Клайв Баркер – Sacrament (страница 25)

‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ she said to Sherwood.

‘I think so.’

‘Does anyone know you took it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

That at least was something to be grateful for. She turned to the next page. It was as complex as the previous page had been simple: row upon row upon row of writing, tiny words pressed so close to one another it was almost a seamless flow. She flipped the page. It was the same again, on left and right. And on the next two sheets, the same; and on the next two and the next two. She peered at the script more closely, to see if she could make any sense of it, but the words weren’t in English. Stranger still, the letters weren’t from the alphabet. They were pretty, though, tiny elaborate marks that had been set down with obsessive care.

‘What does it mean?’ Sherwood said, peering over her shoulder.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘Do you think it’s a story?’

‘I don’t think so. It isn’t printed, like a proper book.’ She licked her forefinger and dabbed it on the words. It came away stained. ‘It was written by him,’ she said.

‘By Jacob?’ Sherwood breathed.

‘Yes.’ She flipped over a few more pages and finally came to a picture. It was an insect – a beetle of some kind, she thought – and like the writing on the preceding pages it had been set down exquisitely, every detail of its head and legs and iridescent wings so meticulously painted it looked uncannily lifelike in the watery light, as though it might have risen whirring from the paper had she touched it.

‘I know I shouldn’t have taken the book,’ Sherwood said, ‘but now I don’t want to give it back, ‘cause I don’t want to see him again.’

‘You won’t have to,’ Frannie reassured him.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sher. We’re safe here, with Mum and Dad to look after us.’

Sherwood had put his arm through hers. She could feel his thin body quivering against her own. ‘But they won’t be here always, will they?’ he said, his voice eerily flat, as though this most terrible of possibilities could not be expressed unless stripped of all emphasis.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They won’t.’

‘What will happen to us then?’ he said.

‘I’ll be here to look after you,’ Frannie replied.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. Now, it’s time you were back in bed.’

She took her brother by the hand and they both tiptoed out along the landing to his room. There she settled him back in his bed, and told him not to think about the book or the Courthouse or what had happened tonight any more, but to go back to sleep. Her duty done she returned to her own bedroom, closed the door and the curtains, and put the book in the cupboard under her sweaters. There was no lock on the cupboard door, but if there had been she would have certainly turned the key. Then she climbed between the now chilly sheets and put on the bedside light, just in case the beetle in the book came clicking across the floor to find her before dawn; which possibility, after the evening’s escapades, she could not entirely consign to the realm of the impossible.

IV

i

Will consumed his soup like a dutiful patient, and then, once Adele had taken his temperature, collected his tray and gone back downstairs, quickly got up and dressed. It was by now early in the evening, and the sleety day was already losing its light, but he had no intention of putting his journey off until tomorrow.

The television had been turned on in the living-room – he could hear the calm, even tones of a newscaster, and then, as his mother changed channels, applause and laughter. He was glad of the sound. It covered the occasional squeak of a stair as he descended to the hallway. There, as he donned scarf, anorak, gloves and boots, he came within a breath of discovery, as his father called out from his study demanding to know from Adele where his tea had got to. Was she picking the leaves herself, for Christ’s sake? Adele did not reply, and his father stormed into the kitchen to get an answer. He did not notice his son in the unlit hallway, however, and while he whittered on to Adele about how slow she was, Will opened the front door and, slipping through the narrowest crack he could make so as not to have a draught alert them to his going, was out on his night-journey.

ii

Rosa didn’t conceal the satisfaction she felt at the absence of the book. It had burned up in the fire, and that was all there was to say in the matter. ‘So you’ve lost one of your precious journals,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a little more sympathetic in the future when I get weepy about the children.’

‘There’s no comparison,’ Steep said, still searching the ashes in the antechamber. His desk was little more than seared timbers, his pens and brushes gone, his box of watercolours barely recognizable, his inks boiled away. His bag containing the earlier journals had been beyond the scope of the fire, so all was not lost. But the work-in-progress, his account of the last eighteen years of his vast labour, had gone. And Rosa’s attempt to equate his loss with what she felt when one of her brats had to be put out of its misery made him sick to his stomach. ‘This is the labour of my life,’ he pointed out.

Then it’s pitiful,’ she said. ‘Making books! It’s pitiful.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Who’d you think you’re making them for? Not me. I’m not interested. I’m not remotely interested.’

‘You know why I’m making them,’ Jacob said sullenly. To be a witness. When God comes, and demands we tell Him what we’ve wrought, chapter and verse, we must have an account. Every detail. Only then will we be…Jesus! Why do I bother explaining it to you?’

‘You can say the word. Go on, say it! Say forgiven. That’s what you used to say all the time. We’d be forgiven.’ She approached him now. ‘But you don’t really believe that any more do you?’ She gently reached up and put her hands to his face. ‘Be honest, my love,’ she said, suddenly soft.

‘I still…I still believe there’s purpose in our lives,’ Jacob replied. ‘I have to believe that.’

‘Well I don’t,’ Rosa said plainly. ‘I realized after our fumblings of yesterday, I have no healthy desires left in me. None. At all. There won’t be any more children. There won’t be any hearth and home. And there won’t be a day of forgiveness, Jacob. That’s certain. We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.’ She smiled. That boy—’

‘Will?’

‘No. The younger one, Sherwood. I had him at my titties, sucking away, and I thought: it’s a sickness to take pleasure in this, but Lord, you know that made it all the more pleasurable? And I began to think, when the child had gone, what else would give me pleasure? What’s the worst I could do?’

‘And?’

‘My mind fairly began to spin at the possibilities,’ she said with a smile. ‘It really did. If we’re not going to be forgiven, why try to be something I’m not?’ She was staring hard into his face. ‘Why should I waste my breath hoping for something we’ll never have?’

Jacob pulled his face from her hands. ‘You won’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘So stop wasting your time. I have my plans laid—’

The book’s burned,’ Rosa snapped.

‘I’ll make another.’

‘And if that burns?’

‘Another! And another! I’ll be the stronger for this loss.’

‘Oh, so will I,’ Rosa said, her features draining of warmth, so that her beauty seemed, for all its perfection, almost cadaverous. ‘I will be a different woman from now on. I will have pleasure whenever I can take it, by whatever means amuse me. And if someone or something gets a child upon me I’ll fetch it out of m’self with a sharpened stick.’ This notion pleased her. Laughing raucously, she turned her back on Jacob, and spat into the ashes. There’s for your book,’ she said. She spat again. ‘And there’s for forgiveness.’ Again she spat. ‘And there’s for God. He’ll have nothing more from me.’

She said no more. Without looking to see what effect she’d had upon her companion (she would have been disappointed; he was stony-faced), she strode out. Only when she’d gone did Jacob let himself weep. Manly tears; the tears of a commander before a broken army or a father at his son’s grave. He didn’t simply grieve for the book – though that added to the sum – but for himself. After this, he would be alone. Rosa – his once beloved Rosa, with whom he’d shared his most cherished ambitions – would go her hedonistic way, and he would take his own road, with his knife and his pen and a new journal full of empty pages. Oh, that would be hard after so many years together, and the work before him still so monumental and the sky so wide.

Then an unbidden thought: why not kill her? There would be satisfaction in that right now, no question about it. A quick slice across her pulsing throat and down she’d go, like a felled cow. He’d comfort her in her final moments; tell her how much he had loved her, in his way; how he would dedicate his labours to her until they were finished. Every nest he rifled, every burrow he purified, he would say: this is for you, my Rosa; and this; and this, until his hands, bloodied and yolked, had finished with their weary work.