The Satanist (17 page)

On her way home Mary cursed herself whole-heartedly. She had meant to play the siren with Barney that evening, and so convert the interest he had shown in her from the first into a much warmer feeling. But now, for the second time, she had behaved in a manner which could only lead him to believe that, attractive as her looks might make her, she was so stupid, prudish, and naturally ill-tempered that it would be folly to cultivate her further. From the manner in which he had left her, it was clear that he did not mean to ask her out again.

Since she had lost Teddy everything had gone wrong. She had given up her home, and the friends who might have comforted her, to set out on a wild-goose chase; or at least one that fear had forced her to abandon. And now she had thrown away the last human link which could provide her with an interest. She was and must continue to be for some time to come, as utterly alone in the world as if she had become marooned on a desert island. Unless, far worse.
when she least expected it, Ratnadatta appeared on the scene to exact payment from her for having ignored his warning. Her day had started with such promise, yet ended with catastrophe. That night she wept herself to sleep.

The saying that ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’ certainly applies to most healthy people, and there was nothing in the least wrong with Mary, either mentally or physically. In consequence, after a sound sleep, she began to view her situation more cheerfully. The occult manifestations she had witnessed on Saturday night were of a potency sufficient to have struck terror into anyone’s mind; so it was hardly to be wondered at that only twenty-four hours later her nerves were still so jumpy that she had accepted an accident as evidence that the Brotherhood was keeping watch on her by supernatural means, and had the power to make her let drop a glass of wine.

But when she had woken and thought about the matter for a while, she decided that she had panicked unnecessarily. For the Satanists to keep a round-the-clock watch on her, they would need to employ a whole team of clairvoyants, and surely that was rating her importance to them much too high? To suppose that when anyone was about to betray their secrets an occult alarm bell rang to inform them of it was hardly credible; and, if they did have some such telepathic control, why should they have let her go on for several minutes describing the temple, its congregation and the things she had seen happen in it, before stopping her? On top of that the idea that they had the power temporarily to paralyse her fingertips from a distance seemed altogether too fantastic. The truth of the matter must be that she had
simply been careless in taking the glass, and the fact that she had dropped it just as she was on the point of telling Barney about the black imp had been no more than a coincidence.

Much comforted by this logical banishing of her overnight fears, while she lay in her bath she sought again for some interest to occupy her mind now that she had abandoned her crusade to bring Teddy’s murderer to justice, and some weeks must elapse before she could restore her old appearance to a point when she could take up once more, without embarrassment, with the people they had known.

The modelling work on which she had started only recently had, as yet, brought her few new acquaintances. It would bring more in time, but she knew that the majority of the men in the so-called ‘rag’ trade regarded the models they employed only as dummies to display clothes on, and the girls themselves, enjoying a much higher than average standard of good looks, all had either husbands or numerous boy-friends, who kept them fully occupied.

The previous night she had resigned herself to having lost Barney and had not been able to make up her mind if she was glad or sorry. Despite her long nurtured grievance against him, while in his company she enjoyed his gay, intelligent conversation and, subconsciously, was still strongly attracted to him physically. To know that she would not now have the satisfaction of making him fall for her, then being thoroughly beastly to him, was a sad disappointment; but she tried to console herself with the thought that two wrongs did not make a right, so perhaps it was as well that her plan to avenge herself on him had been nipped in the bud.

Yet the thought of him was like a worrying tooth and as she lay in her bath she toyed with the idea of trying to get in touch with him. Had she known his address she would have written him a line of apology for her behaviour, and so tried to start the ball rolling between them again that way, but she did not. It then occurred to her that he would
be in the telephone book; so, getting out of the bath, she dried herself quickly and got the book, but no Lord Larne was listed in it. Throwing it down she upbraided herself for a fool for having even bothered to look, as she ought to have realised that, having no right to the title, he would not have had the face to use it publicly. That settled the matter. She must accept it that he had once more gone out of her life.

The only other people she had met after changing her personality to Margot Mauriac were those who attended the meetings at Mrs. Wardeel’s. She now knew several of them by name and could, if she chose, develop a friendship with them. As they were nearly all considerably older than herself, and earnest seekers after truth, that would not prove very exciting. But at the thought of whole days, when she had no modelling engagements, spent in aimless window-gazing, and with no prospect in the evening but going to a cinema on her own, she decided that such human contacts would be better than nothing.

She had meant not to go to Mrs. Wardeel’s again, because that would entail meeting Ratnadatta. But if the spilling of the wine had been, as she was now convinced, a normal accident, she had nothing to fear from him. Instead of simply not keeping her appointment with him next Saturday she would tell him on Tuesday night that, having thought the matter over, she had now decided that she was still too conventionally minded to prove a suitable candidate for initiation into his Brotherhood.

She began to wonder then if, from anger at her having wasted his time, he might bring some form of trouble on her. But suddenly a new thought entered her mind. Barney would be at the meeting too. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Here was her chance to recapture him. She would get him to walk home with her afterwards, tell him that as a compensation for having spoilt his evening on Saturday she had prepared a little supper for them, and bring him up to her flat.

The more she thought over this new plan, the more it
pleased her, and the urge she felt to carry it out soon overcame her vague fears of meeting Ratnadatta again. That afternoon she went up to the West-End to model some swim-suits for the coming summer season, and in the evening thoroughly enjoyed a film. Tuesday she had no engagement; so she spent the morning turning out her sitting-room and in the afternoon spread herself at Harrods, buying smoked Westphalian ham, cold salmon, materials for a salad, cheese straws and fruit. As she laid the table she again regretted her own much nicer things at Wimbledon, but she had bought plenty of flowers to make the room gay and the wine-salesman had assured her that the bottle of Hock he had recommended was really good.

