Sacrament

  “Thomas Simeon?”

  Rukenau halted in his descent. “Oh Jesu,” he said. “You really do know something about me, don’t you?”

  “I’d still like to know more.”

  “Thomas came back to me, at last. Did you know that?”

  “Once he was dead,” Will said. This piece of the story was a guess on his part, fueled by Dwyer’s theorizing, but the more he persuaded Rukenau he knew, the more he hoped the man would confess. And Dwyer had been right in her deductions it seemed, for Rukenau sighed and said: “Indeed, he came back to me a corpse. And I think a little of my own life went out of me when he was laid in the rocks. He had a greater supply of God’s grace in his little finger than I have in my entire being. Or ever had.”

  Now after a little pause to mull this admission over, he continued to descend, and by degrees Will got a better sense of him.

  He was dressed in what had once been fine clothes, but which now, like almost everything in the house, were besmirched and encrusted. Only his face and hands were pale, uncannily pale, so that he resembled a bloodless doll. There was nothing brittle about his motion however; he moved with a kind of sinuous grace, so that despite his excremental garb and the blandness of his features, Will could not take his gaze from the man.

  “Tell me,” Rukenau said, as he continued his descent, “how is it you know these people at the threshold?”

  “You call them Nilotics, is that right?”

  “Almost, but not quite,” Rukenau said. Once again he paused. He was now perhaps ten feet above Will’s head and perched upon a platform of bound boughs. He went down on his haunches and studied Will through the mesh as a fisherman might, to study his catch. “I think despite your acuity you haven’t quite comprehended their natures yet. Is that not so?”

  “You’re right,” Will said. “I haven’t. That’s why I came here, to find out.”

  Rukenau leaned forward a little further and pulled aside a portion of encrusted rope in order to see his subject better, which in turn gave Will a clearer view of Rukenau. It wasn’t simply his sinuous motion that carried an echo of the serpentine.

  There was a gloss to his flesh which put Will in mind of a snake, as did his total absence of hair. He had no eyebrows, nor lashes, nor any sight of hair on his cheek or chin. If this was some dermatological disease, he didn’t seem to be suffering any other effects. In fact he fairly radiated good health—his eyes gleamed, and his teeth shone, uncommonly white.

  “You came here out of curiosity?” he said.

  “I suppose that’s part of it.”

  “What else?”

  “Rosa . . . is dying.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “She is. I swear.”

  “And the male? Jacob? Is he sickening too?”

  “Not the way Rosa is, but yes . . . he’s sickening.”

  “Then,” Rukenau chewed on this a moment, “I think we should continue this conversation without young Theodore.

  Why don’t you go fetch me some sustenance, my boy?”

  “Yes, sir—” Ted replied, thoroughly cowed.

  “Wait—” Will said, catching hold of Ted’s arm before he could leave. “Ted had something to ask you for.”

  “Yes, yes, his wife,” Rukenau said, wearily. “I hear you sobbing over her, Theodore, night and day. But I can do nothing for you, I’m afraid. She doesn’t care to see you any longer. That’s the long and short of it. Don’t take it too personally. She’s just become enthralled with this damnable place.”

  “You don’t like it here?” Will said.

  “Like it?” Rukenau replied, his mask of pleasantry evaporating in a heartbeat. “This is my prison, Will. Do you understand me? My purgatory. Nay, I would say, my Hell.” He leaned down a little and studied Will’s face. “But I wonder, when I look at you, if perhaps some gracious angel hasn’t sent you to set me free.”

  “It can’t be that difficult to get out of here, surely,” Will said. “Ted told me he found his way back to the front door without—”

  Rukenau interrupted, his voice all exasperation. “What do you suppose would happen to me if I stepped outside these walls?” he said. “I’ve shed a lot of skins in this house, Will, and I’ve cheated the Reaper doing so. But the moment I step beyond the limits of this abominable place my immortality is forfeit. I would have thought that would have been plain enough to a man of your wisdom. Tell me, by the way, what do they call we magi in your age? Necromancer always sounded theatrical to my ear; and Doctor of Philosophy entirely too dusty. The fact is, I don’t think there ever was a word that suited us. We’re part meta-physicians; part demagogues.”

