DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (4 page)

And he had long served them, women in that perplexity. He could almost (if he chose) believe that he had been put here just
for that reason,
to draw their doors and bridges: women looking for something, an art, a craft, a passion, a means of unfolding their selves
and turning them to account. Artistic temperaments, certain they possessed powers but with nothing to use them on, predators
trying to discover (in tears, in a frenzy, in the dark of night) just what their prey might be.
What’s to become of me? What’ll I do?

He made Rose no answer. He knew what was being asked of him here, and he was not going to give it, he did not have it any
longer to give and if he did he would keep it for himself, whose need was just as great. He had served selflessly (not selflessly,
no, but recklessly anyway, it came to the same thing when the cost was to be counted); he had served and he would not again.
Non serviam
. Not this time. Not this damn time.

“There’s Beau,” he said, and started up.

Though Rose and Pierce had been lovers for the length of a Faraways summer, they weren’t faithful to each other; at least
Pierce assumed she was not to him: her stories weren’t always clear and never complete, she had a great capacity to deny—to
herself above all—what she had been up to or down to, and when she had had a couple of drinks the nights shut up behind her
like dreams; men and adventures weren’t always firmly registered. Once she had accepted a ride home from a dim acquaintance
(Asp in the shop again?) and, when she pulled out his ashtray, glimpsed the corner of a small container in the gray, and feeling
an inchoate burble of memory she put her fingers in, and took out the contact lenses she had been missing for days.

“Ruined?”

“No. Just dirty.”

“And could he explain?”

“No he couldn’t. How could he if I couldn’t?”

“And so you don’t know then what else might have happened in the car that other time. Coincident to what happened with the
lenses.”

“Well,” she said. “Actually, no.”

He could not require faithfulness of her, had nothing in return to offer her for it, and wouldn’t have known, just then, what
to do with it if she had proffered it. Every one of those with whom in the past he had made or assumed such a compact, of
love, of fidelity, had not kept it, and he thought he was done with making them. Even so, without ever choosing to be, he
had all this summer been faithful to Rose, at least in the sense that he had had no other lovers but her. Or only one, and
he imaginary, or phantasmic: his familiar spirit, incubus too, and (Pierce was convinced) the pander who first brought Rose
and him together.

That was his son, Robbie.

“I wish I could meet him,” Rose said. Rose believed Robbie was the child of his body, begotten on a long-ago long-gone lover,
raised by grandparents elsewhere, only just come again into Pierce’s life. That’s what Pierce told her. And in telling her
this and making it likely, Pierce had come upon some details of Robbie he might not otherwise have discovered.

“You might.” It was midnight in August, and still as hot as day; they were naked and neck-deep in the motionless dark waters
that fill an abandoned quarry up Mount Merrow.

“Dark like you?”

“Blond. Well sort of amber honey; maybe it’ll darken.”

“Dishwater blond.”

“And his eyes too. Honey.” Made by the bees upon Mount Hymettus, the ones they sing of.

“Not like his dad.”

“Not in any way.”

Pierce had expected that his imaginary son and lover (he had not told Rose about that part) would vanish, fast or slowly,
from his life as Rose came farther into it. But Robbie hadn’t gone when Rose came. He had only grown denser, glowed more honey-warm
as throughout that summer Pierce and Rose coupled. Indeed he was with them (though seen, or perceived, only by his father)
on that same hot midnight at the Mount Merrow quarry. A laughing Caravaggio boy, naked on a stela of granite at the water’s
edge, one knee drawn up to rest his cheek on.

“Warm,” she said. She let herself sink down till her chin met its pale reflection on the water’s surface. “At first I was
so hot and the water was cold. Now the air feels cold and the water’s warm.”

He swam ponderously to her. Her face was dim, her hair spread out behind her over the black water. The depth beneath them
was palpable, its weight solid like its darkness. Why at night does deep water seem so much more a beast, a being, and why
when you swim naked?

Those quarry waters are deep, fathom on fathom certainly, though maybe not so deep as some believe. Down at the bottom is
the red Impala in which two lovers drowned in the year 1959; the trunk is open, for the suitcases they were fleeing with were
seen floating on the surface next morning, that’s how it was learned they’d gone together over the cliff above. You hear it
told that the lovers are still inside, up to their chins now in muck, she at the wheel, he beside her (his hand on the door
it may be, too late, too deep). But that’s not true. Divers got them out, and they are buried now in earth, like most of us,
and far apart.

