by Clive Barker
“If he doesn’t kill you,” Frannie said.
“I’ll still be free.”
She stared at him. “It’s as desperate as that?” she said.
“It is what it is,” he replied, with a little shrug. “You know, I don’t regret knowing him: He made me who I am, and how can I regret being me?”
“I’m sure a lot of people do. Being who they are, I mean.”
“Well, I’m not one of ’em,” he said. “I’ve got a lot more out of my life than I ever thought I would.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve got to move on. And I can feel it happening. Things moving in me.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t think I’ve got the words,” he said. He smiled. Then, seeing the quizzical look on her face, he said, “I’m . . . excited. I know that sounds weird, but I am. I was afraid there wouldn’t be closure to all of this. Now I’m going to have it, one way or another.”
She broke her gaze and hurried upstairs, calling back down to him as she reached the landing. “Have you got any way of defending yourself against him?”
“Yes I have.”
“Are you going to tell me what?”
“Just something,” he said. reaching inside his jacket and touching the knife, which he had not done since picking it up.
He felt the thrill of its history in his fingers, and knew he should let it go. But his flesh refused. His fingers tightened around the gummy hilt, instantly addicted to the rush it supplied. Oh, the harm this knife could do—
It would not be hard to kill Steep, to slide the blade deep into his unhappy flesh and stop his heart. And if he had no heart to stop, then the knife would just go on cutting holes in him, until he was a thing of scraps, with the life pouring out everywhere.
“Will?”
Frannie was calling from upstairs. “Yes?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been yelling.” Lost in the blade’s brutalities, he hadn’t heard a word. “Is there a problem?” he called back, opening his jacket as he did so.
His hand was still clamped to the hilt of the knife, his knuckles white.
“I’d just like a cup of tea!” Frannie yelled back.
It was such an absurd contrast—the knife in his hand, filthy with Rosa’s juices, and Frannie’s thirst for tea—that it snapped him from his reverie completely. He pulled his knife-hand free, and closed his jacket as though he were slamming Pandora’s Box.
“I’ll brew some,” he said, and went through to the kitchen, his body aching as he moved. He could not at first understand why. It was only as he washed his hand clean under the cold tap that he realized it was the scars left by the bear that were troubling him, as though his system was punishing him for denying it the pleasure of the blade by awakening old pains. He would have to be careful, he realized. The knife was not to be treated lightly. If and when he wielded it, there could be consequences.
His hand cleansed, he busied himself about the kitchen preparing the tea, hearing Frannie thumping about above. He had brought the threat of calamity into her life, but her sanguine manner suggested she had vaguely expected it. Like him, she had been marked; so had Sherwood. Not as profoundly, perhaps, but then who was to say? If Sherwood had not fallen prey to Rosa, perhaps his mental state would have improved over the years, and Frannie would have been freed of her responsibilities to him. Courted, perhaps; married, perhaps. Lived a fuller, happier life than had been her lot.
He was filling the enamel teapot with boiling water when he heard the front door open and close, and Frannie calling from above, “Is that you, Sherwood?”
Instead of declaring himself, Will hung back. Frannie was coming downstairs now. “I was getting worried about you,” she said. Sherwood mumbled something Will couldn’t hear. “You look terrible,” Frannie said. “What on earth’s happened?”
“Nothing—”
“Sherwood?”
“I’m just not feeling very well,” he said, “I’m going up to bed.”
“You can’t. We have to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Sherwood, we have to. Steep’s come back.”
“He won’t touch us. It’s Will—” He stopped in mid-sentence, and looked toward the kitchen door, where Will had stepped into view.
“Is Rosa still alive?” Will said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sherwood said.
“Frannie, what’s he talking about? We don’t have to leave. Will’s just here to cause trouble as always.”
“Who told you that?” Frannie said.
“It’s obvious,” Sherwood replied, staring at the floor rather than his sister’s face. “That’s what he’s always done.”
“Where is she, Sherwood?” Will said. “Did he bury her?”
“No!” Sherwood shouted. “She’s my lady and she’s alive!”
“Where?”
“I’m not telling you! You’ll hurt her.”
“No I won’t,” Will said, stepping out of the kitchen. The move alarmed Sherwood. He turned suddenly and bolted for the front door.
“It’s all right!” Frannie yelled, but he wasn’t about to be persuaded. He was out of the door at a dash, with Will on his heels. Down the path to the gate, which was open, through it and off to the left, and left again, cannily avoiding the street, where traffic might slow him, to make for the open ground behind the house. Will pursued him up the dirt track, yelling vainly for him to stop, but Sherwood was too quick. If he made it out to the open field, Will knew, the chase was lost. Frannie had outmaneuvered him however. Out of the back of the house she came, and ran straight at Sherwood to intercept him, catching such firm hold of him he couldn’t wrest himself free fast enough to be out of her grip before Will caught up.
“Calm down, calm down,” she said to him.
He ignored her, and turned his ire on Will. “Why did you have to come back?” he yelled. “You spoiled everything!
Everything!”
“Now you hush yourself!” Frannie snapped. “I want you to take a deep breath and calm down before you hurt somebody.
