Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Well, it was, but I jib all over again, don’t you? It would mean those creatures were here a hundred years ago. Eighteen-ninety-something was Dracula?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  ‘And if Stoker stumbled across that castle, and saw the corpse-creatures and witnessed one of the ritual killings, he could have adapted the whole scenario for his book.’

  ‘Why adapt it?’ said Hilary. ‘Why not tell it as he saw it? It’s a pretty good story.’

  ‘Because, my sweet innocent lamb, as it was he had a struggle to get people to swallow Dracula. Even in the Naughty Nineties it created a storm of protest.’

  Hilary said, ‘But if Stoker came across the corpse-things a hundred years ago, then it means—’

  ‘It means what they told you is true. Immortality, damn the word to hell. Sorry, Hilary.’ Michael drained the brandy in his glass and reached to set it down, feeling for the small table at the side of the settle. ‘Whichever way up we look at it, there’s something very odd going on here,’ he said, and reached for her hand.

  Hilary, who had been rather pleased at the calm, very nearly scholarly way in which she had told her story and discussed it, felt the reserve of the last few hours break. Michael accepted the story; he believed her. With the gentleness, with the tacit acceptance of her ordeal, the hard knot of pain melted and hot tears poured helplessly down her face. Without in the least knowing she was going to do it, she turned her head into the side of the cushioned settle and sobbed helplessly.

  Michael’s arms were about her in an instant, his lips against her hair, murmuring words he had thought he would never murmur to a woman ever again. Who could feel emotion for a blind man? Who could be attracted to a blind man?

  The comforting embrace, which was all Michael had intended, erupted into violent passion with a suddenness that startled them both. Hilary had the brief blinding impression of a fiery wall blazing up before her eyes, and then Michael’s mouth came down on hers, hungry and sweet, blotting out the world . . . It sent Hilary’s senses spinning, because of all the things she would have expected him to be, she had never expected that he would be so dreadfully vulnerable, that he could reach for her with such desperate longing. She might have fought successfully against passion, but she had no defence against this helpless need.

  His hands were beneath the thick sweater now, donned a thousand years ago in Varanno and, as he touched her breasts, a groan broke from him.

  ‘Oh God, Hilary, I’ll stop in a minute—’

  Don’t stop, Michael, don’t stop my dear love. . . Words that must not be said.

  There was no memory in her mind of Janos’s ugly fumbling attempt at rape; there was only a spinning sweetness, an astonished delight. So this is what the poets and the writers and the lovers meant . . . Not the messy fumbling of those boys in those months before she had entered her convent. Not the selfish clumsiness that had bored and faintly disgusted her. This. This silken feeling of his hands pouring over her skin. This feeling of his body against hers, still clothed, but so close that she could feel every separate part . . . She could feel the violent arousal . . .

  I can’t. I mustn’t. Oh, but just for another minute, God, just for another heartbeat. He tastes of wine and firelight . . . If he touches me again I shall be lost.

  My dear love . . . Hilary was unsure of which of them had whispered the words, because the words were somehow woven into the quiet room and the leaping flames in the hearth and the golden warmth of the brandy . . . They were part of the feeling of safety and home-coming after the coldness and the terror.

  Michael pushed her from him and sat up, running his fingers through his tumbled hair. Hilary felt a chill brush her skin.

  ‘Jesus God, Hilary, I’m sorry.’ His voice was shaken and the Irish was more strongly marked than she had ever heard it. ‘I never meant . . .’

  Hilary had managed to sit up. She said, a bit shakily, ‘If you say it was only the brandy I shall pour it over you.’ And was rewarded by the glimmer of a smile.

  ‘Will you ever be bereft of that sense of irony, my love?’

  My love . . . Warmth again. He calls me his love and I am instantly warm and safe. This is terrible. I wonder what I shall do about it?

  ‘The sense of humour will be the last thing to go,’ she said, and Michael turned to her.

