Sacrament (18 page)

i

Will knew he wasn't awake. Though he was lying in his own bed in what appeared to be his own room - though
he could hear his mother's voice from somewhere below - he was dreaming it all. The certain proof? His mother
wasn't speaking, she was singing, in French, her voice reedy but sweet. This was absurd. His mother hated the
sound of her own singing voice. She'd mouthed the words when they'd sung hymns in church. And there was
other evidence, more persuasive still. The light that came in through the cracks between the curtains was a
colour he'd never seen light before: a gilded mauve that made everything it fell upon vibrate, as though it were
singing some song of its own, in the language of light. And where it failed to fall, there was a profound stillness,
and shadows that had their own uncanny hue.

'These are the strangest dreams,' somebody said.

He sat up in bed. 'Who's there?'

'Aren't they, though? Dreams within dreams. They're always the strangest.'

Will studied the darkness at the foot of his bed from which this voice was emanating; squinting to get a clearer
picture of the speaker. The man was wearing red, Will thought; a fur coat, perhaps? A peaked hat?

'But I suppose it's like those Russian dolls, isn't it?' the man in the coat went on. 'You know the ones I mean?
They have a doll inside a doll inside - of course you know. A man of the world like you. You've seen so much.
Me, I've seen a patch of moorland five miles square.' He halted for a moment to chew on something. 'Excuse my
noise,' he said, 'But I am so damn hungry ... What was I saying?'

'Dolls.'

'Oh yes. The dolls. You do understand the metaphor? These dreams are like the Russian dolls; they fit inside
one another.' He paused to chew a little more. 'But here's the twist,' he said. 'It works in either direction-'

'Who are you?' Will said.

'Don't interrupt me. I suppose it's a bit of a stretch, but imagine we're in some parallel universe in which I've
rewritten all the laws of physics-'

'I want to see who I'm talking to,' Will insisted.

'You're not talking to anyone. You're dreaming. I've rewritten all thelaws of physics and every doll fits inside every other doll, doesn't matter what size they are.'

'That's stupid.'

'Who are you calling stupid?' the stranger replied, and in his anger stepped out of the shadows.

It wasn't a man in a fur coat and a peaked cap: it was a fox. A dream of a fox, with a burnished coat and needle
whiskers and black eyes that glittered like black stars in its elegantly snouted head. It stood easily on its hind
legs, the pads of its forepaws slightly elongated, so they resembled stubby fingers.

'So now you see me,' the fox said. Will could see only one reminder, in all its poised perfection, of the wild
beast it had been: a spatter of blood on the patch of white fur at its chest. 'Don't worry,' the fox said, glancing
down at the marks, 'I've already fed. But then you remember Thomas.'

Thomas

-dead in the grass, his genitals eaten off

'Now don't be judgmental,' the fox chided. 'We do what we have to do. If there's a meal to be had, you have it.
And you start with the tenderest parts. Oh, look at your face. Believe me, you'll be putting a lot of pee-pees in
your mouth before you're very much older.' Again, the laughter. 'That's the glory of the flow, you see? I'm
talking to the boy, but the man's listening.

'It makes me wonder if you really and truly dreamt this, all those years ago. Isn't that an interesting conundrum?
Did you lie at the age of eleven and dream about me, coming to tell you about the man that you'd grow up to be,
a man who'd one day be lying in a coma dreaming about you, lying in your bed, dreaming a fox...' he shrugged
'... and so on. Following any of this?'

'No.'

'It's just rumination. The kind of thing your father'd probably enjoy debating, except that he'd be debating with a
fox and I don't think that'd fit his vision of things at all. Well ... it's his loss.'

The fox moved to the side of the bed, finding a spot where the light fell fetchingly on its coat. 'I wonder at you,'
it said, studying Will more closely. 'You don't look like a coward.'

'I wasn't,' Will protested. 'I would have taken the book to him myself, but my legs'

'I'm not talking to the boy you were,' the fox said, looking hard at him. 'I'm talking to the man you are.'

'I'm not ... a man,' Will protested softly. 'Not yet.'

