The Last Ritual Read online

  “How are you, Preston?” I said.

  “Glorious, I’ve spent the day… I don’t know… walking? I never tire of this place.”

  “Staying long?” I tried to sound neutral. It had been a while since we last talked, and the gap was not entirely by accident. Preston and I shared a lot of mutual background and friends. I preferred the illusion that I was unique in the world. He made that more difficult.

  He shook his head. “I leave tomorrow. Sailing in the morning. That’s why it’s so perfect that I’ve seen you just now. I’ve been trying to reach you. You are desperately elusive, Oakesy.”

  “I’ve been here all summer,” I said, squinting, shading my eyes.

  “At the beach? It’s no wonder you haven’t had an exhibition in ages.”

  His comment casually found a way to bruise my pride.

  Preston’s cocktail arrived.

  I ordered another and requested the check, hoping to measure our encounter to the most enjoyable length. “Painting isn’t all getting and spending. Learning the craft takes time. I’ve grown this year, but finding my own style has been more difficult than I first anti–”

  “Artists throw the best parties,” Preston interrupted. “I’ll bet you’ve been to a few.”

  Preston Fairmont was no amateur about throwing parties. At college he became a Miskatonic University legend. He’d started out at the University of Chicago, but his lack of seriousness as a student caused his parents to want him closer to home. So, reluctantly, he transferred to MU after a year. When we roomed together as classmates, he was still in his hosting infancy and busy establishing himself, keenly assessing maneuvers in the social terrain. During the Great War we talked about dropping out to join the navy because we liked their uniforms. The girls did too, or so we had surmised. There was something romantic yet viscerally tangible about the sea. It’s the same reason I’ve always enjoyed painting in seaside locations. Well, neither of us volunteered to fight, and the war ended the autumn following our graduation. By then Preston was a connoisseur of the party scene and a host of epic renown. I dabbled on the periphery of such events, more comfortable spending my time slapping paint on canvasses in a studio or lugging an easel around outdoors.

  “Why were you trying to contact me?” I asked.

  “I’m embarrassed to say.”

  “Impossible,” I said. Preston had an innate confidence bred into him. “I’ve never known you to feel that emotion.”

  “You’ll see when I tell you why.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m getting married.” Preston smiled sheepishly.

  “Congratulations! That’s nothing to be flustered about. Cheers!”

  I genuinely felt happy for the old boy, but the joyous surge was quickly throttled.

  “To Minnie Devane,” Preston added.

  The empty glass squirted out of my fingers, tumbling off the table into the sand. Luckily its replacement was due any second. So here was the sticking point. Minnie Devane had been my on-again, off-again college girlfriend, my fiancée and ex-fiancée, my inspiration, the first woman I ever thought I loved. Now, I could write a book about Minnie, but if I did, I’d have to burn it before I was arrested for violating the Comstock Laws. Not that Minnie herself was obscene. See, she was like a piece of broken mirror. Small and shiny, and if you weren’t careful she’d leave you bleeding. She reflected back places in yourself that were better left unexamined. I fell for Minnie because she had a smart, sassy way of talking and a wild, fast, shimmery way of whipping herself around a room so that everybody felt charged up. She was all heat and energy.

  Sometimes that energy exploded. And people got hurt.

  “You and Minnie?” It seemed so impossible, and then, even worse, so obvious.

  I picked up the glass and dusted it off.

  “Ain’t it grand?” Preston said. His forehead beaded with sweat. Dark patches stained his shirtfront. He kept folding and unfolding his arms. His hands were like a pair of birds he was trying to keep from flying away. I noticed his color draining off, like a man about to faint. Was he that nervous about telling me? I hadn’t thought my opinion mattered to Preston.

  “When’s the big day?”

  “Oh, not until next summer. I’ve got… We have a year to plan,” he said.

  The shock of the news still reverberated, of course. I nearly felt concussed. But I was having a hard time coming up with a good reason to object or even to feel bad. I liked Preston. And I liked Minnie. Why shouldn’t I be happy for them?

