Sacrament

  “I think this conversation’s at an end, don’t you?”

  “I certainly feel much better about things,” the fox replied, as though they were two belligerent neighbors who’d just had a heart to heart.

  Will got to his feet. “Does that mean I can stop dreaming now?” he said.

  “You’re not dreaming,” the fox replied. “You’ve been wide awake for the last half hour—”

  “Not true,” Will said, evenly.

  “I’m afraid so,” the fox replied. “You opened up a little hole in your head that night with Steep, and now the wind can get in.

  The same wind that blows through his head comes whistling through that shack of yours—”

  Will had heard more than enough. “That’s it!” he said, starting toward the door. “You’re not going to start playing mind games with me.”

  Raising his paws in mock surrender, Lord Fox stood aside, and Will strode out into the hallway. The fox followed, his claws tap-tapping on the boards.

  “Ah, Will,” he whined, “we were doing so well—”

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “No!”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Will reeled around and yelled back, “Okay, I’m not! I’m crazy! I’m completely fucking ga-ga!”

  “Good,” the fox said calmly, “we’re getting somewhere.”

  “You want me to go up against Steep in a straitjacket, is that it?”

  “No. I just want you to let go of some of your saner suppositions.”

  “For instance?”

  “I want you to accept the notion that you, William Rabjohns, and I, a semimythical fox, can and do coexist.”

  “If I accepted that I’d be certifiable.”

  “All right, try it this way: You recall the Russian dolls?”

  “Don’t start with them—”

  “No, it’s very simple. Everything fits inside everything else—”

  “Oh, Christ . . .” Will murmured to himself. The thought was now creeping upon him that if this was indeed a dream—and it was, it had to be—then maybe all that had gone before, back to his waking, was also a dream; he never woke, but was still comatose in a bed in Winnipeg—

  His body began to tremble.

  “What’s wrong?” the fox said.

  “Just shut up!” he yelled, and started to stumble up the stairs.

  The animal pursued him. “You’ve gone very pale. Are you sick? Get yourself some peppermint tea. It’ll settle your stomach.”

  Did he tell the beast to shut up again? He wasn’t sure. His senses were phasing in and out. One moment he was falling up the stairs, then he was practically crawling across the landing, then he was in the bathroom, puking, while the fox yattered on behind him about how he should take care, because he was in a very delicate frame of mind (as if he didn’t know) and all manner of lunacies could creep up on him.

  Then he was in the shower, his hand, ridiculously remote from him, struggling to grasp the handle. His fingers were as weak as an infant’s, then the handle turned suddenly and he was struck by a deluge of icy water. At least his nerve endings were fully operational, even if his wits weren’t. In two heartbeats his body was solid goose flesh, his scalp throbbing with the cold.

  Despite his panic, or perhaps because of it, his mind was uncannily agile, leaping instantly to the places where he’d felt such numbing cold before. In Balthazar, of course, as he lay wounded on the ice, and on the hill above Burnt Yarley, lost in the bitter rain. And on the banks of the River Neva, in the winter of the ice palace—

  Wait he thought. That isn’t my memory.

  The birds dropping dead out of the sky—

  That’s a piece of Steep’s life, not mine.

  The river like a rock, and Eropkin—poor, doomed Eropkin—building his masterwork out of ice and light—

  He shook his head violently to dislodge these trespassers.

  But they wouldn’t go. Frozen into immobility by the icy water, all he could do was stand there while Steep’s unwanted memories came flooding into his head.

  VIII

  He was standing in the crowded street in St. Petersburg, and if the cold had not already snatched his breath, the sight before him would have done so: Eropkin’s palace, its walls raised forty feet high and glittering in the light of the torches and bonfires that were blazing on every side. They were warm, those fires, but the palace did not shed a drop of water, for their heat could not compete with the frigid air.

  He looked around at the throng who pressed at the barricades, daring the hussars who kept them in check with boots and threats. By Christ, how they stank tonight! Fetid clothes on fetid bodies.

