He started up the engine,
turned around, and headed out of Alien’s Corners in the direction of Waterbury.

The moon was
gone now. Shock and exhaustion began to overwhelm him. He swerved from one side
of the road to the other, and the Oldsmobile’s suspension groaned with every
swerve. It was dark out there, he couldn’t see anything. Then he narrowly
missed a roadside tree, his wheels bumping over grass hummocks and slews of
gravel, and he pulled the car to a stop beside the road.

‘You’re going
to kill yourself,’ he told his reflection in the rear-view mirror.

Hm, retorted
his reflection,
They’re
going to kill you anyway. It
depends what kind of death you prefer. A highway accident – restaurant prodnose
dies in auto smash – or a homicide – food scrutineer chopped into American
steak.

He wanted to go
on, but he forced himself to switch off the engine and douse the headlights. He
needed sleep and he needed it badly. He shifted himself into the passenger seat
and reclined it.

Then he loosened
his necktie and tried to make himself comfortable. Even an hour’s sleep would
be better than no sleep at all.

He dozed and
dreamed. He was trying to find his way through a furniture store, heaped high
with musty antique tables and bureaux and chairs with twisty legs. His face was
reflected in a dozen dusty mirrors. His feet made a reluctant swishing noise on
the parquet floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a small figure in
a hood, and for an instant he caught the shine of a curved machete. He began to
hurry between the stacks of furniture, turning left and then right and then
left again. A high voice kept screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Save me!’ In one of the
mirrors he saw the machete lifted up and down in a brutal chopping motion, and
fingers go flying through the air.

He woke up
shouting. He sat up. He must have been sleeping for three or four hours,
because the sky was already pale. He opened the door and climbed stiffly out of
the car and stretched.

The morning air
felt cold on his sweaty underarms. He would have done anything for a hot cup of
coffee and a shower. Maybe Robyn could oblige when he reached Water-bury.

He sat behind
the wheel and started up the Oldsmobile’s engine. He thought about Mrs Kemp and
wondered whether he ought to go back to Alien’s Corners and report her murder
to the sheriff. But a small voice in the back of his head warned him off. If he
went to the sheriff now, the sheriff would delay him all day with questions and
police procedure, and that was the last thing he wanted.

Apart from
that, he wasn’t sure how much he could trust Sheriff Podmore. Who else, apart
from Charlie himself, had known that Mrs Kemp was out for revenge against the
Celestines?

His most urgent
priority was not a murdered woman whom he had scarcely known, but his son
Martin. He steered back on to the road again and headed for Waterbury.

Driving through
Thomaston, he was observed from the roadside by two police officers in a parked
patrol car. He kept checking them in his rear-view mirror as he headed south,
but they stayed where they were, and made no attempt to follow him. The chances
were that Mrs Kemp’s body hadn’t been found yet; and with any luck Charlie
would be able to rescue Martin and get clear away from Connecticut before it
was.

He switched on
the car radio. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were playing ‘Hollywood
Nights’. Charlie sang along with it for a while. ‘Oh, those Hollywood nights...
in those Hollywood hills ,..!’ but as he approached the outskirts of Waterbury
he fell silent, like a man who recognizes that his destiny is about to turn,
and that life and death are sitting on his shoulders like a pair of predatory
hawks.

T
hey drew up outside a plain 19305 house with maroon-painted
shutters and a scruffy front yard and Bob Garrett appeared almost immediately
on the front porch in a blue
Sears
suit with a fawn
raincoat folded over his arm. He walked quickly towards them with his free arm
swinging.

Charlie climbed
out of the Cobra and folded the front seat forward so that Bob could climb into
the back seat.

Robyn pulled
away from the side of the road and headed north toward Hotchkissville. Bob
leaned forward from the back seat and introduced himself. ‘You’re early,’ he
said, with a nervous laugh. He had a simple, uncomplicated face with pale blue
eyes and a cow’s-lick fringe combed back from his forehead and a neatly-clipped
moustache.

‘I’m real glad
you decided to come,’ Charlie told him.

‘I knew I was
going to, the second you asked me. I just had to think about it, was
all.
I had to think whether I wanted all those memories
brought back. It’s the memories that hurt the most.’

‘I’m sorry,’
said Charlie. ‘Maybe this is your moment to get your own back.’

‘Do you have a
gun?’ asked Bob.

Charlie reached
forward to the glove compartment and produced it. A hefty weapon for a
newspaper editor: a Colt .45 automatic, capable of blowing a hole through five
men standing in a line.

‘Do you know
how to use it?’ asked Bob.

‘I think so,’
Charlie told him. ‘You point it at anybody who happens to be annoying you, and
you pull the trigger. Every American kid knows that.’

