It was night. The cold air was brittle and there were no clouds. Butterworth sat at the wheel of the Bentley, his heart feeling too big for his chest, his stomach feeling hot and acidic. He was waiting for Kingsley to stumble out of the Everlasting Club. Butterworth carried with him a Bible, a crucifix and a two-foot length of lead pipe.
It was shortly after midnight when Kingsley emerged, distinctly early for him. He was unsteady. Something granular and orange had spilled down his jacket and no attempt had been made to wipe it off. He launched himself heavily through the open car door, and fell across the grey leather of the rear seat.
‘Home, Butterworth!’ he shouted, then relaxed into a soft, smiling stupor, but Butterworth had no intention of taking him home.
It was an hour and a half later when Kingsley woke up. He did not know where he was, although that, in itself, was no novelty. He looked out of the car window and saw grass and trees, no buildings, no streetlights. He was in some deserted rural place. He did not like it. Fortunately he was still seated in his own car, but that was little consolation. He remembered little of the earlier part of the evening but he could not believe he had asked Butterworth to bring him here. He became aware of an aching in his wrists and ankles, and looked down to discover he was tied up. Thick, frayed ropes were lashed and tangled around his hands and feet. The tying was inexpert but thoroughly effective.
He considered screaming for help but knew that nobody would come. In the end he said quietly and enquiringly, ‘Are you there, Butterworth old man?’ And suddenly Butterworth was there. He pulled the car door open. Kingsley was at first relieved to see Butterworth’s large, familiar face, but it was wearing a deeply unfamiliar expression, an unholy mixture of anger, determination, hatred and piety.
‘Could you be good enough to tell me precisely what’s going on?’ Kingsley asked, his voice still showing his customary cheerful authority.
Butterworth grabbed him by the neck and yanked him raggedly out of the car. Kingsley’s head and knees hit the ground. It was surprisingly soft, covered in pine needles; rustic indeed. But then he felt the hardness of Butterworth’s highly polished brown shoes kicking him in the kidneys and temple.
‘I say, Butterworth!’ he yelled.
Butterworth towered over him. He was now holding a Bible and talking to himself urgently. Kingsley could not believe his eyes. ‘What’s the game, Butterworth?’ Kingsley said.
‘You want to know what’s going on, do you?’ said Butterworth.
‘I do rather.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Butterworth. ‘I wanted to know what was going on too, but nobody told me. Why should they? After all, I’m only the serving class. I had to work it out for myself.’
‘Is this some sort of practical joke?’ Kingsley asked. ‘Did some of the chaps put you up to it?’
‘Chaps?’ Butterworth repeated as though it was some new and obscene word he’d never encountered before.
‘You’re not drunk are you, Butterworth?’
‘Don’t judge me by your own standards.’
There was a passionate venom in Butterworth’s manner that Kingsley had never seen before, would never have expected to find in the man. Kingsley found it as surprising as it was frightening.
‘I know everything!’ said Butterworth.
‘Do you? Well, bully for you.’
Even as he said it, Kingsley was aware that Butterworth in his current mood would react adversely to flippancy. Butterworth kicked him again. Kingsley shouted out with pain.
‘I know all about the Everlasting Club,’ said Butterworth, allowing himself a small, sinister, triumphant smile.
‘I doubt that very much,’ said Kingsley.
‘Of course, I’m not saying I know every single detail. I don’t know all the petty little rules and regulations that I’m sure you’re all really fond of. But I know the important thing, the only important thing.’
‘You think so, do you?’
‘Yes. I know that you eat human flesh,’ said Butterworth. Kingsley was silent. Real fear and panic filled him for the first time and drove out his drunkenness.
‘Er … what makes you think that?’
‘Stop playing,’ said Butterworth. ‘I don’t care if you deny it or not. I’m not here to beat a confession out of you. Confession might be good for your soul, repentance might be even better, but that’s not what I’m here for.’
‘Is this supposed to be some form of blackmail? It won’t work, you know. I’m not nearly as rich as you probably think I am.’
Butterworth shook his head. He looked offended by the mention of money.
‘I really don’t care how rich you are, or how rich you say you are. All I want to know is where you’ve got Virgil. Have you got him locked up in a dungeon somewhere, or what? Just tell me. I’ll make sure he gets free, and maybe then I can think about freeing you too.’
‘That’s just not possible.’
‘Anything’s possible,’ said Butterworth.
‘Look, Butterworth, I haven’t been such a bad employer to you, have I?’
