DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (39 page)

“‘I tell you three times,’” he said. “You agreed.”

It
was
a test, but not of his nerve; it was a test of his unwillingness to hurt her, of his ability to tell when he had, or would,
no clues permitted, no secret signs, only his own clouded senses; punishment for failure being. Being this. He had ceased
to breathe, his chest rising and falling but no air seeming to enter him. He thought:
this
is the moment that will last forever, this the stasis I begged for.

Pierce might at that moment have perceived (but actually could
not
have perceived, or recognized, except in the form of his own unreasoning guilt and longing) the beings of the time to come,
who were looking in upon him with their receiving eyes, looking into the past from which they themselves would by then be
freed, or banished; waiting, with anxious sympathy, or impatience, or contempt, for Pierce to
get it
at last, to do what he was supposed to do, move the big hand his one allotted notch to help it pass the little hand, but
which he could not do: not right then, not right there.

So somehow the moment was got past without it, he would later be able to tell himself how only in a general way (
somehow we got past that moment
) and have a clear memory only that they came back across the lawn, a sliver moon having arisen, and spent a long time in
his bed, but only fooling with a book of ancient word games he had found in Kraft’s house (
Q: What is it that I give to others daily and yet never part with?
) until—late at night, the lights out—he made her lie still, and lowered his head between her legs (this was the one act she
had always resisted, he could imagine why) and fed himself there, fed till after a long time she held on to his ears and came.
He clambered up her, his face wet as a baby’s, and they fucked moaning wordlessly and holding each other tight in the dark.

Then it was day again, she was going again, her little car already roused and muttering; a cold day, dark at nine in the morning
and a searching wind blowing.

“I love you,” he said. What had so recently been inconceivable to say aloud was now almost the only thing left he could say
with conviction. He waited.

“Pierce,” she said. “That’s real hard for me. You know, saying.”

She had tied a figured wool scarf over her hair, knotted under her chin like a babushka, he touched it and her cheek with
grievous tenderness. Then he took her cheeks in both his hands and made her look at him.

“I love you,” he said again. “I love you and I don’t want to lose you to those, those. That’s just the worst. The worst way
I can think of losing you.”

“Oh that is just so unfair,” she said. “When you don’t even know them. I do.”

He looked at her and said nothing, but his face said
You don’t
.

“Pierce,” she said. “Okay. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t understand why it hurts you but I can’t just deny what happened
to me. I can’t. I won’t soft-petal it.”

“Okay,” Pierce said.

“You know I almost died,” she said then, plainly. “I almost did. I might have if it hadn’t been for them.”

“Not possible,” he said. “How. Died, how.”

“You remember. That really windy night. Remember that? It wasn’t an accident, really. It was dumb, it was stone dumb, but
Pierce it wasn’t an accident. You knew that. I know you did.”

He said nothing.

“It wasn’t the first time, either. It wasn’t.” She had begun to shiver, a delicate tremor of her chin and shoulders. “I know
you think I can deny and forget anything,” she said. “But I can’t. I’m real aware, actually. And maybe you’re so smart you
don’t need any help from anybody …”

“No,” Pierce said. “No.”

“You say death is part of life,” she said. “That there wouldn’t be life without death. Well I can’t think that. You have to
hate death, you have to. Otherwise.”

She had not released his hands, which she had drawn from her face, she held them to her; her gloves were wool, and red; none
of this would be forgotten.

“Listen,” she said. “Next week there’s going to be a sort of thing. An outreach sort of. They do these, for people who don’t
know about us, who are maybe interested. I want you to come.”

A dark highway opened in his heart. “Me?”

“It’ll be fun. Maybe you can contribute. You know a lot about the Bible.” She smiled for him. “You got a Bible?”

“Several.”

“King James?”

“Sure.”

“You have to bring it.”

“I’m really not sure I’m up for this.
Really
not sure.”

She let go of his hands. “Don’t you think,” she said, “you owe it to me?”

“Oh Christ,” he said, and looked around for escape; found none. She asked him again, oh please please. He thought of what
had passed between them in the mansion on the hill, and the doghouse he was still feelably in because of it. So he said All
right, almost too low for her to hear, and then much louder, a bark really, and qualified by a grudging sentence about how
no, he actually did
not
feel he owed her or any of
them
very much in this particular matter and that who owed what to whom might be a subject for another day if ever. Or he did
not say all of that but only something suggestive of it, while she beamed on him, and then kissed with sudden homely passion
the lapel of his coat.

