DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (10 page)

N
o he did not flee, though he felt warned to do so, though in the weeks to come, the months to come, he would sometimes wish
that he had: no he watched her sleep for a time, then yes he turned away, and as silently as possible got his coat and shoes,
slipped out the glass door onto the deck; but only stood in the coming morning, feeling as clear and cold as it was. The only
birds he heard were chickadees and jays, both taking notice of him, alerting the world.

He went out across the deck, littered with the remains of their hors d’oeuvres from last night, they had been too occupied
to clean up. He saw that woodland creatures had apparently scavenged what they had left, had maybe been feasting even as the
two humans were thus occupied. Little ears alert to the alarming sounds from within. He walked down the driveway and out on
the road.

Sometime when he was a kid, just bursting into puberty, Pierce had found among his uncle Sam’s books one on sexual pathology,
written, though he couldn’t know it then, in another and different world-time, Berlin 1920, and full therefore of the pathologies
then apparent, gone now or become unapparent or subsumed in others; mostly it was about people (unimaginable to him, people
named with just a job and a single capital letter, E., a butcher, G., a married woman) whose sexuality had become accidentally
bound up—it seemed to Pierce that it happened easily and often—with something different from the persons of others.

Fetishes
was the word the book used.

There was the woman who craved the touch of feathers; or the other who loved crystals, she laid them out lovingly on black
velvet, dangled them provocatively before candle flames, dropped them one by one into cut-glass bowls of clear oil, where
she could watch them sink slowly as she shivered and moaned in delight.

He had wondered, then, if such a thing might happen to him, that his own mighty feelings might get loose somehow and seize
blindly on the wrong thing forever; it seemed not impossible, since just at that moment almost everything (running water,
fur on his nakedness, thunderstorms) could alert them. He hoped that if it did, whatever it was he ended up with would not
be loathsome or operose, as some of these were, or at least be easily acquired.

If it were, then he imagined it might not be so bad (and having read and thought to this point he was likely to be hard again,
of course, the dumb dumb thing); it would be handy in a way, no muss no fuss, just the one little switch to throw, and endless
refinements to pursue, each one getting closer to the potent node that had somehow formed, the simple powerful itch to be
scratched.

And so it had turned out to be.

She had wept, once early on, when they were done and he held her, freed, in his arms: wept clinging to him, asking him “But
did you like it? Did you really like it, did you, did you?” And he, not knowing why she wept, because of the pain he had made
her bear, or because of her shame at wanting it and knowing he knew she wanted it, or from her capitulation to him, or because
of how carelessly, how quickly and completely she had granted it to him—he said yes he had liked it very much, he had; yes
really really he had. And held her, wondering, till she slept.

You had to be careful, though, so careful: one misstep, one misunderstood gesture, and the castle vanished. Pierce, though
he allowed her to believe he was skilled in these mysteries, didn’t really have much of a grasp of the physics, the stresses
and tensions he needed to apply to keep her immobilized, you’d have to be a goddamn physical therapist or a trained torturer,
he spent hours pondering. For it was worse than embarrassing when his ropes slipped and his bonds failed to hold; she would
free herself and look at him smiling like an impertinent child, waiting to see what would become of her for her misbehavior.
And he must not shrug or laugh, or look nonplussed, but only nod, and raise the stakes.

But if his knotcraft was lacking he had another quality others might not have had: he was willing to go as far as she needed
and could be forced to go, no holding back himself if she would not, a willingness that shocked her, moved her, made her come.
So fast had the doors flown open before him down within her that (afraid then as he still was afraid) he had offered her a
code she could use: a signal, he’d said, by which he would know that he had gone, or was about to go, farther with her than
she could bear to go. He would not listen, of course, to any ordinary entreaties or
pleadings, not to
No no
, not to
Stop stop
, no matter how pitifully or imperiously she said these. She had to say this:
I tell you three times
.

She had not wanted to pay attention to this. What did it mean, anyway? Why three times?

