Sacrament

'Nothing you don't,' the fox said. 'There's a good part of him in you, after all. You take a long look at yourself, one of these days.' The fox approached the table now, lowering his voice to an insinuating whisper. 'Do you really think you'd have wasted most of your natural span taking pictures of tormented wildlife if he hadn't put that knife in your hands? He shaped you, Will. He sowed the hopes and the disappointments, he sowed the guilt, and the yearning.'

'And he sowed you at the same time?'

'For better or worse. You see, I'm nothing important. I'm just the innocent fox who ate Thomas Simeon's private parts. Steep saw me trotting away and he decided I was a villain. Which was very unfair of him, by the way. I was just doing what any fox with an empty belly would do, seeing a free meal. I didn't know I was eating anybody important.'

'Was Simeon important?'

'Well, obviously he was to Steep. I mean Jacob really took this dickeating business to heart. He came after me, like he was going to tear off my head. So I ran, I ran so far and so fast-' This wasn't Will's memory of the event, as he'd witnessed it through Steep's eyes, but Lord Fox was on a roll, and Will didn't dare interrupt. 'And he kept coming after me. There was no escaping him. I was in his memory, you see? In his mind's eye. And let me tell you, he'd got a mind like a steel trap. Once he had me there was no tricking my way out. Even death couldn't spring me from his head.' A raw sigh escaped the animal. 'Let me tell you,' he said, 'it's not like being in your head. I mean, you've got a messed-up psyche, no doubt about it, but it's nothing compared with his. Nothing.'

Will knew bait when it was being trailed. But he couldn't help himself; he bit. 'Tell me,' he said.

'What's he like? Well ... if my head's a hole in the ground and yours is a shack - no offence intended - then his is a fucking cathedral. I mean, it's all spires and choirs and flying buttresses. Incredible.'

'So much for the simple bliss of things.'

'You're quick, aren't you?' the fox said appreciatively. 'Soon as you see a little weakness in a fellow's argument, you're in.'

'So he's got a mind like a cathedral?'

'That makes it sound too sublime. It isn't. It's decaying, year by year, day by day. It's getting darker and colder in there, and Steep doesn't know how to stay warm, except by killing things, and that doesn't work as well as it used to.'

Will's fingers remembered the velvet of the moth's wings, and the heat of the fire that would soon consume them. Though he didn't speak the thought, the fox heard it anyway. 'You've had experience of his methodologies, of course. I was forgetting that. You've seen his madness at first hand. That should arm you against him, at least a little.'

'And what happens if he dies?'

'I escape his head,' the fox said. 'And I'm free.'

'Is that why you're haunting me?'

'I'm not haunting you. Haunting's for ghosts and I'm not a ghost. I'm a ... what am I? I'm a memory Steep made into a little myth. The Animal That Devoured Men. That's who I am. I wasn't really interesting as a common or garden fox. So he gave me a voice. Stood me on my hind legs. Called me Lord Fox. He made me just as he made you.' The admission was bitter. 'We're both his children.'

'And if he lets you go?'

'I told you: I'm away free.'

'But in the real world you've been dead for centuries.'

'So? I had children while I was alive. Three litters to my certain knowledge. And they had children, and their children had children. I'm still out there in some form or other. You should sow a few oats yourself, by the way, even if it does go against the grain. It's not as if you don't have the equipment.' He glanced down at Will's groin. 'I could feed a family of five on that.'

'I think this conversation's at an end, don't you?'

'I certainly feel much better about things,' the fox replied, as though they were two belligerent neighbours who'd just had a heart to heart.

Will got to his feet. 'Does that mean I can stop dreaming now?' he said.

'You're not dreaming,' the fox replied. 'You've been wide awake for the last half-hour

'Not true,' Will said, evenly.

'I'm afraid so,' the fox replied. 'You opened up a little hole in your head that night with Steep, and now the wind can get in. The same wind that blows through his head comes whistling through that shack of yours-'

Will had heard more than enough. 'That's it!' he said, starting towards the door. 'You're not going to start playing mind-games with me.'

Raising his paws in mock surrender, Lord Fox stood aside, and Will strode out into the hallway. The fox followed, his claws tap-tapping on the boards.

'Ah, Will,' he whined, 'we were doing so well-'

'I'm dreaming.'

'No, you're not.'

'I'm dreaming.'

'Nol'

At the bottom of the stairs, Will reeled around and yelled back, 'Okay, I'm not! I'm crazy! I'm completely fucking ga-gal'

'Good,' the fox said calmly, 'we're getting somewhere.'

'You want me to go up against Steep in a strait-jacket, is that it?'

'No. I just want you to let go of some of your saner suppositions.'

'For instance?'

'I want you to accept the notion that you, William Rabjohns, and I, a semimythical fox, can and do co-exist.'

'If I accepted that I'd be certifiable.'

'All right, try it this way: you recall the Russian dolls?'

'Don't start with them-'

'No, it's very simple. Everything fits inside everything else-'

'Oh, Christ...' Will murmured to himself. The thought was now creeping upon him that if this was indeed a dream - and it was, it had to be - then maybe all that had gone before, back to his waking, was also a dream; that he never woke, but was still comatose in a bed in Winnipeg

His body began to tremble.

'What's wrong?' the fox said.

'Just shut up!' he yelled, and started to stumble up the stairs.

The animal pursued him. 'You've gone very pale. Are you sick? Get yourself some peppermint tea. It'll settle your stomach.'

Did he tell the beast to shut up again? He wasn't sure. His senses were phasing in and out. One moment he was falling up the stairs, then he was practically crawling across the landing, then he was in the bathroom, puking, while the fox yattered on behind him about how he should take care, because he was in a very delicate frame of mind (as if he didn't know) and all manner of lunacies could creep up on him.

Then he was in the shower, his hand, ridiculously remote from him, struggling to grasp the handle. His fingers were as weak as an infant's; then the handle turned suddenly and he was struck by a deluge of icy water. At least his nerve-endings were fully operational, even if his wits weren't. In two heartbeats his body was solid goose flesh, his scalp throbbing with the cold.

Despite his panic, or perhaps because of it, his mind was uncannily agile, leaping instantly to the places where he'd felt such numbing cold before. In Balthazar, of course, as he lay wounded on the ice; and on the hill above Burnt Yarley, lost in the bitter rain. And on the banks of the River Neva, in the winter of the ice-palace

Wait he thought. That isn't my memory.

-the birds dropping dead out of the sky

That's a piece of Steep's life, not mine.

-the river like a rock, and Eropkin -poor, doomed Eropkin -building his masterwork out of ice and light

He shook his head violently to dislodge these trespassers. But they wouldn't go. Frozen into immobility by the icy water, all he could do was stand there while Steep's unwanted memories came flooding into hi- head.

CHAPTER VIII

He was standing in the crowded street in St Petersburg; and if the cold had not already snatched his breath, the sight before him would have done so: Eropkin's palace, its walls raised forty feet high, and glittering in the light of the torches and bonfires that were blazing on every side. They were warm, those fires, but the palace did not shed a drop of water, for their heat could not compete with the frigid air.