Books by Clive Barker Galilee Forms of Heaven Sacrament ...

Chant's body was discovered the following day by ninety-three-year-old Albert Burke, who found it
while looking for his errant mongrel, Kipper. The animal had sniffed from the street what its owner only
began to nose as heclimbed the stairs, whistling for his hound between curses:the rotting tissue at the top.
In the autumn of 1916, Alberthad fought for his country at the Somme, sharing trenches with dead
companions for days at a time. The sights andsmells of death didn't much distress him. Indeed, his san?
guine response to his discovery lent color to the story,when it reached the evening news, and assured it of
greatercoverage than it might otherwise have merited, that focusin turn bringing a penetrating eye to bear
on the identity ofthe dead man. Within a day a portrait of the deceased as he might have looked in life
had been produced, and byWednesday a woman living on a council estate south of the river had
identified him as her next-door neighbor, Mr.Chant.
An examination of his flat turned up a second picture,not of Chant's flesh, this time, but of his life. It was
the con?clusion of the police that the dead man was a practitionerof some obscure religion. It was
reported that a small altar dominated his room, decorated with the withered heads ofanimals that
forensics could not identify, its centerpiece anidol of so explicitly sexual a nature no newspaper dared
publish a sketch of it, let atone a photograph. The gutterpress particularly enjoyed the story, especially as
the ar? tifacts had belonged to a man now thought to have beenmurdered. They editorialized with barely
concealed racismon the influx of perverted foreign religions. Between this and stories on Burke of the
Somme, Chant's death at?tracted a lot of column inches. That fact had several conse?quences. It brought
a rash of right-wing attacks on mosques
52 CLIVE BARKER
in greater London, it brought a call for the demolition ofthe estate where Chant had lived, and it brought
Dowd upto a certain tower in Highgate, where he was summoned inlieu of his absentee master,
Estabrook's brother, OscarGodolphin.
2
In the 1780s, when Highgate Hill was so steep and deeply rutted that carriages regularly failed to make
the grade andthe drive to town was sufficiently dangerous that a wiseman went with pistols, a merchant
called Thomas Rox-borough had constructed a handsome house on HornseyLane, designed for him by
one Henry Holland. At that timeit had commanded fine views: south all the way to the river;north and
west over the lush pastures of the region towardsthe tiny village of Hampstead. The former view was still
available to the tourist, from the bridge that spanned theArchway Road, but Roxborough's fine house had
gone, re?placed in the late thirties with an anonymous ten-storytower, set back from the street. There
was a screen of well-tended trees between tower and road, not sufficiently thickto conceal the building
entirely, but enough to render whatwas already an undistinguished building virtually invisible.The only mail
that was delivered there was circulars andofficial paperwork of one kind or another. There were no
tenants, either individuals or businesses. Yet RoxboroughTower was kept well by its owners, who once
every monthor so gathered in the single room which occupied the topfloor of the building, in the name of
the man who hadowned this plot of land two hundred years before and whohad left it to the society he
founded. The men and women(eleven in all) who met here and talked for a few hours and went their
unremarkable ways were the descendants of theimpassioned few Roxborough had gathered around him
inthe dark days following the failure of the Reconciliation. There was no passion among them now, nor
more than avague comprehension of Roxborough's purpose in formingwhat he'd called the Society of the
Tabula Rasa, or the
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