  “I don’t know if you’re looking for it, Preston, but you have my blessing,” I said.

  The more I thought about them as a couple, the more I saw how they fit better than Minnie and I ever did. I was too solitary to match their robustly sociable personalities.

  Preston and Minnie. Linking them up like that would take time to get used to.

  “Oakesy, that’s real swell of you. I’m relieved.” He didn’t look relieved. He was scratching his shoes back and forth under the table, peeking occasionally to witness the progress of his dig. He looked worse than when he dropped the big wedding bomb on me. Was there something else? “You’re a champ. We hoped you wouldn’t be too sore.”

  “I’m glad you found each other. Honestly, I think I really frustrated Minnie. The lonely artist, I guess, living inside his own head. In an imaginary world. ‘But it’s always raining in your world,’ she’d say. ‘That’s the trouble.’ Maybe I was just too peculiar for her.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  Did she now?

  Frankly, Preston and Minnie were the kind of people who typically did as they pleased. If they were inconvenienced, they might try to patch things up to see that things would go smoother for them. But they were hardly the type to lie awake at night wondering about the impact their actions had on bystanders. I felt sort of honored in a weird way.

  “Minnie and I are hoping dearly that you’ll come to the wedding. It’s in Arkham.”

  The unexpected invite dizzied me. Certainly, I might get used to the idea of my old flame marrying a college buddy of mine, but did I want to be there to see it happening?

  Preston glanced past me over my shoulder. The corner of his mouth twitched in an anxious half-smile. I turned to see what he was looking at. It was a woman in a floppy sun hat with a pink ribbon. Either because Preston had been staring, or because I turned abruptly, she concealed herself, lowering the hat’s wide brim to avoid our further attention.

  He reached over the table and grabbed my wrist. His look was pleading. I felt sorry for him. “Please say you’ll be there,” he said. Why was he acting so desperate?

  “I’ll come to the wedding.” I had time to adjust, and he wanted me there so badly.

  His face stretched in an elastic, white grin. “That’s terrific! They will be so happy!”

  “They? Who are they?” I asked, confused.

  Preston paused, then shrugged. “It’s just Minnie and me. No one else.”

  “Now what about that woman sitting behind me? With the sun hat?” I thumped his shoulder. “I saw you smiling at her.” Here I wagged my finger. “Minnie will expect your complete attention and strictest devotion, if you haven’t discovered that already.”

  Preston swallowed dryly. “Well, she’s the only one for me.”

  “Good man! Come next summer, you shall worship the goddess Minnie!” I joked.

  “Ha!” His loud exclamation startled the beachgoers around us.

  The waitress finally came with our drinks. After I signed the check, I pretended to drop my pen accidently so I could get a second, better look at the woman in the floppy hat. But she was gone.

  While I was bending over, I happened to glance under the table. During our conversation, Preston had slipped off one of his white bucks and drawn something in the sand with his toe. A cup-like shape
balanced on a triangle. Inside it were two ovals. Next to the cup, and less distinguishable, he’d scratched a three-pronged fork.

  How truly bizarre, I thought.

  As I tried to make sense of the upside-down symbols, Preston dragged his foot through the sand, obliterating them. Initially he’d come on so very Preston, but now I was noticing his unease. Perhaps this impending marriage really did shake his pillars. Minnie had that effect on some people.

  “When are you planning to head back to Arkham?” Preston asked me as I sat up.

  “I have no formal plans. I’ll be in France for a short while. I was hoping to make a trip along the Spanish coast. My mother wants me home for Christmas. Why do you ask?”

  “Minnie and I are throwing an engagement party. No date yet. Probably at my parents’ house in French Hill, or maybe at the Lodge. We’d like you there. We have a lot of new friends who’ll be attending the wedding. You need to meet them first. Fascinating crowd. Bohemian types, right up your alley. Arkham has a vibrant art scene these days, or so Minnie tells me.”

