DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (61 page)

At The Woods Center for Psychotherapy Sam Mucho was now awake. It was six in the morning, which happened to be the hour at
which the big clock in the main lounge had stopped after it had ceased to be wound. She didn’t wonder why she was wide awake
so far before everyone else. It had now been sixteen hours since her last dose of medicine.

The light had been left on in the bathroom, a little one, and the door was almost shut, just a thin L of light around its
edge. It was far away out the entrance of the lounge and a little down the hall but she could see it.

Tinkle
was what Mrs. Pisky always said. Sam got out of the sleeping bag and on her hands and knees looked around at those asleep,
unable to tell which of the rolls of darkness was her father. She went on all fours through and around them, and one stirred
and then was still; and when she was past them all she stood, and went out into the hall and down to the bathroom. She could
begin to taste the taste of immensity but didn’t recognize it, confusing it with the strangeness of the big building and the
dark. Then she did recognize it.

It was one of the young people from Conurbana who witnessed Sam’s seizure. She heard Sam call
Daddy
softly from the bathroom in the hall, in a voice that awakened this woman but not Mike; she couldn’t at first figure out
just where the call had come from, and when she reached the bathroom Sam was falling.

The woman cried out
Oh my God
. Then Mike’s name.

He stumbled up, feet caught in the entangling sleeping bag, and several others got up too, who beat him to the bathroom to
look in but let him pass when he got there. Sam was in the young woman’s arms rigid and grimacing, the young woman rigid too,
mouth corners drawn down in fear and horror.

“Okay,” Mike said. “Okay. It’s okay.”

He gathered Sam up. She had lost bladder control and her nightgown was wet; she was on fire; spasms shook her as though the
rigid structure she had become were being torn apart.

“She’ll swallow her tongue,” somebody said. “You got to get her mouth open.”

“No,” Mike said. “No she’s okay.”

Someone began to pray, and then the others too, as though remembering to do so, and just as they did that Sam in Mike’s arms
suddenly softened and turned again into a human child. She opened her eyes.

“Okay hon,” Mike said. “It’s okay.”

She didn’t answer; she pulled a wisp of hair from her mouth with a pinky, her eyelids fluttered, she regarded Mike as though
she had never seen him before; then she curled against him and in a moment was deep asleep.

Mike looked up at the faces of those gathered at the bathroom door, looking down at him and his daughter concerned or shocked
or curious, like the faces of people at an accident. He thought of Sam looked at in this way all her life; he knew that he
would not be able to protect her because he could never tell when she would need him, he would always be looking the other
way or doing something else. He bent to kiss her brow, and his lips touched the cool sweat. Ray Honeybeare was now among those
looking down at him and his daughter, and the others looked to Ray.

O
n the carriage drive at Arcady were parked Val’s Beetle and Spofford’s Dodge Ram, beside them the old Bison station wagon
and the Python sedan that Beau Brachman drove. A motorcycle too, resting canted on its kickstand as though taking a sharp
turn at speed.

“Mike will be very afraid,” Beau was saying. They all sat on the floor of the great living room as though around a campfire;
only Val chose to remain in the depths of the leather couch. “He won’t have understood how much he’s been asked to give up,
and now that he does understand he’s going to be confused and empty and afraid. He wants to get to the other side of this
quickly, where it will be all better. Anything could be asked of him now and he won’t know how to refuse. That’s what I think.”

He looked around the circle, and at last to Cliff, who considered Beau’s face or his words for a moment, and then assented,
with a little nod. Spofford, who had been watching Cliff with care, now turned his gaze again on Beau. Rosie took his hand.

“I think it has to be done,” Beau said. “I think it’s important, and I don’t think we can wait at all.” It was the most important
thing that could be done, and everything depended on it from here forward; at the same time it was just one act on one winter
day and only one child at risk. Beau knew that. “I should have known earlier,” he said, “and I didn’t.”

“How many people are up there?” Cliff asked. “Are any of them people we know, besides what’s this guy, Mike? Anybody we can
go calling on?”

“They’ll let us in,” Beau said. “The getting in won’t be hard. Where Sam is, maybe yes.”

Cliff seemed uncomfortable. “I want there to be somebody I know. Somebody I can ask for.”

“Ask,” Beau said, “for Bobby.”

No one spoke, or asked Beau how he knew this name, or why he suggested it. Cliff could be admitted there or almost anywhere
if he had someone he could ask after, someone whose name he knew, toward whom he could open himself in honest inquiry. It
was a thing he could do. Spofford knew it. Beau knew it.

“But the main one?” Rosie asked. She had seen him, the one she wouldn’t now name, at Boney’s funeral, where he had only appeared
seemingly to make himself known to her, and to the Foundation; she had since looked up the grant proposals submitted by The
Woods for the program in healing, and seen his weird name on them. She had dreamed of him too: she just then realized that.

“I know Ray Honeybeare,” Beau said. “I know him.” His face was as clear as it always was; it was the others who felt a dark
chill, or a tense resolve.

