Ritual

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You’d better give me your name,’ the man told him. Rain began to sprinkle the courtyard again, and whisper through the leaves.

  ‘Dan Fielding. I’m a chef.’

  The man suddenly looked interested. ‘A chef? Of what description?’

  ‘I used to work for the South Western Hotel chain, mainly in their prestige restaurants. I could cook anything.’

  ‘Did you ever cook... meat?’

  ‘Are you pulling my leg? I was taught high-grade butchery as well as cooking. I can cut and trim a prime beef carcass in less than twenty minutes. And when I cook it, let me tell you this, nobody holds a candle to Daniel DuBois Fielding, believe me.’

  The man said, ‘You’re not an Acadian.’

  Charlie managed a smile. ‘Of course not, I’m a Hoosier. Does it make any difference where I come from?’

  ‘Strictly, no,’ said the man. ‘Although we do have a church near Lafayette, Indiana.’

  ‘Really? I have cousins in Lafayette. I have cousins in Kokomo, too.’ Charlie was deliberately acting naïf. The man listened to him patiently and the rain began to patter down heavier, until there were droplets shining on his soft black hood.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come back here this evening? Maybe you’d like to talk to our chief Guide. Do you know about Guides? Did your friend from L’Église des Pauvres tell you anything about them?’

  ‘I know about Guides,’ Charlie said. He paused, and then added, ‘I know about Devotees, too.’

  ‘Well, you could be useful to us,’ the man told him. ‘Come back at nine. Where are you staying?’

  ‘With friends, on Philip Street. Have you heard of the Courvilles?’

  ‘There must be five thousand Courvilles in New Orleans. But you come back at nine. Come alone, mind, just like you are now.’

  ‘I understand. So long for now.’

  ‘Au revoir, monsieur.’

  Charlie walked out of Elegance Street not at all sure if he had deceived the black-hooded man into believing that he was a genuine recruit for the Célèstines or not. He had learned from his encounters with the Musettes that the Célèstines were remarkably open and unafraid. This was not only because what they were doing was technically legal, or at least not technically illegal – but because like those who dealt in narcotics and heavy duty pornography and extortion, they had many influential friends.

  He returned to the St Victoir Hotel to find that Robyn was still asleep. He was beginning to have swimmy sensations, like jet-lag, but he was too agitated to sleep. He sat by the window in an upright chair looking out over the misty courtyard and listening to the sounds of New Orleans. Robyn murmured something, and turned over, but still didn’t wake up.

  Charlie’s eyes began to close or maybe he was only dreaming that they were closing. His head nodded, and jerked. He could hear the rain trickling along the gutters. That piano was playing again, some high-stepping piece of music that sounded like Mussorgsky if Mussorgsky had ever written jazz. Some feeling made Charlie open his eyes again, a scarf of fear being laid gently over his shoulders. He looked down into the courtyard and he was sure that he glimpsed a small hooded figure disappearing amongst the palm fronds.

  He was suddenly awake. Involuntarily, he said, ‘Unnhh!’ out loud, and Robyn lifted her head off the bed and stared at him.

  ‘Charlie? What’s the matter?’

  ‘I was dozing. I frightened myself, that’s all. It was only a dream.’

  Robyn looked around the room with the glazed eyes of someone who has fallen deeply asleep in unfamiliar surroundings. ‘I’ve been dreaming, too. I thought we were still driving. All those cotton fields. All those girder bridges. I thought I saw you standing in a field by the side of the road, calling me. But when you turned round, it wasn’t you at all. It had a face like the Devil.’

  Charlie eased himself up from the chair and walked over to the bed. The light in the room was the colour of pewter. ‘It’s so dark,’ said Robyn. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘A little after twelve. It’s been raining most of the morning.’

  ‘Did you go out?’

  ‘I found the Church of the Angels on Elegance Street. It’s only three or four blocks from here. I’m supposed to be going back there at nine to meet the head honcho.’

  ‘You should have woken me.’

  Charlie sat down on the bed beside her and took hold of her hand. ‘You needed your sleep.’

