Sacrament

CHAPTER XV

i

Will knew he wasn't awake. Though he was lying in his own bed in what appeared to be his own room - though he could hear his mother's voice from somewhere below - he was dreaming it all. The certain proof? His mother wasn't speaking, she was singing, in French, her voice reedy but sweet. This was absurd. His mother hated the sound of her own singing voice. She'd mouthed the words when they'd sung hymns in church. And there was other evidence, more persuasive still. The light that came in through the cracks between the curtains was a colour he'd never seen light before: a gilded mauve that made everything it fell upon vibrate, as though it were singing some song of its own, in the language of light. And where it failed to fall, there was a profound stillness, and shadows that had their own uncanny hue.

'These are the strangest dreams,' somebody said.

He sat up in bed. 'Who's there?'

'Aren't they, though? Dreams within dreams. They're always the strangest.'

Will studied the darkness at the foot of his bed from which this voice was emanating; squinting to get a clearer picture of the speaker. The man was wearing red, Will thought; a fur coat, perhaps? A peaked hat?

'But I suppose it's like those Russian dolls, isn't it?' the man in the coat went on. 'You know the ones I mean? They have a doll inside a doll inside - of course you know. A man of the world like you. You've seen so much. Me, I've seen a patch of moorland five miles square.' He halted for a moment to chew on something. 'Excuse my noise,' he said, 'But I am so damn hungry ... What was I saying?'

'Dolls.'

'Oh yes. The dolls. You do understand the metaphor? These dreams are like the Russian dolls; they fit inside one another.' He paused to chew a little more. 'But here's the twist,' he said. 'It works in either direction-'

'Who are you?' Will said.

'Don't interrupt me. I suppose it's a bit of a stretch, but imagine we're in some parallel universe in which I've rewritten all the laws of physics-'

'I want to see who I'm talking to,' Will insisted.

'You're not talking to anyone. You're dreaming. I've rewritten all thelaws of physics and every doll fits inside every other doll, doesn't matter what size they are.'

'That's stupid.'

'Who are you calling stupid?' the stranger replied, and in his anger stepped out of the shadows.

It wasn't a man in a fur coat and a peaked cap: it was a fox. A dream of a fox, with a burnished coat and needle whiskers and black eyes that glittered like black stars in its elegantly snouted head. It stood easily on its hind legs, the pads of its forepaws slightly elongated, so they resembled stubby fingers.

'So now you see me,' the fox said. Will could see only one reminder, in all its poised perfection, of the wild beast it had been: a spatter of blood on the patch of white fur at its chest. 'Don't worry,' the fox said, glancing down at the marks, 'I've already fed. But then you remember Thomas.'

Thomas

-dead in the grass, his genitals eaten off

'Now don't be judgmental,' the fox chided. 'We do what we have to do. If there's a meal to be had, you have it. And you start with the tenderest parts. Oh, look at your face. Believe me, you'll be putting a lot of pee-pees in your mouth before you're very much older.' Again, the laughter. 'That's the glory of the flow, you see? I'm talking to the boy, but the man's listening.

'It makes me wonder if you really and truly dreamt this, all those years ago. Isn't that an interesting conundrum? Did you lie at the age of eleven and dream about me, coming to tell you about the man that you'd grow up to be, a man who'd one day be lying in a coma dreaming about you, lying in your bed, dreaming a fox...' he shrugged '... and so on. Following any of this?'

'No.'

'It's just rumination. The kind of thing your father'd probably enjoy debating, except that he'd be debating with a fox and I don't think that'd fit his vision of things at all. Well ... it's his loss.'

The fox moved to the side of the bed, finding a spot where the light fell fetchingly on its coat. 'I wonder at you,' it said, studying Will more closely. 'You don't look like a coward.'

'I wasn't,' Will protested. 'I would have taken the book to him myself, but my legs'

'I'm not talking to the boy you were,' the fox said, looking hard at him. 'I'm talking to the man you are.'

