Ritual (32 page)

Xavier added a
little fennel to the pan, and stirred the finger around to make sure that it
was properly cooked. M. Fontenot watched Charlie with dark eyes that never once
deviated as one of the white plates was set in front of him and the finger,
still steaming, was placed on it like a small morsel with which to begin a very
much grander dinner.

‘Your
contribution to the holy covenant,’ said M. Fontenot. ‘Your sacrifice, your
very first; and let us hope you will give many more.’

Xavier took the
bloody gauze away from Charlie’s left hand, and replaced it with a clean pad.

Already the
wound was beginning to clot, and Charlie had to admit that M. Fontenot was
right: the human body did have extraordinary powers of recovery.

‘Do I... share
it?’ asked Charlie, trying not to look down at the crisply fried finger.

M. Fontenot
shook his head. ‘This one is all for you. Later, perhaps, when you wish to have
your legs
removed .
..
then
you can share your flesh with your brothers in Christ. For this evening,
however, your meat is your own. For what you are about to receive, may the Lord
make you truly thankful.’

It was a long
time before Charlie could pick up his fork and prod at the finger on his plate,
but M. Fontenot and the rest of the Guides remained silent, watching, giving
him as much time as he needed. Charlie had the feeling that they had watched
such reluctant ceremonies before. The room was filled with such expectancy that
it almost seemed to exert a gravitational pull, as if the rest of the world
would be irresistibly drawn towards it like nuts and bolts to a powerful
magnet.

Charlie stuck
his fork into the fleshy underside of the finger. The crisp skin made a slight
popping noise as it was penetrated by the tines of the fork. Then Charlie
lifted up the finger and somehow managed to guide it towards his mouth. His
stomach made an audible groaning noise, and he could feel the back of his
throat tighten up.

‘Xavier, bring
brother
David some wine,’ said M. Fontenot. ‘I know how it
is!
Very difficult to bite, very difficult to swallow.
But just remember, my friend, the human body is the greatest of all foods,
because the human body is the vessel of the human spirit; and no other creature
on earth has a spirit. This meat that you are about to eat is the food not of
the gods but of the One True God. Think how much you will be offending Him if
you refuse it. Think how much you will be offending all of us.”

Again, the implicit warning.
Charlie knew that he was going
to have to eat his finger if there was going to be any chance at all of him rescuing
Martin.

He bit. The
flesh came away from the bone quite easily. His mouth was filled with the taste
of meat and fat; and the terrible part about it was that it was meat that
needed to be steadily chewed. With rising nausea, Charlie swallowed a half-masticated
piece – a piece that would have seemed tiny if he had been eating chicken or
beef, but which felt as if it were the size and texture of a small
hessian-covered sofa.

Xavier held a
glass of red Californian wine in front of him. He swallowed, and nodded in
appreciation.

The Guides of
the Church of the Angels sat and watched Charlie for almost twenty minutes as
he slowly ate the flesh of his own ring finger. At the end of that time he was
sweating, and very close to vomiting; although the bone that now lay on his
plate was bitten quite clean, even around the fingernail. It didn’t look like
Charlie’s finger any more: it looked like a broken piece from a biology
lecturer’s
skeleton
.

Xavier took the
plate away, and wheeled the trolley out of the room. M. Fontenot drew up a
chair next to Charlie and sat smiling at him with his legs crossed and his
fingers laced together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have done exceptionally well. You
have crossed the threshold into the Church of the Celestines. How do you feel now
about the so-called horror of horrors – the eating of human flesh? Have you
changed your opinion?’

Charlie wiped
his mouth with his napkin. The wound on his left hand where he had severed his
finger was throbbing so painfully that he found it difficult to think straight.

‘I guess it was
a shock,’ he told M. Fontenot.

‘But a good
shock, wouldn’t you agree?’ M. Fontenot pressed him. ‘Good for the
spirit,
and
–
dare
I say it – good for the palate, too?’

‘I’ve never
experienced anything like it,’ said Charlie, quite truthfully.

M. Fontenot
paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘Not even at the Napoleon House, or Le
Tour Eiffel, or Pascal’s Manale?’