Up on the height, the road that the Impala drove in on, long closed, has nearly disappeared; lovers and swimmers now leave
their cars out
by the highway and walk in, past the nearly illegible No Trespassing signs, to reach the quarry’s edge. That’s how Rose and
Pierce had got there. Still the only convenient way of entering the water is to leap. So Pierce had taken Rose’s hand (for
what other woman would he have had to be so brave?) and they went in together, feet first and looking downward, crying out.

“Here’s my plan,” Beau said to Pierce, and laughed lightly at himself. They could already see the glow and pulse of blue lights
out around the bend across the bridge out of town. They approached slowly and not by the straightest way while Beau explained.
It seemed simple enough, though Pierce’s heart shrank somewhat in his bosom, he had never been able to negotiate easily with
the earthly powers, did not usually assume they could be negotiated with, only bowed to or evaded.

Beau stopped his car opposite the overturned turtle of Rose’s car and set the brake. The cops turned to take notice of them
as Pierce got out.

He had driven her home, no picked her up at the party and driven her homeward or townward when. No he had driven her safely
to his place (where she yes now was) and then returned alone back up the mountain because she had left her, had left behind
her contact lenses, which he had volunteered to go back and get. And couldn’t find. And so then on the way back into town,
here, he had encountered something in the road. A raccoon he thought, or maybe a. Something anyway crossing before him. Unfamiliar
car, too, his own was a Steed sedan, big American. And.

Beau was there to say how he, Pierce, had come to his, Beau’s, house in a state of bewildered disorientation. Not hurt no,
a thump on the head maybe. Doctor? No no. Momentary. Fine now. Why had he left before calling the police? Pierce (not for
the first or the last or the worst time) pleaded ignorance. They studied Pierce’s license, asked if he could step into the
light here, and they looked into his face with a fierce flashlight; then they made him walk the white line that edged the
road.

He could do that, and did. He had stepped forward to take her place here, and would do what further was required of him; he
would substitute his (momentary, transient) innocence for her guilt, and would take the fall too, he guessed, if there was
a fall to take. There wasn’t: there were things to do he had never done before, get a wrecker (they worked through the night,
apparently) and fill out forms; and Pierce’s blameless if brief record was now spotted, he would see the result when he went
to pay his next insurance premium. But he knew nothing of that then.

“Something’s going on up at The Woods,” he said to Beau as they drove back. “I don’t know what. Something.”

“I know,” Beau said, unsurprised. “Yes. We know there is.”

Rose was asleep when Pierce got back; she had pulled down the covers of the bed but had not undressed, lay sprawled swastika
fashion across most of the sheet, her long feet bare and her face hidden in her hair. He took off his clothes, suddenly stifled
and too hot, and lay beside her. When he put out the light the wind seemed to expand, and filled the rooms; in the kitchen
something fell to the floor with a papery rustle, and Rose awoke. She ascended as though from a deep pool, lifted herself
and sat up as though on the pool’s edge, looking down within. Then she turned to see Pierce lying long and naked there.

“There wasn’t really any chipmunk,” she said.

“Raccoon, I thought you said.”

“Well there wasn’t any.”

He pondered what that could mean. That she had no excuse for losing control at that turn. That she had not lost control at
all, not of the car anyway, which had done what she had asked of it.
Why
was the only question then, and he wouldn’t put it to her.

“Okay,” he said. She lay again beside him, and put her hands beneath her head.

The room was growing colder as the mass of air within it was exchanged for the incoming one. She slept; she rose again, tossed
up and outward will-lessly to her feet, and went off to the john. He listened to the wind and the toilet’s flush. She padded
back and was clambering again aboard the bed when he stopped her.

“Wait. Wait a sec.”

She stood before him where he sat on the bed’s edge. He undid her stiff jeans, pulled at the snap and the strong zipper; she
rested her hands on his shoulders. He husked her, tugging the denim downward so she could step out. “There,” he said.

He unbuttoned and took her shirt from her too, and encircled her to unhook the bra in back; lightly stroked her freed breasts,
looked into her absent eyes; let her back in bed.

“Scary wind,” she said.

It really had grown alarming. There were noises out in the world, a descant of bangs and thumps and whistles on the wind’s
melody that could not be interpreted, would only next day be seen to be escaped lawn furniture or blown-away pickets.

“What if it’s the one?” she said.

“What one?” he said, but she seemed to be again asleep, anyway
didn’t answer; he looked at her face in the dimness and couldn’t quite tell if her eyes were closed or still open.

