Sacrament

by Clive Barker

  “That’s what the Domus Mundi shows you?”

  “Well, to be honest, I haven’t dared go very far inside. But yes, that’s what Rukenau says. And if we were together, we could go deep, deep inside. We could see the seed of the seed, I swear.”

  Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know whether to be excited or afraid,” he said. “If what you’re telling me’s true, then Rukenau has a way to God.”

  “I think he has,” Jacob said softly. He studied Thomas, who could no longer look at him. “I won’t press you for an answer now,” he said. “But I have to know yea or nay by noon tomorrow. I’ve already lingered here longer than I intended.”

  “I’ll have made up my mind by tomorrow.”

  “Don’t look so melancholy, Thom,” Jacob said. “I meant to inspire you.”

  “Maybe I’m not ready for the revelation.”

  “You’re ready,” Jacob said. “More than me, certainly. More than Rukenau, probably. He’s brought into being something he doesn’t understand, Thom. You could help him, I dare say. Well, we’ll say no more about it today. Just promise me you won’t get drunk and maudlin thinking about all of this. I fear for you when you get into those villainous moods of yours.”

  “I won’t,” Thomas replied. “I’ll be merry thinking of you and me and Rosa going naked all day.”

  “Good,” said Jacob, leaning over to touch Thomas’s unshaven cheek. “Tomorrow, you’ll wake up and wonder why you waited so long.”

  With that, he turned his back on Thomas and started to stride away. If this was the end of the memory, Will thought, it was hard to see why Jacob had been so troubled at the prospect of reliving it. But the past was not done with its unraveling yet.

  On the third stride, Will felt the world inhale again, and the sunlight suddenly dimmed. He looked up through the blossomed branches. In an instant, the perfect sky had been blinded by clouds and the wind brought rain against his face.

  “Thomas?” he said, and turning on his heel, looked back toward the place where the painter had been standing. He was nowhere to be seen.

  This is tomorrow, Will thought. He’s come for his answer.

  “Thomas?” Jacob called again. “Where are you?” There was dry dread in his voice and a churning in his bowels, as though he already knew something was amiss.

  The thicket ahead of him shook, and the red fox walked into view, redder today than he’d been the day before. He licked his chops as he went, his long gray tongue curling up around his snout. Then he slunk away.

  Jacob’s gaze didn’t follow him, but went instead to the clump of wild rose and hazel from which the animal had emerged.

  Oh Jesus, a voice murmured. Look away. You hear me?

  Will heard, but his eyes continued to scrutinize the thicket.

  There was something on the ground beyond the tangle; he couldn’t yet see what.

  Look away, damn you! Steep raged. Are you listening to me, boy?

  He means me, Will thought; the boy he’s talking to is me.

  Quickly! Steep said. There’s still time! His rage mellowed into a plea. There’s no need for us to see this, he said. Just let it go, boy. Let it go.

  Perhaps the pleading was a distraction intended to conceal an attempt to take control, because the next moment Will’s head was filled with a rushing sound, and the scene in front of him gasped, then flickered out.

  The next instant, he was back in the winter wood, his teeth chattering, the taste of salt blood in his mouth from a bitten lip.

  Jacob was still in front of him, his eyes streaming with tears.

  “Enough,” he said. But the distraction, whether intentional or no, only kept the memory at bay a moment. Then the world shook again, and Will was back in Jacob’s trembling body, standing in the rain.

  The last of Jacob’s resistance seemed to have melted away.

  Though the man’s gaze had flitted from the blossom during their brief departure, all Will had to do was call it back to the rose thicket and it dutifully went. There was one last, exhausted sound from the man that might have been a word of protest. If it was, Will failed to catch it and would not have acted upon the objection anyway. He was the master of this anatomy now: eyes, feet, and all that lay between. He could do what he wished with it, and right now, he didn’t want to run or eat or piss: He wanted to see. He commanded Steep’s feet to move, and they carried him forward, until he had sight of what the thicket had concealed.

  It was Thomas the painter, of course. Who else? He was lying face up in the wet grass, his sandals and his pants and his stained shirt strewn about him, his corpse become a palette arrayed with colors of its own. Where the painter had exposed his skin to the sun over the years—his face and neck, his arms and feet—he was tanned a ruddy sienna. Where he had been covered, which was to say every other place, he was a sickly white.

  Here and there, in the bony clefts of his chest and the groove of his abdomen, and at his armpits, he had gingery hair. But there were upon him colors far more shocking than these. A patch of vivid scarlet on his groin where the fox had dined on his penis and testicles. And pooling in the paint pots of his eyes the same bright hue, where birds had taken his tender sight. And along the flank of his body a flap of livid fat exposed by the teeth or beak of a creature wanting to partake of his liver. It was a more radiant yellow than a buttercup.

  Happy now? Jacob murmured.

