Before the apparition the priests, grotesque and terrifying beneath their beast-head masks and furry mantles, were now swinging lighted censers, and after a little a breath of the noisome incense was wafted up the slope.
Rex choked into his hand as the fumes caught his throat, then whispered: `What is that filth they’re burning?’
`Thorn, apple leaves, rue, henbane, dried nightshade, myrtle and other herbs,’ De Richleau answered. `Some are harmless apart from their stench, but others drug the brain and excite the senses to an animal fury of lust and eroticism as you will see soon enough. If only we could catch sight of Simon,’ he added desperately.
‘Look, there he is!’ Rex exclaimed. `Just to the left of the toad-headed brute.’
The goat rose, towering above the puny figures of its unhallowed priests, and turned its back on them; upon which one stooped slightly to give the osculam-infame as his mark of homage. The others followed suit, then the whole circle of Satanists drew in towards the throne and, in solemn silence, followed their example, each bending to salute his master in an obscene parody of the holy kiss which is given to the Bishop’s ring.
Simon was among the last, and as he approached the throne, Rex grabbed De Richleau’s arm. `It’s now or never,’ he grunted. ‘We’ve got to make some effort. We can’t let this thing go through.’
`Hush,’ De Richleau whispered back. `This is not the baptism. That will not be until after they have feasted-just before the orgy. Our chance must come.’
As the two lay there in the rough grass, each knew that the time was close at hand when they must act if they meant to attempt Simon’s rescue. Yet, despite the fact that neither of them lacked courage, both realised with crushing despondency how slender their chances of success would be if they ran down the slope and charged that multitude immersed in their ghoulish rites. There were at least a hundred people in that black-robed crowd and it seemed an utter impossibility to overcome such odds.
Rex leaned over towards the Duke and voiced his thoughts aloud, ‘We’re right up against it this time unless you can produce a brainwave. We’d be captured in ten seconds if we tried getting Simon away from this bunch of maniacs.’
`I know,’ De Richleau agreed miserably. `I did not bargain for them all being shut up together in one room in that house or coming on to this place in a solid crowd. If only they would split up a little we might isolate Simon with just two or three of them, down the rest, and get him away before the main party knew what was happening; but as things are I am worried out of my wits. If we charge in, and they catch us, I have not a single doubt but that we should never be allowed to come up out of this hollow alive. We know too much, and they would kill us for a certainty. In fact, they would probably welcome the chance on a night like this to perform a little human sacrifice in front of that ghastly thing on the stones there.’
`Surely they wouldn’t go in for murder even if they do practise this filthy parody of religion?’ whispered Rex incredulously.
De Richleau shook his head. `The Bloody Sacrifice is the oldest magical rite in the world. The slaying of Osiris and Adonis, the mutilation of Attis and the cults of Mexico and Peru, were all connected with it. Even in the Old Testament you read that the sacrifice which was most acceptable to God the Father was one of blood, and St. Paul tells us that “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission”.’
`That was just ancient heathen cruelty.’
`Not altogether. The blood is the Life. When it is shed, energy-animal or human as the case may be-is released into the atmosphere. If it is shed within a specially prepared circle, that energy can be caught and stored or redirected in precisely the same way as electric energy is caught and utilised by our modern scientists.’
`But they wouldn’t dare to sacrifice a human being?’
`It all depends upon the form of evil they wish to bring upon the world. If it is war they will seek to propitiate Mars with a virgin ram; if they desire the spread of unbridled lust-a goat, and so on. But the human sacrifice is more potent for all purposes than any other, and these wretched people are hardly human at the moment. Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and warlocks of the Dark Ages.’
`Oh, Hell!’ Rex groaned, `we’ve simply got to get Simon out of this some way.’
The Goat turned round again after receiving the last kiss, holding between its hoofs a wooden cross about four feet in length. With a sudden violent motion it dashed the crucifix against the stone, breaking it into two pieces. Then the catheaded man, who seemed to be acting the part of Chief Priest, picked them up. He threw the broken end of the shaft towards a waiting group, who pounced upon it and smashed it into matchwood with silent ferocity, while he planted the crucifix end upside down in the ground before the Goat. This apparently concluded the first portion of the ceremony.
The Satanists now hurried over to the tables where the banquet was spread out. No knives, forks, spoons or glasses were in evidence. But this strange party, governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality, grabbed handfuls of food out of the silver dishes and, seizing the bottles, tilted them to drink from the necks, gurgling and spitting as they did so and spilling the wine down their dominoes. Not one of them spoke a word, and the whole macabre scene was carried out in a terrible unnatural silence, as though it were a picture by Goya come to life.
‘Let’s, creep down nearer,’ whispered the Duke. ‘While they are gorging themselves an opportunity may come for us to get hold of Simon. If he moves a few paces away from them for a moment, don’t try to argue with him, but knock him out.’
At a stealthy crawl, the two friends moved down the hillside to within twenty yards of the little lake, at the side of which the tables were set. The throne still occupied by the monstrous goat was only a further fifteen yards away from them, and by the light of the twelve black candles burning with an unnaturally steady flame even in that protected hollow among the hills, they could see the clustered figures sufficiently well to recognise those whom they knew among them despite their masks and dominoes.
