Sacrament

  “Yes—”

  “Louder.”

  “Yes! I understand. Perfectly.” The admission was enough to banish the horror. The tide retreated and a moment later was gone entirely, leaving Will hanging in the darkness again.

  “Isn’t this a finer place?” Steep said. “In a hush like this we might have a hope of knowing who we are. There’s no error here. No imperfection. Nothing to distract us from God.”

  “This is the way you want the world?” Will murmured.

  “Empty?”

  “Not empty. Cleansed.”

  “Ready to begin again?”

  “Oh no.”

  “But it will, Steep. You might drive things into hiding for a while, but there’ll always be some mudflat you missed, some rock you didn’t lift. And life will come back. Maybe not human life. Maybe something better. But life, Jacob. You can’t kill the world.”

  “I’ll reduce it to a petal,” Jacob replied, lightly. Will could hear the smile in the man’s voice as he spoke. “And God’ll be there. Plain. I’ll see him, plain. And I’ll understand why I was made.” His face was starting to congeal again. There was the wide, pale brow, sheltering that deep, troubled gaze, the fine nose, the finer mouth.

  “Suppose you’re wrong,” Will said. “Suppose God wanted the world to be filled? Ten thousand kinds of buttercup? A million kinds of beetle? No two of anything alike. Just suppose. Suppose you’re the enemy of God, Jacob. Suppose . . . you’re the Devil and you don’t know it?”

  “I’d know. Though I can’t see Him yet, God moves in me.”

  “Well,” said Will, “he moves in me too.” And the words, though he’d never thought he’d hear them from his own tongue, were true. God was in him now. Always had been. Steep had the rage of some Judgmental Father in his eye, but the divinity Will had in him was no less a Lord, though He talked through the mouth of a fox and loved life more than Will had supposed life could be loved. A Lord who’d come before him in innumerable shapes over the years. Some pitiful, to be sure, some triumphant.

  A blind polar bear on a garbage heap; two children in painted masks; Patrick sleeping, Patrick smiling, Patrick speaking love.

  Camellias on a windowsill and the skies of Africa. His Lord was there, everywhere, inviting him to see the soul of things.

  Sensing the certainty moving in Will, Steep countered in the only way he knew how.

  “I put the hunger for death in you,” he said. “That makes you mine. We might both regret it, but it’s the truth.” How could Will deny it, while that knife was still in his hand? Taking his gaze from Steep’s face, he sought the weapon out, following the form of the man’s shoulder, along his arm to the fist that was still gripping the blade, and down, down to his own hand, which still grasped the hilt.

  Then, seeing it, he let it go. It was so simple to do. The sum of the blade’s harms would not be swelled by his wielding of it, not by a single wound.

  The consequence of his letting go was instantaneous. The darkness was instantly extinguished, and the solid world sprang up around him: the hail, the body, the staircase that led up to the open roof, through which straight beams of sun were coming.

  And in front of him, Steep, staring at him with a curious look on his face. Then he shuddered, and his fingers opened just enough to allow the blade to slide from his grip. It had opened his palm, deeply, and the wound was seeping. It wasn’t blood that came, however. It was the same stuff that had seeped from Rosa’s body, finer threads from a smaller wound, but the same bright liquor. Fragments of it curled lazily around his fingers and, without thinking what he was doing, Will reached out to touch it. The threads sensed him and came to meet his hand. He heard Steep tell him no, but it was too late. Contact had been made. Once again, he felt the matter pass into him and through him. This time, however, he was prepared to watch for its revelations, and he wasn’t disappointed. The face before him unveiled itself, its flesh confessing the mystery that lay beneath.

  He knew it already. The same strange beauty he’d seen lurking in Rosa was here in Steep too: the form of the Nilotic, like something carved from the eternal.

  “What did Rukenau do to you two?” Will said softly.

