Ritual

by Graham Masterton

  O Lord, save me from this predicament. O Lord preserve my son. Whatever you want of me, you can have it. Just don’t let Martin die.

  The moon vanished behind the pecans and soon the sky began to lighten. He had prayed that time would stand still, and that this morning would never come. But by seven o’clock the sky was firmly blue and the sun was shining across the whitewashed buildings. At seven-thirty, the man with the close-cropped hair brought Charlie a cup of black coffee and two wholemeal breadrolls, with jack cheese.

  ‘A happy day for you, huh?’ Charlie asked him, as he set the food down on top of the bedside locker.

  The man looked at him without expression, and left.

  Charlie drank his coffee but he couldn’t manage to swallow any bread. He went to the window again to see if there was any activity around Martin’s building, but it appeared to be deserted. He couldn’t even see Ben, who had been sitting outside guarding it for most of the night. Perhaps they had taken Martin to the main building already.

  At nine o’clock, the man with the close-cropped hair came back and said. ‘The rituals are about to begin. M. Musette wants you to come now.’

  Without a word, Charlie put on his jacket and buttoned it up. Then he followed the man outside. In spite of the sunshine, the morning was quite cold. His breath smoked in the damp air as he walked towards the main building. As they reached the doors, Charlie could hear singing. ‘O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come...’

  The man took hold of his elbow and guided him into the main room. Overnight, there had been a transformation. The walls of the room were now hung with yellow and gold banners, and the tables were set with plates and glasses and silver cutlery, and beautifully arranged centrepieces of flowers. Every table was crowded with Célèstine Guides, dressed in plain white-hooded robes – businessmen, bankers, musicians, television producers, fashion models, writers, salesmen, mechanics – men and women from a rainbow of backgrounds. Charlie recognized several famous media faces as he was ushered between the tables to the end of the room. He saw at least one well-known politician, and a singer whose records he had once bought, and right at the end of the table next to the kitchen doors, Sheriff Norman Podmore, his eyes squeezed tightly shut in prayer.

  Charlie was taken to the end of the centremost table, facing the white-draped altar. M. Musette was kneeling at the altar in prayer, flanked on one side by Mme Musette, and on the other side by one of the Guides from L’Église des Anges in New Orleans. Sunlight fell from the clerestory windows high above, and an electronic organ softly played an inspirational interlude before the next hymn.

  The man with the close-cropped hair said, ‘Wait there,’ and left Charlie standing a little way behind M. Musette. As Charlie stood there, his hands down by his sides, it occurred to him that he could jump on M. Musette and seize him around the throat and strangle him. But he probably wasn’t strong enough to do it – even if he did manage to fend off the bodyguards – and he wouldn’t have a chance at all of helping Martin if he screwed up. So he remained where he was, feeling tense and jittery, while M. Musette continued to pray, and the organ continued to pour out ‘Jesus Wants Me That I Know.’

  At last, M. Musette stood up, and came across to Charlie. It was uncanny, but he did almost look as if he were possessed of a great inner light. He was certainly happy, and at peace with himself. He took hold of Charlie’s arm and led him to the table. ‘The proud father,’ he said. ‘God bless this day, and God bless you.’

  ‘God bless you, too, you maniac,’ said Charlie. But M. Musette was quite beyond insults now. He stood at the head of the table, and beamed at Charlie on his left, and Mme Musette on his right, and the surrounding company of Célèstines.

  ‘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 Célèstines. 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 Célèstines 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 li
ttle 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-sacrificial 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’ll 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 Célèstines 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 Célèstine 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 Célèstines 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 Célèstine.’

  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 sautéed 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 nouvelle 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 Célèstine’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.

  M. Musette touched Charlie’s elbow, and said, ‘We must go back to the feast, my dear sir. They will be missing us, and we will be missing our appetizer. I hope you have found this to be instructive.’

  Charlie nodded numbly. ‘Instructive, yes. I think that’s all I can say.’

  He averted his eyes from the gory bodies of the eleven disciples as they left the kitchen. The young girl with the long hair had severed her forearm, and was holding it up in triumph. The doors swung shut behind them. M. Musette said, ‘Are you all right, Charlie?’ but Charlie pushed him away and said, ‘Don’t worry about me.’