Clive Barker - Sacrament

'Well, if you have so little use for their skills, then lend your fingers to me,' Jacob said. 'Let me use them to make pictures half as fine as yours, and I will be the happiest man in creation.'

Thomas grinned, regarding Jacob quizzically. 'You say the strangest things.'

'I say strange things,' Jacob replied. 'You should hear yourself, today or any day.' He laughed and Thomas laughed along with him, his defeat momentarily forgotten.

'Come back to the island with me,' Jacob said, approaching Thomas cautiously, as though afraid of startling him. 'I'll make sure Rukenau doesn't make a workhorse out of you.'

'That's not the point.'

'I know how he always wants things his way, how he badgers you. I won't let it happen, Thom, I swear.'

'Since when did you have that much authority?'

'Since I told him Rosa and I'd go off and leave him if he didn't let us play a little. You wouldn't dare leave me, he said. I know your nature and you don't. If you desert me, you'll never know what you are or how you came to be.'

'And what did you say to that?'

'Oh, you'll be proud of me. I said: It's true, I don't know what made me. Yet was I made and made with love. And that may be knowledge enough to live in bliss.'

'Oh Lord, I wish I'd been there to see his face.'

'He wasn't happy,' Jacob chuckled. 'But what could he say? It was the truth.'

'So prettily put, too. You should be a poet.'

'No, I want to paint like you. I want us to work side by side, and you teach me how to see the flow in things, the way you do. The island's so beautiful, and there's just a few fishermen who live there, too cowed to say boo to the likes of us. We can live as though we were in Eden: you, me and Rosa.'

'Let me think about it,' Thomas said.

'One more persuasion.'

'Leave it alone now.'

'No. Hear me out. I know you don't trust Rukenau's gnostics, and a lot of the time, in truth, they confound me too - but the Domus Mundi isn't an illusion. It's glorious, Thomas. You'll be astonished when you move in it and feel it move in you. Rukenau says it's a vision of the world from the inside out-'

'And how much laudanum does he have you imbibe before you see this vision?'

'None. I swear. I wouldn't lie to you, Thom. If I thought this was just another delirium, I'd tell you to stay here and paint petals. But it isn't. It's something divine, something we're allowed to know if our hearts are strong enough. Lord, Thom, just imagine the petals you could paint if you studied them first in the seed. Or in the shoot. Or in the sap that made a bud come from a twig.'

'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 think

ing 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 unravelling 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 towards 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 grey 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 which 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 trousers and his stained shirt strewn about him, his corpse become a palette arrayed with colours 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 colours 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 and lights. It was a more radiant yellow than a buttercup. Happy now? Jacob murmured.