  ‘Well, lady,’ he said, and the lightness was back. ‘Now you know how I feel about you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew already. Of course you did.’

  ‘Of course I did.’ A pause. ‘You knew as well,’ said Hilary, and saw with incredulity the delight touch his face. Hadn’t he known?

  Michael said, ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She stared at him, her mind tumbling into blazing delight, and then back to despair. ‘It won’t do, Michael. I can’t simply turn my back on – on what I did eight years ago.’

  ‘Eight years of celibacy.’ Was there a faint question in his voice? If there was it had to be ignored. She dare not risk further intimacy in the exchange of confidences.

  But she thought: eight years of celibacy, yes, and of other things. Had the years intended as reparation been years of pretence? Of forcing her mind into a mould that did not fit and that had never been meant to fit? What about the rebelliousness, the impatience? The growing knowledge that she had made a dreadful mistake.

  Michael or God. Oh please, not that.

  Hilary leaned forward and took his face between her hands. Michael felt her lips brush his eyelids. Sweet. Oh God, there is such sweetness here. I think this is the one woman in the world. He forced resolve into his voice, and said, ‘Tomorrow we have to travel back to that place, the castle.’

  ‘Yes?’ Hilary was grateful to him for tipping her mind off its treacherous course and back on to the strange, secret world in the castle. ‘And we have to try to find Catherine,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I hadn’t forgotten that.’ Michael sat back, frowning, and Hilary understood that his mind was already intent on what they would do and how they would do it. This was a fairly safe path to tread. Plans to make. A course of action to decide on. Catherine to be found.

  Michael said, ‘Could you continue to drive the BMW?’

  ‘I think I could. It rather comes back. So many things you think you have forgotten—’

  ‘Driving no longer bothers you?’ said Michael lightly, and Hilary jumped.

  ‘I was once – involved in a bad car-crash,’ she said, her voice expressionless. ‘My sister was a passenger. I was driving.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She was killed,’ said Hilary, and heard with horror how brusque and uncaring she sounded. How could she be brusque about Sarah?

  Michael heard the pain behind her voice, and understood that here was something that might have to be uncovered very carefully. He said, in a studiedly light voice, ‘But you feel able to drive us back there? Because we don’t know what might be happening to Catherine.’

  ‘We don’t know where she was going,’ said Hilary, slowly.

  ‘No, but Csejthe’s as good a place to start looking as any. Or at least find a few clues about what’s going on.’

  ‘And she was certainly driving along that road,’ said Hilary. ‘And yes, of course I can drive us back there Michael.’

  ‘Then I shall be in your hands, lady.’ He said the word not lightly, but in the old-fashioned, almost chivalrous sense, and then, deliberately giving her mind something else to focus on, said, ‘I wonder should we call in the police. Would they believe us, do you think?’

  ‘Would they? No, of course they wouldn’t.’ Blessedly he was not going to probe, and Hilary bent her mind to this new aspect. ‘We ought to find out as much as we can and then lay the – the case before them,’ she said. ‘Did you bring a camera at all?’

  There was the turn of the head, as if he was looking at her. ‘That is an extraordinary question to ask a blind man.’

  ‘No. You could hav
e brought one for research. You could have been going to employ someone as interpreter or driver who could have used it.’

  ‘I did bring one as it happens.’

  ‘Supposing we managed to get photos of the place. That would be very persuasive evidence.’

  ‘It would. Good idea.’ Michael stood up and held her against him roughly for a moment. ‘And now go to bed. Before you tempt me even further.’

  It could not, of course, be easily dismissed. Hilary lay wakeful in the small but comfortable room hastily prepared by Tobias, her hands linked behind her head, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘. . . and a good nun, a pious nun, composes for sleep by crossing her hands on her breasts to remind herself of the last Sleep of all . . . By commending her soul to God and the Holy Saints . . . Her last thoughts are with the Lord . . .’

