DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (59 page)

Inside the front door of her building there was a buzzer to press, her last name beside it in peacock-green ink, and a single
discreet initial.
After a pause long enough to make him think with awful gratitude that there was no one there, it rang back, and the door whose
knob he was holding opened. A stair to go up, one flight, and a door to knock on. A woman not Rose opened it, and Pierce,
startled, looked behind himself to find the door he apparently should have knocked on, no that wasn’t it, was this one; the
woman watched him do that, and then said “Looking for Rose?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“She’s gone.”

Gone. “Oh.”

“I mean not for good. She’ll be back I think, but she’s gone for a while. They didn’t tell her how long.”

The woman’s thin dark hair was partially wrapped around great pink rollers, he could guess from their disposition what kind
of a look she was aiming for, and how far she would get toward it.

“She’s let me stay here,” she said. “I lost my place.”

“Oh. Uh-huh.” He stood, wavering like a candle flame.

“Did you want to come in?” the woman said. “Make a phone call or something? I’m sorry she ain’t here. You come a long way?”

“Oh,” he said, and shook his head, and shrugged.

“Was this business?”

“Um no.”

At last she took his arm and drew him in, since it had become evident that he could do nothing definite himself. “Gets cold
with the door open.”

“Where,” he said, trying to remember this room and these furnishings, cognates of the ones he had recently seen and touched
but not necessarily the same ones. “Where was it she went?”

“West,” the woman said. “Indiana.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry she didn’t tell you. If she knew you was coming.” “She didn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Mexico,” he said. “Mexico, Indiana. Is that right?”

“Well yeah,” she said warily. Pierce realized he was looming and staring in a way that would surely cause her to stop talking,
she was one of them herself certainly.

“I’m a, a friend of hers,” he said, and smiled a smile that probably wasn’t reassuring; she smiled back, though. From within
the bedroom he heard a child call:
Bobby. Bobby Bobby
.

“He can’t say Mommy,” the woman said. “Its his ear.”

“Do you mind,” Pierce said, “if I sit down?”

“No sure.”

She watched him sit carefully and tentatively on a kitchen chair, as though unsure it would hold him, or if his legs would
bend. Then she went to see her child, who was shaking a playpen’s bars in rage or passion. On the kitchen table Pierce perceived
a Testament, not Rose’s white one, this woman’s doubtless, new-looking yet already stuck full of place markers.

“Do you,” he asked when she returned, “know when she’s coming back? What her plans were?”

“Well I
guess
she’s coming back,” the woman said. “I mean all her stuff is here. She didn’t know just when.”

“Okay well,” Pierce said. “Sorry to bother you.”

She sat down beside him, as though to keep him from rising. “You know her real well?” she asked.

Pierce said nothing.

“You’re not Powerhouse,” she said, sure of that.

“No.”

“And you come from far away?”

“Well. A hundred miles, or actually more, I guess.”

“She was real excited about this chance to go out there. Excited and I guess a little scared. How they kinda sprang it on
her.”

With exactly Rose’s gesture, the woman picked up a pack of cigarettes, toyed with it a moment, and put it curtly down.

“Did she go out there alone?” Pierce asked.

“No, no. There was Pitt Thurston, and let’s see. Ray I know was going.” Like a child telling a story she made reference to
several people he could not be expected to know.

“Mike Mucho?” Pierce said.

“Yes. They ast me to come too. ‘Cause of his little daughter, poor thing. I couldn’t ‘cause I just got
him
back.” And she looked toward the playpen.

Pierce hadn’t removed his overcoat, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the heat, why do people like this woman always want it
so hot. “Well I guess I,” he said, and rose, and looked at his watch.

She watched him walk the linoleum irresolutely. Then she spoke. “Can you tell me somethn?” she asked. “Why’d you come lookn
for her? Does she need you?”

The reasons were not this woman’s business, and he tried to make a face that said that, and knew that he had failed. She continued
to regard him, in scrutiny or maybe supplication, something, something that made him look away. “Well she and I were. Have
been. Sort of. Well close. And I was worried for her.” He studied the boy in his little jail. “How far is it, do you guess?”

“Don’t know. I never been there.”

“Dr. Walter,” Pierce said. “Retlaw O. Walter.”

“Listen,” the woman said, in a voice that made Pierce turn to her. “You ought to keep agoin. Long as you started, long as
you got this far.”

She reached out and put her hand on the sleeve of his coat. “Don’t stop following her,” she said. “Don’t stop. The kind she
is. She needs you to keep on.”

