Ritual (21 page)

‘How would you
feel, in my position?’ Charlie asked him.

‘My friend,’
said the sheriff, ‘I was in your position. My own
daughter of
twenty-one years old was one of the first Celestine recruits around here, and
believe
me I did everything I could to get her out of there. I got hold
of a search warrant, and I went through that building like you wouldn’t
believe. And I found her; and do you know what she’d done? She’d already cut
off her own hand.’

He stared
intently at Charlie just to make sure he wasn’t missing the point of what he
was saying.

Just to make
sure that Charlie didn’t believe that he was the only father in the world who
had ever been through agony and doubt and grief because of the Celestines.

‘Let me tell
you something,’ he went on, and his voice was as soft as tissue now. ‘I sat
down by my little girl’s bed and I pleaded with her to come home with me before
she hurt herself more.

And do you know
what she did? She touched me with her one hand, and she smiled at me, she
smiled, and she said, “Daddy, for the very first time in my life I’m truly
happy.” That’s what she said.’

The sheriff
paused. He obviously found this bitterly painful to remember. ‘That was when I
used my authority, or rather my gun. I took my little girl and I got her out of
that place by force. They didn’t try to stop me, they just smiled at me the
same way that my little girl had smiled at me, and they said, “See you later,
Susan,” – that was my little girl’s name. I’ll never forget to my dying day the
way they said that. They were so fucking cheerful.

‘Susan came
home for two and a half weeks. That was as long as I could persuade her to
stay.

You don’t know
what those two and a half weeks were like. She was so depressed I had to take
her to the doctor and the doctor put her on tranquillizers. By the end of the
second week things were so bad she was begging me to let her go back there. Do
you know what she said? She said that what the Celestines were doing was
showing her the way to heaven, and that even if I kept her chained up to her
bed for the rest of her life, she would never be happy in this physical,
material world that the rest of us have to endure. That’s just what she said.
“I’ve broken free,” she told me. “Free of any kind of physical need. All that’s
holding me back now is my earthly body, and I’m going to eat that.’“

The sheriff ran
his hand through his scrubby red hair and said, ‘Jesus! How do you cope when
your daughter tells you something like that?’

‘What did you
do?’ Charlie asked him, in a haunted voice.

‘I didn’t do
anything, except to make sure that Susan was handcuffed to her bed every night.

Then one
morning we woke up and she was gone. She had bitten away all the flesh around
her hand and wrist so that she could get out of the handcuff. The pillow was
plastered in blood and bits of flesh. I knew then that I was never going to get
her back. Those Celestines had won her over and that was it.’

‘Didn’t you
take it any further?’

‘Oh sure.
I took it all the way to Hartford. But in the end I
was quietly taken aside and told to
lay
off. That’s
when I found out everything that I’ve just told you. I made one last effort and
took the story to the media, and I found one reporter on the Hartford Courant
who was prepared to take a risk. But after about a week he called me back and
said the story wouldn’t stand up and that was all there was to it.’

Charlie looked
at the sheriff coldly. ‘So what you’re telling me is that I have to accept
Martin’s kidnap – I have to accept the fact that those people are going to
persuade him to eat himself alive

- because of some national conspiracy of silence?’

The sheriff
said, ‘That’s part of the story, sure. But the other part – the real important
part – is that no kid goes to that place unless they want to. I found that part
the hardest of all to accept, when Susan went. She wanted to go.’

‘Did you ever
get to see her again?’

‘Yes.’ The
sheriff nodded.
‘Just once.
I went up to
Le Reposoir
against the specific
instructions of my superiors and I forced them at gunpoint to let me see her.
They were so damned polite they gave me the creeps. I mean, they were even
humorous about it. They took me into the room and there she was, or what was
left of her. I wish to God that I’d never gone. Did you ever see that old movie
Freaks? There’s a guy in it
who’s
just a head and a
kind of a caterpillar body in a cotton sock? Did you ever see that? Well,
that’s what Susan was like. I never knew that anybody could lose so much of
their body and still live. There was her face, that same face I loved so much,
still with that wavy red hair, and underneath that face there was nothing at
all but a body no bigger than a leg of pork, all wrapped up in a white cotton
stocking.’

