The Devil Rides Out (19 page)

‘So the Devil feeds, too,' Rex murmured.

‘Yes,' agreed the Duke, ‘or at least the heads of his priesthood, and a gruesome meal it is if I know anything about it. A little cannibalism, my friend. It may be a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered, but I would stake anything that it is human flesh they are eating.'

As he spoke, a big cauldron was brought forward and placed before the throne. Then Mocata and the others with him each took a portion of the food which they had been eating from the table and cast it into the great iron pot. One of them threw in a round ball which met the iron with a dull thud.

Rex shuddered as he realised that the Duke was right. The round object was a human skull.

‘They're going to boil up the remains with various other things,' murmured the Duke, ‘and then each of them will be given a little flask of that awful brew at the conclusion of the ceremony, together with a pile of ashes from the wood fire they are lighting under the cauldron now. They will be able to use them for their infamous purposes throughout the year until the
next Great Sabbat takes place.'

‘Oh, Hell!' Rex protested. ‘I can't believe that they can work any harm with that human mess, however horrid it may be. It's just not reasonable.'

‘Yet you believe that the Blessed Sacrament has power for good,' De Richleau whispered. ‘This is the antithesis of the Body of Our Lord, and I assure you, Rex, that while countless wonderful miracles have been performed by the aid of the Host, terrible things can be accomplished by this blasphemous decoction.'

Rex had no deep religious feeling, but he was shocked and horrified to the depths of his being by this frightful parody of the things he had been taught to hold sacred in his childhood.

‘Dear God,' muttered the Duke, ‘they are about to commit the most appalling sacrilege. Don't look, Rex–don't look.' He buried his face in his hands and began to pray, but Rex continued to watch despite himself, his gaze held by some terrible fascination.

A great silver chalice was being passed from hand to hand, and very soon he realised the purpose to which it was being put, but could not guess the intention until it was handed back to the cat-headed man. One of the other officiating priests at the infamy produced some round white discs which Rex recognised at once as Communion Wafers–evidently stolen from some church.

In numbed horror he watched the Devil's acolytes break these into pieces and throw them into the brimming chalice, then stir the mixture with the broken crucifix and hand the resulting compound to the Goat, who, clasping it between its great cloven hoofs, suddenly tipped it up so that the whole contents was spilled upon the ground.

Suddenly, at last, the horrid silence was rent, for the whole mob surged forward shouting and screaming as though they had gone insane, to dance and stamp the fragments of the Holy Wafers into the sodden earth.

‘Phew!' Rex choked out, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. ‘This is a ghastly business. I can't stand much more of it. They're mad, stark crazy, every mother's son of them.'

‘Yes, temporarily.' The Duke looked up again. ‘This revolting spectacle represents a release of all their pent-up emotions and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success and good fortune. That is the only explanation for this terrible exhibition of human depravity which we are witnessing.'

‘Thank God Tanith's not here. She couldn't have stood it. She'd have gone mad, I know, or tried to run away. And then they'd probably have murdered her. But what
are
we going to do about Simon?'

De Richleau groaned. ‘God only knows. If I thought there were the least hope, we'd charge into this rabble and try to drag him out of it, but the second they saw us they would tear us limb from limb.'

The fire under the cauldron was burning brightly, and as the crowd moved apart Rex saw that a dozen women had now stripped themselves of their dominoes and stood stark naked in the candle-light. They formed a circle round the cauldron and, holding hands, with their backs turned to the inside of the ring, began a wild dance around it anti-clockwise towards the Devil's left.

In a few moments the whole company had stripped off their dominoes and joined in the dance, tumbling and clawing at one another before the throne, with the exception of half a dozen who sat a little on one side, each with a musical instrument, forming a small band. But the music which they made was like no other that Rex had ever heard before, and he prayed that he might never hear the like again. Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge.

To this agonising cacophony of sound the dancers, still masked, quite naked and utterly silent but for the swift movement of their feet, continued their wild, untimed gyrations so that rather than the changing pattern of an ordered ballet the scene was one of a trampling mass of bestial animal figures.

Drunk with an inverted spiritual exaltation and excess of alcohol–wild-eyed and apparently hardly conscious of each other–the hair of the women streaming disordered as they pranced, and the panting breath of the men coming in laboured gasps–they rolled and lurched, spun and gyrated, toppled, fell, picked themselves up again, and leaped with renewed frenzy in one revolting carnival of mad disorder. Then, with a final wailing screech from the violin, the band ceased and the whole party flung themselves panting and exhausted upon the ground, while the huge Goat rattled and clacked its monstrous cloven hoofs together and gave a weird laughing neigh in a mockery of applause.

De Richleau sat up quickly. ‘God help us, Rex, but we've got to do something now. When these swine have recovered their wind the next act of this horror will be the baptism of the Neophytes and, after that the foulest orgy, with every perversion the human mind is capable of conceiving. We daren't wait any longer. Once Simon is baptised, we shall have lost our last chance of saving him from permanent and literal Hell in this life and the next.'

‘I suppose it's just possible we'll put it off now they've worked themselves into this state?' Rex hazarded doubtfully.

‘Yes, they're looking pretty done at the moment,' the Duke agreed, striving to bolster up his waning courage for the desperate attempt.

‘Shall we–shall we chance it?' Rex hesitated. He too was filled with a horrible fear as to the fate which might overtake them once they left the friendly shadows to dash into that ring of evil blue light. In an effort to steady his frayed nerves, he gave a travesty of a laugh, and added: ‘The odds aren't quite so heavy against us now they've lost their trousers. No one fights his best like that.'

‘It's not the pack that I'm so frightened of, but that ghastly thing sitting on the rocks.' De Richleau's voice was hoarse and desperate. ‘The protections I have utilised may not prove strong enough to save us from the evil which is radiating from it.'

