Ritual (33 page)

‘Where am I?’
Charlie asked. He looked around the plain whitewashed room. There was a high
window
through which he could see the branches of a large
live oak, and a crucifix carved out of ebony was hanging on the wall, but apart
from that the room was completely bare. Charlie was naked, but he was covered
by a single white sheet.

Mme Musette
said, ‘You’re upstairs, at
L’figlise des
Anges
. We have a nurse here. She’s been taking care of you.’

‘My finger,’
said Charlie.

‘A brave
sacrifice,’ said Mme Musette. ‘You won’t miss it.’ j

‘Is my son all
right?’ Charlie wanted to know.

‘Martin?
Of course.
Martin is very well.’

‘He hasn’t-?’

Mme Musette
shook her head. ‘He hasn’t yet begun the act of self-ingestion, if that’s what
you mean. He’s being saved, you see, for the great Last Supper.’

‘I don’t
understand you people at all,’ Charlie snarled at her.

‘We know that.
That is why I am here. The Last Supper is to be held on Friday at L’Eglise des
Pauvres in Acadia. We want you to be there, to participate in our ceremonies.
When you were trying to gain access to
Le
Reposoir
, you talked to my husband of Saul on the road to Damascus. Well,
we want you to play that part for real. We want you to be our Saul. We want
you, our persecutor, to be our ultimate convert.’

Charlie said,
‘You’re going to try to convert me to cannibalism? That’s the worst joke I’ve
heard all year.’

‘We’re going to
show you the truth and beauty in what we do,’ Mme Musette replied.

Charlie
fiercely held up his bandaged hand.
‘Truth and beauty?
Does that look like truth and beauty? That looks to me like deliberate
mutilation of God’s own creation.’

Mme Musette
smiled again. It unnerved Charlie, the way that Celestines kept on smiling,
regardless of how insulting he was to them. It made him realize that they
believed without question that their grisly re-enactment of the Last Supper had
been ordained by Christ. They really believed it.

Mme Musette
said, ‘Do you remember the quotation from Paul’s letter to the Romans that M.
Fontenot read to you yesterday evening? “Nothing is unclean in itself; but to
him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean”. When we come to
our Last Supper, when a thousand thousand have devoured themselves and been
devoured, then you will see the divine truth of what the church of the
Celestines has been doing. Do you remember what the angels said to the
Apostles? “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in
just the same way as you have watched Him go.’“

Charlie stared intently
into Mme Musette’s eyes for a moment, and then said, ‘I want you to let my son
go. Do you understand that? If you want to keep me, well, we can talk about
that. But you have to let Martin go.’

‘I’m sorry,’
said Mme Musette, ‘but that would be quite impossible. He has already been
blessed.

He has already
been numbered. He – by great good fortune – is the thousandth thousandth
Devotee. When he is devoured, my husband will become the fleshly temple of a
million souls, the embodiment of a million self-sacrificial communions. My
husband will become at last a worthy vessel on earth for the return of Christ
the Saviour. On Friday, Mr McLean, you will witness the event for which the
world has been waiting for almost two thousand years, the second coming of the
Son of God, as it was foretold in the Acts of the Apostles.’

‘For Christ’s
sake,’ Charlie protested.

‘Exactly,’
replied Mme Musette, her beatific smile unwavering.
‘For
Christ’s sake.
He gave His body and blood in order that the human race
might survive. In return, a million human 240

\par souls have
willingly given their body and blood in order that He might return.’

‘And this is
why the government and the police and the press have left you alone?
Because they believe it, too?’

Mme Musette
nodded. ‘The turning point came ten years ago when the then President’s son
became a Devotee. The President tried, as you have tried, to talk his son out
of self-ingestion.

But at last the
President himself was persuaded. Not to join the Celestines himself, but to leave
us unharassed by the law as we approached our ultimate Last I Supper. As he
said himself, Jesus Christ may come to us, or He may not, but if there is even
the remotest chance that the second coming takes place on American soil, then
that chance must be nurtured. To us Celestines, of course, the joy will be
purely spiritual. But the Administration
were
not so
blind that they could not see the political advantages of the Son of God
choosing the United States for his triumphal return. America would become the
Holy Land, even above Israel.’