'Oh now stop this. It's wearisome. You know very well that you're a grown man. You can't hide in the past
forever. It may seem comfortable for a while, but it'll smother you sooner or later. It's time you woke up, my
dear fellow.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Christ, you are so stubborn!' the fox snapped, losing his air of civility. 'I don't know where you think all this
nostalgia's going to get you! It's the future that matters.' He leaned close to Will's head, until they were almost
eyeball to eyeball. 'Do you hear me in there?' he shouted. His breath was rank, and the stench of it reminded
Will of what the creature had eaten; how well-pleased it had looked trotting away from Simeon's corpse.
Knowing this was all a dream didn't make him feel any the less intimidated; if the fox came sniffing for what
little Will had got between his legs, he'd put up a fight, but the chances were he'd lose. Bleed to death, in his
own bed, while the fox ate him alive

'Oh Lord,' the fox said, 'I can see coercion's going to get me nowhere.' He retreated from the bed a step or two,
sniffed, and said, 'May I tell you an anecdote? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. It happened I met a dog,
lying around where I go to hunt. I don't usually consort with domesticated breeds, but we got to chatting, the
way you do sometimes, and he said to me, Lord Fox - he called me Lord Fox - he said: Sometimes I think we
made a terrible mistake, us dogs, trusting them. Meaning your species, my lad. I said, why? You don't have to
scavenge like me. You don't have to sleep in the rain. He said that's not important in the grand scheme of things.
Well, I laughed. I mean, since when did a dog ever think about the grand scheme of things? But give this hound
his due, he was a bit of a thinker.

'We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we
helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said,
we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.

'Flowers? I said. (There's only so much pretension I can take from a dog.) Don't be absurd. Meat, yes. Meat,
you'd want them taking care of, but since when did a dog care for the smell of cherry blossom?

'Well, he got very sniffy at that. This conversation's over, he said, and ponced off.'

The fox was by now back at the bottom of Will's bed.

'Get the message?' he asked Will.

'Sort of.'

'This is no time to be sleeping, Will. There's a world out there needs help. Do it for the dogs if you must. But do
it. You pass that along to the man in you. You tell him to wake up. And if you don't'Lord Fox leaned over the
bedboard, and narrowed his glittering eyes -I'll come back and have your tender parts in the middle of the night.
Understand me? I'll come back sure as God put tits on trees.' His mouth opened a little wider. Will could smell
the flesh on his breath. 'Understand me?'

'Yes,' he said, trying to keep from looking at the beast. 'Yes! Yes! Yes! 'Will.'

'Yes! Yes!'

'Will, you're having a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up.'

He opened his eyes. He was in his room, lying in his bed, except that Lord Fox had gone, along with that
nameless light. In their place, a human presence. Close to the bed, Dr Johnson, who had just shaken him out of
sleep. And at the door, wearing a far less compassionate expression, his mother.

'What on earth were you dreaming about?' Dr Johnson wanted to know. Her palm was pressed against his
brow. 'Do you remember?' Will shook his head. 'Well, you've got quite a fever, my lad. It's no wonder you're
having strange dreams. But you'll mend.' She pulled a prescription pad from her bag and scrawled on it. 'He'll
need to stay in bed,' she said as she got up to leave. 'Three days at least.'

ii

This time Will had no trouble obeying: he felt so weak he couldn't have escaped the house even if he'd wanted
to, which he didn't. He had no reason to go anywhere now, not with Jacob gone. All he wanted to do was put a
pillow over his head and shut out the world. And if he smothered himself in the process, so what? There was
nothing left to live for, except pills, recriminations and dreams of Lord Fox.

If things looked grim when he woke, they looked worse a couple of hours later, when two policemen arrived to
ask him questions. One was in uniform, and sat in the corner of his bedroom, slurping from a mug of tea
supplied by Adele. The other - a droopy man who smelled of stale sweat - sat on the edge of Will's bed,
introduced himself as Detective Faraday, and then proceeded to ply Will with questions.

'I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, son. I don't want lies and I don't want fabrications. I
want the truth, in plain words. This isn't a game, son. Five men are dead.'

This was news to Will. 'You mean ... they were killed?'

'I mean they were murdered, by the woman who was with this man who abducted you.' Will wanted to say: he
didn't abduct me; I went because I wanted to go. But he held his tongue, and let Faraday babble on. 'I want you
to tell me everything he said to you, everything he did, even if he told you to keep it a secret. Even if ... even if
some of the things he said or did are hard to talk about.' Faraday lowered his voice here, as though to reassure
Will that this would be secret stuff, justbetween the two of them. Will wasn't convinced for a moment; but he told Faraday he'd answer any questions he was asked.

