III

Leaving the man was like departing a battlefield. The engagement had ended inconclusively, but painful as the conversation had been, it had obliged him to put into words an idea that would have made little or no sense before the events of the last few days: Jacob and Rosa, despite their extraordinary particularities, were strangers to themselves. They did not know what or who they were; the selves to whom their deeds were attributed, fictions. This, he began to believe, was the conundrum at the heart of his agonized relationship with Steep. Jacob was not one man, but many. Not many, but none. He was a creature of Will’s invention, as surely as Will, and Lord Fox, were Steep’s own creatures, made by a different process, perhaps, but still made. Which thought inevitably begged another conundrum: If there was nobody in this circle who was not somehow dependent upon the volition of another for their existence, could they be said to be divisible entities or were they one troubled spirit: Steep the Father, Will the Son, and Lord Fox the Unholy Ghost? That left the role of Virgin Mother for Rosa, which faintly blasphemous notion brought a smile to his lips.

As he wandered back down the dispiriting corridors to the front of the building he realized that from the very beginning Steep had confessed his ignorance of his own nature. Hadn’t he described himself as a man who couldn’t remember his own parents? And later, talking of his epiphany, evoked the perfect image of his dissolution: his body lost to the waters of the Neva; Jacob in the wolf, Jacob in the tree, Jacob in the bird?

It was cool outside, the air moist and clean. Will lit a cigarette and plotted as best he could what to do next. Some of what Hugo had said carried weight. Steep was indeed dangerous right now, and Will had to be careful in his dealings. But he couldn’t believe that Steep simply wanted him dead. They were too tightly bound together; their destinies intertwined. This wasn’t wish fulfillment on Will’s part: He had it from the fox’s own mouth.

If the animal was Steep’s agent in the curious circle, which he surely was, then he was espousing Jacob’s hopes, and what was being expressed when the animal spoke of Will as its liberation, if not the desire that he solve the enigma of Jacob and Rosa’s very existence?

He lit a second cigarette, smoked his way through it and immediately lit a third, desperate for the nicotine rush that would help him clarify his thoughts. The only way to solve this puzzle, he knew, was to deal with Steep directly, to go to him, as he’d told Hugo he would, and pray that Steep’s desire for self-comprehension overrode the man’s appetite for death. He knew how it felt, that appetite; how it had quickened his senses, shedding blood. The very hand that put his cigarette to his lips had been inspired by the knife, hadn’t it, exulting in the harm it was capable of doing. He pictured the birds even now, huddling in the cleft of a frozen branch, winking their beady eyes—

“They see me.”

“See them back.”

“I do.”

“Fir them with your eyes.”

“l am.”

“Then finish it.”

He felt a tremor of pleasure down his spine. Even after all these years, all the sights he’d seen that in scale and savagery beggared the little murders he’d performed, he could still taste the forbidden thrill of it. But there were other memories that in their way held as much power. He brought one of them to mind now and put it between himself and the knife: Thomas Simeon, standing among the blossoms, proffering a single petal.

“I have the Holy of Holies here—the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself—right here on the tip of my little finger. Look!”

That was also part of the puzzle, wasn’t it? Not just Simeon’s metaphysical ideas, but the substance of the simpler exchanges between the two men. Simeon’s rejection of Jacob’s attempts to coax him back into the company of Rukenau; the promise Steep had made to protect the artist from his patron; the talk of power play between Rukenau and Steep, which had been concluded, Will half-remembered, with some fine, careless words of independence from Steep. What had he said?

Something about not knowing who’d made him? There it was again, that same confession. Will’s recollection of the conversation between Steep and Simeon was far more patchy than his memory of the knife, but he had the sense that Rukenau had possessed some knowledge of Jacob and Rosa’s origins that they themselves did not. Could he have remembered that correctly?

He began to wish he could conjure Lord Fox and quiz him.

Not because he believed the creature would have the answers to his inquiries about Rukenau, he would not. But because for all the animal’s prickly manner and obscure remarks, he was the closest Will had to a reliable touchstone in this confusion. There was evidence of desperation, Will thought. When a man turns to an imaginary fox for advice, he’s in trouble.

“Aren’t you cold out here?”

He looked around to see Adele striding across the parking lot toward him. “I’m fine,” he told her. “How’s Hugo?”

“All settled down for the night,” she said, plainly happy to have him comfortably tucked up.

“Tune to go home?”

“Time to go home.”

He was too distracted to engage Adele in cogent conversation on the way home, but she didn’t seem to mind. She chattered on anyway, about how much better Hugo looked today than he had yesterday, and how resilient he’d always been (he seldom caught so much as a cold, she said). And how quickly he would bounce back, she was certain, especially once she got him home where he’d be more comfortable, and she could coddle him. Nobody was ever comfortable in hospital, were they? In fact, a friend of hers, who’d been a nurse, had said to her the very worst place to be ill was a hospital, with all those germs in the air. No, he’d be much better off at home, with his books and his whiskey and a comfortable bed.

The homeward trek took them over Hallard’s Back, where for a distance of perhaps two miles the road ran straight across bare moorland. No lights here, no habitations, no trees. Just the pitch-black sweep of moor on either side of the road. While Adele chatted on about Hugo, Will gazed out at the darkness, wondering, with a little chill of guilty pleasure, how close Jacob and Rosa were. Out there in the night right now, perhaps: Rosa hunting hares; Jacob staring at the sealed sky. They didn’t need to sleep through the hours of darkness; they weren’t prone to the exhaustion of ordinary men and women. They would not wither; nor lose their strange perfection. They belonged to a race or condition that was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease or even death.

That should have made him afraid of them, because it left him defenseless. But he was not afraid. Uneasy, yes, but not afraid. And despite his ruminations in the parking lot, despite all his unanswered questions, there was a corner of his heart that took curious comfort in the fact that this puzzle was so complex.

There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.