RITUAL.

Graham Masterton.

CHAPTER ONE.

Outside the restaurant window, behind the trees, a huge thundercloud ballooned up, luridly orange in the afternoon sunshine, anvil-headed, apocalyptic, the kind of thundercloud from which Valkyries should have been tumbling.

'Well, then,' said Charlie, his face half hidden in the shadows. 'How long do you think this baby has been dead?'

Martin peered across the table. 'Hard to say, under all that glop.'

'This glop, as you call it, is Colonial-style Sauce,' Charlie corrected him.

'It's glop,' Martin insisted. 'Look at it. It's so gloppy.'

Charlie bowed his head so close to the lumpy scarlet sauce spread out over his plate that Martin thought for one moment that he was going to press his face into it. Charlie was sniffing it, to determine what it was made of. He was also trying to decide whether the veal schnitzel underneath had been defrosted recently enough to justify the menu's confident claim that it was 'Homestead Fresh'.

Without raising his face, Charlie said, 'This is a mixture of Chef Boy-ar-Dee canned tomatoes, undercooked onions, and Spice Islands Mixed Herbs straight out of the jar. Its primary purpose would appear to be to conceal the midlife crisis being suffered by the schnitzel beneath it.'

'Is that what you're going to write about it?' asked Martin. Charlie could hear the challenge in his voice. He sat up straight and looked Martin directly in the eye.

'I have to be practical, as well as critical. Where else is your ravenous fertilizer salesman going to eat, halfway up the Housa-tonic Valley on a wet fall afternoon?'

He picked up his fork, wiped it carefully on his napkin, and added, 'What I shall probably write is, "The Colonial-style Sauce was somewhat short on true Colonial character."'

'Isn't that called copping out?' said Martin. All the same, he watched with amus.e.m.e.nt as Charlie lifted up his entire veal schnitzel on the end of his fork and scrutinized first one side and then the other, as if he were trying to s.e.x it.

'Sometimes, you have to be forgiving to be accurate,' said Charlie. 'The truth is, this veal is disastrous and this sauce is worse, but we'd be wasting our time if we went driving around looking for anything better. Besides, I've eaten far less appetizing meals than this. I was served up with steak tartare once, in the Imperial Hotel in Philadelphia, and there was half a cow's lip in it, complete with hair. The maitre d' tried to persuade me that it was something called Steak Tartare Napoleone. I said, "This is more like Steak Tartare Vidal Sa.s.soon.'"

Martin smiled, one of those odd sly smiles which fifteen-year-old boys put on to convince their forty-one-year-old fathers that they are still interested in hearing all the h.o.a.ry, unfunny anecdotes that their fathers have been telling them ever since they were old enough to listen. He poked at his Traditional Connecticut Potpie.

'I haven't put you off your food?' asked Charlie.

Martin shook his head. 'I don't think you've done anything for their appet.i.tes, though.' And he nodded towards two white-haired New England matrons who were sitting at the next table, staring at Charlie with their spectacles as blind as four polished pennies.

Charlie turned in his seat and smiled at the matrons benignly, like a priest. Fl.u.s.tered, they attended to their fried fish. 'The food is okay here,' he told Martin. 'The vegetables are all home-grown, the breadrolls are fresh, and when they accidentally drop someone's lunch on the floor, they usually throw it in the trash. Did I ever tell you about the time they dropped a whole lobster stew in the service elevator at the Royalty Inn in Seattle? Yes - and sc.r.a.ped it up between two wine-lists. Yes - and served it up to a legionnaires' reunion party. No wonder legionnaires are always having diseases named after them.'

'I think you did tell me that, yes sir,' said Martin, and slowly began to eat. Outside, the thundercloud was already dredging the upper atmosphere with rain. There was a strange, threatening hush in the air, interrupted only by the sound of knives and forks squeaking on plates.

'This place has charm,' Charlie added. 'These days, you don't get to see too much in the way of charm. And, you know, for most people, charm is just as important as food. More important, sometimes. You're taking a girl out, hoping to screw her, what do you care if they only half cook the onions in your Colonial-style Sauce?'

