DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (50 page)

He showed her how you could follow a different thing every time you read an Enosh adventure. The small creatures who (unnoticed
by anybody, least of all Enosh) clamber out of the ground or evolve from the eternal stones, grow faces and characters, change
and disperse or are absorbed into other parts of the drawing, the stars, the planets. Or the moon, whose commentary on things
below is mostly contained in his bored yawns and sly sleepy smiles, who at dawn disappears over the horizon with his towel
and toothbrush (
Boyo boy
) leaving Enosh in his predicaments. Or how words and notions—shadows, reflections, predicaments, thoughts (or
tots
in Enosh’s strange baby talk)—take on independent life as soon as they are named or pictured.

“See,” said Pierce to Sam, as Axel had once to him, “see, here’s Enosh trying to rescue Snoopie Sophie from the Inn of the
Worlds where she’s caught. He calls her the Kurious Kid. Ha ha.”

“Ha ha.”

Sophie keeps opening doors and climbing to windows to see within rooms that contain great blobby people, fat-fingered men
and women in voluminous skirts just barely able to fit inside, shocked or amused at Sophie’s peeking. Only years and years
later did Pierce come to see that the Inn of the Worlds is a whorehouse, and that Sophie’s curiosity is about sex, or is sex.
Sophie forever on the point of losing her shoes, Mary Janes hanging by a toe, their neatly drawn straps a-dangle.

“Who’s they?”

“Uthras,” Pierce said in a sinister bass. Sam laughed. “Bad guys.” The wicked Uthras have got Enosh drunk, foisting on him
a foaming cup of something whose bubbles hover from then on over his own
head, sometimes becoming tiny faces. He is falling asleep, again, again.
Wen U come to the N of a perfiday
, he muses, cheek on hand and elbow in liquor-spill,
+ UR left alone wit your Tot
. In the next panel his Tot, a mirror-image Enosh, is beside him, also asleep.

“He has to wake up.”

“Yep. He’s going to get a letter from his mother. The letter will wake him up.”

“It will?”

“It’ll say
Wake up
,” Pierce said, and Sam laughed again.

“Does he?”

“Well, see?”

Pierce had forgotten how much of the story was always left out, intentions and announcements often standing for deeds, which
in the next day’s panels have already been done, or forgotten. Here was Enosh awake, going down the circular stair of the
Inn of the Worlds toward the deepmost Lockup for panel after panel (his little bun feet never quite touching them though,
their shadows are clearly visible upon the treads; the most moving thing about Enosh is that he can suffer and be brave and
at the same time never actually be touched at all; Pierce beside Sam thought this thought for the first time).

“Why is he sad?”

“Well see, he’s looking into the cell where Sophie is. See, she’s in jail.”

Relentless Rutha, Queen of the Uthras, has shackled Snoopie Sophie in the dark well of the Inn of the Worlds; one tiny star
only visible through the high thick-barred window, a star like the tear on Sophie’s cheek. Rutha’s glad to have Sophie there
because she knows that will bring Enosh, and after Enosh his mother and protector Amanda de Haye, setting out from the Realms
of Light to find and rescue him (
4 the 10
²
time
admits Enosh). And with the three of them bound up and immobilized (the brutal Uthras laugh and toast one another) then the
stars will go out at last and Rutha’s awful Boss (who’s never ever seen) will never have to hear the word
Light
again. And the plot will work, too; it always does.

“
She
looks like
her
,” Sam said, pointing to Snoopie Sophie and then to Amanda de Haye. The same flyaway ringlets and mobile nose, the same puppetlike
articulation.

“Yup,” Pierce says. “See, Enosh thinks so too. What he
doesn’t
know, and never does figure out, is that Sophie’s his sister. Long-lost.”

“Why doesn’t his mother tell him?”

“She’s sort of forgotten,” Pierce said. “And besides, if she told him, the story would be over.”

Sam raised her eyes from the book.

“Are you sad?” she asked.

“No,” said Pierce, “No, oh no,” as though surprised by her question. “No no. Listen. Is it time for you to lie down?”

