Sacrament

by Clive Barker

  “Do you think I might have a vision, too?”

  “No,” Will said. “But you’d find the birds, if they haven’t been eaten by . . . foxes or whatever . . .” He caught a fearful look on the man’s face. He wouldn’t go up the hill to look for the birds, today or any time. For all his understanding looks and his gentle persuasions, he didn’t want to see the truth, much less know it. And why? Because he was afraid. Faraday was the same, and the constable. All of them afraid.

  The next day, the doctor pronounced that he was well enough to get up and move around the house. Seated in front of the television, he watched an update on the murders at Burnt Yarley, with the reporter standing in the street outside Donnelly’s butcher shop. Sightseers had come from all over the country, apparently, despite the inclement weather, to see the site of the atrocities.

  “This little hamlet,” the reporter said, “has had more visitors in its icy streets the last four days than in half a century of summers.”

  “And the sooner they go home again,” said Adele, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of vegetable soup and cheese and chutney sandwiches for Will, “the sooner we can all go back to normal.” She set the tray on Will’s lap, warning him that the soup was very hot. “It’s so morbid,” she said, as the reporter interviewed one of the visitors. “Coming to see a thing like this. Have people no decency?” With that, she retreated to her steak-and-kidney-pie making in the kitchen. Will kept watching, hoping there’d be some mention of him, but the live coverage from the village now ceased, and the newscaster returned to report on how the search for Jacob and Rosa had spread to Europe. There was evidence that two people fitting their description had been linked to crimes in Rotterdam and Milan within the last five years, the most recent report from northern France, where Rosa McGee had been involved in the deaths of three people, one of them an adolescent girl.

  Will knew it was shameful to feel the pleasure he did, hearing this catalogue of deeds. But he felt it nevertheless, and he’d learned from Jacob to speak his feelings truthfully, though in this case the only person he was telling was himself. And what was the truth? That even if Jacob and Rosa turned out to be the most bloodthirsty pair in history, he couldn’t regret having crossed their paths. They were his connection to something bigger than the life he’d been leading, and he would hold on to their memory like a gift.

  Of all the people who talk to him during this period of recuperation, it was, surprisingly, his mother who knew most intimately the way he was thinking. He had no verbal proof of this; she kept her exchanges with him brief and functional. But the expression in her eyes, which had been until now a vague fatigue, was now sharpened into wariness. She no longer looked through him as she’d been wont to do. She scrutinized him (several times he caught her doing so when she thought he wasn’t watching) with something strange in her eyes. He knew what it was. Faraday and Parsons were afraid of the mysteries he’d talked about. His mother was afraid of him.

  “It’s brought up all the bad memories, I’m afraid,” his father explained to him. “We were doing so well and now this.” He had called Will into his study to have this little talk. It was, of course, a monologue. “It’s all perfectly irrational, of course, but your mother has this very Mediterranean streak in her.” He had not looked at Will more than once so far, but gazed out of the window at the sleet, lost in his own ruminations. Like Lord Fox, Will thought, and smiled to himself. “But she feels as though somehow . . . oh, I don’t know, somehow death’s followed us here.” He had-been twirling a pencil in his fingers, but now he tossed it down on his well-ordered desk. “It’s such nonsense,” he snorted, “but she looks at you and—”

  “She blames me.”

  “No, no,” said Hugo. “Not blames. Connects. That’s it, you see. She makes these . . . connections.” He shook his head, mouth drawn down in disgruntlement. “She’ll snap out of it eventually,” he said. “But until then we just have to live with it. God knows.” Finally, he swung his leather writing chair around and looked at Will between the piles of papers. “In the meanwhile, please do your best not to get her stirred up.”

  “I don’t do—”

  “—anything. I know. And once this whole tragic nonsense is over and done with, she’ll be on the mend again. But right now she’s very sensitive.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Yes,” said Hugo. He returned his gaze to the gloom beyond the window. Assuming the conversation was over, Will rose.

  “We should really talk more about what happened to you,” Hugo said, his distracted tone suggesting that he felt no urgency to do so. Will waited. “When you’re well,” Hugo said. “We’ll talk then.”

  iii

  The conversation never happened. Will’s strength returned, the interviews ceased, the television crews moved on to some other corner of England, and the sightseers went soon after. By Christmas, Burnt Yarley belonged to itself again, and Will’s brief moment of notoriety was over. At school, there was the inevitable gauntlet of jokes and petty cruelties to run, but he felt curiously inured against them. And once it was plain that the name-calling and the whispers were not discomforting him, he was left alone.

  There was only one real source of pain: that Frannie kept her distance from him. She spoke to him only once in that period before Christmas, and it was a short conversation.

  “I’ve got a message for you,” she said. He asked from where, but she refused to name the source. When she told him the message, however, he didn’t need the name. Nor, in fact, did he need the information. He’d already had a visit from Lord Fox. He knew he was part of the madness, for as long as he lived.