Martin was quite aware that Charlie was trying to talk to him man-to-man. But anybody who had been sitting next to them, father and son, both silhouetted against the pewterish light of an October afternoon - anybody would have realized quite quickly that they were strangers to one another. There were too many empty pauses; too many moments of un-familiarity and too many questions that no father should ever have needed to ask his own son.

'How's the potpie?' Charlie wanted to know. 'I never knew you liked potpie.'

'I don't,' said Martin. 'But look at the alternatives. That fish looks like it died of old age.'

'Don't knock old age,' said Charlie. 'Old age has a dignity all its own.'

'If that's true, your veal must be just about the most dignified piece of meat I ever saw.'

Charlie was cutting up his schnitzel with professional neatness. 'It's acceptable, given the location, the net cost and the time of year.'

'You always say that. You've been saying that since I was five years old. You said that about the very first catcher's mitt you bought me.'

Charlie laid down his fork. 'I told you. I have to be practical as well as critical. I have to remember that most people aren't picky.'

Martin said, more venomously than he had ever dared to speak to his father before, 'You'd eat anything, wouldn't you?'

Charlie looked at his son with care. At last, he said, 'It's my job,' as if that explained everything.

For a few minutes, the two of them were silent. Charlie always felt tense when they were silent. There was so much to ask, so much to say, and yet he found it almost impossible to express what he felt. How can you explain to your son that you regret every minute you missed of his growing up, when there had never been anything to prevent you from being there but your own misguided sense of destiny?

He carried a plastic wallet that was fat with dog-eared photographs, and for him they were as progressively agonizing as the Stations of the Cross. Here was Martin playing in the yard at the age of three with a bright red firetruck, his eyes squin-ched up tight against the summer sun. Here he was again, dressed as Paul Revere at the grade-school concert, unsmiling, unsure of himself. That picture had been taken in 1978, when Charlie hadn't been home for over four months. Here was Martin after his team had won the Little League baseball tournament, his hand raised up in triumph by some ginger-haired gorilla of a man whom Charlie had never even met.

Charlie had missed almost all of it. Instead, he had been dining in strange hotels all across America, Charlie McLean, the restaurant inspector, an unremembered ghost at countless unremembered banquets. But how could he explain to Martin why he had been compelled to do it, and what it had been like? Those solitary hotel rooms, with television sets quarrelling through every wall; those fifteenth-floor windows with soulless views of ventilation shafts and wet city streets, into which the taillights of pa.s.sing automobiles had run like blood.

Every meal taken alone, like a penance.

Watching his father's face, Martin said, 'Sounds like that storm's headed this way.'

'Yes,' said Charlie. 'There's a legend up here in the Litch-field Hills that electric storms are caused by ancient Indian demons; the Great Old Ones, they call them. The Narragansett medicine men fought them and beat them, and then chained them up to the clouds so that they couldn't escape. But, you know, every now and then they wake up and get angry and shake their chains and gnash their teeth together, and that's what causes electric storms.'

Martin put down his fork. 'Dad? Is it okay if I have another 7-Up?'

Charlie said, 'You know - you can call me Charlie. I mean, you don't have to. But you can if you want to.'

Martin didn't say anything to that. Charlie beckoned the waitress. 'You want to bring me another 7-Up, no cherry, and another gla.s.s of the chardonnay?'

'You're not on vacation,' the waitress said. It wasn't a question. She wore a blue satin dress that stuck to all the most unflattering parts of her hips and her b.u.t.tocks with the tenacity of Saran-wrap. She could have been quite pretty, except that one side of her face didn't quite seem to match the other, giving her a peculiarly vixenish appearance. Her hair was the colour of egg-yolk, and stuck up stiffly in all directions.

'Just making the rounds,' said Charlie, winking at Martin. There was a distant grumble of thunder, and he pointed with a smile towards the window. 'I was telling my son about the Indian demons, chained up in the clouds.'

The waitress stopped writing on her pad for a moment and stared at him. 'Pardon me?'

'It's a legend,' said Martin, coming to his father's rescue.

