The Last Ritual

by S. A. Sidor

  “Like Court Dunphy’s plunge from the South Church rooftop,” I said.

  “Precisely. My research is leading me to hypothesize an underlying pattern to these deaths. If not in method, then in flavor. They share the same… unique design.”

  “That ‘intelligent influence’ you mentioned outside.” Now normally, I wasn’t drawn to the macabre the way Roland and, apparently, Nina were. But I liked puzzles. However, this puzzle appeared too weird and obscure to feel real. Then I flashed to the bizarre street festival I’d witnessed in Spain. Perhaps the world was weirder than I knew. Yet I worried Nina might be more deeply eccentric than I first thought. Would Houdini’s debunking have made her angry? I hoped not. I was a fan of logical earthly solutions. “If the design is the same, that might suggest a designer, a unifying personality behind it all. Like an artist compiling a body of work. Do you suspect a hidden force is behind these fatal events?”

  Nina considered my question. “Not always hidden. Some of the deaths were violent homicides; people committed them. However, their motives may be… highly unusual.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wasn’t talking about vengeful ghosts.

  “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” She frowned at me.

  “These mysterious deaths are like puzzles. They present us with a challenge, and I do like challenges. Maybe I could help you solve them?”

  She straightened out her legs. “I never asked you for any help.”

  Don’t blow this, Alden, I thought. “Perhaps, you’d like, what’s a good word, a kind of collaborator? Someone to talk over the crimes with. Another mind in the mix. A teammate?”

  “How would you assist me?” She raised her eyebrows, quizzical.

  She had raised a salient point to which I had no ready reply.

  “I don’t know exactly.” I had no investigative experience. I was an artist.

  “Well, then.” Nina slid to the front of the wingback seat as if she were getting up.

  “I have a good imagination,” I said, quickly. “I’m a visual thinker. What if you describe the murders, and I’ll picture them in my head. Maybe I’ll see something useful?”

  After a skeptical tilt of her head Nina settled back in her chair again.

  “I guess it’s worth a try,” she said.

  “Oh, I think so.” Maybe it hadn’t started out entirely that way, but now I really did want to hear about these unexplained cases. I wanted to see if I might contribute something.

  Nina drew in a deep breath. “Dr Juliana Silva was found hanged from a lamppost in front of St Mary’s Hospital in Uptown. She was visiting Arkham from her home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An expert in contagious diseases of the Americas. She traveled here for a year of teaching. A nurse arriving to work her morning shift discovered Dr Silva’s body.”

  “Hanged overnight at the hospital. It wasn’t a suicide?”

  “Dr Silva’s hands were tied behind her back. She was swaying six feet above the sidewalk. No one saw or heard anything. No signs she fought off an attacker. She was still wearing her stethoscope and eyeglasses. She had purple witchweed flowers stuffed in the pocket of her exam coat. Those flowers are not easy to come by, but they grow nearby at Hangman’s Hill. Dr Silva was known to take walks there in the daytime, but never at night.”

  I closed my eyes, concentrating.

  Like a sketch, the scene began to develop, stroke by stroke, in my mind’s eye.

  “Flowers pilfered from a potter’s field… Her killer knew where she went for walks. Maybe they picked the flowers knowing she liked them. And used them to lure her.” My mental sketch showed a bouquet, an outstretched hand, a length of rope concealed behind the strangler’s back.

  “Hmm… so she didn’t run or fight because she didn’t see the killer as dangerous.” Nina’s voice betrayed her surprise. “I hadn’t thought of that. She was killed quickly?”

  “I haven’t any idea. Go on. Tell me another one…”

  “Udo Ganz, union organizer. His body was discovered floating in the Miskatonic River near the docks.” This time there was a tinge of anticipatory excitement in her recap.

  I opened my eyes. “Hardly much of a mystery there. My father is a local business owner and he hated Ganz, as did most of the industrialists in Arkham. There’s a crime there to be sure. Sadly, I don’t think it’s unusual if a businessman’s hired goon drowned Ganz.”

