Sacrament (28 page)

But Drew didn't move. Frustrated now, Will put his hand down into the muck in front of him, and raised
himself up. He tried to say Drew's name, but for some reason his throat loosed a vile din, more like a bark than
a name.

Drew dropped the glass of water. It smashed at his feet.

'Jesus!' he yelled, and started to back away towards the stairs. What nonsense was this? Will thought. He
needed help and the man was moving away?

He lurched towards the bedroom door, trying to call out a second time, but his throat again betrayed him. All
he could do was to stagger out onto the landing, into the light, where Drew could see him. His legs were no
more reliable than his larynx however. He stumbled at the door, and would have fallen amongst the broken
glass had he not caught hold of the jamb. He swung around, realizing in this ungainly moment that for some
reason his witless dick was hard again, slapping against his stomach as he lurched out onto the landing.
And now, by the light thrown up the stairwell from the hallway below, Drew saw his pursuer.

'Jesus Christ,' he said, the fear on his face becoming disbelief. 'Will?' he breathed.

This time, Will managed a word. 'Yes,' he said.

Drew shook his head. 'What are you playing at?' he said. 'You're freaking me out.'

Will's bare feet trod the glass, but he didn't care. He had to stop Drew abandoning him. He caught hold of the
banister and started to haul himself along the landing to the top of the stairs. His body felt utterly alien to him,
as though his muscles were in the business of re-orienting themselves. He wanted to drop back down on his
knees to ease their motion; wanted to move sleekly in pursuit of the animal in front of him. He'd been patient,
hadn't he? He'd waited in the grey until the quarry showed itself. Now it was time to give chase

'Stop this, Will,' Drew was saying. 'For God's sake! I mean it!' Fear had made him shrill. He sounded comical,
and Will laughed. Short and sharp. A yelp of a laugh.

The din was too much for Drew. What little courage he'd had broke, and he stumbled backwards down the
stairs, shouting at Will as he went - something incoherent - and snatching up his jacket at the bottom of the
flight. He was bare-chested and barefoot, but he didn't care. He wanted to be out of the house, whatever the
discomfort. Will was at the top of the stairs now, and began his descent. The slivers of his glass in his soles
were agonizing however, and after two steps - knowing he was in no condition to catch up with his quarry - he
sank down onto one of the stairs and watched Drew while he struggled to unlock the door. Only when it was
open, and Drew had sight of the street, did he look back and yell

'Fuck you, Will Rabjohns!'

Then he was gone, out into the night and away.

Will sat on the stairs for several minutes enjoying the cold gusts through the open door. His gooseflesh did
nothing to dissuade his erection. It ticked on between his legs, reminding him that for many the pleasures of the
night were only just beginning. And if for others, why not for him?

i

There was a club on Folsom called The Penitent. At the height of its notoriety in the mid-seventies, it had been
called The Serpent's Tooth, and had been to San Francisco what the Mineshaft had been to New York: a club
where nothing was verboten if it got you hard. On the wild nights, moving down the streets of the Castro, the
serious leather crowd had counted off their pleasuredomes on the knuckles of one wellgreased fist, and the
Tooth had always been one of the five. Chuck and Jean-Pierre, the owners of the club, had long since gone,
dying within three weeks of one another in the early years of the plague, and for a time the site had remained
untaken, as though in deference to the men who'd played there and passed away. But in 1987 the Sons of
Priapus, a group of onanists who'd restored masturbation to the status of a respectable handicraft, had occupied
the building for their Monday night circlejerks. The ghosts of the building had smiled on them, it seemed,
because word of the atmosphere there soon swelled the number of the Sons. They organized a second weekly
gathering, on Thursdays, and then when that become overcrowded, a third. Almost overnight the building had
become a paean to the democracy of the palm. An element of the fetishistic gradually crept into the Thursday
and Friday assemblies (Monday remained vanilla) and before long the leaders of the Sons had turned into
businessmen, leased the building, and were running the most successful sex-club in San Francisco. Chuck and
Jean-Pierre would have been proud. The Penitent had been born.

ii

The club wasn't particularly busy. Tuesdays were usually slow, and tonight was no exception. But for the thirty
or so individuals who were wandering The Penitent's bare-brick halls, or chatting around the juicebar (unlike
the backroom, this was an alcohol-free party), or idling in the television lounge, watching porno of strictly
historical interest, there would be reason to remember tonight.