'You're not kidding,' the waitress remarked. She peered down at Charlie's plate. 'You really hate that veal, don't you?' she told him.

'It's acceptable,' said Charlie, without looking at her. Like each of his five fellow inspectors, he wasn't permitted to discuss meals or services with the management of any of the restaurants he visited, and it was a misdemeanour punishable by instant dismissal to tell them who he was. His publishers believed that if their inspectors were allowed to reveal their ident.i.ty, they would be liable to be offered bribes. Worse than that, they would be liable to accept them. Charlie's colleague, Barry Hunsecker, paid most of his alimony out of bribes, but lived in a constant cold sweat unless he was found out, and fired.

The waitress leaned over, and whispered to Charlie, 'You don't have to be embarra.s.sed. It's awful. Listen, don't eat it if you don't want to. n.o.body's forcing you to eat it. I'll make sure they charge you for the chowder, and leave it at that.'

Charlie said, 'You don't have to worry. This is fine.'

'If that's fine, I'm a Chinese person.' The waitress propped her hands on her hips and looked at him as if he were deliberately being awkward.

'It's fine,' Charlie repeated. He could hardly tell her that he was obliged to eat it, that doggedly finishing his entire portion was part of his professional duties. And he was supposed to order dessert, and cheese, and coffee; and visit the restrooms, to scrutinize the towels.

'Well, I took you for a gourmand,' the waitress told him. She scribbled down '7~Up + Char' and tucked her pad into the pocket of her dress.

'A gourmand?' asked Charlie. He lifted his head a little, and as he did so the last of the sunlight caught him, and gave his age away, but that was all. A round-faced man of forty-one, his roundness redeemed by the lines around his eyes, which gave him a look of experience and culture, like a Meissen dish that had been chipped at the edges. His hair was clipped short and neat as if he still believed in the values of 1959. His hands .were small, with a single gold ring on the wedding finger. He wore a grey speckled sport coat and plain grey Evvaprest pants. Perhaps the only distinctive thing about him was his wrist.w.a.tch, an eighteen carat gold Corum Romulus. That had been given to him under circ.u.mstances that still made him sad to think about, even today.

n.o.body had ever guessed what he did for a living, n.o.body in twenty-one years. Most of the time, this anonymity gave him a slightly bitter sense of satisfaction; but at other times it made him feel so lost and isolated that he could scarcely breathe.

'Of course, this place has been going to the dogs ever since Mrs Foss took over,' the waitress said, as if they ought to know exactly who Mrs Foss was, and why she should have such a degenerative influence. She curled up her lip. 'Mrs Foss and all the other Fosses.'

'How many Fosses are there exactly?' asked Charlie. Martin covered his mouth with his hand to hide his amus.e.m.e.nt. He enjoyed it when his father was being dry with people.

'Well, there's six, if you count Edna Foss Lawrence. There used to be seven, of course, but Ivy went missing the week before Thanksgiving two years gone.'

Charlie nodded, as if he remembered Ivy Foss going missing just like it was yesterday. 'It sounds to me like too many Fosses spoil the broth,' he remarked.

'She'd burn a can of beans, that woman,' said the waitress. 'Come on, now, why don't you let me get you the snapper. I should of warned you not to have the veal.'

There was a sharp sizzling crack, and the restaurant flickered like a scene out of a Mack Sennett movie. One of the matrons pressed her hands to her face, and cried out, 'Mercy!' Everybody looked around, their retinas imprinted with luminous green trees of lightning. Then a bellowing thunderclap rattled the plates and jingled the gla.s.ses, and set the panes of the old colonial windows buzzing.

'I think G.o.d's telling me to finish my veal and behave myself,' said Charlie.

'I thought you said they were demons,' Martin reminded him.

'I don't believe in demons.'

'Do you believe in G.o.d?'

Charlie looked across at Martin, narrow-eyed. The rain began to patter against the windows. 'Would it make any difference to you if I said that I didn't?'

'Marjorie always says that you have to believe in something.'

'How come you call your mom Marjorie but you won't call me Charlie?'

'How come you never say you hate anything?'

