Free Ritual by Graham Masterton Page A

before. Even in the
Criterion Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, in the middle of winter, he hadn’t felt as
isolated as this. He began to feel that real life was a little more than he
could manage.
    He turned and
looked up at the moon, masking itself behind the clouds. He felt there was
something he ought to do, some magic ritual he ought to perform to ward off
malevolence until morning, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do except
to cross his two index fingers in the sign of the crucifix and hold them up to
the sky. ‘God, protect me,’ he said, although he wasn’t sure what good that
would do, or even if he meant it.
    He went back
inside, locking the kitchen door behind him. He returned the walking stick to
the umbrella stand. The house was silent. He climbed the stairs feeling very
tired. One of the reasons he had been able to survive his job for so long was
because he had always gone to bed early, with two large glasses of water to
drink if he happened to wake up, and he had always made sure that he stayed in
bed for a full eight hours.
    Martin had
returned to bed, and was lying with his back turned to the door. Charlie
climbed between the sheets, and lay there for a long time
listening to Martin breathe . He knew he wasn’t asleep, but he was
waiting for him to say something.
    After a while,
he felt Martin gently shaking. He realized with intense pain and discomfort
that he was crying.
    ‘Martin?’ He
laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Martin, for Christ’s sake, if you can
tell anybody what this is all about, you can tell me.’
    ‘I can’t tell
anybody,’ Martin sobbed.
    Charlie was
silent for a very long time. The worst part of it was not having the experience
to be able to think of the right thing to say. Marjorie would know; Marjorie
was unfailingly good with children. Marjorie had been unfailingly good with
him, too, but not good enough to know what he really wanted out of life.
    Martin wiped
his eyes on the corner of the pillow slip and then lay there silently, not
sleeping, but perfectly still.
    Charlie said.
‘I don’t know what any of this means.’
    ‘It doesn’t
mean anything.’
    ‘But I don’t
see why you have to lie to me, Martin. I don’t see why you have to pretend that
there was nobody there when there very obviously was.’
    ‘There was
nobody there, Dad.’
    For a split
second, Charlie felt angry enough to smack Martin’s head. But he made a
deliberate effort to turn away, and stare fiercely at the bedside table, and
let his sudden burst of temper dissipate into the darkness like a tipped-over
basketful of small black snakes.
    ‘We’re going to
have to talk this over tomorrow,’ he said.
    ‘Okay,’ Martin
said, as if he didn’t have any intention of discussing it again.
    There was
another long pause, and then Charlie said, ‘Was he a dwarf, or what?’
    Martin didn’t reply.
His breathing was regular and even. Charlie leaned over him and saw that he was
asleep – or, at least, that he was pretending to be asleep. He lay back on his
pillow and looked up at the ceiling and wondered what the hell he was going to
do now. There were no handbooks for the estranged fathers of awkward and
secretive teenage sons. There was no advisory service which could tell you what
to do if your offspring started making mysterious trysts with white-hodded
midgets in the middle of the night. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been
so distressing; and if Martin hadn’t plainly been so upset.
    The night went
by as slowly as the great black wheel of a juggernaut. Every time Charlie
checked his watch, it seemed as if the hands had hardly moved since the last
time he had looked. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even remember what it was he
normally did to get himself to sleep.
    He thought
about Marjorie, he thought about Martin. He thought about Milwaukee and the
pain that he had suffered there. He half dozed for a while, and dreamed that he
was eating dinner in a strange