Butterworth thought about it and looked unwilling to come to a conclusion.
‘We can work this out, I’m sure,’ said Kingsley. ‘But the one thing I absolutely can’t do is tell you where Virgil is. It would break all sorts of club rules. It’s more than my life’s worth.’
‘But your life is worth so little.’
Butterworth put down the Bible. He reached into the car and brought out the piece of lead pipe. He hit Kingsley in the knees and shins half a dozen times. Kingsley squawked in high-pitched, disbelieving pain.
‘Please, please,’ said Kingsley, ‘let me try to explain. All right, so we eat human flesh. Is that so terrible? It’s certainly not unusual. It happens all the time. It’s perfectly natural. It’s been going on since time immemorial. It happens in all sorts of societies; societies that you and I might call primitive and heathen, but societies, in fact, which are far more in touch with spiritual truth than ours is. Eating human flesh is holy.’
Butterworth hit him a couple more times with the lead pipe, because of his blaspheming.
‘I don’t want to hear all this,’ Butterworth said. ‘Just you tell me where Virgil is. Save yourself some grief.’
‘I can’t tell you. I really can’t.’
‘You saying you don’t know?’
‘Of course I know, I’m the Chief Carver, but I can’t tell.’
‘Oh really? I think you can.’
It was a long night, and in the course of it, as he beat and tortured Kingsley, Butterworth frequently had to ask God for forgiveness. Just as any Christian must love the sinner and hate the sin, so Butterworth hated the pain he inflicted on poor Kingsley, but he knew it was in a good, and higher, cause. Butterworth discovered there was a fine art in keeping his victim conscious enough to be able still to feel pain. Too much violence brought oblivion and release, and that defeated the object of the exercise. It was all a matter of technique and Butterworth was a little surprised to see how easily the technique might be mastered.
It was nearly light, a thin watery dawn, and Kingsley’s body was a mesh of bruises and weals before he finally named the place where Virgil could be found, a place that Rose had told him of in her daily phone call.
‘I hope you’re not lying to me,’ said Butterworth. ‘We’ll drive there together and if I don’t find Virgil, we can start all over again.’
Rose had to buy Virgil a new pair of trousers in Carlisle. The pair belonging to his Armani suit had started to hurt round the waist. Carlisle didn’t have such a wide range of shopping options as L.A., but a simple pair of jeans were easy enough to obtain. Designer labels had even got as far as Carlisle, not that Virgil knew exactly where Carlisle was. The jeans she bought were on the large side, but Rose assured him he’d grow into them.
He was no longer sure how he felt about Rose. It wasn’t altogether easy to like a woman who had abducted you, stolen your passport, made you eat when you weren’t hungry and made you stay in shitty bed and breakfast dives. She may have been nice looking and she may have been easy enough to talk to, and she was certainly as wild as ever in bed, but Virgil knew she wouldn’t be talking to him or bedding him if it weren’t for the money she was getting from the Everlasting Club. That depressed him. He thought there were one or two things you shouldn’t do for money, and sex was one of them.
And yet, and yet … Virgil hadn’t made any desperate attempt to get away from Rose. He hadn’t tried running to the police or to the American embassy, or tried phoning home for help. He’d thought about it but it all seemed like too much trouble. Most of the time he felt too drunk or too bloated to do anything. He was living in a haze induced by excesses of food, alcohol and sex. There were worse kinds of haze. In fact, it did occur to him that Rose might be putting some will-destroying substance in his food, not that Virgil ever had very much will to destroy. Besides, Rose did have a peculiar kind of integrity. When Virgil offered to pay her what she was getting from the Everlasting Club plus more besides, if only she’d let him go, she declined firmly. She’d made an agreement. A deal was a deal.
It did cross his mind that Rose might simply be insane. Maybe her story was untrue and she had kidnapped him for her own dubious ends. That would mean he was not being ‘initiated’ at all, and therefore there was no foreseeable end to this farce. But she didn’t seem mad and she appeared to phone the club every day and report their whereabouts, so maybe he really was being initiated, whatever the hell that meant. And if, as she claimed, the plan was simply for her to feed and water him for a month, that month was very nearly at an end. What the hell happened next?
He dreaded to think about all the food he had consumed, digested and excreted over the past four weeks. Mother’s milk was the least of it. He had become stuffed with ‘English Fayre’, with skate and ray and smelt and tench; with calf’s head and ox tongue and bullock’s heart and faggots; with endless local delicacies like Barnsley Chop and Cumberland Rum Nicky and Oxford John and Bedfordshire Clanger. He felt he was a very different man from the one who had first stepped off the plane and got into the car with Butterworth.