When she was gone he went back into his threatened little house, built apparently on sand, as we have all been warned houses
should not be. No, he thought, no oh no. Oh no. He stood for a length of time in the kitchen watching the black ivy lash the
windowpane, then in the study amid the papers. He went into the bathroom, regarded the stranger in the mirror, then into the
bedroom. On the wall of the bedroom still hung the horrid brown frame into which he had put the picture of her he had taken.
He sat down before it, on the edge of the iron bed where she had lain on that night, bound.

“All right, Rose,” he said aloud, practicing, trying out an assent more measured, more considered, a
wiser
assent than the assent he had just given her. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that Rose. All right. Okay.”

And so it was that, on a wet afternoon midway between equinox and solstice, Pierce Moffett came to be riding a long-distance
bus, its blue-and-silver side marked with a fleeing or pursuing hound, toward the city of Conurbana; afraid to drive his own
car so far, more afraid than he had ever been of anything in all his life, not resolute but without other options, and amazed
at how dark the world had grown.

This is all my fault
, he thought. He meant the black cold that he felt rising around him, and the mephitic air, unbreatheable and hard to see
through; he meant the instability of earth and sky, he meant all the precious and irreplaceable things falling to ruin somewhere
behind or around him, things he could not name or remember; he meant the threat in the weak scant rain and the black unfreeway,
the stench of the halfcapped whiskey bottle in his seatmate’s overcoat pocket (how sharp his senses had become, though only
to perceive what was very close to him, out to get him, needing to be fended off).

All his fault. Willing or wishing that things might be not as they are but some different way instead leads, it seemed, to
this: it was now up to him to make it come out right. Up to him anyway to imagine that it
could
come out right, or at least all right, a thing which he could not do, which should never have been left up to someone as
incapable as he, paralyzed with astonishment and knowing at last how unwise he truly was.

But why amazed? Why astonished? Had he not delighted in the idea that exactly this might really really be so, was he not at
work daily (not so daily, though, recently) on a book proving that the world is malleable in just this way, and can change
all in a moment? Well he was right, it is, and it can. Just as a language will change as its speakers use it over decades
and centuries, so the language that creates the world—the language that
is
the world, its Meaning, its Logos—can change as we use it, all of us human persons and others, and when it does the world
in which we have our beings is remade.

Is that true? Yes certainly it is. In here it is.

S
o long as the rain stayed rain, Bobby thought she’d be all right; if it turned to snow she’d have to stop, and even if the
rain only got worse the front tires on her flimsy ten-year-old Tomcat, mismatched and bald, would start losing their grip
and for a scary second float on the water’s surface before being snatched back, like a person nodding off in a chair, or at
the wheel, which she might do too if she didn’t stop and sleep somewhere for a while. She’d worked consecutive shifts to put
together these days, and she felt it. A big sacrifice. To do something she wanted to do about as much as nothing: pushing
south and west toward her grandfather against her own reluctance, like one of those magnetic Scotties pressed against the
other.

The kids in Bondieu had those, the white one and the black one; little doggies that magically fought each other off, or spun
around to meet one another and click together. And in the tall cabinet in the dining room a green bottle with the same two
dogs pictured on it, and the words Black & White. The boy Pierce had read the words to her. She couldn’t then read at all,
and they used to try to teach her, and she would pretend to learn. That week: the week when she hid in their big house stuffed
with things, avoiding Mousie Calton who had been hired to care for them, the time she ran away from Floyd and got so sick;
how old was she then, eight or nine. What she remembered out of so much forgotten, tossed away, denied.

How her grandpap had hated and feared them, that family on the hill. Not them so much as the church they belonged to, the
priest in his collar, the hospital where those kids’ father was doctor, the nuns in their black robes and stiff white fronts.
Black & White. Got tails underneath, that’s why they wear ‘em, he’d say, joking in that ferocious way of his, a kid couldn’t
tell. And now he was there in their hospital, in their care
all day and night, though he didn’t know it. He knew nothing: they said so: his half-lidded eyes cold as a snake’s, knowing
nothing, unseeing. They said.

Allentown and Reading and Harrisburg, she knew men who worked in the mills in all three towns, never saw the names on a map
or on the green signs without seeing their faces, though (she thought) they never would remember hers. Can’t remember it myself,
she joked to no one. At Harrisburg she entered the turnpike, passing back through the gate that once—when she had first come
to it, going the other way, on the other side of the road—seemed to her to be the gate to a different circle of existence,
but which had proved not to be.

She struck the steering wheel in annoyance: she had forgotten to gas up the Cat, gas was more on the pike.

“Supposed to remind me,” she said to herself, to the new self within her, channel of the Spirit; and laughed.

