DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (3 page)

Sam walked straight through the wreckage as though she were indeed arriving home. “There,” she said, and pointed to the thrones.
“There.”

“Yours?” Rosie asked.

“My daddy’s and mommy’s.”

“They lived here too?”

“And I had sisters.”

“How many?”

“One hundred.”

“Wow, a lot. Did they all fit?”

“They are little,” Sam said, and held up a thumb and finger to show the size, a small, a very small gap, she raised the fingers
to her eye to squint at the microscopic smallness they measured. “Teeny TEENY tiny.”

“And they all lived here.”

“No,” said Sam with instant certainty. “No, in the ball. Go sit there.”

She pointed to the throne. Allan and Rosie looked down on her. She kept her pointer up, for their information. “There.”

“Maybe we should look around a while.”

“Sit,” said Sam, minatory. And waited while her mother and her lawyer mounted the steps and sat.

Why, Rosie wondered, had they just walked away? The owners, the staff, leaving all this behind. Maybe it wasn’t thought to
be worth anything then, old stuff, weather-beaten. It didn’t look worthless now. People in the past had been willing to go
to trouble they never would today; not content with a river island, they had gone and built there a whole false place, of
real stone and wood though, realer than any stage set. The seat where she sat, as richly detailed as the Queen’s in
Snow White
or the big cobwebby furniture in a vampire movie.

“I wanted to tell you,” Allan said. He had not sat, stood at her side, minister or wizard or gray eminence. “Just before I
came out to pick you up. I got a call from your husband’s attorney.”

“Oh yes?”

“It was a strange call. She seemed a little hesitant. But what I gather is that Mike wants to reopen some aspects of the agreement.”

“Oh.”

“He wants to talk about custody.”

Rosie’s hands lay queenlike along the arms of her throne. The smell of the sun-warmed gray wood was strong. Why had she known
from the beginning that she would hear this? Sam, who had ignored them after she had them enthroned and gone exploring around
the litter of the open yard, now stopped. She looked down at her feet, at the ground between her Mary Janes, where she had
spied something of interest, and then squatted there to get a better look. The beauty of her bare brown legs, of her attention
to earth’s minutiæ. Through Rosie’s soul there blew a wind, an awful certainty of loss.

“We’ll have to talk,” Allan said. “Not here, not now.”

They explored the rest of the place. They pushed open the doors of the small theater that occupied the central tower (THE
KEEP it said over the doors, in letters carved to look shaggy and twiggy, like logs) and found it filled with things, chairs
and tables, ancient kitchen equipment, canvas awnings, piles of trays and wooden crates of steins and cups; some whole towers
of such crates were sunken and the dishes smashed in dust-covered archæological heaps. Rosie’s flashlight reached inward to
finger the stage draperies, the stacks of benches. Sam under her arm looking in too.

“Bats,” said Allan, unwilling to go in.

She made him climb to the battlements with her, though, the old stairways still sound, they built so solidly then; the walkways
at the top were less certain, but Rosie and Sam climbed up into a belvedere to look out.

“Rosie,” Allan said. “We don’t have to get crazy.”

“Allan, I know what I want,” she said. “I just figured it out.”

“You did,” Allan said, one level below her, a hand on the ladder by which they’d gone up.

“I want to have a party.”

“Not here.”

“Here,” Rosie said. “Really big. On Halloween. For a lot of people. Everybody.”

“Yay,” said Sam.

Allan said nothing. Rosie turned to look down on his patient upturned face.

She had come here to see her castle, hers, and to decide about it or begin to think about deciding, before it died of neglect
and slipped into the river and was lost. And she had decided, or it had been decided for her as she stood there.

“It ought to be given to the town,” she said. “You’re right. We will. They can have it and fix it up. We can help fix it up,
the Foundation can. But I want to have a party first.”

“Halloween?” Allan said. “Halloween night?” He was so patient, so willing to try at least to entertain the things she wanted.

“Witches, Allan,” she said. “Can’t you see it?”

“Bats,” he said.

“And ghosts.” Rosie laughed, at the lands below her, the height of air above.

“Ghosts,” Sam said.

It was a big view, the river winding lordly to the north, to the jambs, disappearing around the bend through David’s Gate,
the illusory portal that seems cloven into the mountains, but which widens and falls away as you come close, no gate after
all.

Up on Mount Whirligig (which was named, some say, for the winding mists that rise on currents of warmer air from the Shadow
River and seem to spin around it or cause the mountain to seem to spin; no one really knows why) was The Woods Center for
Psychotherapy, the refurbished summer retreat where Mike Mucho worked as a therapist, where he was this day probably; he’d
told Rosie he had been practically living there lately. A lot to do. Rosie couldn’t see The Woods from here, but she knew
just about where it lay; someone standing on its roof might be able to see her standing here.