Finally, it looked like some small concession, Rose let Virgil go to the cinema. It was at some arts centre somewhere in the Midlands (wherever that was). The centre was not the kind of place Virgil could easily tolerate, being simultaneously worthy and Bohemian. Posters flapped from noticeboards, unplastered brick walls were painted a gleaming white. There was a counter selling dense, home-made wholefood.
They saw a triple bill of films, comprising of Tom Jones, Babette’s Feast and La Grande Bouffe. Virgil might have known. He sat there in the dark, his eyes turned towards the screen, but his mind made no sense of the images. Projected scenes of seduction, cooking and gluttony moved disconnectedly before him. He felt ill. He felt, not for anything like the first time, that he’d had enough. He felt like a zombie. He tried to doze off but Rose would keep prodding him in the stomach so that he’d be awake for all the ‘good bits’.
Hours later they emerged from the cinema. Virgil felt half-dead. Rose told him he needed a pick-me-up, so they made a trip to the bar. As Virgil drank some cold, weak, American-influenced lager, he noticed that a small group of people, almost an audience, was gathering down the far end of the bar. Rose took him by the elbow and they joined the group.
They turned out to be poetry lovers. An anorexic redhead was shuffling a bundle of typewritten sheets in preparation for a reading. She looked haunted and skeletal, a little demented. Virgil had the feeling he wasn’t going to enjoy this very much. Nobody introduced her. She just stood up and began to read in a precise but fractured voice.
‘I am gall,
I am heartburn,’ she began.
‘I am wormwood,
I am broth,
I am a Tuc cracker,
I am a Cheddar cheese,
I am sage.
I am the olive pit under your duvet,
I am peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth,
I am oatmeal,
I am All-Bran and hog’s pudding and tripe.
I am a midnight feast,
I am a tuckshop,
I am your Christmas hamper,
your vacuum flask full of Horlicks.
I am the fly in your soup,
I am the grit in your oyster,
I am full-bodied,
I am blood.
I am wholemeal and granary and wheaten,
I am bloomer and rye.
I am eels and pies.
I am the set menu and the dish of the day.
I am the appetiser and the wedding feast.
I am the amputee’s finger buffet.
I am bulimia,
I am food poisoning,
I am salmonella …
‘Oh my God,’ said Virgil, not entirely to himself, ‘this is all I need.’
He saw that the poetess no longer seemed to be reading from her manuscript. She seemed to be, oh no, improvising. Having hit her stride she might go on forever. Virgil slipped away from Rose, out of the bar, out of the arts centre. He had terrible stomach pains. Escape didn’t even cross his mind. He climbed into the back of the Mercedes, swept food wrappers and crumbs off the back seat and gently lay down. He tried to adopt a foetal position but that made his stomach feel worse. He began to cry quietly. It was some time before Rose found him there.
‘What’s the matter, Virgil?’ she asked, sliding into the front passenger seat.
‘What the hell do you think?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she did sound sort of sorry to Virgil.
‘Can I do anything to help?’
‘Like what?’
‘We could go and eat something.’
‘Oh please.’
The tears streamed down Virgil’s cheeks.
‘How about oral sex?’ Rose suggested. ‘Or I could do something indecent with a bag of salted cashews while you watched.’
‘No,’ said Virgil, very softly and politely.
Rose looked at him sadly, genuinely sadly, with compassion. This was not the way she had imagined things would turn out.
‘It’s very nearly over,’ she said. ‘The month’s very nearly up.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then I guess you’re a member of the Everlasting Club.’
‘And then what?’
‘How should I know? Maybe then you can eat, drink and be merry for the rest of your life.’
‘With some bunch of English assholes who I can’t stand.’
‘I’m really sorry, Virgil. Really.’
‘Huh.’
They said nothing, and for a moment Virgil felt strangely at peace, as though he might fall into a blissful sleep. Then there was a rasp of tyres across the car park and a big car braked hard and stopped abruptly beside the Mercedes. Virgil opened his eyes but could see nothing from his foetal position. Rose looked round startled as the car door against which she was leaning suddenly opened. A man’s black hand swept into the car and slapped her across the face, and a voice said, ‘Jezebel!’ It sounded like a voice Virgil knew, like Prince Charles maybe, like Butterworth, but Virgil didn’t see how it could be. He thought he must be hallucinating. He was ready for hallucinations. But then sure enough Butterworth was peering into the back seat and saying, ‘Everything’s all right now, Virgil. I’m here and I’ve saved you.’
