Ritual (20 page)

He cantered
down the stone steps and across the gravel, and as he did so a flock of ravens
rose cawing from the spires of
Le
Reposoir
, the first birds that he had heard since he trespassed here.

They sounded
harsh and triumphant, and they circled around and around above his head as if
they were gloating over his defeat.

He got into the
car, slammed the door, and switched on the engine. As he did so, Mme Musette
came down the front steps of the house after him. She stopped only a few feet
away, and Charlie let down his window.

‘I’m going
straight to the police,’ he warned her.

‘I know that,’
she replied. ‘It will do you no good.’

‘Maybe it will
and maybe it won’t.’

‘Don’t you
think every parent who finds out that their son or daughter has come to join
the Celestines feels the same way?’

‘Every parent?’
For some reason the thought that he might
just be one worried father out of a thousand hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Of course.
Parents always have their own ideas about how
they wish their children to be brought up, both morally and spiritually. But
they must understand that their children are not their property; that their
children are entitled to pursue happiness in any way they wish. The Rev Moon
and his followers were regarded with the same suspicion as the Celestines. Many
parents tried desperate measures to rescue their children from Moonie
settlements, and to persuade them never to return. But most did; and those who
didn’t were unhappy for the rest of their lives. Remember, Mr McLean, your son
came to the Celestines of his own free will. You will never get him back now.
Physically, perhaps – although that is unlikely.
But never, never, spiritually.
You have lost him now, for
ever.’

Charlie stared
at Mme Musette with a ferocity that he had never experienced in his whole life.

Then he said,
vehemently, ‘Fuck you,’ and drove off up the gravelled driveway with his tyres
spinning and the rear end of his Oldsmobile snaking from side to side.

H
e found the Sheriff much more quickly than he had expected. There
had been a traffic accident on the steeply sloping road to Alien’s Corners. An
elderly farmer in a station wagon had tried to overtake a slow-moving delivery
truck on a blind bend, and collided head-on with another car coming the
opposite way. The road surface was mushy with blood and broken glass, and the
damaged cars were being towed away like injured dinosaurs.

The sheriff was
standing by the side of the road with his hands on his hips as if he found the
stupidity of his fellow men impossible to believe. He was short and
sandy-haired, with a big curving belly in front and a big curving bottom
behind. He wore designer sunglasses that didn’t suit him at all. Not far away,
the deputy who Charlie had first met when he drove into Alien’s Corners was
taking down an eye-witness statement from a highway worker who had been
clearing out ditches only fifty yards away from the smash.

Charlie parked
his car on the grassy verge and climbed out. The sheriff turned to him as he
approached, then leaned sideways a little so that he could see past him to his
car.

‘This is an
accident here, fellow,’ he told Charlie, in a voice made harsh by smoking and
Connecticut winters. ‘You’re going to have to move that vehicle out of here.’

‘I was coming
to your office,’ Charile told him. ‘I have a serious crime to report.’

Somehow, out
here by the roadside, Charlie thought that his words sounded weak and unreal.

The sheriff
gave a short, hammering cough, and eyed Charlie through his green-tinted lenses
as if he wasn’t sure whether to shout at him or hit him.

‘What nature of
serious crime?’ he inquired.

‘Kidnap, maybe
worse,’ said Charlie.

The sheriff
asked, ‘Where?
And when?
And who got kidnapped?’

‘It happened
last night. My fifteen-year-old son Martin was abducted from the Windsor Hotel
at West Hartford.’

‘Outside of my
jurisdiction,’ said the sheriff. ‘You should
of
reported it in West Hartford.’

‘But they
brought him here.1

‘Who brought
him here? You mean you know who did it?’

‘M. and Mme Musette, at
Le
Reposoir
, back on the Quas-sapaug Road.
I saw him there not more
than ten minutes ago.’

The sheriff
said, ‘Hold on, now. You’ve seen him since this alleged kidnap took place?’

‘That’s correct.
I tried to get him away, but I couldn’t.’