Children say it, he said. You know.
What I tell you three times is true
. But it was unknown to her, she had never chanced to hear what he would have thought was a universal formula.

Anyway he was never to learn where her limits lay. Between them they constructed limits, and she would take them for her own,
and then in the night, late, they would violate those limits, and cross into new country. He always supposed her own actual
limits lay somewhere beyond those, and that she knew where they were or would know them if they came in sight. But he never
reached them.

Wesley.
That
was the limit: he would have to be as crazy as she was to get that far. He hoped for her sake that she never again attracted,
by the exhalations of her own spirit, a man capable of that rage, that. It was the one thing Pierce had never been able to
summon up for her, or even imitate very convincingly: the sudden upwelling of male rage, the dangerous mad aggression like
a beast’s, unpredictable in onset and consequences, like the fires and the fireworks that also so moved her.

No he was not like them, he was not, no he was not. There was a big difference, clear to Pierce: that kind of man wanted only
power, and used sex, wielded it or withheld it or inflicted it, all to have power.

But hadn’t he used power, wouldn’t he again, wasn’t he already planning to use it, as a way to have sex? His pretend magic
power, his chance knowledge of her insides, hadn’t he employed them ruthlessly,
forza e froda
, like a sex Machiavelli, a sex secret agent? Hadn’t he?

No. He didn’t think so. He could not hear the voice within him that might accuse him of it, though maybe it spoke. Pierce
Moffett, though an adult male human, a mammal living on earth, nevertheless was able to believe that power and sex were realms
of being not only different but opposed in their natures; that what power was guilty of, primordially guilty of, sex was not:
sex, soiled or enchained or even bought and sold, was innocent.

He jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, feeling a shiver run across his rib cage. How much longer would she sleep? He looked
at the watch he had not removed last night. A trout—he thought it was a trout—leapt from the Shadow as though inviting him
to come play.

He turned back to the cabin. As he pushed aside the slider and came in from the deck her eyes opened: her big eyelids lifting
suddenly like a doll’s, the rest of her motionless.

* * *

The cabin’s tub was a mingy stained fiberglass affair not long enough for her body; he ran it for her, testing the water with
his hand, and led her to it when it was full.

“Yike it’s too hot.”

“No it’s okay.”

She entered slowly. Pierce thought of the dark waters of the quarry on Mount Merrow’s flanks. She lay, knees up, steam dampening
her hair and curling it against her cheeks. Her little swelling abdomen like an Egyptian drawing: he studied it, and the cup
of her navel, deep enough to retain a minute sip of bathwater when she arose, he could foresee that; maybe before it was poured
he would drink it. See how we go on building the
impresa
by which we capture ourselves. He washed her; together they examined her. Her wrists were red. That would pass. They talked
of this and that as he washed her long hind feet, their white bottoms.

“I did get an offer,” she said. She often opened topics in the middle, as though he really could read her mind, and knew what
train of thought she was taking.

“What kind of offer?”

“At work. The healing group invited me to join. To start to join, I mean to start the process.”

“I thought you thought,” he said, “that they were going to fire you.”

She raised her other foot to him. “This is different. The two things aren’t connected. The healing project is a special group
within The Woods. They’re not from here.”

Why did his antennæ lift? He thought he knew. She was regarding her toenails, where the remains of paint still clung, crimson
rose. “Isn’t old Mike a part of this?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“And was it he who.”

“Yep.” She squeezed the loofah slowly. “He’s changed a lot. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Well you know I don’t actually know him.” Mike Mucho was something of a figure of fun within their nights, the comic relief
or satyr-play sometimes preceding their more solemn masques; Pierce had come to know quite a bit about a certain part of Mike’s
life, though he was yet to actually make his acquaintance. He remembered that his very first words to Rose had been
How’s Mike?
back when he knew nothing of either her or him. An imposition, a trick. “How different? Better or worse?”

