Sacrament

by Clive Barker

  Given that fact, Will wanted to separate himself from Adele as soon as possible. Plainly Steep had little compunction about harming people who got between him and his quarry; Adele’s life would surely be forfeit if she was in his path. Luckily, she was already in her pragmatic mode—her tears all dried, at least for now, as she listed all the things she needed to do. There was the funeral director to contact, and a coffin to choose, and the vicar at St. Luke’s had to be told so that a service could be arranged. She and Hugo had found a nice plot, she told Will, near the west wall of the churchyard. Strange, Will thought, for a man who had scowled at any profession of religious belief, to eschew the clean ease of cremation in favor of burial among the God-fearing elders of the village. Perhaps Hugo had done it for Adele’s sake, but even that in its way was remarkable: that he would put his own feelings aside so as to accommodate her wishes. Especially this decision, this last. Perhaps he had felt more for her than Will had thought.

  “He made a will, I do know that,” Adele was saying. “It’s with a solicitor in Skipton. A Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Napier. That’s it. Napier. I suppose you should be the one to contact him, because you’re next of kin.” Will said he’d do that straight away. “First, some breakfast,” Adele said.

  “Why don’t you go down to your sister’s place for a few hours,” Will said. “You don’t want to be cooking food—”

  “That’s exactly what I do want to be doing,” she said firmly. “I’ve been happier in this house,” they were driving up to the gate as she spoke, “than any other place I’ve ever been. And this is where I want to be right now.”

  She was plainly not going to be moved on the subject, and Will remembered her stubbornness well enough to know that further pressure would only entrench her. Better to eat some breakfast and assess the situation when he’d filled his belly. He had a few hours of grace, he suspected, until Steep made another move. There was Rosa’s body for Jacob to deal with, for one thing, that was assuming she was dead. If she wasn’t, he’d presumably be tending to her. She’d sustained at the very least a grievous wound, delivered by a weapon that carried more than its share of fatal capacity. But she had outlived a human span by many decades (she’d been there on the banks of the Neva, two hundred and fifty years before), so she was clearly not as susceptible to death as an ordinary human being. Perhaps she was even now recovering.

  In short, he knew very little, and could predict even less. In such circumstances, eat. That was Adele’s recipe, and by God, it worked. Both their moods brightened as she cooked and served a breakfast fit for suicidal kings: bacon, sausage, eggs, kidneys, mushrooms, tomatoes, and fried bread.

  “What time did you get to sleep last night?” she asked him as they ate. He told her sometime after one-thirty. “You should lie down for a little while this afternoon,” she said. “Two hours is not enough for anyone.”

  “Maybe I’ll find a little time later,” he said to her, though he would have to balance out the requirements of fatigue and vigilance to do so.

  Fortified by food, tea, and a couple of cigarettes, he made the call to Napier the solicitor, for Adele’s peace of mind. Napier expressed his condolences, and confirmed that yes, all the necessary paperwork had been completed two years before, and unless Will intended to contest his father’s wishes, all of Hugo’s money, and of course the house, would go to Adele Bottrall. Will replied that he had no intention of contesting, and thanking Napier for his efficiency, went to pass the news along to Adele.

  He found her at the door of Hugo’s study.

  “I think maybe you should go through his papers rather than me,” she said. “Just in case there’s, oh, I don’t know, things from your mother. Private things.”

  “We don’t have to do it today, Adele,” Will said gently.

  “No, no, I know. But when the time comes, I’d be more comfortable if you did it.”

  He told her he would and reported on his conversation with Napier.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the house,” she fretted.

  “Don’t even think about it right now,” Will told her.

  “I’ve never been very good with legal things,” she said, her voice softer than he’d ever heard it. “I get confused when solicitors talk.”

  He took her hand. Her thin fingers were cold, but her skin was creamy soft, despite the years of washing and cleaning.

  “Adele,” he said. “Listen to me. Dad was very organized.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I liked that about him.”

  “So you needn’t worry—”

  Suddenly she said, “I loved him, you know.” The saying of it seemed to surprise her as much as it did Will; tears came, filling her eyes. “He made me . . . so happy.” Will put his arms around her, and she willingly took his comfort, sobbing against him. He didn’t insult her grief with platitudes; she had loved this man with all her heart, and now he’d gone, and she was alone.

  There were no words for that. What little comfort he could offer he offered with his arms, gently rocking her while she cried.

  He had seen mourning in a hundred species in his time.

  Made photographs of elephants at the bodies of their fallen kind, grief in every tiny motion of their mass; and monkeys, maddened by sorrow, shrieking like keening clansmen around their dead; a zebra, nosing at a foal brought down by wild dogs, head bowed by the weight of her loss. It was unkind, this life, for things that felt connection, because connections were always broken, sooner or later. Love might be pliant, but life was brittle. It cracked, it crumbled, while the earth went on about its business, and the sky on its way as though nothing had happened.

  At last, Adele drew herself away from him, and mopping up the tears with a much used handkerchief, sniffed and said:

  “Well, this isn’t going to get anything done, is it now?” She drew a sighing breath. “I’m sorry things were the way they were between you and Hugo. I know how he could be, believe me I do.