  The flesh inside Steep’s flesh stared out at him like a prisoner, despairing of release. “Tell me,” Will pressed. Still it said nothing. Yet it wanted to speak; Will could see the desire to do so in its eyes; how it wanted to tell its story. He leaned a little closer to it. “Try,” he said.

  It inclined its head toward him, until their mouths were only three or four inches apart. No sound escaped it, nor could, Will suspected. The prisoner had been mute too long to find its voice again so quickly. But while they were so close, gaze meeting gaze, he could not waste its proximity. He leaned another inch toward it, and the Nilotic, knowing what was coming, smiled. Then Will kissed it, lightly, reverently, on the lips.

  The creature returned his kiss, pressing its cool mouth against his.

  The next moment, as had happened with Rosa, the thread of light burned itself out in him, and was gone. The veil fell instantly, obscuring what lay beneath, and the face Will was kissing was Steep’s face.

  Jacob pushed him away with a shout of disgust, as though he’d momentarily shared Will’s trance and only now realized what the power inside him had sanctioned. Then he fell back against the wall, clenching his wounded hand tightly closed to be certain no more of this traitorous fluid escaped, and with the back of his other hand, wiped his lips clean. He scoured every trace of gentility from his face as he did so. All perplexity, all doubt, were gone. Fixing Will with a rabid gaze, he reached down and picked up the knife that lay between them. There was no room for further exchange, Will knew. Steep wasn’t going to be talking about God or forgiveness any longer. All he wanted to do was kill the man who’d just kissed him.

  Even though he knew there was no hope of peace now, Will took his time as he retreated to the door, studying Steep. When next they met, it would be death for one of them; this would most likely be his last opportunity to look at the man whose brotherhood he had so passionately wanted to share. A kiss such as they’d exchanged was nothing to a man who was certain of himself. But Steep was not certain, never had been. Like so many of the men Will had watched and wanted in his life, he lived in fear of his manhood being seen for what it was, a murderous figment, a trick of spit and swagger that concealed a far stranger spirit.

  He could watch no longer, another five seconds and the knife would be at his throat. He turned and took himself off across the threshold, down the path and out into the street.

  Steep didn’t follow. He would brood a while, Will guessed, putting his thoughts in murderous order before he began his final pursuit.

  And pursue he would. Will had kissed the spirit in him and that was a crime the figment would never forgive. It would come, knife in hand. Nothing was more certain.

  I

  Will emerged from the Donnelly house in a daze and remained that way for the next hour or so. He was aware of getting into Frannie’s car, Rosa half-lying across the seat behind him, and their taking off out of the village as though they had a horde of fallen angels on their heels, but he was monosyllabic in his responses to Frannie’s inquiries, resenting her attempts to snap him out of his fugue. Was he hurt? She wanted to know. He told her no. And Steep, what about Steep? Alive, he told her. Hurt?

  She asked. Yes, he told her. Badly enough to kill him? She asked.

  He told her no. Pity, she said.

  A little while later, they stopped at a garage and Frannie got out to use the pay phone. He didn’t care why. But she told him anyway when she got back into the driver’s seat. She’d called the police, to tell them where to find Sherwood’s body. She was stupid not to have done it earlier, she said. Maybe they would have caught Steep.

  “Never,” he said.

  They drove on again in silence. Rain began to spatter the windshield, fat drops slapping hard against the glass. He wound the window halfway down, and t
he rain came in against his face, and the smell of the rain too, tangy, metallic. Slowly, the chill began to rouse him from his trance. The numbness in his knife hand started to recede, and his fingers and palm began instead to ache. As the minutes passed he began to pay some attention to the journey he was on, though there was nothing of any great significance to be noted. The roads they were traveling were neither jammed nor deserted, the weather neither foul nor fine; sometimes the clouds would unleash a little rain, sometimes they would show the sliver of blue. It was all reassuringly mundane, and he took refuge from his memories of Steep’s vision by making himself its witness. There to his left was a car carrying two nuns and a child; there was a woman putting on lipstick as she drove; there was a bridge being demolished and a train running parallel to the motorway for a little distance, with men and women rocking in its windows, staring out, glassy-eyed. There was a sign, pointing north to Glasgow: one hundred eighty miles.