Simon, like the rest, was gnawing at a chunk of food as though he had suddenly turned into an animal, and, as they watched, he snatched a bottle of wine from a masked woman standing nearby, spilling a good portion of its contents over her and himself; then he gulped down the rest.
For a few moments Rex felt again that he must be suffering from a nightmare. It seemed utterly beyond understanding that any cultured man like Simon, or other civilised people such as these must normally be, could behave with such appalling bestiality. But it was no nightmare. In that strange, horrid silence, the Satanists continued for more than half an hour to fight and tumble like a pack of wolfish dogs until the tables had been overthrown and the ground about the lakeside was
filthy with the remaining scraps of food, gnawed bones and empty bottles.
At last Simon, apparently three parts drunk lurched away from the crash and flung himself down on the grass a little apart from the rest, burying his head between his hands.
‘Now!’ whispered the Duke. ‘We’ve got to get him.’
With Rex beside him, he half rose to his feet, but a tall figure had broken from the mass and reached Simon before they could move. It was the man with the mutilated ear, and in another second a group of two women and. three more men had followed him. De Richleau gritted his teeth to suppress an oath and placed a restraining hand on Rex’s shoulder.
‘It’s no good,’ he muttered savagely. ‘We must wait a bit. Another chance may come.’ And they sank down again into the shadows.
The group about the tables was now reeling drunk, and the whole party in a body surged back towards the Goat upon its throne. Rex and De Richleau had been watching Simon so intently they had failed to notice until then that Mocata and the half dozen other masters of the Left Hand Path had erected a special table before the Goat, and were feeding from it. Yet they appeared strangely sober compared with the majority of th
e crowd who had fed beside the lake.
‘So the Devil feeds, too,’ Rex murmured.
‘Yes,’ agreed the Duke, ‘or at least the heads of his priesthood, and a gruesome meal it is if I know anything about it. A little cannibalism, my friend. It may be a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered, but I would stake anything that it is human flesh they are eating.’
As he spoke, a big cauldron was brought forward and placed before the throne. Then Mocata and the others with him each took a portion of the food which they had been eating from the table and cast it into the great iron pot. One of them threw in a round ball which met the iron with a dull thud.
Rex shuddered as he realised that the Duke was right. The round object was a human skull.
‘They’re going to boil up the remains with various other things,’ murmured the Duke, ‘and then each of them will be given a little flask of that awful brew at the conclusion of the ceremony, together with a pile of ashes from the wood fire they are lighting under the cauldron now. They will be able to use them for their infamous purposes throughout the year until the next Great Sabbat takes place.’
‘Oh, Hell!’ Rex protested. ‘I can’t believe that they can work any harm with that human mess, however horrid it may be. It’s just not reasonable.’
‘Yet you believe that the Blessed Sacrament has power for good,’ De Richleau whispered. ‘This is the antithesis of the Body of Our Lord, and I assure you, Rex, that, while countless wonderful miracles have been performed by the aid of the Host, terrible things can be accomplished by this blasphemous decoction.’
Rex had no deep religious feeling, but he was shocked and horrified to the depths of his being by this frightful parody of the things he had been taught to hold sacred in his childhood.
‘Dear God,’ muttered the Duke, ‘they are about to commit the most appalling sacrilege. Don’t look, Rex-don’t look.’ He buried his face in his hands and began to pray, but Rex continued to watch despite himself, his gaze held by some terrible fascination.
A great silver chalice was being passed from hand to hand, and very soon he realised the purpose to which it was being put, but could not guess the intention until it was handed back to the catheaded man. One of the other officiating priests at the infamy produced some round white discs which Rex recognised at once as Communion Wafers-evidently stolen from some church.
In numbed horror he watched the Devil’s acolytes break these into pieces and throw them into the brimming chalice, then stir the mixture with the broken crucifix and hand the resulting compound to the Goat, who, clasping it between its great cloven hoofs, suddenly tipped it up so that the whole contents was spilled upon the ground.
Suddenly, at last, the horrid silence was rent, for the whole mob surged forward shouting and screaming as though they had gone insane, to dance and stamp the fragments of the Holy Wafers into the sodden earth.
‘Phew!’ Rex choked out, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. ‘This is a ghastly business. I can’t stand much more of it. They’re mad, stark crazy, every mother’s son of them.’
‘Yes, temporarily.’ The Duke looked up again.’ Some of them are probably epileptics, and nearly all must be abnormal. This revolting spectacle represents a release of all their pent-up emotions and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success and good fortune. That is the only explanation for this terrible exhibition of human depravity which we are witnessing.’
‘Thank God, Tanith’s not here. She couldn’t have stood it. She’d have gone mad, I know, or tried to run away. And then they’d probably have murdered her. But what are we going to do about Simon?’
De Richleau groaned. ‘God only knows. If I thought there were the least hope, we’d charge into this rabble and try to drag him out of it, but the second they saw us they would tear us limb from limb.’
