Ritual (41 page)

‘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 southwest.’

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 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.

C
harlie 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!’

‘Robyn?’
Charlie repeated.
‘Robyn, for Christ’s sake!’

Robyn said, in
a high voice, ‘He hit my shoulder.’

Charlie stared
at the dwarf with renewed fury. ‘You runt, David,’ he breathed, taking two
awkward steps forward in the bottom of the skiff. But David laughed, a
ridiculous hysterical laugh, and swished his machete from side to side, and
taunted Charlie as if he were taunting a dog.

‘Come on then,
bozo. Come here and get it. You think I’m a runt? I’ll show you who’s a runt! I
gave my arms and legs to the Lord Jesus Christ, that’s how much of a runt I am!
Would you dare do that? Would you give your cock and your balls to the Lord
Jesus Christ? That’s what I did! I cut them off myself, with a big sharp knife,
and I ate them! You can’t do anything to me that I haven’t already done to
myself, bozo, so you listen
good
. I’m going to kill
you, you and your harlot too! I’m going to cut you into little pieces, the same
way I did with Mrs Kemp! I’m going to drink your blood, bozo! I’m going to
drink it out of your arteries while you’re still alive! You got me? So come on
here, come on – and make me happy!’

Charlie
remained crouched in the middle of the skiff, watching the dwarf intently,
lifting first one hand and then the other to give the impression that he was
skilled in some kind of martial art.

He wanted to
say all kinds of things to David to psyche him out, but somehow the words wouldn’t
come. The only noises he could make
was
a series of
attenuated burps. Fear, he thought. I’m afraid.

Tm going to
take your manhood first,’ the dwarf promised him, whistling his machete around
his head.
‘Your manhood – and then your head.
Just
think how pleased Mme Musette is going to be, if I bring her your head.’

‘You asshole,’
snarled Charlie. ‘You couldn’t even go the whole way, could you, and do a good
job of killing yourself?’

The dwarf let
out a noise that was halfway between a retch and a scream and hobbled violently
towards Charlie with his machete swinging. Charlie threw himself sideways out
of the skiff, splashing noisily into the muddy water under the bridge, and the
dwarf toppled after him, still screaming. Robyn fell into the water, too,
clutching her injured shoulder; but Charlie knew that it was only three or four
feet deep, and that she wouldn’t come to any.
serious
harm.

For David the
dwarf, however, the water was overwhelming, and his scream of fury turned to a
gasp of shock. Charlie immediately waded towards him, with a surge of muddy
wash, and gripped the stump to which his machete was strapped. David bucked and
jumped and heaved his amputated limbs, but Charlie smacked him hard in the side
of the face, and twisted the machete free of its leather strap. He tossed it
away, into the water, and it skipped just once on the surface before sinking.

David
screeched, ‘Heretic! Heretic! Bastard!
Heretic!’ in a voice
that sounded completely unreal.

But then
Charlie seized hold of the back of his neck, and forced his head under the
water, into the mud. David struggled and thrashed like a maniac. Charlie found
it almost impossible to hold him. But he knew that if he didn’t kill David now,
he would return time after time to haunt him, and that in the end he would
destroy him, and Martin, and Robyn too. With that determination firing him up,
he kept David’s face pressed deep into the mud, two feet below the water, and
he held him there and he held him there and he wasn’t going to let him go for
anything.

David struggled
and struggled, but gradually his convulsions became weaker, and more spasmodic.
His back arched in one final shudder, and then he floated face down in the
water, nudged by the current, a torso with stumps for arms and legs, wrapped in
a soaking robe. A dwarfish parody of Ophelia, ‘Till that her garments, heavy
with their drink, / Pulfd the poor wretch from her melodious lay /
To
muddy death.’

Juddering with
cold and exertion, Charlie waded his way back around the skiff. Robyn had pulled
herself up on to the muddy bank of the bayou, underneath the trailing vines,
and she was pressing her hand over her shoulder where David had cut her. She
was white-faced, and shaking.

Charlie sloshed
up to her through thigh-deep mud and put his arm around her and held her very
close. ‘It’s all right. You don’t have anything to worry about. He’s dead.’

Neither of them
turned to watch David’s body float like
a water
-sodden
cotton bale out from under the bridge and slowly away down the bayou. Charlie
carefully opened Robyn’s blood-soaked blouse and lifted her hand away from her
wound. It was a vicious, blunt, nasty cut, and there was no doubt that it
needed stitches. But David had missed her vital arteries, and chopped his
machete into nothing but muscle and bone. She was lucky: a second blow could
have caught her in the skull.