Ritual (46 page)

‘In the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ, I bless this meal, which is to be eaten in the sure and certain
knowledge of the resurrection of our Saviour.’

‘Amen,’
chorused the Celestines. Charlie swallowed, because his mouth felt so dry.

‘Please, sit,’
M. Musette invited him. ‘You are about to eat the meal of your life.’

Charlie said,
‘Oh, no. Not a chance. I’m not going to eat that stuff.’

‘That would be
very impolite of you, as well as impious,’ said Mme Musette. She was dressed
almost like a nun, with a starched wimple. ‘This meal is the product of one
thousand times one thousand lives. It is the true reflection of the Last
Supper. How can you refuse to take part in the sacrament? And how can you let
down your son? This is your son’s day of glory!’

Charlie reached
across for the cut-glass water jug and poured himself a large glass of cold
water.

He drank it
without saying a word. He had promised himself during the night that he
wouldn’t allow the Musettes to provoke him. He had to think clearly and
logically and be prepared to act at a split-second’s notice.

‘Don’t worry,’
said M. Musette, laying his hand on top of his wife’s two fingers. ‘Mr McLean
is a connoisseur. Once he has tasted long pig for the first time, he will be
hooked for ever.’

‘Long pig?’
asked Charlie. ‘What’s that?’

‘Just my little
joke,’ said M. Musette. ‘Long pig is the euphemism the Caribs used for human
flesh. You see, the trouble with human flesh is that it tastes so very good.
Well cooked, it is rich and firm, and better than the very best beef. It is
illegal to eat it only because those who have tasted it always long for more.
It’s a fact, historically proven! Take that poor Australian convict who escaped
with his fellow prisoners from
MacQuarie
Harbour. He
ended up eating them, to stay alive; but once he had tasted human flesh, he
killed people deliberately so that he could get more. The Donner party who were
stranded in the Sierras ate the bodies of those who died, and one Mr Keseberg
was found boiling the liver and lungs of a young boy in a pot, even though he
had left whole legs of oxen untouched. The ox-meat, he said, was too dry
eating.’

Charlie glanced
from M. Musette to Mme Musette, and then quickly searched around to see if he
could see where Robyn was. At last he caught sight of her two tables away, and
she looked as sick and as tired and miserable as he did. M. Musette, undeterred
by Charlie’s inattention, continued to tell him about modern-day cannibalism.

‘Look at those
boys who were stranded in the Andes after that airplane crash! They ate their
friends, and they were haunted afterward by what they had done. But sometimes
in the darkness of the night the craving comes and the craving is like a drug!
It is irresistible! It is not only gastronomic, but erotic – and this is quite
apart from its powerful spiritual significance. Many primitive tribes used to
eat the brains and the hearts of their dead fathers and mothers in order that
they should inherit their intelligence and their strength. The Fore people of
Eastern New Guinea still do it today – only they tend to be less than
fastidious about hygiene, and they suffer quite frequently from a progressive
and fatal disease called kuru. No chances of contracting kuru today, I hasten
to add. All the meat will be fresh and clean!’

Charlie closed
his eyes. He prayed that when he opened them again he would be somewhere else,
and that his encounter with the Celestines would have proved to have been
nothing but a long and troublesome nightmare. But he could not block his ears,
either to the low burbling of conversation all around him, or to M. Musette’s
persistent monologue about the delights of human flesh. Eventually he opened
his eyes again to find Mme Musette smiling at him like a sister of mercy. If
only she were.

‘Come now,’
said M. Musette, bristling with enthusiasm, ‘now that I have said grace, you
may accompany me to the kitchens.’

Charlie said,
‘I’d rather stay here, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Charlie,’ M.
Musette insisted, in a low and threatening voice, ‘you may accompany me to the
kitchens.’

Charlie took a
deep breath,
then
pushed back his chair. ‘I’m warning
you now, if any harm comes to Martin or Miss Harris...’

M. Musette
linked arms with him. ‘What will you do? Strangle me with your bare hands?’

Charlie felt an
odd little chill. That was exactly what he had been thinking about doing, only
a few moments before. He began to wonder if there was something spiritual about
M. Musette – if all his years of eating human flesh had invested him with an
extra sense of psychic perception.

