DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (11 page)

Careful not to drop the sections. He didn’t want to have to begin again. It had taken him some time and care to gain her trust
before the mirror, more time than to gain it in the bed.

Other days, or nights, the process at the mirror might be lengthy. She might have to take out from the dark drawer where they
lived her slim-jawed scissors like a bird’s skull, and place them on the vanity before her, where she could see them. He would
talk to her about them. Sometimes she would take them up. He too might take them up, and if her mood were right, he would,
delicately and judiciously, cut.

All it took were the blades’ snicker and the little clippings falling glittering in the lamplight over her bare shoulders
and the tops of her breasts, her eyes consuming these things. All it took. She had told him how when she was a teenager and
just learning this about herself she would sit before her mirror by the hour, and just cut, and come, and cut and come.

He never cut much: a few tiny bites from the hem, unnoticeable. Not only because he was unskilled, which he was, but because
if it were truly cut, cut as he talked to her of cutting it—chopped, shorn, removed, and with it her selfhood, will, autonomy;
shriven like a penitent, like Joan, like a collaborator made to feel her shame, eyes lowered—then she would no longer be able
to imagine it being cut, no longer imagine submitting to its cutting.

So it had always to be long: always able to be cut.

“I’ll see you tonight?” he said. “Or …”

“I’m going to be gone,” she said, watching his hands take up her hair, on one side, the other.

“Oh?”

“Over Columbus Day. To Conurbana.”

“For what reason?”

“A group from The Woods is going.” She drew from between her parted lips a stray hair that had caught there. “For a sort of
orientation.”

“And you’re travelling there with …”

“It’s a whole group. We leave from The Woods; we take a van from there. And just go on.”

For a time he continued to braid in silence. The trick was to keep the tension equal on both sides, or he would end up with
one side tight, the other coming free.

“Well then,” he said, “there’s something I’ll want you to do.”

“What?”

“I’ll want you,” he said, “to leave yourself alone.” Tight, tight, a cable, a chain. “Till I see you again. You understand?”

“But—you mean … Jeez Pierce.” A smile bloomed on her lips, gravely attentive usually at these rituals.

“That’s what I mean. No touch.”

“Well what if, you know, I can’t.” Idly, unseriously, she was at it even as they talked.

“Rose.”

He took the thick rope he had made and drew her head back. Eve’s apple in her throat rose and fell.

“You can,” he said. “You will.”

Holding her, he bent and placed his cheek on hers, his lips on her throat.

French braid: for her, maybe for her alone, it belonged on the list with those other French things, letters, lessons, kisses.
He held her hard, and waited till she had, once again, assented.

There was, just as Pierce had supposed, a way back over the mountain that didn’t involve returning to the Jambs and going
up the Blackbury River road again; before he departed Rose described it to him, the turn to take at Shadowland that would
lead to a road that went right east to join the road to Littleville, and what the landmarks would be. He set out that way,
up into the hills, as the sun reached its zenith.

He had commanded her not to touch herself; he himself could not even wait till he reached home. On the road beyond the Shadowland
bridge, climbing (it seemed) more or less endlessly upward, Pierce slowed at an entrance to the woods, a logging road, in
fact, long abandoned, and with some trepidation turned in there, and went a ways, and stopped.

Alone.

There are ordinarily but two instances when spirit—that universal animator that is finer than body yet not quite immortal
soul, this quicksilver stuff that enwraps the soul and fills the heart and takes the impressions of the sense organs—can be
physically apprehended outside the body. One is in speech, more especially in song: song is in fact spirit, expressed from
the body in audible though not visible form. The other is this thick white stuff, spirit double-distilled, cooked up by his
heat, clouded into visibility like an egg’s white; also the slick coatings she produced, started by his prohibitions, which
she was at that moment revolving in her mind even as she disobeyed them. Precious; exhaustible, supposedly, and hard to replenish—which
is why we are instructed not
to expend it on phantasms, why we are not to lie alone and soak the sheets with it or fling it onto the earth or this dipstick
rag.

Pneumatorrhæa
they called it; sapping the starstuff we are born with.

But why, then, should there be more of it the more he, the more she. Pierce lay inert for a long while, his head back against
the upholstery. Leaves of many colors fell upon the hood. Now and then he heard the rush of a car’s passing. He did not know
that he had taken the wrong turning back at Shadowland, had gone left not right, and that he was now lost.