“If she needed me,” Pierce said, “she wouldn’t have gone. Not that way. Not so far.”

“You don’t know,” the woman said, and stood up. “Maybe she couldn’t say. Maybe she doesn’t know.”

He stood unmoving, his car key in his hand. He thought of his little house by the river. He thought of Rosie Rasmussen, and
Sam lost to her.

“Look,” she said, trying to guide him to sit again. “You need something to eat? Let me get you something.”

“No,” said Pierce. “No no.”

But she had already opened the refrigerator, scaring from its top the greymalkin, who had stayed behind, and starting her
son’s wails of desire.

“Ain’t got much,” she said.

“Please,” he begged, but could not for some reason refuse; she gave him Velveeta cheese and Wonder Bread and strawberry pop
and even that did not enlighten him as to who she was and why she knew what she knew; but when he had eaten it he felt it
strengthen and vivify him. He had been hungry, he guessed. Hungry yes, hungry as hell.

“You cain’t stop now,” she said. “You never did before.”

“But,” he said.

“We’ll steal the world if you let us,” she said. “Don’t let us. Don’t.”

She stood then, and quick before he could speak again she pointed. “You go west on 6,” she said. “That’s all. West on 6, then
take 66.”

“Six,” he said, “six six.”

“Bobby,” said the child. “Bobby.”

She could see he didn’t really know what he had to do, so she found a pencil and a scrap of paper and drew him a little map,
the rights and lefts he must make. She licked the pencil before she started to write. He had not, he thought, ever seen anyone
actually do that; but once, long ago, he had.

S
o he went on. The western ramps lifted his car up out of the city center and above the river. He joined the multicolored traffic
hurrying home or toward some other destiny or none. By that time the sun was setting, a lurid bloody smear crossed by the
white plumes of falling or escaping planes. Such sunsets had once been rare, but they were common now, caused by the clouds
of gas and smoke that he and others were making, from here out to where he was headed and far beyond. To the south on the
long river island below the city he could see, as he travelled on, the great parabolic towers of the nuclear power plant,
the one that Metatron had made to power the whole of this quadrant of the megalopolis; above their tops, formless beings of
steam stood up as tall again as they, and gestured slowly.

They were armed, supposedly, the supposed adherents of the supposed cult or religion. Who knew, but out there in the boonies
where he had never been anything was possible. Night fell. He thought how there is but one road, one dark wood, one hill to
climb, one river to cross; one city to come to, one night, one dawn. Each one is only encountered again and again, apprehended,
understood, recounted, forgotten, lost and found again. And yet at the same time and for everyone the universe stretches out
infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant. He had thought this thought before, not once,
more than once, but he had long forgotten all those other instances, and he soon forgot this one too.

Ahead of him by many hours went the black van with smoked windows (once the property of The Woods Center for Psychotherapy)
driven by Pitt Thurston; Pitt leaned over the big wheel, his nose pointed eagerly toward the west, and now and then his lips
drew back a little in a smile that revealed the tips of his canines. Ray Honeybeare beside him seemed
asleep. In the seat behind them were Mike Mucho and Rose Ryder, erect and alert even after the long miles; silent though,
nothing to say. Between them, Sam, silent too, knowing for the first time the melancholy of rainy winter highways at nightfall;
and—hiding its light in the plastic backpack in her lap, unknown so far to anyone but her—the brown glass ball she had taken
from the big commode in the living room of Arcady. The road straightened itself, the road to the west, pointing ahead, the
long dashes that marked its hide appearing one after another out of the darkness to slide beneath the tires and be lost.

No that could not have been or there would have been no end to it; there
is
no end to it that way and we can never have found ourselves here doing this if we had gone that way and done that.

What happened was that as soon as Pierce started off from the street where Rose had lived he immediately lost himself, his
earlier luck having run out; he found he could not both read the little map the woman had drawn and drive the car, and he
took one wrong turn and then another. After a long anxious time he came upon signs for Route 6 and entered doubtfully upon
it (a more confident car behind him honking at him to prod him along) and set out. Only after dark, when he had seen no promised
signs for the westward road, did he recall or consider that he had seen the awful sun go down on his left (hadn’t he?) and
that therefore it was certain (wasn’t it?) that he was going north not south, back the way he had come; but still he went
on, unwilling to get off again for fear he would set off in another direction entirely and never find his way either there
or back, and anyway shedding with every mile his conviction and his courage. Sometimes he wept.