'I'm not ... a man,' Will protested softly. 'Not yet.'

'Oh now stop this. It's wearisome. You know very well that you're a grown man. You can't hide in the past forever. It may seem comfortable for a while, but it'll smother you sooner or later. It's time you woke up, my dear fellow.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Christ, you are so stubborn!' the fox snapped, losing his air of civility. 'I don't know where you think all this nostalgia's going to get you! It's the future that matters.' He leaned close to Will's head, until they were almost eyeball to eyeball. 'Do you hear me in there?' he shouted. His breath was rank, and the stench of it reminded Will of what the creature had eaten; how well-pleased it had looked trotting away from Simeon's corpse. Knowing this was all a dream didn't make him feel any the less intimidated; if the fox came sniffing for what little Will had got between his legs, he'd put up a fight, but the chances were he'd lose. Bleed to death, in his own bed, while the fox ate him alive

'Oh Lord,' the fox said, 'I can see coercion's going to get me nowhere.' He retreated from the bed a step or two, sniffed, and said, 'May I tell you an anecdote? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. It happened I met a dog, lying around where I go to hunt. I don't usually consort with domesticated breeds, but we got to chatting, the way you do sometimes, and he said to me, Lord Fox - he called me Lord Fox - he said: Sometimes I think we made a terrible mistake, us dogs, trusting them. Meaning your species, my lad. I said, why? You don't have to scavenge like me. You don't have to sleep in the rain. He said that's not important in the grand scheme of things. Well, I laughed. I mean, since when did a dog ever think about the grand scheme of things? But give this hound his due, he was a bit of a thinker.

'We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.

'Flowers? I said. (There's only so much pretension I can take from a dog.) Don't be absurd. Meat, yes. Meat, you'd want them taking care of, but since when did a dog care for the smell of cherry blossom?

'Well, he got very sniffy at that. This conversation's over, he said, and ponced off.'

The fox was by now back at the bottom of Will's bed.

'Get the message?' he asked Will.

'Sort of.'

'This is no time to be sleeping, Will. There's a world out there needs help. Do it for the dogs if you must. But do it. You pass that along to the man in you. You tell him to wake up. And if you don't'Lord Fox leaned over the bedboard, and narrowed his glittering eyes -I'll come back and have your tender parts in the middle of the night. Understand me? I'll come back sure as God put tits on trees.' His mouth opened a little wider. Will could smell the flesh on his breath. 'Understand me?'

'Yes,' he said, trying to keep from looking at the beast. 'Yes! Yes! Yes! 'Will.'

'Yes! Yes!'

'Will, you're having a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up.'

He opened his eyes. He was in his room, lying in his bed, except that Lord Fox had gone, along with that nameless light. In their place, a human presence. Close to the bed, Dr Johnson, who had just shaken him out of sleep. And at the door, wearing a far less compassionate expression, his mother.

'What on earth were you dreaming about?' Dr Johnson wanted to know. Her palm was pressed against his brow. 'Do you remember?' Will shook his head. 'Well, you've got quite a fever, my lad. It's no wonder you're having strange dreams. But you'll mend.' She pulled a prescription pad from her bag and scrawled on it. 'He'll need to stay in bed,' she said as she got up to leave. 'Three days at least.'

ii

This time Will had no trouble obeying: he felt so weak he couldn't have escaped the house even if he'd wanted to, which he didn't. He had no reason to go anywhere now, not with Jacob gone. All he wanted to do was put a pillow over his head and shut out the world. And if he smothered himself in the process, so what? There was nothing left to live for, except pills, recriminations and dreams of Lord Fox.

If things looked grim when he woke, they looked worse a couple of hours later, when two policemen arrived to ask him questions. One was in uniform, and sat in the corner of his bedroom, slurping from a mug of tea supplied by Adele. The other - a droopy man who smelled of stale sweat - sat on the edge of Will's bed, introduced himself as Detective Faraday, and then proceeded to ply Will with questions.

