The Secret History - Donna Tartt [83]
“But these are fundamentally sex rituals, aren’t they?”
It came out not as a question but as a statement. He didn’t blink, but sat waiting for me to continue.
“Well? Aren’t they?”
He leaned over to rest his cigarette in the ashtray. “Of course,” he said agreeably, cool as a priest in his dark suit and ascetic spectacles. “You know that as well as I do.”
We sat looking at each other for a moment.
“What exactly did you do?” I said.
“Well, really, I think we needn’t go into that now,” he said smoothly. “There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings but the phenomenon was basically spiritual in nature.”
“You saw Dionysus, I suppose?”
I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when he nodded as casually as if I’d asked him if he’d done his homework.
“You saw him corporeally? Goatskin? Thyrsus?”
“How do you know what Dionysus is?” said Henry, a bit sharply. “What do you think it was we saw? A cartoon? A drawing from the side of a vase?”
“I just can’t believe you’re telling me you actually saw—”
“What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture—blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don’t know what Dionysus looks like. We’re talking about God here. God is serious business.” He leaned back in his chair and scrutinized me. “You don’t have to take my word for any of this, you know,” he said. “There were four of us. Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he’d got, but it wasn’t a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she’d believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed. Actually, it was miles. I know that for a fact. Apparently we ran and ran and ran, because when we came to ourselves we had no idea where we were. Later we figured out that we had got over at least four barbed-wire fences, though how I don’t know, and were well off Francis’s property, seven or eight miles into the country. This is where I come to the rather unfortunate part of my story.
“I have only the vaguest memory of this. I heard something behind me, or someone, and I wheeled around, almost losing my balance, and swung at whatever it was—a large, indistinct, yellow thing—with my closed fist, my left, which is not my good one. I felt a terrible pain in my knuckles and then, almost instantly, something knocked the breath right out of me. It was dark, you understand; I couldn’t really see. I swung out again with my right, hard as I could and with all my weight behind it, and this time I heard a loud crack and a scream.
“We’re not too clear on what happened after that. Camilla was a good deal ahead, but Charles and Francis were fairly close behind and had soon caught up with me. I have a distinct recollection of being on my feet and seeing the two of them crash through the bushes—God. I can see them now. Their hair was tangled with leaves and mud and their clothes virtually in shreds. They stood there, panting, glassy-eyed and hostile—I didn’t recognize either of them, and I think we might have started to fight had not the moon come from behind a cloud. We stared at