The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(169)

‘You will now be silent!’ he suddenly said in a voice of such authority that we all stood up straight. He was wearing a long, white soutane sort of thing made of heavy silk; the only illumination came from the single candle he had placed on the altar: an ordinary white one, I noticed, and the right way up. Any mumbo-jumbo, it was evident, was not likely to embody the word ‘abracadabra’. The candle lit up only the text of the travesty of the Mass before him and a small but startling patch of the embroidery on the corporal.

He said, or seemed to say, a few sentences under his breath. I did not try to hear, I have troubles of my own. Then, in a high, clear voice, he began to patter out the Introit, with the canting, carneying kind of intonation that old-fashioned Irish priests used to use – and still do for all I know. I dare say Sam may have picked up some of the Latin nastinesses that started to creep into the Ritual but I’m sure they were all Greek to George. I, who had both copied and, later, typed out, the Ritual, was expecting these passages, but nevertheless, on Eric’s lips they seemed to sound nastier every minute. When he came to the part which, in Lord Dunromin’s MS, had been filled only with a rectangle of red ink containing the words Secrets Infames, his voice, startlingly, dropped quite two octaves and in a horrid, bass grunt he began rhythmically to intone a number of names beginning with Ashtaroth, Astarte, Baal, Chemoz – people like that. I am happy to say that I do not remember more than a few of them – and if I did I certainly should not write them down here: I am not a superstitious man but I do not believe in poking sleeping gods in the eye with a sharp stick. I’m sure you understand me.

We three others had all, I suppose, been prepared for a mixture of tedium and embarrassment but it was quite extraordinary how little Eric Tichborne exuded a sort of aura of command – extraordinary, too, how he changed in stature. When his voice returned to the canting, seminary-priest’s whine the inflections seemed to rise and fall in an almost inhuman way which I seemed to have heard before. On the previous night. Coming from my own tape-recorder. I did not like it a bit.

During the particularly tasteless mockery of the Kyrie Eleison his voice seemed to be shaking with an emotion which could have been suppressed laughter or, indeed, suppressed tears. Certainly not Pastis. But the strangest thing came afterwards, for his speech seemed to accelerate to a point where he was rattling off words at a speed which one would not have thought the human voice-box capable of. It went on accelerating until it had become the unnerving twitter of – yes – of a tape-recorder played at too fast a speed. This suddenly, inexplicably, broke off and we could hear the agonized rasp of his breathing. This, too, changed, as we watched and listened, and as he bowed and cramped into a spasm apparently asthmatic: wrenching coughs and retchings racked his little frame and, in between, he yelled out bits of Ezekiel: ‘ … young men riding upon horses … there were her breasts pressed … there she bruised the teats of her virginity … ’

George half-rose and looked at me with a question. I shook my head. This was not something to interfere with. Bit by bit the little broken priest re-assembled himself, leaned upon the altar and pursued the increasingly filthy Ritual but more and more as though the words hurt him physically. It was probably an illusion caused by the candle-flame, but it seemed to me that he was being buffeted about by something that could not have been a wind. I stole a glance at the others: George’s face was a mask of disapproval and disgust, his mouth not quite closed. Sam, to my astonishment, displayed a face crumpled up with compassion and, if I was not mistaken, traced with tears.

I don’t know what my own face looked like.

Up at the altar, only his hands clearly visible in the pool of candlelight, Fr Tichborne jerked and swayed as his voice grew ever shriller, more frantic. I did not ask the others, afterwards, what they saw but to my mind the light seemed to thicken. I became acutely conscious, all of a sudden, of being exactly above the grave-chamber of the dolmen. Through the soles of my feet I seemed to feel a grinding crepitation as though the great slabs of the roof underground were shifting against the slabs of the side-walls. I am very much grown up, mature and not in the least superstitious, but I don’t mind admitting that I wished, just then, that I were young enough to wish that my mother were there, if you take my meaning. Not that she would have helped, of course; she wasn’t that kind of mother.

Something was being burned on the altar now, something which gave off a thick, delicious smoke that muddled our thoughts. The rooster was produced and displayed and then certain beastly things happened to it which, in an ordinary time and place, I dare say we shout have prevented. The priest turned round to us, arms raised, his gown now kilted up above his navel to keep it clear of the blood-stains. George turned completely around, his face sunk in his hands. Sam did not move but I could hear him whimpering very quietly, piteously. I am, as I have often pointed out, a mature and sensible man; moreover I had personally copied out the Ritual and knew what was coming – I was a little surprised, therefore, to find that I had crossed the fingers of both my hands.

It cannot have been Eric’s voice which began to bellow Great Salute and Imprecation of S. Sécaire: so little a man could never have whooped and bayed in so disgusting a fashion, nor can I believe that the rocks beneath the chapel could have shifted and groaned so hideously as they seemed to. In that thick, stupefying atmosphere, amidst those atavistic animal noises, nothing was real and when Eric seemed to rise some eight inches from the floor my fuddled surprise was only that I had not seen that he was barefooted and had not known that his right foot was horribly deformed. He was stuttering out the list of things which S. Sécaire offers to those against whom he is invoked when I saw his face blacken. He fell towards us on his face. His face, when it struck the stone floor, made a sound which I have been trying to forget ever since. It was inches from my shoe. The silk robe was almost up to his armpits; his body was not good to look at. He went on making odd noises – how was I to know that he was dead?