Now . . . I suggest we all go back into the house and talk like civilized people.”
“First he has to take his hands off me,” Sherwood demanded.
“You’re not going to run, are you?” Frannie said.
“No,” Sherwood replied sourly.
“Promise?”
“I’m not a kid, Frannie! I said I wouldn’t run, and I won’t.” Will unhanded him, and Frannie did the same. He didn’t move. “Satisfied?” he sulked, and slouched back into the house.
ii
Once inside, Will left Frannie to ask the questions. Plainly he was the enemy as far as Sherwood was concerned, and there would be no answers forthcoming if he was doing the inquiring.
She began by reciting a shortened version of what Will had told her. Sherwood was silent throughout, staring at the floor, but when she told him Hugo had been murdered by Steep and McGee—which fact she cleverly kept back (at first simply saying Hugo was dead) until almost the end of her monologue—
Sherwood could not conceal the fact that he was shaken. He’d been fond of Hugo, according to his last conversation with Will, and became fidgety and then tearful as Frannie described Rosa’s part in it.
At last he said, “I only wanted to save her from Steep. She can’t help herself.”
He looked up at his sister now, blisters of tears in his eyes.
“Why would he hurt her if she wasn’t trying to free herself? That’s what she wants to do.”
“Maybe we can help her,” Will said. “Where is she?” Sherwood hung his head again.
“At least tell us what happened,” Frannie said gently.
“I met her a few days ago on the fells when I was out walking. She said she’d been looking for me; she needed my help. She asked me if I could find her somewhere to sleep, now that the Courthouse was gone. I knew I should be afraid of her, but
I wasn’t. I’d imagined seeing her again so often. Dreamed about meeting her just the way I did, up there in the sun. She looked so lonely. She hadn’t changed at all. And she told me how happy she was to see me again. I was like an old friend, she said, and she hoped I thought of her the same way. I told her I did. I said I’d get her rooms at the hotel in Skipton, but she said no, Steep refused to stay in a hotel, in case somebody locked the doors while he was asleep. I don’t understand why, but that’s what she said. She hadn’t even mentioned Steep until then, and I was disappointed. I thought maybe she’d come back on her own. But the way she begged me to help her, I saw she was afraid of him. So I said I knew a place they could go. And I took her there.”
“Did you see Steep?” Frannie asked him.
“Later I did.”
“He didn’t threaten you?”
“No. He was quiet, and he looked sick. I almost felt sorry for him. I only saw him once.”
“What about this morning?” Will said.
“I didn’t see him this morning.”
“But you saw Rosa?”
“I heard her, but I didn’t see her. She was lying in the dark, she told me to go away.”
“How did she sound?”
“Weak. But she didn’t sound as if she was dying. She would have asked me to help her if she’d been dying. Wouldn’t she?”
“Not if she thought it was too late,” Will said.
“Don’t say that,” Sherwood snapped. “You said we could help her two minutes ago.”
“How can I be sure of anything until I see her?” Will replied.
“Where is she, Sher?” Frannie said. Sherwood was looking at the floor again. “Come on, for God’s sake. We’re not going to hurt her. What’s the problem?”
“I just don’t want to share her,” Sherwood said softly. “She was my little secret. I liked it that way.”
“So she dies,” Will said, exasperated. “But at least you haven’t shared her. Is that what you want?” Sherwood shook his head. “No,” he murmured. Then, even more quietly, “I’ll take you to her.”
XII
Happiness had always sharpened Jacob’s appetite for its contraries. Blithe from some successful slaughter he would invariably make straightaway for a cultured city where he could seek out a tragic play, better still an opera, even a great painting, that would stir up the rich mud of feelings he kept settled most of the time. Then he would indulge his passions like a reformed drunkard left among the brandy barrels, imbibing until he sickened on the stuff.
Unlike happiness, however, despair only wanted its like. When he was in its thrall, as he was now, his nature drove him to discover more of the very feelings that pained him. Others sought out palliatives for their wounds. He looked only for a harsher grade of salt.
Until now, he’d always had a cure for this sickness. When the despair became too much for him to bear, Rosa would be there to coax him from the brink of total collapse and restore his equilibrium. Sex had more often than not been her means; a little hide the sausage, as she’d been fond of calling it in her more bumptious moods. Today, however, Rosa was the cause of his despair, not its cure. Today she was dying, by his hand, her hurt too deep to be mended. He had laid her down in the murk of their shuttered house and, at her instruction, left her there.
“I don’t want you anywhere near me,” she’d said. “Just get out of my sight.”
So he’d gone. Out of the village and up the slope of the fell, looking for a place where his despair might be amplified. His feet knew where to take him: to the wood where the damnable child had shown him visions. He would find plenty of fuel for his wretchedness there, he knew. There was nowhere on the planet he regretted setting foot more than that arbor. In hindsight he’d made his first error offering the knife to Will. His second? Not killing the boy as soon as he’d realized he was a conduit. What strange sympathy had been upon him that night, that he’d let the brat go, knowing that Will’s mind was filled with filched memories?