Just before eleven thirty, a man appeared in the hallway, whose identity would be described variously by people
who later talked about the evening's events. Good-looking, certainly, in a man-who'd-seen-theworld kind of way. Hair slicked back or receding, depending on who was telling you the story. Eyes dark and deep-set, or invisible behind sunglasses, depending, again, on who was recounting the tale. Nobody really remembered what he was wearing in any
detail. (He wasn't naked, as a few of the more exhibitionist patrons were; that was agreed). Nor was he dressed
for casting in any specific scenario. He wasn't a biker or a cowboy, or a hardhat or a cop. He didn't carry a
paddle or a whip. Hearing this, a certain kind of listener would inevitably ask: 'Well what the hell was he into?'
to which the storytellers universally replied: sex. Well, not universally. The more pretentious may have said the
pleasures of the flesh, and the cruder said meat, but it amounted to the same thing: this man - who within the
space of an hour and a half had created a stir so potent it would become local myth inside a day - was an
embodiment of the spirit of The Penitent: a creature of pure sensation, ready to take on any partner heated
enough to match the fierceness of his desires. In this brave brotherhood, there were only three or four members
equal to the challenge, and - not coincidentally - they were the only celebrants that night who said nothing about
the experience afterwards. They kept their silence and their fantasies intact, leaving the rest to chatter on what
they'd seen and heard. In truth, no more than half a dozen people remained purely witnesses. As had happened
often in the long-ago, but infrequently now, the presence of one unfettered imagination in the crowd had been
the signal for general licence. Men who had only ever come to The Penitent to watch dared a touch, and more,
tonight. Two love-affairs began there, and both prospered; four people caught crabs, and one traced his
gonorrhoea to his loss of control on the stained sofa of the television lounge.

As for the man who'd initiated this orgy, he came several times, and went, leaving the couplings to continue
until closing time. Several people claimed he spoke to them, though he said nothing. One claimed they knew
him to be a sometime porn star who'd retired from the business and moved to Oregon. He'd returned to his old
hunting grounds, this account went, for sentimental reasons, only to vanish again into the wilderness that always
claims the sexual professional.

One part of this was certainly true. The man vanished and did not return, though every one of the thirty patrons
that night came back, crabs and gonorrhoea not withstanding, within the next few days (most of them the next
night) in the hope of seeing him again. When he did not appear, a few then made it their private mission to
discover him in some other watering-hole, but a man seen by the yellowing light of a dim lamp in a secret place
is not easily identified elsewhere. The more they thought about him and talked about him, the less clear the
memory of him became, so that a week after the event, no two witnesses could have readily agreed on any of his
personal details.

And as for the man himself, he could not remember the events of the night clearly, and thanked God for the fact.

iii

Drew had fled back home after the encounter on the stairs, and ferreting out the pack of cigarettes he kept for
emergencies (though God knows he'd never anticipated an emergency quite like this) he'd sat down and smoked
himself giddy while he thought about what he'd just experienced. Tears came, now and then, and a fit of
trembling so violent he had to sit with his knees drawn up underneath his chin until it passed. It was no use, he
knew, trying to make a sane appraisal of what had happened until tomorrow, for a very good reason: before
setting out for Will's house, he'd dropped what he'd thought was a tab of Ecstasy, just to ease him into a more
sensual mood. At the beginning of the evening, before the drug had kicked in, he'd felt slightly guilty about not
telling Will what he'd done; but he'd been so careful to present himself as a man whose drug days were behind
him that he feared the date would sour if he told the truth. Then the Ecstasy had started to mellow him out, and
the guilt had vanished, along with any need to expunge it.
So what had gone wrong? Something venomous in the tablet had turned round and bitten him, no doubt of
that. He'd had a bad trip of some kind. But that wasn't the whole answer; at least that's what his instincts told
him. He'd had bad trips before, a goodly number. He'd seen walls soften, bugs burst, clothes take flight. This
delusion had been qualitatively different in a fashion he presently had no words to describe. Tomorrow maybe,
he'd be able to articulate how it had seemed to him Will had been a conspirator with the venom in his system,
feeding the madness in Drew's veins with an insanity all of his own. And tomorrow maybe he'd also understand
why when the man he'd just made love to had come out of the bedroom, his head low, his body running with
sweat, there had been a moment (no, more than a moment) when Will's face had seemed to smear, his eyes
losing all trace of white, his teeth becoming sharp as nails. Why, in short, the man had lost all semblance of
humanity and become - for a few heartbeats, something bestial. Too wild to be a dog, too shy to be a wolf; he'd
looked, just for a moment, like a fox, yelping with laughter as he came to do mischief.