‘I’m sorry?’
Charlie asked him. He really didn’t understand what M. Fontenot was talking
about.

Not unless he meant
–

‘They’re all
restaurants, aren’t they?’ M. Fontenot asked him.

‘That’s right,’
Charlie acknowledged.

‘And that’s
what you do, isn’t it? You travel around the country, under various assumed
names and aliases, testing restaurants?’

Charlie’s eyes were
half closed with pain. He was gripping his left wrist with his right hand as
tight as a tourniquet, in an effort to deaden the throbbing. ‘You must have me
mixed up with somebody else,’ he told M. Fontenot. ‘I’m a chef, not a
restaurant inspector.’

M. Fontenot
shook his head. ‘You were never a chef, my friend. Nor were you ever a butcher.

Both a chef and
a butcher would have cut through that finger joint in two quick coups.

You didn’t even
know where the joint was, not properly. Look how badly you have injured
yourself.’

He turned to
the Guide sitting closest to him, and leaned forward and whispered something.

The Guide said,
‘Certaine-ment, M. Fontenot,’ and got up from the table, leaving the room by
the same door through which Xavier had wheeled the trolley. M. Fontenot then
leaned back towards Charlie, and said, ‘You should have known that we suspected
you from the ease with which we admitted you to this assembly. As a rule, no
lesser church officials are permitted to intrude on these meetings, and no
Devotees are allowed anywhere near. This is what that old radio programme used
to call the inner sanctum.’

Charlie held up
his left hand, swathed in bloody gauze.
‘If you suspected me
right from the beginning, then why –?’

‘Why did we let
you amputate your own finger? My dear Daniel – or perhaps I should call you my
dear Charles – if you thrust your head into the lion’s mouth, you should
occasionally expect a nip or two around the neck.
If not
complete decapitation.’

The door opened
again, and back came the guide whom M. Fontenot had sent out of the room.

Beside him,
waddling on his
stumps,
came the hooded dwarf who had
murdered Mrs Kemp. He made his way around the table and heaved himself up on to
a chair. Charlie watched him in dread and fascination. So he hadn’t been
mistaken. He had seen the dwarf at the back of the St Victoir hotel, and at
Pirates Alley.

‘We found it
quite astonishing that you thought you could get away from us,’ said M.
Fontenot.

‘Also, that we
would dream of letting you go. You made one attempt to break into
Le Reposoir
to take your son away from
his chosen destiny. You would surely make another. This, one supposes, is it.
A clumsy effort to infiltrate the church of the Celestines, in the
hope that you might be able to snatch your son away at a moment when our guard
was relaxed.
And where were you going to go then?
To
Canada, perhaps?
Some of them go to Canada. But most try Mexico. It’s a
pity for them that we have such a close arrangement with the Mexican police. La
mordita, that’s what they call it.
The bite.
They will
do anything for money.’

Charlie stood
up, unsteadily. ‘I think you’d better let me leave.’

‘I’m sorry,’
said M. Fontenot, ‘That is absolutely out of the question.’

‘You can’t keep
me here against my will.’

‘You came here
voluntarily.’

‘Sure I did.
But now I want to leave, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

M. Fontenot
turned around in his seat and gave the dwarf a quick summoning wave. The dwarf
rolled himself off his chair and came swinging up towards him. He stayed close
to M. Fontenot’s knee, his eyes gleaming malevolently out of the shadows of his
hood.

‘You have seen
what David can do with a machete,’ said M. Fontenot blandly.

Charlie said
nothing, but stared back at the dwarf with equal enmity.

‘As I say,’ said
M. Fontenot, ‘You came here voluntarily. During the course of the evening’s
proceedings, you suffered an unfortunate accident to your finger, and since I
have all the necessary medical facilities right here at
L’figlise des Anges
for the treatment of such a wound, I suggested
that you stay.
An offer, of course, which you readily
accepted.’

Charlie went
suddenly white. He could feel the blood draining from his face just like a
bucket being emptied. ‘I have to throw up,’ he told M. Fontenot. His stomach was
churning and twisting and his mouth was flooded with bile and bits of chewed-up
flesh.