The first thing she had heard about the Powerhouse was that they charged you two hundred dollars to take the entry-level course,
“God’s Guarantee,” which would include your books and materials and the tapes of Dr. Walter’s instruction—and a guarantee:
they could guarantee that you would have life, and have it more abundantly, starting before the course was even completed.
They said they’d never known anyone who asked for their money back. Two hundred dollars had been more than Bobby had ever
spent on anything at once; people who had taken the course told stories of how the money and even more had come back to them
in time, but it hadn’t come back to her, her fault maybe for not believing hard enough that it would, or should: still unsure
that it was she whom Dr. Walter talked to out of the tape machine.

Anyway she had not signed up to get money, or abundant living, though she could use a bunch of both. She had signed up and
given them the money (taken from the bank on her credit card) because of their promise that if she continued, if she followed
their instruction and direction, she would no longer be afraid to sleep. Ray Honeybeare said it: she would no longer need
to fear she might fall down through her pillow into the night lands, where her grandpap went, where the dead were.

Can you do that? she’d asked, and No, he said, I can’t, but I know who can. She thought at first he meant Dr. Walter, wherever
he was, the man in the tapes, but after a moment she knew it wasn’t Dr. Walter he meant.

Is it true? she asked.

What I tell you three times is true, he said. Ever hear that, Bobby?

His smile was strange and piercing in such an unsmiling face, and his eyes were on her. It’s true, Bobby, he said. I tell
you three times.

Dr. Walter, more learned than any of the preachers she had known, could tell you just what all the hard parts of the Gospels
really meant, every knotty word, because he knew the language in which they had been written. She had been sort of surprised
to learn they hadn’t been written in English. In his work with them after the tapes were played, Ray Honeybeare told them
how the sinning part of them wasn’t them, but a false self that had been acquired in Adam’s fall. When you turned to God,
He would open you and pour in His grace, pour and pour, as much as would fill you at last; and this they knew how to bring
about, for it was part of the revelation made to Dr. Walter. Ray said that even after your true self was filled with the Spirit,
that false self might go on sinning now and then, though growing weaker and less headstrong, until at length it withered away
or vanished; meanwhile she, Bobby, was clean and not at fault for what her sinning self did.

The mountain preacher whose church she had helped to build never told her that, that the Gospels promised that. He had no
personal revelation to impart, no truths or powers granted only to him. Sundays and revival nights he invited the Spirit to
come among them, and the Spirit quickening in their hearts caused them to speak, but often as not what one said wasn’t the
same as what others said; some saying how God loves us no matter what, others saying His wrath knew no bounds. And the shepherd
of that flock never would say which of these was true, and which not. If it came from their hearts, the Spirit had moved them
to say it; it meant to them what they meant to express, he said, and maybe spoke a truth that another soul right there that
minute needed to hear. God’s power won’t be fenced in; the Word’s a great speckled bird, different for everyone.

In the mountains they spoke in tongues; the Powerhouse also spoke in tongues, and could teach you how, anybody could learn
they said; they didn’t require you to produce from your own heart a unique sweetness, God burgeoning like a ripe fruit within
you and coming out through your mouth. It was—well it wasn’t a trick but they could guide you and show you how it was done,
she learned how to do it just as she learned to draw blood and to give a shot, neither of which she had ever believed she
could do; now she could talk the God language as long and loud as they had in that church-house, and without falling and weeping
or getting soaked in sweat. When you had done it the first time, your group gathered round you and hugged you laughing and
exulting and even Ray Honeybeare hugged you, sure of you now. Sure.

But above all they taught her that she had not seen the dead, not
on that night at the big church-house in the mountains, not on any of the other nights down there and in Conurbana. Not any
of them; not Roberta.

No matter what others who called themselves Christians believed, the dead were dead, lying in their graves, mere potentialities,
until the Last Days. The Bible was as clear as clear on this; you needed only take it and read; any other interpretation,
that had people’s souls or spirits flying off to Heaven or to Hell and only joined up with their bodies at the end of time—
interpretations
was what they were, and the Bible needed no interpretation. Its sense was clear: how could it not be?

The dead were dead: dead as the mouse found neck-broke in a trap, dead as the dead dog the crows pecked at by the roadside.
What’s God’s power to give eternal life if we’ve got it already? The dead did not walk the earth looking for something, asking
something of her. They wanted nothing. They knew nothing. They weren’t even waiting. Those she saw were not the dead but were
inside herself; they were symptoms of a mental illness whose roots ran deep, starting from her past; before the grace of God
could fill her fully they must be evicted. And that too the Powerhouse knew how to do.

One hundred miles to Harrisburg, a hundred from Harrisburg to Morgantown in West Virginia, a hundred from Morgantown to Charleston
but slower; a last hundred through Huntington and down to Breshy County and Bondieu, a hundred as the crow flies but more
if the crow has to climb every knob and descend into every holler as her old Tomcat must.

