Sacrament Read Online Free PDF

handiwork: not gleeful vampires or ghouls, but more troubled spirits, constructed
from scraps of sealskin and bits of fur and cardboard, all roughly daubed with red and blue paint. Set on such
diminutive bodies they were strangely unsettling.
    'Come and stand here for me, will you?' Will said, calling them over to pose in front of the doorway.
    'Do I get to be in this?' Tegelstrom asked.
    'No,' Will said bluntly.
    Affably enough, Tegelstrom stepped out of the picture, and Will went down on his haunches in front of the
children, who had ceased their hollers and were standing at the doorstep, hand in hand. There was a sudden
gravity in the moment. This wasn't the happy family portrait Adrianna had been trying to arrange. It was a
snapshot of two mournful spirits, posed in the twilight beneath a loop of plastic lights. Will was happier with
the shot than any of the pictures he'd made at the dump.
    Cornelius was not yet home, which was no great surprise.
    'He's probably smoking pot with the Brothers Grimm,' Will said, referring to the two Germans with whom
Cornelius had struck up a dope-and-beer-driven friendship. They lived in what was indisputably the most
luxurious home in the community, complete with a sizeable television. Besides the dope, Cornelius had
confided, they had a collection of all-girl wrestling films so extensive it was worthy of academic study.
    'So we're done here?' Adrianna said, as she set about making the vodka martinis they always drank around this
time. It was a ritual that had begun as a joke in a mud-hole in Botswana, passing a flask of vodka back and forth
pretending they were sipping very dry martinis at the Savoy.
    'We're done,' Will said.
    'You're disappointed.'
    'I'm always disappointed. It's never what I want it to be.'
    'Maybe you want too much.'
    'We've had this conversation.'
    'I'm having it again.'
    'Well I'm not,' Will said, with a monotony in his tone Adrianna knew of old. She let the subject drop and moved
on to another.
    'Is it okay if I take a couple of weeks off? I want to go down to Tallahassee to see my mother.'
    'No problem. I'm going back to San Francisco to spend some time with the pictures, start to make the
connections.'
    This was a favourite phrase of his, describing a process Adrianna had never completely comprehended. She'd
watched him doing it: laying out maybe two or three hundred images on the floor and wandering amongst them
for several days, arranging and rearranging them, laying unlikely combinations together to see if sparks flew;
growling at himself when they didn't; getting a little high and sitting up through the night, meditating on the
work. When the connections were made, and the pictures put in what he considered to be the right order, there
was undeniably an energy in them that had not been there before. But the pain of the process had always
seemed to Adrianna out of all proportion to the improvement. It was a kind of masochism, she'd decided; his
last, despairing attempt to make sense of the senseless before the images left his hands.
    'Your cocktail, sir,' Adrianna said, setting the martini at Will's elbow. He thanked her, picked it up and they
clinked glasses.
    'It's not like Cornelius to miss vodka,' Adrianna observed.
    'You just want an excuse to check out the Brothers Grimm,' Will said.
    Adrianna didn't contest the point. 'Gert looks like he'd be fun in bed.'
    'Is he the one with the beer belly?'
    'Yep.'
    'He's all yours. Anyway, I think they're a package deal. You can't have one without the other.'
    Will picked up his cigarettes and wandered over to the front door, taking his martini with him. He turned on the
porch-light, opened the door and leaning against the door-jamb lit a cigarette. The Tegelstrom kids had gone
inside, and were probably tucked up in bed by now, but the lights Peter had put up to entertain them were still
bright: a halo of orange pumpkins and white skulls around the house, rocking gently in the gusting