Ritual. Part 17

Robyn said, 'Do one thing for me. Book three plane tickets.'

'We're going to California, and then to Mexico. I hope you understand that. I'm not at all sure we're ever coming back.'

'Ever since Carl, I've learned to take one day at a time.'

'Carl was the spectacularly messy love affair?'

'Carl was Adolf Hitler reincarnated as Robert Redford.'

Charlie knew at that moment that something was happening between Robyn and himself; that they were both strongly attracted to each other. With luck, and a little prayer, the time might come when they could let that feeling of attraction loose. But right now, Charlie's overwhelming priority was 176.

rescuing Martin. He did nothing more than lean forward and kiss Robyn on the forehead, and squeeze her hand again, and tell her, Til be waiting to hear from you, right? And thanks for everything. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being sane.'

'Carl never said that I was sane.'

'Human society is riddled with bozos.'

Charlie said goodnight to Mr and Mrs Harris and Robyn came to the kerb to see him off.

'Don't stay out here,' he told her. 'You'll catch cold.'

'Tomorrow we're going to rescue your son like the Three Musketeers, and tonight you're worried about me catching cold?'

'Goodnight, Robyn.' He smiled, and blew her a kiss. He U-turned in the road, and drove off. He glanced in his rear-view mirror as he reached the intersection, and she was still standing by the fence watching him go. He didn't know whether to feel happy or apprehensive. He switched on the radio and listened to Tina Turner.

He reached Alien's Corners at half past midnight. The sloping green was silver under the full moon. The streets and the buildings were silver, too. Charlie was reminded of a poem his schoolteacher used to read when he was small, about the moon turning everything to silver. He parked outside Mrs Kemp's house, switched off the radio, and dry-washed his face with his hands. For the first time since he had discovered that Martin was missing, he allowed himself to admit that he was totally exhausted.

He was about to climb out of the car when he thought he saw something flicker beside the house. He frowned, and peered into the shadows. There was nothing there. He got out, closed the car door as quietly as he could, and locked it. It was then that he heard a rustling, scurrying sound, only about thirty or forty feet to his left, beside the trees. He froze, and stared, and listened intently. Slowly, silently, now the moon / Walks the night in her silver shoon - 177.

He took one step towards the front gate. Without any warning, the dwarfish hooded figure rushed out of the shadows straight towards him, in a hopping, tumbling, headlong gait, and collided with his legs. He fell backwards against the car, jabbing his hand up as he did so to push the dwarf away. But then he saw the hooked machete lifted in to the moonlight, and he twisted sideways just as the metal blade clanged against the hood of the car, and rolled across the sidewalk into the gutter.

The dwarf hissed, and came rushing after him again. Charlie kicked at him, and felt his foot strike at the solid meat of his stubby thigh. The machete whistled, but Charlie heaved himself away, and the blade jarred against the sidewalk.

With one more roll, Charlie somehow managed to scramble up on to his feet. The dwarf advanced, swinging the machete from side to side as if he were cutting gra.s.s, panting and whispering under his breath. All that Charlie could see inside the shadow of his hood was a pale nose and two glittering eyes.

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' Charlie breathed at him. 'You sawn-off runt.'

The dwarf let out a piercing, effeminate shriek, and rushed at Charlie yet again. Charlie backed and dodged sideways, but the machete sang into his left thigh, wheeooo-smakk! and even though Charlie felt no pain, he knew that he was cut. He pivoted around and punched the dwarf in the side of his hood, so hard that the dwarf somersaulted over on to the ground.

'Come on, you runt!' Charlie yelled at him. 'Come on, if that's what you want! You want blood? All right, then, you can have some blood! Come on, runt!'

The dwarf clung on to the side of Charlie's car in an effort to heave himself back up on to his feet. Charlie kicked him mercilessly in the ribs, and he dropped to the sidewalk again. Then Charlie stepped on to his arm and knocked the machete out of his reach with a sideways sweep of his foot, and then reached down and seized hold of the dwarfs robes.

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'You G.o.dd.a.m.ned half-a.s.sed -!' he began. But the dwarf suddenly lifted his arms and dropped right out of his robes, falling heavily on to the ground with a noise like a sack of beets.

'Scaaaarrccchh!' the dwarf screamed, and glared at Charlie in venomous hate. Charlie stood where he was, paralyzed, still clutching the dwarfs discarded robes. The dwarf- the creature that M. Musette had called 'David' - was standing in front of him wearing nothing but a tight cotton waistband.

David was hideously white-faced, but his head was normal size. He was a mature young man of twenty-four or twenty-five, with wiry mid-brown hair. It was the sight of his body that had stopped Charlie dead, however. His arms had been severed below the elbows. He had been holding his machete by means of a leather strap around his right stump. His legs had been severed halfway down his thighs, and his stumps were protected by leather cups padded with the fibrous material that lined the hoods of cars. There were ugly scars and indentations all over his torso, where he must have cut out flesh for the Celestine rituals; but worst of all, his genitals were missing. There was nothing but a bush of pubic hair, beneath which Charlie glimpsed a grotesquely twisted scar, a male v.a.g.i.n.a made out of purple knots. He took in every horrifying physical detail of this thing called David in the same way that he had made an instantaneous check often fingers and ten toes the moment that Martin had been born.

'I will murder you, I promise!' the dwarf shrieked at him, all teeth and spittle. Then he s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 179.

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 cas.e.m.e.nts 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 n.o.body 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 bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s bedhead, and he could see one of Mrs Kemp's feet lying on its side by the bureau, 180.

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 n.o.body 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 b.u.mping over gra.s.s 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 pa.s.senger seat and reclined it. Then he loosened his necktie and tried to make 181.

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.

182.

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.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

They 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.'

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'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-b.i.t.c.h, believe me.'

They drove through Alien's Corners without stopping and made their way up towards the Qua.s.sapaug 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 a.s.sailant who had long since hurried away.

The Cobra's tyres complained as they climbed the cork- 186.

screw 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 b.u.t.ton 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.

'M. Musette,' said Charlie, 'it seems that I owe you an apology.'