Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  Tramps camping out in ruins somewhere on the mountain? Or some kind of commune, living close to the land? Hilary knew that such things were quite prevalent these days. Greenpeace and back-to-nature movements and New Age travellers. People who grew organic vegetables and ate brown rice and protested against various injustices. They were usually very sincere and rather admirable. But Hilary thought she had better remember that she was in an unknown country and that eight years inside St Luke’s might have blunted her alarm signals. She must not forget that there were cruel, desperate men in the world. Probably there always had been, but probably they were given more publicity these days. She looked back to the dark, lonely road, trying to calculate how long it would take her to run back down the track if the lights turned out to belong to something unpleasant.

  The track was fringed by trees and it was unexpectedly easy to climb, rather as if somebody maintained it in a roughish fashion. The night was not quite silent; it was filled with scurryings and patterings, and the occasional beating of wings on the air. It was cold up here and, although there was a faint drift of something sweet – hawthorn? no, not in autumn, you fool – a dank, tomblike odour lay just beneath. Hilary found this faintly sinister.

  And then she rounded the last curve in the track and there before her was not the house or the shepherds’ huts or even the gypsy camp she had been half expecting, but something so wholly surprising that a gasp broke from her.

  Ahead of her was the crouching bulk of a ruined castle, black and jagged against the night sky.

  And within its depths, flickering lights.

  Of course it was the stuff of every Gothic horror story ever written or read or remembered. A ruined castle deep in the mountains, in the hinterlands between Romania and the land once known as Transylvania.

  Transylvania, the Land Beyond the Forest . . . It was the backdrop of every horror writer’s imagination, every film-maker’s dream. Matthew Lewis’s mad Regency monk. The woman in white who stalked the pages of Wilkie Collins’s novel. And what about the most famous and the most apt of them all: the dark mountain road and the mishap to the car or the carriage, and all those foolish young ladies who knocked on the door of the friendly neighbourhood vampire centre for help?

  Am I really doing this? thought Hilary, torn between wry amusement and burgeoning fear. Am I really about to go up to a ruined castle on the borders of Transylvania at three o’clock in the morning and ask for help?

  She could see the castle more clearly now and she could see moving lights inside it, rather as if somebody might be going from one room to another, carrying a torch. This seemed to be such an ordinary, everyday thing to do that she felt instantly braver.

  The castle was an immense place, set half into the mountainside, its upper sections long-since crumbled, but the lower portions still standing. Black, jagged walls, with the narrow slitted windows of the Middle Ages, jutted upwards like fangs, and on the left was a rearing tower, black and stark, tapering as it reached its zenith, studded with tiny square windows. At the castle centre was a massive square stone entrance, with an iron portcullis.

  The nearer Hilary got, the more sinister the castle looked. It was not hard to imagine that all kinds of strange creatures prowled in its cavernous depths: things that peered out and watched your approach and grinned slyly to one another and rubbed their bony hands, and said: oho, a juicy victim approaching . . .

  A small narrow wooden bridge led across a deep dark depression that girdled the entire castle. A moat? Yes, but long-since dried. Did that make it less or more sinister? Hilary trod across the rough-and-ready drawbridge warily.

  The castle was not as ruined as it had seemed from below. It looked as if there might still be whole rooms that were roofed and habitable. On each side of the portcullis were immense iron brackets that once would surely have held flaming torches to light the path of those who crossed the drawbridge. Thick twists of wood had been thrust into the brackets and, as the dry, cold wind rustled again, it stirred the wood twists into glowing life. Tiny cinders lit and a scent of burning drifted on the air. Then flaring torches had burned here a short while ago.

  And the portcullis was raised.

  Fear closed about her. What was up here? What was inside the ancient moated castle that was drenched in such menace? What was going from room to room, lighting its way as it went?

  She looked behind her to the desolate hillside. The castle’s isolation was complete. From within the shadowy depths, she could hear little scuttlings and patterings and the beating of dry, papery wings. Bats. Did that mean it was nearing dawn? Bats fled from the rising sun, didn’t they? Hilary repressed a shudder. But bats were harmless. Bram Stoker had simply used them as a – what did the novelists call it? – a vehicle for his horror tale.

  As Hilary moved forward and passed under the ancient portcullis, the shadow of the ruined castle fell over her.

  The walls were charred as if an immense fire had at some time swept the castle, but Hilary saw that her earlier impression had been right: it was not nearly as devastated as it looked from below.

  A thin mist was drifting from the mountainside, touching her face with cold, damp fingers, and Hilary shivered and drew the raincoat more closely about her shoulders.

  Beyond the portcullis was what would certainly once have been the banqueting hall: a long, stone-floored chamber, barely touched by the fire or even by time. The roof was still in place, and at the far end was a deep old fireplace, the lintel above it cracked and pitted, but otherwise untouched. Huge tapestries hung over stone walls, their colours dim, and at the centre was a long, oaken table.