The Sheriff
looked thoughtful. Then he called to his deputy, ‘Clive! You want to wrap this
up? I have to talk to this gentleman here for a while.’

Clive came over
with his thumbs in his belt. ‘How do you do,’ he greeted Charlie. Then he said
to the sheriff, ‘This is the gentleman who parked in Mr Haxalt’s space the
other day.’

The sheriff
said, ‘Sounds like you’re the kind of man who likes to live dangerously.’

‘Where can we
talk?’ asked Charlie.

‘You’d better
follow me back to my office. You and I have got some discussing to do.’

The sheriff
eased his bulky bottom into his car, and drove off, with Charlie following
close behind. His office was eater-corner from the church, overlooking the
sloping green at Alien’s Corners. He parked in a space marked ‘Sheriff and
Charlie parked beside him in a space marked

‘Coroner’.

‘You sure do
like to live dangerously,’ the sheriff remarked, indicating the slot in which
Charlie had parked. ‘Our county coroner has a rare temper.’

‘I’m not in the
mood for worrying about people’s private parking spaces,’ said Charlie.

The sheriff
grasped his shoulder. ‘I know you’re not.
Just trying to
lighten the atmosphere a little.

Come on in.
Maybe you’d care for some coffee.’

Charlie sat in
the
sheriffs
office under a tired-looking flag and a
crest with the Connecticut state motto, Qui Transtulit Sustinet. There was also
a comprehensive selection of colour photographs of the current sheriff shaking
hands with almost everybody from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Breslin. The sheriff
sent his work-worn, bespectacled secretary to bring them two Styrofoam cups of
what turned out to be remarkably good coffee. Then he kicked the door closed,
and settled himself down behind his desk.

‘You’d better
give me some of the salient facts,’ he said.
‘Your boy’s age,
description, what he was wearing, all that kind of thing.
You’d better
tell me how it happened, too.’

‘But I know
where he is,’ Charlie insisted.

The sheriff
pulled a tight face. ‘Sure you know where he is. The difficulty is, if he’s
staying with those people voluntarily, we’re not in any kind of a position to
go crashing in there with all guns blazing to rescue him.’

‘He’s a minor.
Don’t tell me that you can’t get a warrant to go in and get him. Listen – I can
prove that his life is in danger. Do you know anything about those people at
all? Do you know what they’re doing in that place?’

‘Well, sir, as
a matter of fact I do.’

‘You know about
the rituals?’

The sheriff
nodded, squashing his double chins like an accordion bellows.

‘And you’ve
been content to sit here and let them get on with it? For Christ’s sake,
sheriff, they’re cannibals! They’re worse than cannibals! They’re actually
persuading young people to hack themselves to pieces and eat their own bodies!’

‘Yes,’ said the
sheriff.

H5

‘ y
«?’ Charlie exploded. ‘Is that all you can say?
V«?
I’m talking about my only son, sheriff. My boy is lying
on a bed in that place stark naked and preparing himself to do God alone knows
what. He’s probably going to cut off his own fingers and eat them.
Or worse.’

The sheriff
sipped his coffee and then set it back on his desk. ‘Whatever I’m going to say
to you now, Mr McLean, you’re going to feel that it falls far short of the kind
of response you’ve been expecting from the law on this matter. But there
are
what you might call ramifications.’

‘I don’t see
how any ramifications can allow the law to turn a blind eye while my son is
allowed to remain in the hands of people like that.’

The sheriff
said, ‘The problem is, the law and the ramifications are kind of tied up
together. You see, those Celestine people used to be nothing much more than a
small secret society, maybe twenty or thirty people, no more than that, centred
on New Orleans. They were two separate bodies in those days, the same way that
the Irish Republican movement is split up into the IRA, which is technically
illegal, and the political wing, Sinn Fein, which is technically legal,
although who knows where one begins and the other ends? You understand me? The
Celestines in New Orleans were divided between their religious order, which was
recognized as an official religious body, and their secret society of
flesh-eaters. In those days, the flesh-eating side was kept totally under
cover. Several FBI agents tried to penetrate it and couldn’t. All the
law-enforcement agencies knew that it was going on, but there was no way of
proving it. The National Enquirer printed a story about it, and all that
happened was nobody believed it and the Celestine Order successfully sued them
for four and a half million dollars.’

