Reading: The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein - Book Eight: The Test

Sabbats likely

Book VIII of The Ceremonies begins on July Twenty-first. Klein gives the reader a bravura depiction of Gilead and environs, home of the Brethren of the Redeemer Christian sect, overrun by serpents. 

That evening horror literature scholar and summer renter Jeremy Friers asks his hosts, Sarr and Deborah Poroth (members of the Redeemer sect), about an upcoming community feast.

.....'If you're interested in the Feast of the Lamb,' said Deborah, 'you could join us at the Geisels'. That's where we'll be having it this year. Sister Corah's a wonderful cook, but I warn you, there'll be a lot of praying.'

     'I take it I'm invited.'

     'I don't see why not. Honey, can't Jeremy have the lamb with us at Matt and Corah's?'

     'He'll be welcome,' said Poroth. 'If he's still here.'

     Freirs flushed. 'I certainly hope I am.'

     'And why wouldn't he be?' said Deborah, busy taking out plates and saucers. 'Put away the paper, honey, it's time to eat.' She glanced at Freirs. 'Nobody's going to leave meals like this behind.'

     'How could I?' Freirs said, with a heartiness he didn't feel. Eyeing the food she was already laying on the table, the bright reds and greens of the salad, the cold pitcher of milk, the beans fresh from the garden, he wondered what the Poroths had been saying about him today.

     The subject of his leaving didn't come up again. But after dinner, as the two men stood on the back porch watching darkness settle over the land and listening to Deborah singing hymns as she worked in the kitchen, Sarr returned, if only indirectly, to an earlier subject.

     'You know,' he said with obvious deliberation, 'God answers to many different names, and He's worshiped in strange ways. But He's always the same God.'

     There was a pause; Freirs felt the other's eyes on him. 'That's true,' he said at last, wondering what the man was driving at. 'I'm sure it doesn't matter what you call Him.'

     'It doesn't,' said Poroth heatedly. 'The words may be different, but the spirit's always been the same. At Trenton the professors talked about "other systems of belief," and so did all those books in there' — he nodded toward the house, where his few remaining college texts stood gathering dust in the living room - 'and at first I was troubled, I don't mind telling you, at how many different forms God seemed to take. But in the end I found I was able to return to the fold with even more faith than I'd started with, because I came to see how, even when He had different names, He was the same God I knew.'

     'I once read a story,' Freirs began, 'about how the people in Tibet have nine billion names for Him . . . '

     'You don't even have to go that far away,' said Poroth. 'There was a little village down in Mexico that the Catholics were wonderfully proud of. The Indians in the area had all been converted, you see -they'd been Christians for at least a hundred years - and week after week every last one of 'em would show up in church to worship the Virgin Mary. And then one day the priest had the altar taken up, so as to make some repairs, and underneath it he discovered another altar, with an idol much older than his, a cruel-looking thing with a snake head and teeth.'

     'And that's what they'd really been worshiping all along?'

     Poroth nodded. 'But the point is, they were all just fooling themselves. The Catholics thought they were praying to one god and the Indians thought they were praying to another, but they were really praying to the same. It's as if below both the Virgin and the snake was still another god - the true one.'

     'The one with the capital G,' said Freirs. Privately he had drawn a different conclusion from the story: something about older, darker gods, and rites in which the blood wasn't just a symbol.

     'It's the same with the Feast of the Lamb,' Poroth was saying. 'Actually, it's got another celebration buried underneath, though folks around here wouldn't have heard of it.'

     'What kind of celebration?'

     Poroth shrugged. 'Pagan. Your standard harvest festival.' He held open the screen door. 'Come on, I'll show you.'

     Deborah was standing at the sink as they passed through the kitchen but didn't look up from her washing. A glowing lantern made the night beyond the windows look darker than it had from the porch. Sarr lit another and they went into the living room, where he stooped before his little cache of books in the corner, peering at the names on the spines.

     'Sometimes,' he said, 'the Christians took a pagan day and made it their own - like Easter, which, as I expect you've heard, was a planting festival long before Christ.' He pulled out a battered grey volume from the bottom shelf and began thumbing through it. 'Sometimes they changed the name a little, to disguise the origin. That's what we Brethren did with the Feast of the Lamb, which sounds so proper and Christian.'

     'It wasn't originally?'

     Poroth looked up from the book. 'No,' he said in a low voice. 'And I'm probably the only one who knows.'

     'What's that you're looking at? Some rival to the Bible?'

     The other laughed uneasily. 'No, just an almanac, something I haven't opened for years.' He squinted at the cover, but the name had long since worn away, and he turned instead to the tide page. 'Byfield's Newly Revised Agricultural Almanack and Celestial Guide for 1947,' he read. 'I found it at a church bazaar in Trenton for fifteen cents.' Looking down, he flipped through several more pages, then paused. 'Ah, here's what I've been searching for.' He handed the open book to Freirs, pointing to a line in the middle of what appeared to be a chart. 'See? Right there.'

     The book itself smelled faintly of mildew, its covers warped and faded. Freirs scanned the opened page. Festivals of the Ancients, it said at the top; below it lay a complicated-looking calendar. He found the indicated line. August 1, it said. Lammas.

     'It's got nought to do with lambs,' said Poroth. 'Nor does the night before.'

     Freirs checked the previous column. July 31, he read. Lammas Eve. 'Hmmm, sounds sinister!'

     'It can be. Black magic's always powerful on Lammas Eve. There'll probably be some odd doings somewhere in the world that night.'

     'Why's that?'

     Instead of answering, Poroth merely pointed back to the calendar in the book. There was something called Roodmas on May third, and Midsummer on the twenty-fourth of June, and the day Deborah had spoken of, St Swithin's, on the fifteenth of July. Several dates, he noticed now, were marked with tiny asterisks - dates like the first of May and the last day of October. So was Lammas Eve, the last day of July.

     He looked down at the bottom of the page. There beside an asterisk was the footnote, a simple one, just two words long:

     Sabbats likely.