  But he could be so wonderful, when he didn’t feel as if he had to show off. He didn’t have to do that with me, you see. I doted on him and he knew it. And of course he liked to be doted on. I think most men do.” She sniffed hard, and for a moment it seemed tears were going to come again, but she got the better of them. “I’m going to call the vicar,” she said, tugging her mouth into a wan semblance of a smile. “We’ll have to think of some hymns.”

  When she’d gone, Will opened the study door and peered in.

  The curtains were partially drawn, a shaft of sunlight falling across the littered desk and onto the threadbare carpet. Will stepped into the room, breathing the scent of books and old cigarette smoke. This had been Hugo’s fortress: a room of great men and great thoughts, he’d been fond of saying. The shelves, which covered two full walls from floor to ceiling, were crammed with books. All the usual suspects: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kant. Will had peered into a couple of these volumes in his youth—a last forlorn attempt to find favor with Hugo—but the contents had been as incomprehensible to him as a page of mathematical equations. On the antique table to the left of the window, the second great collection this room boasted: a dozen or more bottles of malt whiskey, all of them rare, and all savored when the study door was closed and Hugo was alone. He pictured his father now, sitting in the battered leather chair behind his desk, sipping and thinking. Had the whiskey eased his understanding of the words, he wondered; had his mind slid through the forests of Kant more speedily when slickened by a single malt?

  He crossed to the desk, where a third collection was gathered: Hugo’s brass paperweights, seven or eight of them, set upon various piles of notes. If any private correspondence with Eleanor survived it would be here in one of the drawers. But he doubted its existence. Even assuming his parents had once been so in love as to exchange passionate billets-doux, he could not imagine Hugo preserving them after the separation.

  There was a sheaf of papers lying on the blotting pad in the middle of the desk.
Will picked them up and flipped through them. They seemed to be notes for a lecture, every other word contested, scribbled, and rewritten, portions of the text so densely annotated it was virtually indecipherable. Opening the curtain a little wider to shed a better light on the desk, he sat down in his father’s chair and studied the chaotic sheets, piecing the sense of the text together as best he could.

  We deal daily with the squalid facts of our animality, Hugo had written, putting (illegible) a process of self-censorship so engrained we can no longer see it at work. We do not examine the excrement in the bowl or the phlegm in the handkerchief for moral or ethical (he had first written spiritual in place of ethical, but struck it out) indicators. There followed a paragraph that he had excised completely, cross-hatching it in his fervor to erase it.

  When the text picked up again, it was clearer, but still problematic:

  Tears, we may allow, carry a measure of emotional significance. In certain (illegible) sweat may be . . . (illegible) But as scientific methodologies become increasingly sophisticated their tools charting and ( calibrating, was it, or calculating—one of the two) the nuances of the phenomenal world with an accuracy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, we are obliged to reconfigure our assumptions. Chemical signifiers—the sap that oozes from our flesh and organs in response to emotional activity—may be found in all our waste products. Beside this he had scrawled three question marks, as though he was here doubtful of his facts. He plowed on with his thesis nevertheless:

  Emotion, in other words, resides in the most despised matter in our local parameters, and it will soon be within the realm of instrument sensitivity that the precise emotional source of these signifiers may be discovered. In short, we will be able to recognize a quality of mass that carries traces of envy; a sample of sweat containing evidence of our rage; a portion of excrement that may be dubbed loving.

  The perverse wit of his father’s construction brought a smile to Will’s lips; the way that last sentence had been cunningly constructed, phrase by phrase, to climax in the inevitable collision of the sublime and the abject. Had Hugo seriously intended to deliver this to his students? If so, it would have been quite a sight, Will thought, seeing the import of what they were being told dawn on them.

  There followed two and a half paragraphs that had been scratched out, and then Hugo had taken up his argument in an even more unlikely direction, his language growing steadily more ironic. How are we to read and interpret these glad tidings? he’d written, this curious interface between emotions that we hold in high esteem and the muck that our bodies ooze and expel? In passing these chemical signifiers into the living and sensitive matrix of a world that it pleases us to characterize as neutral, are we perhaps influencing it in ways neither our sciences nor our philosophies have hitherto recognized? And further, in reconsuming the products of this now tainted reality as food, are we at some presently indiscernible level continuing a cycle of emotional consumption: dining, as it were, on a salad dressed with other men’s emotion?

  At the very least, let us admit the possibility that our bodies are a kind of marketplace, in which emotion is both the coin and the consumable. And if we dare a braver stance, consider that the terrain we have dubbed our inner lives is, in a fashion we cannot yet analyze or quantify, affecting the so-called outer or exterior world at such a subtle, but all-pervasive level that the distinction between the two, which depends upon a clear definition of a non-sentient, material state and us, its thinking, emoting overlords, becomes problematic. Perhaps the coming challenge is not, as Yeats had it, that ‘the center will not hold,’ but that the boundaries are blurring. All that constituted the jealously defined expression of our humanity—our private, passionate selves—is in truth a public spectacle, its sights so universally manifested, and so commonplace, that we can never gain the necessary distance to separate ourselves from the very soup in which we swim.