  As for Sherwood, he didn’t come back to school at all until the third week of January, and when he did he was in a much subdued state. It was as if something had broken in him, the part that had turned his lack of mental grasp into a strange kind of attribute. He was pale and listless. When Will tried to talk to him, he clammed up, or started to get teary. Will quickly learned his lesson and left Sherwood to heal at his own speed. He was glad that the boy had Frannie to look after him. She protected Sherwood fiercely if anyone tried to pick on him. People soon got the message. They left brother and sister alone, just as they left Will.

  This slow aftermath was in its way as strange an experience as the events that had preceded it. Once all the hoopla died down (even the Yorkshire press had given up the story by early February, having nothing to report), life resumed its usual even pace, and it was as if nothing of any consequence had happened.

  Of course, there were occasional references made to it (mainly in the form of sick jokes passed around at school) and in a host of minor ways the village had changed (it no longer had a butcher, for one; and there were more people at church on Sundays), but the winter months, which were brutally cold that year, gave people time to either bury their sorrow or talk it through, all behind doors that were often blocked by drifts of snow. By the time the blizzards receded, folks were done with their grieving and were ready for a fresh start.

  On the twenty-sixth of February, there was a change in the weather so sudden that it had the quality of a sign. A strange balm came upon the air, and for the first night in ninety there was no frost. It wouldn’t last, the naysayers at the pub predicted: Any plant fool enough to show its nose would have it nipped off soon enough. But the next day was just as warm, and the day following, and the day following, and the day following that.

  Steadily, the sky began to clear, so that by the end of the first week of March, it was a gleaming swath of blue above the valley, busy with birds, and the naysayers were silenced.

  Spring had arrived, the gymnast season, all muscle and motion. Though Will had lived through eleven springs in the city, they were wan imitations of what he witnessed that month.

  More than witnessed, felt. His senses were brimming, the way they’d brimmed that first day outside the Courthouse, when he’d felt such union with the world. His spirits, which had been downcast for months,
finally looked up from his feet and flew.

  All was not lost. He had a head full of memories, and hidden among them were hints of how he had to proceed from here: Things he knew nobody else in the world would have been able to teach him, and that perhaps nobody else in the world would understand.

  Living and dying, we feed the fire.

  Suppose they were the last.

  Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.

  Clues to epiphanies, all of them.

  From now on, he would have to look for epiphanies on his own. Find his own moments when the world spun and he stood still, when it would be as though he was seeing through the eyes of God. And until that time, he would be the careful son Hugo had asked him to be. He’d say nothing to stir up his mother, nothing to remind her of how death had followed them. But his compliance would be a pretense. He did not belong to them, not remotely. They would be from this time temporary guardians, from whose side he would slip as soon as he was able to make his way in the world.

  iv

  On Easter Sunday, he did something he’d been putting off since the mellowing of the weather. He retraced the journey he’d taken with Jacob, from the Courthouse to the copse where he’d killed the birds. The Courthouse itself had the previous year inspired much morbid interest among sightseers and had as a consequence been fenced off, the wire hung with signs warning trespassers that they would be liable to prosecution. Will was tempted to scramble under the fence and take a look at the place, but the day was too fine to waste indoors, so he began to climb.

  There was a warm gusty wind blowing, herding white clouds, all innocent of rain, down the valley. On the slopes, the sheep were stupid with spring and watched him unalarmed, only darting off if he yelled at them. The climb itself was hard (he missed Jacob’s hand at his neck), but every time he paused to look around, the vista widened, the fells rolling away in every direction.

  He had remembered the wood with uncanny accuracy, as though—despite his sickness and fatigue—that night his sight had been preternaturally sharp. The trees were budding now, of course, every twig an arrow aiming high. And underfoot, blades of brilliant green where there’d been a frosted carpet.

  He went straight to the place where he’d killed the birds.

  There was no trace of them. Not so much as a bone. But simply standing on the same spot, such a wave of yearning and sorrow passed through him that it made him gasp for breath. He’d been so proud of what he’d done here. (Wasn’t that quick? Wasn’t that beautiful?) But now he felt a bit more ambiguous about it.

  Burning moths to keep the darkness at bay was one thing, but killing birds just because it felt good to do so? That didn’t feel so brave, not today, when the trees were budding and the sky was wide. Today it felt like a dirty memory, and he swore to himself there and then that he’d told the story for the last time. Once Faraday and Parsons had filed away their notes and forgotten them, it would be as though it had never happened.

  He went down on his haunches, to check one final time for evidence of the victims, but even as he did so he knew he’d invited trouble. He felt a tiny tremor in the air as a breath was drawn and looked up to see that the wood itself had not changed in any detail but one. There was a fox a short distance from him, watching him intently. He stood on all fours like any other fox, but there was something about the way he stared that made Will suspicious. He’d seen this defiant gaze before, from the dubious safety of his bed.

  “Go away!” he shouted. The fox just looked at him, unblinking and unmoved. “D’you hear me?” Will yelled at the top of his voice. “Shoo!” But what had worked like a charm on sheep didn’t work on foxes. Or at least not this fox.

  “Look,” Will said, “Coming to bother me in dreams is one thing, but you don’t belong here. This is the real world.” The fox shook its head, preserving the illusion of its artlessness. To any gaze but Will’s, it seemed to be dislodging a flea from its ear. But Will knew better: It was contradicting him.