After all, if
so many tribes had believed in eating human flesh in order to acquire the
brains and the strength of the people they had devoured, maybe there was
something in it.

Or maybe M.
Musette and his followers were all deranged; and Charlie was becoming deranged
too.

M. Musette
said, ‘I heard this morning about M. Fontenot. They found his body in a bayou,
drowned. Accidental death, that’s what they said,’ He squeezed Charlie’s arm
uncomfortably tight. ‘He was one of my dearest friends, Fontenot. I just
thought you might like to know that.

His death is
very painful to me.’

Charlie said
nothing. If M. Musette was psychic enough to be able to work out that M.
Fontenot had died trying to chase after him, then there was nothing he could do
to conceal it. If he wasn’t, then Charlie certainly wasn’t going to admit it.

They approached
the kitchen doors. The windows were black, like tunnels going to nowhere at
all, tunnels that never ended. From inside the kitchen Charlie could hear the
clattering of knives and the dull ringing sound of saucepans, and something
else.
Grunts, and suffocated cries, and the spasmodic rasping
of saws.

‘I can’t go
in,’ he told M. Musette. His face felt as if it had no blood in it at all.

M. Musette
tugged at his arm, coaxing, threatening. ‘You must. This is what you came for.
This is what you came to see. This is what you have been pursuing so hotly,
both asleep and awake.’

Charlie
swallowed but his throat was utterly dry. ‘I can’t go in.’

‘You must.’

‘Is Martin
there yet? Is Martin in there?’

‘Not yet.’ ‘Martin
will come in when the feast is almost finished, and he will make the first
self-sacrifical cut right in front of us.’

‘What cut?’
asked
Charlie.

M. Musette
tugged at his arm again. ‘Come on, you have to see it for yourself.’

‘What damn
cut?’ Charlie persisted.

‘What cut do
you think? The cut that is holy without being fatal.
The cut
that transforms a man into a divine being.’

‘He’s going to
-?’

M. Musette
nodded.

Charlie could
have screamed, and hit out at him, and banged his head against the wall. He was
shuddering with suppressed hysteria. But all the time his logic was telling
him: This isn’t the way.

These are only
words. They haven’t hurt Martin yet, and until they do you’ve got to bide your
time, Charlie, otherwise you’ll blow this chance and you’II never get another.

‘Come on,’ M.
Musette encouraged him. Charlie swallowed again, and followed him through the
kitchen doors.

It took Charlie
a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. The kitchen was so crowded and
steamy, and there was so
much bustle
, that at first he
saw nothing but stainless steel and glistening scarlet flesh and two dozen men
and women wearing blue aprons and overalls. There was a strong smell of garlic
and grilling meat; and that distinctive aroma of herbs which the Celestines
always seemed to find to their taste. The noise was chaotic, too. Pans were
being clonked on to the ranges; knives were being sharpened on steels; people
were shouting and coaxing and calling and sobbing and crying out; and it could
have been the busy kitchen of any large international restaurant.

Except... as
Charlie stepped forward, pulled by M. Musette like a boat being pulled through
water, the true spectacle of what was happening was almost too grisly for the
human mind to comprehend.

At the first table,
a young naked girl with long brown hair was sitting up, supported by two
blue-shirted Guides, and she was sawing through her own arm at the elbow. Her
eyes were fixed and wild-looking. Her teeth were clenched on a hard rubber
wedge, to prevent her from biting her tongue. She had cut through the skin and
muscle of her upper forearm with a surgical scalpel, and now she was rasping
her way through the bones, radius and ulna, bone dust mushing white into her
bright leaking blood.

At the next
table, a one-armed boy of about twenty was grimacing in concentration as he cut
long deep slices of flesh from his calves and his thighs. One leg had already
been reduced to the bare bone, and the raw meat of his upper thigh was bound
around with a rubber tourniquet to prevent the boy from bleeding to death
before he had finished stripping the meat from his other leg. Blood ran along
the gutters around the table, and poured darkly down the drains.

One hideous
spectacle followed another, eleven of them, and M. Musette tugged Charlie past
all eleven. Velma was there, or what was left of Velma. She had sliced off both
her breasts, and then cut open her own stomach in an attempt to drag out her
liver and her kidneys. The assistants who had been helping her looked up as M. Musette
passed, and explained, ‘She died just a few minutes ago.’ Two of them were
carefully dipping their hands into the bloody tangle of her abdomen and cutting
out her stomach and her pancreas; a third was severing her head with a
stainless-steel hacksaw.