He in fact knew what one, for it was from him that she had heard mythologies of wind, how it bloweth where it listeth, one
part of Nature not under God’s thumb and therefore perhaps at the disposal of our Enemy; she had heard his stories about changer
winds, how one had once blown away the Spanish Armada and thus saved England from Catholic conquest, a famous wind which if
you went to look for it in the records of the time wasn’t there. He had told her of the wind that carries away the old age,
and the contrary wind that brings in the new age, and of the stillness between. He had told her a lot of things.

God what a dream-tossed sleeper she was, her arm now flung across him and her open mouth making a child’s soft frightened
whimper with each exhalation. He didn’t usually permit her to sleep beside him.

Not something in her path that she had swerved to avoid: more likely something behind and following, which she meant to escape.
Who flies so fast in the night and the wind?

He shuddered deeply, and drew the sheet over his nakedness.

When it was late, Robbie came from his daybed out on Pierce’s sun-porch to stand above his father. Pierce, who was fast asleep,
was amazed at how clearly present the boy was to him, more than he had been since Pierce had begun to perceive him. The golden
hair of his arms; the awful serenity of his smile, abashing and cheering at once, which Pierce had not often seen, which he
had sought so often by spiritual and lowly physical means to see. Robbie bent and kissed his father’s cheek, and turned away,
his duties here done and others and other games summoning him. Unable in the depths of sleep to cry out or call after him,
Pierce felt him torn away, but he would not remember that: he would remember only how he had suddenly awakened, desolate,
the woman only alongside him, and the wind enormous.

The next morning then, a tremulous blue one with flying clouds overhead, Rose sat on Pierce’s sunporch and thought and smoked
cigarettes while Pierce loaded his boxes and furniture into the same truck (Brent Spofford’s) that had once brought it all
out of the city and into the country. When they were done they all drove out of the Jambs (waving to Rosie Rasmussen, Pierce’s
employer, coming out of the drugstore) and went out to Littleville, to the house to which Pierce was moving. He almost expected
to find it had vanished, magicked away by the wind, but it was there.

A
t September’s end, then, Pierce was living by a running river, and Rose Ryder too, a different house by a different river.
Rose was spending autumn in the summer cabin of an administrator at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy; when The Woods began
to wrap up its summer programs the administrator moved back to her City house and office, and Rose had her cabin until the
freezing weather, when she would have to turn off the water, bring in the deck chairs and the grill, board the windows with
sheets of gray plywood, and look for somewhere else to live till the next fall, a roommate or a room. Meanwhile she could
watch the woods along Shadow River color, and the deck fill with tattered leaves, and the river steam whitely in the mornings.
She thought of the little house as hers.

Pierce’s new house in Littleville was by the Blackbury, the other river that runs through the Faraways, rising from different
sources than the Shadow’s, springs and melting snows far up in the Appalachians, and eventually subsuming the Shadow on its
journey to the sea.

It was Rose who had led him to the house, before he had even moved to the county, when at a moonlit party by a backwater of
this river he’d invited her for a row, and they had come to this house, which was unoccupied then; and they broke and entered.
She was with him too when he answered an ad for a house to rent, and found it to be the same one they had violated in the
moonlight: they went together through the small and faintly smelly bathroom and into the unexpected bedroom, as they had before.
Oh secret
she said this time too, and Pierce embraced her as he had done before, and said to her
Now you must remember
. And she said
Yes
in a whisper.

And yet (Pierce thought, as he lay now on this late-September morning looking at that very bedroom from within his own bed,
his own curtains now hanging at the windows and his own pictures dim on
the walls in the dawnlight) maybe even then she had not remembered. She had answered Yes: but had he not made it a rule that
in certain circumstances she never answer No to him?

In his broad bed in the midnight—not here, but on Maple Street in the Jambs—he had placed the rule on her:
Don’t say no to me, Rose. You don’t want to say no. Only yes. Do you understand?

Yes
.

Say it
.

Yes
.

So it may be that she had really not recognized the place, and therefore had not felt the queasy pressure of Fate on her inward
parts as he felt it on his to have returned here. Perhaps she even
chose
not to remember it. She could do that. She had a talent that way.

Most secret of all is what’s forgotten.

He rose, wide awake—she in her bed in her cabin within the sound of the Shadow slept on—and stood in thought, long, naked
and pale where his skin was not darkened by black hair. Tonight they would meet, dinner on her deck by her young cold river.
He would have to lay some plans then for the evening, could not go up there all unready.

At that he lay down again to think.

