Ritual (38 page)

‘Is that all
you know?’

‘I know a lot,
my friend,’ said Eric Broussard. ‘But it all depends on what you want to hear.’

‘I want to know
what they actually do, on the day of the second coming.’

Eric Broussard
said, ‘I don’t have any notion whatsoever. As I say, the Celestines used to
make my blood run cold. Once Nancy joined up with them, that
was
our marriage gone for good.

Even before she
went off to stay with them permanent, she seemed like she was possessed, you
know what I mean? She used to say the strangest things, and sometimes she used
to be sitting at the dinner table and deliberately bite her own arm, just lift
it up and bite at it, and there was blood going everywhere and me not
understanding a word of what she was trying to explain to me. “I seen God!” she
used to call out. “
I seen
God!” All you could say
about her was
,
she was a woman possessed.’

‘Did you ever
try taking her to a doctor?’ Robyn asked him.

‘Oh, surely, Itried.
But the doctor .s
. .
,vas
fine; just a little overwrought, that’s all. He
prescribed her some Valium tablets and charged me a hundred-ten dollars.’

Eric Broussard
eyed Robyn with bloodshot eyes. ‘Let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m
going to go upstairs and find my Nancy’s Celestine Bible. Then you can look up
anything you want to your heart’s contentment.’

Charlie said,
‘The Celestines have their own special Bible?’

‘Sure they do,
just like the Latter-Day Saints. They brought it round for me when they came to
tell me that Nancy was gone. I was tempted to drop it in the stove, but then I
thought that I might need it someday, just to prove to the world what Nancy had
to go through. Otherwise, who’d’ve believed me?’

‘We believe
you,’ said Robyn gently.

Eric Broussard
lifted his head. The muted sunlight caught a fingerprint on the lens of his
spectacles, setting it glowing like a tiny spiderweb. ‘Whatever I do to help
you,’ he said, ‘it ain’t never going to bring my Nancy back.’

Nonetheless, he
lifted himself out of his armchair and shuf- < fled off to look for the
Celestine Bible. Charlie sipped his beer, and said, ‘We need to find out when
they’re going to hold the ritual – whether they’re supposed to do it at any
special time of the day or night – and we also need to know what happens, so
that we don’t make fools of ourselves by bursting in to rescue Martin at the
wrong moment, before they’ve brought him out of his room, for instance.’ He
didn’t add, ‘or after they’ve eaten him’, but he didn’t have to. Robyn knew
that their chances of getting Martin away from the Celestines were
extraordinarily slim, especially since the police and the FBI and anybody with
any political or commercial influence seemed to support them, or at least to
turn a blind eye to what they were doing.

Eric Broussard
returned with a thin book about the size of the New Testament, bound in cheap
red leather with a white mitre embossed on the front. ‘Nancy said the red
leather was supposed to represent the blood, and the white hat was supposed to
be the body.’ He passed the book to Charlie, and Charlie opened it up, while
Robyn leaned closer so that she could read over his shoulder.

On the title
page, it said, ‘The Book of Celestine’, and underneath: ‘Being the holy words
of Saint Celestine V, Pietro di Murrone 1215-^6, concerning the communion of
the Last Supper.’

Charlie flicked
through the text. There were 120 pages of closely printed text. ‘Mr Broussard,’
he said, ‘it’s going to take us some time to read all this; and we do want to study
it really well. I’d truly appreciate it if you’d allow us to stay.’

Eric Broussard
slowly rubbed the back of his neck. Then he said. ‘All right, if that’s what
you want. But in return, you can go to Sidney’s Store for me out on the Normand
highway and fetch in some steaks and some groceries and maybe a couple of
bottles of liquor.’

‘Mr Broussard,
you’ve got yourself a deal.’

‘Not quite,’
said Eric Broussard. ‘You’ve got to stop calling me “Mr Broussard” and start
calling me “Eric” instead.
Either thator”Tabac-Sec”.’

Charlie reached
over and shook Eric Broussard’s hand. ‘Eric, I think we’re in business.’

They lifted
their beer glasses and drank a silent toast to an adventure that would probably
prove to be dangerous, painful, and frightening.

