Sacrament (15 page)

'Geoffrey Sauls.' Was that her footfall behind him? He had to get going, or she'd be upon him. He scanned the
ground for her lethal rosaries.

'No middle name?' she said.

'Oh. Yes.' He could see nothing moving, but that didn't mean they weren't there, in the shadows. 'Alexander.'

'That's a lot prettier than Geoffrey,' she said, her voice closer to him. He glanced back down at Del's dead face,
to give himself that last jolt of motivation, and then he was up, and turning towards the door. He'd guessed
aright. There it was, ahead of him now. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed the whore, and felt her eyes
burning into him. He didn't give them the opportunity to work their hex on him. Loosing a shout he'd learned in
the Territorial Army (it was designed to accompany a bayonet charge, while this was a retreat, but what the
hell?) he fled for the exit. His senses were more acute than they'd been since boyhood, his adrenalin-flooded
system alive to every nuance. He heard the whine of the rosaries as they flew, and glancing over his shoulder,
saw them in the air like beaded lightning, flying towards him. He dodged to his right, ducking as he did so, and
watched them fly past him, striking the door. There they writhed for a heartbeat, and in that beat he snatched at
the handle and threw the door wide. His own strength astonished him. Though the door was heavy it swung
fully open, its hinges screeching, and slammed against the wall.

'Alexander,' the woman called, her voice silky. 'Come back. Do you hear me, Alexander?'

He pelted down the passageway, unmoved by her summons, and for a very good reason. Only his mother,
whom he had hated with all his heart, had ever called him by that name. The woman could call to him using all
the voices of the sirens, and if she hung that dreaded Alexander upon him he would be immune.

Out now; down the steps and into the snow; ploughing towards the hedgerow, never looking back. He plunged
through the thicket and out onto the road with his lungs burning, his heart drumming, and such a sense of
happiness he was almost glad he was alone to enjoy it. Later, when he recounted this, he would talk quietly and
mournfully of how he'd lost his friend. For now, he shouted, and laughed, and felt (oh, the perversity of this) all
the more glorious because he'd not only outwitted the whore but had Del's death as proof of how terrible his
jeopardy had been.

Whooping, then, and stumbling, he returned to his car, which was parked some fifty yards away, and undaunted
by the icy road (nothing could harm him now; he was inviolate) he drove at foolhardy speed back into the
village to sound the alarm.

ii

Back in the Courthouse, Rosa was not a happy woman. She'd been content enough until Alexander and his
overweight comrade had arrived, sitting dreaming of finer places and balmier days. But now her dreams had
been interrupted, and she had to make some quick decisions.

There'd be a mob at the gates soon enough, she knew: Alexander would make certain of that. They'd be feeling
righteous and wrathful, and they'd surely attempt some mischief upon her person if she didn't make herself
scarce. It would not be the first time she'd been harried and harassed this way. There'd been an unsavoury
incident in Morocco only the year before, in which the wife of one of her occasional consorts had led a minor
jihad against her, much to Jacob's amusement. The husband, like the fat fellow lying at her feet now, had died
in flagrante delicto, but - unlike Donnelly - had expired with a broad smile on his face. It was the smile that had
truly inflamed his wife: that she'd never seen its like in her life had put her in murderous mood. And then in
Milan - oh, how she'd loved Milan! - there'd been a worse scene still. She had lingered there for several weeks
while Jacob went south, and had fallen into the company of the transvestites who plied their hazardous trade
about the Parco Sempione. She'd always loved things artificial, and these beauties, who were self-created
females to a man (the viados, the locals called them; meaning fawns) had enchanted her. In their company she'd
felt a strange sisterhood, and might have elected to stay in that city had

one of the pimps, a casual sadist by the name of Henry Campanella, not earned her ire. Hearing that he'd made a
particularly savage assault on one of his herd, Rosa had lost her temper. This happened infrequently, but when it
did, blood invariably flowed, and copiously. She'd choked the bastard on what had passed for his manhood, and
left the corpse in the Viale Certosa, on public display. His brother, who was also a pimp, had raised a small
army from the criminal fraternity, and would have slaughtered her if she hadn't fled to Sicily and the comfort of
Steep. Still, she often thought of her sisters in Milan, sitting around chatting about surgeries and silicone, while
they plucked and teased and squeezed themselves into a semblance of femininity. And when she thought of
them, she sighed.

Enough of memories, she told herself. It was time to vacate the premises, before the dogs came after her,
two-legged and four. She carried a candle into her little dressing room, and packed up her belongings, keeping
her senses sharp every moment. Remotely, she thought she heard raised voices, and assumed that Alexander
was at the village, telling tales, the way men liked to do.

Finishing her packing hurriedly, she said farewell to the body of Delbert Donnelly, and calling her rosaries to
her, made her departure. She had intended to head off northeast along the valley, putting the village and its
idiots as far as she could behind her. But once out in the snow, her thoughts turned to Jacob. She was of half a
mind to leave him in ignorance of what her deeds had unleashed. But in her heart she knew she owed him the
warning, for sentiment's sake. They had spent so many decades together, arguing, suffering and in their curious
way devoting themselves to one another. Though his recent frailties disenchanted her, she could not leave him
until she'd performed this last duty.

Turning her face to the hills, which had emerged from the retiring blizzard, she rapidly sought him out. She had
no need of senses in this: there was in them both a compass for which the other was north; all she had to do was
let the needle swing and settle, and there he would be. Lugging her bags, she started up the slope in his
direction, leaving a trail in the snow she was well aware her pursuers would follow. So be it, she thought. If
they come, they come. And if blood has to be spilled, I'm in a fine frame of mind to spill it.

