Sacrament

  And as he saw them, he felt Steep’s hand on his shoulder, felt Steep’s breath at his neck one last time, the man said his name. He waited for the coup de grace, while the tree grew still taller and shedding its fine fruit, blossomed a second time.

  The fatal blow didn’t come. Instead, Steep’s hand slid from his shoulder, and Will heard the fox say: Oh, I think maybe you should take a look at this.

  He wouldn’t have attended to any other voice but that.

  Ungluing his eyes from the spectacle a moment, he glanced back toward Steep. The man was no longer looking at Will. He had himself turned round and was staring at the figure who had pursued him through the house to this spot. It was Rosa, but only just. To Will’s eyes she seemed to have become a wonderful patchwork. The woman she’d once been was still visible, of course—her exquisite features, the ripeness of her body—but the brightness that had seeped from her in Donnelly’s house was in greater evidence than ever, flowing copiously from her wound, and as it came it inspired the form inside her form to show itself more plainly.

  Will heard Steep say: Stay away from me, but there was no weight in his words, nor belief that his order would be obeyed.

  She kept coming toward him, slowly, lovingly; her arms lifted from her sides a little way, palms out, as though to show him the innocence of her intent. And perhaps it was indeed innocence.

  Or perhaps this was her last, and slyest, deceit—to play the pliant bride, folded in veils of light, delivering herself to his mercy.

  If so, it worked. Instead of defending himself against her, he let the brightness wash around him, and he was engulfed.

  Will thought he saw a shudder pass through Steep’s form, as though Jacob was suddenly aware that he was caught and was trying to shake himself free. But it was too late. The man he’d been was lost already, his exhausted form flayed away by light, uncovering the mirror image of the face that was even now sup-planting the last of Rosa. Will saw her human features make a smile as they were dissolved, then the Nilotic was there in all its burnished perfection, moving through the circling confluence of light to marry its form with the form in Steep. This was the final conundrum, solved. Jacob and Rosa weren’t separate creatures; they were each a part of the Nilotic, divided and grown forgetful of who they were. Living in the world with stolen names, learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them, unable to live apart, though it was a torment to be so close to the other, yet never close enough.

  Oh, now look what you’ve done. . . . Will heard the fox say in his head.

  “What’s that?”

  You’ve set me free.

  “Don’t go yet.”

  Oh Lord, Will. I want to be gone.

  “Just a little while. Stay with me. Please.” He heard the fox sigh. Well, the beast said, maybe just a little while.

  Rukenau shuddered in Frannie’s embrace. “Are they whole?” he said. “I can’t see them clearly.”

  Frannie was dumb with disbelief. Hearing Rukenau speak of dividing the Nilotic was one thing, seeing that process reversed another entirely.

  “Did you hear me?” Rukenau said. “Are they whole?”

  “Yes. . .” she murmured.

  Rukenau sank back against her arm. “Oh God in Heaven, the crimes I committed against that creature,” he said. “Will you forgive me?”

  “Me?” Frannie said. “You don’t need forgiveness from me.”

  “I’ll take it wherever I can find it,” Rukenau replied.

  “Please.”

  He was clearly in extremis, his voice so frail Frannie had difficulty catching his words, his clownish face slackening. It was, she knew, the last service he would require of her. And if it gave him comfort, why not? She leaned a little closer to him, so that she could be certain he heard her.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  He made a tiny nod and for a moment his eyes focused upon her. Then the sight went out of them, and his life stopped.

  The braids of light in which the Nilotic had been wed to itself were dispersing now, and as they did so the creature turned and looked at Will. Simeon had not done too badly with the portrait he’d painted, Will thought. He’d caught the grace of the creature well enough. What he’d failed to capture was the alien cadence of its proportions; its subtle otherness, which made Will a little fearful it would do him harm.

  But when it spoke, his fears fled.

  “We have come from a distance together,” it said, its voice mellifluous. “What will you do now?’”’

  “I want to go a little further,” Will replied, glancing back over his shoulder.

  “I’m sure you do,” the Nilotic said. “But believe me when I tell you it wouldn’t be wise. Every step we take we go deeper into the living heart of the world. It will take you from yourself and at last, you will be lost.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But those who love you will care. They’ll mourn you, more than you know. I would not wish to be responsible for another moment’s suffering.”

  “I just want to see a little more,” Will said.

  “How much is a little?”

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Will said. “I’ll walk with you a while, and we’ll turn back when you tell me it’s time.”

  “I won’t be coming back,” the Nilotic said. “I intend to unmake the house and must unmake it from its heart.”

  “Then where will you go?”

  “Away. From men and women.”

  “Is there anywhere like that left?”

  “You’d be surprised,” the Nilotic said, and so saying, moved past Will and proceeded on into the mystery.

  It had not explicitly forbidden Will to follow it, which was all the invitation he needed. He went in cautious pursuit of it, like a spawning fish climbing waters that would have dashed him to death without the Nilotic ahead of him to breast the flow.

