DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (60 page)

The world is, or was then, a figuration, a cipher, an equation to be solved, a seal to be completed. It was also (as it is
now) just a world, full of this and that in billions, unresolvable, both entire and infinite. Rose Ryder hadn’t remembered
exactly what Pierce said about marriage on the night of the Ball, but what he told her had touched her, and left
in her heart the conviction that after all he had
not
tried to use her awakening to God as a means of shedding her, the way most men would do, the way you would expect. It was
for that reason that she thought she ought to give him a call from the road, to say goodbye. And because Pierce was someone
who had never been able to tell left from right, and never would, he had been there in his house in Littleville to answer.

At length he put down the receiver, understanding there was no one any longer there. Then he picked it up again, and called
Arcady again. This time the phone was answered. It was Brent Spofford.

“Hi, it’s Pierce.”

“Hi.”

“Is Rosie there?”

“She’s asleep,” said the shepherd, sounding wary and distant, which brought a furious blush to Pierce’s cheek and a corresponding
icy grip to his heart; but there was no way to speak of what had occurred between himself and Rosie, supposing that something
actually had.

“Well don’t get her,” Pierce said, but Spofford had already left the phone, and soon Pierce heard Rosie’s voice, and for a
moment couldn’t speak, overcome with something, compassion or humility or grief.

“Pierce?” she said. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.” He gathered himself, cleared his throat of the coagulated tears and fears that had collected there. “I don’t know
how long I’ll be here, but. I wanted to tell you. I think I know where Sam is.”

F
ar up on the slopes of Mount Randa, tallest of the hills that form the Faraways, there stands on an easterly bluff a monument,
put up some years ago to honor that locally famous autodidact and visionary Hurd Hope Welkin, “the educated shoemaker,” naturalist,
reformer, philosopher. The original plan for this monument had been a statue of the old man himself, not set up on a pedestal
or pointing the way east, but just standing on the earth, bent and white-bearded, wearing the old checked suit and wide-awake
hat he always went botanizing in; he would be caught having just spied a specimen in the mountain grasses,
Silene virginica Hurdii
, and bending to it: the moment before he heard what he afterward called “this loud though yet gentle noise,” on that “fair
day in summer, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring”: that noise that awakened him.

The path upward to the monument from the valley below follows old cowpaths and loggers’ ways, coming and going on its traverses,
disappearing into a slough or a woods and appearing again, marked occasionally with round rocks painted white. It was now
dawn of the following day, once again mild in the Faraways, and from where the monument stood the sun could be seen beginning
to rise, still molten and uncollected. On the path, far down, able to be discerned only by the hawks awakening on the heights,
Pierce Moffett walked, climbing upward toward it. Now and then he paused and lifted his head, confused or alarmed, as though
he too heard a loud though gentle noise; once he started back down again, only to stop, seeming to remember something, and
turn to climb once more.

That there was a path upward to this place had been mentioned to Pierce on the first day he had come to the Faraways. Brent
Spofford amid his sheep had pointed upward, and they had talked of one day going all the way up to the spot. And on this day,
when Pierce found
himself long before dawn still awake, he decided that rather than dispute further with the demons gathered around his bed
he would get up, throw on some clothes, and go for a walk. A good long walk. He set out, and past the Littleville post office,
not a mile from the Winterhalters’, he came across a small road he had not noticed before, marked by an enamelled sign pointing
upward, with the symbol of the shoemaker’s last on it; and he turned up that way. His disputants had not been left behind,
but went along with him, and he told and retold his story to them, or refuted theirs; they charged him with his sins, and
he denied or admitted them. Then he began again. Now and then he stopped, looked around himself in wonder to find himself
here, the world too; tried to judge how far he had walked, and failed; told himself to go back, and instead went on.

The long view from the monument on the heights had formerly been even longer, before the mountain farms were given up and
their pastures filled up with quaking aspen, sumac, balm-of-Gilead poplars, firs and pine. You could have seen then all the
way down to where the Shadow River joins the Blackbury, and runs to pour over the curve of the earth. Down there now, in the
wooded hills, were the lights of Blackbury Jambs, still lit: the all-night gas station blue, the streetlights yellow.

Lights were lit too in Allan Butterman’s office, where the counsellor was already at work though nobody else in the Ball Building
was. He had court appearances today and felt unready, had come in in his sweats to look over the papers his secretary had
prepared the night before and left neatly flagged and tabbed. On the hat-rack his black suit and white shirt hung like armor
waiting to be donned.

“Well it’s not theirs yet,” he said to Rosie Rasmussen. “Maybe it never will be.”

Rosie had called and found him here. He had tried to ignore the call, but on the fourth ring he had given in.

