He didn’t waste any more time.
He got a grip on the dividing wall and hauled himself up, scrambled on to the sloping roof of the outhouse. So far, so good — but it was the easy part he had done up to now. Approaching the lower window of the house he found he could look over the sill into the room beyond. The window was, as he had thought, uncurtained, and after a moment or two he could begin to make out the dark interior. It didn’t seem to be furnished in the normal way; it had a deserted look, and yet there were stacks of… of what?
He peered intently through the glass, and as his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom he realized that the room was full of crates of bottles. Then he understood. This room was probably used as a store by the club, part of whose premises the house itself must in fact be. If he could get in, there would be a staircase up to the landing above, off which must be a room adjoining the other one, the next-door room where the meeting was going on. Most of these old terrace houses were twins one of the other…
Shaw pulled himself up and sat on the sill, then fumbled at the window and tried to heave it open.
It was locked. He reached into his pocket and brought out a stout, thin-bladed clasp-knife. He pushed the blade down between the join of the upper and lower frames, then pushed sideways until he felt the catch click back. Then very carefully, very slowly, he edged the bottom window up and pulled himself over the sill. He dropped down into the room. Feeling his way cautiously past the crates of empties, he found the door and opened it. He inched out into a pitch-dark passage, groped for the stairs. He moved as silently as a cat up the staircase, stopping on each step before moving carefully to the next. He went into the room — it seemed to be a bedroom — directly above the one he had just left.
Once inside, he could hear vague sounds through the party wall from next door, but there was nothing identifiable.
He would have to get out of the window after all.
He inched the window up, pausing petrified as it squeaked. He climbed out on to the sill. He knew a brief moment of dizziness as he looked downward to some derelict flowerbeds and an overgrown strip of coarse lawn, and then he took a grip on his nerves, kept his eyes firmly on his objective of the next-door window, and stepped boldly across the gap, moving sideways with his arms spread against the grimy brickwork, feeling with a foot before letting go of the storehouse window entirely. A moment later the sill of the club window was firm and wide beneath him, and he let go, sliding his hands carefully across the remaining brickwork of the wall until he was standing squarely on the sill.
He stayed there motionless, feeling the beating of his heart, controlling his rapid breathing, holding steady against the wind which curled round the corner of the building to drive a light rain into his already wet dinner-jacket.
Voices came to him, voices raised in a weird, fantastic sing-song chant, which after a moment or two faded away into silence. Then there was a man’s voice with a curious echo effect behind it. Shaw strained his ears, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. Soon the voice died away and there was another short silence, then again the eerie chanting.
Shaw felt a chill in his heart.
Those people — assuming that the Africans who had left the room below on the albino’s whispered instructions had come up here, as Shaw believed they had — some of them, at least, had been reasonable looking citizens. If those people could be induced to come to a place like this, to take part in whatever was going on inside there, what hope was there that the masses in Africa itself would hold aloof from the Cult — if this was indeed connected with the Cult? They would never cast off the insidious dope that was being fed to them, stirring them up to acts which they would never perform if they were left to themselves.
Thick curtains were drawn across, but, as Shaw had seen from the next-door garden, the window was open a little way at its top. He reached in, very gently put a finger in the join of the curtains, and edged them aside, just a fraction at a time until he had a clear view of the centre of the room.
He drew in his breath sharply, unbelievingly.
The room was brightly lit and perfectly commonplace; it was what was going on in that room, shown up the more vividly by the contrast with the ordinariness of the room itself, that gave Shaw the shock.
At the far end, immediately before a heavy curtain of blood-coloured velvet, was a plain wooden table like a kitchen table, the deal legs visible beneath the folds of a white cloth. Against this startling background the polished ebony of a young coloured girl’s body stood sharply out. The girl was quivering, quivering throughout her body, and she was making a low moaning sound which Shaw could hear quite clearly as the chanting once again died away. Shaw didn’t recall having seen this girl in the room below, and for that matter there were many more Negroes present than had been down there; there was no doubt another way in — a funk-hole, which would be used for a quick getaway if anything should happen, such as a police raid. As he watched and wondered, his horror and revulsion growing, the velvet curtains behind the ‘altar’ began very slowly to draw apart, and as they did so the same voice as before, still with its curious background effect, began what Shaw fancied was a kind of prayer, while from somewhere to the left and out of his range of vision there began the throb of African drums, a slow, erotic beat which filled the room and gave the atmosphere a feeling of hate and cruelty and fear.
The gap in the curtains widened, behind the ‘altar.’
In the centre, seated on a low stool and dressed in native costume, was a big African with a fuzz of greying hair, a man who had just about the most sadistic face that Shaw had ever seen. The thick lips, sensual lips, were parted in a kind of ecstacy as he looked down at the girl on the ‘altar.’ Next to this person a white man sat, a bald, flabby man dressed — so incongruously in these surroundings — in ordinary workaday City clothing of neat pin-stripe suit and highly polished black shoes. The shirt and tie were a little too well matched, a little too expensive-looking… the man was plumply dandified, overdressed, overfed. His general air was that of the faked-up expense account and of self-indulgence, and he had a vaguely foreign look about him. Two more Africans were standing on either side of this man and the big black.
The Africans’ eyes rolled as the drumbeats increased the tempo, and their hips began to sway as if in automatic, almost involuntary response. Shaw could sense the heavy, intent breathing of the audience, the glazed eyes, the halfopen, slack mouths. It was much the same sort of reaction as he had observed in the room below during the strip acts. Indeed, this ritual, this initiation ceremony as it most probably was, clearly had a sexual origin.
Suddenly the drums ceased and the chant broke off.
It was an anticlimax, a sudden cutting of the tension which left the ear and the mind high and dry for a moment. Then Shaw heard the mutter from the audience and noticed the faint trail of smoke rising from a metal vessel behind the ‘altar,’ saw one of the Africans move towards it and pull out a glowing iron. He saw this man approach the girl on the table, saw the terrified gleam in her eyes, and then the man reached out and jabbed the red-hot iron on to her right forearm, just below the elbow…
There was no doubt left now, if there had been earlier, as to the origins of this meeting.
The girl screamed — one short, sharp, yelping cry, like a whipped dog. Her body writhed, convulsed; the knees jerked up, parted. A deep-throated baying sound came from the onlookers, a savage, primitive expression of satisfaction, of cruelty and sensuality brought to a fine point. As the girl’s convulsions ceased the big African in the centre of the group stood up, and another black handed him a squawking, protesting bundle of feathers which he had brought out from behind… a chicken. The white man on the central figure’s left hand came forward as the bird was held poised, with its neck extended, over the girl’s body, and he sliced a sharp knife straight along its neck.