Free Ritual by Graham Masterton Page B

high-ceilinged restaurant with a long white
napkin tucked into his collar. The waiters were all hooded, like monks, and
they came and went in silence, carrying plates and wheeling chafing dishes.
There was no menu, you had to eat whatever the
monk-waiters set in front of you. The other diners were smooth-faced and
expressionless. There was no food in front of them, and yet they waited at
their tables with consummate patience, as if their meals would be worth waiting
for even if they took several hours to be served. The men were dressed in
evening wear – white ties and stiff collars and tail coats. The women wore
extravagant wide-brimmed hats with wax fruit and flowers and ostrich plumes. They
also wore glittering diamond necklaces and earrings that sparkled like
Christmas trees, but apart from that most of them were nude.
    Looking around
the restaurant Charlie saw bare breasts everywhere, some with nipples that had
been rouged, others which had been pierced and decorated with golden rings. He
saw a redheaded woman with a feathery hat talking to the maitre d’, smiling
archly as she did so. Her thighs were wide apart on her satin dining chair, and
a small hairless dog, was lapping with its tongue at her bushy, russet vulva.
He turned. A monk-waiter had brought his meal, concealed beneath a shiny dish
cover. The monk-waiter’s face was as black as the inside of a clothes closet.
‘Your dinner, sir,’ he whispered seductively, and raised the dish cover with a
flourish.
    Charlie looked
down at his plate and screamed.
    The plate was
brimming with thin, greyish soup, in which Martin’s face was floating, staring
up at him in silent desperation.
    He opened his
eyes. He was twisting the quilt in both hands, and he was smothered in sweat.
He also had a taut, painful erection.
    He thought for
a moment that he had screamed out loud, but the night seemed so silent and
undisturbed, and Martin was still breathing steadily and peacefully, and he
realized then that he must have screamed only in his dream. He checked his
watch. A minute and a half had passed since the last time he had looked.
    He thought for
a while about Martin’s face staring up at him out of the plate. Then he thought
about the naked women in his dream restaurant. There was no question about it, his daytime problems were catching up with him while he
slept. The problems of food, fatherhood, and sexual
frustration. He lay there feeling very middle aged and inadequate and
tired, for hour after hour. He didn’t know when he fell asleep; but shortly
afterwards Martin opened his eyes and turned and looked at him, and then slid
quietly out of bed and went to the window.
    Martin stood by
the window for almost a half-hour, while the sky gradually grew paler over the
treeline towards Black Rock and Thomaston. In the yard below him, the small
hooded figure stood, equally silent, its cloak ruffled by the thin,
early-morning wind, its eyes fixed steadily on Martin, waiting with a patience
that had been shared by the diners in Charlie’s dream.

CHAPTER FIVE
    W alter Haxalt was smooth, patronizing, and impatient. He sat behind
his leather-topped reproduction desk, his hands steepled, gently tapping his
fingertips together as if he were counting the valuable seconds that Charlie
was wasting, second by second, dollar by dollar.
    The morning sun
struck through the window of his office and illuminated, as if it were a sign
from God, a gold presentation clock that stood on the bookshelf just behind
him. There was a motto engraved on the clock, ‘Time Driveth Onward Fast’.
Strangely, Charlie could remember the verse from which that motto had been
taken. It ended, ‘all things are taken from us, and become/Portions and parcels
of the dreadful Past’.
    Walter Haxalt
said, ‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid. My only contract with M. Musette is purely
professional. He lives here and so he banks here, and that’s as far as it
goes.’
    Charlie glanced
towards the window. Martin