Eric Broussard
wiped his mouth with the back of his sun-wrinkled hand, and said, ‘You want a
double bed or two singles? I’ve got clean sheets for both of them. The double
bed creaks pretty bad, on account of all the weekending couples we used to have
here, but in times of stress I always say that it’s better to have somebody to
hold on to, don’t you?’

They ate a
supper of steaks and fried eggs and Bulgar wheat salad, with straight Jack
Daniel’s as an accompaniment, and then after supper Eric Broussard produced his
German accordion and sat on the kitchen chair and played slow, bluesy, but
inarguably Cajun melodies of love and dancing and crayfish, and many other
subjects close to the Cajun heart.

‘I play better out
of doors,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘There’s something about the
plein-air that makes the music resonate. I like to play out of doors wearing a
big wide hat to keep the sun off of my face and the rain off of my cigareet.
That’s why they call me “Tabac-Sec”.’

They thanked
him for his cooking and his music, and then they went upstairs and showered and
undressed and climbed into the big double bed which creaked as friendly and
amusing as anybody’s honeymoon bed in any honeymoon hotel. Charlie sat propped
up with pillows drinking the last of the whiskey and reading the Celestine
Bible. Robyn lay close to him and closed her eyes and rested. The north-west
wind blew across the bayou and whistled lightly through the cracks in the
window frame, a soft complainte of its own.

Most of the
Celestine text was rambling evangelism and complicated prophecies about ‘the
Lord who smiteth all those whose faces are set against His Glory; and all those
who worship artifice and deceit,’ and ‘in the Days of the Ethiopian whose
descendants shall number fifty times fifty millions, a drought shall descend
upon the lands of their forefathers and their suffering will be heard in all
corners of the world.’

It quickly
became clear, even under Charlie’s inexpert scrutiny, that the Celestine Bible
had certainly not been written by Saint Celestine himself, but possibly as much
as five hundred years later – even as late as 1775. There was a reference to
the ‘Lands that were given by deed to those who had been cast out of Acadie.’
If Charlie remembered an article he had read not too long ago in the Reader’s
Digest, those who had been cast out of Acadie could only mean those French
colonists in Nova Scotia who had been dispossessed by the British after the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. In those days, Nova Scotia had been called Port
Royal, or ‘L’Acadie’, meaning pastoral paradise on earth. The French had been
uprooted from their paradise and sent back to France, or to Guadeloupe; or even
as far as the Falklands; but they had been invited back to America in 1775 when
the French sold Louisiana to the Spanish. The new Spanish governor had been
worried that his small population would not be able to resist a takeover by the
British, so he had offered the one-time Acadians a free passage back across the
Atlantic and free land deeds so that they could settle in the south-west.

Charlie found
another more glaring anachronism. Although there was no direct mention of
cannibalism, there was an endless obsession in the text with human flesh and
blood and its relation to the words of the Last Supper. From what M. Musette
had told him at
Le Reposoir
, the
Celestines had only taken to eating real flesh and real blood after their
sojourn with the Caribs on the island of Sainte Desiree – and that had been
after the French Revolution in 1789.

So it was
conceivable that the Celestine Bible had been written in the early part of the
iSoos, or even later.

Robyn fell
asleep, and Charlie felt her breathing softly and deeply against his arm. Eric
Broussard had been right: it was good to have somebody to hold in times of
stress. He finished his whiskey, and went on reading, although he would have
given anything to be able to close his eyes. A little after one o’clock in the
morning, he came across the passage that he had been looking
for
.
The Return to Earth of Our Lord Jesus Christ as
Prophesied by the Angels.

The verses
read: ‘And the Day shall come when one thousand times one thousand shall have
taken communion with Christ our Lord, save only for twelve disciples, one disciple
from each parent church. And the twelve shall be brought to the appointed place
known as the place of the poor, in the company of elders and Guides, and there
they shall take communion with Christ our Lord in solemn memorial to the Last
Supper. And they shall take communion one upon the other, until there is but
one; and he shall be numbered one thousand times one thousand.