That's what he did, for the next hour and a quarter, with both Faraday and the constable taking notes on what he
was telling them. He knew some of what he recounted sounded strange, to say the least, and some of it,
especially the part about burning the moths, made him seem cruel. But he told it all anyway, knowing in his
heart nothing he told these dull men would ever allow them to find Jacob and Rosa. He had no information
about where Steep and McGee lived or where they were going. All he knew for certain, all he cared about, was
that he wasn't with them.

There was another interview two days later, this time from a man who wanted to talk to Will about some of the
stories he'd told Faraday, especially the part about seeing Thomas, alive and dead. The interviewer's name was
Parsons, but he invited Will to please call him Tim, which Will pointedly refused to do, and he kept circling
around the business of how Jacob had touched him. Will was as plain as he could be: said that when they were
climbing the hill and Jacob laid a hand on him, he felt strong. Later, he explained, in the copse, it had been him
who'd done the touching.

'And that's when you felt as if you were in Jacob's skin, is that right?'

'I knew it wasn't real,' Will said. 'I was having this dream, only I wasn't asleep.'

'A vision ...' Parsons said, half to himself.

Will liked the sound of it. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was a vision.' Parsons jotted something down. 'You should go up
there and look,' Will said to him.

'Do you think I might have a vision, too?'

'No,' Will said. 'But you'd find the birds, if they haven't been eaten by ... foxes or whatever...'

He caught a fearful look on the man's face. He wouldn't go up the hill to look for the birds, today or any time.
For all his understanding looks and his gentle persuasions, he didn't want to see the truth, much less know it.
And why? Because he was afraid. Faraday was the same; and the constable. All of them afraid.

The next day, the doctor pronounced that he was well enough to get up and move around the house. Seated in
front of the television, he watched an update on the murders at Burnt Yarley, with the reporter standing in the
street outside Donnelly's the Butchers. Sightseers had come from all over the country, apparently, despite the
inclement weather, to see the site of the atrocities.

'This little hamlet,' the reporter said, 'has had more visitors in its icy streets the last four days than in half a
century of summers.'

'And the sooner they go home again-'said Adele, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of vegetable soup and
cheese and chutney sandwiches for Will '-the sooner we can all go back to normal.' She set the tray on Will's
lap, warning him that the soup was very hot. 'It's so morbid,' she said, as the reporter interviewed one of the
visitors. 'Coming to see a thing like this. Have people no decency?' With that, she retreated to her
steak-and-kidney-pie making in the kitchen. Will kept watching, hoping there'd be some mention of him, but the
live coverage from the village now ceased, and the newscaster returned to report on how the search for Jacob
and Rosa had spread to Europe. There was evidence that two people fitting their description had been linked to
crimes in Rotterdam and Milan within the last five years, the most recent report from northern France, where
Rosa McGee had been involved in the deaths of three people, one of them an adolescent girl.
Will knew it was shameful to feel the pleasure he did, hearing this catalogue of deeds. But he felt it
nevertheless, and he'd learned from Jacob to speak his feelings truthfully, though in this case the only person he
was telling was himself. And what was the truth? That even if Jacob and Rosa turned out to be the most
bloodthirsty pair in history, he couldn't regret having crossed their paths. They were his connection to
something bigger than the life he'd been leading, and he would hold onto their memory like a gift.
Of all the people who talked to him during this period of recuperation, it was, surprisingly, his mother who
knew most intimately the way he was thinking. He had no verbal proof of this; she kept her exchanges with him
brief and functional. But the expression in her eyes, which had been until now a vague fatigue, was now
sharpened into wariness. She no longer looked through him as she'd been wont to do. She scrutinized him (he
several times caught her doing so when she thought he wasn't watching) with something strange in her eyes. He
knew what it was. Faraday and Parsons were afraid of the mysteries he'd talked about. His mother was afraid of
him.
'It's brought up all the bad memories, I'm afraid,' his father explained to him. 'We were doing so well and now
this.' He had called Will into his study to have this little talk. It was, of course, a monologue. 'It's all perfectly
irrational, of course, but your mother has this very Mediterranean streak in her.' He had not looked at Will more
than once so far, but gazed out of the window at the sleet, lost in his own ruminations. Like Lord Fox, Will
thought, and smiled to himself. 'But she feels as though somehow ... oh, I don't know ... somehow death's
followed us here.' He had been twirling a pencil in his fingers, but now he tossed it down on his well-ordered
desk. 'It's such nonsense,' he snorted, 'but she looks at you and-
'She blames me.'