  “Rabble . . .” He murmured.

  To Steep’s left, a beet-faced brat was shrieking on her father’s shoulders, snot frozen at her nostrils. To his right a drunkard with a grease-clogged beard reeled about with a woman in an even more incapacitated state clinging to his arm.

  “I hate these people,” said a voice close to his ear. “Let’s come back later when it’s quiet.”

  He looked round at the speaker, and there was Rosa, her exquisite face, pink from the cold, framed by her furlined hood.

  Oh, but she was beautiful tonight, with the lantern flames flickering in her eyes.

  “Please, Jacob,” she said, tugging on his sleeve in that little-girl-lost fashion that she knew worked so well. “We could make a baby tonight, Jacob. Truly, I believe we could.” She was pressing close to him now, and he caught the scent of her breath; a fragrance no Parisian perfumery could ever hope to capture. Even here, in the heart of an iron winter, she had the smell of spring about her. “Put your hand on my belly, Jacob,” she said, taking his hand in hers and placing it there. “Isn’t that warm?” It was.

  “Don’t you think we might make a life tonight?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “So let’s be away from these animals,” she said. “Please, Jacob. Please.”

  Oh, she could be persuasive when she was in this coquettish mood. And truth to tell he liked to play along.

  “Animals, you say?”

  “No better,” she replied, with a growl of contempt in her voice.

  “Would you have them dead?” he asked her.

  “Every one of them.”

  “Every one?”

  “But you and me. And from our love a new race of perfect people would come, to have the world the way God intended it.” Hearing this, he couldn’t refrain from kissing her, though the streets of St. Petersburg were not like those of Paris or London, and any display of affection, especially one as passionate as theirs, would be bound to draw censure. He didn’t care.

  She was his other, his complement, his completion. Without her, he was nothing. Taking her glorious face in his hands, he laid his lips on hers, her breath a fragrant phantom rising between their faces. The words that breath carried still astonished him, though he had heard them innumerable times.

  “I love you,” she told him. “And I will love you as long as I have life.”

  He kissed her again, harder, knowing there were envious eyes upon them, but caring not at all. Let the crowd stare and cluck and shake their heads. They would never feel in all their dreary lives what he and Rosa felt now: the supreme conjunction of soul and soul.

  And then, in the midst of the kiss, the din of the crowd receded and completely disappeared. He opened his eyes. They were no longer standing on the street side of the barricades, but were at the very threshold of the palace. The thoroughfare behind them was deserted. Half the night had passed in the time it took to draw breath. It was now long after midnight.

  “Nobody’s going to spy on us?” Rosa was asking him.

  “I’ve paid all the guards to go and drink themselves stupid,” he told her. “We’ve got four hours before the morning crowd starts to come and gawp. We can do what we like in here.” She slipped the hood back off her head and combed her hair o
ut with her fingers so that it lay abundantly about her shoulders. “Is there a bedroom?” she said.

  He smiled. “Oh yes, there’s a bedroom. And a big four-poster bed, all carved out of ice.”

  “Take me to it,” she said, catching hold of his hand.

  Into the palace they ventured, through the receiving room, which was handsomely appointed with mantelpiece and furniture, through the vast ballroom with its glittering stalactite chandelier, through the dressing room, where there was arranged a wardrobe of coats and hats and shoes, all perfectly carved out of ice.

  “It’s uncanny,” Jacob said, glancing back toward the front door, “the way the light refracts.” Though they had ventured deep into the heart of the structure, the glow from the torches set all around the palace was still bright, flickering through the translucent walls. To other eyes it would surely have aroused only wonder, but Jacob was discomfited. Something about the place awoke in him a memory he couldn’t name.

  “I’ve been somewhere like this before,” he said to Rosa.

  “Another ice palace?” she said.

  “No. A place that’s as bright inside as it is out.” She ruminated on this for a moment. “Yes. I’ve seen such a place,” she said. She wandered from his side and ran her palm over the crystalline wall. “But it wasn’t made of ice,” she said.