It was a sudden spring. The breath out of the earth came and went, and when it passed took winter with it. The
trees were miraculously clothed in leaf and blossom, the frosted earth gave way to blades of summer grass, to
bluebells and wood anemone and melancholy thistle; sunlight danced everywhere. In the branches birds courted
and nested, and from the quickened thicket a red fox appeared, regarding Will with a fearless gaze before
trotting off about his business, his whiskers and coat gleaming.

'Jacob?' said a reedy voice off to Will's left. 'I thought not to see you again so soon.'

Will turned to the speaker, and found a man standing a few yards off, leaning against a graceful ash. The tree
was better dressed than he, his stained shirt, coarse trousers and ill-made sandals far less flattering than the
flickering leaves. Otherwise, man and tree had much in common. Both slender in body and limb, yet finely
made. The man, however, boasted something the tree could not: eyes of such a flawless blue it seemed the sky
had found its way into his head.

'I must tell you, my friend,' he said, staring not at Jacob but at Will, 'if you still hope to persuade me to go with
you, you're wasting your breath.'

Will looked around at Jacob in the hope of some explanation, but Jacob had gone.

'I told you the truth yesterday. I have nothing left to give Rukenau. And I will not be seduced with tales of the
Domus Mundi

Stepping away from the tree, he walked towards Will, and to add to the sum of the mysteries here, Will realized
that, though the stranger was several years his senior, and lankily tall, they were looking at one another eye to
eye, which meant that he had somehow sprung up a foot and a half in height.

'I don't want to know the world that way, Jacob,' the man was saying. 'I want to see it through my own eyes.'

Jacob? Will thought. He's looking straight at me and he's calling me Jacob. That means I'm in Steep's body. I'm
looking out through his eyes! The idea didn't frighten him; quite the reverse. He stretched a little, and it seemed
to him he could feel the muscle of the man enveloping him,

heavy and strong. He inhaled and smelt his own sweat. He raised his hand and fingered the silken curls of his
beard. It was the most extraordinary feeling. Though he was the possessor here, he felt possessed, as though
being in Steep had put Steep in his being.

There were appetites in his hips and head he'd never felt before. He wanted to be off, away from this
melancholic youth; out under the sky testing this borrowed flesh; running until his lungs were furnaces,
stretching until his joints cracked. To go naked in this glorious anatomy; yes! Wouldn't that be fine? To eat in it,
piss from it, stroke its long limbs.

But he was not the master here; memory was. He had sufficient freedom to scratch his beard or his groin, but he
couldn't leave the business that had brought Steep back to this place. All he could do was sit behind Jacob's
gilded eyes and listen to what had been said this sunlit day. He had conjured this encounter against Steep's will,
it had seemed - I don't want this, Jacob had said, over and over again - yet now that it was here, it had a
momentum all of its own, and he wasn't about to contest its authority, for fear he lose the simple joy of standing
in the man, flesh in flesh.

'Sometimes, Thomas,' Jacob was saying, 'you look at me as though I were the very Devil.'

The other man shook his head, his greasy hair falling across his forehead. He pushed it back with a
long-fingered hand, stained red and blue. 'If you were the Devil, you wouldn't be Rukenau's creature now,
would you?' he said. 'You wouldn't let him dispatch you off to bring home runaway painters. And if you came
for me, I wouldn't be able to resist you. And I can, Jacob. It's hard, but I can.' He lifted his hand up above his
head and drew down a blossom-laden branch to sniff. 'I had a dream last night, after you'd gone. I dreamed I
was up in the heavens, higher than the highest cloud, looking down at the earth, and there was somebody close
to me, whispering in my ear. A soft voice, neither a woman nor a man.'

'Saying what?'

'That in all the universe, there was only one planet so perfect, one so blue and bright as this. One so prodigious
in its creations. And that this glory was God's very being.'

'God's delusion, Thom. That's what it is.'

'No, listen to me! You've spent too much time with Rukenau. All this around us right now isn't some trick God's
playing on us.' He let the branch he'd been holding go, and it sprang back into place, dropping petals down on
Thomas's head and shoulders. He didn't notice. He was too inflamed by his dream and the telling of it. 'God
knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service. And at
night, He looks out through our eyes, out into the

immensity, and names the stars, so that in time we'll sail to them.' He dropped his head. 'That's what I dreamt.'

'You should tell it to Rukenau. He loves to read the meaning in dreams.'

'But there's nothing to decipher,' Thomas replied, grinning at the ground. 'That's the genius of it, don't you see?'
He looked up at Will again, the sky in his head pristine. 'Poor Rukenau. He's been reciting his liturgies for so
long, he's more in love with them than with the true sacrament.'

'And what's that, pray tell?'

'This,' Thomas said, plucking one of the petals off his shoulder. 'I have the Holy of Holies here, the Ark of the
Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself, right here on the tip of my little finger. Look!' He proffered
the petal, balanced on his digit. 'If I could paint this perfection ...' he stared at the petal as he spoke, as though
mesmerized by the sight'... put it on a sheet of paper so that it showed its true glory, every painting in every
chapel in Rome, every illumination of every Book of Hours, every picture I ever made for every one of
Rukenau's damned invocations would be ...' he paused for the word '... superfluous.' He blew the petal from
his finger, and it rose up a little way before starting its descent. 'But I cannot make such a painting. I labour and
I labour, and I make only failures. Jesus. Sometimes, Jacob, I wish I'd been born without fingers.'

'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.