Sacrament by Clive Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

can't be taught,' Hugo had said. 'It can only be inspired.'
    Perhaps the exchange had gone on a little longer, but Will doubted it. A short explosion, then peace: that was
the ritual. And sometimes a fond exchange, but that too quickly withering. And always on his mother's face the
same distracted look whether the subject was philosophy or affection.
    But then Nathaniel had died, and even those exchanges had ceased.
    He was injured on a Thursday morning, crossing the street: run down by a taxi, the driver racing to carry his
passenger to Manchester Piccadilly Station in time for a noon train. Struck square on, he was thrown through
the window of a shoe-shop, sustaining multiple lacerations and appalling internal injuries. He did not die
instantly. He held on to life for two-and-a-half days in Intensive Care at the Royal infirmary, never regaining
consciousness. In the early hours of the third night his body gave up the fight and he died.
    In Will's mythologized version of the event, his brother had made the decision, somewhere in the depths of his
coma, not to come back into the world. Though he was only fifteen when he died, he had already tasted more of
the world's approbation than most men who lived out their Biblical spans. Loved to devotion by those who'd
made him, blessed with a face nobody could lay eyes upon without wanting to love, Nathaniel had decided to
let go of the world while it still idolized him. He had been adored enough, feted enough. He was already bored
with it. Best to be gone, without a backward glance.
    After the funeral Eleanor did not stir from the house. She'd always liked to walk and windowshop; she no
longer did so. She'd had a circle of women-friends with whom she lunched at least twice a week; she would no
longer come to the phone to speak to them. Her face lost all its glamour. Her distraction turned to vacuity, her
obsessions grew stronger by the day. She would not have the curtains in the living-room open, for fear she saw
a taxi. She could not eat, except off white plates. She would not sleep until every door and window in the house
had been treble-locked. She took to praying, usually very quietly, in French, which was her native tongue.
Nathaniel's spirit, Will heard her telling Papa one night, was with her all the time; did Hugo not see him in her
face? They had the same bones, didn't they? The same, French bones.
    Even at the age of thirteen, Will had an unsentimental grasp of the world; he didn't lie to himself about what
was happening to his mother. She was going crazy. That was the simple, pitiful truth of it. For several weeks in
May she could not bear to be left alone in the house, and Will was obliged to skip school (no great hardship
there) and stay at home with her -banned from her presence (she had no wish to see a face that resembled a poor
copy of Nathaniel's perfection) but called back with sobs and promises if he was heard opening the front door.
Finally, in the middle of August, Hugo sat Will down and told him that life in Manchester had plainly become
intolerable for all three of them, and he had decided they would move. 'Your mother needs some open skies,' he
explained, the toll of the months since the accident gouged into his face. He had, in his own words, a pugilist's
face; its monolithic rawness an unlikely rock from which to hear fine distinctions of thought and vocabulary
spring. But spring they did. Even the simple business of describing the family's departure from Manchester
became a linguistic adventure.
    'I realize these last few months have been troubling to you,' Papa told Will. 'The manifestations of grief can be
confounding to us all, and I can't pretend to fully understand why your mother's distress has taken such
idiosyncratic forms. But you mustn't judge her. We can't feel what she feels. Nobody can ever feel what
somebody else feels. We can guess at it. We can hypothesize. But that's it. What happens up here-' he tapped his