Clive Barker - Sacrament

'I don't know. I didn't see-'

'Lift me up,' Rosa demanded. To judge by the splaying of her limbs, she'd broken a number of bones, but she was plainly indifferent to the fact. 'Lift me up,' she said again. 'We're going into the House, you and me.'

Frannie doubted she had the strength to haul the woman further than the top of the incline. But even if she could do that little service it would surely be the last she provided for Rosa. The woman's death was imminent, to judge by her quickening gasps, and by the violence of the tremors passing through her body. Redistributing her weight on the rocks, Frannie bent to clear the debris off Rosa's body. The bandages had been torn from her wound, Frannie saw, and though it was partially clogged with mud, the same uncanny iridescence she'd first seen in Donnelly's house flickered in its depth.

'Did Steep do this to you?' she asked.

Rosa stared sightlessly at the sky. 'He cheated me of my children,' she said.

'I heard.'

'He cheated me of my life. And I'm going to make him suffer for it.'

'You're too weak.'

'My wound's my strength now,' Rosa said. 'He's afraid of what's broken in me...' she shaped a terrible smile; as though she had become Death itself '... because it's found what's broken in him ...'

Frannie didn't try to make sense of this. She simply bent to the task of cleaning the body, and then, once that labour was done, attempting to raise Rosa into a position that allowed her to be lifted. Once she had her arms beneath the woman, she found to her astonishment a curious strength passed between them. Her body became capable of what it could never have achieved a minute before: she lifted Rosa out of the earth and carried her - not without effort, but with some measure of confidence - up the remainder of the incline to secure ground. The scene looked like a battlefield. Fresh fissures had opened in the earth, running in all directions from the place where Rosa and Jacob had clashed. 'Now to your left-' Rosa said. 'Yes?'

-do you see a piece of open ground?' 'Yes.'

'Carry me to it. The House is there.' 'I don't see anything.' 'That's because it has ways to fold itself out of your sight. But it's there. Trust me, it's there. And it wants us inside.'

The sound of the avalanche was audible in the Domus Mundi, but Will took little notice of it, distracted as he was by the scale of the spectacle before him. Or more precisely, above him. For it was there that Gerard Rukenau, the satyric sermonizer himself, had chosen to make his home. The considerable expanse of the chamber was criss-crossed with a complex network of ropes and platforms, the lowest of them hanging a little above head-height, while the highest were virtually lost in the shadows of the vaulted ceiling. In places, the knotted ropes were so densely intertwined, and so encrusted with detritus, that they formed almost solid partitions, and in one spot a kind of chimney that rose to the ceiling. To add further to the sum of these strangenesses, there were scattered throughout the structure items of antique furniture collected, perhaps, out of that mysterious house in Ludlow from which Galloway had liberated his friend Simeon. Amongst this collection were several chairs, suspended at various heights; two or three small tables. There was even a platform heaped with pillows and bed-clothes, where, presumably, Rukenau laid his head at night. Though the cords and branches from which all of this was constructed were filthy, and the furniture, despite its quality, much the worse for wear, the obsessive elaboration of knots and partitions and platforms was beautiful in the flickering luminescence which rose from the bowls of pale flame that were set around the web, like stars in a strange firmament.

And then, from a location perhaps forty feet above Will's head, at the top of the woven chimney, Rukenau's voice came floating down.

'So now, Theodore,' he said. 'Who have you brought to see me?' His voice was more musical than it had sounded when he'd been summoning them. He sounded genuinely curious as to who this stranger in their midst might be.

'His name's Will,' Ted said.

'I heard that much,' Rukenau replied, 'and he hates William; which is sensible. But I also heard you came looking for me, Will; and that's far more intriguing to me. How is it you've come looking for a man who's been removed from human sight for so long?'

'There's still a few people talking about you,' Will said, looking up into the murky heights

'You mustn't do that,' Ted whispered to him. 'Keep your head bowed.' Will ignored the advice, and continued to stare up at the mesh. His defiance was rewarded. There was Rukenau, descending through the myriad layers of his suspended world, stepping from one precarious perch to another like a tightrope walker. And as he made his descent, he talked on:

'Tell me, Will: do you know the man and woman making such a ruckus outside?' he asked.

'There's a man?' Will said.

'Oh yes, there's a man.'

It could only be one, Will knew; and hoped to God Frannie had got out of his path. 'Yes, I know them,' he told Rukenau, 'but I think you know them better.'

'Perhaps so,' the man above him replied, 'though it's been a very long time since I drove them out of here.'

'Do you want to tell me why you did that?'

'Because the male did not bong my Thomas back to me.'

'Thomas Simeon?'

Rukenau halted in his descent. 'Oh Jesu,' he said. 'You really do know something about me, don't you?'

'I'd still like to know more.'

'Thomas came back to me, at last; did you know that?'

'Once he was dead,' Will said. This piece of the story was a guess on his part, fuelled by Dwyer's theorizing; but the more he persuaded Rukenau he knew, the more he hoped the man would confess. And Dwyer had been right in her deductions it seemed, for Rukenau sighed and said: 'Indeed, he came back to me a corpse. And I think a little of my own life went out of me when he was laid in the rocks. He had a greater supply of God's grace in his little finger than I have in my entire being. Or ever had.'

Now after a little pause to mull this admission over, he continued to descend, and by degrees Will got a better sense of him. He was dressed in what had once been fine clothes, but which now, like almost everything in the House, were besmirched and encrusted. Only his face and hands were pale, and these uncannily pale, so that he resembled a bloodless doll. There was nothing brittle about his motion however; he moved with a kind of sinuous grace, so that despite his excremental garb, and the blandness of his features, Will could not take his gaze from the man.

'Tell me,' Rukenau said, as he continued his descent, 'how is it you know these people at the threshold?'

'You call them Nilotics, is that right?'

'Almost; but not quite,' Rukenau said. Once again he paused. He was now perhaps ten feet above Will's head, and perched upon a platform of bound boughs, he went down on his haunches and studied Will through the mesh as a fisherman might, to study his catch. 'I think despite your acuity you haven't quite comprehended their natures yet. Is that not so?'

'You're right,' Will said. 'I haven't. That's why I came here; to find out.'

Rukenau leaned forward a little further and pulled aside a portion of encrusted rope in order to see his subject better, which in turn gave Will a clearer view of Rukenau. It wasn't simply his sinuous motion that carried an echo of the serpentine. There was a gloss to his flesh which put Will in mind of a snake; as did his total absence of hair. He had no eyebrows, nor lashes, nor any sight of hair on his cheek or chin. If this was some dermatological disease, he didn't seem to be suffering any other effects. In fact he fairly radiated good health; his eyes gleamed, and his teeth shone, uncommonly white.