  Even so, he quickly understood the truth in its warnings. The deeper they ventured the more it seemed he was treading not among the echoes of the world, but in the world itself, his soul a thread of bliss passing into its mysteries.

  He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.

  Somewhere along the way, perhaps among the clouds, perhaps among the fish, he lost sight of his guide. The creature that had been, in its human incarnations, both his maker and his tormentor, slipped away and was gone out of his life forever. He was vaguely aware of its departure and knew it’s going to be a signal that he should stop and turn round. It had trusted him with his destiny; it was his responsibility not to abuse the gift.

  Not for his sake, but for those who would mourn him if he was lost to them.

  He shaped all these thoughts quite clearly. But he was too besotted to act upon them. How could he turn his back on these glories, with so much more to see?

  On he went then, where only souls who had learned the homeward paths by heart dared to go.

  ii

  I’m a witness, Frannie thought. That’s what I’m meant to do right now: Watch these events as they unravel and keep them clear in my head, so that I can be the one who tells everything, when all these wonderful sights have passed away.

  And pass they would. That was becoming more evident by the moment. The first sign she had that the house was beginning to unknit was a spatter of cold rain on her head. She looked up.

  The ceiling of Rukenau’s chamber
was now dissolving, the living forms that had spilled from it disappearing. They didn’t melt; they were just lost to her sight as a more familiar scene reestablished itself. Indeed she was tempted to believe that they remained around her, but simply became unavailable to her senses. She was not altogether unhappy at this. Though the sight of gray clouds shedding gray rain was less inspiring than the glories passing from her view, they had the virtue of familiarity. She was not obliged to gorge on them, afraid she’d miss some choice glory.

  The walls were also receding from her, just as the ceiling had, layer upon layer of flickering lucidity subsumed. That roiling wall, alive with silver life, was tamed into a simple sea; that other, green and glistening, the crown of Kenavara. Here were the birds now—the kittiwakes, the cormorants, the hoodie-crow—while underfoot her eyes caught a glimpse of the lives that lay below her in the earth—the seeds, the worms—before that vision was also dimmed, and she was staring at the excremental mud that the rain was making from the sheddings of the house.

  Remember how this is, she told herself, while she kneeled in the mud. This presence of all things, seen and unseen, around and about; remember. There will be days in your life when you’ll need to have this feeling again, to know that all that’s gone from the world hasn’t really gone at all; it’s just not in sight.

  There were more people than she’d expected sharing the clifftop with her; all, she assumed, released from the maze of the Domus Mundi. There was an old man standing up in the downpour some twenty yards from her shouting hallelujahs at the sky, there was a woman a few years her senior who was already wandering back toward the body of the island, as if in fear that she would be claimed again if she didn’t escape the cliff. There was a young couple, shamelessly hugging and kissing with a passion the icy rain could not chasten.

  And there was Will. He hadn’t gone wherever the creature who’d made the house had gone. He was here still, standing gazing out toward the sea, glassy-eyed. She got to her feet to go to him, glancing down at Rukenau as she did so. She was astonished at what she saw. His flesh, now that it was no longer rocked in the cradle of the house, had succumbed to the claim of his true age. His skin had split in a dozen places and was being driven off his withered muscle by the pelting rain. His blood had already been sluiced from the corpse, so that it looked like something a child might have made from papier-mâché and paint, and now, having grown bored with the game, abandoned in the mud.

  Even as she watched, its chest caved in, its contents gone to mush and jelly. She took her eyes off it, knowing when she looked again it would have been received into the sodden earth.

  There were worse ways to disappear, she thought, and went to Will.

  He was not staring at the sea, as she’d initially thought.

  Though his eyes were wide open, and when she said his name he made a guttural sound that she took to be a response, his thoughts were not with her, but about some business that was claiming most of his attention.

  “I think we should go,” she said to him.

  This time he didn’t even murmur a response, but when she took his arm, as now she did, he went with her, neither seeing nor blind, back over through the mud and rain toward the machair.

  By the time they reached the car, the rainstorm had passed over the island and was headed for America. Night was on its way; there were lights in the cluster of houses at Barrapol, and stars coming out between the ragged clouds. She got Will into the passenger seat without any problem (it was almost as though he were in a trance, capable of responding to simple instructions, but in every other way absent); then she backed the car up until she reached the road and drove through the rapidly descending twilight to Scarinish. There’d be a ferry tomorrow; they’d be back on the mainland by evening, and—if she drove through the night—home by the following morning. That was as far as she was presently willing to project her thoughts: as far as the kitchen and the teapot and the comfort of her bed. Only when she was safely back in her own house would she think about what she’d seen and felt and suffered since the man at her side had come back into her life.

  XVI

  The following day went pretty much as she’d anticipated. They passed an uncomfortable night in the car, parked just outside Scarinish, and at noon or thereabouts boarded the ferry for the return journey to Oban. Her only problem on the drive south was her own exhaustion, which she kept at bay with copious amounts of coffee. But it still crept up on her, so that by the time she finally got home, at four in the morning, she was barely able to keep her thoughts in order. For his part, Will remained in the same trancelike condition that had possessed him since the destruction of the house. It was plain to her he knew she was there beside him, because he could answer questions as long as they were simple (do you want a sandwich, do you want a cup of coffee?), but he wasn’t seeing the same world that she was seeing. He had to fumble to find the coffee cup and, even when he did, deposited half the contents over him as he drank from it.