  The crossed hands, of course, were to stop roving hands from sometimes indulging in secret forbidden self-caresses. To prevent questing fingers from exploring breasts made tiptilted with desire . . . Roving hands. Who had said, ‘License my roving hands?’ John Donne? Was Michael lying like this, aching with desire? One knew, of course, what men did if the feeling became too unbearable. Hilary had always thought it rather a lonely thing for them.

  Hilary had entered St Luke’s at the age of nineteen, soon after Sarah was killed. It had seemed the only thing to do; the only way to make reparation and ease the terrible guilt over Sarah’s death. Sarah . . . All that bright intelligence, all that enthusiasm for life cut off so abruptly. And it was my fault. Despite the assurances, despite the court findings that had exonerated her so completely, despite even the lorry driver’s emotional admission of blame at the hearing, she had still believed it to be her fault. If I had not been driving Sarah back from school for Christmas, if she had taken the train . . . But it had been a small private end-of-term ritual: the collection from the convent school which had been Hilary’s own; the journey to Gerrards Cross. Lunch at the same roadside inn. Sarah always had the same thing: chestnut soup, poached salmon and apple tart and cream.

  If I had taken another road . . . Travelled earlier, travelled later. Listened to the weather forecast to avoid the sleet.

  ‘What-ifs’ again. She could hear Michael saying it.

  Michael. Her thoughts swung on to a different path.

  Hilary was not entirely inexperienced – school holidays had been spent with the aunt who was their mother’s elder sister, and with whom she and Sarah had lived since Sarah was a baby. There were cousins a little older and the cousins had boyfriends and parties. Hilary was bright and attractive and she had been included in it all, just as Sarah would have been.

  It had been a time when the world was becoming practical again: the flower children with their love doctrines and their pacifisms had given place to hard-headed, hard-working young Thatcherites, and the affluence of the Sixties and Seventies had almost gone. You no longer preached love and railed against war, or sat on the floor at parties and smoked cannabis. The parties were still there, and the pot, mildly flavoured, was still passed round sometimes. You talked about where you were going in life and investing money and buying property. Hilary had found it all rather boring.

  There had been a few fumbling, incomplete experiences in the backs of cars or on borrowed beds at people’s houses, which had mostly seemed rather sordid. She had lost her virginity at seventeen in an awkward, painful encounter, which she had pretended she had enjoyed, because it was what you did, but afterwards she had thought about all the men and women through the centuries who had counted the world well lost for love, and she had felt cheated. Was this all it was? Was this what Heloise had felt for Abelard? Henry VIII for Ann Boleyn? Had Edward VIII abdicated a Crown for nothing more than this? If this was all it was, Abelard’s castration had been dearly bought, and Henry VIII had tumbled England upside-down and burned monks wholesale for something very minor indeed. Five and a half minutes (Hilary had timed it) of thrusting and grunting. She supposed she must be naturally passionless and it had been rather a daunting discovery.

  And then Sarah had died just before her fourteenth birthday, and anything that would shut out the tormented guilt was seized on.

  Hilary had been barely nineteen herself, and the nuns’ influence was still strongly with her. When you had sinned, when you had offended against God’s law or man’s, you had to do penance. She had wanted to fling herself into an enclosed Order of the strictest Rule she could find and to spend her days praying and fasting. Atonement. Reparation. My life for hers. The nuns at her old school had warmly welcomed her tentative approach; they had said, How wonderful to think that one of their girls should have a vocation. How marvellous that she was finding solace in God after the loss of Sarah, and how very rewarding she would find it. She had fastened on to the word ‘rewarding’, and she had let their approval enclose her, forming a carapace against the world and the guilt.

  She had gone first as a lay worker in St Luke’s Annexe, discovering an affinity with the blind people who came for training or rehabilitation. And, in one sense, the nuns had been right: the work was marvellously satisfying; it was tremendous to know you were helping people to come to terms with disability; teaching them small, simple ways of coping, occasionally even thinking up little practical devices for them to use. She had got to know people within the guide dogs’ organisations.