i

Hugo had never been a sentimentalist. It was one of the bounden duties of a philosopher, he'd always
contended, to eschew the mask of cheaply-gained emotion, and find a purer place, where reality might be
studied and assessed without the prejudice of feeling. That was not to say he was not weak, at times. When
Eleanor had left him, twelve years ago now, he had found himself susceptible to all manner of clap-trap that
would have left him untouched at any other time. He'd become acutely aware of how much popular culture
promoted yearning: songs of love and loss on the radio, tales of tragic mismatches on the soaps he'd catch
Adele watching in the afternoon. Even some of his own peers had turned their attentions to such trivialities;
men and women of his own age and reputation studying the semiotics of romance. It appalled him to see these
phenomena, and sickened him that he himself was prone to their blandishments. It had made him doubly harden
his heart against his estranged wife. When she'd asked for a reconciliation the following January (she'd left him
in July) he had refused it with a loathing that was fuelled in no small part by a repugnance at his own frailty.
The love songs had left their scars, and he hated himself for it. He would never be that vulnerable again.

But memory still conspired against reason. When every year towards the end of August the first intimations of
autumn appeared - a chill at twilight, and the smoky smell in the air - he would remember how it had been with
Eleanor at the best of times. How proud he'd been to have her at his side; how happy to see their partnership
fruitful: to be a father of sons who would, he'd thought, grow up to idolize him. They had sat together, he and
Eleanor, for evening after evening in those early years, planning their lives. How he would get a chair at one of
the more prestigious universities and lecture a couple of days a week while he wrote the books by which he
would change the course of Western thought. Meanwhile, she would raise their sons, then - once the children
were independent spirits (which would be quickly, given that they had such self-willed parents) - she would
return to her own field of interest, which was genealogy. She too would write a book, very probably, and garner
her share of the limelight.

That had been the dream. Then, of course, Nathaniel had been killed, and the whole prospectus had become nonsense overnight. Eleanor's nerves, which had never been good, started to require higher and higher doses of medication; the books Hugo had planned to write refused to find their way out of his head and onto the page. And the move from Manchester - which had seemed an eminently rational decision at the time - had brought its own crop of troubles. That first autumn had been the nadir, no doubt. Though there had been plenty of bad times later, it had been the insanities of that October and November that had scoured him of his former optimism. Nathaniel, in whom the virtues of the parents (Eleanor's compassion
and physical grace, Hugo's robust pragmatism and cleaving to truth) had been wed, was gone. Will meanwhile,
had become a mischief-maker, his pranks and his secretiveness only reinforcing Eleanor's belief that the best
had gone from the world, so there was no harm sedating herself into a stupor.

Grim memories, all of them. And yet when he thought of Eleanor (and he often did), the sentimental songs had
their way with him still, and he would feel that old yearning in his throat and belly. It wasn't that he wanted her
back (he'd made new arrangements since then, and they worked well enough in their unromantic way) but that
the years he'd had with her - good, bad and indifferent - had passed into history, and when he conjured her face
in his mind's eye he conjured a golden age, when it had still seemed possible to achieve something important.
He yearned then, despite himself. Not for the woman or for the life he'd lived with her, and certainly not for the
son who'd survived, but for the Hugo who had still been self-possessed enough to believe in his own
significance.

Too late now. He would not change the world of thought with a brilliantly argued thesis. He could not even
change the expressions on the faces of the students who sat before him at his lectures: slack-faced young
dullards whom he could not remotely inspire, and so now no longer tried. He had ceased to read the work of his
peers - most of it was masturbatory rubbish anyway - and the books that had once been his personal bibles,
particularly Heidegger and Wittgenstein, languished unstudied. He had exhausted them. Or, more probably,
exhausted his interaction with them. It was not that they had nothing left to teach him, but that he had no
interest left in learning. Philosophy had not made him one jot happier. Like so much of his life, it was a thing
that had seemed to offer value - a repository of meaning and enlightenment that had proved to be utterly empty.

That was one of the reasons he hadn't moved back to Manchester after Eleanor's departure: he had no interest in
rifling the graves of Academe for some pitiful nonsense to publish. The other reason was Adele. Her husband
Donald had died of a creeping cancer two years before Eleanor had left, and in widowhood the woman had
become more attentive than ever to the needs of the Rabjohns household. Hugo liked her plain manners, her plain cooking, her plain emotions, and though she was very far from the vintage beauty Eleanor had been, he had no hesitation in
seducing her. Perhaps seduction was not quite the word. She had no patience with conniving of any kind, and
he'd finally bedded her by telling her outright that he needed the comfort of a woman's company, and surely she
in her turn missed the company of a man. Now and again, she'd said, she missed having somebody to snuggle
up with, especially on cold nights. It had been, the week of this exchange, exceptionally chilly, which fact Hugo
had pointed out to her. She'd given him the closest approximation to a sexy smile her dimpled face could
manage and they'd retired to bed together. The arrangement had steadily become ritualized. She would sleep at
home four nights a week, but on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays she'd stay with Hugo. When his divorce
from Eleanor was finalized, he'd even suggested they marry, but to his surprise she'd told him she was very
happy with things just the way they were. She'd had enough of husbands for one lifetime, she told him. This
way they weren't bound to one another, and that was for the best.