Long after dark he turned in again at the Winterhalter gateposts, uncertain what he had done and what he had not done but
rather seemed to have done. Of one thing he was certain, though: that he had failed again, this time utterly; and that when
he came to this same place on the next turn of the rising spiral he would doubtless fail again, and then again, forever.

In his own house everything was as it had been, though seeming to have just hurried into place seconds before he arrived,
and looking a little harried and disordered; he thought he heard a faint settling rattle from the crowded drawers of kitchen
implements, a rustle from his papers in their piles. He went to the phone and lifted it warily, but the familiar tone was
produced almost instantly. He thought with sick sadness of the news he must give. He dialed. No one answered at Arcady.

Meanwhile at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy (which according to the laws of the state had actually ceased to exist in
the previous
month, its assets being sold to satisfy its creditors), the lights were coming on. The black bulk of it was pierced by a few
windows blinking open like eyes one or two at a time, starting with a string along the west basement where the laundry is,
whose door was the only one to which the hopeful new possessors had been given a key.

It was Ray Honeybeare, and Mike Mucho and Sam, and a group of the others whom Ray had picked out to help make a thorough inventory
of the place and its contents pursuant to a purchase-and-sale agreement.

Ray had asked Mike to come along at the last minute, just when Mike arrived at the Bypass Inn ready to go west with Pitt.
Mike, seeing Ray so preoccupied and distant, had made no argument. Ray also suggested that Mike bring Sam along, her situation
among them too new and unsettling, no reason to make her feel abandoned; and Ray had touched Sam’s hair with his big hand.

They went up floor by floor, switching on banks of lights as they went, finding the switches with a big red flashlight the
vanguard carried. Laughing at their own voices echoing in the darkness, picking out spooky shapes with the lantern before
resolving them with the overheads into timid inanimate objects, furniture and piled boxes. Mike Mucho lifted Sam so she could
switch on some lights, click, lovely simple cause and effect. Ray Honeybeare came last, who as it happened had an unreasoning
fear of the dark.

As though the sleeping pile awoke, startled and displeased, a dull rumble began all around them: the group in the basement
had got the furnace going. The radiators were few and weak, never having been needed much; the heating system was high on
the list of things that would need redoing. Ray had told them to bring sleeping bags and expect to be cold even in the daytime
while the work of inventory and assessment was done.

They had intended to get here a lot earlier, and after a while Ray suggested that it was now so late that maybe they should
start bedding down, and get an early start in the morning. Most of them elected to lay out their sleeping bags in the main-floor
lounge, like a big sleepover, and there was more hilarity as the bathrooms were shared and nightclothes divulged, until Ray
took out his small Testament and began looking for a passage he wanted to read; and then they grew quiet.

Mike was still in the bathroom, helping Sam get ready, watching her brush her teeth with great enthusiasm and flair and then
sit on the pot, cheek in hand waiting.

“So that’s it?” Mike asked her. “All ready?”

“Well,” she said, and raised a forefinger. “I have to take my medicine.” “Do you always take it?”

“
You
-sually,” Sam said. “If I need to I can cancel.”

“You don’t like it.”

“Daddy,” she said, letting him know he was being obtuse. “Because it’s way down in the van,” Mike said. “I left it. I don’t
know why I didn’t remember it. And we want to hear Ray read. Don’t we.”

“If I don’t take it Mommy cries.”

“Does she?”

“Sometimes. What I don’t like,” she said, “is the
taste
.” She made a face of tried patience and disgust, eyes crossed and lifted and her remarkable big pink tongue, long enough
to touch her nose with, hanging down. Mike laughed and clasped her.

“Listen,” he said. “I don’t think you have to take that medicine tonight. I don’t want you to have to take it. I think—I think
there’s a way for you to never have to take it again.”

“Yay,” Sam said calmly, as though she had long expected this announcement, and it was overdue.

“Mommy doesn’t need to cry, Sam,” Mike said, and he bent and took her by the shoulders. Sam saw little starry tears inside
his own eyes. “Nobody ever needs to cry.”

She took his hand and they went out into the big lounge, and the young people applauded her in her jammies; she wiggled into
her sleeping bag, lined in flannel on which were printed cartoon people, Ray had shaken his head over them, smiling in something
that was not quite amusement or even tolerance. After a few moments she got out again and dragged her plastic backpack near
her, and got back in again.

