"Ritual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

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.
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 . . .
'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.'


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 amusement 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 sex 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 Sassoon.'"
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 hoary, 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 appetites, 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. Flustered, 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 scraped it up between two wine-lists. Yes Ч 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 passing 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.'