  Whether this question was meant for his occupant or the corpse before them, Will did not dare inquire. He’d dragged Jacob to revisit this appalling vision against the man’s wishes, and now he felt shame at what he’d done. Sickened too. Not at the sight of the body. That didn’t bother him particularly; it was no more horrible than the meat hanging up in a butcher’s window. What made him want to look away was the thought that this thing before him was probably the way Nathaniel had looked, give or take a wound. Will had always imagined Nathaniel somehow perfected in death; his injuries erased by kindly hands, so that his mother could remember him immaculate. Now he knew differently. Nathaniel had been thrown through a shoe store window. There was no concealing wounds so deep. No wonder Eleanor had wept for months and locked herself away; no wonder she’d taken to eating pills instead of bread and eggs. He hadn’t understood how terrible it must have been for her, sitting beside Nathaniel’s bed, while he slipped away. But he understood now. And understanding, he blushed with shame at his cruelty.

  He’d had enough. It was time to do as Steep had wanted all along, and look away. But now the shoe was on the other foot, and Steep knew it.

  Do you want to take a closer look? Will heard him say, and the next moment Steep was going down on his haunches beside Thomas’s corpse, scrutinizing it wound by wound. It was Will who flinched now, his curiosity more than sated. But Jacob would not give him release. Look at him, Steep murmured, his gaze going to Thomas’s mutilated groin. That fox made a meal of him, eh? There was a phony jocularity in Steep’s tone. He felt this as deeply as Will; perhaps more so. Serves him right. He should have got some pleasure from his prick while he still had it to wave around. Poor, pathetic Thomas. Rosa tried to seduce him more than once but he could never get it up. I told him: If you don’t want Rosa, who has everything a man could want in a woman, then you can’t want a woman at all. You’re a sodomite, Thom. He said I was too simple.

  Steep leaned over and peered more closely at the wound.

  The fox’s needle teeth had done a neat job. If not for the blood and a few remnants of tissue, the man could have been born unsexed. “Well, you look like the simple one now, Thomas,” Steep said, taking his gaze from gelded groin to blinded head.

  There was another color here, which Will had not noticed until now. On the inner surfaces of the painter’s lips, and on his teeth and tongue, a bluish tinge.

  “You poisoned yourself, didn’t you?” Steep said. He leaned closer to Thomas’s face. “Why did you do a damn fool thing like that? Not because of Rukenau, surely. I would have protected you from him. Didn�
�t I promise?” He reached out and brushed the back of his fingers across the man’s cheek, the way he had as they parted the day before. “Didn’t I tell you you’d be safe with Rosa and me? Oh Lord, Thom. I would not have seen you suffer.” He leaned back from the body and, in a louder voice than he’d used hitherto, as though making a formal declaration, said,

  “Rukenau’s to blame. You gave him your genius; he paid you in lunacy. That makes him a thief, at very least. I won’t serve him after this. And I will never forgive him. He can stay in his wretched house forever, but he won’t have me for company. Nor Rosa neither.” He got to his feet. “Goodbye, Thom,” he said, more softly. “You would have liked the island.” Then he turned his back on the body, the way he’d turned his back on the living man the day before, and strode away.

  As he did so, the scene began to flicker out, the pattering rain, the roses and the body that lay under both, dimming in a heartbeat. But as they went, Will caught a glimpse of the fox, standing at the limit of the trees, gazing back at him. A shaft of sun had pierced the rain clouds and found the animal, stretching its lean flanks and keen head and flickering brush in gold. In the instant before his vision fled, Will met the beast’s unblinking stare. There was nothing contrite in its look, no shame that it had fed on pudenda today. I’m a beast, its stare seemed to say, don’t you dare judge me.

  Then they were both gone—the fox and the sun that blessed it—and Will was back in the dark copse above Burnt Yarley. In front of him stood Jacob, his hand still caught in Will’s grip.

  “Had enough?” Steep said.

  By way of reply, Will simply let go of the man’s hand. Yes, it was enough. More than enough. He looked all around him, to be certain nothing of what he’d witnessed had lingered, reassured by what he saw. The trees were once again leafless, the ground frosted, and the only corpses upon it two birds—one broken, one stabbed. In fact, he was by no means certain that this was even the same wood.

  “Did it . . . happen here?” he asked, looking back at Jacob.

  The man’s tearstained face was slack, his eyes glazed.

  It took a few moments for him to focus his attention upon the question. “No,” he said, finally. “Simeon lived in Oxfordshire that year—”

  “Who’s Simeon?”

  “Thomas Simeon, the man you just met.” Will tried the name for himself, “Thomas Simeon—”

  “It was the May of seventeen-thirty. He was twenty-three years old. He poisoned himself with his pigments, which he mixed himself. Arsenic and sky-blue.”

  “If it happened in some other place,” Will said, “why did you remember it?”

  “Because of you,” Jacob replied, softly. “You brought him to mind, in more ways than one.” He looked away from Will, out through the trees toward the valley. “I’d known him since he was about your age. He was like my own to me. Too gentle for this world of illusions. It made him mad, trying to find his way through this profligate Creation.” He glanced back at Will, his eyes as sharp as his blade. “God’s a coward and showoff, Will. You will come to understand this, as the years go by. He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are. But Thomas had it right. Even in his wretched state, he was wiser than God.” Jacob raised his hand palm up in front of his face, his little finger extended. The significance of the gesture was perfectly clear. All that was missing was the petal. “If the world were a simpler place, we would not be lost in it,” he said.