“No?” Rosie said. “It’s where they are right now. Moving in.”

“Well we’ve found some things out,” Allan said. “In the first place they are not a registered nonprofit, as they have listed
themselves as being.”

“They aren’t?”

“Not in this state. Maybe somewhere. Indiana or Iowa or wherever. Not here. They can’t buy it under the conditions they propose
until they are. And that’s not all.” He switched his phone to the left ear, and lifted his feet to his desk. “There’s a story.
A young woman named Flora Fasti, I think it was Flora, who became a convert to this organization. She was
an heiress, I didn’t learn where the money came from but there was a lot of it, and she was also very ill. She was starving
to death. Have you ever heard of this? She wouldn’t eat, not that there was anything wrong with her physically. She just wouldn’t.
Or not enough anyway.”

“I’ve heard of it. It has a name, I forget what, Mike told me. I’ve known people, girls.”

“All girls, yes,” said Allan. “So she became a convert, and they claimed they could cure her, get her out from under this.
And she made over to them her entire fortune. It came to well over a million. Gave them control over it. A gift. Just like
that.”

“So that’s where the money is.”

“It goes on,” Allan said. “Apparently they don’t have the pull with God that they claim to have, because she died. Flora died.
In their center or headquarters. It was hushed up for a time but has now come out. And the state is very interested in this,
and so are her collateral relatives. Who tend to think that maybe Flora was deceived and robbed.”

“Oh my God.”

“Anyway, the money now is in dispute to say the least. No one knows how this will turn out. Maybe they’ll win. They certainly
have been on a streak. But you never know.”

For a long time Rosie said nothing more. Dawn gathered in Allan Butterman’s window.

“Allan, I have to see you this morning,” she said. “I have to.”

“I’m going to be in court.”

“I mean right now. In a little while. I’m, well I have to do something today that I want your advice on. I wasn’t sure I had
to do it but now I am. It won’t take long. Please.”

“You can’t ask?”

“I have to see you. When I tell you you’ll know why. Allan, it might be the last thing you’ll ever want to hear from me, and
if it is I’ll understand.”

There are multitudes of spirits, Giordano Bruno taught, rank on rank, more kinds of spirits than there are kinds of material
things like dogs, stars, stones and roses. They are mortal, though many live fabulously long lives; some are good, some bad,
some neither good nor bad; they can be shy, weak and flighty, fierce and terrible, placid and inert, stupid or wise. Of those
who clustered around Pierce as he went up Mount Randa he might have distinguished several of these kinds. There are demons
who can hear and understand our voices and demons that cannot; there are fiery great gods who need nothing from us and demons
who live with us companionably; there are some who love us,
some who shun us, like the “light-fleers, throwers of stones whose impact is however harmless,” who had often thrown stones
at young Bruno and his friends back in Nola, up near the ruined temple of Portus on Mount Cicala, a mountain like this one.

You never know in what form you might encounter one. Travelling spirits can house themselves in plants, in gemstones, in animals.
And in fact Pierce, just then sensing something behind him to be afraid of, half turned to see a large black dog, just steps
away, following him silently,
dogging
him: red tongue awag, and eyes like coals.

MEPHISTO,
Schwarzer Pudel
, uncommonest of his shapes. You can only know this fact, in these latter days, if you’ve read it somewhere, and Pierce had,
and how does it happen that such a notion can so startle the heart—intellectual Meaning translated into physiological Dread
in a single beat? For upon seeing the hound so near, Pierce drew the big breath of a startled mammal who might need the air
in the coming fight, his elbows jutted, claws at the ready, and he bared his own canines. He did this all in an instant, without
a choice, poor beast. The dog (just a dog, it was obvious in a moment) only tilted his head quizzically at him, and wagged
his tail. Everyman I will go with thee.

They walked on together. Pierce thought of the little she-wolf that once, long ago, Sam and Winnie being absent, he and his
cousins had taken in, to tame or try to tame. He began to tell this story to his interlocutors, only to realize it had not
happened. No of course not. Soon thereafter he found himself speaking to a new person, one he hadn’t known to be present to
him before: not Pitt Thurston or spectral Rose, or Mike Mucho; not Robbie or any other phantasmic offspring, not the Kentucky
girl either, the she-wolf cub whom he still couldn’t name. A real girl. A nine-year-old girl, about; a girl in knee socks
and a plaid kilt fastened with a silver safety pin, large wise glasses maybe, a tender broad brow. He had been talking to
her, and listening to her answers, for some while before she came clear to him.

If it really all was up to me, he said to her, I would hope it would be different.

Different how, she asked.

Not so dark, Pierce said. Not all the time.

And? she asked.