Pierce had no alarm clock. He awakened when his dreams were done, plenty early. Lately he had ceased to sleep much at night:
he commonly fell into a deep paralysis for two or three hours after climbing into his great bed, and then awoke as though
he had been shaken, to lie alert and humming like a switched-on appliance for hours, thinking, thinking, weaving, weaving;
sometimes rising to scribble, or smoke, or just stare out at the sinking moon. Another hour or two of sleep after first light
began to touch the windows; then up and busy in the kitchen, at work already even while he clattered the coffeepot and skillet.

For a long time after he received the publisher’s advance for the book he was to write about magic, secret histories, and
the End of the World, money that (along with some from the Rasmussen Foundation) bought his daily bread, Pierce had made no
progress on it. He had climbed to the high diving board in proposing it, and thereupon found that he could neither jump nor
back down. He scribbled notes and lined them out, typed pages and almost immediately crushed them.
Why i
s
it we believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes?
he would begin; or
There is more than one history of the world
: and then he’d lie down, or go out, or give up.

But then summer had come, hot as hell, fecund and various, inspiring in him maybe an imitative abundance. Robbie too, summoned
by
his powers, powers he hadn’t known he had, a being himself made of powers that Pierce did not know how to calculate. And then
Rose, whom he was now nearly done thinking of for this idle morning. Like a wise investment, the more time he spent on Rose
or with her the more returns he seemed to get; he pretended a lordly annoyance at her calls and impetuosities during his hours
of working or spellbinding but he had grown superstitious about her too, couldn’t be sure his productivity didn’t actually
depend on her, found himself talking her into forgoing other possibilities in favor of dates with him; and when she came at
evening she would find him often enough still in his dressing gown, shaken and glowing like an athlete, with a new yellow
pad filled that had been blank not long before; how do you go so
fast
, she would marvel, and he would laugh a great laugh and push her before him toward the bedroom.

Another possibility, which Pierce sometimes entertained as he lay abed, laughing there sometimes outrageously as well, was
that Time was really decanting into his big brain, unfillable like the conjurer’s trick chalice, the wine of a new revelation,
one that he was to impart as best he could to those who waited for it, a revelation that might only in this moment, this year
of this decade, be worth imparting.

Meanwhile Rosie Rasmussen flew. She leapt from the top of the Ball Building on River Street, where four big stone balls are
placed; she had always looked up at those balls but had never before been able to touch them, and the cold rough feel of them
was gratifying as she pushed off and out above the river.

Whyever had she forgot she could do this? She remembered now, as the wrinkled river spread below her, that of course she could
and had, many times, in certain seasons, which seasons? Flying weather maybe. She was a little rusty now but oh the easy bliss
of it when you got your bearings and learned to bank and wheel, kick-turn, dive and rise again!

There was Butterman’s on its rock, should she alight there? No not where she was headed. She lifted her eyes. Beyond, the
city of Cascadia spread, the paper mill pouring white smoke, the new treatment plant, the shining pelt of the river draped
over the dam and gathering in foam at the bottom. No not far enough. She strained somewhat to rise, afraid momentarily that
she was getting somehow heavier, airlogged, sinking. The straitened river opened again southward. Over earth’s curve came
the tops of the twofold city, Conurbana, the many old towers on the left bank (gold dome of the Municipal Building catching
the morning light) and the few higher cold-steel ones on the right bank.

Oh yes there, Rosie thought, losing altitude. That’s the way she would go. Duty and apprehension gathered in her breast. She
wondered if she had been wrong, if actually she had been thrown or shot upward and was now not flying but falling: and she
realized that to think so was to fall; and she began to.

Landing on her pillow in her bed in the predawn gloom, her eyes gulping light. The alarm clock on the table beside her just
gathering force to go off, its whir what woke her. Rosie smacked it, forestalling it, and fell back. Groaned aloud in eerie
horror then as she became aware of some living thing in the bed with her, oh yes Christ, Sam, who had awakened past midnight
with the terrors and wouldn’t rest till Rosie took her in.

Oh I don’t want to go, Rosie thought or pleaded. She sat up and felt with her feet for her slippers, couldn’t find them, got
down on hands and knees and felt under the bed for them (another shiver of eldritch fear as she groped in that dark den) and
then gave up and went barefoot into the hall. Past Boney’s old room and to the back stairs. Autumn odors, of chilly air and
last year’s fires waiting to be relit, cold old woodwork, past lives lived here and their meals and linens and furnishings,
all for some reason vivid in this season. The stairs debouched into the kitchen. Rosie left the door open (why anyway did
stairs need doors at all?) so she could hear Sam if she awoke; and she filled the teapot at the sink.

Remembering flying. You always seem to remember, in dreams, that you can, and have before. And of course you have: in other
dreams. If she could fly today to Conurbana for this appointment she would fly.

