By this time, he was quite convinced that he was dealing with a cult. He had encountered them before. They were more dangerous than any purely criminal organization, since their members were fanatical and hell-bent on their goals.
A hot breeze skirled on the evening air around him. Holmes was dressed as he had been earlier, but had put on a light raincoat. Not that he expected rain, but the garment served to cover up the pair of sidearms, both which had extended clips.
The address he was headed to was several blocks behind the old part of the Strip. The clientele at these casinos were hardier than their uptown counterparts. There were vagrants in evidence, even on the main drag. The avenues further back had an ugly reputation, but Holmes had known streets of this kind in Victorian London, and he pressed on, undeterred.
He came, finally, to the building in question. His brow creased with mild shock. It was derelict, as he had already supposed, but he had not expected to find any place of worship in a closed-down porno theatre.
So far as he could make out, there was nobody guarding the exterior of the place. The front doorways were covered up with rusty corrugated iron. Holmes noticed immediately that one of them was badly bent. He went over to it. Sure enough, it pulled back easily, sufficient to allow him through.
He went cautiously into the theatre. The lobby was empty and perfectly dark, its air stagnant with the odor of decay, but from the double doors that led into the cinema, he could hear low chanting. There were chinks of colored light.
Feigning the manner of a man lost and bewildered, he ventured through … to be confronted by a very deeply curious sight.
Up at the front of the auditorium, fires were blazing in large earthenware pots. The flames being cast out were not yellow. They were a startling crimson, giving the whole place a haematic aspect. The smoke from them rolled towards the ceiling, forming a miasma which let out a sickly stench.
There were perhaps a hundred congregants in here, far more than Holmes had expected. They stood between the rows of rotting seats, and did not even notice him enter. All were of the same kind he had remarked on earlier, blighted, shabby souls enthralled by the failed promise of the gaming tables. Men and women, young and old. Holmes went gently down the aisle, and found a place beside the same grey-haired individual who’d invited him this afternoon.
She realized he’d arrived. Greeted him with a tight smile and a brief nod, and then returned her attention to the front of the theatre, and did not look away again.
None of these folk did. The Oriental-looking woman had their complete attention.
She was standing at the centre of the open space out front, shaking a pair of large, crude rattles. Her face was tipped forwards and her eyes were closed. She was yelling out some kind of chant, a fevered caterwauling in a language that Holmes did not recognise.
To one side of her stood some sort of altar, hewn from a large block of stone. How it had been brought in here was anyone’s guess. On top of it was ranked a row of goblets of dully-gleaming metal. It sickened one to think of their use.
The woman was dressed as before, except that now, the collar of the blouse had been fully unbuttoned. Her neck and throat and the top portion of her breastbone were revealed.
Holmes squinted in the sickly light. Was it just a trick of shadow, or were those narrow scars on the side of her neck, cut in deliberate patterns? He’d thought that he had caught the briefest glimpse of scar tissue before, but hadn’t guessed at anything like this display.
Despite his parlous circumstances, Holmes allowed himself a knowing smile. He was beginning to understand.
From the darkened theatre wings, a gurney was wheeled out by four assistants, and his smile disappeared.
The man strapped to it was perfectly healthy. All that he had suffered so far was the indignity of being stripped down to his underwear. His mouth was gagged. He was struggling mightily, but to no avail. He might have been a taller, rather more muscular version of Fred Bonner.
This was without any shade of a doubt somebody else who had done well at some game of chance. It struck Holmes how badly all these congregants would like the opportunity to do the same.
But what was taking place here? How could capturing and killing such a man achieve…?
The woman’s chanting stopped. Her face came up. The heat from the fires had caused some of her make-up to be sluiced away, and the true nature of her features was becoming apparent. Her cheekbones were more angular, and her eyes looked wider than they’d done when he had first encountered her. Yes, he had
She laid the rattles to one side, then stooped over her victim, grinning hideously. Save for the crackling of the flames, the room had fallen silent.
“Be still now. You have what we want,” Holmes thought he heard her mutter.
And she had to have some kind of mastery of hypnosis herself. Either that or what she had said served to freeze the unfortunate man with incomprehension and terror. He became completely motionless, his widened eyeballs following her when she moved away.
She stepped over to the altar, picked up one of the goblets and something else that Holmes could not make out, and then returned to her prey. Set the cup beside him on the gurney, and then turned her attention to the fellow’s wrist. He gave a muffled gasp of pain. Holmes realized what she had been carrying in her other hand. It was a thick, crude needle with a length of rubber tubing running from it.
She pierced one of the man’s veins. The tube was dangled into the goblet. Blood began to fill it. It looked black in this strange light.
Holmes knew the time for action was almost at hand, but his limbs felt very stiff. His mind was whirring. He ought to have been expecting something like this after all the evidence he’d been presented with — he knew that. What this woman and her followers hoped to gain by actions of this nature was impossible to fathom.
Next moment, though, he got an awful demonstration of it. The woman suddenly pinched off the tube, stopping the flow of gore. She picked up the goblet with both hands, raised it into the air in some form of supplication.
And then — to the detective’s horror — put it to her lips and drank.
Even worse was to follow. The cup was passed on to the assistants who’d wheeled the man out. They each took a sip. Then the goblet was handed over to the people standing in the rows of seats, who began to follow suit.
It was as repulsive a sight as Holmes had ever witnessed. Behavior so degraded it was barely human. Were these the depths to which this miserable rabble had been reduced? Did they genuinely believe that if they drank the fluids of a victor at the tables they would become winners too?
It defied credulity, but equally, it made no sense.
They might try this one time, out of utter desperation, but it surely would make not the slightest difference to their fortunes, except that the grey-haired lady beside him was obviously a regular here. So were many others — it was beyond question. What on earth made them keep coming back?
It was of no real importance, he decided. There was no accounting for the demented behavior to which addicts stooped. The woman up front was preparing to drain her victim a second time. Holmes knew he had to put a stop to this.
He stepped back out into the aisle, drawing both his weapons, aiming one at the crowd, and the other at the black-clad figure.
And then shouted, in his sternest voice, “You are
All movement stopped. Every eye turned towards him. Only the flickering red light of the flames continued as it had before.
“On closer inspection,” Holmes went on, “you’re a Native American. Had you gone to the casinos unmade-up, people would have noticed right away, recalled you instantly and in close detail. By the ritualistic scarring on your