'I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, son. I don't want lies and I don't want fabrications. I want the truth, in plain words. This isn't a game, son. Five men are dead.'

This was news to Will. 'You mean ... they were killed?'

'I mean they were murdered, by the woman who was with this man who abducted you.' Will wanted to say: he didn't abduct me; I went because I wanted to go. But he held his tongue, and let Faraday babble on. 'I want you to tell me everything he said to you, everything he did, even if he told you to keep it a secret. Even if ... even if some of the things he said or did are hard to talk about.' Faraday lowered his voice here, as though to reassure Will that this would be secret stuff, justbetween the two of them. Will wasn't convinced for a moment; but he told Faraday he'd answer any questions he was asked.

That's what he did, for the next hour and a quarter, with both Faraday and the constable taking notes on what he was telling them. He knew some of what he recounted sounded strange, to say the least, and some of it, especially the part about burning the moths, made him seem cruel. But he told it all anyway, knowing in his heart nothing he told these dull men would ever allow them to find Jacob and Rosa. He had no information about where Steep and McGee lived or where they were going. All he knew for certain, all he cared about, was that he wasn't with them.

There was another interview two days later, this time from a man who wanted to talk to Will about some of the stories he'd told Faraday, especially the part about seeing Thomas, alive and dead. The interviewer's name was Parsons, but he invited Will to please call him Tim, which Will pointedly refused to do, and he kept circling around the business of how Jacob had touched him. Will was as plain as he could be: said that when they were climbing the hill and Jacob laid a hand on him, he felt strong. Later, he explained, in the copse, it had been him who'd done the touching.

'And that's when you felt as if you were in Jacob's skin, is that right?'

'I knew it wasn't real,' Will said. 'I was having this dream, only I wasn't asleep.'

'A vision ...' Parsons said, half to himself.

Will liked the sound of it. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was a vision.' Parsons jotted something down. 'You should go up there and look,' Will said to him.

'Do you think I might have a vision, too?'

'No,' Will said. 'But you'd find the birds, if they haven't been eaten by ... foxes or whatever...'

He caught a fearful look on the man's face. He wouldn't go up the hill to look for the birds, today or any time. For all his understanding looks and his gentle persuasions, he didn't want to see the truth, much less know it. And why? Because he was afraid. Faraday was the same; and the constable. All of them afraid.

The next day, the doctor pronounced that he was well enough to get up and move around the house. Seated in front of the television, he watched an update on the murders at Burnt Yarley, with the reporter standing in the street outside Donnelly's the Butchers. Sightseers had come from all over the country, apparently, despite the inclement weather, to see the site of the atrocities.

'This little hamlet,' the reporter said, 'has had more visitors in its icy streets the last four days than in half a century of summers.'

