Sacrament

by Clive Barker

  “Frannie?”

  Her mother’s voice.

  “Will you come back in here?”

  Even now, though Steep was long gone, it was hard for Frannie to look away.

  “Now, Frannie!”

  At last, she reluctantly turned her gaze back toward the house. Her father had managed to half-carry, half-haul Will to the doorstep, where her mother stood hugging Sherwood.

  There would be hell to pay now, Frannie thought.

  Questions and more questions, and no chance of concealing anything. Not that it mattered after tonight. Will was back, his adventures over before they’d begun: She didn’t need to protect him with lies. All that remained was to tell the truth, however strange that was, and take the consequences. Heavy-hearted and empty-handed, she trudged back toward the threshold, where Sherwood was sobbing against their mother’s bosom, sobbing as though he’d never stop.

  XIV

  Three hours later, with the gloomy day dawned and a second blizzard moving in, Jacob and Rosa found each other on the Skipton road, a few miles north of the valley. They’d not made an explicit arrangement to meet, yet they came to the place (from different directions: Jacob from the valley itself, Rosa from her rock in the hills) within five minutes of each other, as though the rendezvous had been planned.

  Rosa was in a bit of a haze as to what she’d actually done to her pursuers, but it had turned into quite a chase, she knew.

  “One of them ran and ran,” she said. “And I was so mad when I caught up with him, I . . . I . . .” She stopped, frowning.

  “I knew it was terrible, because he was like a baby, you know? The way they get.” She laughed. “Men,” she said. “they’re all babies. Well, not all. Not you, Jacob.”

  A gust of snow-flecked wind carried the sound of sirens in their direction.

  “We should be on our way,” Jacob said, looking up the highway and down. “Which way do you want to go?”

  “Whichever you’re taking,” she replied.

  “You want to go together?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Jacob wiped his nose, which was running, with the back of his glove. “I suppose so,” he said. “Until they’ve given up looking for us, at least.”

  “Oh, let them come,” Rosa said, with a sour smile. “I’d like to tear out their throats, every one of them.”

  “You can’t kill them all,” Jacob said.

  Her smile sweetened. “Can’t we?” she said, for all the world like a child wheedling for some indulgence. It amused Jacob, despite himself. She always had some little performance to entertain him: Rosa the schoolgirl, Rosa the fishwife, Rosa the poetess. Now Rosa the slaughterer, so busy with her murders she couldn’t remember what she’d done to whom. If he wasn’t to travel alone, then who better to go with than this woman who knew him so well?

  It was not until the next day, reading The Daily Telegraph in a café in Aberdeen, that they got some sense of what Rosa had actually done, and even then the newspaper uncharacteristically chose discretion as to the details. Two of the four bodies found on the hill had been dismembered and some portions of one remained unaccounted for. Jacob didn’t inquire as to whether she had eaten them, buried them, or scattered them along her route of retreat for the delectation of local wildlife. He simply read the account, then passed it over to Rosa.

  “They’ve got good descriptions of us both,” he remarked.

  “From the kids,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I should go back and kill them,” Rosa drawled. Then, with a spurt of venom, “In their beds.”

  “We brought it on ourselves,” Jacob said. “It’s not the end of the world.” He grinned into his Guinness. “Or maybe it is.”

  “I vote we head south.”

  “I’ve no objection.”

  “Sicily.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  She shrugged. “Widows. Dust. I don’t know. It just struck me as a place to lie low, if that’s what you want to do.”

  “It won’t be for long,” Jacob said, setting down his empty glass.

  “You’ve got a feeling?”

  “I’ve got a feeling.”

  She laughed. “I love it when you have feelings,” she said, lightly cupping his hand in hers. “I know we’ve said some hard things to one another in the last little while—”

  “Rosa—”

  “No, no, hear me out. We’ve said some hard things and we meant them, let’s be honest, we meant them. But . . . I do love you.”

  “I know.”

  “I wonder if you know how much I love you?” she said, leaning a little closer to him. “Because I don’t.” He looked puzzled. “What I feel for you is so deep in me—it goes so far down into my soul, Jacob—into the very heart of who I am. There’s no seeing the end of it.” She was gazing deep in his eyes and he returning her gaze, unblinking. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “It’s true for me—”

  “Don’t say it if it’s not.”

  “I swear it’s true,” Jacob replied. “I don’t understand it any more than you do, but we belong together; I concede it.” He leaned a little further and kissed her unpainted lips. She tasted of gin; but beyond the alcohol was that other taste, the like of which no mouth but this, his Rosa’s mouth, had in it. If any man had told him at that moment she was less than perfection, he would have killed the bastard on the spot. She was a wonderment, when he saw her like this, with unclouded eyes. And he the luckiest man alive to be walking the earth with her. So what if it took another century to be done with this work? He had Rosa at his side, an ever-present sign of what lay at the end of his endeavor.

  He kissed her harder, and she replied with kisses of her own, deep, deep kisses, which inspired him to return them in kind, until they were so wrapped about each other that nobody in the place dared so much as glance their way, for fear of blushing.