Charlie
swallowed. His throat was dry; but he knew that if he tried to swallow any
coffee he would probably gag.

The sheriff
said, ‘You may not believe me, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it
was that she lay there in the sunshine and she smiled at me and said, “Daddy”,
and I knew that she was completely contented. They called me about two weeks
later to tell me that she was gone. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust
myself. I took a week’s vacation that was owing to me and I stayed drunk from
Friday evening to the following Sunday night.’

‘How am I going
to get my son out of there?’ Charlie asked him.

ISO

‘I don’t think
you’ve been listening to me, my friend. Your son is there because your son
wants to be there, and you’re not going to get him out of that place without
the US Marines.

‘And the same
thing happened to you, to your only daughter, and you just accept it?’

‘Tell me what I
can do about it!’ the sheriff said, his jowls shaking. ‘Tell me just one thing
that I can do about it! Short of killing the Musettes
outright,
and burning the whole damned house down – and, believe me, that wouldn’t help
either. There are nineteen Celestine houses in the continental United States;
there are more in Eurpoe. If you burn down one, there will always be scores of
others. You’d be pissing in the wind.’

Charlie stood
up. He laid one hand on the
sheriffs
desk and looked
him steadily in the eye. ‘Is this what it’s come to?’ he said.
‘The country that was founded on the principles of life and
liberty?’

The sheriff
gave him a defeated, sideways look. ‘Sometimes the price of life and liberty is
pretty high.’

‘Tell me who
else in Alien’s Corners has lost a child.’

‘Apart from Mr
Haxalt, there must have been eleven or twelve. Some of them know where their
children have gone, others don’t.’

‘Like Mrs Kemp,
you mean?’

The sheriff nodded.
‘We don’t tell ‘em if they don’t find out. We don’t want to cause any more
distress than we have to.’

Charlie rubbed
his eyes. He felt as if he were dreaming all this; but the dream was so
procedural that he knew it was true. Apart from that, he couldn’t wake up, no
matter how hard he tried.

The sheriff
said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go on up to
Le Reposoir
myself, and talk to them about your son. Martin, is
that what you said his name was?’

Charlie said,
‘You’ve got to get him out of there, sheriff.’

‘More parents
have said that same thing to me than I like to recall.’

‘I promise you
– if you don’t do it – then I will.’

‘I can’t stop
you from making promises, my friend. But it’s my elected duty to uphold the
law, and I’m telling you right here and now that if you attempt anything in the
way of aggravated assault on those people, or damage or intrude on their
property, then I’m bound to give them assistance.

Charlie said,
‘What’s your name, sheriff?’

‘Podmore,’ he
replied.

‘I mean your given
name.’

‘What do you
want to know that for? It’s Norman, as a matter of fact.’

Charlie said,
‘I want to be able to say to you, “Norman, this is Charlie. You’ve lost your
daughter,
I’m in danger of losing my son.” I want you to
think about that, Norman, what that means. And you tell me something else,
Norman. That boy’s mother doesn’t know what’s happened yet. You tell me what
I’m supposed to say to her?

G
rey-faced with rage and frustration, Charlie drove back up the
corkscrew road to
Le Reposoir
, the
tyres of his Oldsmobile howling and squittering on the blacktop. He swerved
into the entrance and collided at nearly ten miles an hour with the front gate,
with a noise like the gates of hell being clanged shut. Two or three of the
gate’s iron uprights were bent, but the locks held, and all Charlie ended up
with was mild whiplash and two shattered headlights.

He climbed out
of the car and stabbed furiously at the intercom button. M. Musette – who must
have inspected the damage to his gates through his closed-circuit television
camera – answered almost immediately.

‘Mr McLean,
what can I do for you? You seem to have suffered an accident.’