The huge old kitchen, meant more for cooks and maids than a family, was still the place she liked best in this house to which
she had come to live, and which was in some sense hers. Not hers to dispose of, but hers in trust: for it all belonged to
the Foundation that Boney had long ago set up, which now possessed all the Rasmussen wealth. In his will he had named her
to be its director.

It was no fate she expected or desired. He had been kind to her and she missed him terribly. But she had refused his bequest,
or at least hadn’t agreed to accept it; turned aside all of Allan Butterman’s inquiries about when a decision might be expected,
while the summer ran out and the house grew cool. Every day that she didn’t decide seemed to her a small hard-won victory,
and every morning she prepared herself to fail once again to decide. It was a knack, she thought, and one that might have
come down to her in her genes, for Boney certainly had it. And maybe it would keep her alive till great old age as it had
Boney. Maybe she
could do here what Boney had somehow longed to do and had not done: maybe by making no decisions she could live forever.

There was Sam now: an urgent moan as though she had been roughly snatched back from wherever she spent the dark hours.

“Okay, hon, Mom’s coming,” let her know who’s with her here, sometimes Sam arrived in the waking world in a sort of bewildered
amazement that Rosie used to find funny. She mounted the stairs by twos, the teapot singing urgently behind her.

Dr. Bock’s phenobarbital was a stopgap, he said; Sam needed tests to find out what was going on with her, and a program of
medication tailored to her.
Tailored
was the word he used, a little suit just her size. She needed an EEG, the test where your brain waves are measured with electrodes,
which might or might not reveal something about what in Sam’s brain could be causing her seizures.

So today Sam and Rosie were to go to Conurbana Pediatric Institute and Hospital to see a neurologist and have the tests; and
then (Rosie could feel it already) they would continue in that direction from then on. No road that they could take would
ever lead back to before that August night when Sam first said
What’s that?
toward something she alone saw in the empty air, and then grew rigid and trembled, blind deaf and absent. The road they parted
from that night fell steadily behind them, the life Rosie had been living; it went on unrolling, no doubt, she would picture
it sometimes vaguely but vividly, with a pang of regret and longing nearly unbearable. Her real life, growing imaginary, while
her new life filled up with obdurate reality.

Bring a favorite toy or book, said the mimeoed list the hospital had sent her. Sam chose Brownie, a rag doll she’d found in
a drawer here at Arcady, whose brown yarn hair and gingham dress were sordid with age and whose left eye, a black bead, had
recently come loose and now hung by a thread, ghastly a little, Rosie promised to fix it and had not. If you wash your child’s
head carefully the morning of the test this will not have to be done upon arrival. Answer the following questions in consultation
with your child’s physician. A careful description of the nature of the attacks is necessary to make a proper diagnosis. List
the medications your child is currently taking with exact dosages and times.

“No Mommy. No no no no.”

“Oh come
on
Sam. For just this once no fight. We need to go so we’re not late.”

Sam slipped from her and started down the hall. Rosie with her dose followed. “Samantha!”

She hadn’t been told if she was to give Sam her usual medicine.
Would it interfere with the brain waves? Make them look worse, or not bad enough? She didn’t dare not give it to her. Dr.
Bock said that very likely Sam’s seizures weren’t hurting her brain, but Rosie couldn’t bear to see another one, her child
shaken nearly apart, how could that not damage you. And no number of them she saw thereafter, down the years from that day
to this (never many in a year, but never none) would make them easier to witness. Or remember. Or envision.

“Oh Sam damn it. Come here. You little.”

“Go way you big.”

Down the front stairs naked and bright against the dark wainscot and purplish carpet, Rosie after her handicapped by the syringe
she held aloft. Negotiation in the downstairs hall where Boney Rasmussen died, on his way to the toilet. Yes okay French toast
if you’ll just, Sam I haven’t got time to argue: laughter rising helplessly in her throat, laughter of bewildered frustration,
cosmic laughter maybe because this really
was
just a game, as Sam (laughing too) believed or knew; but it had to be got through anyway, had to. Sam be serious.

Done at last, tears but at least she didn’t spit it out (Rosie had tried mixing it into juice but Sam never drank the whole
thing, and Rosie never knew in what part of the drink the medicine—medicine she called it, it cured nothing—was lingering).
While Sam ate her French toast Rosie packed, Sam’s book about mice who go up in a balloon, a book for herself too (
The Company
by Fellowes Kraft, she had been becalmed in the second chapter for some weeks), Brownie and blankie, cookies and juice and
the bottle of phenobarbital and the syringe and all the various papers.