From the beginning she’d told Allan that she would have custody, that there was no question about that, none that she would
entertain. And Mike had not raised any question then. What had happened, what was the matter, what was he thinking, of his
child only, or of something else?

I’ll bring her here and keep her, she thought, lock that big door behind us. Never ever ever.

An equilateral triangle could be drawn, in that summer, from summit to summit of the three mountains she looked at—Mount Merrow,
east of the Blackbury; Mount Whirligig, west of the Shadow; and, tallest in the center, Mount Randa to the north. More exactly,
the points of the triangle lay respectively on a bluff on Mount Randa’s western height, where a monument stood, a monument
to a long-dead freethinker of the county, once somewhat famous or notorious; on the central gateway of The Woods Center for
Psychotherapy; and on a red 1959 Impala sedan submerged in the waters of an abandoned quarry halfway up the wooded slope of
Merrow.

Bisect the east and west angles of this triangle and the lines meet in Stonykill, at Arcady in fact, the house built last
century by Rosie’s forebears and now the seat of the Rasmussen Foundation. Drop a plumb from the triangle’s peak through its
base and it will arrive at length just here, at Butterman’s, right at this tower at the island’s tip, the belvedere where
Rosie looked out.

Secret geometries of earth such as these tend to loosen over time, slide away from true, and become ambiguous. It always happens,
was happening just then to these; they would not survive the change just then sweeping unfelt over the county and the world.
But since no one had ever discovered them in the days when they still obtained, no one would notice when they failed.

T
he worldwide wind that had blown so strongly on the night of the autumn equinox that year (don’t look for it in your almanacs,
they date from later on, conscientious editors have already altered these impossibilities and healed the weird lacunæ) resembled
autumn storms of the kind we all remember very well, indeed was such a storm in every way—the barometric pressure fell fast,
an awful weight was felt on every breast, a black exhilaration too as the front, tall as the night sky, passed over, roaring
and stamping; then the bright day following on, littered with tree limbs and tossed shingles, and the sky and the heart strangely,
wonderfully clear. That kind of one. They all feel, those autumn storms, as though they blow away something old, and bring
in something new.

When the wind began that night, but was far from full, Pierce Moffett sat in the little sitting room of the apartment he then
had on Maple Street in Blackbury Jambs, talking with his neighbor Beau Brachman, who perched in a little velvet slipper-chair;
now and then as they talked Beau brushed back with a soft girlish gesture his long black hair from before his face.

“In Tibet,” Beau said, “they practice on dreams.”

“Oh yes?” Pierce said. He loved to listen to Beau talk, wasn’t sure he wasn’t half in love with Beau himself. They were talking
about whether, or to what extent, the world can be altered by human intent alone. (The world: all this, the surrounding stuff,
its laws and bounds and givens, what is, was, will be—they knew what they meant.) All around them, in boxes and bags, in this
room and the next, were most of the contents of Pierce’s apartment, for the next day he was to move from Blackbury Jambs to
a house in Littleville not far away. On the floor between the two were a tall cylindrical Turkish coffeepot of brass and two
brass cups; Beau on his travels had learned to drink it and
make it, and Pierce happened to have the pot and cups, never used; and so now they sipped the little sweet strong doses, careful
not to let their lips meet the sludge at the cup’s bottom.

“They learn,” Beau went on, “how to remain conscious in dreams, even though they submit to all the adventures, and experience
all the events. But then when some danger comes, or when they get bogged down in some endless circular insoluble problem,
you know the kind …”

“Oh yes. I do.”

“Or some bad anxiety, or grief—well then they alter the dream so they can pass safely through those things.”

“Like …”

“Like oh you’re lost in a dark wood, and you’re threatened by wild animals; you want out, so you consciously summon up a …”

“A taxi.”

“Sure.”

“Take me home.”

“Sure,” Beau said. “And so by practice you learn to do the same when you’re
not
dreaming. When you come to a place where you need help, or can’t find a way; or you feel threatened or …”

“The difference is,” Pierce said, “that dreams are in us, inside. The world though is outside us; we’re in it.”

“Uh-huh,” Beau said, and smiled; actually he had not left off smiling, he had a sort of permanent smile like that of a hieratic
mask, a head of Buddha or an archaic Greek sculpture, foxier though, more teasing.