‘I don’t
believe what I’m hearing.’ said Charlie.
i
‘How can
you not believe it? You have seen for yourself the people of Alien’s Corners,
Mr Haxalt and Sheriff Podmore and all the others. If the Celestines did not
have government approval, would we be able to recruit so openly, would we
be
able to discuss our religion with such freedom? The
government of the United States believes that Christ will come again, Mr
McLean. Why don’t you?’

Charlie lowered
his eyes. He looked down at his left hand, and stiffly opened and closed his
fingers. ‘If Christ returns to earth because you kill my son, then let me tell
you this: He’s I not the kind of saviour that I want to know about.’ ‘Now
you’re being petulant,’ said Mme Musette.

‘Petulant!
You’ve kidnapped my son, you’ve forced me to cut off and eat my own finger, and
you have the gall to call me petulant!’

Charlie tugged
away the sheet, and swung his legs off the bed. Mme Musette made no attempt to
stop him.

‘Where are my
clothes?’ Charlie demanded.

‘Burned, I
expect. That’s what they usually do.’

‘Then get me
something to wear!’

‘I will if you
wish,’ said Mme Musette. ‘But before you attempt to escape, perhaps you ought
to remember that there is nothing at all you can do to stop us. Apart from
having government approval, we have friends and supporters in all of the
law-enforcement agencies. Besides which, it would be very unwise of you to go
to the police or the FBI. There is a Federal warrant out for your arrest, on a
charge of homicide in the first degree.’

‘What the hell
do you mean?’ Charlie sat down on the side of the bed, and pulled the sheet
over to cover himself.

‘The
Connecticut police want you in connection with the murder of Mrs Kemp. She was
discovered hacked to death by a machete, and the fingerprints on the machete
were yours.’

Charlie said,
‘What have you done to me?
And why?

Mme Musette
laid her one fingered hand on Charlie’s knee, making him recoil. ‘We have done
nothing, Mr McLean. Everything that happened to you has been a consequence of
your own actions. If you had simply accepted that your son has chosen a
different path from yours, then you would have been free to continue your life
unharmed and unmolested. We are a religious order; not terrorists.’

She stood up,
and drew her cloak tightly around her. ‘I shall be back. We have much more to
talk about. By Friday, I want you to believe.’

‘You can want
what you
like,
you won’t get it from me.’

‘Mr McLean,’
said Mme Musette. ‘I want you to believe not for my sake but for yours. You are
a man whose existence has no meaning. You stumble through life as if you are
wearing a blindfold.

You allow
yourself nothing: no purpose; no love. Even when you attempt to indulge
yourself, as you did with
Velma,
it brings you nothing
but difficulty and pain. Think about it, Mr McLean, I am talking about having a
goal. I am talking about bringing back the Saviour Jesus Christ in order to
save the entire world. Your son is already part of that. In fact, your son is
the ultimate part of that.

You could be
part of it, too.’

Charlie said,
‘I think you’d better get out of here.’

‘Very well,’
said Mme Musette. To Charlie’s complete surprise, she leaned forward and kissed
his forehead. ‘I shall come later, some time this afternoon, when you have rested
some more.’

She left, and
closed the door behind her. Charlie didn’t hear a key turn in the lock, but
when he went across and tried the handle, he found that he couldn’t open the
door even by wrestling with it. He went back to the bed and sat down.

So – the
Celestines had sewn him up. He couldn’t go to the police for help, nor to the
media – and that was supposing he was able to escape, stark naked, in the
middle of New Orleans. On Friday the Celestines were going to sacrifice Martin
in the deranged belief that his death would bring about the second coming of
Christ, and there was nothing at all that he could do about it.

He lay back on
his pillow and cursed himself for handling the Celestines so clumsily. Their
friends in the FBI and local police forces must have been tracking him and
Robyn all the way from Waterbury to New Orleans; and the Musettes must have
flown to New Orleans yesterday.