  ‘And what about you? Aren’t you tired?’

  ‘In my job, fatigue is a way of life.’

  Robyn combed through her hair with her fingers to loosen the sleep tangles ‘Didn’t you ever think about doing anything else? I mean––you didn’t want to be a restaurant inspector when you were a little boy, did you?’

  Charlie smiled. ‘When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a zoo keeper.’

  ‘That’s a pretty smelly job, zoo keeping.’

  Charlie laughed. Then he stopped laughing, and sat there silently with a smile on his face thinking about wanting to be a zoo keeper. He could remember all of those model animals, the tigers and the monkeys and the elephant with the broken ear. Robyn touched his shoulder and looked closely into his eyes, and he thought, you can always tell whether you’re going to fall for somebody or not by their eyes. Love is retinal.

  He kissed Robyn’s forehead. It was still warm from sleeping. She closed her eyes and he kissed her lips. It was a long lingering kiss that was more romantic than passionate. Charlie hadn’t kissed a woman like that in years. Not since Milwaukee.

  In the midday twilight of a thunderstorm, Charlie unbuttoned Robyn’s checkered shirt and bared her breasts to the touch of his fingertips. They were soft and heavy, and they fell to each side of her chest in full, pale curves. Her areolas were the palest pink, and as wide as pink-frosted cookies. Charlie bent forward and kissed her nipples and they stiffened between his lips. Robyn whispered something that could have been words of love; or maybe the words of a song.

  He unfastened her jeans. That high-stepping piano music slowed down now, and Robyn’s breathing was as soft as the rain. Underneath her jeans she wore French lace panties, peach-coloured, transparent, so that the dark delta of her pubic hair showed through. Charlie slipped his hand into the leg of her panties and felt a thin slippery line of wetness that almost made him feel as if all his emotions were going to self-destruct.

  They made love for over an hour. He kissed her neck, kissed her shoulders and watched as the shining shaft of his erection slid in and out of that perfect dark delta. Feelings washed over him like bayou water, muddy, warm, and blinding, but always moving with a slow, strong current. Robyn sang that little song again, softly as a memory. At the very last she opened her thighs as wide as she could and he touched and tasted her, and then put his fingers to his lips and anointed her nipples so that they glistened for a moment like diamonds.

  Robyn showered, then they ventured out of the St Victoir to the Café du Monde on Decatur Street, where they indulged themselves in a late lunch of beignets dusted with powdered sugar and piping hot café au lait.

  Charlie could afford to relax, because he had done all that he could possibly do; and all that was left was to wait until nine o’clock. He didn’t forget about Martin. He couldn’t, because Martin was the reason he was here. But he allowed himself to walk hand in hand with Robyn through the French Quarter, around Jackson Square, where the twin Pontalba Buildings shone oddly orange in the afternoon light, and along Pirates Alley, where they stopped to look at paintings of nudes and bayous and old black men with wrinkled faces and straw hats, art for the tourist trade.

  They reached the end of Pirates Alley, and emerged into an unexpected slice of sunshine, when Charlie caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of something white and small, fluttering like a flag. He stepped back to see what it was, and trod on the foot of an old lady who had been walking close behind him.

  ‘You watch where you’re treading!’ she squawked, and lifted he
r stick as if she were going to strike out at him.

  Charlie said, ‘Please––I’m sorry. I thought I saw somebody I knew.’

  Robyn took hold of Charlie’s hand. ‘What is it?’ she asked him. She could see that he was upset.

  ‘I’m not sure. I glimpsed it before, in the courtyard at the back of the hotel. At least, I thought I glimpsed it. I thought I was dozing off that time, but maybe I wasn’t.’

  ‘What?’ asked Robyn. ‘What was it?’

  ‘The dwarf, the one who killed Mrs Kemp. The one who cut my leg.’

  ‘But nobody could have followed us here. Nobody knew where we were going.’

  Charlie shaded his eyes from the misty sunlight and tried to peer between the constantly changing patterns of passers-by. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s gone; if he was ever there.’