  “I’m none of those things,” Will said.

  “Oh, but there’s a spirit moves in you,” Rukenau said. “An animal of some kind, is it?”

  “Why don’t you come down and see for yourself?”

  “I could never do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve told you. The house is an atrocity. I have sworn I will not set foot on it. Ever again.”

  “But you’re the one who had it built.”

  “How is it you know so much?” Rukenau said. “Did you get all this from Jacob? Because let me tell you, if you did, he knows less than he thinks.”

  “I’ll tell you everything I know, and where I learned it,” Will said. “But first—”

  Rukenau looked lazily at Ted. “Yes, yes, his wretched wife. Look at me, Theodore. That’s better. Are you sure you want to leave my employ? I mean, is it such a burden to fetch me a little fruit or a little fish?”

  “I thought you told me you never left the house?” Will said to Ted.

  “Oh he doesn’t go out to get it,” Rukenau said. “He goes in, don’t you, Theodore? He goes where his wife has gone, or as close as he dares.”

  Will was confounded by this, but he did his best to keep the bewilderment from his face. “If you really want to leave,” Rukenau went on, “I will make no objection. But I’m warning you, Theodore, your wife may feel otherwise. She went into the soul of the house, and she was enamored of what she found. I have no power over that kind of stupidity.”

  “But if I could somehow get her back?” Ted said.

  “Then if your new champion here will stay in your place, I would not prevent your leaving. How’s that? Will? Is that a fair bargain?”

  “No,” Will said, “but I’ll accept it.” Ted was beaming. “Thank you,” he said to Will. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Then to Rukenau, “Does that mean I can go?”

  “By all means. Find her. If she’ll come to you, that is, which I frankly doubt . . .”

  This talk didn’t wipe the smile from Ted’s face. He was gone in a moment, darting off across the chamber. Before he’d even reached the door he’d started calling his wife’s name.

  “She won’t come to him,” Rukenau said, when Ted had exited the chamber. “The Domus Mundi has her. What does he have to offer her by way of seduction?”

  “His love?” Will said.

  “The world doesn’t care for love, Will. It goes on its way, indifferent to our feelings. You know that.”

  “But perhaps—”

  “Perhaps what? Go on, tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Perhaps we haven’t shown it enough love ourselves.”

  “Oh would that make the world kind?” Rukenau said.

  “Would that make the sea bear me up if I was drowning? Would a plague rat elect not to bite me, because I professed my love?

  Will, don’t be so childish. The world doesn’t care what Theodore feels for his wife, and his wife is too entranced with the glamour of this miserable place to look twice at him. That is the bitter truth.”

  “I don’t see what’s so enchanting about this place.”

  “Of course you don’t. That’s because I’ve worked against its seductions over the years. I’ve had them sealed from my sight with mud and excrement. Much of it my own, by the way. A man passes a lot of shit in two hundred a
nd seventy years.”

  “So it was you that covered the walls?”

  “At the beginning it was my personal handiwork, yes. Later, when people made the mistake of wandering in, I turned their hands to the task. Many of them died doing it, I’m afraid—” He interrupted himself, rising to his feet on his perch. “Oh now,” he said. “It begins.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Jacob Steep has just entered.” There was a barely perceptible tremor in Rukenau’s voice.

  “Then you’d better tell me what you know about him,” Will replied. “And do it quickly.”

  XIII

  Now that he was in the House, Steep saw the perfection of the route that had brought him here. Perhaps, after all, he had not returned into the Domus Mundi to perish, as least not yet.

  Perhaps he had come into this place to do his ambition greater service. Rosa had been right when she accused him of loving the slaughter; he always had, always would. It was one of his appetites as a man—to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill came as naturally as voiding his bladder. And now, back in this house, he would have the opportunity to feed that appetite as never before. Once Will and Rosa were dead, and Rukenau too, he would sit at the heart of the Domus Mundi, and oh what he would do. He would show the merchants who raped the world from their boardrooms, and the popes who sanctioned harvests of hungry children, and the potentates who salved their loneliness with shows of destruction, sights that would astonish them.