Some private
investigator he turned out to be.

About a
half-hour later, the nurse in the wimple came in and re-dressed his wound for
him. She gave him another pain-killing injection and took his pulse, watching
him all the time with eyes as blue as water.

‘Do you really
work for these freaks?’ Charlie asked her, but she didn’t answer. She packed up
her black leather medical case and straightened his sheet and left him lying
alone in his plain whitewashed room with only the nagging ache in his missing
finger for company.

Charlie began
to think about Mme Musette. Did it really show that badly, that he was living a
life without purpose? There had never been very much purpose to begin with, but
he had lost it for ever when he had driven past her house that day when her
husband was beating her. Why hadn’t he stopped? Why hadn’t he jumped out of the
car and run across the snowy sidewalk and beaten up her husband and claimed her
for his own?

Maybe he had
realized that, for her, he was just a dream, and that she never would have been
happy leaving her husband. He beat her, but she belonged to him. She had told
Charlie about the beatings, but she had never complained about them. Charlie
had always been so tender towards her, bringing her flowers, treating her like
a princess. Maybe that wasn’t what cocktail waitresses wanted out of life.
Maybe tenderness without pain had no meaning.

He could see
her in his mind’s eye as clearly as if he had only just turned away from her.
Her name was Dolores. He had met her in the bar of what had then been called
the Sheraton Schroder, in Milwaukee. He had been drunk and she had been
desperate to hide the bruises on her cheek. They had fallen genuinely in love.
It had been one of those sad stories, played on an off-key piano.
‘ When
I fall in love... it will be for ever... or Fll never
fall in love...”

Dolores would
haunt him for ever more. He would see her face the day he died, watching him in
desperation as he drove past her.

He slept for a
while. The drugs made him feel incredibly dopey. When he woke up, there was a
tray on his bedside table, with cold chicken and salad and a glass of mineral water.
The sky outside the small, high window was intensely blue, as if somebody had
spilled ink across a drawing pad. The live oak shone gold. He drank the mineral
water but he couldn’t face the thought of eating. His throat was still sore
from yesterday’s vomiting. And chicken! How could he possibly eat anything that
had once been alive?

Later, when the
sky was beginning to pale, Mme Musette reappeared, wrapped in her cloak like a
Bedouin, with only her eyes showing. She sat in her chair beside his bed, and
said nothing at all for five or ten minutes; simply watching
him,
and waiting to see what he would do.

‘You’ve been
thinking,’ she said at last.

‘Of course I’ve
been thinking. There’s nothing else to do.’

‘No – I mean
thinking seriously. Thinking about
yourself
.’

‘What if I
have?’ Charlie challenged her.

Mme Musette
allowed her eyes to register amusement. ‘It’s good for you, to think about
yourself. Perhaps you’re beginning to understand that you need some purpose in
your life. You can’t spend the rest of your life aimlessly wandering from one
restaurant to another, until MARIA decides that you’re past your prime. Because
what will you do then? Will you kill yourself? Or will you simply allow
yourself to fall to pieces, little by little, piece by piece, until there is
nothing left of you but unfulfilled longings and curled up credit card slips?’

Charlie said,
‘You’d better go. You’re not going to convert me. You’re wasting your time.’

Mme Musette
stood up. She drew back her black cloak. Underneath it, she wore a severe black
dress, and black stiletto shoes. ‘I promise you, Charlie, you will kneel down
in front of me, before this week is finished. You will kneel down in front of
me and kiss my feet and profess your love for Jesus, the resurrected Saviour, and
for Saint Celestine, and you will tell me that you adore me.’

‘I don’t think
so,’ said Charlie.

Mme Musette
came closer. Charlie could smell her perfume, which was rich and exotic; but he
could also smell her womanly body. There was a hint of that honey-and-bleach
odour about her, as if she had very recently had sexual intercourse. She kissed
his forehead, even though he turned away, and said, ‘You are such a fool. The
whole world is lying in front of you, stretched out at your feet. It could be
yours.’