Clive Barker - Sacrament

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

SACRAMENT. Copyright 1996 by Clive Barker.All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound.

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Adobe Acrobat E-Book Reader edition v 1. ____ 2001 ISBN

006-009177-0

Print edition first published in 1996 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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CONTENTS

For Malcolm

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories.

This is a gift from God, who spoke our species intobeing, but left the end of our story untold.

That mystery is troubling to us.

How could it be otherwise?

Without the final part, we think, how are we tomake sense of all that went before:

which is to say, our lives?

So we make stories of our own,

in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker,hoping that well tell, by chance, what God left untold.

And finishing our tale,

come to understand why we were born.

I

HE STANDS

BEFORE

AN

UNOPENED

DOOR

I

To every hour, its mystery.

At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.

It had been Saturday when Will Rabjohns arrived at the weather-bullied wooden shack on the outskirts of Balthazar. Now it was Sunday morning, two-seventeen by the scored face of Wills watch. He had emptied his brandy flask an hour before, raising it to toast the Borealis, which shimmered and billowed far beyond Hudson Bay, upon the shores of which Balthazar stood.

He had knocked on the door of the shack countless times, calling out for Guthrie to give him just a few minutes of his time. On two or three occasions it seemed the man was going to do so; Will heard him grumbling something incoherent on the other side of the door, and once the handle had been turned. But Guthrie had not appeared.

Will was neither deterred nor particularly surprised. The old man had been universally described as crazy: This by men and women who had chosen as their place of residence one of the bleaker corners of the planet. If anyone knew crazy, Will thought, they did. What besides a certain lunacy inspired people to build a communityeven one as small as Balthazar (popula-2

SACRAMENT

tion: thirty-one)on a treeless, wind-battered stretch of tidal flats that was buried half the year beneath ice and snow, and was for two of the remaining months besieged by the polar bears who came through the region in late autumn waiting for the bay to freeze? That these people would characterize Guthrie as insane was a testament to how crazy he really was.

But Will knew how to wait. Hed spent much of his professional life waiting, sitting in hides and dugouts and wadis and trees, his cameras loaded, his ears pricked, watching for the object of his pursuit to appear. How many of those animals had been, like Guthrie, crazed and despairing? Most, of course.

Creatures whod attempted to outrun the creeping tide of humankind, and failed; whose lives and habitats were in extremis. His patience was not always rewarded. Sometimes, having sweat or shivered for hours and days he would have to give up and move on, the species he was seeking, for all its hopelessness, preserving its despair from his lens.

But Guthrie was a human animal. Though he had holed himself up behind his walls of weather-beaten boards, and had made it his business to see his neighbors (if such they could be called, the nearest house was half a mile away) as seldom as possible, he was surely curious about the man on his doorstep, who had been waiting for five hours in the bitter cold. This was Wills hope, at least; that the longer he could stay awake and upright the likelier it became that the lunatic would surrender to curiosity and open the door.

He glanced at his watch again. It was almost three. Though he had told his assistant, Adrianna, not to stay up for him, he knew her too well to think she would not by now be a little concerned. There were bears out there in the dark: eight hundred, nine hundred pounds some of them, with indiscriminate appetites and unpredictable behavior patterns. In a fortnight, theyd be out on the ice floes hunting seal and whale. But right now they were in scavenging mode, come to befoul themselves in the stinking garbage heaps of Churchill and Balthazar, andas had occasionally happenedto take a human life. There was every likelihood that they were wandering within sniffing distance of him right now, beyond the throw of Guthries jaundiced porch light, studying Will, perhaps, as he waited on the 4

CLIVE BARKER

doorstep. The notion didnt alarm him. Quite the reverse, in fact.

It faintly excited him that some visitor from the wilderness might at this very moment be assessing his palatability. For most of his adult life hed made photographs of the untamed world, reporting to the human tribe the tragedies that occurred in contested territories. They were seldom human tragedies. It was the populace of the other world that withered and perished daily.

And as he witnessed the steady erosion of the wilderness, the hunger in him grew to leap the fences and be part of it, before it was gone.

He tugged off one of his fur-lined gloves and plucked his cigarettes out of his anorak pocket. There was only one left. He put it to his numbed lips and lit up, the emptiness of the pack a greater goad than either the temperature or the bears.

Hey, Guthrie, he said, rapping on the blizzard-beaten door, how about letting me in, huh? I only want a couple of minutes with you. Give me a break.

He waited, drawing deep on the cigarette and glancing back out into the darkness. There was a group of rocks twenty or thirty yards beyond his Jeep; an ideal place, he knew, for bears to be lurking. Did something move among them? He suspected so.

Canny bastards, he thought. They were biding their time, waiting for him to head back to the vehicle.

Fuck this! he growled to himself. Hed waited long enough. He was going to give up on Guthrie, at least for tonight.

He was going to head back to the warmth of the rented house on Balthazars Main (and only) Street, brew himself some coffee, cook himself an early breakfast, then catch a few hours sleep.

Resisting the temptation to knock on the door one final time, he left the doorstep, digging for the keys as he strode back over the squeaking snow to the Jeep.

At the very back of his mind, hed wondered if Guthrie was the kind of perverse old bastard whod wait for his visitor to give up before opening the door. He was. Will had no sooner vacated the comfort of the porch light when he heard the door grinding across the frosted steps behind him. He slowed his departure but didnt turn, suspecting that if he did so Guthrie would simply slam the door again. There was a long silence. Time enough for Will to wonder what the bears might be making of this peculiar