‘Of course, you
knew Velma,’ said M. Musette, but Charlie could only hear his voice as a
distant echo, like somebody shouting through a closed window.

Harriet was
there, too, the waitress from the Iron Kettle.

She was weeping
as she lifted her left bicep away from the bone with the point of a
broad-bladed carving knife. M. Musette approached her and laid his hand gently
on her naked back, and said.

‘Are you in
pain, Harriet?’ And she turned to him with tearful eyes and smiled.

‘Christ
suffered on the cross,’ she said, with the blade of the knife running right
through her upper arm from one side to the other, and blood running from her
elbow in an endless stream.

They came
across two more disciples who were already dead. Their bodies were being
quickly and expertly butchered. The dark red meat was being arranged on white
enamel trays, according to which cut it was, leg or arm or shoulder or rib.
Offal was being collected in white enamel buckets, great slimy maroon heaps of
human liver, and gristly crimson hearts.

Out of all of
this horror, one image cut itself with extra vividness into Charlie’s
consciousness: a young boy of nineteen, no more than that, who had already
amputated both of his legs below the knee, holding a razor-sharp butcher’s
knife underneath his scrotum, and staring at his genitals in fascination and
fear. For the first time since he had seen a Celestine Devotee, Charlie saw
indecision and uncertainty. Ecstasy was one thing: self-emasculation was
another. M. Musette must have seen the hesitation, too, because he stopped for
a while, and watched the boy with expressionless eyes.

‘Vincent?’ he
said at last.

The boy looked
up. Charlie saw a look of terrible desperation. So it was possible for the
influence of the Celestines to be broken. It remained to be seen, though,
whether the boy could stand up against the cold, withering personality of
Edouard Musette.

M. Musette
stepped forward and laid his hand on the stump of the boy’s left leg. ‘Vincent?
Is something troubling you? Today you will become part of our Lord Jesus
Christ.’

The boy opened
and closed his mouth, and then looked down at his genitals again. Charlie could
see his hand was trembling.

‘Vincent?’
whispered M. Musette.

Charlie turned away.
He heard the knife slicing through skin and veins and spongy flesh. He heard
the boy Vincent utter a noise that was almost inhuman. When Charlie turned
back, the boy’s assistants were already pressing a large bloody pad of gauze
between his thighs, and the boy was holding up something which looked like a
butchered bird.

‘Now,’ said M.
Musette, ‘let us see how our sacramental feast is being prepared.’

He guided
Charlie through to the kitchen range. There, a small sallow man with a white
apron and a black wilting moustache was grilling flesh over a gas barbecue. As
the slices were cooked, he was arranging them on white dinner-plates, three
thin slices on each, and garnishing them with zucchini and peeled tomatoes and
green beans. The plates were then being carried out to the waiting company.

‘This is
Fernest Ardoin, who directs the preparation of all our sacrifices,’ explained
M. Musette.

‘Fernest has
prepared meals of human flesh for private dinners all over America, and a few
in Europe, too. Some of the meals were for spiritual purposes. Others were
simply for the appreciation of long pig. All of the meals, of course, were
superb. Fernest is an artist, as well as a dedicated Celestine.’

Fernest nodded
his head to acknowledge this flattery. ‘We are almost finished preparing the
first course, M. Musette. The barbecue-grilled fillet of upper thigh, served
with a light tomato-and-garlic sauce.’

Next to him,
one of his younger assistants was cutting liver into wafer-thin slices, almost
transparent, to be lightly sauteed in butter and served with fresh rosemary.

The cooking
smelled so much like ordinary restaurant cooking, and it was so fastidiously
prepared, that Charlie found it almost impossible to associate the elegant
nouvclle cuisine on the plates with the grim self-inflicted butchery that was
going on behind him. Somehow he had always imagined cannibalism to be a matter
of gnawing at half-roasted human legbones, or cutting off human flesh in strips
and hanging it out to dry, like pemmican. This gastronomic expertise somehow
made the Celestine’s crime against nature ten times
more ugly
,
and ten times more sickening. They were indulging a forbidden appetite, that
was all, and they were taking the name of God in vain to do so.