‘Well, you’ve
just about got it,’ said Bob. ‘The question is
,
will
you have the courage to pull the trigger?’

He sat back,
and watched the Connecticut countryside flashing past the window. Charlie
looked at Robyn and made a face. ‘Rambo the Second,’ she whispered.

Charlie gave
her a philosophical smile. ‘Maybe that’s what we need.’

‘Have you
worked out how we’re going to get into
Le
Reposoir
?’ asked Bob.

‘We’re going to
walk in,’ said Charlie.

‘Walk in? You
think they’re going to let you?’

‘They’re not
going to let me break my way in, are they?’

‘Well, I guess
not,’ said Bob, in that deep, hesitant voice. ‘I guess if you can swing it,
walking in is the best way. That’s the way I did it, anyhow.’

‘The most
important thing is to take them by surprise,’ said Charlie. ‘It shouldn’t take
more than a couple of minutes to get hold of Martin and drag him out of the
house, but we have to be fast and we have to work together.’

‘So tell me
what you’re planning to do,’ said Bob.’

‘I’m going to
walk straight in there and tell them that I’ve seen the light, and that I want
to join the Celestines, too.’

‘You think
they’re going to buy that?’ asked Bob, leaning his elbows on the front seats.

‘Is there any
reason why they shouldn’t? They have two major weaknesses – their fanaticism
and their over-confidence. Fanatics always find it hard to believe that other
people don’t agree with their point of view. They find it a great deal easier to
accept the idea that you’ve seen the light, and been won over. And that’s
exactly what I’m going to tell them. If eating himself alive is good enough for
my son, then
it’s
good enough for me.’

‘I’m glad you
can joke about it,’ said Robyn.

‘I’m not joking,’
said Charlie. ‘If those people think for one moment that I’m threatening them,
they’ll kill me.’

‘You sound like
you know something that we don’t,’ Bob said.

Charlie said,
‘Let me put it this way. I didn’t get this cut on my leg by accident.’

Robyn glanced
at him as she drove. ‘You told mom that it was an accident.’

‘Sure I did, I
didn’t want to upset her. And she bandaged it up so well.’

‘What happened?
Did somebody attack you?’

‘That dwarf –
you remember the one I was telling you about? He was waiting for me when I got
back to Alien’s Corners last night.’

‘Why didn’t you
tell me straight away?’

‘With your parents straining their ears?
Come on, I’m not
saying they’re interfering or anything, but they are interested in finding out
what kind of a man their daughter is working with, all of a sudden. I didn’t
want them to get upset, that’s all.’

‘I’ve seen that
dwarf, too,’ said Bob. ‘Well he’s not exactly a dwarf, is he? He wasn’t born
like that. He cut off his arms and legs.’

‘That’s right,’
Charlie nodded. ‘And he’s a mean son-of-a-bitch, believe me.’

They drove
through Alien’s Corners without stopping and made their way up towards the
Quassapaug Road. Charlie managed to catch a glimpse of Mrs Kemp’s house; but
there were no police cars outside, no crowds, and no ambulance. Mrs Kemp’s body
probably hadn’t been discovered yet, and that suited him fine, although the
guilt and the pain that he felt for Mrs Kemp were as red-raw as fresh-cut meat.
He didn’t allow himself to think about her hacked-up body, soaking into the
mattress. He didn’t allow himself to think about her arms, still raised in
rigor mortis, fighting off an assailant who had long since hurried away.

The Cobra’s
tyres complained as they climbed the corkscrew towards
Le Reposoir
. The sky was as dark as a Rembrandt painting; the trees
were as pale as faces. Robyn said, ‘Just about now, my editor’s going to look
in his desk and realize that his gun has gone.’

‘He won’t
suspect you, though, will
he
?’

‘Not to begin
with. But one of our advertising people came into the editorial offices while I
was looking through his desk.’

Charlie patted
his breast pocket. ‘Don’t worry. I bought three tickets to San Diego. After
that, we can make our way down to Baja, and thence into oblivion. Your editor
won’t be able to find you in a thousand years.’

They reached
the gates of
Le Reposoir
sooner than
Charlie expected. Robyn slewed the Cobra around in a wide curve, and shut off
the engine. Charlie took the .45, turned it one way, then the other, then
pushed it into his inside pocket. He looked back at Bob. ‘Are you ready? We
want to take this real easy, a step at a time.’

‘I’m ready,’
Bob told him.

Charlie got out
of the car, and went over to the intercom. He pressed the call button and
waited for somebody to answer. This time, he didn’t have to wait long.

‘Mr McLean? I’m
surprised to see you back so soon.’ It was the voice of M. Musette, but careful
this time, and suspicious.