“Well it’s amazing,” Rose said. “Having gone through the training.” She pondered, he could see her ponder how amazing. What
Pierce knew
about the healing project or group at The Woods was that it had something to do with the power of prayer, and that it occupied
more and more of Rose’s thought even as she said less and less about it.

“Training,” he said.

“You’d be interested,” she said. “Really. It’s a way of power. Like you talk about.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Only from God. Out of the Bible. If you look and read, it’s so clear. The promises are there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you ask for bread,” she said, “God’s not going to give you a stone.”

“I’ll wash your hair,” he said.

They were silent a while for this. He was careful to draw the soap only one way through the length of it, to keep it from
tangling badly; laving it again and again with water poured from a child’s plastic bucket kept by the tub just for that purpose.
When she was done he handed her out, and robed her in a robe of white (a gift or product of The Woods); and then, holding
a mug of coffee by its handle and its body, she went out onto the deck. The sun was already red and hot, strange days, surely
they would end. She lay on an aluminum chaise, and let her hair hang down behind to dry.

“I don’t know, though,” she said or murmured.

“Don’t know what.”

“The course. It costs a lot.”

“They
charge
you for this?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Good Lord,” Pierce said. “Hey. I see in the paper that the Shadowland Gospel Church offers a healing service every Saturday.
I bet they don’t charge.”

“Pierce. This is very different.”

“And you’ve got that much?”

“Well you know. I’ve got my little emergency stash.”

“Oh yes?”

“Sure. Getaway money. I always have had. Everybody does.”

“I don’t,” he said. He thought of her escaping; thought of Wesley. He wondered if the other women he had shared his life with
in the past had kept a secret getaway stash. It made, he guessed, a lot of sense, and though a little shocked at the idea,
he thought it likely. Get away from him, though? Or with him, fleeing some common disaster? It wouldn’t matter, to the money.

“But oh I don’t know,” she said again.

“Well sure.”

In fact she did know. When Mike had brought her before Ray Honeybeare and Ray had taken her hand in both of his and smiled
at her as though he knew something secret about her, something fine and brave that she had never told anyone but that was
within her always, something that made her who she was. She was writing home to her father to send her a couple of savings
bonds she had been given on big birthdays long ago, which now she would cash to pay for it. Then there would be no going back.
The knowledge that she had and would was warm in her breast, warmer than her bath, warmer than this injun-summer sun, warmer
than the flesh Pierce had done his work on.

“I thought maybe you’d have a hard time with this,” she said. She shook her tresses, long enough almost for a fool prince
to climb to her window by.

“With what?”

“Well healing. The power of God.” She closed her eyes. She seemed near sleep again. “Miracles.”

“Heck no,” Pierce said. “I’m with Sir Thomas Browne. ‘Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active
faith.’”

She grinned, eyes still closed.

“An
active
faith,” he said again, and laughed, and felt the grip of a small hand on his heart.

When her hair was nearly dry they returned to the cabin, and she doffed the robe again to sit before a little blond vanity
with a big half-circle mirror.

He approached her where she sat. She had taken out comb and brush, an antique set bound in tarnished silver. He chose the
comb and went to work, starting with the tangled ends, then going higher.

“So what are we going to do with it?” he asked her, lifting it in his hands, black and thick, heavy as a pelt.

“Oh gee,” she said, watching him and herself.

“Well we don’t want to just leave it,” he said. “Just free.”

“No?”

“I think something tight,” he said. He picked up the brush, and began to brush, firmly and expertly (he had become expert
only in this summer, a fast learner). “Don’t you? You don’t mind, do you?”

“I,” she said. Her legs parted.

“Isn’t that what you want?”

Pause. His brush raised, waiting.

“Yes,” she said.

Yes. When it was smooth and knotless he lifted a section of hair
from the top of her head, dividing it carefully into three equal parts. He began to braid the three strands he held, right
over center, left over right, center over left. When he had made two turns that way he took up a hank of loose hair from the
side of her head, and added it to the one he was braiding. Then the other side.