  “I’m sure not—”

  “What then?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, when I try to remember things, I lose my way.”

  “So do I.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Consorting with Rukenau maybe.”

  She spat on the floor at the sound of his name. “Don’t talk about him,” she said.

  “But there’s a connection, sweet,” Steep said. “I swear there is.”

  “I won’t hear you talk about him, Jacob,” she said, and hurried away, her skirts hissing across the icy floor.

  He followed her, telling her he’d say no more about Rukenau if it troubled her so much. She was angry now—her rages were always sudden, and sometimes brutal—but he was determined to placate her, as much for his own equilibrium as for hers. Once he had her on the bed, he’d kiss her rage away, easily; open her warm body to the cold air and lick her flesh till she sobbed. Her flesh could stand to be naked here. She complained of the cold, of course, and demanded he buy her furs to keep her from freezing, but it was all a sham. She’d heard other women demand such things from their husbands and was playing the same petulant game. And just as it seemed to be her wifely duty to pout and stamp and flee him in some invented tantrum, so it was his to pursue and coerce, and end up taking her body—forcibly, if necessary—until she confessed that his only errors were errors of love, and she adored him for them. It was an absurd rigmarole, and they both knew it. But if they were to be husband and wife, then they were to play out the rituals as though they came naturally. And in truth, some portion of them did. This part, for instance, where he caught up to her and held her tight, told her not to be a ninny, or he’d have to fuck her all the harder. She squirmed in his arms, but made no attempt to escape him. Only told him to do his worst, his very worst.

  “I’m not afraid of you, Jacob Steep,” she said. “Nor your fucks.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said, lifting her up and carrying her through to the bedroom. The bed itself was in every way a perfect replica of the real thing, even to the dent in the pillow, as though some frigid sleeper had a moment past risen from the spot. He gently laid her there; her hair spread upon the snowy linen, and began to unbutton her. She had forgiven his talk of Rukenau already, it seemed. Forgotten it, perhaps, in her hunger to have Steep’s flesh in her, a desire as sudden as her rages, and sometimes just as brutal.

  He had bared her breasts, and put his mouth to her nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth. She shuddered with pleasure and pressed his head to the deed, reaching down to pull at his shirt. He was as hard as the bed on which they lay.

  Eschewing all tenderness, he hoisted up her skirt, found the place beneath where his prick ached to go, and slid his fingers there, whispering in her ear that she was the finest slut in all of Christendom and deserved to be treated accordingly. She caught his face in her hands and told him to do his worst, at which invitation he removed his fingers and pressed his prick to service, so suddenly her cry of complaint echoed through the glacial halls.

  He took his time, as she demanded he did, laying his full weight upon her as he climbed to his discharge. And as he climbed, and her shouts of pleasure came back to him off the ceiling and walls, the feeling that had caught him in the passage came again: that he had been in a place which this palace, for all its glories, could not approach in splendor.

  “So bright—” he said, seeing its luminescence in his head.

  “What’s bright?” Rosa gasped.

  “The deeper we go,” he said, “the brighter it gets—”

  “Look at me!” she demanded. “Jacob! Look at me!” He thrust on mechanically, his arousal no longer in service of her pleasure, or even his own, but fueling the vision. The higher he climbed, the brighter it became, as though the spilling of his seed would bring him into the heart of this glory. The woman was writhing under his assault, but he paid her no mind; he just pressed on, and on, as the brightness grew, and with it his hope that he would know this place by and by, name it, comprehend it.

  The moment was almost upon him; the blaze of recognition certain. A few more seconds, a few more thrusts into her void, and he’d have his revelation.

  Then she was pushing him away from her, pushing his body with all her strength. He held on, determined not to be denied his vision, but she was not going to indulge him. For all her squealing and sobbing, she only ever played at subjugation—the way she played at the lost girl or the needy wife—and now, wanting him away from her, she had only to use her strength.