  Hilary moved warily forwards. The flickering lights seemed to have vanished, but at the far end of the hall, partly obscured by a swathe of dusty velvet, a dull red glow emanated from beyond a half-hidden archway. Hilary stood very still. To investigate? To take a chance that the lights were made by nothing more menacing than the Romanian equivalent of New Age travellers? Or to risk it being something else altogether? She thought she was not going to have got this far to run away now. In any case, prowling maniacs and serial killers did not lie in ruined castles waiting for victims to walk up the mountainside to them. They went out into the villages and the towns and took them, though this was not really a good thought to pursue.

  As Hilary started to cross to the door, from somewhere behind her she heard the slither of stones as if a soft footfall had disturbed the rubble. She spun round at once, her eyes raking the moonlit hall. Was there something creeping after her? Was there someone – something? – standing watching from the deep shadow at the side of the hearth? She stood motionless, the perspiration cooling between her shoulder-blades. And of course there was no one there; of course there was nothing creeping through the ruins towards her. The hall was deserted.

  She crossed resolutely to the archway.

  Narrow stairs led almost immediately down, twisting as they went, enclosed by stone walls. The steps were slippery and steep, and worn away a little at the centre, and there was the scent of dust and age.

  Hilary did not like underground rooms, even in ordinary-sized houses. She hated cellars and basements, even if they had been made into laundries or games rooms or places for developing photos. But she could still see the lights, a thick, smeary glow that seeped upwards, and so she took a deep breath and began to descend, holding on to the thin rope that was looped into iron staves in the wall.

  She could almost feel the great castle crouching over her. Above her head were thick stone buttresses and groynes. Did the castle rest on those? The light trickled across the stair, showing up leering gargoyles on some of the stonework, and Hilary remembered the medieval superstition that gargoyles had once been demons who had walked the world, but had been petrified into stone. This was not at all the sort of thing to remember down here.

  She reached the last stair unexpectedly, stumbling and half missing her footing and, as she did so, the light flickered wildly casting fantastical shadows. For a terr
ible minute, nightmare silhouettes leapt out and gibbered from the darkness, and Hilary felt her heart lurch painfully, and then resume a too-fast beating. The shadows receded. Firelight on the walls, nothing more. And people who lit fires did so to keep themselves warm. Fires were comforting, friendly things.

  She moved forward and there before her were the castle dungeons.

  They were long and cavernous and they must surely stretch for the entire length and width of the castle. Whoever had built this place had created low stone archways at its depths, partly separating the dungeons from one another, but not quite closing them off. Hilary, who had not really known what she would see but who had been vaguely expecting the classic stone passage with barred cells opening off it, stared in surprise.

  The dungeons were a series of echoing crypts, strung out under the castle and, to Hilary’s astonished eyes, they seemed to go on for miles. Velvet and silk cushions had been flung down rather haphazardly in the first cavern, and Eastern rugs were strewn on the stone floors, their once-glowing colours faded and dim. Tapestries similar to the ones upstairs but less faded, lined the walls.

  Fires burned in each of the caverns: small glowing cores of light and warmth set in tiny hearths. You might light one fire if you were camping down here, but you would surely not light half a dozen. And no tramp or New Age traveller ever possessed silk rugs or velvet cushions. Hilary moved forward and the wall-hangings stirred in the small current of air. The fire burned up as if a gentle breath had blown on it, and there before her was the most horrific sight she had ever seen.

  At the dungeon’s centre was a long table with chairs drawn up to it and the remains of a meal set out. There was a platter of bread and wedges of cheese and cold meat. There were dishes of fruit and flagons of wine and jugs of milk at intervals. The very homeliness of it should have been reassuring.

  But Hilary’s mind reeled because this must be a nightmare. Please God, let it be a nightmare.

  Seated at the table were creatures so impossibly thin and dried out that for a moment she thought they were not human. They were some kind of mutant insect: wingless stick-things, disproportionately large, gigantica-something.

  And then the shadows shivered and she saw that they were unmistakably human. Human bodies, dried out corpses, juiceless. Yellowed skin like thin leather, like old parchment, stretched over their bones, and tufts of sparse dry hair sprouted from nearly bald skulls. Their eyes were open and staring. Dried corpses, thought Hilary wildly. Fossilised human bodies.

  There were easily a dozen of them – perhaps eighteen or so – all sitting up to the table as if they had just partaken of a meal. As if they dined and drank and then died where they sat, thought Hilary, appalled and uncomprehending. As if, after they died, they were left for a hundred years.

  It was important to remain very calm indeed. There was nothing frightening about poor dead bodies, even like this. Dead bodies were not very nice but they could not hurt you. Hilary thought she ought to be thankful that the poor things had avoided the rotting putrefaction and the decay . . .

  She would go back up the stone stairs at once. There was no one here; she would simply have to spend what remained of the night in the ruined castle. That would be better – that would be safer – than sitting on the edge of the dark roadside in the crashed car. In the morning, she could go along the road in search of help. It might be a longish walk, but it would be possible in daylight. She might be able to flag down a passing car. It was absurd and pointless to stand here, staring at the eerie scene in front of her, seeing the fire flickering on the dried-out bodies, so that it lent them a semblance of life. It was only the play of the leaping flames, of course, that was all it could possibly be. But the open eyes were disconcerting. You imagined sight there. And just for an instant, there had been a flicker of movement on the rim of her vision. As if the corpse-creatures might have followed her with their eyes, and as if the firelight had caught the movement. This was so patently impossible as to be ridiculous.