Xavier took him
to the bathroom along the hall and he was violently and painfully sick. He used
his left hand to support himself as he leaned over the toilet and it left a
wide smear of blood on the white paint. Strings of meat dropped from his
stretched open mouth. He spent almost five minutes in there before the spasms
in his stomach began to subside.

M. Fontenot was
still waiting for him when he returned. ‘You will stay here in this house until
Friday. Then you will come with us to Acadia, to L’figlise des Pauvres. That
was the mother church in the early days when the Celestines were still
outlawed. It is there that we will be holding our Last Supper.’

Charlie lowered
his head. His eyes were watering and the taste in his mouth was greasy and
filthy and reeked of the aniseed flavour of fennel.

M. Fontenot
reached forward and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Monsieur, I advise you not to
try to escape from us,
nor
to make trouble.’

I
n the small hours of the night, when the pain became intolerable,
a nurse appeared in a white winged wimple like the ghost of an albatross flying
out of the darkness. Through half-closed eyes he saw the glint of a needle. Then
she had injected him; and it was only a few minutes before the pain ebbed away,
and dark waves of relaxation began to lift him buoyantly into the ocean of the
night.

He dreamed
about the strange high-ceilinged restaurant again, with the waiters who were
hooded like monks, just like he had at Mrs Kemp’s, and even though he was
asleep he was conscious that the dream had been curiously prophetic. He saw the
men in their starched shirt fronts and immaculate tail coats. He saw the
mysterious and alluring women, some veiled, some wearing masks made of bird’s
feathers, most of them naked. One woman was standing by the doorway, her thighs
and genitals tightly bound with thin leather straps, her large breasts
completely covered with tattoos. She turned and looked at Charlie, and her face
was the face of Mme Musette. In front of his eyes, she fell apart in great
lumps of human clay.

A monk-waiter
brought his meal, underneath a shiny dish cover.

‘Your dinner,
sir,’ he whispered, and lifted the cover. Charlie knew what he was going to see
there, and screamed.

He screamed,
but he was drugged with morphine, and he didn’t wake up. Instead, one dream
closed and another dream opened. He found himself driving along West Good Hope
Road in Milwaukee. It was snowing. Everything was white.

The snow
pattered against the windshield and the wipers had trouble coping with it. The
world crept around in silence.

He could see
her on the front steps of the single-storey house as he approached. Her husband
was with her. He knew what has happening even before he reached the end of
their block. He could see her husband’s arm rising and falling, rising and
falling, like a man trying to chop down a tree. He watched her fall to the
porch floor,
then
try to get up again.

And in his
dream, he was condemned to do what he had done in real life. He drove past
slowly because it was
snowing,
staring all the time at
the one woman he had really loved being beaten by her husband. And as she had
tried to struggle to her feet, she had turned, and looked towards him, and
recognized him through the partially misted window of his car, driving past
without stopping as if he were a helpless passenger on a passing train. And
their eyes had met and they had both known that was the very end of their love
affair, and then he had turned the corner and when he managed to back up the
car and turn and drive past the house again, they were gone. In his dream, he
stopped his car and got out and went up to the front door and beat at the
knocker, just as he had done in real life. In his dream, the knocker turned
into the wolf-knocker on Mrs Kemp’s front door, and he could feel its bristles
in the palm of his hand. Then the door was hurtled open and there stood Velma
from the Windsor Inn, her face hideously white, her eyes red-rimmed,
both
arms severed at the elbows and spraying blood like fire
hydrants.

He screamed
again, and this time he woke up. It was light.

There was a
woman in black sitting beside his bed. She pushed back the hood that covered
her face and he saw that it was Mme Musette. She was smiling at him.

‘I had a
nightmare,’ he croaked.

She nodded. She
took a glass of water from the small table beside his bed, and passed it to him
with a hand that was nothing more than a thumb and an index finger. He
hesitated, and then accepted it, and drank. When he returned the empty glass,
he looked down at his own hand. Sometime during the night it had been expertly
bandaged, and although it still ached, the most severe pain seemed to have
subsided.