T
he leaves of the oaks at Arcady turned brown and fell reluctantly, would still be hanging on after the first snows fell, even
till spring buds pushed them off; the brilliant leaves of the maples though, especially the old ones, fell in sudden glad
drifts as though by common consent. It was exhilarating in a melancholy way to lift your eyes and see them, so high, let go
their hold on their branches all at once and sail. Whee, death. The other trees (a great variety, associated here by a long-ago
landscape architect and grown old together, but not ever really become friends, Rosie thought) shed their leaves of many shapes
and many colors at different rates. Bright yellow willow and coppery Japanese maple, golden birch, greeny-brown ash, and a
double row of flame trees (they needed pruning) beet-red and hardest of all to rake.

Rosie had taken a huge bamboo rake from the carriage house, easy and graceful in use despite its size, a well-made tool in
fact, they’d known what they were doing back then when all this yardwork had been done by hand. Of course she didn’t need
to rake Arcady’s leaves; Allan Butterman had urged her to get a lawn service to do this and all the other jobs that a huge
house like this would always need doing, and she said sure yes, she definitely would; but for now she piled the leaves in
great spicy-smelling piles, for the pleasure of it and to slow her racing blood: and for Sam to jump in, she’d promised.

“More, Mommy! Higher!”

“Higher, okay, higher and higher.”

Sam had a date now to go back to Little Ones and have the test Dr. Marlborough had described, where they wired her up for
three days and tried to see where the seizures were coming from. So it had not been a bad dream, Little Ones, or if it was
a bad dream it was one that was going to continue. And there was the possibility of real bad news, a
possibility arising in Rosie’s consciousness at unexpected times, having to be routed before the day’s work or the night’s
sleep could be continued: like being surrounded by hostile tribes or the eyes of hungry animals in the dark. Keep the fire
going.

The worst part of it—the part Rosie couldn’t cease regretting even though it was shamingly unimportant, relatively—was that
the great party she had planned at Butterman’s was off. The only time Sam could be scheduled for the procedure was the very
days on which Halloween fell. The weekend before—not quite Halloween but close enough—wouldn’t do either. Rosie didn’t trust
herself to plan and hold a huge affair just before she went back to Little Ones; it seemed she had to focus and bind all her
energies on what would happen there, on that floor, Dr. Marlborough’s floor, though it was evident that nothing she could
think or feel beforehand would alter the results of what he did there. But doing that work of anxious pressing on futurity
seemed to make it impossible to carry forward a great and messy event at the same time, to say nothing of the awful bad omen
if she dropped the ball and the party failed; so she gave it up.

“Throw me in! Throw me!”

“Throw?
Throw?
” She lifted shrieking Sam under the arms and hauled off as though to toss her a mile; waved her in the pile’s direction,
then backed off and began again. The anticipation was what made you laugh so helplessly: Rosie had learned that watching Mike
toss his daughter in the air. Higher, Daddy.

Mike, when she told him the party was off, was relieved. That stuff’s not funny, he said. What stuff? Halloween, he said;
witches and ghosts. Be careful what you play around with; you don’t know what you’ll attract. Rosie laughed, and asked if
he was serious, and he hadn’t answered, only kept a minatory silence that suggested he could say a lot if he chose to: another
Mike trick Rosie was familiar with.

“Whee!” She dropped Sam gently after all, into the middle of the pile. “Okay?”

“Now cover me,” Sam said, and lay back; Rosie could smell as though through her daughter’s nostrils the smell of the leaves,
hear through her ears the dry crackle of their crushing. You never forget. When she had first come back to the Faraway Hills
and to Arcady after her years in the Midwest, it was fall; Boney was ill then and using a rented wheelchair, and Rosie raked,
then as now to have an occupation. He watched her for a time toss the leaves like salad. That’s one thing I’ll never do again,
he said. His head on its long turtle’s neck reached toward her, toward the leaves and the day. I wish I’d done it more, he
said.

Oh I don’t know, she’d replied; you do it once, you’ve done it a hundred times, right?

