Clive Barker - Sacrament

'You are a treasure,' she said to Will, setting down the lamp. Her accent was not local, but tinged with a little Cockney. 'You just hold that damn hare a minute longer, while I get my bag.'

She set down the lamp, rummaged in the folds of her sleek coat and pulled out a small sack. Then she approached Will and with lightning speed clawed the squealing hare from his arms. It was in the bag and the bag sealed up in moments. 'You're as good as gold, you are,' she said. 'We would have gone hungry, Mr Steep and me, if you hadn't been so quick.' She set down the bag. 'Oh my Lord, look at the state of you,' she said, bending to examine Will more closely. 'What's your name?'

'William.'

'I had a William once,' the woman remarked. 'It's a lovely name.' Her face was close to Will's, and there was a welcome heat in her breath. 'In fact I think I had two. Sweet children, both of 'em.' She reached out and touched Will's cheek. 'Oh but you are cold.'

'I got lost.'

'That's terrible. Terrible,' she said, stroking his face. 'How could any self-respecting mother let you stray out of sight? She should be ashamed, she should. Ashamed.' Will would have concurred, but the warmth seeping from the woman's fingers into his face was curiously soporific.

'Rosa?' somebody said.

'Yes?' the woman replied, her voice suddenly flirty. 'I'm down here, Jacob.'

'Who've you found now?'

'I was just thanking this lad,' Rosa said, removing her hand from Will's face. He was suddenly freezing again. 'He caught us our dinner.'

'Did he indeed?' said Jacob. 'Why don't you step aside, Mrs. McGee, and give me sight of the boy?'

'Sight you want, sight you'll have,' Rosa replied, and getting to her feet she picked up the sack, and moved a short way down the slope.

In the two or three minutes since Will had caught hold of the hare, the sky had darkened considerably, and when Will looked in the direction of Jacob Steep it was hard to see the man clearly. He was tall, that much was clear, and was wearing a long coat with shiny buttons. His face was bearded, and his hair longer than Mrs. McGee's. But his features were a blur to Will's weary eyes.

'You should be at home,' he said. Will shuddered, but this time the cause was not the cold but the warmth of Steep's voice. 'A boy like you, out here alone, could come to some harm or other.'

'He's lost,' Mrs. McGee chimed in.

'On a night like this, we're all a little lost,' Mr. Steep said. 'There's no blame there.'

'Maybe he should come home with us,' Rosa suggested. 'You could light one of your fires for him.'

'Hush yourself,' Jacob snapped. 'I will not have talk of fires when this boy is so bitter cold. Where are your wits?'

'As you like,' the woman replied. 'It's no matter to me either way. But you should have seen him take the hare. He was on it like a tiger, he was.'

'I was lucky,' Will said, 'that's all.'

Mr. Steep drew a deep breath, and to Will's great delight descended the slope a yard or two more. 'Can you get up?' he asked Will.

'Of course I can,' Will replied, and did so.

Though Mr. Steep had halved the distance between them, the darkness had deepened a little further, and his features were just as hard to fathom. 'I wonder, looking at you, if we weren't meant to meet on this hill,' he said softly. 'I wonder if that's the luck of this night, for us all.' Will was still trying hard to get a better sense of what Steep looked like; to put a face to the voice that moved him so deeply, but his eyes weren't equal to the challenge. 'The hare, Mrs. McGee.'

'What about it?'

'We should set it free.'

'After the chase it led me?' Rosa replied. 'You're out of your mind.'

'We owe it that much, for leading us to Will.'

'I'll thank it as I skin it, Jacob, and that's my final word on the thing. My God, you're impractical. Throwing away good food. I'll not have it.' Before Steep could protest further she snatched up the sack, and was away down the slope.

Only now, watching her descend, did Will realize that the worst of the storm had blown over. The rainfall had mellowed to a drizzle, the murk was melting away; he could even see lights glimmering in the valley. He was relieved, certainly, but not as much as he thought he'd be. There was comfort in the prospect of returning home, but that meant leaving the company of the dark man at his back, who even now lay a heavy, leather-gloved hand upon his shoulder.

'Can you see your house from here?' he asked Will.

'No ... not yet.'

'But it will come clear, by and by.'

'Yes,' Will said, only now getting a sense of how the land lay. He had managed somehow to come halfway around the valley during his blind trek, and was looking down on the village from a wholly unexpected angle. There was a track not more than thirty yards down the ridge from where he stood; it would lead him, he suspected, back to the route he'd followed to get to the Courthouse. A left at that intersection would bring him back into Burnt Yarley, and then it was just a weary trudge home. 'You should go, my boy,' Jacob said. 'Doubtless a fellow as fine as you has loving guardians.' The gloved hand squeezed his shoulder. 'I envy you that, having no parents that I can remember.'

'I'm ... sorry,' Will said, hesitating because he was by no means sure a man as fine as Jacob Steep was ever in need of sympathy. He received it, however, in good part.

'Thank you, Will. It's important that a man be compassionate. It's a quality that our sex so often neglects, I think.' Will heard the soft cadence of Steep's breathing, and tried to fall in rhythm with it. 'You should go,' Jacob said. 'Your parents will be concerned for you.'

'No they won't,' Will replied.

'Surely-'

'They won't. They don't care.'

'I can't believe that.'

'It's true.'

'Then you must be a loving son in spite of them,' Steep said. 'Be grateful that you have their faces in your mind's eye. And their voices to answer when you call. Better that than emptiness, believe me. Better than silence.'

He lifted his hand from Will's shoulder, and instead touched the middle of his back, gently pushing him away. 'Go on,' he said softly. 'You'll be dead of cold if you don't go soon. Then how would we get to meet again?'

Will's spirits rose at this. 'We might do that?'

'Oh certainly, if you're hardy enough to come and find me. But Will ... understand me ... I'm not looking for a dog to perch on my lap. I need a wolf.'

'I could be a wolf,' Will said. He wanted to look back over his shoulder at Steep, but that was not, he thought, the most appropriate thing for an aspirant wolf to do.

'Then as I say: come find me,' Steep said. 'I won't be far away.' And with that he gave Will a final nudge, setting him off on his way down the slope.

Will did not look back until he reached the track, and when he did he saw nothing. At least nothing alive. The hill he saw, black against the clearing sky. And the stars, appearing between the clouds. But their splendour was nothing compared to the face of Jacob Steep; a face he had not yet seen, but which his mind had already conjured a hundred different ways by the time he reached home, each finer than the one before. Steep the nobleman, fine-boned and fancy; Steep the soldier, scarred from a dozen wars; Steep the magician, his gaze bearing power. Perhaps he was all of these. Perhaps none. Will didn't care. What mattered was to be beside him again, soon, and know him better.

Meanwhile, there was a warm light from the window of his home, and a fire in the hearth. Even a wolf might seek the comfort of the hearth now and then, Will reasoned, and knocking on the front door, was let back in.

i

He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations - his mother in racking tears, certain he was dead, his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn't - that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn't a violent man. He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard - with a book, of all things - he reduced them both to tears: Will, of pain, his father of anguish that he'd lost so much control.