by Clive Barker
“A bit.”
“You go up and do it, then. Your mom and Sherwood’ll take care of the dishes.”
Grateful to be away from the table, Frannie took herself upstairs, fully intending to prepare for the history test that was looming, but the book before her was as incomprehensible as Jacob’s journal, and a good deal less intriguing. At last she gave up on the life of Anne Boleyn, and guiltily pulled the journal out of its hiding place to puzzle over it afresh. She had scarcely opened it, however, when she heard the telephone ring and her mother, having talked for a few moments, called her to the landing. She slid the journal out of sight beneath her study books and went to the top of the stairs.
“It’s Will’s father on the phone,” her mother said.
“What does he want?” Frannie said, knowing full well.
“Will’s disappeared,” her mother said. “Do you know where he might have gone?”
Frannie gave herself a few moments to think it over. While she did so she heard the gale bringing snow against the landing window, and thought of Will out there somewhere, in the freezing cold. She knew exactly where he’d go, of course, but she’d made a promise to him, and she intended to keep it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He didn’t say where he was when he telephoned?” her mother asked.
“No,” she said, without hesitation.
This news was duly communicated to Will’s father, and Frannie took herself back to her bedroom. But she could no longer concentrate on study, legitimate or no. Her thoughts returned over and over to Will, who had made her a coconspirator in his escape plans. If any harm came to him she would be in some measure responsible, or at least she’d feel that way, which would amount to the same thing. The temptation to confess what little she knew, and be relieved of its weight, was almost overwhelming. But a promise was a promise. Will had made his decision: He wanted to be out in the world somewhere, far from here, and wasn’t there a part of her that envied him the ease of his going? She would never have that ease, she knew, as long as Sherwood was alive. When her parents were old or dead, he would need someone to watch over him, and—just as she had promised him—that someone would have to be her.
She went to the window and cleared a place on the fogged glass with the heel of her hand. Snow blazed through the glow from the streetlight, like flakes of white fire, driven by the wind that whined in the telephone wires and rattled around the eaves.
She’d heard her father say fully a, month before that the farmers at the Plow were warning that the winter would be cruel.
Tonight was the first proof of their prophecies. Not the cleverest time to run away, she thought, but the deed was done. Will was out there in the blizzard somewhere. He’d made his choice. She only hoped the consequences weren’t fatal.
ii
In his narrow bed in the narrow room beside Frannie’s, Sherwood lay wide awake. It wasn’t the storm that kept sleep from coming. It was pictures of Rosa McGee: Bright flickering pictures that made everything he’d ever seen in his head before look like black and white. Several times tonight it felt as if she was right there in the room with him, the memory of her was so overpowering. He could see her clearly, her titties shiny-wet with his spit. And though she’d scared him at the end, raising her skirts that way, it was that moment he replayed more often than any other, hoping each time to extend her motion by a few seconds, so that this time the dress would rise up to her belly button and he would get to see what she’d been wanting to show him. He had several impressions of what it was: a kind of lop-sided mouth, a patch of hair (perhaps greenish, like a little bush), a simple round hole. Whatever form it took, however, it was wet; of that he was certain, and sometimes he thought he saw drops of that wetness running down the insides of her thighs.
He could never tell anybody about these memories, of course. He wouldn’t be able to boast about what had happened with Rosa once he was back among his schoolmates, and he certainly wouldn’t talk about it in adult company. People already treated him as strange. When he went out shopping with his mom, they’d peer at him, pretending they weren’t, and talk about him in lowered voices. But he heard. They said he was odd; they said he was a little wrong in the head; they said he was a cross to bear and it was good his mom was a Christian woman. He heard it all. So these rememberings had to stay hidden away, where people couldn’t see them, or else there’d be more whispers, more shaken heads.
He didn’t mind. In fact he liked the idea of keeping Rosa locked up in his brain, where only he could go and look at her.
Perhaps he would find a way to talk to her, as time went by, persuade her to lift her skirts a little higher, a little higher, until he could see her secret place.
In the meantime he worked his belly and hips against the weight of the sheet and blankets, pressing his hand hard against his mouth as though his palms were her breasts and he was back licking them; and though he had cried himself dry in the last little while, all his tears were forgotten in the thrill of the memory, and the strange hotness in his groin.
Rosa, he murmured against his hand; Rosa, Rosa, Rosa . . .
VII
By the time Will opened his eyes the fire, which had been in its heyday when he arrived, was not in its embery dotage. But Jacob had laid his guest close to it, and there was still sufficient heat in its dwindling flame to drive the last of the chill from Will’s bones. He sat up, and realized he was wrapped in Jacob’s military coat and naked beneath.
“That was brave,” somebody on the other side of the fire said.
Will squinted to see the speaker better. It was Jacob, of course. He was lounging against the wall, staring through the flames at Will. He looked a little sick himself, Will thought, as though in sympathy with his own condition; but whereas Will’s illness had left him worn and weak, Steep glittered in his hurt: pale, gleaming skin, shiny curls pasted to the thick muscle of his neck. His coarse gray shirt was unbuttoned to his navel, his chest arrayed with a fan of dark hair that ran over the ridges of his belly to his belt. When he smiled, as he did now, his eyes and teeth glistened, as though made of the same implacable stuff.