The fire under the cauldron was burning brightly, and as the crowd moved apart Rex saw that a dozen women had now stripped themselves of their dominoes and stood stark naked in the candle-light. They formed a circle round the cauldron, and holding hands, with their backs turned to the inside of the ring, began a wild dance around it anti-clockwise towards the Devil’s left.
In a few moments the whole company had stripped off their dominoes and joined in the dance, tumbling and clawing at one another before the throne, with the exception of half a dozen who sat a little on one side, each with a musical instrument, forming a small band. But the music which they made was like no other that Rex had ever heard before, and he prayed that he might never hear the like again. Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge.
To this agonising cacophony of sound the dancers, still masked, quite naked and utterly silent but for the swift movement of their feet, continued their wild, untimed gyrations, so that rather than the changing pattern of an ordered ballet the scene was one of a trampling mass of bestial animal figures.
Drunk with an inverted spiritual exaltation and excess of alcohol-wild-eyed and apparently hardly conscious of each other-the hair of the women streaming disordered as they pranced, and the panting breath of the men coming in laboured gasps-they rolled and lurched, spun and gyrated, toppled, fell, picked themselves up again, and leaped with renewed frenzy in one revolting carnival of mad disorder. Then, with a final wailing screech from the violin, the band ceased and the whole party flung themselves panting and exhausted upon the ground, while the huge Goat rattled and clacked its monstrous cloven hoofs together and gave a weird laughing neigh in a mockery of applause.
De Richleau sat up quickly. ‘God help us, Rex, but we’ve got to do something now. When these swine have recovered their wind the next act of this horror will be the baptism of the Neophytes and after that the foulest orgy, with every perversion which the human mind is capable of conceiving. We daren’t wait any longer. Once Simon is baptised, we shall have lost our last chance of saving him from permanent and literal Hell in this life and the next.’
‘I suppose it’s just possible we’ll pull it off now they’ve worked themselves into this state?’ Rex hazarded doubtfully.
‘Yes, they’re looking pretty done at the moment,’ the Duke agreed, striving to bolster up his waning courage for the desperate attempt.
‘ Shall we-shall we chance it?’ Rex hesitated. He too was filled with a horrible fear as to the fate which might overtake them once they left the friendly shadows to dash into that ring of evil blue light. In an effort to steady his frayed nerves, he gave a travesty of a laugh, and added: ‘The odds aren’t quite so heavy against us now they’ve lost their trousers. No one fights his best like that.’
‘It’s not the pack that I’m so frightened of, but that ghastly thing sitting on the rocks.’ De Richleau’s voice was hoarse and desperate. ‘The protections I have utilised may not prove strong enough to save us from the evil which is radiating from it.’
‘If we have faith,’ gasped Rex, ‘won’t that be enough?’
De Richleau shivered. The numbing cold which lapped up out of the hollow in icy waves seemed to sap all his strength and courage.
‘It would,’ he muttered. ‘It would if we were both in a state of grace.’
At that pronouncement Rex’s heart sank. He had no terrible secret crime with which to charge himself, but although circumstances had appeared to justify it at the time, both he and the Duke had taken human life, and who, faced with the actual doorway of the other world, can say that they are utterly without sin?
Desperately now he fought to regain his normal courage. In the dell the Satanists had recovered their wind and were forming in the great semi-circle again about the throne. The chance to rescue Simon was passing with the fleeting seconds, while his friends stood crouched and tongue-tied, their minds bemused by the reek of the nox
ious incense which floated up from the hollow, their bodies chained by an awful, overwhelming fear.
Three figures now moved out into the open space before the Goat. Upon the left the beast-like, catheaded high priest of Evil; upon the right Mocata, his gruesome bat’s wings fluttering a little from his hunched-up shoulders; between them, naked, trembling, almost apparently in a state of collapse, they supported Simon.
‘It’s now or never!’ Rex choked out.
‘No-I can’t do it,’ moaned the Duke, burying his face in his hands and sinking to the ground. ‘I’m afraid, Rex. God forgive me, I’m afraid.’
Chapter 17
Evil Triumphant
As the blue Rolls, number OA 1217, came to rest with a sickening thud against the back of the big barn outside Easterton Village, Tanith was flung forward against the windscreen. Fortunately the Duke’s cars were equipped with splinter-proof glass and so the windows remained intact, but for the moment she was half-stunned by the blow on her head and painfully ‘winded’ by the wheel, which caught her in the stomach.
For a few sickening seconds she remained dazed and gasping for breath. Then she realised that she had escaped serious injury, and that the police would be on her at any moment. Her head whirling, her breath stabbing painfully, she threw open the door of the Rolls and staggered out on to the grass.
In a last desperate effort to evade capture, she lurched at an unsteady run across the coarse tussocks and just as the torches of the police appeared over the same hillock, which had slowed down the wild career of the car, she flung herself down in a ditch, sheltered by a low hedge, some thirty yards from the scene of the accident.
She paused there only long enough to regain her breath, and then began to crawl away along the runnel until it ended on the open plain. Taking a stealthy look over the hedge, she saw her pursuers were still busy examining the car, so she took a chance and ran for it, trusting in the darkness of the night to hide her from them.
The Devil Rides Out Page 14