  “That sounds intriguing,” I said. Since when did bohemians flock to Arkham? “What kind of arts do they practice?”

  Preston’s skin turned a clammy gray. No longer the tanned picture of good health, he gulped his drink and began sucking on the ice. I worried he was suddenly feeling unwell.

  “Are you all right, chum?”

  “One too many escargots last night, I’m afraid,” he said, wiping his damp forehead.

  “And a few too many bottles of bubbly to chase them?”

  Preston smiled. “You know me, old friend.”

  I thought I did.

  He asked me to consider a return to Arkham in the fall. He and Minnie needed to start planning for their wedding bash. And weren’t the fall trees beautifully colorful around our New England town? Couldn’t I find something worth painting closer to my birthplace?

  “In any case, get yourself home before all the leaves are gone,” he said.

  “I’ll try my best.”

  My answer seemed less than satisfactory to him, but we shook hands (his felt like a cold thing washed up on the beach) and said au revoir.

  Our waitress swung by, and I ordered an absinthe.

  My nerves felt jangly, my inner wiring frayed. For no real reason, my senses felt as if they were set on high alert. It was as if I were living on only coffee and cigarettes.

  The water flashed with intricate, metallic-seeming patterns. I noticed one sailing yacht anchored out in the bay, closer to the beach than any of the others. She wasn’t the biggest. Her slim white lines lay just above the water like a bobbing shard of ice.

  Quickly, on an impulse, I grabbed a pencil and pad and began to sketch her.

  Out onto her foredeck stepped a figure visible only in silhouette. Sexless, ageless, viewed at this distance and in the failing light, it might have been any person on the planet. I knew not what drew my eye to it. But I could not look away. The figure glided along the yacht’s length. It must have been a sailor carrying ropes, I told myself. Long tendrils looped from the central body and were cast off into the sea. The figure appeared to vibrate. Trick of perspective. The water’s reflection was at play with the abundant shadows. My mouth felt dry, tasted of salt. A ripple of nausea passed through me like a sound wave traveling from the middle of the bay. My hand trembled as I traced long, unbroken lines onto the paper, attempting to capture the oddity I saw.

  The horizon divided into layers: dark blue, indigo, purple, violet, and smoked gray.

  The Bay of Cannes became a sheet of glass.

  Those ropes, if they were ropes, retracted. The figure elongated, growing taller by half. This sailor, or fisherman, this distortion of a human form also wore something on its head.

  Huge spikes, in the fashion of a crown, a dark cluster of bayonet-like appendages.

  That’s what they looked like, anyway.

  Then the light changed, and soft black fuzz seemed to sprout from the air itself. The yacht became a normal sailing vessel at anchor among dozens of others.

  I saw no one onboard.

  Night had arrived. I looked around me as if I had been sleeping and wakened in my chair. The corrugated sea came alive once more with twinkling lights mirrored from the cafés and hotels ringing the shoreline. People were talking, sipping aperitifs or cups of coffee.

  Normal.

  Whatever peculiarity had passed briefly over the bay vanished.

  I contemplated the spot where Preston had been talking to me less than an hour ago. He might have been a mirage, a conjuration, a product of my imagination animated in a dream. I picked up my bag from the sand, then stood to put away my sketchpad. I swayed, feeling lightheaded. Was it the liquor? The onset of a fever?

  Too long in the sun, I concluded.

  I walked back to my hotel in a daze. Falling on my bed, I didn’t even bother to undress but slept straight though until morning. I woke instantly at daybreak. The room smelled stuffy, but I felt revived, energized. I might’ve looked like hell, but, boy oh boy, was I humming. After my breakfast I told the hotel manager I wished to settle the bill. The idea came to me that I must leave Cannes at once. I had no obligations but to myself, so I followed this unexplained urge, curiously compelled to see where it might lead me. I bought a map of Spain and arranged to rent a car. I gave myself through the month of August to prepare for my return to Arkham. If someone had suggested to me, when I went down to the beachfront for a drink by the sea, that I was going be altering my plans and heading circuitously back to the USA early, well, I just might have believed them. But if they had told me that the reason would be a wedding invitation from Preston and Minnie, I would have laughed in their face.