  He would be chillier than an accountant’s ledger, crueler than a general on the night of a coup d’état.

  Why hadn’t he seen the ease of this before? Stupidity, was it? Or cowardice, more like, afraid to return into the presence of the man who’d wielded such power over him. Well, he wasn’t afraid any longer. He would not waste any more time with knives hereafter (except for Rukenau, perhaps; Rukenau he would stab). In his dealings with the rest of the world, he would be far cleverer. He would poison the tree while it was still a seed, and let all who ate from it perish. He would warp the fetus in the womb and blight the harvest before it even showed itself.

  Nothing would survive this holocaust, nothing: It would, in time, be the end of everything, except for God and himself.

  All his life had been, he realized, a preparation for this return, and the conspiracies mounted against him by the woman and the queer, even that kiss, that vile kiss, had been ways to bring him, all unknowing, to this threshold.

  He was astonished when he stepped inside, to see how changed the place was. He went down on his haunches and scraped at the ground: It was covered with a layer of excrement, animal and human mingled. The walls were the same, and the ceiling. The whole house, which had been so transcendent at its creation, so light, had been concealed behind layers of dirt. Rukenau’s doing, no doubt. Steep wasn’t surprised. For all his metaphysical pretensions, Rukenau had at heart been a foolish and frightened man. Hadn’t he dispatched Jacob to bring Thomas home to the island, because he’d needed an artist’s vision to understand what he’d wrought? In lieu of that comprehension, what had he done?

  Covered the glories of the Domus Mundi with clay and shit.

  Poor Rukenau, Jacob thought, poor, human Rukenau. And then the thought became a shout, which echoed off the walls as he strode in search of his sometime master. “Poor Rukenau! Oh, poor, poor Rukenau!”

  “He’s calling my name—”

  “Ignore him,” Will said. “I need to know what he is.”

  “You already know,” Rukenau replied. “You used the very word yourself. He’s a Nilotic.”

  “That’s a location, not a description. I need to know details.”

  “I knew the legends. I know the prayers. But I don’t know anything that could pass for the truth.”

  “Just spit it out, whatever it is!”

  Rukenau looked at him balefully, and for a moment it seemed he would say nothing; then the words came, and once begun there was no stopping them. No time for questions or clarifications. Just an unburdening.

  “I am the bastard son of a man who built churches,” he said.

  “Great places of worship my father made, in his time. And when I was old enough, though I’d not been brought up in the bosom of his family, I sought him out and said: I think I have just a little of your genius in me. Let me walk in your footsteps; I’ll be your apprentice. Of course, he’d have none of it. I was a bastard.

  I couldn’t be there, in public view, embarrassing him in the eyes of his patrons. He drove me away. And when I went from his house I said: So be it. I’ll find my own way in the world, and I’ll make a place where God wants so much to come that He’ll leave all my father’s fine churches empty.

  “I learned magic; I became quite a learned fellow. And quite admired, I fancy. I didn’t care much. I’d had all the admiration I needed in a year or two. Then I went off around the world, in search of the secret geometries that make holy places holy. I went to Greece to look at the temples, and to India to see what the Hindu had done. And on my way home, to Egypt, to see the pyramids. There I heard tell of a creature that had, according to legend, made temples from the altars of which a priest might see the Creator’s labors at a single glance.

  “It sounded preposterous, of course, but I journeyed up the Nile in search of this nameless angel, prepared to use whatever magical makings I possessed to bring it to my purpose. And in a cave near Luxor, I found the creature, which I dubbed a Nilotic. I brought it back here, and with Simeon’s help I laid plans for the masterpiece it would build. A place so holy that all my father’s churches would fall into ruin, and his memory be despised.” He made a sour laugh at his own folly. “But of course it was too much for us all. Simeon fled and lost his mind. The Nilotic grew impatient, and left me, even though I had confounded its memories of itself and, without my help, it would remain in ignorance. And I . . . stayed here, determined to master what I’d made.” He shook his head. “But there’s no mastering the world, is there?” He was interrupted here by another shout from Steep.

