DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (46 page)

—Waiting long? said Dr. Kroll. He was smiling with an odd intensity; his hands were clasped behind his back; there was a contingent
of the Imperial guard come with him, and a sergeant at arms, who watched impassively.

—I hope you have not.

—Oh very long, the man said. Oh yes a very very long time indeed.

—Now, said John Dee. Now we have our carriages and their equipage, horses, fine horses, with harness; leathern bags aplenty;
a Queen’s safe-conduct too. Let us go, go, go. Now while we may.

Now, while the gold he had accumulated could still be marked by a tooth, still color a touchstone; he filled the bags with
it, and secured them in the new coach himself. The coach was enormous, oddly high-sided and heavy, Dee’s own design; the coach
maker had shaken his head over it and huffed and muttered and turned the drawings upside down and right side up, and asked
Dee why he had not gone to a boatwright with this. But now it was ready and its furnishings installed and its brightwork polished
and its tack all creaking-new and odorous.

Now. One last communication though, left deliberately till last: in the midst of his servants and the Duke’s men carrying
out his boxes and chests Doctor Dee sat down and wrote in Latin in a swift hand to the Emperor’s chamberlain. He told him
how God through the medium of His holy angels had first brought him to Prague, and how the evil tongues of some close to the
Emperor’s counsels had then driven him out; and how the Emperor’s commandment now prevented his going there again. He said
that he could not himself return the one redeemed from the White Tower without violating that commandment. Also he feared
the Nuncio and the Italians, who would not hesitate to take him if they could. He said he regretted the delay, but that the
boy was now wholly cured, his present gentleness greater
than his former ferocity; that he no longer needed restraints. Now, he said, he would give the boy over to those servants
of the Emperor who continuously watched the comings and goings of John Dee’s household here, to be carried to His Sacred Majesty.
The bearer would give SS Majestas all particulars.

This letter, folded sealed and addressed, John Dee tucked into his sleeve.

And as Jane and the children, the servants following with the last of their belongings, left the palace and piled into the
interior of the coach, Doctor Dee climbed to the tower room to fetch the crystal sphere, the glass from which he had been
spoken to. He had almost thought to leave it; he did leave the table with its
signacula
, all the beeswax candles, and the frame that had held it up. But he took the glass itself. He wrapped it in lambskin, placed
it in a leather pouch, pouch in a strong box, box in the bottommost of the wagon. Safe as a cage of doves or a saint’s bones.
He thought it likely, though, that it would never speak again; he thought it would from now on show nothing but the surrounding
air and the world, strangely curved by its surface.

Nothing.

She had said, once, that a wind would bring in the time of passage wherein the new age was forged, and a second wind bear
it out again; and of that new age she’d said,
Look not for me, I will not be there
. She had not said that in the new age she would not only be absent, but impossible: that whatever was possible, she would
not be.

There were twelve young Hungarian horses to pull, and three Wallachees for saddle horses: Arthur begged to ride with the postilions
and was allowed. Up to the coachman’s seat,
to guide us in the country and the night
he said with a smile, Dee sent the young Bohemian boy with the dreadful hobble, hatted and scarved for the cold. And when,
as he expected, the eternal loiterers at the tavern leapt up to see this grumbling coach emerge from the Duke’s gates, Doctor
Dee summoned one with a wave; he took the letter to the chamberlain from his sleeve, and gave it into the man’s astonished
hands.

—Take this to Prague castle, he said. Be quick if you expect reward.

And he drew the curtain.

Next day at dawn a company of the Imperial guard rode out from Hradčany, clattering and clanking in their arms, their horses’
iron-shod hooves slipping on the cobbles and striking sparks. They were many hours and miles behind the fleeing wizard, but
moving much faster. There was only one way he could have gone, the captain thought, through the southern passes of the Böhmerwald,
making for Regens-burg, and he was right: after another night and day John Dee’s carriage
stood at the top of a pass, his horses spent and weary and the sun going down far away at the end of a winding road.

—Now, said John Dee, who sensed the troop that pursued him; he could have spied it like Cæsar if he had had the Emperor’s
mirrors. He climbed down from the coach, wetted a forefinger and held it up into the still air. Now we must make speed or
we will be stopped. We must not stay the night.