She shrugged, it was up to him, she was not yet a clock person. Pierce showed her the bedroom, how it was reached through
the bathroom, which didn’t amuse her as much as he thought it would; she resisted this place, a little chilly and weird, and
Pierce too after a moment decided no, and instead showed her the daybed by the stove, oh yes sure, she liked this one. She
lay down and let him cover her and her rag doll with a blanket, watching him with interest and perhaps caution.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I
am
a little scared.”

“Yes,” said Pierce. “I can understand. Without mom or dad. Your first nap here and all. I,” he said, “am going to take my
nap too.”

She looked at him. “You could take Brownie,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

“Oh no,” said Pierce. “I will be happy alone wit my Tot.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

In his own bed his thought was of her, Sam; and of Rosie, and Rosie’s life. To act every day as though you believed your child
was safe and okay, while knowing she wasn’t; to live knowing you could lose her, or see her hurt. How could you bear that.
Well he would never have such a being, so valuable and so vulnerable, in his own life, they inhabited a sphere that he (he
thought) did not. The only child of his person there would ever be he had constructed by himself in his own workshop, like
Geppetto; had prayed then to the smiling powers that he might be made into a real little boy. And—like that lonely old puppeteer—he
had got a sort of conditional yes. Real
to you
: as real as unreal can be: as real as the gods’ gifts ever are.

And what had he done with his new son then? What had he imagined he had done with him then?

His heart struck loudly within him like a door slamming shut upon him.

Did he really know of no other way to love except that, was it so?

He heard Sam stir, and speak a word, but then no more. Pierce had never seen her asleep, yet he saw her now with clarity,
the curve of her open mouth, the curve too of her closed blond-lashed lids.

Could he be sure he knew the difference between a real child and one who could not suffer, one he could pretend even took
delight in what he imagined they did together? He had told himself that his son,
his phantasm, could not be hurt; whom then
had
he hurt, in what realm, by what he had pretended to do? It seemed suddenly certain to him that he had caused harm to someone
somewhere: that it mattered what he had done in the hollow of his heart and hand.

Just a game. He thought of his cousin Hildy, one night home from the novitiate: they had stayed up late over coffee talking
about Last Things, and about that dread moment (Michelangelo in his Judgment in the Sistine Chapel had pictured a damned soul
experiencing it) when you realize that you knew this all along, knew what you were doing and what it meant, but pretended
you didn’t know. That’s Damnation, Hildy had said: that moment, lasting forever.

“I’m just afraid for her,” Mike Mucho said. “She’s only a little kid. It breaks my heart. I’ve tried to talk to her mother
about how I feel, but she won’t even talk to me anymore about it. She’s just—‘here, give her this medicine.’”

Ray Honeybeare pondered this, or did not.

“Well,” he said at last. “The medical condition isn’t what I’m afraid of. If God doesn’t want that child to suffer those fits
she won’t. And if it’s not just ordinary seizures that’s bothering her, then the medicine isn’t helping anyway.”

Mike and he were on the road, going up to the Faraways to meet Rosie Rasmussen to pick up Sam from Rosie. Mike’s weekend to
have her would begin at sundown on Friday, like a Sabbath. The talk was of her, Sam, though Mike (who was driving) wasn’t
always clear where Ray’s thought was running.

“Let me ask you this,” Ray said. “Does your little girl watch television?”

“Well she did. I mean, not the cartoons and, like
the violence. She watched the educational channel.”

Ray nodded as though this was what he feared he would hear. “And did she attend a little school there?”

“The Sun School,” Mike said.

“The one most of the progressive parents send their kids to.”

“Well I guess.”

“Yes. And what was the one thing that they both taught? That they both put the emphasis on?”

Nothing Mike could think of seemed to be what Ray was thinking of (letters and numbers? Colors and shapes?).

“They teach them to
imagine
,” Ray said. “They teach them that it’s a wonderful thing to imagine. You pretend to be something, anything, and you are that
thing. Pretend to be anywhere and you are there.
Just imagine
.”

He regarded Mike with a smile of complicity, or irony, and Mike nodded, though he didn’t feel included exactly.