  ‘You’re over-tired, said Robyn. ‘You’ve started hallucinating.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  They walked back to the St Victoir. The fat woman like Jabba the Hutt beamed at them as they passed the reception desk.

  ‘Everything va bien?’ she asked them.

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re very comfortable.’

  ‘Les haricots sont pas salé,’ the woman sang, as they walked across to the elevator.

  Charlie was opening the decorative sliding elevator gate. He turned when he heard the women singing and said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘Just a song, monsieur.’

  ‘Charlie?’ Robyn frowned.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘Not only am I suffering from déjà vu, I’m suffering from déjà écouté.’

  Robyn kissed him as the elevator rose up to the fourth floor. ‘It’s all this Cajun French. It’s having an effect on your brain.’

  Charlie checked his watch. It was almost four o’clock. Robyn saw what he was doing and covered the face of his watch with her hand. ‘Don’t think about it,’ she said, with great gentleness. ‘Don’t think about it until you have to.’

  16

  The rain had cleared by nine o’clock but the streets were still steamy and wet, so that the lights of Bourbon Street glistened and gleamed on the sidewalks and on the rooftops of passing cars and brightly in the eyes of those who had come to listen to jazz, or those who had come to eat at Begue’s or Mike Anderson’s, or those who had come simply to gawp, or to score.

  Against his will, Robyn had made Charlie sleep for two hours during the afternoon, and then join her downstairs in the St Victoir’s restaurant for a meal of blackened redfish and rice, with ice-cold beer. There were two musicians playing under the single large palm that dominated the St Victoir’s old-fashioned dining rooms: a toothless old black man of about eighty playing a fiddle and a pale, pimply boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen sitting on a stool and playing a piano accordion. They played several Cajun complaintes, with the boy singing in a high, weird voice. Then they played ‘Les Haricots Sont Pas Salé’ which was the song that had given Zydeco music its name – les haricots repeated over and over until it was slurred. Charlie had the feeling that he had woken up in the wrong century, on the wrong continent.

  He had checked his watch at a quarter to nine, and given Robyn a tight, anxious smile. ‘Time I was going,’ he told her. She had reached across the table and taken hold of his hand and said, ‘Take care. Just remember that whatever happens, you’ve got somebody to come back to.’

  They walked together to the corner of Royal Street. Then Charlie kissed her and made his way along the crowded sidewalks to Elegance Street. The little courtyard was lit by a single 1920s lamp standard, and from the main street it was impossible to see the gates of the Church of the Angels. Charlie hesitated for a moment, listening to the noise of traffic and laughter and music, and then walked through the shadows until he reached the gates. He pulled the bell and waited. He wore only a lightweight grey tweed jacket, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of pale grey slacks, but he still felt sweaty and hot. He heard a clock strike nine; he heard a jet scratch the sky. They were like his last reminders of the real world.

  The man with the black hood and the hair like Japanese rice noodles appeared so suddenly and so close to the gate that he made Charlie jump. ‘You are very punctual, Mr Fielding,’ he remarked. ‘You’d better come on in.’

  Charlie thought: This is it. This is the moment of decision. I can back out now if I want to. But then he thought of Martin. He thought not only of the Martin he had come to know in the past few days, before the Célèstines got hold of him, but the Martin he had known on his rare visits back home, when he was small. Suddenly, a dozen images of Martin that he had long forgotten came crowding back to him, and by the time the man in the black hood had shot back the bolts and unlocked the locks, he was ready to go, carried on a floodtide of emotional memories.

  The man made a noisy performance of relocking all the locks and rebolting all the bolts. Then he said to Charlie, ‘Come this way,’ and led him across a courtyard that was so dark that Charlie could see where he was going only by the faint gleam of wetness on the paving stones. Soon, however, they reached the back of a large old house, which Charlie guessed must have fronted on to Royal Street, although where and how he couldn’t quite work out. It was three storeys high, with black-painted cast-iron balconies, and black shuttered windows from which no light penetrated whatsoever. The man in the black hood led Charlie up a flight of stone steps to the front door.