“One thing I want to know,” Val asked. “Is anybody going to jail for this? I mean that’s not going to do the kid any good.”

Rosie fetched a huge sigh, and hugged herself. Allan hadn’t answered when she asked him what would happen, waving his hand
by his ear as though to brush away the incoming words. If she genuinely believed Sam was at risk? If she was open with Mike
for as long as she could be before she acted, if there was no coercion at all, none? But Allan had stopped listening, was
already denying that he was hearing what she said. So she couldn’t answer Val.

“Mike would have to press charges somehow,” Spofford said, and lifted his brows and looked around the circle, am I right?

“He won’t,” Beau said.

Spofford did not nod satisfied. He took Rosie’s hand again.

“We’ll wait till it’s dark,” Beau said. “There’s a funny reason for that I won’t tell you.” His smile was unchanged, Beau’s
smile that they all knew, abashing and cheering and mystifying all at once. “Anyway that’s not long from now. Rosie. Do you
have a room I could sit in for a while? Just sit.”

She got up, looking around the circle to see if others understood this any better than she did, and saw that they did not,
but felt no need to ask; she took Beau first to Boney’s office, but once he was in it he laughed, looking around, and shook
his head No. No not here. He liked the kitchen better, sat down at the old wooden table in a hard chair and was still even
before Rosie backed away out the swinging door.

Night falls so fast in December at the latitude of the Faraway Hills; it had hardly been day at all, and the lights had long
been lit at The
Woods. Through the building and the garages and the sheds and over the grounds the young men and women of the Powerhouse had
gone in twos and threes, finding excuses not to be alone but not knowing why they should be afraid to be, and then excuses
to end their accounting and list-making and return into the big main building and the lounge. Yes that was where Ray and the
others were, and there was the reason: Mike sat with his daughter on an ottoman in the center of the room, and Ray with his
Testament on a hard chair. By twos and threes they entered quietly and took seats.

Ray explained to them what he was going to try to do, and why he thought it was necessary, and he looked around at their faces
as though to garner their assent. He asked them for their prayers. Then he got up, with some effort, and Sam watched him grow
big and come to stand over her.

“Sam’s not going to understand everything that happens here tonight,” he said to them, looking down on Sam, “but it’s going
to make a very big difference to her, I think, if God wills.” He said this in that masking way grown-ups have of smiling and
looking into a child’s eyes and at the same time saying things the child is assumed not to get or even really to hear. “We
have to be prepared for some difficult manifestations. But we know no real harm can come to us, or to this child.”

They moved in their chairs or in their places, and some made soft noises.

Sam, understanding that she was the sole focus of their attention, became alarmed.

“Daddy.”

Mike held her shoulders and bent to kiss her head. Ray put his hand over Mike’s.

“Daddy’s going to go out for a while now, honey,” he said. “Because we want to talk a little alone. You and I.”

Mike raised his head, but didn’t release Sam. “No,” he said. “Of course I’ll stay.” He said it to Ray, not to Sam. “Of course.”

“Mike, this is something I don’t think you can witness. Mike.” The soft iteration of his name silenced Mike. No one there
in the lounge was looking at him except Ray: he saw that.

“Well is there a reason?” he asked, trying for a voice as low and firm as Ray’s, where had all his strength gone, where.

“Yes there’s a reason,” Ray said. “We’ve talked about this.”

Mike took his hands from Sam’s body.

“Mike, I want to work with you on this,” Ray said. “There’s nothing that can’t be lifted from you, from your soul: nothing.
And I want to help you to ask for that. But this child’s need is more urgent now.”

Sam had begun to shudder intermittently, the cold in the lounge intense. Mike wanted to take off his own down vest, wrap her
in it, but he couldn’t.

“He can stay,” Sam said. “I don’t mind.”

“Mike,” Ray said.

They all waited, and Mike looked at none of them; he wanted to say to Sam
I’ll be right outside honey
but he couldn’t do that either, if it was he who had once hurt her so dreadfully he couldn’t say that, it would sound like
a threat or a warning, it sounded like that to him even as he heard himself think of saying it. He couldn’t touch her. He
couldn’t say he loved her.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Ray loves you. You listen.” He stood, pulling away from her hand that reached for him, but
not able to avoid Ray, who moved to him more nimbly than Mike would have thought he could, and took him in a big embrace,
and holding him laughed a small and kindly laugh, these things aren’t so important; but Mike knew they were; then Ray let
him go, and turned to Sam.

“Daddy?”

“It’s okay,” Mike said, and half looked back but not so far as to see her, putting out his hand toward her as he went away.
He went out through the big arched door and down past the bathroom where Sam had had her seizure and down the hall to the
window that looked out to the golf course and the hills. He could hear voices from the lounge, prayer maybe, but not the words.

It seemed to Mike that only as Ray spoke of them did the things he referred to (
whenever it was, maybe more than one time
) come into being; and that when they came into being they came into being as Mike’s own secret, things that no one knew but
he. It wasn’t so, he knew it hadn’t been so before, but he felt it now coming to be so: and therefore to have always been
so.