Even that stupidity might not have cost him so dearly if the boy had not grown up queer. But he had. And undisturbed by the call to fecundity he’d become a far more powerful enemy—no, not enemy; something more elaborate—than he would have been if he’d married and fathered children. Steep had never been comfortable in the company of queers, but he’d felt, almost against his will, a kind of empathy with their condition. Like him, they were obliged to be self-invented; like him, they looked in at the rest of the tribe from its perimeters. But he would have gladly visited a holocaust on the entire clan if it would have kept this one, this Will, from crossing his path.
Fifty yards from the wood, he halted and, looking up from his boots, surveyed the panorama. Autumn was close; he could smell its bruising touch in the air. It was a time of the year he’d often set out walking, taking a week or two off from his labors to explore the backwaters of England. Despite the calamities of commerce, the country still possessed its sacred places if a traveler looked hard and carefully enough. Communing with the ghosts of heretics and poets he had strode the country from end to end over the years: walked the straight roads where the Behemists had gone and heard them call the very earth the face of God; idled in the Malvern Hills, where Langland had dreamed of Piers Plowman; strode the flanks of barrows where pagan lords lay in beds of dirt and bronze. Not all these sites had noble histories. Some were lamentable places, fields and copses where believers had died for their Christ. At Aldham Common, where Rowland Taylor, the good rector of Hadleigh, had been burned at the stake, his fire fueled from the hedgerows that still grew green about the spot; and Colchester, where a dozen souls or more had been cremated in a single fire for a sin of prayer. Then to more obscure spots still, places he’d found only because he listened like a fly at a dying man’s mouth. Places where unhallowed men and women had perished for love or faith or both. He envied the dead, very often. Standing in a plowed field some September, crows cawing in the fleshless trees, he thought of the simplicity of those whose dust was churned in the dirt on his boots, and wished he had been born with a plainer heart.
He would not visit these places again, not this autumn, nor ever. His life, which had been in its curious way a model of stability, was changing: by the day, by the hour. Though he would certainly silence Rabjohns, the deed would not repair the damage that had been done. Rosa would still die, and he would be left alone in his despair, spiraling down and down. Given that there would be nobody to check his descent, he would keep going until he could fall no further. Then he would perish, most likely by his own hand, and his vision of a naked earth would be left in other, less honorable, hands.
No matter, he thought, as he resumed his trek toward the wood. There were plenty of men who were in unwitting service of the same ideal. He’d had the questionable pleasure of meeting a brace of them in his time: crazed military men, in a few cases, many of these psychotics; a few who knew precisely the name of their evil, and simply pleasure in it; but most—these the most interesting to speak with—men who were not personally inhumane, but who sat in their offices like bland accountants, orchestrating pogroms and ethnic cleansing for fiscal and political reasons. Whatever their natures, they were his allies to a man, as likely to wipe out a species as he, in their pursuit of ambition.
Some did so in the name of profit, some in the name of freedom, some simply because they could. The reasons didn’t really matter to him. What mattered was the consequences. He wanted to see Creation dwindle, family by family, tribe by tribe, from the vast to the infinitesimal, and he’d always needed the autocrats and the technocrats to help him achieve his goal. But whereas they were indiscriminate and crude, often unaware of the damage they’d done, he had always plotted against life with the greatest precision—researching his victims like an assassin, so as to be familiar with their habits and their hideaways. Once marked for death, few had escaped him. He knew of no finer feeling than to sit with one of the dead and record its details in his journal, knowing that when corruption had
claimed the corpse he and only he possessed a record of how and when this line had passed into history.
This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this . . .
He had reached the border of the wood now. A gust of wind moved through the trees, overturning the coins of sun on the ground. He stepped among them, gingerly, while the wind came again, shaking down a few early leaves. He went directly to the place where the birds had sat that distant winter. A spring nest sat in the fork of the branches, forsaken now that it had served its function as a nursery, but still intact. Standing at the spot where the birds had fallen, he remembered the vision Rabjohns had made him endure with vile ease—
Simeon in the sunlight, a day from death, refusing the call of his patron, eloquent, even in his despair. And then the same scene, a day and a moment later. Simeon dead, under the trees, his body already carrion—
Steep let out a little moan, working the heels of his hands against his eyes to press the sight from his head. But it wouldn’t go. It pulsed behind his lids, as though he were seeing it now for the first time in all its cruel particulars: the claw marks upon Thomas’s cheek and brow, where the birds had skipped as they pecked out his eyes; the dung spattered on his thigh, where some animal had voided itself while sniffing around; the curl of hair at his groin, miraculously untouched though the manhood that had nestled there had been ripped away and left the place all blood, but for this golden tuft.
He did not imagine that killing the conduit would heal his deepening anguish. He was in its thrall now, and would be swallowed utterly. But when he finally succumbed to it, he would do so with his wits his own. There would be no trespasser among his thoughts, treading where his griefs lay tenderest. He would die alone, in the belly of his despair, and nobody would know what last thoughts visited him there.
It was time to go. He had put off the moment long enough, fearful of his own weakness. He would have liked to have his knife in his hands as he strode down the hill—it knew the business of slaughter more intimately than even he. But no matter.