Charlie looked down at his plate. Then, for the first time in years, he put his knife and fork together, even though he hadn't sc.r.a.ped the plate clean. 'You may find it difficult to understand, but when you're somebody's employee, as I am, you have to do what's expected of you, regardless of your own personal feelings.'

'Even if you don't respect yourself?'

Charlie was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'If you and I are going to be friends, you should try to get out of the habit of quoting your mother at me.'

Martin flushed. The waitress came over and set down their drinks. 'You saved your stomach some extra torture there, sir,' she told Charlie, taking his plate away.

'We'll have the apple pandowdy,' said Charlie.

'Are you that tired of life?' the waitress remarked.

The rain trailed across the parking lot and dripped from the yew hedges that surrounded the restaurant gardens. There was another dazzling flicker of lightning, and another 8.furniture-moving bout of thunder. Charlie sipped his wine and wished it were colder and drier. Martin stared out of the window.

'You could have gone to stay with the Harrisons,' said Charlie.

Martin was frowning, as if he could see something outside the restaurant, but couldn't quite decide what it was. 'I didn't want to stay with the Harrisons. I wanted to come around with you. In any case, Gerry Harrison is such a t.u.r.d-pilot.'

'Would you keep it clean?' Charlie requested. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'In any case, what the h.e.l.l is a - t.u.r.d-pilot?'

'There's somebody outside there,' said Martin.

Charlie turned around in his seat and looked out into the garden. All he could see was a sloping lawn and a row of badly trimmed hedges. In the middle of the lawn stood an old stone sundial, leaning at a derelict angle; and further back, surrounded by a tangle of old man's beard, hunched a wet, half-collapsed shed.

'I don't see anybody,' he said. 'And who the h.e.l.l would want to stand out there in the middle of a storm?'

'Look - there!' Martin interrupted him, and pointed.

Charlie strained his eyes. For one moment, through the rain that herringboned the windowpanes, he thought he glimpsed somebody standing just to the left of the shed, veiled like a bride with old man's beard. Somebody dark, somebody stooped, with a face that was disturbingly pale. Whoever it was, man or woman, it wasn't moving. It was standing staring at the restaurant window, while the rain lashed across the garden so torrentially that it was almost laughable; like a storm-at-sea movie in which all the actors are repeatedly doused with bucketfuls of water.

There was a third flash of lightning, even more intense than the first; and for one split second every shadow in the garden was blanched white. But whoever had been sheltering there had disappeared. There was only the old man's beard, and the dilapidated shiplap shed, and the bushes that dipped and bowed under the relentless lashing of the rain.

'Optical illusion,' said Charlie.

Martin didn't answer, but kept on staring outside.

'Ghost?' Charlie suggested.

'I don't know,' said Martin. 'It gave me a weird kind of a feeling, that's all.'

The waitress returned with their plates of apple pandowdy and a jug of country cream. She was grimacing as she came across the restaurant. Walking close behind her was a short, fat woman in a blue and turquoise tent dress. There was an air of ferocious authority about her which told Charlie at once that this must be Mrs Foss, under whose direction the Iron Kettle was going to the dogs.

Mrs Foss wore spectacles that looked as if they had been modelled on the rear end of a '58 Plymouth Fury. The skin around her mouth was tightly lined, and the fine hairs on her cheeks were clogged with bright beige foundation.

'Well, h.e.l.lo there,' she announced. 'I'm always glad to see strangers.'

Charlie rose awkwardly out of his seat, and shook her hand, which was soft and limp, but jagged with diamond rings.

'Harriet tells me you didn't care for the veal,' said Mrs Foss, the lines around her lips bunching tighter.

'The veal was acceptable,' said Charlie, making sure that he didn't catch Martin's eye.

'You didn't eat it,' Mrs Foss accused him. 'Usually, they polish the plate.'

The patronizing use of the word 'they' didn't go unnoticed by a man who had eaten and slept in over four thousand different American establishments.

'I'm sorry if I gave you an extra dish to wash.' Charlie told her.

'The dishwashing isn't here and it isn't there. What concerns me is that you didn't eat your food.'