  “Are you telling me I’m dreaming this as well?” he said.

  The animal didn’t bother to nod. It simply perused Will, amiably enough, while he worked the problem out for himself.

  And now, as he puzzled over this curious turn of events, he vaguely recalled something Lord Fox had mentioned in his rambling. What had he said? There’d been some talk of Russian dolls, but that wasn’t it. An anecdote about a debate with a dog; no, that wasn’t it either. There’d been something else his visitor had mentioned. Some message that had to be passed along. But what? What?

  The fox was plainly close to giving up on him. It was no longer staring in his direction, but sniffing the air in search of its next meal.

  “Wait a moment,” Will said. A minute ago, he’d been wanting to drive it away. Now he was afraid it would do as he’d wished and go about its business before he’d solved the puzzle of its presence.

  “Don’t leave yet,” he said to it. “I’ll remember. Just give me a chance—”

  Too late. He’d lost the animal’s attention. Off it trotted, its brush flicking back and forth.

  “Oh, come on,” Will said, rising to follow it. “I’m trying my best.”

  The trees were close together, and in his pursuit of the fox, their bark gouged him and their branches raked his face. He didn’t care. The faster he ran, the harder his heart pumped and the harder his heart pumped the clearer his memory became—

  “I’ll get it!” he yelled after the fox. “Wait for me, will you?” The message was there, on the tip of his tongue, but the fox was outpacing him, weaving between the trees with astonishing agility. And all at once, twin revelations. One, that this was not Lord Fox he was following, just a passing animal that was fleeing for its fleabitten life. And two, that the message was to wake, wake from dreams of foxes, Lords or no, into the world—

  He was running so fast now, the trees were a blur around him. And up ahead, where they thinned out, was not the hill but a growing brightness; not the past, but something more painful.

  He didn’t want to go there, but it was too late to slow his flight, much less halt it. The trees were a blur because they were no longer trees, they’d become the walls of a tunnel, down which he was hurtling, out of memory, out of childhood.

  Somebody was speaking at the far end of the tunnel. He couldn’t catch hold of precisely what was being said, but there were words of encouragement, he thought, as though he were a runner in a marathon, being coaxed to the finishing line.

  Before he reached it, however—before he was back in that place of wakefulness—he was determined to take one last look at the past. Ungluing his eyes from the brightness ahead, he glanced back over his shoulder, and for a few precious seconds glimpsed the world he was leaving. There was the wood, sparkling in the spring light—every bud a promise of green to come. And the fox! Lord, there it was, darting away about the business of the morning. He pressed his sight to look harder, knowing he had only moments left, and it went where he willed, back the way he’d come, to look down the hillside to the village.

  One last heroic glance, fixing the sight in all its myriad details.

  The river, sparkling; the Courthouse, moldering; the roofs of the village, rising in slated tiers; the bridge, the post office, the telephone box from which he’d called Frannie that night long ago, telling her he was running away.

  So he was. Running back into his life, where he would never see this sight again, so finely, so perfectly—They were calling him again, from the present. “Welcome back, Will . . .” somebody was saying to him softly.

  Wait, he wanted to tell them. Don’t welcome me yet. Give me just another second to dream this dream. The bells are ringing for the end of the Sunday service. I want to see the people. I want to see their faces, as they come out into the sun. I want to see—The voice again, a little more insistent. “Will. Open your eyes.”

  There was no time left. He’d reached the finishing line. The past was consumed by brightness. River, bridge, chur
ch, houses, hill, trees, and fox—gone, all gone, and the eyes that had witnessed them, weaker for the passage of years, but no less hungry, opened to see what he’d become.

  I

  i

  “It’s going to take time to get you up and moving normally again,” Dr. Koppelman explained to Will a few days after the awakening. “But you’re still reasonably young, reasonably resilient. And you were fit. All that puts you ahead of the game.”

  “Is that what it’s going to be?” Will said. He was sitting up in bed, drinking sweet tea.

  “A game? No, I’m afraid not. It’s going to be brutal some of the time.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Merely horrendous.”

  “Your bedside manner’s for shit, you know that?” Koppelman laughed. “You’ll love it.”

  “Says who?”

  “Adrianna. She told me you had a distinctly masochistic streak. Loved discomfort, she said. Only happy when you were up to your neck in swamp water.”

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  Koppelman threw Will a sly smile. “Nothing you wouldn’t be proud of,” he said. “She’s quite a lady.”

  “Lady?”

  “I’m afraid I’m an old-fashioned chauvinist. I haven’t called her with the news, by the way. I thought it’d be better coming from you.”

  “I suppose so,” Will said, without much enthusiasm.

  “You want to do it today?”

  “No, but leave me the number. I’ll get round to it.”

  “When you’re feeling a little better,” Koppelman looked a little embarrassed, “I wonder if you’d do me a favor? My wife’s sister Laura works in a bookstore. She’s a big fan of your pictures. When she heard I was looking after you, she practically threatened my life if I didn’t get you back to work, happy and healthy. If I brought in a book, would you sign it for her?”

  “It’d be my pleasure.”