  Clearly, I might have said no and stayed in France. Sometimes I’ve wondered what my life would have been like if I had. Would I be where I am today? And the rumors that inevitably follow me, what would it be like to live without hearing them? The horrible deaths, everything we saw at the Silver Gate event that night, everything that emerged in the unwholesome chaos…

  But such thinking is beyond pointless.

  I said, “Yes.”

  And nothing that followed will ever be changed.

  Chapter Three

  I drove along the coast, saying goodbye to France mile by mile. I had little in the way of luggage, and art supplies took up most of the space in my sleek yellow Renault. I drove dangerously. I never was a particularly good driver and have no sense of direction.

  Somewhere between Toulon and Marseilles my map flew out the window and the mountain winds kited it into a ravine. How could I get lost? I kept the ocean to my left and drove on, snaking my way through the stony massifs until it got dark. I looked for a place to get a hot meal and a soft bed for the night. There were no villages to be seen. My eyes burned with fatigue. I considered pulling over to catch forty winks, but the back roads were far too narrow. I didn’t want to wake up pasted to the grille of a speeding delivery truck.

  To occupy myself I entertained thoughts of Arkham.

  Why had I left? What had I missed? How would the city look when I got back?

  I was born in Arkham. My family was rich and socially prominent, although my parents were getting older and Wilfred, my father, had turned over much of his company’s management to his younger associates. He made most of his money in metallurgy and chemicals. I never understood the specifics of what his Northside factories produced, nor did I care to learn more. Father’s life appeared unbearably dull to me. He ranked the arts somewhere below sports and marginally above children’s games. I knew the war had been good for the company, good for my family, as horrible as that sounds. My mother, Pearl, had her charity work. She wasn’t overly concerned with helping actual people. Her causes leaned more toward public places like parks and museums. I don’t fault her too much. I am certain my passion for painting was bo
rn out of wandering bored one evening into an exhibition hall during a fundraising dinner. The paintings leapt out at me! Such colors! I really saw them for the first time, and I trembled. It was like a religious epiphany without any religion. Or, I suppose, my god was art. In that instant I decided the direction of my life. I must do this, I thought with a zealot’s clarity. I will make beautiful things. I wanted my work to hang in museums. I wanted people, like my mother and her friends, to organize fundraisers to hang pictures I would someday paint and, in return, I’d help people escape their dreary, tedious lives. Conveniently, I’d discovered a way out of the suffocating future that lay ahead of me.

  Visions of Arkham flooded my brain for the remainder of my drive, and before I knew it, the world turned blue, then golden, and finally, an almost blindingly sunny white.

  I was not seeking out any singular or heightened experiences in Spain. I wanted simply to relax. I settled in a rooming house at the center of a fishing village like many others that exist along the coast. I visited churches and strolled the steep, winding streets, lost in a maze of picturesque dwellings. Like much of the Mediterranean, the buildings I passed were whitewashed with red tiled roofs and tall windows shuttered against the sun’s rays during the hottest hours of the day. Cats of every stripe and color napped in the shadows and eyed me with lazy indifference. I moved more slowly and felt myself adjusting to my old roommate’s unexpected announcement of what was certain to be Arkham’s social event of the year. I warmed to the idea of seeing Minnie and Preston together, and attending their fabulous parties. It would be good to go home again.

  Although I was obviously a foreigner the villagers did not stare at me, but neither did they ignore my presence. When engaged they were uncommonly polite. I ate my meals in restaurants, devouring bread, olives, and plates of various small, oily fish, guzzling bowls of gazpacho, often imbibing a glass of Andalusian sherry before slouching off to a soft bed. My condition became one of blissful isolation. Language was like a cage I carried with me everywhere I went. I spoke no Spanish. No one I met spoke English. But I discovered that a mix of French and pantomime was all I needed to get my meaning across.