Filled with happy anticipation, she set off for Mrs. Wardeel’s and arrived there a little before eight o’clock. When she entered the lecture room neither Barney nor Ratnadatta had arrived. The latter did so just before the proceedings started, but Barney had still not put in an appearance.

The lecture that evening was on Maya religious beliefs and how they tied up with Theosophy, but she hardly took in a word of it. Every few minutes she looked towards the door, hoping that she would see Barney slip in and quietly take a seat at the back; but her hopes were disappointed.

She then tried to persuade herself that, having heard the subject of the lecture at the last meeting, he thought it would bore him, so meant to come later in time only to see another medium perform. But the lecture finished, the chairs were arranged in a circle, and still he did not come.

On this occasion the medium was a tall, thin man. Having taken his chair in the middle of the circle, he was wrapped up to the chin by Mrs. Wardeel in a voluminous sheet, then two members of the audience were chosen to assure the rest that no hidden wires or other apparatus had been connected in his vicinity. All the lights, except for one small bulb, were turned off, the spectators linked hands with their neighbours, there was a long, long silence during which nothing happened, then a gentle radiance in the neighbourhood of the medium’s mouth became perceptible.

Gradually it increased until the whole of the lower part of his face could be seen by it. Opening his mouth wide he began to breathe stertorously and a pale yellow foam formed round the inside of his lips. The foam increased until it became a solid bubble, hiding both his upper and lower teeth and his tongue. For a while the bubble ballooned and deflated in time with his breathing, and as he strove to force it out the radiance was sufficient to show that sweat was streaming down his face. At last it lapped over, covering his chin then, looking like a thick band of dough, slowly made its way down the slope of the sheet that covered his chest until it reached the level of his stomach. There it stopped, but more and more of the stuff oozed down till a lump as large as a medium-sized melon had formed. The lump flattened out and five roundish points began to protrude from it. These lengthened until the whole thing had roughly the shape of a huge hand attached by a curved arm to the medium’s mouth.

Mary had never before seen an occultist project ectoplasm, and cause it to take on the likeness of human limbs or a rudimentary human body; so normally she would have been much impressed by the strange exhibition. But having, three nights before, witnessed the far more hair-raising spectacle of the Great Ram conjuring up a cloud of smoke that turned into a perfectly formed manikin capable of movement, although unattached to him, she found the long slow performance somewhat wearisome. Moreover, her mind was still on Barney and his failure to attend the meeting.

When they had last dined together, he had frankly declared his disbelief in the genuineness of the medium they had seen the week before, so she thought it possible that scepticism about Mrs. Wardeel’s parties as a whole had decided him against giving any more of his evenings to attending them. But she was more inclined to believe that, feeling certain she would be there, he had refrained from coming so as to avoid any possibility of being drawn into a resumption of their, so far, most unsatisfactory, tentative
moves towards entering on an affair.

Her disappointment was naturally proportionate to the hours she had given to musing over the way in which that evening she would make Barney take a much better view of her, and those she had spent in preparing that delightful little supper. But by the time the medium had re-absorbed his ectoplasm she had made herself face up to it that, if it was to avoid meeting her again that Barney had failed to attend this meeting, the odds were all against his coming to the one next week, so she would be wise to write him off for good and all.

When the party moved into the dining-room for coffee, Ratnadatta sidled up to her, gave his toothy smile and said in a low voice: ‘Mrs. Mauriac, I haf another person with weech I wish to talk here tonight. But I also wish to talk with you. As it ees private matter, better that we talk in street; so plees I walk part off way home with you.’

His friendly greeting at first confirmed her belief that she had nothing to fear from him; but his words sent a sudden chill through her. Perhaps he did know that she had spoken of the Brotherhood to Barney. If so, his proposal to walk home with her suggested that he wanted to get her on his own in a situation where he could do her some injury. Then, after a moment, she dismissed the idea as highly improbable, and reassured herself with the thought that, anyway, he would not be such a fool as to attempt to harm her while walking through a respectable district at an hour when there would still be plenty of people about on whom she could call for help.

Taking her consent for granted, he had left her at once and quickly attached himself to a heavily made up, middle-aged woman, wearing valuable jewels, whom Mary had not seen there before, and he remained talking to her for the next twenty minutes. Meanwhile a retired General, who had singled Mary out on a previous occasion, brought her a coffee and sought to entertain her with an account of marvels he had seen Fakirs perform in India many years before she was born.

When the party began to break up, the bejewelled lady took herself off, Ratnadatta rejoined Mary, listened with her to a final story by the General, then tactfully prised her away from him. Five minutes later they were walking side by side towards the central stretch of the Cromwell Road, and he said:

‘I haf forgot to tell you that when we meet on Saturday you must wear no make-up. None at all, you understand? Scrub your face clean. Also your hair must be done as plainly as possible, scrag back flat with ends done as bun at back off head.’

Mary gave him an astonished look, then faltered: ‘As a matter of fact, Mr. Ratnadatta, I … I’ve been thinking things over and I… well, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really advanced enough to accept initiation yet.’

In turn he shot a surprised look at her. But his voice held no trace of anger as he replied: ‘Initiation! You haf flatter yourself. At best some time must pass before you can hope for so much. First stage ees neophyte. Acceptance on probation only, after taking oath of loyalty to the Brotherhood. Next the neophyte must perform some act for token off willing service…’

He had been about to go on, but she cut in quickly, ‘Do you mean that in the case of a woman it is then that she performs her service to the temple by, er – offering herself to a stranger?’

‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘That does not come until initiation. It ees part off the initiation rite. By act off willingness I refer to performing satisfactorily some work for furtherance off aims off the Brotherhood weech the neophyte is giffen order to do by our High Priest Abaddon. Only by passing such test does a neophyte become qualified for initiation.’