Mike thought she would fall asleep while Ray read, but she didn’t.
There was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon fought, and his angels; and prevailed
not
. After Ray had shut the book and prayed a while in silence, he gestured to Mike, who got up and went to him in sock feet.
Ray turned to lead him out. When Mike looked back he could see Sam’s open eyes. Ray took his shoulder, and motioned with his
great head toward the door.

“Be back in a minute, sweetie,” he whispered to Sam; he followed Ray out of the lounge and down the dim wood-panelled hall
toward the former director’s office.

“I was going down to the van,” Mike said. “Sam’s medicine. I know you said, I mean I know how you feel about it, but in consideration
of her mother.”

Ray looked at him in a way that Mike knew, as though he were waiting for Mike to be done, yet listening carefully.

“I mean what do you think, I.”

“Mike,” Ray said, to silence him gently, compel his attention, let
him know Ray needed no further information. “Mike there’s a reason why this has happened to this child. I don’t know exactly
what the reason is and it may be, Mike, that you don’t know the reason either.”

He pointed Mike to a chair. He himself remained standing, leaning against the former director’s broad desk, his slippered
feet crossed and his tartan robe tied loosely around him. Mike realized that he was sitting in the same chair, in the same
room, where he had first applied for a job at The Woods.

“But maybe,” Ray said, “you
do
know it, or knew it once, and don’t remember it now.”

“I don’t know it, Ray,” Mike said. “I don’t.”

“This trouble that she’s experiencing now,” Ray said, as though he hadn’t heard Mike speak. “It was let into her at some past
time somehow. This evil.”

“How do you mean, let into her.” A kind of internal noise like a rising wind was filling Mike’s ears. He thought at first
that it was the roar of the far-off furnace, then knew it was not. “What time, when.”

“Well,” Ray said, and now he turned to look directly at him. “Mike, whenever it was—and maybe it was more than one time, I
don’t know—it’s perhaps still giving strength to this thing. We don’t know that. But we know that something which can make
such a little child so sick has got to have once been well fed. Do you understand? Got to have.”

“What are you saying, Ray. That I.”

As soon as these words left his mouth they seemed to Mike to be a lie, a form of lying, even though the words said nothing
in themselves. Ray didn’t respond, but for a long time didn’t look away: as though Mike had not spoken, but might. Then he
pushed his great body from the desk’s edge, and tightened his robe. “Throw away that medicine, Mike,” he said. “She’s not
going to be helped by anything you put in her. There’s been enough of that.”

The phone’s ring in the midnight lifted Pierce bodily from his bed, like a cartoon animal.

“Hi Pierce. This is Rose Ryder.”

Cheery, as though she were in the neighborhood, just down the road or over the hill. But she could not be.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m,” she said, and seemed to study her surroundings, he could hear nothing, the swish maybe of a passing car. “I’m in Millstone.”

“In where?”

“Millstone, Ohio. Near Zanesville. The far side.”

“Rose,” he said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this,” she said. “I really meant to, last night.”

He couldn’t think for a moment what she meant, last night, then understood that yes it had been only twenty-four hours, less,
since she had been with him here in this house.

“I’m going out to Indiana,” she said. “It happened really fast.”

“I know,” he said. “Indiana. I knew that.” There was a silence on her end that might have been wonderment or suspicion. “I
went to your house today,” he said. “To your apartment.”

“Why?” she asked.

He couldn’t say, couldn’t remember; or what he remembered could not be said. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need me
to come get you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I will. I can. I can leave now.”

“Pierce. I’m fine.”

He heard another car go past, there where she was. He saw her, for a moment, at a public phone, her eyes lowered and her hair
falling over the instrument, a hand over her other ear to hear. “When will you come back?” he said. “Will you come back?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe when they finish the deal with The Woods and it reopens. They’re up there now, Ray and Mike
and those. It’s all going so fast. So fast.”

“Mike’s not with you?”

“He’s coming soon,” she said. “Pierce, I’ve gotta go. Goodbye.”

“No.”

“I just wanted to tell you where I was,” she said. “Where I’m going. It wasn’t fair not to tell you.”

“Wait,” he cried; but Rose didn’t hear him, she had hung up, for the van’s horn had already sounded twice; the van waited,
rain-slick and already exhaling whitely at the pumps. She’d told them she was only going to pee.

She wept a little, but in the rain no one would notice the wetness she wiped from her cheeks. All she wanted was what she
wanted, and out there she would know, maybe, what that really was; and knowing it would not be different from having it. The
side door of the van slid open for her as she approached. It was still many hours more.