“You’re sick, and yet you found your way through this blizzard. That shows courage.”
“I’m not sick,” Will insisted. “I mean . . . I was a little, but I feel fine now—”
“You look fine.”
“I am. I’m ready to go any time you want to.”
“Go where?”
“Wherever you want,” Will said. “I don’t care. I’m not afraid of the cold.”
“Oh this isn’t cold,” Jacob said. “Not like some winters we’ve endured, the bitch and me.” He glanced back toward the courtroom, and through the smoke Will thought he saw a contemptuous look cross Jacob’s face. A heartbeat later, his gaze came Will’s way once more, and there was a new intensity in it.
“I think maybe you were sent to me, Will, by some kind god or other, to be my companion. You see, I won’t be traveling with Mrs. McGee after tonight. We’ve decided to part company.”
“Have you . . . traveled with her for long?” Jacob leaned forward from his squatting position and picking up a stick, poked at the fire. There was still fuel concealed in the embers, and it caught as he raked them over. “More than I care to remember,” he said.
“So why are you stopping now?”
By the light of the spluttering flames (whatever had been cremated here, it had been fatty) Will saw Jacob grimace.
“Because I hate her,” he replied. “And she hates me. I would have killed her tonight, if I’d been quicker. And then we’d have had us a fire, wouldn’t we? We could have warmed half of Yorkshire.”
“Would you really have killed her?”
Jacob raised his left hand into the light. It was gummy with something that looked like blood, but mixed with flakes of silvery paint. “This is mine,” he said. “Shed because I failed to shed hers.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “Yes. I would have killed her. But I
would have regretted it, I think. She and I are intertwined in some fashion I’ve never understood. If I’d done harm to her—”
“You’d have hurt yourself?” Will ventured.
“You understand this?” he said, almost puzzled. Then, more quietly: “Lord, what have I found?”
“I had a brother,” Will replied, by way of explanation.
“When he died I was happy about it. Well, not happy. That sounds horrible—”
“If you were happy, say so,” Jacob replied.
“Well I was,” Will said. “I was glad he was dead. But since he died I’m different. It’s the same with you and Mrs. McGee in a way, isn’t it? If she’d died you’d be different. And maybe you wouldn’t be the way you wanted to be.”
“I don’t know either,” Jacob replied softly. “How old was your brother?”
“Fifteen and a half.”
“And you didn’t love him?” Will shook his head. “Well that’s plain enough,” Jacob said.
“Do you have any brothers?” Will asked him. Now it was Jacob who shook his head. “What about sisters?”
“None,” he said. “Or if I did, I don’t remember them, which is possible.”
“Having brothers and sisters and not remembering?”
“Having a childhood. Having parents. Being born.”
“I don’t remember being born,” Will said.
“Oh you do,” Jacob said. “Deep, deep inside,” he tapped his breastbone, “—there’s memory in there somewhere, if you knew how to find it.”
“Maybe it’s in you too,” Will said.
“I’ve looked,” Jacob said. “Looked as deep as I dare.
Sometimes I think I get a taste of it. A moment of epiphany, then it’s gone.”
“What’s an epiphany?” Will asked.
Jacob smiled, happy to be a teacher. “A little piece of bliss,” he said. “A moment when for no reason you seem to understand everything or know that it’s there for the understanding.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those.”
“You wouldn’t necessarily remember if you had. They’re hard to hold on to. When you do, it’s sometimes worse than forgetting them completely.”
“Why?”
“Because they taunt you. They remind you there’s something worth listening for, watching for.”
“So tell me one,” Will said. “Tell me an epiphany.” Jacob grinned. “There’s an order.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it if you did,” Jacob said.
“I did,” Will said, beginning to see a pattern in what Jacob asked of him. “I want you to tell me an epiphany.” Jacob poked the fire one last time, and then leaned back against the wall.
“Remember how I said I’d endured colder winters than this?”
Will nodded.
“There was one worse than any other. The winter of seventeen thirty-nine. Mrs. McGee and I were in Russia—”
“Seventeen thirty-nine?”
“No questions,” Jacob said. “Or you’ll have nothing more. It was the bitterest cold I’ve ever known. Birds froze in flight and fell out of the air like stones. People perished in their millions and lay in stacks unburied because the earth was too hard to be dug. You can’t imagine . . . well, perhaps you can.” He gave Will a curious little smile. “Can you see it in your mind’s eye?”
Will nodded. “So far,” he said.
“Good. Well now. I was in St. Petersburg, with Mrs. McGee in tow. She had not wanted to come, as I recall, but there was a learned doctor there by the name of Khrouslov who had theorized that this lethal cold was the beginning of an age of ice, that acre by acre, soul by soul, species by species, it would grasp the earth.” Jacob closed his stained hand into a fist as he spoke, until the knuckles blazed white. “Until there was nothing left alive.” Now he opened his hand, and lightly blew the silvery dust of dried blood off his palm into the dying fire. “Plainly, I needed to hear what the man had to say. Unfortunately by the time I arrived he was dead.”