'And the sooner they go home again-'said Adele, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of vegetable soup and cheese and chutney sandwiches for Will '-the sooner we can all go back to normal.' She set the tray on Will's lap, warning him that the soup was very hot. 'It's so morbid,' she said, as the reporter interviewed one of the visitors. 'Coming to see a thing like this. Have people no decency?' With that, she retreated to her steak-and-kidney-pie making in the kitchen. Will kept watching, hoping there'd be some mention of him, but the live coverage from the village now ceased, and the newscaster returned to report on how the search for Jacob and Rosa had spread to Europe. There was evidence that two people fitting their description had been linked to crimes in Rotterdam and Milan within the last five years, the most recent report from northern France, where Rosa McGee had been involved in the deaths of three people, one of them an adolescent girl. Will knew it was shameful to feel the pleasure he did, hearing this catalogue of deeds. But he felt it nevertheless, and he'd learned from Jacob to speak his feelings truthfully, though in this case the only person he was telling was himself. And what was the truth? That even if Jacob and Rosa turned out to be the most bloodthirsty pair in history, he couldn't regret having crossed their paths. They were his connection to something bigger than the life he'd been leading, and he would hold onto their memory like a gift. Of all the people who talked to him during this period of recuperation, it was, surprisingly, his mother who knew most intimately the way he was thinking. He had no verbal proof of this; she kept her exchanges with him brief and functional. But the expression in her eyes, which had been until now a vague fatigue, was now sharpened into wariness. She no longer looked through him as she'd been wont to do. She scrutinized him (he several times caught her doing so when she thought he wasn't watching) with something strange in her eyes. He knew what it was. Faraday and Parsons were afraid of the mysteries he'd talked about. His mother was afraid of him. 'It's brought up all the bad memories, I'm afraid,' his father explained to him. 'We were doing so well and now this.' He had called Will into his study to have this little talk. It was, of course, a monologue. 'It's all perfectly irrational, of course, but your mother has this very Mediterranean streak in her.' He had not looked at Will more than once so far, but gazed out of the window at the sleet, lost in his own ruminations. Like Lord Fox, Will thought, and smiled to himself. 'But she feels as though somehow ... oh, I don't know ... somehow death's followed us here.' He had been twirling a pencil in his fingers, but now he tossed it down on his well-ordered desk. 'It's such nonsense,' he snorted, 'but she looks at you and- 'She blames me.'

'No, no,' said Hugo. 'Not blames. Connects. That's it, you see. She makes these ... connections.' He shook his head, mouth drawn down in disgruntlement. 'She'll snap out of it eventually,' he said. 'But until then we just have to live with it. God knows.' Finally, he swung his leather writing chair around and looked at Will between the piles of papers. 'In the meanwhile, please do your best not to get her stirred up.'

'I don't do

-anything. I know. And once this whole tragic nonsense is over and done with, she'll be on the mend again. But right now she's very sensitive.'

'I'll be careful.'

'Yes,' said Hugo. He returned his gaze to the gloom beyond the window. Assuming the conversation was over, Will rose. 'We should really talk more about what happened to you,' Hugo said, his distracted tone suggesting that he felt no urgency to do so. Will waited. 'When you're well,' Hugo said. 'We'll talk then.'

iii

The conversation never happened. Will's strength returned, the interviews ceased, the television crews moved on to some other corner of England, and the sightseers went soon after. By Christmas, Burnt Yarley belonged to itself again, and Will's brief moment of notoriety was over. At school, there was the inevitable gauntlet of jokes and petty cruelties to run, but he felt curiously inured against them. And once it was plain that the name-calling and the whispers were not discomfiting him, he was left alone.

There was only one real source of pain: that Frannie kept her distance from him. She spoke to him only once in that period before Christmas, and it was a short conversation.

'I've got a message for you,' she said. He asked from where, but she refused to name the source. When she told him the message, however, he didn't need the name. Nor, in fact, did he need the information. He'd already had a visit from Lord Fox. He knew he was part of the madness, for as long as he lived.

As for Sherwood, he didn't come back to school at all until the third week of January, and when he did he was in a much subdued state. It was as if something had broken in him; the part that had turned his lack of mental grasp into a strange kind of attribute. He was pale and listless. When Will tried to talk to him, he clammed up, or started to get teary. Will quickly learned his lesson, and left Sherwood to heal at his own speed. He was glad that the boy had Frannie to look after him. She protected Sherwood fiercely if anyone tried to pick on him. People soon got the message. They left brother and sister alone, just as they left Will. This slow aftermath was in its way as strange an experience as the events that had preceded it. Once all the hoopla died down (even the Yorkshire press had given up the story by early February, having nothing to report) life resumed its usual even pace, and it was as if nothing of any consequence had happened. Of course, there were occasional references made to it (mainly in the form of sick jokes passed around at school) and in a host of minor ways the village had changed (it no longer had a butcher, for one; and there were more people at church on Sundays), but the winter months, which were brutally cold that year, gave people time to either bury their sorrow or talk it through, all behind doors that were often blocked by drifts of snow. By the time the blizzards receded, folks had finished their grieving, and were ready for a fresh start.