  “We wouldn’t be greedy for novelty. We wouldn’t always want something new, always something new! We’d live the way Thomas wanted to live, in awe of the mysteries of a petal.” Even as he spoke, Steep seemed to hear the yearning in his own voice, and turned it to ice. “You made a mistake, boy,” he said, his hand closing into a fist. “You drank where it wasn’t wise to drink. My memories are in your head now. So’s Thomas. And the fox. And the madness.”

  Will didn’t like the sound of this at all. “What madness?” he said.

  “You can’t see all that you’ve seen, you can’t know what we now both know, without something souring.” He put his thumb to the middle of his skull. “You’ve supped from here, wunderkind, and neither of us can ever be the same. Don’t look so frightened. You were brave enough to come with me this far—”

  “But only because you were with me—”

  “What makes you think we can ever be apart after this?”

  “You mean we can still go away together?”

  “No, that won’t be possible. I’ll have to keep you at a distance—a great distance—for both our sakes.”

  “But you just said—”

  “That we’d never be apart. Nor will we. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be at my side. There would be too much pain for both of us, and I don’t wish that for you any more than you wish it for me.”

  He was talking the way he would to an adult, Will knew, and it soothed a little of the disappointment. This talk of pain between them, of places where Jacob didn’t want to look this was the vocabulary one man would use talking to another. He would diminish himself in Jacob . . . eyes if he answered like a petulant child. And what was the use? Plainly, Jacob wasn’t going to change his mind.

  “So . . . where will you go now?” Will said, attempting to be casual.

  “I’ll go about my work”

  “And what’s that?” Will said. Jacob had spoken of his work several times, but he’d never been specific about it.

  “You already know more than’s best for either of us,” Jacob replied.

  “I can keep a secret.”

  “Then keep what you know,” Jacob said. “There,” he put his fist to his chest . . . “where only you can touch it.” Will made a fist of his numb fingers and echoed Jacob’s gesture. It earned him a wan smile.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. Now . . . go home.”

  Those were the words Will had hoped so hard not to hear.

  Hearing them now, he felt tears pricking his eyes. But he told himself he wasn’t to cry—not here, not now—and they receded.

  Perhaps Jacob saw the effort he’d made, because his face, which had been stern, softened.

  “Maybe we’ll find each other again, somewhere down the road.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “Now, go off home. Leave me to meditate on what I’ve lost.” He sighed. “First the book. Then Rosa. Now you.” He raised his voice a little. “I said go!”

  “You lost a book?” Will said. “Sherwood’s got it.” Will waited, daring to hope the information might give him a reprieve.

  Another hour in Jacob’s company, at least.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure!” Will said. “Don’t worry, I’ll go get it from him. I know where he lives. It’ll be easy.”

  “Now don’t be lying to me,” Jacob warned.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” Will said, offended at the accusation.

  “I swear.”

  Jacob nodded. “I believe you,” he said. “You would be of great service to me if you put the book back in my hand.” Will grinned. “That’s all I want to do. I want to be of service.”

  XII

  i

  There was no magic in the descent: no sense of anticipation, no strengthening hand laid on Will’s nape to help him negotiate the snow-slickened rocks. Jacob had done all the touching he intended to do. Will was left to fend for himself, which meant that he fell repeatedly. Twice he slithered several yards on his rump, bruising and scraping himself on buried boulders as he tried to bring his careening to a halt. It was a cold, painful, and humiliating journey. He longed for it to be over quickly.

  Halfway down the hill, however, his misery was made complete by the reappearance of Rosa McGee. She appeared out of the murk calling for Jacob, with sufficient alarm in her voice that Jacob told Will to wait while he spoke to her. Rosa was plainly agitated. Though Will could hear nothing of the exchange, he saw Jacob lay a reassuring hand on her, nodding and listening, the
n replying with his head close to hers. After perhaps a minute, he returned to Will and told him, “Rosa’s had a little trouble. We’re going to have to be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask questions,” Jacob replied, “just take my word for it. Now,” he pointed down the hill, “we have to hurry.” Will did as he was told and headed on down the slope. He cast one backward glance at Rosa and saw that she’d squatted down on a flat-topped rock, from which she seemed to be staring back toward the Courthouse. Had she been ousted, he wondered?

  Was that what all her distress was about? He would probably never know. More weary and dispirited by the stride, he continued his descent.

  There was, he saw, a good deal of activity in the streets of the village: several cars with their headlights blazing, people gathered in groups here and there. The doors of many of the houses stood open, and people were standing on the steps in their nightclothes, watching events.

  “What’s going on?” Will wondered aloud.

  “Nothing we need concern ourselves with,” Jacob replied.

  “They’re not looking for me, are they?”

  “No, they’re not,” Jacob said.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” Will said, the mystery of Rosa’s distress suddenly solved. “They’re after Rosa.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid they are,” Jacob replied. “She’s got herself in some trouble. But she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. Why don’t we just stop for a moment and examine our options?” Will duly stopped, and Jacob descended the slope a stride or two, until they stood just a couple of yards apart. It was the closest he’d been to Will since the wood. “Can you see where your friends live from here?”