Lost in a dark wood. Pierce thought of a long-ago kid’s show on television, where you could send away for a special sheet
of plastic to fix over your screen, and a box of crayons; and then when the little cartoon hero of the show (what was his
name?) stood baffled before a chasm or a cliff, an urgent voice told you Quick, kids, draw a bridge, or Draw a ladder, kids;
and up or over he’d go. Only he also went up or over if you didn’t, through thin air.

But if you expected you could alter the world, the way Beau said, that you could make good luck in your life or the lives
of others, wouldn’t you then have to think that awful and unlikely disasters, just as coincidental, just as perfectly appropriate,
were also alterations of the world that you had made, reverse miracles? Or were they the work of other powers, other persons,
as good at this as you or better? If you can choose any of it, you might have to believe you choose it all: that at any moment
you stand at a crossroads you yourself have drawn.

Winky Dink, that was the little guy’s name on TV. Helpless little foolish little. Hurry, kids. Hurry and help. Who would do
that for him, he wondered, draw him a bridge from here to there, a door to go out by?
Would you or could you do it for yourself, would you have to? The trick would be to assume that someone somewhere would, and
just set out.

Set out.

They both thought at first that the wind, rising, had flung open the street door downstairs with a bang: but right away there
came rapid stumbling steps on the stairs leading up to Pierce’s apartment, and they heard his name cried. Then Rose Ryder
was at the glass-panelled door, both knocking and working the handle, and in deep distress.

“What,” Pierce said, opening the door to her, but she was wild, too wild with some grief or disaster even to describe it.
She began to cry, or to laugh, raising harsh staccato sobs that could be the prelude to either.

“What,” Pierce said again. “Hush. What.”

Beau withdrew his leg from beneath him and rose.

“I flipped the car,” Rose said. And she looked at Beau and Pierce in sudden horror, as though they had delivered this news
to her, not she to them.

“What?”

“The car,” she said. “I flipped it over.”

“While you were driving it?”

She stared at him. Astonishment seemed for a moment to calm her. “Well yes while I was driving it! I mean Pierce.”

“When?”

“Just now just this minute. Aw God.”

“Where?”

But whatever it was that had happened overcame her again; trembling, she sank to the floor. Her hair, blacker and longer than
Beau’s, curtained her face. “Aw,” she said from behind that curtain. “Aw.”

“Well what,” Pierce began, but then Beau came and knelt beside her. He took her face in his hands to make her look at him,
though he said nothing to her. Then he sat beside her on the floor and put his arms around her shaking shoulders, his temple
close to hers, till she was quiet. Pierce, hands in his pockets, looked down on them.

“So,” Beau said at last. “What happened? Where’s the car?”

Rose buried her face into the crook of her arm to wipe her tears. “On the Shadow River road. Just over the bridge. In somebody’s
lawn.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I guess. Some black-and-blues I bet.” She looked up at Pierce, and away again. Pierce wondered, not for the first time, at
her nighttimes, filled with weird incident, as though she somnambulated. Real, though, usually.

“I was coming down to town,” she said. “And too fast. And the big sharp turn, you know? And this something ran across the
road in front of me.” Once again she was seized, and seemed again suddenly to get
the news of what she had done, and looked ready to bawl: but she pressed her cheeks with her two hands and kept it in.

“Something?”

“Like a chipmunk, I think. I just couldn’t see it real well.”

“Chipmunk?”

“Or a raccoon. So I.” And she wrenched an imaginary wheel. “And.” She turned her hand in midair, showing her sailing car.
She wept again, but more softly.

The two men said nothing. Beau kept his arm around her; they had questions, but they let her leave them for a moment. She
was in the car again, freewheeling, knowing that she and earth had parted, first on the left side, then on the right.

“Oh shit,” she said.

Pierce, feeling her horror come and pass, sat too on the floor beside her and took her arm. “You’re okay though,” he said.
“That’s all that matters.” For she might have been driving her own car, her little red Asp convertible—that was actually what
he had been imagining, the small projectile turning in air, trying to right itself in time … But of course it wasn’t the Asp,
the Asp was in the shop (it often was) and she was driving a loaner, a dumpy sedan she had spoken contemptuously of, a Harrier
(or Terrier? he hadn’t heard clearly) that was plainly at fault here, maybe. “All that matters,” he said again, and kissed
her unhurt head.

“How did you get from there to here?” Beau asked.

She seemed not quite to know. It was a long way, several blocks (Pierce still measured in city blocks), a mile at least out
to the edge of town and across the bridge over the Shadow River. Her eyes seemed to look back over the distance in wonderment.

“Ran,” she said, a guess.

