- Ritual by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-06-01T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In the small hours of the night, when the pain became intolerable, a nurse appeared in a white winged wimple like the ghost of an albatross flying out of the darkness. Through half-closed eyes he saw the glint of a needle. Then she had injected him; and it was only a few minutes before the pain ebbed away, and dark waves of relaxation began to lift him buoyantly into the ocean of the night.

He dreamed about the strange high-ceilinged restaurant again, with the waiters who were hooded like monks, just like he had

at Mrs Kemp's, and even though he was asleep he was conscious that the dream had been curiously prophetic. He saw the men in their starched shirt fronts and immaculate tail coats. He saw the mysterious and alluring women, some veiled, some wearing masks made of bird's feathers, most of them naked. One woman was standing by the doorway, her thighs and genitals tightly bound with thin leather straps, her large breasts completely covered with tattoos. She turned and looked at Charlie, and her face was the face of Mme Musette. In front of his eyes, she fell apart in great lumps of human clay.

A monk-waiter brought his meal, underneath a shiny dish cover.

'Your dinner, sir,' he whispered, and lifted the cover. Charlie knew what he was going to see there, and screamed.

He screamed, but he was drugged with morphine, and he didn't wake up. Instead, one dream closed and another dream opened. He found himself driving along West Good Hope Road in Milwaukee. It was snowing. Everything was white.

238

The snow pattered against the

windshield and the wipers had trouble coping with it. The world crept around in silence.

He could see her on the front steps of the single-storey house as he approached. Her husband was with her. He knew what has happening even before he reached the end of their block. He could see her husband's arm rising and falling, rising and falling, like a man trying to chop down a tree. He watched her fall to the porch floor, then try to get up again.

And in his dream, he was condemned to do what he had done in real life. He drove past slowly because it was snowing, staring all the time at the one woman he had really loved being beaten by her husband. And as she had tried to struggle to her feet, she had turned, and looked towards him, and recognized him through the partially misted window of his car, driving past without stopping as if he were a helpless passenger on a passing train. And their eyes had met and they had both known that was the very end of their love affair, and then he had turned the corner and when he managed

to back up the car and turn and drive past the house again, they were gone. In his dream, he stopped his car and got out and went up to the front door and beat at the knocker, just as he had done in real life.

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