I wish I’d done it more, he only said. I wish I’d done everything more. Leaning forward in his chair, his face as though pressed
against a glass beyond which the world was taking place, his mouth open a little in grief or yearning or maybe just unable
to breathe easily.
He just loves life
, his old housekeeper Mrs. Pisky used to say.

The tumulus was high now over Sam; Rosie couldn’t discern even her outline beneath the heap.

“Okay,” Rosie said. “Okay? Deep enough?”

Rosie waited. No leaf stirred.

“Okay Sam?”

No answer.

She felt a violent black rush to her heart, and plunged her arms within the leaves; she pushed them aside, they had become
heavy as gold; Sam’s exhumed face was still. The day in an instant ceased also to stir, and went cold. Rosie took hold of
Sam’s coat, full of Sam’s heaviness, but not, she knew it, of Sam.

“Sam!” Rosie bellowed, a voice she had never used or heard before, drawn from somewhere down inside, loud enough to call her
daughter back. She pulled her up, and Sam’s head fell heedless to her shoulder. How long was it—Rosie thought later it was
only a second or two or three, but the seconds had stopped falling away—till Sam’s eyes opened, and she smiled.

“Oh Christ, Sam,” her mother said. “Oh Sam, how can you do that. Don’t you know.”

“I was being dead,” Sam said. Taking handfuls of her mother’s hair and arranging them to her liking. “I was dead. But now
I’m alive again.”

Up on Mount Whirligig the leaves were turning decisively even while others in the Faraways hesitated; the mountain’s heights
occupied a sort of climatic microzone of their own, always colder than elsewhere, its flowers blooming later and more briefly,
its storms more severe; when you drive up it on a cold rainy night the rain will predictably turn, just past Shadowland, to
sleet, then snow.

Quieter at The Woods this morning, the staff tidying up, packing their papers, putting their personal coffee mugs and stuffed
animals and snapshots into knapsacks and totes. One therapist at her desk, in tears, inconsolable, but why? Her door closes.
Elsewhere a maintenance crew is emptying drains and sealing attics; but in the spring there will be burst pipes and squirrels’
nests to deal with. Or worse.

“Our work done?” said Ray Honeybeare. “Oh no not for a long time. We haven’t hardly begun.”

“I only meant here,” said Mike Mucho. “Just with the closing and all.”

“Yes. Well I’m sorry about that, and we’ll push forward with a solution. Because there is so much sickness and suffering,
and we have so much help to give. We haven’t hardly begun. That’s my opinion.”

Ray had a way of stating that something was his opinion which suggested—made clear, actually—that he didn’t think it was just
his opinion. This irritated or excited Mike Mucho; made him want to challenge whatever it was, the supposed opinion, and at
the same time afraid to.

“Well, Ray,” he said.

“I think of the children now,” Ray said. “You’re treating a lot of young people here.”

“Well, we have been.”

“And you know that it’s the parents who are at the root of these kids’ troubles.”

“Yes,” Mike said. “The early experiences, yes.”

“Often they can’t remember, though, isn’t that right, not without a lot of effort on our part, a lot of inquiry. They can’t
remember.”

“Repression,” Mike said, no Freudian himself, his early training had been behaviorist; he knew the concepts though, the language,
which Ray seemed often enough never to have heard of.

“It goes so far back and so deep,” Ray said. “You see, parents might not realize it, but it’s their behavior that invites
these possessors in.”

Mike neither nodded nor answered.

“Sexual behavior, blasphemy, you know the kind of thing I mean,” Ray said. “Even if they aren’t consciously worshipping the
devil, I mean assenting to him, these parents are caught up in these behaviors, and it comes to the same thing. A implicit
pact. And the children are the ones to suffer. All across this land. The boys and girls know nothing of it, and maybe won’t
know until one day someone calls on those devils within them. I think we’re raising up an awful harvest now, and in ten–twenty
years we’re going to start reaping; the devils invited in now by these parents are going to start to speak, though they’ve
kept silent all those years. And those kids are going to start to remember what was done to them. We’re going to see terrible
things then, hear terrible things said. We are going to find that a generation of devils was laid in the souls of our children
like the eggs of some kind of insect.”

He smiled at Mike, and Mike lowered his eyes and smiled too; he knew Ray could sense his ambivalence, this feeling within
him that resembled shyness or embarrassment, a not exactly unpleasant feeling.