  And then without warning, Frannie said, “I’m sorry. We have to stop,” and bringing the vehicle over to the side of the highway, got out. It was all Will could do to stir himself from his seat, but at length he did so. The rain was coming on again; his scalp ached where the drops struck

  “Are you sick?” he asked her. It was the first time he’d put a sentence together since they’d left the village, and it took effort.

  “No,” Frannie said, wiping rain from her eyes.

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I have to go back,” she said. “I can’t . . .” She shook her head, plainly enraged at herself. “I shouldn’t have left him. What was I thinking? He’s my own brother.”

  “He’s dead,” Will said. “You can’t help him.” She covered her mouth with her hand, still shaking her head. There were tears mingling with the rain, running down her face.

  “If you want to go back,” Will said, “we’ll go back.” Frannie’s hand slid from her face. “I don’t know what I want,” she said.

  “Then what would Sherwood have wanted?” Frannie gazed forlornly at the bundled figure in the back of the car. “He would have done his damnedest to make Rosa happy. Lord knows why, but that’s what he would have done.” She looked at Will now, her expression close to utter despair.

  “You know, I’ve spent most of my adult life doing things to accommodate him?” she said. “I suppose I may as well do this one last thing.” She sighed. “But this is the last, damn it.”

  Will took over the wheel for the next stage of the journey.

  “Where are we headed?” he wanted to know.

  “To Oban,” Frannie told him.

  “What’s in Oban?”

  “It’s where you catch the ferries for the islands.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I almost went, five or six years ago, with a group from the church. To see Iona. But I canceled at the last minute.”

  “Sherwood?”

  “Of course. He didn’t want to be left alone. So I didn’t go.”

  “We still don’t know which island we’re heading for,” Will said. “I got an old atlas from the house. Do you want to run through the names with Rosa, to see if any of them ring a bell?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you awake?”

  “Always,” Rosa said. Her voice was weak.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” she said.

  “How’s the bandage holding up?” Frannie asked her.

  “It’s intact,” Rosa said. “I’m not going to die on you, don’t worry. I’ll hold on till I see Rukenau.”

  “Where’s the atlas?” Frannie wanted to know.

  “On the floor behind you,” Will told her. She reached round and picked it up. “Have you considered that Rukenau may be dead?” Will said to Rosa.

  “He had no plans to die,” Rosa replied.

  “He might have done it anyway.”

  “Then I’ll find his grave and lie down with him,” she said.

  “And maybe his dust will forgive mine.” Frannie had found the Western Isles in the atlas, and now began to recite their names, starting with the Outer Hebrides.

  “Lewis, Harris, North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Benbecula, and Arran.” Then on to the Inner, “Mull, Coil, Tiree, Islay, Skye . . .” Rosa knew none of them. There were some, Frannie pointed out, that were too small to be named in the atlas; maybe it was one of them. When they reached Oban they’d get a more detailed map, and try again. Rosa wasn’t very optimistic. She’d never been very good remembering names, she said. That had always been Steep’s forte. She’d been good with faces, however, whereas he—

  “Let’s not talk about him.” Frannie said, and Rosa fell silent.

  So on they went. Through the Lake District to the Scottish border, and on, as the afternoon dwindled, past the shipyards of Clydesbank, alongside Loch Lomond and on through Luss and Crianlarich up to Tyndrum. There was for Will an almost sublime moment a few miles short of Oban when the wind brought the smell of the sea his way. Forty some years on the planet, and the chill scent of sharp salt still moved him, bringing back childhood dreams of the faraway. He had long ago made these dreams a reality, of course, seen more of the world than most. But the promise of sea and horizon still caught at his heart, and tonight, with the last of the light sinking west, he knew why. They were the masks of something far more profound, those dreams of perfect islands where perfect love might be found. Was it any wonder his spirits rose as the road brought them down through the steep town to the harbor? Here, for the first time, he felt as if the physical world was in step with its deeper significance, the forms of his yearning made concrete. Here was the busy quayside from which they would depart; here was the Sound of Mull, its unwelcoming waters leading the eye out toward the sea. What lay across those waters, far from the comfort of this little harbor, was not just an island; it was the possibility that his spirit’s voyage would find completion, where he would come to know, perhaps, why God had seeded him with yearning.