“We want them to open their minds wide, don’t we?” Ray said. “And believe that in imagination all power is theirs. But do
you see what word is there at the root of
imagine?
It’s
magic
, isn’t it? We’re teaching children to imagine they can have whatever they want, we make them
practice doing it
all day long, and what we’re teaching them is the first principle of magic.”

Mike began to say something, ask at least for elucidation, thinking of all those children, thinking how he had believed (and
thought Ray and all of them also surely believed) in that sense of possibility, in that childlike, that that, but before he
could say so much Ray spoke his name.

“Mike. I’ll tell you what I’m concerned about, and it’s not a small thing. What happens to the
imaginer
who trusts in his own power? I want you to think about this. Right into that wide-open mind can step a being much more powerful
than any human person. Right into that mind. And we can call that insanity, if we want, or dysfunction, or seizures, there’s
a lot of medical names for it. But we recognize it. Don’t we.”

This was a question or a demand to which Mike was to respond, and he understood that.
Don’t we
. If he couldn’t see it in his own daughter he could see it in no one, and had been lying to himself and to Ray and to God
when he had said that he could. It was a lie to say he believed that Ray could help anyone and not to believe he could help
Sam.

“Yes,” he said.

“We’ve been fighting magic for two thousand years, Mike. Remember Simon Magus, a
magus
is a magician, that Peter contended with. He thought the Word of God was some kind of magic, and he tried to buy the power
off Peter. Peter said it wasn’t for sale. Well in history we can read that this Simon believed himself to be the Power of
God Incarnate, and he paraded around a whore he’d picked up in a brothel somewhere, who he called the Lost Wisdom of God.
He got people to believe that.” Ray chuckled, deeply, and his belly shook with it. “Sure. Here she is, ain’t she beautiful.
Just use your imaginations, folks.”

Peter: that’s who Ray was, coarse and big and truthful and plain, whom no evil could approach without his seeing it first
for what it was. Safe with him, safe. “Didn’t that guy think he could fly?”

“He did. He had a trick he played on people, to make them think he could; and then he convinced himself he really could.”

Mike remembered the movie, the red-robed mage climbing to the top of his tower to jump off, what scary hawk-faced actor had
played
him. He wondered for a moment if Ray was remembering it too, and calling it history.

“If Sam’s to beat this thing, Mike, you’ve got to be strong on her behalf. So very strong.”

Mike took the exit toward the Faraways. It had begun to rain lightly again. “We need to have Sam with us, Mike,” Ray said,
looking straight ahead. “We need her right with us from now on. We’re going to put all the resources we have into this for
you. I promise.”

In Pierce’s house Sam drew her plastic backpack closer to her. Without climbing out from under the shaggy and smoky-smelling
blanket he had wrapped her in, she turned so that she could open it. She thrust her arm into the darkness inside, dug past
her clothes till she came upon the glass ball that she had put in, that no one knew was in here but she. Her fingers touched
it and then closed around it as though it crept into her hand, cold and round and brown, and greeted her: a living thing underneath
all the things that weren’t alive. Not even Brownie was alive really. But this was.

She had taken it from the commode in the living room at Arcady, because her mother and her father were going to court and
it might be (they wouldn’t say so but she had said it to herself, and thus had seen that it could be said) she’d go and live
with him in another house, and she didn’t want to leave it alone behind. She brought it out and lifted it into the window
light. If she moved her head to one side, the dart of light in the center of the ball moved the other way.

Where did they go? she wondered. Maybe out of these rooms, into rooms she couldn’t see.

She thought of the rooms inside mirrors: as far as you can see into them, they are just like your own, except backwards; you
can see through their door and down their hall, but then it must go farther, farther than you can see, and you can’t be sure
it stays the same always, or that the outdoors, if there is an outdoors, would be the same and not different. Or even if the
house really
doesn’t
go on but comes to an end and wraps up, smaller than you thought, too small inside to hold you, narrowing like a throat.