  Almost casually, she threw him out and off her, across the gelid bed. Instead of spilling his seed in the midst of revelation, he discharged meekly, in half-finished spurts, too distracted by her violence to catch the vision that had been upon him.

  “You were thinking of Rukenau again!” she yelled, sliding off the bed and tucking her breasts from view. “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you I’d have no part of it!” Jacob sealed his eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of what had just escaped him. He’d been so close, so very close. But it had gone, like a firework dying in the heavens.

  And in the dark, the sound of water, splashing down over him.

  He opened his eyes—and found that he’d slumped down in the shower, while the icy water continued to berate his skull.

  “Christ,” he murmured, reaching up feebly and shutting off the flow. Then he lay gasping and shuddering in the draining water. What the hell was happening to him? First dreams within dreams. Now visions within visions? He was either having the mother of all nervous breakdowns, which was an unpalatable thought to say the least, or else—or else what? That Lord Fox was right? Was that even an option? Was it remotely possible that whatever the animal was—symptom or spirit—it was telling him some kind of metaphysical truth, and all that his skull contained was, like a Russian doll, itself contained? Or rather, that his mind’s contents, which included his memories of Steep and a bloody-snouted fox, were paradoxically enveloped by some portion of those contents; Steep indoctrinating him with his own mythology, in which that same bloody-snouted fox had been raised to lordship?

  “All right,” he said to the animal, too exhausted to argue with it any longer. “Suppose for the sake of some peace and quiet I go along with what you’re telling me? Does that mean I don’t have to think about fucking Rosa any more? Because I’m sorry, that’s just not my idea of a fun night on the town. Are you listening to me?”

  There was no reply forthcoming from the fox. He hauled himself to his feet, grabbed a towel to wrap around his trembling body, and staggered, still dripping, out onto the landing. It was deserted. He went downstairs
. The file room, the darkroom, the kitchen were all deserted. The fox had gone.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, where the carton of milk he’d been drinking from still stood, and was suddenly, almost inexplicably, overtaken by a fit of gentle laughter. His situation was absurd: He’d spent the night trading metaphysics with a fox, whose only purpose, it seemed, was to open Will’s head up to a notion of its own reality. Well, it had succeeded. Whether he was dreaming or being dreamed, whether Steep was in his head, or he was in Steep’s, whether the fox was myth, mischief, or flea bitten proof of his lunacy, it was all part of a journey he had no choice but to take. His recognition of that fact, and his accept-ance of it, were curiously comforting. He’d trekked to so many wild places in his life that he’d finally run out of faith with such journeys. But perhaps they had all been taken in order to bring him back home, and set him on a journey he could not have found until he despaired of every other.

  He emptied the carton of milk and—still smiling to himself at the absurdity and simplicity of this—went to bed. His sheets were a luxury after the cold bed in Eropkin’s palace and, drawing the quilt up around him, he fell into a contented sleep.

  IX

  From the verandah of what had once been the Portuguese commander’s residence in Suhar, in Oman, Jacob had a magnificent view across the Gulf to Jask, and up the coast to the Strait of Hormuz. It was many centuries since the occupiers had vacated the country. and the modest mansion had fallen into grievous decay. Nevertheless, he and Rosa had been very comfortable here for the last twenty two days. Though the town had dwindled into dusty obscurity since imperialist days, it was notable for one peculiarity: A band of transvestites, locally known as Xanith and claiming to be possessed by the spirits of minor female divinities, wandered its streets. As ever, Rosa was happiest in the presence of men who pretended her sex, and hearing of this extraordinary tribe had demanded Steep accompany her in search of them, given that she’d been at his side on a number of successful killing sprees of late. He had plenty of work to do on his journals, transposing the notes he’d taken at the extinction sites into a final form, so he agreed to go along with her, though he emphasized that when his work resumed he would be stepping up the scale of his endeavours and would expect her full cooperation. Things had gone well for him of late. A dozen near certain extinctions in the last seven months, eight of them, it was true, minor forms of South American insect life, but all grist to the fatal mill. And now, all guided into legend by his careful hand.