  II

  He had expected Oban to be just a bland little ferry port, but it surprised him. Though night had fallen by the time they found their way down to the quay, both town and harbor were still abuzz: the last of the summer’s tourists window-shopping or out to drink or dine; a gang of youths playing football on the Esplanade; a small flotilla of fishing boats heading out on the night tide.

  There was a ferry leaving as they arrived at the dock, all alive with lights. Will parked the car beside the ticket office, which was in the process of closing up for the night. A somewhat severe looking woman told Will that the next sailing would be at seven the following morning, and that no, he didn’t need to book passage.

  “You can get aboard at six,” the woman said.

  “With the car?”

  “Aye, you can take your vehicle. But the morning boat’s only for the Inner islands. Which were you headin’ for?” Will told her he hadn’t yet made up his mind. She gave him a small booklet of timetables and fares, and along with it a glossy brochure describing the various islands the Caledoman MacBrayne ferries visited. Then she said again that the first sailing was at seven sharp the following morning and pulled the ticket window shutter down.

  Will returned to the car with the brochures and the information, only to find the vehicle empty. Frannie he discovered sitting on the harbor wall, watching the departing fishing boats.

  Rosa, she informed him, had taken herself off walking, refusing Frannie’s offer of accompaniment.

  “Where did she go?” Will asked.

  Frannie pointed to the distant harbor wall, which jutted out into the sound.

  “I suppose it’s stupid to worry about her,” Will said. “I mean, I’m sure she can look after herself. Still . . .” He returned his gaze to Frannie, who was staring down into the dark waters lapping against the wall seven or eight feet below. “You look deep in thought,” he remarked.

  “Not really,” she said, almost coyly, as though she were a little embarrassed to admit the fact.

&nbsp
; “Tell me.”

  “Well, I was just thinking about a sermon, of all things.”

  “A sermon?”

  “Yes. We had a visiting vicar at St. Luke’s three Sundays ago. He was pretty good, actually. He talked about—what was the phrase he had?—doing holy work in a secular world.” She glanced up at Will. “That’s what this trip feels like, at least to me. It’s as though we were on a pilgrimage. Does that sound daft?”

  “You’ve sounded dafter.”

  She smiled, still looking at the water. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve been sensible for far too long.” She looked at him again, her meditative mood passed. “You know what?” she said.

  “I’m starved.”

  “Should we try and check into a hotel?”

  “No,” she said. “I vote we just eat and then sleep in the car. What time does the ferry depart?”

  “Seven o’clock sharp,” Will said. Then, with a fatalistic shrug, “Of course we’re not sure if it’s even going where we need it to go.”

  “I say we go anyway,” Frannie said. “Go and never come back.”

  “Don’t pilgrims usually return home again?”

  “Only if there’s something to go home for. ” They walked along the esplanade looking for somewhere to eat, and as they walked Frannie said, “Rosa doesn’t think you can be trusted.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because all you care about is Steep. Or you and Steep.”

  “When did she say this?”

  “When I was bandaging her up.”

  “She doesn’t know what’s she’s talking about,” Will said.

  They walked in a silence for a little distance, past a couple of lovers who were leaning against the harbor wall, whispering and kissing.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened in the house?” Frannie finally said.

  “Isn’t it pretty obvious? I tried to kill him.”

  “But you didn’t do it?”

  “As I said, I tried. Then he grabbed hold of the knife, and . . . and I got a little glimpse of what I think he was before he became Jacob Steep.”