J
ohn Dee put away that little globe of moleskin-colored quartz, the first of the stones that Edward Kelley had seen into, the
last that he would himself look into. He wrapped it in wool and opened a leather trunk to put it in, only to find that mice
had nested there while he was away, amid the papers: four no five minute pink babes smaller than his finger’s end, squirming
blindly together, their bed made of his scumbled writings. Poor naked babes. He must think how he would live now. He had left
Prague City a rich man and arrived in England with nothing but his wife and children, hungry mouths that he could no longer
feed on spirits’ promises.

After crossing Germany duchy by duchy in his sail-coach—horseless, for he had given his fine Hungarian team as a gift to the
Landgrave of Hesse in exchange for a passport through his lands; and by night largely, so his passage might not alarm the
people, already so afraid of what they did not understand; with his children asleep and the sails snapping lowly in the chastened
wind—he had taken a house in Bremen. For the next months he paid his rent and read and wrote and met with many learned doctors,
Heinrich Khunrath among them, and to all of them he said that yes there was a new age to make, and it would be made by no
powers but their own; let them, therefore, take up their tools. They could have of him what they wanted, he was dispersing
his estate, if they could find anything of use in his fripper’s shop they should take it away.

No word came from Kelley in Prague. At last Dee hired passage across the narrow sea, and brought his family to England. His
great coach lay long in a Bremen stable, dismasted and shut up. It wasn’t forgotten, though: twenty years after, men and women
were still telling how they had heard it pass their shuttered houses—had heard the sound of its iron-shod wheels on the road
or on the cobbles, and no sound of
hooves, as though it rolled unhitched downhill. It was seen, too; scholars in their towers, outwatching the Bear with Thrice-great
Hermes, saw from their high windows a sight they might themselves have conjured by their deep studies: either the silvered
moonlit road that coiled below had turned river, or.
Moreover there was no wind, not a breath
, one wrote in his book: it moved as though by memory of some other night, a night when the wind really had blown. Too fast
to catch, always gone when they set out after it.

Dee came home to a cold Christmas: his house broken into and his library taken away—for its safety’s sake, the Queen’s officers
said—and Germans and magic not to be talked of. A play written by a mad university wit about a German magician’s awful fall
held the stage in London, showing how he signed a compact with the Devil, was granted invisibility, teased the Pope and the
Emperor: and it was said that real brimstone could sometimes be smelled when the overreaching mage was dragged down to Hell,
and an extra imp or two perceived among the squib-tossing actors in black skins.
I’ll burn my books
. The magician of the play was meant for Agrippa, with his staff and his
schwarzer Pudel
; but it touched John Dee too.

Yet old friends came to lend him money—one of them Edward Kelley’s brother, who did not say how he had come by the ten pounds
gold he gave Dee, nor why he could spare it. And the old Queen was kind to him, when she remembered him; she intimated that
when the right post fell vacant—it was to be the Chancellery of St. Paul’s, or the advowson of St. Cross at Winchester—it
would be his. Nothing happened. Come summer, he and Jane presented themselves to the Queen at Sian House with all seven of
their children, from Arthur the oldest to baby Frances; Jane Dee, who had once sat among the ladies waiting upon the Queen,
was permitted to kiss her hand, and gave her a petition in her husband’s name. The Queen took it with her own hand, and put
it by her on her pillow, and on the long way back home the family talked of these signs and noted them again and again; and
yet nothing came of that either. Next Christmas they were still living on the gifts of friends, and the Queen called Dee to
Richmond, and said she would send him a hundred angels—she meant those gold coins whose name the poets loved to quibble with,
she too, but not he.
There was never promise made but it was broken or kept
, she told him.

One office at last appeared: the wardenship of Manchester College, far to the north. It was not anything he had ever envisioned
or wanted, such a distance from London and his home. The chief business of the old warden had been the persecution of Catholic
believers, many of whom still lay in Manchester prisons. In the dark of winter, earth as
hard as iron in the streams, he started north with his family, the new baby whom John Dee named Madimia, their lastborn, swaddled
like the Christ-child. In February he was installed. His diary, so full an accounting of every visit, every hope and disappointment,
every honor paid him, does not describe the ceremony.