Like wishes come true, huh
, Rosie had mocked him once, when Mike had tried to tell her about prayer, tried to tell her that the physics isn’t final,
that maybe we can have what we want.

He thought these thoughts, but could hardly attend to them; the voice was his own and what it said was true but at the same
time had nothing to do with him, like the voice in a train station announcing trains when you know your own has already gone,
already long gone, and there is nothing to be done.

You don’t have to wait till Judgment Day to go to Hell
, Ray had once told him.
You can start right now if you want to
.

He had been there a long time, maybe, when a voice spoke, very near him, he had heard no one approach:

“Mike, man.”

He turned. A wraithlike person was coming to touch him, a person entirely white, a human person. The remains of Mike Mucho
nearly flew apart in terror, but the man’s touch when it came was annealing.

“Mike, can we talk, man? It’s important.”

Something caught Mike’s eye down at the broad hall’s other end, a mouse maybe crossing the floor or a bat awakened by the
furnace’s heat and flitting at eye level down and into the lounge, no it was nothing. He thought of Beau Brachman’s mocking
smile.

“What about?” he asked.

What those gathered in the lounge saw—ceasing to pray and rising—was a small man in an Afghan shepherd’s coat, long Jesus
hair and a face like his too (they had seen it in prayer, all of them, not all the same face but always with this smile, this
dread calm and beauty) who asked Ray too a quiet question.

“So why’m
I
here?” Val asked.

The moon was faintly gibbous now, and there was nothing else for Spofford and Val to look at. Beau had told her she was necessary
to the thing he had devised with Rosie, but he couldn’t tell her why, and only from Beau would she accept such an assignment,
on such terms; usually by this time of year she had already ceased to leave her rooms above the Faraway Lodge except for groceries
and cartons of Kents when the supplies ran low. “Why am I here?”

“So I don’t go nuts,” Spofford said calmly.

Beau, Cliff and Rosie had gone up the hill to The Woods in Beau’s car, leaving Val and Spofford at the point where the road
up Mount Whirligig became The Woods’s private way, and a big rustic but grand sign stood in the middle of the road, obstructing
and welcoming at once: The Woods Center for Psychotherapy.
Wait here
, Beau had said, and rolled his window up.

Now Spofford and Val sat in the truck together looking at the sign. Brent Spofford had spent time in more than one such place
in the bad years after Vietnam, places of compassion and help, so fearsome and repellent that he didn’t like being so close
to one. The Beetle was beside the truck, but its heater was, of course, useless; Val’s breath was as white as cigarette smoke.

“You,” Val said. “Nimrod the mighty hunter. Ice water in your veins.”

“That’s what it feels like right now.” He turned up his collar. “Well. They also serve.”

He too did not understand what had been asked of him in Beau’s
plan; there was nowhere else he would have wanted to be now but here, and he thought that if he were in some sense too late
and had not done for Rosie and for Sam what he could have or should have done, then. Then what? He wouldn’t answer even to
himself. He was no hunter; but he knew darkness, that was true, and he knew waiting in the cold for what you didn’t understand,
or couldn’t quite believe in. He had done a lot of that this year.

He thought all that, and was quiet for a while; but then he pulled on his cap and opened the truck door. “I’m going to walk
a ways up there,” he said.

“No. Beau said we wait here.”

“I can’t.”

“Listen,” Val said, starting to climb out too. “You’re not leaving me alone in this woods.”

“Just a few steps up the road,” Spofford said. “To anticipate what’s coming. I won’t get out of sight.”

But he hadn’t gone more than a few yards upward when he saw, and Val from inside the truck also saw, a person coming down
the road: at first only a progressive distortion of the moonshadows of naked trees, but then definitely a person. Soon Spofford
could hear footsteps on the dirt.

Two people: Rosie, with Sam in her arms wrapped in a sleeping bag.

Distances walked are greater than distances driven; walked in the winter woods at night carrying a frightened five-year-old
much greater; Rosie kept putting her feet one in front of the other without seeming to get any farther, expecting to see headlights
or hear pursuit. As though entirely disconnected from her circumstances her brain went on buzzing along about its own concerns,
going through its files; Rosie noticed it—she had nothing else to do—but she paid no attention. Plot, she thought: she’d sometimes
wondered if lives, her life maybe, had plots in the same way books do, like the novels of Fellowes Kraft: courses that turn
halfway or two-thirds to the end and proceed back through the events or conjunctions that formed them, reversing each one
in turn, or most of them, to bring about an ending. How far can you go into the woods? Halfway: then you start coming out
again. No, no plot: you never got halfway; astonishing things or nothing or new things would go on and on, never returning
you to resolve or tie up the threads, tie up the beasts once let loose. You just went on.

How far? Way beyond here; beyond death maybe. She thought of Sam grown, grown old, dead, past death. She saw Spofford coming
up the road toward her at last, at last.