Half an hour later Butterworth and Virgil sat in the front seats of the Bentley. Rose and Kingsley were in the back, their hands and feet inexpertly tied with the same frayed rope. Rose was sniffling like some pink pet animal. Her mascara was running. Her jaw wobbled like soft rubber. She looked terminally miserable. From time to time she muttered that she was sorry, and complained that the rope was cutting into her ankles. Her regrets and her complaints fell on equally unsympathetic ears.
Butterworth’s beating up of Kingsley had been discreet. Apart from a lot of dried blood below his left nostril he looked very little abused. The bruises and abrasions were all hidden by his clothes. His face inevitably wore a pained expression, but at the same time, perhaps because he felt there was little else Butterworth could do to hurt him, the pained expression was alloyed with a look of superior defiance.
‘So let me get this straight,’ said Virgil, ‘I was going to be a human sacrifice for those suckers? They were going to kill me and eat me because they believe that eating people gives ’em some sort of immortality? I was being fattened up and stuffed by Rose, and Kingsley was going to do the carving? Is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Butterworth.
Virgil laughed and shuddered simultaneously. How could you not find this absurd? How could you possibly believe all this shit? In fact, he’d have been perfectly happy to believe that Butterworth was some kind of headcase if it weren’t for the fact that Kingsley, the prime mover of all this lunacy, was sitting there admitting that every word of it was true.
‘How the hell could you think of slicing me up?’ Virgil demanded of Kingsley.
‘That’s what a Chief Carver does. As I’ve always said, I’m a new boy at the Everlasting Club. Terrific honour and all that. You don’t get made Chief Carver and then immediately start questioning all the rules, do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Virgil. ‘I’ve never been in that happy position.’
‘It’s a tradition, that’s all,’ said Kingsley.
‘You’ve been eating people for three hundred and fifty years?’
‘Not me personally …’
‘You’re a bunch of fucking maniacs. How the hell can you sit around a table and eat human flesh?’
‘It’s not so hard,’ said Kingsley. ‘You managed it.’
‘WHAT?’
‘You ate human flesh, Virgil,’ he repeated. ‘The dinner you had at the Everlasting Club. The sausages. I think you found them quite tasty.’
Virgil left the car and threw up for a while. When he returned he demanded, ‘Why the fuck didya feed me human flesh?’
‘We do it to all our guests. It gives us a kind of hold over them.’
Even Butterworth, who seemed to have a pretty strong stomach for the workings of Satan, looked a bit ill at this one, and Rose began to sob zestfully.
‘And your father,’ Kingsley said, ‘he seemed to enjoy it too, like father, like son.’
‘What’s my father got to do with this? He’s been to the Everlasting Club? He’s in town?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kingsley.
‘Jesus,’ said Virgil. Then a new train of thought shunted through his mind. ‘My Dad was at the Everlasting Club eating human flesh? Another couple of days and he could have been eating me!’
Kingsley chuckled to himself. Virgil tried to hit him. Then he turned to Butterworth, looking lost and hopeless.
‘I mean, what the fuck are we supposed to do about this?’ he asked.
‘Tell the police? I know your policemen are wonderful, but they’re gonna think we’re mad.’
‘As fruitcakes,’ Butterworth agreed.
‘So what do we do?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Butterworth. ‘The important thing was to save you, and I’ve done that, but that doesn’t solve everything. Running away isn’t always the answer.’
‘I’ll buy that,’ said Virgil, ‘but what are we actually going to do?’
‘I know what ought to be done,’ said Butterworth.
‘Yeah?’
‘But it isn’t a job for simple human agencies.’
‘Huh?’
‘We need to exorcise the Everlasting Club. We need to go back there, to that abominable place, and we need to drive a stake through its black, evil heart.’
Virgil held his head, trying to clear the fog inside.
‘Are we talking figuratively here?’ he enquired.
‘We raze it,’ said Butterworth. ‘We do a little work with a few gallons of petrol. We torch the lot. It’ll be a kind of purification.’
In the back of the Bentley, Rose and Kingsley exchanged fearful, panicky glances. Butterworth was sounding dangerously out of control, and they were at his mercy. Who knew what punishments he might devise and inflict on them in support of his holy war?
In the front of the Bentley, Virgil, befuddled by food, drink and whatever else Rose had been giving him, thought Butterworth was one of the more rational people he’d met in England. His plan sounded just fine to Virgil.