  But somebody had lit those fires and somebody had set the table and, by the look of it, it had been quite recent.

  Hilary knew that if she was going to spend what was left of the night in the castle she would have to search all the dungeons. They said that people who lived alone, returning home late at night, quite often glanced into each of their rooms as a matter of course. You did not really think you were going to come upon anyone hiding, ready to leap out at you, but it was a sensible thing to do. She would do it now so that she would be sure that no one was hiding, ready to pounce on her. And then she would go back up the stairs and find a warm, dry corner where she could wait until it was light.

  Actually walking past the table was nastier than she had expected. In almost all of the corpses, the lips had curled back from the teeth, making the teeth look longer and sharper than they had probably been in life. It was only contraction of the face muscles, of course; Hilary knew this perfectly well. Shrinkage. It would be ridiculous to think they were snarling. It would be even more ridiculous to think they were watching her.

  Snarling corpses, propped up around a table . . . Watching her. Several of them were hunched over in the chairs, as if they had fallen, and some of the heads flopped to one side as if the neck stems had snapped, giving them a sinister, crouching appearance. Hanged men, thought Hilary. Wasn’t that how people looked when they had been hanged? Hanged men looking up at me beneath their brows.

  They were all dressed more or less normally, although Hilary, trying not to look absolutely directly at them, received the impression that some had a vaguely old-fashioned appearance. Nineteenth century? Even Regency? Most of the women wore jewels that caught the flickering firelight. Probably it was this that had created that fleeting impression of movement earlier. The men wore jackets that looked to be velvet or brocade, although one or two had relatively modern dinner jackets.

  Hilary walked forward, trying not to make a sound. She would just glance into the other caverns and then she would leave this grotesque, rather sad place. It was a huge mausoleum, nothing more. Some kind of air-exclusion had preserved the poor, withered bodies. The castle might be owned by anyone, and this might be some eccentric family practice. Vague thoughts of Hapsburg dynasties, of fleeing Russian tsars and of weird shrine-cults darted across her mind.

  It might all be some kind of research project. This was a far likelier solution. Scientists working on something innovative and secret. Governmental money – maybe Soviet money or Chinese. Even with the Iron Curtain torn down you never quite knew what the Chinese might be up to.

  To turn her back on the strange, silent banquet and go through the second cavern was one of the hardest things Hilary had ever had to do. But it was important to do it. Someone had made those lights she had glimpsed earlier, and someone had lit these fires.

  The second cavern was partly hidden by another of the thick velvet curtains, drawn across the archway. Hilary put up a hand to pull it aside and, as she did so, there was a sound from behind her that made her blood turn cold.

  The scraping of a chair being pushed back from a table.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hilary whipped round at once, her hands clenching, ice and fire chasing down her spine.

  There, before her, between her and the shadowy stair that led to freedom, were the corpses. On their feet and walking towards her.

  They held out their skeletal hands and their eyes were staring and avid.

  ‘Another one for our feast,’ they said, and their voices were the ugly cracked voices of extreme age. ‘Another one to dine with us and serve us.’

  ‘Another one for the ritual . . .’

  Their heads rolled on their necks and their drawn-back lips stretched in terrible smiles.

  ‘To the cage with her . . .’

  They reached for her, their gait stiff and puppet-like. Hilary backed away, pressing a clenched fist into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. Could she somehow get past them to the stair? How strong wer
e they?

  She took a deep breath and, lowering her head, ran straight at them. At once they closed in, their cold, dry hands clutching. Hilary shuddered and pushed out wildly, sending several of them tumbling to the ground, hearing the sickening crunch of brittle bones, hating herself for doing it, but almost beyond feeling.

  ‘Hold her, hold the fair-skinned one!’ cried the creatures.

  ‘To the cage with her!’

  They were shrieking in her ears, and their shrunken, mummified faces were pressing close to her. Hilary’s senses swam, so that for several dizzying minutes the firelit dungeon tilted and spun.

  And then there was a soft padding step behind her and something struck her on the head and the entire grisly scene exploded in a kaleidoscope of starbursts and sky rockets.

  A thick, silent blackness descended, and Hilary fell fathoms deep into unconsciousness.

  Somebody was screaming, high-pitched, terrified screams that penetrated the black curtain shrouding Hilary’s mind. Above the screaming and beyond it was another sound: a metal, rhythmic clanking. Something menacing. Something inexorable. Machinery?

  Hilary frowned and, through a spinning tunnel of semiawareness, heard terse orders being given.

  ‘Nail the lips!’ someone was shouting. ‘Nail the lips up before the gerons arrive!’

  Nail the lips . . .? Hilary struggled against the sick dizziness and heard the machinery again: clanking nightmare winches and cogs grinding and meshing. Somewhere close by was a huge machine that would gobble you up, something relentless that possessed a terrible intelligence so that it would grind your flesh and your bone and grin as it did so . . . All the better to eat you, my dear. . .

  The screaming stopped abruptly and, as the sick waves rolled back, memory returned in jagged splinters.