  “Except he wasn’t drowned.”

  My dull reaction switched to bewilderment. “Beaten to death?”

  Nina shook her head. “Mr Ganz had his skin peeled off in one piece. The folded-up flesh suit was mailed to the Advertiser on ice. With a note explaining that Ganz had to die. Several elaborate tattoos covering his chest and back made the identification easy. A confidential source told me Ganz had scaled back his union agitating because he was receiving bribes from the same business owners he’d battled for years. In other words, he’d sold out. But union members didn’t know. His funeral devolved into a pro-Labor riot. Factories were set on fire. Equipment destroyed. The police arrested over fifty protesters.”

  I decided not to draw a mental picture of the skin suit. Nina’s facts made Ganz’s hellish demise plain enough. How could a person commit that crime unless they were insane?

  “You have more cases, right?”

  Nina nodded. I closed my eyes again.

  “The Galinka sisters, Mary Lou and June, perished on the Unvisited Isle. A Boy Scout troop out on a Saturday canoeing excursion discovered their charred bones.”

  “Oh, my butler told me about this one! They were dancers?”

  “That’s right. Say, you knew about Ganz and the Galinkas. Maybe you’re the missing connection between these deaths?” she teased.

  I hoped she was only teasing.

  “Ha ha… Just because I know names doesn’t make me guilty. Continue, please.”

  “The twin sisters owned a dance studio where they taught ballet and the latest modern steps. They had vanished after a Friday night recital. The twins were renowned for their cheery, vibrant personalities. Witnesses reported seeing ‘a wall of flames’ on the island early Saturday. The reports were ignored by the police who figured it was a hobo campfire.”

  Behind my eyelids, I saw a ring of trees around a blaze. Twisted orange flames licking the sky. Dancers in the dark. “These murders all happened last year?” I was shocked.

  She stared at me. “No. That’s in the last six months. Go back a year, you can add another half a dozen unsolved bizarre deaths. Each one stranger than the last. My favorite? At the train station, a drifter’s body turned up in a boxcar. Throat opened ear to ear by a switchblade knife. The knife clutched in his hand. Not a drop of blood left in him. Or on him. Or anywhere else in the boxcar.”

  “How did the police explain that?”

  “They didn’t.” Nina threw her arms up and the scent of Chanel No.5 enchanted me. She ran her fingers through her short, slick hair and gazed out the window at the pale moon.

  “Look there,” she said, whispery.

  I looked.

  “No. Not at the moon, silly.” Nina blew a gentle breath toward the dusty windowpane.

  A spiderweb trembled in a corner of the window.

  Where a delicate spider balanced on the swinging threads.

  Waiting. Watching.

  A shiver crawled over my skin. “All this bloody-minded talk has me tragically sobered up. I plan to address this issue without haste,” I said, offering Nina my hand.

  We navigated a trail through the stygian, labyrinthine library. The air smelled of mildew, old books, and dust. Nina stopped abruptly. “What’s that noise?”

  I listened. “I don’t hear anything. We’re almost to the door.”

  “The door is the other way.” She stopped again and tugg
ed me back.

  We were in a very dark aisle, and I began to think she was correct. “Maybe I’m not looking for a door. Ever consider that? Maybe I’m exploring.” I turned, hesitating among the oppressive shelves. Which way was the damned door? I squinted without it doing any good.

  “Some explorers get lost and are never heard from again,” she said. From behind me, she grazed my neck lightly with her fingernail. Then I felt her warm fingertip press down.

  “Maybe I want to get lost. That’s been my plan all along.”

  Now we stopped talking. I turned to her.

  But I could hardly see anything. Silhouettes.

  Nina came closer, so our faces were inches apart. Were we going to kiss? The music from the band had gone quiet, though I swore I heard the blood pumping in both our hearts.

  Soft murmurs.

