Sacrament

'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.