He had them all disembark, and he and the stolid coachman set to work and stepped a light mast amidships (it had been carried
underslung in three long pieces, fitted with iron cuffs and made to slip one into another; with a long hammer the coachman
nailed them securely together). A bowsprit too reaching off the bow, which is what the carriage’s strange sharp nose could
clearly be seen to be. They slung a yard across the mast and from it dropped a four-cornered lugsail, such as John Dee remembered
the fishing keels of the River Humber at home to have, right for a heavy broad craft such as his; he ran a little topsail
too, for the brave show of it, and a jib from the bowsprit.

The older children all helped to set a standing rigging of fore-and-aft stays to keep the mast steady. Stays from the bowsprit
to the mast too, and stays to hold down the bowsprit from being lifted by the jib—the great grief of your lugsail, said the
Doctor. Running rigging then to make and shorten sail, held by pins along the rail. The afternoon grew late. With the little
ones Jane Dee sat by the roadside; the children sought for spring wildflowers under the forest mold and put them in her lap;
she watched her husband, and when he caught her look he could read it well enough: you are a great fool, and that a Ship of
Fools.

When it was rigged he stood off, clasped his hands behind his back and studied it. The air was still.

—Well, we must lighten our load. Come.

From down deep in the wagon’s hold he began to pull out the leathern bags that held their gold.
Not those, not those
, his children cried, but he kept on; when they were heaped on the ground he unbelted one and took from it a few great coins.
They shone, but not with gold’s light; they seemed to have acquired a film of slime. They stank.

—Come, he said again; tossed those coins back and lifted the bag. Arthur and Katherine each took another and followed their
father to where a little bridge crossed a rocky gullied place that fell sharply away; a roadside shrine was there, a cross,
a Corpus. The leather bag was too heavy for the Doctor to lift high enough; Arthur came and
pushed from below, and all the gold within poured out, coins slipping and sliding in a ringing rush down the slope. They looked
down to see what they had done: gold enough to buy happiness twice over lay shining in the dark gulch, caught in cracks and
crevices and flung over the ground like blossoms.

—Now the rest, said Dee. In the first hard rain it will be gone, or be so changed it will fool no one.

They tore open the others and poured them out too. Arthur laughed aloud: throwing it away was even more astonishing than making
it had been.

When they returned to the carriage the Bohemian boy had climbed down, taking with him the small bundle that was his, shirts
Jane Dee had sewn for him, herbals the Doctor had made, a Latin grammar of Arthur’s.

—I will lighten your load too.

—No, John Dee said.

—If you cannot go quick enough, the boy said, and they catch you, I should not be with you.

—We will be quick. I promise you.

—No, said the boy. I will be gone.

—Home? asked the Doctor.

—I don’t know how to find it. They would not take me in. Anywhere is home enough.

—How will you live?

The boy smiled, and hooked his crutch beneath his arm. Beg, he said.

John Dee would have said more, wanted to say more, to know more too; he had thought to take the boy far with him, to Bremen,
to England it might be, and find him a ship bound for Atlantis or the new-found-lands: but now a sharp wind had risen, and
the wheels of the wagon creaked. John Dee clutched his hat, expostulated under his breath in Latin; the wind subsided, but
only a little. He embraced the boy.

—May God bless you then, he said. And keep you from all harm. Wherever you go. In whatever land.

—Amen, said the boy, and kissed the old man, and turned away. The others did not see him go, for the quick little wind had
changed its quarter; the children were watching it luff and belly the sails, the coachman hauling on the reins and calling
to his frightened team and stamping on the brake. Arthur and Rowland were reminding each other how a lugsail is hauled into
the wind.

—The wind! called Katherine as her mother pushed her aboard.
Father! Is it
Boreas
the North Wind? Or
Auster
the South Wind? Or
Angustes
the Northwest Wind? Or?

—It is my very own wind, John Dee shouted over its cry, pulled aboard the moving coach by his sons. But God alone knows how
long it will be mine. If it blow till the world’s end it may not be long enough.

The wolf went on, following a track he came upon, which grew clearer and broader as he walked along, until the roofs of woodcutters’
and charcoal-burners’ cottages appeared, and just when he thought he could walk no farther he reached a village, a church
where he might be helped.