You measured your progress on the pike by the tunnels you passed through, the long and the short one and the double one but
always one more than you expected, and that one the last one. Blue Mountain, Laurel Hill, Kittatinny Mountain, Tuscarora,
they had their names carved over their arched entrances, she had not wanted to come to know them or ever to pass back through
them again. Night came and she awakened more fully, seeming to descend into her body from somewhere above and behind; things
came clearer, the geometries of the road and the lights, red ones ahead, white ones in her mirror, she found it easier to
drive when you needed to recognize nothing and think about nothing.

Pray. Time went faster given to Him, they said. All good came to you when you opened your heart to the Spirit’s incoming.

What if you couldn’t, though? Was that the devil self in you resisting, fighting back like a bad screaming kid you had to
haul along with all your might? Maybe, but maybe not; maybe it was not yours at all, maybe it was something squatting in you,
like a cowbird’s egg laid in a finch’s nest. Not until she told the healing group that when she was
nine or ten she was still sharing a bed with her grandfather (who was her father too by adoption) did they begin to break
through to her, Ray actually putting out his nose to hear this, like a hound who’s caught a strong scent, and leaning forward
to ask her more. The bed. Of course Ray had known it was there that the thing was hidden, and who it was who had hidden it
there, but it was no good his knowing or seeing if she couldn’t, no way he could simply
tell
her or infuse her with his insight against her will, she would have to find it herself, reenter it and see it with her own
eyes looking backwards.

When she understood they meant to invade it, that bed more familiar to her still than any bed she had shared with anyone ever
after, she fought them off fiercely. Christ God Almighty how patient they had been with her, how hard they had struggled and
how little she had been able to grasp, in her state of sin, the effort being expended on her. How she had just wasted their
time by her hardness, sitting (she could see herself now, if she looked back, as though she were another) clutching one elbow
in the other hand, defiant cigarette pointed their way; denying denying denying. Bobby, they would call to her, Bobby, Bobby,
somebody sometime let this evil into you when you were too little to fight it. You can’t remember. But the memory is
there
and you can recover it because Bobby no memory ever goes away, it only becomes lost and covered up because it’s too painful
to live with. Bobby that’s what the Devil counts on, that you won’t remember, because if you can’t remember you can never
be free.

It took days, or weeks; she lost track of time. She couldn’t have done it without Ray Honeybeare, whose big scored face became
the only constant she knew, in waking life or in dreams like waking; Ray talking to her, waiting, dissatisfied with her, loving
her. She would say to him
Last night I dreamed you cut off the fingers of my hands
and then would awake to find she had only dreamed she had dreamed that. Once she called him to tell him she had proof that
the story was all true, what Floyd had done to her and why he had done it (not out of plain lust or loneliness for sure),
and then had fallen silent while Ray waited: for she realized that she had not really remembered the proof but had been given
it in a dream, and it made no sense at all. Sometimes in those days she walked in her sleep; she awoke in her nightdress once
halfway down the stairs to the street, another time in the hallway of her neighbors’ apartment; they started then to lock
their doors.

So hard was her case that she was given an Intensive, volunteers staying with her night and day (Ray was one) to wrestle with
what held her so tight. After a day she began to weep and couldn’t stop, couldn’t say why; and then to shriek obscenities
at them, at Ray, and then—at
last—at Floyd.
Leave her
; Ray said, holding her arms and shaking her.
Leave her. I command you. In Jesus’s name
. They told her that, later; they told her she had bellered like no human they had ever heard, and had strength like a great
furious infant. She remembered only the awful kindness of their faces close to hers, the grip they held her in, not going
to let her go, praying to beat the band as she had it torn from her: they saw—some of them later said they actually
saw
it, and others said it was just
as though
they had seen it, so exactly that it might as well have been so—they saw it come forth, right from her hell-yelling throat,
big as a potato or (one said) a turd, filling her mouth and wriggling, thrashing out and gone in a second. Quiet came. They
clung together weeping. Ray said he was glad they weren’t
all
as tough as that. They told her that later too, each one of them told her (
Ray said he’s sure glad they’re not all as tough as that one
) because she hadn’t herself seen or known any of it.

Learn the truth
, they had told her,
and the truth shall make you free
. Her grandfather in that bed had let some of the devil out of himself and into her, let it out the end of his dick most likely,
and that was what caused her to see the dead, or think she did, just as he did. And when he’d said
You’re of a kind I know, you’re of my kind
, that’s what he meant: that he had made her of his kind by what he had done to her. Of course she had hated him, hated him
without knowing why. She knew now.