“Of the cold?”
“Of the cold,” Jacob replied, indulging the question despite his edict. “I would have left the city there and then,” he went on, “but Mrs. McGee wanted to stay. The Empress Anna, having recently executed a number of well-loved men, had commanded an ice palace to be built as a distraction for her disgruntled subjects. Now if there’s one thing Mrs. McGee loves it’s artifice. Silk flowers, wax fruit, china cats. And this palace was to be the greatest piece of fakery ice and man could create. The architect was a fellow called Eropkin. I got to know him briefly. The empress had him executed as a traitor the following summer—it wasn’t the last winter of the world, you see, except for him. But for the months his palace stood, there on the river bank between the Admiralty and the Winter Palace, he was the most admired, the most lionized, the most adored man in St. Petersburg.”
“Why?” Will said.
“Because he’d made a masterpiece, Will. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen an ice palace? No. But you understand the principle. Blocks of ice were cut from the river, which was solid enough to march an army over, then carved, and assembled, just the way you’d build an ordinary palace.
“Except . . . Eropkin had genius in him that winter. It was as though his whole career had been leading up to this triumph.
He’d only let the masons use the finest, clearest ice, blue and white. He had ice trees carved for the gardens around the palaces, with ice birds in their branches and ice wolves lurking between. There were ice dolphins, flanking the front doors that seemed to be leaping from spumy waves, and dogs playing on the step. There was a bitch, I remember, lying casually at threshold, suckling her pups. And inside—”
“You could go inside?” Will said, astonished.
“Oh certainly. There was a ballroom, with chandeliers.
There was a receiving room with a vast fireplace and an ice fire burning in the grate. There was a bedroom, with a stupendous four-poster bed. And of course people came in there tens of thousands to see the place. It was better by night than by day I think, because at night they lit thousands of lanterns and bonfires around it, and the walls were translucent, so it was possible to see layer upon layer of the place—”
“Like you had X-ray eyes.”
“Exactly so.”
“Is that when you had your moment of . . . of—”
“Epiphany? No. That comes later.”
“So what happened to the palace?”
“What do you think?”
“It just melted.”
Jacob nodded. “I went back to St. Petersburg in the late spring, because I’d heard the papers of the learned Dr. Khrouslov had been discovered. They had, but his wife had burned them, mistaking them for love letters to his mistress. Anyway, it was by then early May and every trace of the palace had gone.
“And I went down to the Neva—to smoke a cigarette or take a piss, something inconsequential—and while I was looking down into the river something seized hold of my—I want to say my soul, if I have one—and I thought of all those wonders, the wolves and dolphins and spires and chandeliers and birds and trees, there, somehow waiting in the water. Being in the water already, if I just knew how to see them—” He wasn’t looking at Will any longer, but staring into what remained of the fire, his eyes huge. “Ready to spring into life. And I thought, if I throw myself in, and drown in the river, and dissolve in the river, then next year when the river freezes and the Empress Anna commands another palace to be built I’ll be in every part of it. Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.”
“But none of it’d be alive.”
Jacob smiled. “That was the glory of it, Will. Not to be alive. That was the perfection. I stood there on the riverbank and joy in me, oh, Will, the sheer . . . sheer . . . brimming bliss of it. I mean God could not have been happier at that moment. And that, to answer your question, was my Russian epiphany.” His voice trailed away, in deferen
ce to the memory, leaving only the soft popping of the dying fire. Will was content with the hush; he needed time to mull over all he’d just been told. Jacob’s story had put so many images into his head. Of carved ice birds sitting on carved ice perches, more alive than the frozen flocks that had dropped out of the sky. Of the people—Empress Anna’s complaining subjects—so astonished by the spires and the lights that they forgot the deaths of great men. And of the river the following spring, with Jacob sitting on its banks, staring into the rushing waters and seeing bliss.
If somebody had asked him what all this meant, he wouldn’t have had any answers. But he would not have cared. Jacob had filled up some empty place in him with these pictures and he was grateful for the gift.
At last, Jacob roused himself from his reverie and, giving the fire one last, desultory poke, said, “There’s something I need you to do for me.”
“Whatever you want.”
“How strong are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.”
“Can you stand?”
“Of course.” Will proceeded to do so, lifting the coat up with him. It was heavier and more cumbersome than he’s imagined, however, and as he rose it slipped off him. He didn’t bother to pick it up. There was scarcely any light for Jacob to see him naked by. And even if he did, hadn’t he taken Will’s clothes off, hours before, and laid him down beside the fire? They had no secrets, he and Jacob.
“I feel fine,” Will pronounced, as he shook the numbness from his legs.
“Here,” Jacob said. He pointed to Will’s clothes which had been laid out to dry on the far side of the fire. “Get dressed. We have a hard climb ahead of us.”
“What about Mrs. McGee?”
“She has no business with us tonight,” Jacob replied. “Or indeed, after our deeds on the hill, any night.”
“Why not?” said Will.
“Because I won’t need her for company, will I? I’ll have you.”