  The sisters had been pleased with her: such a quiet, obedient child. Such a diligent worker. And a natural teacher. The transition from the Annexe to the Postulants’ House, and then the Novitiate had happened almost without noticing, and every time she performed a distasteful task, every time she took part in Lenten fasting or one of the all-night vigils when the whole community prayed for some especial cause, she visualised the scales of her guilt tipping back in her favour. Look what I am doing, God. Look how self-sacrificing I am being. And it was all of it so wrong as to be almost sinful in itself.

  But by the time she was able to recognise this, she had so successfully shut out the guilt and the memories that she had been afraid to go out into the world and risk the carapace being torn aside.

  And now Michael was doing what should have been done eight years earlier. He was forcing her to face the world and her own guilt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The first thing to assail Catherine’s senses inside CrnPrag was the smell. It was like a solid wall, thick, fetid. The scent of human despair. She shuddered and stood just inside the door, looking about her.

  Directly before her was a long, bare corridor, lit by naked electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling at intervals. Catherine hesitated. Dare she go in? What if she had unwittingly activated some kind of alarm system? What if she was being watched, on – what did they call it? – closed-circuit television? She looked about her to see if there were any electronic eyes or tiny monitors, but if there were they were well hidden. Catherine thought she would probably not recognise them anyway.

  On the left, a door was partly open into what were plainly sculleries. She could see a huge, scrubbed-top table, and an iron cooking range with a black pot on it, emitting a faint odour of soup or stew. Copper pans hung from the walls and there was a deep, old-fashioned earthenware sink at the far end.

  There did not appear to be anyone about, although Catherine was conscious of movements and stirrings. Several times she caught what sounded like stealthy footsteps creeping along behind her, but each time she turned, there was nothing to be seen. She was very conscious indeed that there were people close by, and that CrnPrag was inhabited by a large number of people. But pray God I don’t meet any of them until I’ve found Pietro.

  Set into the corridor wall was a series of doors, each one secured with locks and iron bolts with chains, and each with a small judas window with the flap closed. Was Pietro behind one of those doors? Catherine reached up to the sliding partition of the nearest, and at once there was the slithering of chains from inside and a thick phlegmy chuckling. She snatched her hand back at once
as if she had been burnt, but as if responding to a signal, screechings and wailings started up from behind all of the doors. There was the cold, teeth-wincing sound of steel dragging against stone, and the pounding of fists on the thick oak doors. Several of the doors began to shake and the corridor reverberated with the ugly chucklings and screamings and with frenzied beatings and hammerings. Peals of mad laughter swooped about Catherine’s head and she stumbled back to the scullery, her heart racing, fear scudding across her skin. She dived inside the room, pulling the door half closed.

  From deep within the old mansion came the sound of running feet, and two darkly clad attendants, both with bunches of keys at their waist and revolvers slung into their belts, came down the passage.

  ‘Dawn chorus,’ said one, reaching up to rap sharply on the first of the doors.

  ‘Give them a bit of light,’ said the other, pulling back the tiny flaps. ‘They don’t like the dark.’

  ‘Would you, in their place?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’ The second guard stood looking up and down the bare passageway.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I suppose nothing’s got in?’

  ‘What could get in here?’ said the other man. And then, with a rather horrid grin, ‘What would want to get in?’

  They turned back and Catherine let out a huge breath of relief. She had not bargained for armed guards, but at least she was still free. So far so good.

  She waited until the guards’ footsteps had died away, and then moved cautiously into the corridor again. Pietro was surely not here, because whatever they had done to him, Pietro would never sound like the creatures in these cells. These were plainly Stefan Bathory’s lunatics. Poor, moonstruck madmen, frightened of the dark, hammering to get out.

  Where the guard had opened the flaps, bars showed clearly, and Catherine shivered. Barred cells. Necessary if there were violent cases here, of course. It was nothing to get upset about.