  Later, they adjourned to a piece of waste ground adjacent to a railroad track. There, with dusk upon the isle, and another snow, they finished the lovemaking they’d left off in the Courthouse. There was no paucity of passion this time: They were so elaborately intertwined that a passenger in one of the many trains that flew by while they coupled, glimpsing them there in the dirt, might have thought they were seeing not two beings but one: a single nameless animal, squatting beside the tracks, waiting to cross to the other side.

  XV

  i

  Will knew he wasn’t awake. Though he was lying in his own bed in what appeared to be his own room—though he could hear his own mother’s voice from somewhere below—he was dreaming it all. The certain proof? His mother wasn’t speaking, she was singing, in French, her voice reedy but sweet. This was absurd.

  His mother hated the sound of her own singing voice. She’d mouthed the words when they’d sung hymns in church. And there was other evidence, more persuasive still. The light that came in through the cracks between the curtains was a color he’d never seen light before: a gilded mauve that made everything it fell upon vibrate, as though it were singing some song of its own, in the language of light. And where it failed to fall, there was a profound stillness, and shadows that had their own uncanny hue.

  “These are the strangest dreams,” somebody said. He sat up in bed. “Who’s there?”

  “Aren’t they, though? Dreams within dreams. They’re always the strangest.”

  Will studied the darkness at the foot of his bed from which this voice was emanating, squinting to get a clearer picture of the speaker. The man was wearing red, Will thought, a fur coat, perhaps? A peaked hat?

  “But I suppose it’s like those Russian dolls, isn’t it?” the man in the coat went on. “You know the ones I mean? They have a doll inside a doll inside—of course you know. A man of the world like you. You’ve seen so much. Me, I’ve seen a patch of moorland five miles square.” He halted for a moment to chew on something. “Excuse my noise,” he said, “But I am so damn hungry . . . What was I say
ing?”

  “Dolls.”

  “Oh yes. The dolls. You do understand the metaphor? These dreams are like the Russian dolls; they fit inside one another.” He paused to chew a little more. “But here’s the twist,” he said. “It works in either direction—”

  “Who are you?” Will said.

  “Don’t interrupt me. I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch, but imagine we’re in some parallel universe in which I’ve rewritten all the laws of physics—”

  “I want to see who I’m talking to,” Will insisted.

  “You’re not talking to anyone. You’re dreaming. I’ve rewritten all the laws of physics and every doll fits inside every other doll, doesn’t matter what size they are.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Who are you calling stupid?” the stranger replied and, in his anger, stepped out of the shadows.

  It wasn’t a man in a fur coat and a peaked cap: It was a fox.

  A dream of a fox, with a burnished coat and needle whiskers and black eyes that glittered like black stars in its elegantly snouted head. It stood easily on its hind legs, the pads of its forepaws slightly elongated, so they resembled stubby fingers.

  “So now you see me,” the fox said. Will could see only one reminder, in all its poised perfection, of the wild beast it had been: a spatter of blood on the patch of white fur at its chest.

  “Don’t worry,” the fox said, glancing down at the marks, “I’ve already fed. But then you remember Thomas.” Thomas—

  Dead in the grass, his genitals eaten off—

  “Now don’t be judgmental,” the fox chided. “We do what we have to do. If there’s a meal to be had, you have it. And you start with the tenderest parts. Oh, look at your face. Believe me, you’ll be putting a lot of pee pees in your mouth before you’re very much older.” Again, the laughter. “That’s the glory of the flow, you see? I’m talking to the boy, but the man’s listening.

  “It makes me wonder if you really and truly dreamed this, all those years ago. Isn’t that an interesting conundrum? Did you lie at the age of eleven and dream about me, coming to tell you about the man that you’d grow up to be, a man who’d one day be lying in a coma dreaming about you, lying in your bed, dreaming a fox,” he shrugged, “and so on. Following any of this?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just rumination. The kind of thing your father’d probably enjoy debating, except that he’d be debating with a fox and I don’t think that’d fit his vision of things at all. Well . . . it’s his loss.”

  The fox moved to the side of the bed, finding a spot where the light fell fetchingly on its coat. “I wonder at you,” it said, studying Will more closely. “You don’t look like a coward.”

  “I wasn’t,” Will protested. “I would have taken the book to him myself, but my legs—”

  “I’m not talking to the boy you were,” the fox said, looking hard at him. “I’m talking to the man you are.”

  “I’m not . . . a man,” Will protested softly. “Not yet.”

  “Oh now stop this. It’s wearisome. You know very well that you’re a grown man. You can’t hide in the past forever. It may seem comfortable for a while, but it’ll smother you sooner or later. It’s time you woke up, my dear fellow.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Christ, you are so stubborn!” the fox snapped, losing his air of civility. “I don’t know where you think all this nostalgia’s going to get you! It’s the future that matters.” He leaned close to Will’s head, until they were almost eyeball to eyeball. “Do you hear me in there?” he hollered. His breath was rank, and the stench of it reminded Will of what the creature had eaten; how well-pleased it had looked trotting away from Simeon’s corpse.