  Strange stuff, Will thought, as he laid the sheets back on the blotting pad. Though the word spiritual had been very severely ousted from the text, its presence lingered. Despite the dry humor and chilly vocabulary of the text, it was the work of a man feeling his way toward a numinous vision; sensing, perhaps reluctantly, that his philosophies were out of breath and it was time to let them die. Either that, or he’d written it dead drunk.

  Will had lingered long enough. It was time he got on with the business of the day, the first notion of which was contacting Frannie and Sherwood. They needed to be told of events at the hospital, in case Steep came looking for them. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. Returning to the living room, Will found Adele busy on the phone, talking, he surmised, to the vicar. While he waited for the conversation to finish, he juggled the relative merits of delivering his message to the Cunninghams by phone or going down to the village to talk with them in person. By the time Adele was done, he’d made his decision. This was not news to be delivered down the telephone line; he’d speak to them face-to-face.

  The funeral had been arranged for Friday, Adele told him, four days hence, at two-thirty in the afternoon. Now that she had the date set she could start to organize the flowers, the cars, and the catering. She’s already made a list of people to invite.

  Was there anybody Will wanted to add? He told her he was sure her list was fine and that if she was happy to get on with her arrangements he would take himself down to the village for an hour or so.

  “I want you to bolt the front door when I’m not here,” he told her.

  “Whatever for?”

  “I don’t want any . . . strangers coming into the house.”

  “I know everybody,” she said blithely. Then, seeing that he wasn’t reassured, said, “Why are you so concerned?” He had anticipated her question and had a meager lie prepared. He’d overheard a couple of nurses talking at the hospital, he told her: There was a man in the area who’d been trying to talk his way into people’s homes. He then described Steep, albeit vaguely, so that she didn’t become suspicious about the story. He was by no means certain he’d succeeded in this, but no matter: As long as he’d sowed sufficient anxiety to keep her from letting Steep in, he’d done all he could.

  XI

  i

  He didn’t go straight to the Cunningham house, but stopped off at the newsagents for a pack of cigarettes. Adele had apparently spoken to others besides the vicar while Will had been in the study, because Miss Morris already knew about Hugo’s demise.

  “He was a fine man,” she said. “When’s the funeral?” He told her Friday. “I’ll close up shop,” she said. “I want to be there to pay my respects. He’ll be missed, your father.” Frannie was at home, in the midst of housework, apron on, hair roughly pinned up, duster and polish in hand. She greeted Will with her usual warmth, inviting him in and offering coffee.

  He declined.

  “I need to talk to you both,” he said. “Where’s Sherwood?”

  “Out,” she said. “He disappeared early this morning, while I was still getting up.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “No, not when he’s feeling unwell. He goes up into the hills, sometimes stays out all day, just walking. Why, what’s happened?”

  “A great deal, I’m afraid. Do you want to sit down?”

  “That bad?”

  “I don’t know if it’s bad or good right now,” he said.

  Frannie untied her apron and they sat in the armchairs either side of the cold hearth. “I’ll keep this as short as I can,” he said, and gave her a five-minute summary of events at the hospital. She offered a few words of condolence regarding Hugo, but then kept her silence until he reported on the effect the name Rukenau had had upon Rosa and Jacob.

  “I remember that name,” she said. “It’s in the book, isn’t it?

  Rukenau was the man who hired Thomas Simeon. But how does that all fit with the happy couple?”

  “They’re not a happy couple anymore,” Will said, and went on to tell her the rest. Her expression grew more astonished
by the moment.

  “He killed her?” she said.

  “I don’t know if she’s dead. But if she isn’t, it’s a miracle.”

  “Oh, my Lord. So what happens now?”

  “Eventually Steep’s going to want to finish what he started.

  He may wait until dark, he may—”

  “Just come knocking.”

  Will nodded. “You should pack up a few things and get ready to leave as soon as Sherwood comes home.”

  “You think Steep’ll come here?”

  “He may. He’s been here before.”

  Frannie glanced toward the front door. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “I still dream about it. Dad in the kitchen, Sher on the stairs, me with the book in my hand, not wanting to give it to him.” She had visibly paled in the last few moments. “I have a horrible feeling, Will. About Sherwood.” She got to her feet, wringing her hands. “What if he’s with them?”

  “Why are you even thinking that?”

  “Because he never quite let go of Rosa. In fact he thought about her all the time, I’m pretty sure. He only admitted to it once or twice, but she was never far from his mind.”

  “All the more reason you should pack and be ready to go,” Will said, getting to his feet. “I want us out of here the moment Sherwood comes back.”

  She headed out into the hall, talking as she went. Will followed. “You said earlier you weren’t sure whether the news was good or bad,” she remarked. “Seems to me, it’s all had.”

  “Not for me it isn’t,” Will said, “I’ve been living in Steep’s shadow for thirty years, and now I’m going to be free of him.”