‘Open up,’
Charlie demanded. ‘I want my son back.’

‘Mr McLean, you
know as well as I do that your son wishes to remain here.’

‘I don’t give a
shit, Monsewer Musette. I want my son back and I want him back now.’

‘Do you always
treat your son’s wishes with such contempt?’

Charlie yelled,
‘
Don’t
you start getting fancy with me, you Goddamn
cannibal! Now open up, and give me my son back!’

‘I’m sorry,
that’s impossible. If your son has a change of heart, then obviously I shall be
glad to let you know. But at the moment he is very happy where he is. Why don’t
you talk to the sheriff?’

Charlie said,
with more control, ‘I already did that, thank you.’

‘I hope he was
sympathetic.’

‘Yes, he was.
Yes, he was sympathetic. That’s all that anybody seems to be good for, around
here: being sympathetic.’

‘Well, I quite
understand your feelings, my dear sir. You don’t want sympathy, do you? You
want your son’s affection.’

‘I’ll worry
about his affection when I get hold of him again.’

‘He’s not a
dog,
monsieur
. He’s an intelligent
human being – quite capable of making his own decisions.’

‘And what are
you?” Charlie wanted to know.

The intercom
clicked once, and then remained silent. Charlie returned to his car, started
the engine, slammed into reverse, then back into drive and collided again as
hard as he could with the gates. Then he backed up and crashed into the gates a
third time, and then a fourth, until he could hear his radiator fan clattering
against its cover, and a grinding sound in the transmission like a Cuisinart
full of broken glass.

He sat in his
car and screamed at the gates of
Le
Reposoir
in helpless rage. Then he crossed his arms over his steering wheel
and bent his head forward and sobbed. He stayed like that for almost a quarter
of an hour, while the emotionless eye of the remote-control camera watched him
from the trees.

Eventually, he
sat up and dug out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his face. It was clear to
him now that a frontal assault on the Celestines was not going to work. Nor was
any appeal to the police, or to the media. The Celestines had won for
themselves the kind of charmed lives that only true fanatics seem to be able to
achieve. If he wanted to get Martin out of
Le
Reposoir
, he was going to have to do it alone. What’s more, he was going to
have to make sure that his plan was properly thought out. Martin would have to
be taken someplace secure, where it would be impossible for him to escape and
return to the Celestines. And there was no doubt that he would need
deprogramming, either by a psychiatrist or by one of those people who made it
their business to deprogram Moonies and other adolescent victims of obsessional
cults.

It was very
hard for him, but he reversed his car away from the entrance to
Le Reposoir
and drove slowly back
towards Alien’s Corners with his transmission crunching and his suspension
complaining at every bump. The sun, which for most of the day had been
enveloping itself in hazy grey clouds, now suddenly decided to make an
appearance, and it lit up the coppery fall leaves for miles around. There was a
tang of woodsmoke in the air, and Charlie knew that he would never be able to
come up to Connecticut again, in fall, whether he was able to rescue Martin or
not. It would always remind him of mutilation, and self-inflicted pain, and the
Celestines.

He returned to
Mrs Kemp’s. Mrs Kemp herself was standing at her front door, almost as if she
had been waiting for him; but in fact she was lifting her face to the sun. Her
eyes were closed and her fists were clenched and there was an odd little smile
on her face as she basked her wrinkles.

She opened her
eyes as Charlie walked up the front path.

‘Mr McLean,’
she said.

‘How are you
doing, Mrs Kemp?’

‘I’m enjoying
this sunshine. It’ll be winter before you know it. You’re back soon. I didn’t
expect you for at least a year; if ever.
Your boy not with
you?’

‘Martin’s...
having a break.’

‘I thought you
said you were taking him to Boston with you.’

‘Well, I was.’

Mrs Kemp
frowned at him, and touched his arm. ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I can tell.’

‘Everything’s fine, Mrs Kemp.
I just need a place to stay
for the next few days. Some place quiet, where I can think.”