On the twenty-sixth of February, there was a change in the weather so sudden that it had the quality of a sign. A strange balm came upon the air, and for the first night in ninety there was no frost. It wouldn't last, the naysayers at the pub predicted: any plant foolish enough to show its nose would have it nipped off soon enough. But the next day was just as warm, and the day following, and the day following that. Steadily, the sky began to clear, so that by the end of the first week of March, it was a gleaming swathe of blue above the valley, busy with birds; and the naysayers were silenced.

Spring had arrived; the gymnast season, all muscle and motion. Though Will had lived through eleven springs in the city, they were wan imitations of what he witnessed that month. More than witnessed, felt. His senses were brimming, the way they'd brimmed that first day outside the Courthouse, when he'd felt such union with the world. His spirits, which had been downcast for months, finally looked up from his feet and flew.

All was not lost. He had a head full of memories, and hidden amongst them were hints of how he had to proceed from here: things he knew nobody else in the world would have been able to teach him, and perhaps nobody else in the world would understand.

Living and dying we feed the fire.

Suppose they were the last.

Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.

Clues to epiphanies, all of them.

From now on, he would have to look for epiphanies on his own. Find his own moments when the world spun and he stood still; when it would be as though he was seeing through the eyes of God. And until that time, he would be the careful son Hugo had asked him to be. He'd say nothing to stir up his mother; nothing to remind her of how death had followed them. But his compliance would be a pretence. He did not belong to them; not remotely. They would be from this time temporary guardians, from whose side he would slip as soon as he was able to make his way in the world.

iv

On Easter Sunday, he did something he'd been putting off since the mellowing of the weather. He retraced the journey he'd taken with Jacob, from the Courthouse to the copse where he'd killed the birds. The Courthouse itself had the previous year inspired much morbid interest amongst sightseers, and had as a consequence been fenced off, the wire hung with signs warning trespassers that they would be liable to prosecution. Will was tempted to scramble under the fence and take a look at the place, but the day was too fine to waste indoors, so he began to climb. There was a warm gusty wind blowing, herding white clouds, all innocent of rain, down the valley. On the slopes, the sheep were stupid with spring, and watched him unalarmed, only darting off if he yelled at them. The climb itself was hard (he missed Jacob's hand at his neck) but every time he paused to look around, the vista widened, the fells rolling away in every direction.

He had remembered the wood with uncanny accuracy, as though despite his sickness and fatigue - that night his sight had been preternaturally sharp. The trees were budding now, of course, every twig an arrow aiming high. And underfoot, blades of brilliant green where there'd been a frosted carpet.

He went straight to the place where he'd killed the birds. There was no trace of them. Not so much as a bone. But simply standing on the same spot, such a wave of yearning and sorrow passed through him that it made him gasp for breath. He'd been so proud of what he'd done here. (Wasn't that quick? Wasn't that beautiful?) But now he felt a bit more ambiguous about it. Burning moths to keep the darkness at bay was one thing, but killing birds just because it felt good to do so? That didn't feel so brave; not today, when the trees were budding and the sky was wide. Today it felt like a dirty memory, and he swore to himself there and then that he'd told the story for the last time. Once Faraday and Parsons had filed away their notes and forgotten them, it would be as though it had never happened.

He went down on his haunches, to check one final time for evidence of the victims, but even as he did so he knew he'd invited trouble. He felt a tiny tremor in the air as a breath was drawn, and looked up to see that the wood itself had not changed in any detail but one. There was a fox a short distance from him, watching him intently. He stood on all fours like any other fox, but there was something about the way he stared that made Will suspicious. He'd seen this defiant gaze before, from the dubious safety of his bed.

'Go away!' he shouted. The fox just looked at him, unblinking and unmoved. 'D you hear me?' Will yelled at the top of his voice. 'Shoo!' But what had worked like a charm on sheep didn't work on foxes. Or at least not this fox.