In that village he lived for a time, and then passed on to another village and then to another, gathering as he travelled
a past around himself deep enough to satisfy questioners; and he would never again be caught, asleep or awake, in that land
or this one. He would not ever see Atlantis, though he would sometimes dream of it. He would find work, and a wife, and father
children, and his children and their children would be born without the destiny he suffered.

When he became a very old man he was brought to trial (the records exist) for saying that he had as a youth gone out in the
form of a wolf to do battle with witches. The judges tried to make him confess that he had made a compact with the Devil,
but he would not; what did he have to do with the Devil? He had fought the Devil’s witches at Hell’s door, and when he was
dead his soul would go to heaven. The judges did not know what to do with him. The time was past when men of reason could
be frightened by such stories; no witch had been burned in that diocese for a generation. The priest was brought in to scold
him for his lies and his blasphemies, and he was given ten lashes and sent home.

By that time seams of coal had been discovered and opened all over those mountains. The people of the region became miners,
the most famous in Europe, taught their trade (some said) by the old kobolds whom their picks and hammers had awakened. Take
it and leave us in peace. And his children’s children mined, and raised their children to be miners. And their descendants
did, at last, come to Atlantis, and indeed there were great forests there, and high mountains, and coal in the mountains that
must be mined: a vast seam running down the gnarled backbone of the land.

They went south and west as more mines were opened; many more of them came from the old lands over time, and it was they who
taught the mountain people how to mine, who before had only farmed and
hunted and cut timber. They were called bohunks or Dutchmen by the people of those mountains; they went together with them
down the deep shafts and did not see the day, and loaded the cars with the mountains’ heart. Black Gold one company called
theirs; earth transformed to worth by time. They kept to themselves mostly, in their hunky towns, speaking their own language
(less and less over time till only grandmas and babies shared it) and building churches for themselves of wood and clapboard
like their neighbors’; priests brought saints’ bones all the way from Prague and Brno and Rome to put under the altar stones.
And there, in those mountains, some of their children would again be born with the caul, and their mothers would look into
their hooded faces and not remember what it foretold.

T
here are ways down into the land of Death: and there are also ways upward into the realms above, to which the same dead go.

There are the dark brotherhoods, the unknown ones, who go down into those lands that are not under the earth’s skin of soil
but are nevertheless deep down; who give chase, who follow after those whom they are bound to pursue, to whom they are joined
through time in an enmity that is not different from love. And there are also the light brotherhoods, who go the upward ways,
and they are also unknown. Over their lifetimes—over many lifetimes, it might be—these have built for themselves, by thought
and by works, a body of light: a body that beyond death can arise through all the spheres like an ark, and escape the jealous
rulers. They know the right words to say, they don’t drink at the silver river and forget whence they have come and whither
they go, and so they don’t need to turn back and do it all again.

And yet among them are a few who, knowing all this, nevertheless
do
return here below, for our sakes. How many? Only one in any age, whose name is known to all though not his nature? Or numbers
of them, enough so that every one of us will one day be touched by one? Anyway they return, not once but many times, and they
will go on returning—not recycled out of hylic ignorance and forgetfulness but turning back by choice from that shore, each
time more reluctantly, with deeper pangs, and only because so many of us still remain behind.

Beau Brachman didn’t remember where he had first learned this story, on what continent or coast, or if he had maybe not learned
it at all but simply recalled it, like Plato’s boy and the triangle. He didn’t know if, in the story, those who return to
us with their aid and their knowledge are able to remember who they are and why they have come back: or if they act as they
do without knowing. If that were so it made the heart
almost stop for a moment in pity and love to think of—Beau’s anyway—before beating again more richly. Beau was himself on
a journey of remembrance and recall, as well as of progress and discovery, if they’re different (they weren’t then); he was
walking downtown through New York City and drawing, from the things and people that he saw, the city he had once lived in.
Gautama, Pythagoras too, remembered each and every one of their past lives, and were not crushed by the weight of that measureless
suffering; Beau worked to reassemble just the present one he was actually living, cleaning his house in search of the groat
he had lost.

Midtown streets were full of the usual handers-out of flyers and offerings. Beau had always taken these, whether snapped briskly
at him from the hands of men in dark glasses or held out hopelessly by the walking wounded or pressed on him as though for
him alone, for he knew that those who are paid to hand them out only get their money when they’re all gone. He had at one
time used to study each one too—not for anything he might want that they offered, only trying his luck, a sortilege or fortune
cookie. There seemed to be more being proffered now than there had been then, which was maybe why Beau took no notice of the
wraithlike boy with starveling’s arms bare in the cold who handed him one, his last or only one.