I would like, Pierce said, and the hard lump in his throat hurt just as though he spoke aloud; I would like the earth back.
I would like it to be first, not last. I would like it to be final. Just earth.

How so? she asked, so grown-up, but perhaps understanding less than she seemed. He wanted to say to her that if it was up
to him, then what he would decree was that it
not
be up to him. He wanted to come
last, he and all his kind, latest children of a billion ancestors; he wanted not to have come from elsewhere but to know he
arose here, where he would lie down at last. That’s all. He wanted to resign his commission, or decline his duty. This sick
plague of Meaning he was caught in, or of no meaning, which seemed to be the same thing, a world of no meaning but many acts,
where intentions had random effects unrelated to desire or need and yet produced by them, like the dishes a madman breaks
trying to fight off his pursuers: he wanted it to stop. That’s all.

If that’s what you want, she said, that’s what you’ll have to make.

I did what I thought I was supposed to do, he said, and
I failed. I would like to be freed.

Up to you, she said.
Nunc dimittis
. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

But what about Sam? he cried to her, or the brightening air. What about Rose? Will they all be all right? Will she be all
right?

It is not of thy charge, she said.

Sometimes the gods are as amused by releasing the caught soul like an undersized trout as by reeling it in once more. Or maybe
it was only that the sun arose fully just then, warming Earth and Pierce’s cheek, making the world real, and real to him;
or maybe it was that the accumulation of sleepless nights, the stresses of hopeless effort, and the long breakfastless climb
upward now caused, or “triggered,” a release of endorphins in Pierce’s brain like those which give the flagging athlete a
sudden superb calm strength, the world bright and the goal near and easy: a neurochemical process coming to be understood
just then in faroff labs, just at the turning of the age. Whatever it was, in that moment they all fled away.

All of them, the staring demons, the name-callers and rock-throwers, Pitt and Ray and the dynamen and dynamettes, he actually
saw them turning tail, growing small and scattering. All the powers, not only those who had afflicted him but those who had
aided him as well; even she herself who had just now answered him.
They fold into 10
^ths
like the Arabs and quietly steelaway
said Enosh, who was one himself.

Pierce took another step or two, and then stopped, and lifted his eyes to the heights, blinking. He turned and looked back
down the way he had come. He didn’t know how he had got up here so high; he remembered setting out from his house and turning
upward, but not the rest. He tried to remember what he had been told, what he’d seen, what the discourse with all of those
he’d seen had been, and couldn’t. Then he couldn’t remember that there was something to remember. He looked down to see that
he was wearing two different shoes, a black one and
a brown one, pulled on in his ignorance in the darkness of his bedroom. He had walked miles without noticing.

Oh you dope, he thought. What are you, nuts?

Wake up, he said, as though to another, and then again: Wake up. And, blinking with mouth ajar as though in fact awaking,
he looked upon a roadside tangle of bittersweet, the black branches frosted and the berries orange and red; for a long time
he looked at it. He felt his cloudy breath issuing; and he heard a clamor of crows assuring one another that they were there,
and the day had begun. That’s all.

He turned to walk back down the mountain. The black dog (who himself lived up that way) watched him go. With his two different
shoes, like one of those heroes who goes to the Happy Isles or the land of the dead to find the flower or the fleece, and
comes back up onto the surface of the earth with one foot shod and the other bare, one hoofed or cloven and the other human.
His own hands though, he thought, were empty. So was the sky.

When he got back to his house, he thought, he would call his mom in Florida. He would go see her; go and get some answers
from her, make her tell him; ask her, get her to tell him, to tell him

Bobby.

That was the name. Bobby what, Bobby. As though a stubborn stone now gave way at last under a lifting bar and rolled aside,
Pierce without surprise found her name:
Bobby Shaftoe
.

Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea Silver buckles at her knee She’ll come back and marry me Pretty Bobby Shaftoe. That was her name.
And inside her name, he saw, was the name of his imaginary son.

He felt lighter than he had in days and weeks. His step down the mountain was lighter, almost like that skimming over the
earth, an inch aloft like Little Enosh, that we do in dreams. It wouldn’t last, of course, for his tasks were not yet done
or even recognized for what they were; he guessed it wouldn’t last, and tried to memorize the things he saw as he came down
again to the river road and its habitations—the sun in the brown bracken, melting the frost and making it glisten; the long
body of mist prone over the supine river, pierced with the same light; old green truck in that driveway, tailpipe breathing
whitely, waiting for its master—so that he could, when it was lost, recall that at least for a moment he had known better.
He thought he could, he prayed he might. And yet even before night came again, he would be helplessly picking up his burdens,
asinus portans mysterium
, and he would go on carrying them far longer than everyone else thought he should, or could.