  “I think he’d disagree with you,” Will said.

  “Why am I afraid?” Rukenau said. “I’ve no desire to live.” He looked at Will with distressing rabidity in his eyes. “Oh but Jesu, keep it from me.”

  “You controlled it before,” Will pointed out. “Do the same again.”

  “How can I do to it what’s already done?” Rukenau spat.

  “You have to find persuasions of your own.” With that he started to scramble back up the ropes, his panic making him nimble. He’d only got a few yards however, when Will heard Steep’s footfall across the chamber and looked round to see the man lurching into view. He looked far worse than he had in Donnelly’s home. He was rain-sodden, and spattered with mud from brow to boots, the orbits of his eyes pressing brightly at his flesh, his body shaking. He looked like a man who would die very soon.

  Even his voice, which at its most monotone had still been persuasive, was scoured of charm. “Has he told you the story of our lives, Will?” he said.

  “Some of it.”

  “But you’d like to know still more. And apparently you’re willing to perish for the privilege.” He shook his head. “You should have left me alone, both of you. Lived and died in ignorance.”

  “You wanted to be touched,” Will said.

  “Did I?” Steep replied, as though he was now quite ready to be persuaded on the subject. “Maybe I did.” There was a motion on the web overhead and, with almost theatrical slowness, Steep looked up. Rukenau had by now retreated to the heights.

  “You can’t hide up there,” Steep said to him. “You’re not a child. Don’t make yourself ridiculous. Come down.” He took the knife out of his jacket. “Don’t make me crawl up there.”

  “Let him be,” Will said.

  “Please,” Jacob replied, a little pained. “This isn’t your business. Why don’t you go and look at the pretty lights? Go on.

  Take a look, while you still can. I’ll join you in a li
ttle while.” He spoke to Will as though to a child. “Go on!” he yelled suddenly, reaching up to catch hold of the net. “Rukenau! Come down!” He shook the net with astonishing violence. Clots and scabs of filth rained down on both his head and Will’s; the ropes creaked and in several places snapped; a chair was shaken free and fell, smashing on the ground.

  Plainly no words of Will’s were going to calm him, which left Will with only one option. He strode toward Jacob and caught hold of the man, laying his palm against the man’s neck.

  There was no intake of breath this time, no earth-moving tremor. There was only a sudden blinding dust, a bitter red, in which Will glimpsed, all in the same moment, a thousand geometries, vast as cathedrals, moving, opening, some of them, like rigorous flowers, while brightening. glyphs—the language of Simeon’s paintings and of Steep’s journal—blazed from them.

  These weren’t Jacob’s memories, Will realized. They were the Nilotic’s thoughts or some portion thereof: an array of mathematical possibilities far more overwhelming than the wood or the fox or the palace on the Neva.

  Gasping, he let Jacob go and stumbled away from him. The assault of forms didn’t leave his head immediately however: They continued to move in his mind’s eye for several seconds, blinding him. If Jacob had chosen to strike him down in that moment Will would have been as vulnerable as a sheep in a pen, but Steep had more pressing business. By the time Will had recovered his sight Jacob had given up shaking the web and was climbing it. And as he climbed, he yelled to Rukenau, “Don’t be afraid. It has to happen to us all. Living and dying, we feed the fire.”

  XIV

  Of all the bizzareries that Frannie had experienced on this journey none was quite as shocking to her as stepping over the threshold of the Domus Mundi with Rosa. To be standing in daylight one moment surrounded—as far as her naïve senses were concerned—with grass and sky, and the next to be in a dark, poisonous place with the sun and the sea gone: It was terrifying.

  She was glad she had Rosa with her or she’d certainly have panicked, and this would not be, she thought, a good place to lose your self-control.