The page was so dim and crabbed, the type so small, that Beau had walked on half a block before he had got it right side up
and read its heading; and when he saw what it was and looked back, the child who had given it to him was “nowhere to be seen,”
of course.

Beau folded the sordid sheet and pocketed it, thoughtful—not because of the story it told, which he actually knew, but because
he remembered being handed this sheet or an almost identical one years before, and therefore guessed that this one pointed
the right way (backwards).

Out on these streets, yes maybe on this very corner, a decade and more ago: Beau was recently back from Elsewhere and feeling
that he had fetched up on the wrong coast, not to say the wrong continent, and this Sophia one was not the only paper he had
got in the way of in those days, not the only news handed to him or blown up against his legs or bought for pennies that had
altered his direction, handmade news borne out from underground printshops by troglodytes and sold all in an instant by bedizened
children. A picture for instance (one of many, doubtless, but this the one that had remained with him) of four or six godlike
persons, a band it was said, their thumbs in their belt loops and their jean cuffs turned up above their bootheels, American
giants, he had forgotten during his time among the smaller older peoples how strong and tall humans could be; and their hair
grown to fabulous lengths, fulfilling hair destinies previously unrealized for modern male humans, hair like Botticelli’s
angels, hair like dandelion moons, hair like storm-tangled seaweed, a promise that if this was possible then nothing need
ever be the same here again. Quicksilver Messenger Service.
I only am escaped alone to tell thee
. Beau now, in this winter, going downtown on Madison, smiled to remember them.

And had it been because his hand was open and his heart too that on those streets he had, just about then, acquired one of
the legendary passes that circulated on certain days and times in what was assumed to be random fashion (though you were never
exactly surprised at having one pressed into your hand or slipped to you across a bar or left for you in the pigeonhole of
the downtown hotel where no one knew you slept): a white cardboard oblong with only a number and the letters MM on it? If
you did not know what the letters signified you tossed the thing away with a sense maybe of having avoided being tricked or
cheated, but if you
did
know you experienced a hot rush of blessing, having been given, for nothing, by fate, what others sought to pay fabulous
sums for.

MM. It was underneath Park Avenue somewhere, reached by way of the tunnels that fed people into the subways and trains from
the American Metal Climax building, the Cyanamid building, the Metatron building, towers whose weight you could feel above
you and that you imagined might go down as far as they went up, mirror Babels or Babylons. (It was believed that you could
also reach the place by heading down along the New York Central tracks from the old private station
under the Waldorf-Astoria where FDR used to pull in, to exit in his chair out of sight of the newsreel cameras and then appear
later erect and grinning at a ball or banquet; more than one party was lost going that way, hope and Evereadys giving out
amid the drip of seep and the chitter of rats.) The door when you found it was white, unremarkable, marked with the same MM
in black sans serif, no Day-Glo or art-nouveau exfoliation; once past it, and another like it, you took further passageways
all tending downward and filled with progressively less light and more sound, music, insistent mechanized yearning and throbbing;
then after a last and smallest door the place opened up like the great chamber a spelunker comes upon after wriggling through
cold narrow caves for unmeasured time: a space apparently unending because so dark, crossed overhead with ductwork and pipes
hugely coupled and ramifying, moist and hissing. Wide is the gate and easy is the way: people occupy the floors and bars and
fill the vast transparent beds and turquoise pools and the music actually shakes the smoke that fills the air, Beau had marvelled
to see that, the wisps and fumes of it standing trembling in the thunder like souls: the rich smell of it, and of the cheapest
and strongest incenses from most of the countries he had dwelt in or passed through. And the universal smell as well, nostril-widening,
shocking, unmistakable. Suspended overhead in glass was the famous silkscreen of the titular goddess of the place, not one
copy but ten or twenty, it being of no consequence which were originals and which knockoffs, they all had the same mouth,
and the lidded eyes at once hurt and dangerous, at once having and wanting. Lost and found. Child and whore. Savior never
saved.