He met his duties, cared for his College and the people of his city. They came to borrow his books, as they had in London;
many dozens he had brought to Manchester College, and the Lancashiremen came and browsed with their hands clasped behind their
backs. Justices of the peace came to ask for help in the cases of witchcraft being brought always before them in those days,
a woman seen milking an axe handle and filling two hogsheads with good milk, or contrariwise drying up her neighbor’s cow,
or things more dreadful, so dreadful that unless men were much more wicked even than Scripture saith, must be the Devil’s
work. Dee lent them the
Malleus maleficarum
when they asked for it (how could he say no?) but gave them John Wier’s
De præstigiis dæmonum
too, that urged mercy for old women fooled by the Devil.

Midwinter again; Dee’s curate came to bring him to a widow’s house whose seven children had become possessed, lay shivering
in their beds unable to speak or sleep as the demon passed from one to another of them.

—I went in their house, said Matthew the curate as they hurried thither, and what did I see but the woman in a fit, and standing
over her the man Hartley.

Hartley had a reputation for conjuring. John Dee had been careful never to speak to him. Matthew, panting along to the widow’s
house with Dee, told his tale.

—What do you here, says I. Praying, quoth he. Thou pray! says I, why what prayer canst thou say? None but the Lord’s prayer,
saith he. Well say it, says I. The which he could not do.

The house was small and mean, a broken door and a cloth against the wind. Tall John Dee stooped to enter. Dark as a sepulcher,
the one window not glazed but only set in with horn. Children moaning under foot, the bed filled with three or four squirmers.
The man Hartley a lump kneeling amid them, a little candle quivering in his hand.

—
Exorcizo te, immunde spiritus
, the man breathed in a whisper, as though almost afraid he might really be heard.
Exabi ea
. Go away from her, begone.

—Cease this, Dee said.

Hartley, so occupied he had not heard Dee enter, turned to see the Doctor, and the bright fear in his eyes was the same as
the fear in the mother’s: who had passed it to whom?

—Put down thy bell and candle, Dee said. Go away from this place. Call down no more powers.

—I will send for the watch, Matthew the curate said to Doctor Dee. It is he himself that has let these wicked spirits in,
he.

—No, said John Dee. Let him be gone.

Hartley was harder to remove than that, by turns disputing with Doctor Dee and his curate and continuing to fuss over the
children and mutter his formulæ; but at length he was put out, and the charged air calmed, and the children ceased their crying.

—Have no more to do with him, Dee told the mother, who was weeping and clinging to her beads and looked ready to chase after
her protector and tormentor. Mind now. Give your young ones new bread in milk. Take this shilling, take it. Seek a godly preacher,
and with him appoint prayers and a fast. Do no more.

He went out into the cold clean air.

—Why do you linger? his curate asked him when he hesitated at the gate.

—I am an old man, John Dee said. Superannuated.

Once in Mortlake he had had a serving maid, poor Isabel Lister, troubled by a wicked spirit. She had tried to drown herself
in the well, and John Dee had himself pulled her out near dead. After that he had prayed with her many nights, twice anointed
her breast with holy oil to expel the wicked one, and put a woman of the house to watch her always; but not long after
suddenly and very quickly rising from prayer and going toward her chamber, as the mayden her keeper thought, but indede straight
way down the stayrs behind the door, most miserably did cut her own throte
.

Had he done that which he should have done for her? All that he could have done? He had knelt later that night in humility
before the glass with Edward Kelley and asked the angel if he had done aright. What should he have done, what should he now
do? And the answer came, their fearsome remote compassion:
It is not of thy charge
.

Poor wretch, poor wretches. He had wanted to win help for man’s hurts and lacks from God’s holy angels, and had won only passage
into the world for powers he did not understand, whose natures were not like his.

He found suddenly he could go no farther. Not of thy charge. He sat down on the stones of a wall and put his trembling hands
upon his knees. It is not of thy charge.

—That man will be hanged within the year, said Matthew the curate. I doubt not.

—God have mercy on him then. On our souls too.