  The food she plied him with was eaten mechanically, as though his body was going through the motion without the assistance of his conscious mind.

  She knew where his thoughts resided. He was still enraptured by the house, or by his memories of it. She did her best not to resent him for his detachment, but it was hard when the problems of the here and now were so demanding. She felt abandoned; there was no other word for it. He was inviolate in his trance, while she was exhausted, confused, and frightened.

  There would be questions to answer when people realized she was back from her travels, difficult questions. She wanted Will there to help her formulate some answers to them. But nothing she said to him roused him from his fugue. He stared on into middle distance and dreamed his dreams of the Domus Mundi.

  There was a worse betrayal to come. When she woke the following morning, having passed four grateful hours in her own bed, she discovered he’d vacated the couch where she’d put him to rest, and wandered out of the house, leaving the front door wide open. She was infuriated. Yes, he’d witnessed a great deal in the House, but so had she, and she hadn’t gone wandering off in the middle of the night, damn it.

  She called the police after breakfast and made her presence known. They were at the house three quarters of an hour later, plying her with questions about all that had happened in the Donnelly house. Plainly they viewed her departure from the scene of Sherwood’s demise as strange, perhaps even evidence of mental imbalance, but not an indication of guilt. They already had their suspects: The two itinerants who had been seen in the vicinity of the Donnelly house for two or three days prior to the murder. She was happy to name them and to offer detailed descriptions; and yes, she was certain they were the same pair who had tormented Will, her brother, and herself all those years ago. What, they wanted to know, was the connection between Sherwood and these two, that he’d been there in the Donnelly house in the first place? She told them she didn’t know. She had followed her brother there, she said, intending to bring him home, and had discovered Steep in mid-assault. Then she’d given chase. Yes, it had been a stupid thing to do, of course. But she’d been witless with shock and anger, surely they understood that.

  All that she had been able to think about was finding and confronting the man who’d murdered her brother.

  How far had she tracked him, the detectives wanted to know. Here she told her direct lie. Only as far as the Lake District, she’d said; then she’d lost them.

  Finally, the oldest of the detectives, a man by the name of Faraday, came to the question she’d been waiting to hear.

  “How the hell does Will Rabjohns fit into the picture?”

  “He came along with me,” she said simply.

  “And why did he do that?” the man said, watching her intently. “For old times’ sake?”

  She said she didn’t know what he was talking about, to which the detective replied that unlike his two companions, he was very familiar with what had happened here all those years ago; he’d been the man who??
?d tried to get the truth out of Will.

  He’d failed, he admitted. But a good policeman—and he counted himself a good policeman—never closed a file while there were questions unanswered. And there were more unanswered questions in this file than any other on his shelves. So again, he said, what had been going on that she and Will had been together in this? She pretended innocence, sensing that Faraday, for all his doggedness, was no closer to understanding the mystery here than he’d been thirty years before. Perhaps he had some suspicions, but if they were anywhere close to the mark they were unlikely to be the kind he could have voiced in front of his colleagues. The truth lay very far from the usual realm of investigation, where a man like Faraday probably only ventured in his most private ruminations. Though he pressed his suit, she returned only the blandest answers, and he finally gave up on the business, defeated by his own reluctance to put the pieces in their true order. Of course he wanted to know where Will was now, to which Frannie truthfully answered that she didn’t know. He’d disappeared from the house this morning, and could be anywhere.

  Stymied in his inquiries, Faraday warned that this interview would not be the end of the matter. There would be identifications to be made if and when the culprits were apprehended.

  She wished him luck in finding them, and he departed, with his colleagues in tow.

  The interview had taken up almost all of the day, but with what was left of it she set about the melancholy business of planning Sherwood’s funeral. She would go over to the hospice in Skipton tomorrow and find out from the doctors if they thought she should tell her mother the sad news. Meanwhile, she had a lot of organizing to do.

  In the early evening, she answered the door to find Helen Morris, of all people, come to offer her condolences. Helen had never been a particularly close friend, and Frannie harbored the suspicion that the woman had come calling to garner some gossip, but she was glad of the company anyway. And it was comforting, in its petty way, to know that Helen, who was one of the most conservative women in the village, saw fit to spend a few hours with her. Whatever people were surmising about events in the Donnelly house, they would not find Frannie culpable. It made her think that perhaps she owed Helen and the rest of the folks puzzling over this mystery a helping hand. That maybe in a month or two, when she was feeling a little more confident, she’d stand up between the hymns at the Sunday service and tell the whole sad and wonderful truth. Maybe nobody would ever speak to her again if she did so; maybe she’d become the Madwoman of Burnt Yarley. And maybe that would be a price worth paying.