All protest against the Powers starts with the flouting of their command
be fruitful and multiply
: Beau knew that. Make no more bodies in which the lost light is caught and suffers. Which, with the Pill and all, had just
in that time and place become possible, even common. “Copulation Without Generation is Salvation,” the famed orgiast Mal Cichy
said or shouted once into Beau’s ear in the “Venusberg Room” at MM. “Fuck your way to freedom.” The Phibionites for instance
(Tertullian saith) aimed to consume the seed produced in 365 sexual couplings with 365 different partners, one for each Æon
that separates us from God. “Not a big number,” said Mal, prolific producer and consumer of seed, at once lithe and porcine,
his every maxim an offer too.

Escapism
was what this was called by concerned commentators in the papers then, this and so much else that so many people were thinking
up then to do, and Beau supposed that was exact, especially the
ism
part, implying a program, a commitment, even a hope. Except that the headshakers seemed to think escape was
easy
when just the opposite
is the case, as usual the valuation had got reversed and the escapists who were held up as examples—the maddened addicts and
the pleasure suicides and the soiled bodies uncollected at MM when the lights came on past dawn—were precisely those who had
not
escaped, those who even after fabulous exertions hadn’t made it, crashing shattered and aflame like flop experiments in aviation,
ærialists falling prey to hateful gravity,
escape artists
who had been unable to wriggle out of the last wrapping of chains, the last padlocked carette. Beau encountering them in
that underground didn’t know (but he could tell now, looking backwards) that his vocation had revealed itself to him there:
that once he had failed often enough himself he would then spend years finding and caring for others who had failed: offer
himself for them to love, a path by which they could maybe really
get out of themselves
: out of there where, despite all their efforts, they were stuck more firmly than ever.

The place was gone now, of course, MM: Beau walking downtown was sure of that. It had become for good the fiction that most
people always thought it was. The Powers were changing their masks, and so the stories they issue, that we enact, must change
as well. Beau kept on, down past Madison Square, arriving at length at a genteel and shabby brownstone on East Twenty-fifth
Street off Lexington (the one neighborhood in Manhattan that has no name) where were housed the offices of the Astra Literary
Agency: that is, the apartment and book-crowded bedroom of Julie Rosengarten, who was Pierce Moffett’s agent and—once upon
a time, the time when Beau himself lived in these streets—Pierce’s lover too. Beau knew her at first from MM, to which she
had come after her time with Pierce: among the first of those Beau’s opened eyes saw truly.

“Something has happened in Hell,” Julie Rosengarten was just then writing on a long yellow pad at her desk. “An ancient evil
has burst its bounds”—she pondered this, then struck out “bounds” and wrote “bonds” instead—“and threatens to engulf the world.”
She liked “engulf,” a word she wasn’t sure she had ever written down before. “What dark destiny from another time connects
an autistic boy in a small Maine town to the CEO of a giant munitions corporation, a faded movie queen, and the keeper of
the poisonous snakes in the Central Park Zoo?” She was aware of footsteps on the stair outside, and wondered a little, for
she was almost always entirely alone here weekdays; some departing tenant had probably once again left the street door open.
An ancient evil. A
nameless
ancient evil. “Alone and unregarded they battle for their own souls and the soul of the world.”

A sweetly deferential and yet definite knock on her own door. She saw she had used the word “world” twice. And what was the
soul of the world? Something that Beau Brachman would be able to tell her maybe.

She opened the door to him.

“Oh my God. I just this second thought of you.”

“Hi, Julie.”

“What is it?” Beau had never visited her here before.

“Can I come in, Julie? I won’t stay long.”

“Oh God, of course come in.” She stood aside for him, seeing as though through his eyes as he entered her chaotic place, the
piles of bound galleys, the lurid covers of romances and fantasies, the typescript of the nameless-ancient-evil book she had
been blurbing, a book she knew was going to make her some money; she didn’t know which made her more uneasy as Beau came in,
the book or the money.

He let her make him tea, and ate the bread she gave him slowly and with what appeared to be delight; Beau’s abstemiousness
always looked like a kind of shy delight, Julie didn’t think he really meant it that way and maybe the delight was only hers,
just to be in his company again.
It’s been so long
, she said, though it wasn’t like they hadn’t been in touch: she had called him in some alarm and fear the night of the big
wind in September (she had called a few people that night, shocked at her phone bill the following month).