  Her face swiveled away from me. “What is that noise? I’m not kidding, Alden. I hear people. Two voices, I think.” She tipped her head to listen better. “Talking. You hear it?”

  “It’s just us,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  But it wasn’t just us because I could hear the low voices now too. They sounded… funny. Guttural, deep, and thick. But hissing too, filled with fricatives. I felt an unpleasant creeping chill, like a cold, damp knuckle gliding down my backbone.

  “It’s coming from this way,” Nina said.

  I flicked my banjo cigarette lighter so we could see better.

  Just under our chins, Nina approached a shelf housing leather-bound, astronomical textbooks and star charts, an English translation of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and a battered tome entitled Morryster’s Marvells of Science. Quickly but quietly, she unloaded the musty, thick books, piling them in my waiting arms. Once she’d cleared the space, Nina stuck her head inside the vacant cubby.

  “They’re behind this bookcase,” she said. “On the other side of the wall.”

  “You still hear them?”

  “Shuush!” She pointed into the cubby, then nodded.

  I snugged myself beside her for a listen.

  I held my lighter’s wobbly flame up, although there was nothing to see.

  There were only sounds.

  We leaned forward together.

  Voices! Yes, I heard them more clearly inside here; the space made a kind of acoustic amplifier. Voices talking in rhythm, a cadence, as if reciting prayers. Alarmingly close.

  Nina held up two fingers.

  I nodded in agreement. Two people talking.

  She whispered, “A man and a woman.”

  “Yes. I hear the same.”

  Almost musical, yet discordant, a harsh pattern. If these were words, they made no sense to me. I could hear them well enough now, but their meaning remained cryptic. I might’ve even called it gibberish, but despite my lack of comprehension, the utterances were affecting me. I felt uneasy, nauseated. My muscles ached as if I had come down with the flu. We were hearing a sort of chaotic language, nonsense sounds, disorganized but repetitious.

  “Yoohoo? LA. Pada,” I tried to recreate what I heard.

  “Something like that. Not quite,” Nina said. “They’re saying it over and over. You? You? Fapada. Vadada? Rabada?”

  The source was frustratingly close. What did the words mean? Who were the talkers?

  My brain stirred. A thought in my grasp slipped away. I’d heard something like this language before. But where? Gregorian chants? No. A Dadaist poetry reading?

  I smelled a sudden acrid burning. My thoughts derailed.

  “What’s that horrible smell?” Nina asked as a flame reared up next to her like a darting snake head. “Fire!”

  Nina pulled out of the bookcase. The amber serpent of flame followed her. It had coiled itself around her left arm.

  Nothing so exotic as a flaming serpent.

  In my distraction I had accidently ignited one of the mummy bandages dangling from Nina’s wrist. Jerkily, she waved her blazing arm. I grabbed the clown hat off my head and smothered her combusting bindings with my floppy chapeau. The flames quickly snuffed out.

  The burnt bandages were a crumbly black mess.

  Reluctantly, I struck the wheel of my lighter. Nina’s skin appeared slightly pinkish.

  “Are you hurt?” I felt terrible, responsible, foolish.

  “My skin feels hot but not burned. Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

  When we bent our heads toward the bookcase again, the voices had fallen silent.

  “Damn! They’ve gone,” Nina said, disappointed.

  “The energy has changed. It’s as if I can feel their absence. Do you feel it too?”

  She did.

  Nina insisted that we had to search for the room beyond the bookcase. I agreed. We began by inspecting the hallway, but found no doors on that side. All the second-floor accesses were locked. We went outside. The area of the building in question had no windows. I wondered if it was storage space. The dome of the observatory loomed above the yard.

  “We have to find a way in there,” Nina said. “What if someone’s stuck in a closet?”

  “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  “I need to know where those voices came from.”

  I fetched us more punch. The alcohol made our quest more feasible.

  “Well, we do know one possible way in. Don’t we?” I said.

