Free Sacrament by Clive Barker

passageway and out through the front door to freedom.
Will was pleased with himself. It wasn't quite the adventure he'd expected to have in this bizarre place, but it
had satisfied some instinct in him. 'Perhaps I'll be a farmer,' he said to himself. Then he headed out, into
whatever was left of the day.
     

CHAPTER V
     
    The episode with the sheep had delayed him in the Courthouse longer than he'd intended; even as he stepped
outside the clouds covered the sun, and a gust of wind, strong enough to bow the grass low as it passed, brought
a spatter of rain. He would not now be able to outrun a soaking, he knew, but he was determined not to go back
the way he'd come. Instead he'd take a short cut across the fields to the house. He walked to the corner of the
Courthouse, and tried to spot his destination, but it was out of sight. He knew its general direction, however; he
would simply follow his nose.
The rain was getting heavier by the moment, but he didn't mind. The air carried the metallic tang of lightning,
sweetened by the scent of wet grass; the heat was already noticeably mellowed. On the fells ahead of him, a few
last spears of sunlight were shining through the big-bellied clouds and stabbing the heights.
Just as the storm was filling the valley, so it seemed his senses were filled: with the rain, the grass, the tang, the
sunlight and thunder. He could not remember ever feeling as he felt now: that he and the world around him
were in every particular connected. It made him want to yell with happiness, he felt so full, so found. It was as
though, for the first time in his life, something in the world that was not human knew he was there.
His blessedness made him fleet. Whooping and shouting he ran through the lashing grass like a crazy, while the
clouds sealed off the last of the sun and threw lightning down on the hills.
He did his best to hold to the direction he'd set himself, but the rain quickly escalated from a bracing shower to
a downpour, and he could soon no longer see slopes that minutes before had been crystalline, so obscured were
they by veils of water and cloud. Nor was this his only problem. The first hedgerow he encountered was too
thick to be breached and too tall to be clambered over, so he was obliged to go looking for a gate, his trek along
the edge of the field disorienting him. It was some time before he found a means of egress: not a gate but a stile,
which he hoisted himself over, glancing back at the Courthouse only to find that it too had disappeared from
sight.
He didn't panic. There were farmhouses scattered all along the valley, and if he did find himself lost then he'd
just strike out for the nearest residence and ask for directions. Meanwhile he made an instinctive guess at his
route, and ploughed on first through a meadow of rape and then across a field occupied by a herd of cows,
several of which had taken refuge under an enormous sycamore. He was almost tempted to join them, but he'd
read once that trees were bad spots to shelter during thunderstorms so on he went, through a gate onto a track
that was turning into a little brook, and over a second stile into a muddy, deserted field. The rainfall had not
slowed a jot, and by now he was soaked to the skin. It was time, he decided, to seek some help. The next track
he came to he'd follow till it led him somewhere inhabited; maybe he'd persuade a sympathetic soul to drive him
home.
    But he walked on for another ten or fifteen minutes without encountering a track, however rudimentary, and
now the ground began to slope upwards, so that he was soon having to climb hard. He stopped. This was
definitely not the right way. Half-blinded by the freezing downpour he turned three hundred and sixty degrees
looking for some clue to his whereabouts, but there were walls of grey rain enclosing him on every side, so he
turned his back to the slope and retraced his steps. At least that was what he thought he'd done. Somehow