‘ Then
shall the elder of the Guides take communion with the
twelfth of these disciples, and he shall become the vessel in which those souls
now reside, one thousand times one thousand. And in so doing he shall become a
worthy vessel in his turn for the second coming on earth of Christ our Lord,
and he shall be transformed. And all of those who have kept the faith of the
true communion shall be rewarded on this earth as well as in the next.

‘For know you
by these secrets that the fifth day was the one on which he was vanquished, but
his day is the sixth day, and on that day you shall be given your just reward.’

Charlie read
the verses again and again. There was no doubt that they were referring to the
ceremony that was supposed to be taking place on Friday at L’Eglise des
Pauvres, the Church of the Poor. Twelve Devotees from twelve Celestine churches
would be brought down to Acadia as representatives of the twelve disciples –
only the Last Supper was going to be worked in reverse. Instead of the Master
giving them His body and His blood, they were going to give Him theirs, and the
process that had led up to the Crucifixion and the Ascension was going to
happen backwards. At least, that seemed to be the Celestine theory.

The last verse
puzzled Charlie a little, because it was the only verse that didn’t appear to
make explicit sense. It had the character of a riddle, but there was something
about it which sounded peculiarly like a warning as well, although Charlie
couldn’t quite analyse what it was.

Certainly there
was a mention of ‘secrets’. And the next phrase was odd – ‘the fifth day was
the day on which he was vanquished.’ Presumably this meant Good Friday – but no
Christian believed that Christ was vanquished on Good Friday – rather that he
finally triumphed over evil.

It was also
noticeable that in this one paragraph ‘he’ was spelled with a lowercase ‘h’.
And what did the writer mean by the sixth day being ‘his day’ – the day on
which you will be given your just reward?

Maybe it was
that term ‘just reward’ that Charlie found vaguely threatening. It seemed to
have the quality of ‘on Saturday, you’ll get what’s coming to you.’

When it came to
rewards, too, there was another line that bothered him: ‘And all of those who
have kept faith with the true communion shall be rewarded on this earth as well
as in the next.’

To be given a
material reward as well as a spiritual one seemed peculiarly at odds with
anything that Christ would have promised or a Christian would have expected.

At a quarter of
two, Charlie finally put down the Celestine Bible on the bedside table. He
switched off the light, and snuggled up close to Robyn. In fact, the bed dipped
so much in the middle he didn’t have any choice.

By two o’clock
he was asleep. He didn’t dream. But the north-west breeze stiffened during the
early hours of the morning, and rattled the window even more frantically, and
one by one it leafed over the pages of the open Bible, one whispering page
after another, until it came to rest at the page which said, ‘But the sixth day
is his day, and on that day you shall be given your just reward.’

While only two miles away, in the darkness, a car turned off the
Normand highway and began to make its way purposefully along the dirt track
that led to Eric Broussard’s house on the bayou.

C
harlie was awakened by a bony hand shaking his shoulder.
Involuntarily, he shouted in fright, and sat up so fast that he knocked heads
with Eric Broussard, who was leaning over him. Eric Broussard said, ‘Shit,
Charlie, that
hurt.’

‘What’s the
matter?’ Charlie asked him. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m not too
sure,’ said Eric, in the darkness, ‘but there’s a vehicle parked in the cypress
grove, about two hundred feet off to the east. I heard it coming. Your ears
acquire
a sensitivity
for things like that. But it
didn’t come right up to the house, like you’d expect. It parked in the trees
and now it’s just waiting.’

Charlie switched
on the light. Eric Broussard was wearing a wonderfully ancient pair of
red-flannel longjohns, and big, old, frayed carpet slippers. Eric said, ‘If
it’s the po-lice, I don’t want
no
shooting.’

Charlie climbed
out of bed. In doing so, he allowed Robyn to roll into the dip in the middle of
the mattress, and that woke her up. She blinked and stared at them and said,
‘What time is it?’

‘Five o’clock,’
Eric told her.

Charlie went to
the window and drew back the blind, but it was too dark outside for him to be able
to make out anything. All he could see was his own face, as pale as a ghost
floating in the night. ‘If it’s the police, or the FBI, it seems pretty weird
that they should park in the trees like that. They know I’m not armed.’