Clive Barker - Sacrament

'You smell satisfied,' Rosa remarked. 'Did you eat?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Should we have brought you something?'

She shook her head. 'I'm fasting,' she replied. 'Though I was tempted by some of the fish they were hauling in off the jetty.'

'Raw?' Frannie said.

'It's best that way,' Rosa replied. 'Steep was always good at catching fish. He'd step into a river and tickle them into a stupor-'

'Got it!' Will said, waving the book. 'Here it is!' He paraphrased the passage for Frannie's benefit. Hoping to rediscover a place in Rukenau's affections, Simeon had planned a symbolic painting; one that showed his sometime patron standing amongst piles of grain, 'as befits his island'. 'That's the connection, right there!' he said. 'Rukenau's island is Tiree. Look! It's a granary, just the way Simeon was going to paint it.'

'That's pretty flimsy evidence,' Frannie observed.

Will refused to be deflated. 'It's the place. I know it's the place,' he said. He tossed Dwyer's book over to Frannie and dug the timetable out of his pocket to consult it. 'Tomorrow morning's sailing is to Coll and Tiree, via Tobermory,' he grinned. 'Finally,' he said. 'We got lucky.'

'Do I take it from all this yelping that you know where we're going?' Rosa said.

'I think so,' Will said. He went down on his haunches beside her. 'Will you get back into the car now? You're not doing yourself any favours sitting down there.'

'I'll have you know some Good Samaritan tried to give me money for a bed,' she said to him.

'And you took it,' Will said.

'You know me so well,' Rosa replied wryly, and opened her fist to show him the coinage.

With a little more persuasion Rosa finally consented to be returned to the car, and there the three of them passed what remained of the night. Will slept better than he expected to, doubled up in the driver's seat. He woke only once, his bladder full, and as quietly as he could he got out of the car to relieve himself. It was four-fifteen, and the ferry that would take them out to the islands in the morning, The Claymore, had docked. There were already men at work on deck, and on the quay, loading cargo and preparing for the early sailing. Otherwise, the town was still; the Esplanade deserted. He pissed lavishly in the gutter, scrutinized only by three or four gulls who were idling the night away on the harbour wall. The fishing boats would be coming in soon, he guessed, and they'd have fish scraps to breakfast on. Before returning to the car he lit a cigarette, and begging the pardon of the gulls, sat on the wall gazing out into the dark water that lay beyond the harbour lights. He felt curiously content with his lot. The cold smell of the water, the hot sharp smoke in his lungs; the sailors preparing The Claymore for her little voyage: all were pieces of his happiness. So too was the presence he felt in him as he sat watching the water: the fox spirit whose senses sharpened his, and who was wordlessly advising him: take pleasure, my man. Enjoy the smoke and the silence and the silken water. Take pleasure not because it's fleeting, but because it exists at all.

He finished his cigarette and went back to the car, slipping back into his seat without waking Frannie, whose face was lolling against the window in sleep, her breath rhythmically misting the cold glass. Rosa also appeared to be asleep, but he was not so certain she wasn't pretending, a suspicion he had confirmed when he himself had started to doze again, and heard her whispering at the very limit of audibility behind him. He could not grasp what she was saying, and was too weary to think about it, but just as sleep took him, in one of those flashes of lucidity which come at such times, he deciphered the syllables she was speaking. She was reciting a list of names. And something about the fond way she spoke them, interspersing the list with a sigh here, or oh my sweet there, made him think these were not people she'd met along the way. They were her children. This then was the thought that carried him into sleep: that Rosa was remembering her dead children as she waited for the day, and was reciting their names in the dark, like a prayer that had no text; just a list of the divinities to whom it was directed

It had always been Steep's preference, when he was about the business of slaughtering mating couples, to kill the male first. If he was dealing with the last of a species, of course - which was his great and glorious labour - the dispatch of both genders was academic. All he needed to do was kill one to ensure that the line was ended. But he liked to be able to kill both, for neatness' sake, starting with the male. He had a number of practical reasons for this. In most species the male was the more aggressive of the sexes, and for his own protection it made sense to incapacitate the husband before the wife. He'd also observed that females were more likely to demonstrate grief at the demise of their mates, in the throes of which they could be readily killed. The male, by contrast, became vengeful. All but two of the serious injuries he'd sustained over the years had come from males that he had unwisely left to kill after the female, that had thrown themselves upon him with suicidal abandon. A century and a half since the extinction of the great auk on the cliffs of St Kilda, and he still bore the scar on his forearm where the male had opened him up. And in cold weather there was still an ache in his thigh where a blaubok had kicked him, seeing its lady bleeding to death before its eyes.

Both were painful lessons. But more painful than either the scars or the ill-knit bones was the memory of those males who had, through some failing of his, outmanoeuvred him and escaped. It had happened seldom, but when it had he had mounted heroic searches for the escapee, driving Rosa to distraction with his doggedness. Let the brute go, she'd tell him, ever the pragmatist; just let him die of loneliness.

Oh, but that was what haunted him. The thought of a rogue animal out in the wild, circling its territory, looking for something that was its like, and coming back at last to the place where its mate had perished, seeking a vestige of her being - a scent, a feather, a shard of bone - was almost unbearable. He had caught fugitives several times under such circumstances; waiting for them to return to that fatal place, and murdering them on the spot where they mourned. But there were some animals that escaped him completely, whose final hours were not his to have dominion over, and these were a source of great distress to him. He dreamed and imagined them for months after. Saw them wandering in his mind's eye; growing ragged, growing rogue. And then, when a season or two had passed, and they had not encountered any of their own species, losing the will to live; fleabitten and bony-shanked, becoming phantoms of veldt or forest or ice floe, until they finally gave up all hope, and died.

He would always know when this finally happened; or such was his conviction. He would feel the animal's passing in his gut, as though a physical procedure as real as digestion had come to its inevitable end. Another dinning thing had gone into memory (and into his journal) never to be known again.

This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this ...

It was no accident that his thoughts turned to these rogues as he travelled north. He felt like one of their pitiful number now. Like a creature without hope, returning to its ancestral ground. In his case, of course, he was not looking for signs of his lady-wife. Rosa was still alive (it was her trail he was following, after all) and he would certainly not mope over her remains when she passed away. Yet for all his eagerness to be rid of her, the prospect left him lonely.

The night had not gone well for him. The car he'd stolen in Burnt Yarley had broken down a few miles outside Glasgow, and he had abandoned it, planning to steal a more reliable vehicle at the next service station. It turned out to be quite a trek; two hours walking beside the highway, while a cold drizzle fell. He'd make sure he stole a Japanese car next time, he thought. He liked the Japanese; an enthusiasm he'd shared with Rosa. She'd liked their delicacy and their artifice; he liked their cars and their cruelty. They had a nice indifference to the censure of hypocrites, which he admired. They needed shark fins for their soup? They took them, and dumped the rest of the carcasses back in the sea. They wanted whale oil for the lamps? Dammit, they'd hunt the whales, and tell the bleeding hearts to go sob on someone else's doorstep.