  ‘This house has quite a history,’ he remarked, as he produced a key and turned it in the lock. ‘It was originally built by Micaela Almonester de Pontalba, who also built the Pontalba buildings on Jackson Square. It was said that she had a secret admirer, and this was the house she built for their romantic trysts.’

  ‘Interesting location for a church,’ said Charlie.

  The hooded man said nothing, but admitted Charlie to the hallway. Charlie was immediately struck by the smell, which reminded him strongly of Le Reposoir. It was a curious blend of herbs, and cooking, and dead flowers, and something else besides which was unidentifiable but slightly unsettling. The smell not of death but of pain.

  The hallway was decorated with a mustard-coloured dado and wallpaper that looked as if it had been chosen from the Sears catalogue of 1908. A chandelier of black cast iron had a dozen bulbs but gave out very little light. There was a heavy bow-fronted bureau, with a black bronze statue of Pope Célèstine on it, lifting his hand in benediction. The man in the black hood led Charlie up to a pair of double doors, and said, ‘You are about to meet the chief Guide and his council of Guides. The chief Guide here is Neil Fontenot. Some of the council you may recognize. But the etiquette among the Célèstines is for members not to acknowledge each other’s existence outside of the church. Your friend probably told you that.’

  Charlie gave him a quick-dissolving smile.

  ‘Very well, then,’ said the man, and opened up the doors.

  Inside, there was a large plain room in which a dozen middle-aged men sat at a long mahogany dining table. The dining table had been polished so deeply for so many years that the men sitting on the opposite side of it were reflected upside down from the waist, so that they looked like kings and knaves on playing cards. The men were dressed in long black robes, with hoods cast back. As Charlie and his escort entered, they were all looking attentively towards the far end of the room, where a tall man with a cadaverous face was reading the Bible from a lectern.

  In a rich, resonant voice, he was reading the Parable of the Dinner, in which a man invited his friends to eat with him, only to be met with repeated excuses and refusals. ‘And the master said to his slave, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame. Compel them to come in, that my house be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.”’

  The chief Guide raised his head, and said, ‘What do we learn from that? That Jesus belie
ved in our divine mission. That Jesus taught us to fulfill our hunger. And what is our hunger? The real hunger, to which most men dare not confess. The hunger for the body; the hunger for blood. The hunger for the only food of which man is worthy. Were we ever supposed to eat pigs? The Jews say no! Were we ever supposed to eat cattle? The Hindus say no! My friends, when you read the New Testament today and consider the words of Jesus, you know in your hearts that there is only one true way.

  ‘For what did he say at the Last Supper? He said, “this is My body, given for you; do this for a commemoration of Me,” and he said, “This cup is the new testament in My blood.”’

  At last, the chief Guide turned to Charlie. He smiled, and came over, extending a long-fingered right hand. ‘My friend. Welcome to the Church of the Angels. Xavier told me that you were coming.’

  ‘I feel like I’m interrupting,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Interrupting? Of course not! We are always pleased to greet new members. I understand from what Xavier told me that you used to have a friend who was a Célèstine?’

  Charlie gave an equivocal shrug. ‘I never really knew what they were. All I know is, Michael was happy. Well––we called him Michael. I think his real name was Michel.’

  M. Fontenot draped his arm around Charlie’s shoulders, and led him down to the head of the table. There was a large mole on M. Fontenot’s right cheek, and his nose was peppered with blackheads. He said affably, ‘Your friend Michael was a Devotee, was he?’

  Charlie said, ‘That’s right, a Devotee.’

  ‘And are you fully aware what happened to him?’

  Charlie glanced around. ‘Can I say it here?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ smiled M. Fontenot. ‘Openly.’ He looked around at the other Guides assembled at his table and beamed in the way that a father beams at other fathers when his son has said something cute.

  Charlie said, ‘The fact is, Michel told me everything that he was going to do. He said he was going to eat his own body, as much as he could, and that was the way to find Jesus.’

  ‘And now you want to find Jesus in the same way?’ M. Fontenot asked. The Guides at the table broke out into spontaneous but ragged applause.