We must not call down the powers from their spheres, John Dee thought, lest they answer us. For they never will be conformable
to our wills, and their own wills are no more bent on helping us than is the sea’s, or the wind’s. Job asked God, who had
permitted his wife and children to be slain, for help and understanding: and in answer God showed him the greatness of his
creatures, and the strength of his arm, and told him to be silent.

Out of long habit, John Dee went on keeping a record of his daily doings, the books he lent, his children’s illnesses, his
dreams.
I had the vision and shew of many bokes in my dream, new printed, of very strange arguments
. The entries grow shorter as his life grew long; then they begin to cease. They say nothing of his wife’s death of the plague:
she whom he thought would long outlive him. The people of Manchester called on God to reveal whose sins had brought the plague
upon them, the Papists or the worshippers of Satan; Dee buried his wife, and said nothing.

Visitors came now and then, and are noted in a phrase, and letters too, with news of Edward Kelley. He is in the Emperor’s
prisons; he has fallen from favor, has been restored to favor; newly married to a Bohemian lady of rank; imprisoned again.
In March of ’93 Dee dreams of him
two nights running, as if he wer in my howse, familiar; with his wife and brother
. Dee records a letter from Kelley himself, not in Kelley’s hand though, inviting Dee to come again to Prague and enter the
Emperor’s service; all is forgiven. Then on November 25, 1595, Dee enters in his diary a single line:
newes that Sir Edward Kelley was slayne
.

Three tales the people of Prague like to tell visitors: the story of the doomed magician Jan Faust, whose house they can point
out, sometimes it’s this one in this part of town and sometimes a different one somewhere else; and the Golem made by the
Great Rabbi Loewe, who saved the Jews in time of peril, or who imperilled them itself, or both; and the story of the Irish
knight-alchemist Kelley, who lived on Goldmaker’s Street with his beautiful Bohemian wife, Joana, and who fell to his death
attempting to escape from the White Tower or another prison when he failed to make gold, or enough gold, for the Emperor.

But Faust never lived in Prague; all his magic was done elsewhere. There is no knowing what the Great Rabbi was capable of,
but in fact the Golem was really made by a rabbi in Chelm, fifty years before the Great Rabbi of Prague was born. Edward Kelley
was indeed brought after many adventures to the high tower a prisoner of the Imperial guard: but there his fate broke in pieces.

There was one fate where he escaped from the tower and ran; changed his name, vanished, lived somehow somewhere a long time
by his wits, an unchanged man.

Or he fell, having got partway down the tower, fell and broke one or both of his legs, the bone coming through the flesh,
and was not found till he had bled almost to death, or to death.

Or he was put to his task again there in the tower, like the girl in the story who was put before the pile of straw and told
to spin it into gold, and he did it: what he had said he could do, what he knew he could do. He even wrote a rhyming treatise
on his methods while in prison, and that has actually come down from that time to this.
Go burn your Bookes and come and learne of me
.

Or he tried but failed. In a sweat of terror trying night after night to insert himself again into the lives of those powers,
and unable to make them live, make the play begin.

Or Oswald Kroll came to him in the tower, and talked long with him, putting to him again the plea or offer that the Emperor’s
sapientes
wished to make to him. The long box and its engine and its uses. Talked at first gently and with elaborate politeness, making
a dreadful kind of sense. Kelley huddled on his pallet, more afraid than he had been in the presence of any of the spirits
whom he had summoned and discoursed with, and said nothing, only shook his head. Kroll came again, and then again. At last
he said that there was but one way Kelley could refuse the offer made him: and he began to talk of that
hypothegm
or notion of Alcindus—Kelley had read Alcindus, had he not?
De radiis?
—that the net of rays in which we have our beings, the net of time and space and quality and form, may be escaped, or transcended
for a moment. And how? Alcindus says the reason the ancients practiced animal sacrifice was that in the sudden extinguishing
of a life a sort of hole was for a moment torn in that net, that net so light yet so strong; and through that hole the priest,
the operator, might look or even step, to see the twistings that had tied this bleeding being to the ladder or web of all
being—perhaps even, the hole being large enough, to move himself through it as though down a chute or up a ladder, to a far
time or place. For a moment.