Clive Barker - Sacrament

'Who says I haven't been driven crazy?' he said, thinking of the troubled path that had brought him to this possession. 'You know that I see something in you, don't you?'

'If you do then look away,' she said.

'I don't want to. It's beautiful.' The burnished creature was still visible, but only just: its alien elegance receding into Rosa's wounded substance. 'Oh Lord,' he murmured. 'I've just realized, I've seen this before. This body inside you.'

She didn't speak for a moment, as though she couldn't make up her mind whether to be drawn into this enquiry or not. But she could not resist. 'Where?' she said.

'In a painting,' he said. 'By Thomas Simeon. He called it the Nilotic.'

She shuddered at the syllables. 'Nilotic?' she said. 'What is that?'

'Somebody who lives on the Nile.'

'I was never.. .' she shook her head; began again, '... I remember an island,' she said, '... but not a river. Not that river, at least. The Amazon, yes. I went with Steep to the Amazon to kill butterflies. But ... never the Nile . . .' her voice was fading as she spoke, and the last of her other self disappeared from sight. 'Yet ... there's truth in what you say. Something moves in me as the fox moves in you...'

'And you want to know what it is.'

'Only Rukenau knows that,' she said. 'Will you take me to Rukenau? You're a fox. You can sniff him out.'

'And you think he'll explain it.'

'I think if he can't, then nobody can.'

He found Frannie sitting at the bottom of the stairs, reading a yellow and welltrodden newspaper she'd found in one of the rooms. 'How's she doing?' she asked.

He clung to the door frame, his limbs still weak. 'She wants to find Rukenau. That's about the only thing in her mind right now.'

'And where's he?'

'If he's anywhere, he's up in the Hebrides, where the book said he went. She doesn't know what island.'

'Do you want us to take her?'

'Not us. Me. If you can bandage her up, I'll take over from there.'

Frannie closed the newspaper and tossed it to the dusty boards. 'And what do you thinks on this island?'

'Worst case scenario: a lot of birds. Best case? Rukenau; and the Domus Mundi, whatever the hell that is.'

'So you're suggesting I should stay here while you go off and see?' Frannie said with a tight little smile. 'No, Will. This is my moment too. I was there at the beginning. And I'm going to be there at the end.'

Before Will could respond the front door was pushed open, and Sherwood came in, nursing a bag of medications. 'I've brought every bandage I could find,' he said, dumping the bag in Frannie's arms.

'All right,' said Will. 'Here's the plan. I'm going to go back to my Dad's house and tell Adele I've got to leave

'Where are you going?' Sherwood wanted to know.

'Frannie'll explain,' Will said, coaxing his still nervous limbs into motion. He lurched past Sherwood to the front door.

'Please be quick,' Frannie said, 'I don't want to be here when-'

'Don't even say it,' Will told her. 'I'll be quick as I can, I promise.'

Then he was out of the door at a stumble, down the pathway and out into the street. He wanted to run barefoot; or naked, the way he'd once

imagined himself walking to Jacob in the Courthouse, the fire in him turning snow to steam. But he kept the desires of boy and fox hidden as he made his way home. They'd have their moment. But not yet.

i

Adele wasn't alone. There was a meticulously polished car parked outside the house, and inside its owner, a sprightly, even gleeful fellow by the name of Maurice Shilling, the undertaker. Will took Adele aside and explained that he was going to have to leave for a day or two. She of course wanted to know where he was going. He lied as little as possible. A woman-friend of his was sick, he told her, and he was going to drive up to Scotland to do what he could to comfort her.

'You will be back for the funeral?' she said.

He promised he would. 'I feel bad leaving you on your own right now.'

'If it's a mission of mercy,' Adele said, 'then you should go. I've got everything under control.'

He let her return to Mr Shilling, and went upstairs to fetch some more robust attire. Sitting on the bed lacing up his boots he chanced to glance out of the window just as the sun broke the clouds, and laid a patch of gold on the hillside. The laces went untied as he watched, his spirit suspended in a moment of grace. This isn't a dream of life, he thought, nor a theory, nor a photograph. This is life itself. And whatever happens now we've had our moment, the sun and me. Then the clouds closed again, and the gold vanished, and heading back to the business of threading and tying he found his eyes wet with gratitude for the epiphanies he'd been granted. The visions in Berkeley, the visitations of the fox, the touch of Rosa's thread: each had been a kind of awakening, as though he'd stirred from his coma with a hunger for sentience that would not be sated by a single transformation. How many times would he have to waken, until he was as conscious as a man could be? A dozen? A hundred? Or did it go on forever, this rousing of the spirit, the skins of his slumbers stripped away only to uncover another dream, and another?

Downstairs, Mr Shilling was still talking about flowers, coffins and prices. Will didn't interrupt the negotiations - Adele was perfectly capable of driving a hard bargain on her own - but slipped quietly into his father's study to look for an atlas. All the oversized books were collected on one shelf, so he didn't have to search far. It was the same battered edition he remembered from his childhood, furnished whenever he had geography homework. Much of it was out of date by now, of course. Borders had shifted, cities been renamed or destroyed. But the Western Isles were constants, surely. If wars had ever been fought over them, the peace treaties had been signed centuries ago. They were inconsequential; a scattering of coloured dots on a paper sea. Happy with his prize, he slipped out of the study, and collecting his leather jacket from the hook by the door, left the house, while Mr Shilling waxed lyrical about the comfort of a well-pillowed coffin.

ii

'There's nothing to be afraid of,' Frannie had been told by Rosa when she went back in with the bandages. Her instincts had told her otherwise. The cloying heat, the prickly air, the way the sound of Rosa's pain drummed upon the boards: they conspired to give the impression that an invisible thunderhead hung about the woman, and no words from Rosa were going to reassure Frannie that she was safe in its proximity. Fear made her swift. Instructing Rosa to clamp her fingers around the wound to close it, she pressed a wad of gauze against it as though it were a perfectly natural wound, and then taped the gauze down with half a dozen foot-long pieces of tape. To finish the job off she wrapped a length of bandage around the woman's body, though this was, she knew even as she was doing it, absurdly over-zealous. As she was finishing the work, however, Rosa lay her hand on Frannie's shoulder and murmured the one word Frannie had feared hearing:'Steep.'

'Oh Lord,' Frannie said, looking up at her patient. 'Where?'

Rosa had her eyes closed, her gaze roving behind her lids. 'He's not here,' she said. 'Not yet. But he's coming back. I can feel it.'

'Then we should get going.'

'Don't be afraid of him,' Rosa said, her eyes flickering open. 'Why give him the pleasure?'

'Because I am afraid,' Frannie said. Her mouth was suddenly arid, her heart noisy.

'But he's such a pathetic thing,' Rosa said. 'He always was. There were times when he was gallant, you know, and honourable. Even loving, sometimes. But mostly he was petty and dull.'

Despite her new-found urgency, Frannie could not help but ask the begged question.