‘If we have faith,' gasped Rex, ‘won't that be enough?'

De Richleau shivered. The numbing cold which lapped up out of the hollow in icy waves seemed to sap all his strength and courage.

‘It would,' he muttered. ‘It would if we were both in a state of grace.'

At that pronouncement Rex's heart sank. He had no terrible secret crime with which to charge himself, but although circumstances had appeared to justify it at the time, both he and the Duke had taken human life, and who,
faced with the actual doorway of the other world, can say that they are utterly without sin?

Desperately now he fought to regain his normal courage. In the dell the Satanists had recovered their wind and were forming in the great semi-circle again about the throne. The chance to rescue Simon was passing with the fleeting seconds, while his friends stood crouched and tongue-tied, their minds bemused by the reek of the noxious incense which floated up from the hollow, their bodies chained by an awful, overwhelming fear.

Three figures now moved out into the open space before the Goat. Upon the left the beast-like, cat-headed high priest of Evil; upon the right Mocata, his gruesome bat's wings fluttering a little from his hunched-up shoulders; between them, naked, trembling, almost apparently in a state of collapse, they supported Simon.

‘It's now or never!' Rex choked out.

‘No–I can't do it,' moaned the Duke, burying his face in his hands and sinking to the ground. ‘I'm afraid, Rex. God forgive me, I'm afraid.'

As the blue Rolls, number OA 1217, came to rest with a sickening thud against the back of the big barn outside Easterton Village, Tanith was flung forward against the windscreen. Fortunately the Duke's cars were equipped with splinter-proof glass and so the windows remained intact, but for the moment she was half-stunned by the blow on her head and painfully ‘winded' by the wheel, which caught her in the stomach.

For a few sickening seconds she remained dazed and gasping for breath. Then she realised that she had escaped serious injury, and that the police would be on her at any moment. Her head whirling, her breath stabbing painfully, she threw open the door of the Rolls and staggered out on to the grass.

In a last desperate effort to evade capture, she lurched at an unsteady run across the coarse tussocks and just as the torches of the police appeared over the same hillock, which had slowed down the wild career of the car, she flung herself down in a ditch, sheltered by a low hedge, some thirty yards from the scene of the accident.

She paused there only long enough to regain her breath, and then began to crawl away along the runnel until it ended on the open plain. Taking a stealthy look over the hedge, she saw her pursuers were still busy examining the car, so she took a chance and ran for it, trusting in the darkness of the night to hide her from them.

After she had covered a mile she flopped exhausted to the ground, drawing short gulping breaths into her straining lungs–her heart thudding like a hammer. When she had recovered a little, she looked back to find that the village and the searching officers were now hidden from her by a sloping crest of down-land. It seemed that she had escaped–at least for the time being–and she began to wonder what she had better do.

From what she remembered of the map, the house at Chilbury where the
Satanists were gathering in preparation for holding the Great Sabbat was at least a dozen miles away. It would be impossible for her to cover that distance on foot even if she were certain of the direction in which it lay, and the fact that she was wanted by the police debarred her from trying to seek a lift in a passing car if she were able to find the main road again. In spite of her desperate attempt to reach the rendezvous in the stolen Rolls, and the frantic excitement of her escape from the police, she found to her surprise that a sudden reaction had set in, and she no longer felt that terrible driving urge to be present at the Sabbat.

Her anger against Rex had subsided. She had tricked him over the car, and he had retaliated by putting the police on her track. She realised now that he could only have done it on account of his overwhelming anxiety to prevent her from joining Mocata, and smiled to herself in the darkness as she thought again of his worried face as he had tried so hard that afternoon on the river to dissuade her from what she had only considered, till then, to be a logical step in her progress towards gaining supernatural powers.

She began to wonder seriously, for the first time, if he was not right, and that during these last months which she had spent with Madame D'Urfé her brain had become clouded almost to the point of mania by this obsession, to the exclusion of all natural and reasonable thoughts. She recalled those strange companions who were travelling the same path as herself, most of them far further advanced upon it, of whom she had seen so much in recent times. The man with the hare-lip, the one-armed Eurasian, the Albino and the Babu. They were not normal, any one of them, and while living outwardly the ordinary life of monied people, dwelt secretly in a strange sinister world of their own, flattering themselves and each other upon their superiority to normal men and women on account of the strange powers that they possessed, yet egotistical and hard-hearted to the last degree.

This day spent with the buoyant, virile Rex, among the fresh green of the countryside and the shimmering sunlight of the river's bank, had altered Tanith's view of them entirely; and now, in a great revulsion of feeling, she could only wonder that her longing for power and forgetfulness of her foreordained death had blinded her to their cruel way of life for so long.

She stood up and, smoothing down her crumpled green linen frock, did her best to tidy herself. But she had lost her bag in the car smash, so not only was she moneyless but had no comb with which to do her hair. However, feeling that now Rex had succeeded in preventing her reaching the meeting-place he would be certain to call off the police, she set out at a brisk pace away from Easterton towards where she believed the main Salisbury-Devizes road to lie; hoping to find a temporary shelter for the night and then make her way back to London in the morning.

Before she had gone two hundred yards her way was blocked by a tall, barbed-wire fence shutting in some military enclosure, so she turned left along it. Two hundred yards farther on the fence ended, but she was again brought up by another fence and, above it, the steep embankment of a railway line. She hesitated then, not wishing to turn back in the direction of Easterton, and was wondering what would be best to do when a dark, hunched figure seemed to form out of the shadows beside her. She started back, but recovered herself at once on realising that it was only a bent old woman.

‘You've lost your way, dearie?' she croaked.