ii

So life had gone on, in its unremarkable way, and despite his disappointments, Hugo had come to feel more at
home in Burnt Yarley than he'd ever thought he would. He was not a great lover of nature (the theory of it was
fine, the practice mucky and malodorous) but there was a rhythm to the agricultural year which was comforting,
even to an urban soul like his. Fields ploughed and seeded and tended and harvested; livestock born and
nurtured and slaughtered and eaten. He let the house, which was now far too big for him, run down. He didn't
care that the gutters needed mending and the window-frames were rotting away. When somebody at The Plough
mentioned that the front garden wall had partially collapsed he told them he was glad of the fact: that way the
sheep could get in to clip the lawn.

He was increasingly regarded as an eccentric in the village, he knew; a reputation he did nothing to contradict.
He'd once been quite the peacock when it came to suits and accoutrements. Now he simply wore what came to
hand, often in faintly outlandish combinations. In crowded places, such as the pub, his deafness (which was
slight in his left ear, much worse in his right) made him shout, which only increased the impression of a slightly
addled soul. He would sit at the bar drinking brandies for hours on end, opining on any subject that came up; to
hear him in the midst of shouted debate, nobody would have guessed him a man out of faith with the world. He
argued heatedly on politics (he still called himself a Marxist, if pressed), religion (of course, the opiate of the people), race, disarmament or the French, his debating skills still formidable enough to win two out of every three rounds,even when he was espousing a position he had no belief in, which was to say, most of the time.

The one subject he would not talk about was Will, though of course as Will's reputation had grown, so had
people's curiosity. Very occasionally, if Hugo was three or four brandies deep, he'd offer a non-committal reply
to an observation somebody made, but people who knew him well soon came to understand that he was not a
proud father. Those with long enough memories knew why. The Rabjohns boy had been a participant in what
was surely the grimmest episode in the history of Burnt Yarley. Twenty-nine years on, Delbert Donnelly's
daughter still put flowers on her father's grave on the first Sunday of every month, and the reward for
information leading to the arrest of his killers (posted by the meat baron in Halifax from whom Delbert had
always got his pies and sausage) was still good. At the time of his death, so history told, he'd been playing the
Good Samaritan, out in the snow looking for a runaway child, a child who, it was believed by those who still
mused on the mystery, had been somehow complicit with the killers. Nothing had ever been proved, of course,
but anyone who had followed Will Rabjohns' rise to fame could not help but notice the perversity of his work.
Nobody in the village could have used that word, besides perhaps Hugo. They would have called it a mite
strange or not quite right, or - if they were in a superstitious mood, the Devil's business. It certainly wasn't
wholesome or healthy to be going around the world the way he had, finding dying animals to photograph. It was
further proof, for those who cared, that Will Rabjohns, man and boy, was a bad lot. So bad, in fact, that his own
father would barely admit paternity.

Hugo's silence, however, did not mean Will was not in his thoughts. Though he spoke with his son rarely, and
when he did their exchanges were remote, the mysteries of that winter almost three decades before (and of his
son's place in the midst of those mysteries), vexed him more as the years passed, and for a reason he would
never have admitted to anyone. Philosophy had failed him, love had failed him, ambition and ego had failed
him: only the unknown remained to him, as a source of hope. Of course, it was everywhere, the unknown. In the
new physics, in disease, in a neighbour's eyes. But his closest brush with it remained the business of that bitter
night so many years ago. Had he realized at the time something extraordinary was afoot, he would have paid
closer attention: memorized the signs, so that he might later find his way back into its presence. But he had been
too busy with the labours of being Hugo to notice. Only now, when those distractions had rotted away, did he
see the mystery glinting there, as cold, remote and constant as a star.

He'd read in Newsweek an interview in which his son, when asked what quality he valued most in himself, had
replied patience. That came from me, Hugo had thought. I know how to wait. That was how he passed the days
now, when he wasn't in Manchester. Sitting in his study smoking a French cigarette, waiting. When Adele came
in with a cup of tea or a sandwich he would turn his attention to his papers as though he were in the midst of
some profound thought, but as soon as she'd gone he'd be gazing out through the window again, watching cloud
shadows pass across the fell that rose behind the house. He didn't know exactly what he was waiting for, but he
trusted his wits enough to be certain he'd recognize it when it came.