'Look,' Will said, 'Coming to bother me in dreams is one thing, but you don't belong here. This is the real world.'

The fox shook its head, preserving the illusion of its artlessness. To any gaze but Will's, it seemed to be dislodging a flea from its ear. But Will knew better: it was contradicting him.

'Are you telling me I'm dreaming this as well?' he said.

The animal didn't bother to nod. It simply perused Will, amiably enough, while he worked the problem out for himself. And now, as he puzzled over this curious turn of events, he vaguely recalled something Lord Fox had mentioned in his rambling. What had he said? There'd been some talk of Russian dolls, but that wasn't it. An anecdote about a debate with a dog; no, that wasn't it either. There'd been something else his visitor had mentioned. Some message that had to be passed along. But what? What?

The fox was plainly close to giving up on him. It was no longer staring in his direction, but sniffing the air in search of its next meal.

'Wait a moment,' Will said. A minute ago, he'd been wanting to drive it away. Now he was afraid it would do as he'd wished, and go about its business before he'd solved the puzzle of its presence.

'Don't leave yet,' he said to it. 'I'll remember. Just give me a chance-'

Too late. He'd lost the animal's attention. Off it trotted, its brush flicking back and forth.

'Oh, come on-' Will said, rising to follow it. 'I'm trying my best.'

The trees were close together, and in his pursuit of the fox, their bark gouged him and their branches raked his face. He didn't care. The faster he ran, the harder his heart pumped and the harder his heart pumped the clearer his memory became

'I'll get it!' he yelled after the fox. 'Wait for me, will you?'

The message was there, on the tip of his tongue, but the fox was outpacing him, weaving between the trees with astonishing agility. And all at once, twin revelations. One, that this was not Lord Fox he was following, just a passing animal that was fleeing for its fieabitten life. And two, that the message was to wake, wake from dreams of foxes, Lords or no, into the world

He was running so fast now, the trees were a blur around him. And up ahead, where they thinned out, was not the hill but a growing brightness; not the past, but something more painful. He didn't want to go there, but it was too late to slow his flight, much less halt it. The trees were a blur because they were no longer trees, they'd become the wall of a tunnel, down which he was hurtling, out of memory, out of childhood.

Somebody was speaking at the far end of the tunnel. He couldn't catch hold of precisely what was being said, but there were words of encouragement, he thought, as though he were a runner on a marathon, being coaxed to the finishing line.

Before he reached it, however - before he was back in that place of wakefulness - he was determined to take one last look at the past. Ungluing his eyes from the brightness ahead, he glanced back over his shoulder, and for a few precious seconds glimpsed the world he was leaving. There was the wood, sparkling in the spring light - every bud a promise of green to come. And the fox! Lord, there it was, darting away about the business of the morning. He pressed his sight to look harder, knowing he had only moments left, and it went where he willed, back the way he'd come, to look down the hillside to the village. One last heroic glance, fixing the sight in all its myriad details. The river, sparkling; the Courthouse, mouldering; the roofs of the village, rising in slated tiers; the bridge, the post office, the telephone box from which he'd called Frannie that night long ago, telling her he was running away.

So he was. Running back into his life, where he would never see this sight again, so finely, so perfectly- They were calling him again, from the present. 'Welcome back, Will ... somebody was saying to him softly. Wait, he wanted to tell them. Don't welcome me yet. Give me just another second to dream this dream. The bells are ringing for the end of the Sunday service. I want to see the people. I want to see their faces, as they come out into the sun. I want to see-

The voice again, a little more insistent. 'Will. Open your eyes.'

There was no time left. He'd reached the finishing line. The past was consumed by brightness. River, bridge, church, houses, hill, trees and fox, gone, all gone, and the eyes that had witnessed them, weaker for the passage of years, but no less hungry, opened to see what he'd become.