Sacrament

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Clive Barker 1996

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006482642

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007358298 Version: 2014-07-17

For Malcolm

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

PART ONE: He Stands Before An Unopened Door

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PART TWO: He Dreams He Is Loved

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PART THREE: He Is Lost; He Is Found

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PART FOUR: He Meets The Stranger In His Skin

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PART FIVE: He Names The Mystery

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PART SIX: He Enters The House Of The World

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Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by The Author

About the Publisher

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, 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 to make 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 we’ll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale come to understand why we were born.

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 Will’s 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 had seemed the man was going to do so; Will had 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 community – even one as small as Balthazar (population: thirty-one) – on a treeless wind-battered stretch of tidal flats which 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 quite a testament to how crazy he really was.

But Will knew how to wait. He’d 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 who’d 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 sweated 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.