  Nina wrinkled her forehead. As we sipped, I watched her eyes grow wide. When she grinned at me, I knew she’d do it. “We’re going to need tools.”

  “And more punch,” I said.

  The party was enjoying a second wind. The band returned to the stage after a refreshment break. Using the distraction to our advantage, Nina and I returned to the library. We were alone this time. Hurriedly, we blocked the doors from inside to avoid the need to explain our peculiar destructive activities. Having discovered an unlocked janitor’s closet, Nina procured a hammer and a sturdy mop handle. She weighed these in her hands.

  “Hammer first, then the stick. Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

  “Fairly sure.” She handed me the mop handle and gave the hammer a practice swing.

  “Fairly sure or sure sure?”

  “I’m sure. Let’s do it. Preston can pay for the damages later. He owes me.”

  Experimentally, I rapped my fist inside the empty bookcase, noting the hollow sound.

  “Ladies first?”

  “I would stand for nothing less.”

  Nina bashed the hammer through the back of the bookcase. The wood was old and dry. It made a splintery crunch. I jabbed with the mop handle, clearing a wider hole. Even with the band bashing in the other room, I couldn’t believe no one heard our demolition.

  We discovered a void where there should have been a solid wall.

  Like Howard Carter inserting a candle into Tutankhamun’s tomb, I slid my hand into the gap, tasting strong musky incense, and something more metallic and far less pleasing.

  “Alden, there’s something terrible in there. I feel it.” She touched her stomach.

  “I fear you’re right.” I had the awful sensation of turning in a forest and feeling lost.

  “We’ve gone this far,” she said. “No backing down now.”

  I didn’t argue.

  I was preparing to yank out the bookcase, when my grasping fingers entered a notch behind the bookcase’s crown molding. It felt like a latch. I popped it.

  The bookcase swung free – a hidden doorway: that old gothic trope.

  Side by side, Nina and I followed the tiny flame of my lighter into the vault.

  “Look at that. It isn’t a room after all,” I said.

  “A secret staircase. Where do you think it goes?”

  “One way to find out.”

  “These stairs are quite narrow,” she said. “I’ll fo
llow you.”

  “Oh, thanks!”

  I went up one step. Nina was right behind me, her hot hand pressed firmly to my back.

  “This might be the closest I’ve ever come to being frightened,” she said in my ear.

  “I’m well past that point. We don’t know what’s at the top of these steps.”

  The stairway was utilitarian; its wood painted all black. Above us, a soft gray rectangle of space awaited our arrival. I kept seeing bulky imaginary forms oozing into view.

  Silence. Except for our quickening breath. The quiet made it worse – the anticipation of noises, unspeakable in the offing. I wanted to fill the quiet with my voice, but I dared not.

  “That iron smell is blood. Isn’t it?” she said.

  “I believe so.” Why did the blackness ahead seem to shift to red?

  No. It was black.

  Nina made a tiny choking sound at the back of her throat. “Keep going.”

  Five stairs higher and we took them without hesitation. I paused halfway to the top. “We could turn around.” There was a pressure now ahead of us and behind. It felt as solid and real as the stair treads under our feet. The pressure pushed. “There’s no shame in that.”

  Nina said, “It feels like I’m underwater. I can’t breathe.”

  We heard something then – a gnawing sound, like tissue being bitten and sawed apart.

  “Do you think some poor animal got trapped?” she asked.

  “And it’s chewing its leg off?”

  “Go! However bad, I need to see it,” she said. “I can’t take it. This wondering.”

  We rushed to the top of the stairs.

  A large room. Faint, lead-colored light over our heads. The air felt cool and drafty, the floor wet. My shoes slipped as if I’d walked out onto an icy pond. But this was no pond, and what lay obscenely before us was no injured animal in need of kindhearted rescuers.

  It was far more hideous.

  Chapter Ten

  The unclothed corpse of a man: awash in blood, shockingly headless.