Confused,
Charlie said, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m trying to
tell you that for years the Celestines had to carry on this cannibalism business
in total, one hundred per cent secrecy. Their people used to walk the streets
of New Orleans. They’d meet up with young, disaffected runaways, get to talking
to them,
then
introduce them to the legitimate side of
their religion. When they were sure that they weren’t dealing with undercover
cops masquerading as runaways, they’d introduce them to the other side of what
they were doing. One secret FBI report estimated that between 1955 and 1965,
more that eighteen per cent of all young people who went permanently missing in
the New Orleans area became Celestine followers, and finished up as their own
Last Supper.’

‘If the FBI
knew all this, why didn’t they stop it?’ Charlie asked.

‘They almost
did, more than one time. But the Celestines had first-class lawyers, and since
nobody could prove kidnap, abduction, imprisonment, or any criminal act either
local or federal, they had to let them go. There is no law in any state which
says that it is a criminal offence to devour
yourself
;
nor is it an offence to offer parts of yourself to other people for no charge
for whatever purpose they may care to put it. I guess the legislators just
didn’t envisage anybody wanting to do things like that.’

‘But people who
want to eat themselves must be mentally incompetent,’ said Charlie. ‘Surely
somebody tried to put a stop to the Celestines with mental health legislation.’

‘Oh sure.
There was a test case put before the Louisiana
Supreme Court on n May 1967. It was held in camera, so it never got reported.
They called expert witnesses to testify as to the sanity of a nineteen-year-old
girl who had eaten both of her arms. They had psychiatrists, priests, social
workers, theologians, anthropologists, the whole cast of thousands. Not one of
them could tell the court with any conviction that the girl was nuts. She had
mutilated herself for an
explicable
religious reason,
in accordance with the teaching of a recognized church. Her lawyer pointed out
that millions of young boys all over the world are mutilated every year –
circumcised, that is – for religious reasons that are far less profound that
those embraced by the Celestines. The case for committal to a mental
institution was dismissed, and the girl went back to New Orleans and ate the
rest of
herself
.’

‘Is that why
they’re so brazen about what they’re doing?’ said Charlie.

The sheriff
nodded. ‘That’s part of the reason. They know now that anybody who tries to
challenge them in the courts is going to have a real difficult time – apart
from attracting all kinds of very unwelcome publicity. Women don’t like to tell
the police they’ve been raped; you think parents like to come along and admit
that their children have been eating themselves?’

‘What’s the
other part of the reason?’

‘The other part
of the reason is that the daughter of a very senior member of the United States
government died two years ago at a Celestine house in South Carolina. The
scandal would have been a doozy, believe me. The FBI undertook a six-month
covert investigation and found out that the sons and daughters of countless
socialite, celebrity and big-business families were also Celestine Devotees.
Worse than that, at least four top-ranking politicians and at least two members
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were involved. Several of them were Guides. Do you
know about Guides?’

Charlie nodded
numbly.

The sheriff
sucked up some more coffee. It was too hot to drink without making a lot of
noise.

‘The government
decided that so long as the Celestines never actually committed any illegal
acts, they were to be left alone. They have what you might call diplomatic
immunity.
It’s
national legislative policy, my friend,
all the way down from the Oval Office to yours truly, the sheriff of Litchfield
County.’

‘Why are you
telling me all this?’ asked Charlie. ‘If it isn’t true, I’m bound to find out
that it isn’t.

If it is, then
I would have thought that it wasn’t the kind of story you would want to spread
around.’

The sheriff
shook his head. ‘I have a very good reason for telling
you,
and that reason is that right now you’re feeling mad. You want the law to go
busting in to
Le Reposoir
and rescue
your son, Rambo-style. And if the law won’t do it for you, then by God you’re
going to take the law into your own hands and do it yourself. Am I right? Am I
reading you right?’