She had first found herself—rediscovered herself—hanging upside down in the seat belt, she didn’t remember buckling it even
but apparently had: and it was one of those times again when she exited from a black funnel of unknowing into a place, a place
in her life, this place; and she had to reconstruct the rest backwards, without a clue, how, why. Was she still in motion?
No that was the wind at the crack of the window. Was this her blood dripping warmly down her leg? No some car fluid decanting.
What black being was pressed up against her side window, pressing in, mouth-flap open?

“I think I knocked over their mailbox,” she said. “Yes. I know I did.” She lit a cigarette, hands still trembling. “And so.
I got out of the seat belt, and I guess the door open. And got out.” Got out, revolving as she did so, to stand upside-down
beside her right-side-up car? No the dark world turned around with her as she came forth,
it was the car that was upside down, one wheel still lazily spinning. “And I was just so scared. And I came here, I don’t
know how, and now. Now. Oh shit.”

“But,” said Pierce. “You’re all right, and nobody’s hurt …”

“She left the scene of an accident,” Beau said, seeing Pierce’s bafflement.

“Oh.”

“Not supposed to do that.”

“Oh yes.”

Pierce’s own driver’s license was brand-new, he had only just come to know how fully the world he lived in was adapted to
cars and their drivers, how their needs for information and directions, space to park and turn, help when crippled or abandoned,
were provided for, he had not really noticed this before; and of course there would be the exactions too, the regulations
and controls, just as complete.

“But,” he said. “I mean. What was it? Were you drunk?”

“Well Pierce yes of course I was. Am.”

“Oh.”

She covered her eyes with the heels of her long hands, her cigarette between two fingers pointing up. “God if I get tested.
I’ll lose my license. I just know it.”

Her little convertible had a number of dings in it where she had tangled with others in minor set-tos, never her fault exactly,
but piling up no doubt on the records kept carefully somewhere. Drunk she might now be, but Pierce thought she could probably
pass any test given her, her reaction to even a beer or two was strangely psychotropic, Bacchantic even. He knew.

“Were there people in the house?” Beau said. “Nobody saw?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see lights.” She hugged herself mournfully. “Oh what’ll I do.”

“Maybe there’s time then.”

“Time?” she said warily. “What time?”

“We’ll go see,” Beau said. “Maybe we can get you back there, before—”

She was already on her feet, arms around herself straitjacket style, defensive. “No no I can’t. I can’t I can’t.” She sheltered
against Pierce, eyes closed.

Beau regarded them both, perhaps thinking (it seemed to Pierce) how he might interpose himself here to mend this reality.
The wind took the house just then and shook it sharply once, as though shouldering past them on its way up Maple Street and
out to the mountains. “We’ll go see,” he said. “Pierce?”

“I’ll get my car,” Pierce said, firmly he hoped.

“No!” Rose said, and took his arm. “No stay!”

“We’ll take mine,” Beau said. “I’ll drive by in a minute. Listen for me and come down. I’ve got an idea, if you want it.”

When he was gone, Pierce guided Rose to the next room, his largest, his bedroom and office, and sat her on the bed.

“I’m going to lose my job,” she said.

“Because of this? Oh I bet not,” Pierce said.

“Not because of this. The place is shutting.”

Rose worked as an aide and social worker at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy. Pierce had heard the rumors. Large amounts
had been spent on the conversion, and staff were said to be well paid, thought to be lucky. It was a huge place, though, and
despite the modest solid richness of its public face, the nice graphics and the glossy vans seen in town, the support it gave
to community events, it had always also seemed insubstantial; ungrounded, maybe, like its clients.

“They’ve told you?”

“Oh they don’t
say
,” Rose said. “But they told us staff appointments for the spring won’t be announced till the end of the year.” The Woods
worked on a sort of semester system, like a college in reverse, most popular in the summer, mostly closed for much of the
winter, too hard to heat, too high up the snowy mountain. “They told us this
at the party
. Well you
know
.”

The end-of-season staff party was where she had been this night, he remembered. Jug wine and maybe a keg. Without him to watch
over her. She’d asked him not to come.

“But,” he said. “They didn’t specifically.”

She lay back on the bed; she raked with both hands her long hair from behind her, and laid it out on the pillows.

“Oh,” she only said, or keened. “Oh what’ll I do. Waddle I
do
.”

He lay beside her to hold her. The wind rolled around them. What would she do? He thought of all those who made their own
way nowadays, who like her had come away from universities with degrees in their hands real but useless (hers in American
literature), who got jobs in social work or opened shops on shoestrings, learned simple crafts and sold their products or
other things or themselves, always knowing it might not last long.

Well and he too. Strange generation they were, loose seam in the civil fabric, some of them actually bound for big things,
some not, some borne away and lost. Optimistic mostly but the abyss could always open before you, you had to wonder and fear.