  Knowing this was all a dream didn’t make him feel any the less intimidated; if the fox came sniffing for what little Will had between his legs, he’d put up a fight, but the chances were he’d lose. Bleed to death, in his own bed, while the fox ate him alive—

  “Oh Lord,” the fox said, “I can see coercion’s going to get me nowhere.” He retreated from the bed a step or two, sniffed, and said, “May I tell you an anecdote? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It happened I met a dog, lying around where I go to hunt. I don’t usually consort with domesticated breeds, but we got to chatting, the way you do sometimes, and he said to me, Lord Fox—he called me Lord Fox—he said: Sometimes I think we made a terrible mistake, us dogs, trusting them. Meaning your species, my lad. I said, Why? You don’t have to scavenge like me. You don’t have to sleep in the rain. He said that’s not important in the grand scheme of things. Well, I laughed. I mean, since when did a dog ever think about the grand scheme of things? But give this mutt his due, he was a bit of a thinker.

  “We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn’t we? And why? I said I didn’t know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.

  “Flowers? I said. (There’s only so much pretension I can take from a dog.) Don’t be absurd. Meat, yes. Meat, you’d want them taking care of, but since when did a dog care for the smell of cherry blossom?

  “Well, he got very sniffy at that. This conversation’s over, he said, and pounced off.”

  The fox was by now back at the bottom of Will’s bed.

  “Get the message?” he asked Will.

  “Sort of.”

  “This is no time to be sleeping, Will. There’s a world out there needs help. Do it for the dogs if you must. But do it. You pass that along to the man in you. You tell him to wake up. And if you don’t,” Lord Fox leaned over the bedboard, and narrowed his glittering eyes, “I’ll come back and have your tender parts in the middle of the night. Understand me? I’ll come back sure as God put tits on trees.” His mouth opened a little wider. Will could smell the flesh on his breath. “Understand me?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to keep from looking at the beast.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “Will”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Will, you’re having a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up.” He opened his eyes. He was in his room, lying in his bed, except that Lord Fox had gone, along with that nameless light. In their place, a human presence. Close to the bed, Johnson, who had just shaken him out of sleep. And at the door, wearing a far less compassionate expression, his mother.

  “What on earth were you dreaming about?” Dr. Johnson wanted to know. Her palm was pressed against his brow. “Do you remember?” Will shook his head. “Well, you’ve got quite a fever, my lad. It’s no wonder you’re having strange dreams. But you’ll mend.” She pulled a prescription pad from her bag and scrawled on it. “He’ll need to stay in bed,” she said as she got up to leave. “Three days at least.”

  ii

  This time Will had no trouble obeying: He felt so weak he couldn’t have escaped the house even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. He had no reason to go anywhere now, not with Jacob gone.

  All he wanted to do was put a pillow over his head and shut out the world. And if he smothered himself in the process, so what?

  There was nothing left to live for, except pills, recriminations, and dreams of Lord Fox.

  If things looked grim when he woke, they looked worse a couple of hours later, when two policemen arrived to ask him questions.

  One was in uniform and sat in the corner of his bedroom, slurping from a mug of tea supplied by Adele. The other—a droopy man who smelled of stale sweat—sat on the edge of Will’s bed, introduced himself as Detective Faraday, and then proceeded to ply Will with questions.

  “I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, son. I don’t want lies and I don’t want fabrications. I want the truth, in plain words. This isn’t a game, son. Five men are dead.” This was news to Will. “You mean . . . they were killed?”

  “I mean they wer
e murdered, by the woman who was with this man who abducted you.” Will wanted to say: He didn’t abduct me; I went because I wanted to go. But he held his tongue, and let Faraday babble on. “I want you to tell me everything he said to you, everything he did, even if he told you to keep it a secret. Even if . . . even if some of the things he said or did are hard to talk about.” Faraday lowered his voice here, as though to reassure Will that this would be secret stuff, just between the two of them. Will wasn’t convinced for a moment, but he told Faraday he’d answer any questions he was asked.

  That’s what he did, for the next hour and a quarter, with both Faraday and the constable taking notes on what he was telling them. He knew some of what he recounted sounded strange, to say the least, and some of it, especially the part about burning the moths, made him seem cruel. But he told it all anyway, knowing in his heart nothing he told these dull men would ever allow them to find Jacob and Rosa. He had no information about where Steep and McGee lived or where they were going.

  All he knew for certain, all he cared about, was that he wasn’t with them.

  There was another interview two days later, this time from a man who wanted to talk to Will about some of the stories he’d told Faraday, especially the part about seeing Thomas, alive and dead. The interviewer’s name was Parsons, but he invited Will to please call him Tim, which Will pointedly refused to do, and he kept circling around the business of how Jacob had touched him. Will was as plain as he could be: He said that when they were climbing the hill and Jacob lay a hand on him, he felt strong. Later, he explained, in the copse, it had been him who’d done the touching.

  “And that’s when you felt like you were in Jacob’s skin, is that right?”

  “I knew it wasn’t real,” Will said. “I was having this dream, only I wasn’t asleep.”

  “A vision . . .” Parsons said, half to himself.

  Will liked the sound of it. “Yes,” he said, “it was a vision.” Parsons jotted something down. “You should go up there and look,” Will said to him.