Clive Barker - Sacrament

'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 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 outmanoeuvred 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 child, 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 enquiring. 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.'

Happiness had always sharpened Jacob's appetite for its contraries. Blithe from some successful slaughter he would invariably make straight away 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 amongst 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 arbour. 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

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 labours to explore the backwaters of England. Despite the calamities of commerce, the country still possessed its sacred places if a traveller 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 Behmenists 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 earth 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 burnt at the stake, his fire fuelled 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 ploughed 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.