Read Online Ritual by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page A

wanted with all his heart to develop an easy
father-and-son relationship with Martin, but right now he would have given a
month’s salary to be alone.
    They ate in a
corner booth at Billy’s. A jukebox played ‘Joleen’ and ‘Blanket on the Ground’
and
    ‘DIVORCE’ and
what with the rough wooden decor and the loud laughter and the red fluorescent
lights they could have been in Amarillo, TX, instead of Alien’s Corners, CT.
Martin seemed to have rediscovered his appetite, and wolfed down a king-sized
cheeseburger with mammoth fries. Charlie restricted himself to a New York steak
sandwich with onion rings.
    Afterwards,
they walked around the windy deserted green for a while, with their hands in
their pockets, not talking, and then went back to Mrs Kemp’s to play cards.
    Before he went to
bed, Charlie found Walter Haxalt’s telephone number in the local directory, and
called him up from the phone in Mrs Kemp’s parlour. The phone rang and rang but
there was no reply.
    Mrs Kemp was
watching him through the partly open doorway. ‘Do you know anybody who goes to Le Reposoir to eat?’ Charlie asked her,
as he waited for somebody at Walter Haxalt’s number to pick up.
    Mrs Kemp shook
her head. ‘You’d be better off keeping clear,’ she advised him. ‘I don’t know
what’s so bad about that place, but if I were you I wouldn’t want to find out.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    I t was well past two o’clock in the morning when Charlie awoke. For
a moment he had that terrible vertiginous feeling of not knowing where he was,
or what city he was in. But after years of waking up unexpectedly in unfamiliar
rooms, he had developed a trick of closing his eyes again and logically
analysing where he must be.
    Usually, his
sense of smell and his sense of touch were enough for him to be able to
re-orient himself. Howard Johnson’s all smelled like Howard Johnson’s and
TraveLodge beds all felt the same. This was somewhere private. This was
somewhere old. This, he thought, opening his eyes again, is Mrs Kemp’s boarding
house in Alien’s Corners, C T.
    The bedroom was
intensely dark. Charlie felt as if black felt pads were being pressed against
his eyes. Either the moon had not yet risen, or it was obscured by
thunderclouds. The room was also very quiet, except for the intermittent
blowing of the wind down the chimney, and the soft ticking of Charlie’s watch
on the bedside table.
    Charlie eased
himself up into a sitting position. Gradually, he found that he could make out
the slightly lighter squares of the windowpanes, and the gleam of reflected
street light on one of the brass knobs at the end of the bed, but that was
about all. He strained his ears to hear Martin breathing next to him, but from
the other side of the bed there was no sound at all.
    ‘Martin?’ he
whispered. There was no reply, but he didn’t call again. He didn’t want to wake
Martin up for no reason at all. He reached out his hand to make sure that his
son was well covered by the thin patchwork quilt, and it was then that he
realized that Martin was silent because Martin wasn’t there.
    He fumbled
around in the darkness of the top-heavy bedside lamp, almost knocking it over.
He switched it on and it lit up the room as starkly as a publicity photograph
for a 19505 detective movie. Martin’s side of the quilt was neatly folded back,
as if he had left the bed quietly and deliberately, and Martin’s bathrobe had
disappeared from the back of the chair. Charlie said,
    ‘Shit,’ and
swung himself out of bed. His own bathrobe was lying on the floor. He tugged it on, raked his fingers through his
hair, and opened the bedroom door. Outside, the house was silent.
    Engraved
portraits stared at him incuriously from the brown-wallpapered landing. There
was a smell of dust and sticky polish and faded lavender; the sort of smell
that dreams would have, if dreams were to die.
    ‘Martin?’ His
voice didn’t even echo. The darkness muffled it like a blanket. ‘Martin