“These therapists with their therapies made out of doubts and hesitations,” Ray said. “They say that sickness is a matter
of
belief
. And cure is a matter of
trust
. A matter of
changing
beliefs by giving people something new to believe in. But I say that it’s not a matter of beliefs, a matter of who you trust.
I say it’s a matter of
fact
.”

“I see what you mean,” Mike said lamely. He wished he were not sitting quite so close to Ray, who liked to sit very close
to the person he talked to, for reasons Mike could guess, for reasons he had even been taught about; in his chair, so close
to Ray’s that his knees were almost touching Ray’s knees, he felt giddy, as though he might burst into helpless laughter,
like a baby tickled; or weep.

“Now it’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Ray said. “If you say something’s a matter of beliefs, a matter of trust, well that shouldn’t
be so hard to change. What are beliefs? Are they real? No, they’re artifacts of the mind. They have no real existence. They
could change easily, like movie pictures.”

“Well the theory is,” said Mike.

“So what surprises me,” Honeybeare said, and put his hand over Mike’s, “is that
they
say it’s just a matter of wrong belief—like believing a magician can saw a woman in half, you can show it not to be so, by
exposing the illusion. But
they
can’t make changes. Not in the hard cases.
We
say it’s a matter of fact, that the thing that’s wrong is something real in them that has to be got out: and we can do what
we say. We can help.”

“Yes.”

“Right here, maybe, we’ll be dealing with them,” Ray said, his eyes not having left Mike, nor his smile altered. “It might
be you dismissing them, Mike. I’ll be lying asleep by then. You’ll be seeing them go smoking out every window and chimney
of this place.”

“Ray, it’s so easy for you to say these things.”

“Mike,” Ray said. “You’ve seen it.”

He had. On that September night when the wind had blown so furiously he had seen Ray take a woman who was having a bad episode,
very bad, and speak—not to her but to some being inside her; and he had seen the thing, the problem, abandon her instantly,
and her face soften as though she took off a constricting mask, and her eyes awaken, astonished and grateful. No denying what
he had seen. “Yes,” he said.

“Not because of any power I have.”

“No.”

“No. Because of the power of the Holy Spirit in me. Because of the Name I can invoke.”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m possessed too. You see?” He grinned at Mike, and the multitude of his wrinkles radiated out across his face,
running through his cheeks as through a dry topography. “I’m possessed. I am not my own.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the power you’re offered, Mike. Not for any unimportant reason. Not for any selfish reason.”

“Yes.”

It had been all laid before him. Mike felt the wonderment of it, and felt also Ray’s impatience with him, or maybe it wasn’t
impatience: his eagerness. Mike had only to cease wondering at it, and move.

Ray waited. Everything waited.

“Do you want this, Mike? You can have this. Do you accept this?” “Yes,” Mike said. And time bifurcated. “Yes.”

Easy, it was easy. Holding Ray Honeybeare’s hands, Mike bent his head as though to food. “Yes,” he said again.

“Yes,” Ray said; and after a moment, not releasing Mike’s hand, but leaning back in his chair minutely, he said: “Now this
little girl of yours, Mike. Do you want to talk a little about her?”

“I just wish you had a damn phone,” Rosie said to Spofford. He was calling her from a pay phone near the job site, his lunch
hour; checking in with her, as he did faithfully but irregularly, so that she expected and waited for his calls more than
she would have if he had called every day at ten two and four. What Mike called
intermittent reinforcement
when in psych lab he’d used it on white rats with twitching baffled noses. She knew Spofford wasn’t calculating the effect.

“No I’m glad,” she said. “It wan’t so bad. Not a bad outcome.” Sam in the great double drawing room watched her mother talking.
Saw her mother cover her eyes and turn her face away

Sam thought of Boney: seeing her mother in tears brought Boney to her mind, when her mother had wept, talking on the phone
about Boney. And thinking of Boney directed her eyes to a sort of deep-bellied commode that stood between the tall windows,
drawers and doors with pictures of fruit and musical instruments on them made of wood of different colors, and at the top
of it, as though resting there but really part of it and stuck on, a little box like a jewelry box with doors of its own.
Sam slid from the leather sofa to the rug, and (seeing her mother still turned away) crossed to an armchair of cut plush in
another corner.