DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (18 page)

He laughed. Laughed and laughed. His prick stood, his chin trembled; an awful terror and delight had arisen in him, and he
cried aloud as though he leapt from a height into dark water.

At day’s end John Dee read over to Edward Kelley all that he had written down, all that had been spoken through Kelley.

—She will have us gather here every seventh day, for a hundred days, he said. She will enter here to us out of the stone.

—No, said Kelley. I will never speak to them more.

—What?

—No more, he said. No more intercourse with them. Else I am lost.

John Dee put down his papers and regarded Kelley, lying wrung and inert on his couch, white as death.
Your other wife
, his wife Jane had mocked him in her rage. Wife, son, brother.

—You have said so before, Edward.

He had said so before; but after this day Edward Kelley truly would not speak to them again. He knew he would not. But it
was no matter if he did or didn’t, for he was theirs now, theirs and not his own, as he had feared and hoped he would become
ever since that night of March in 1582 when he came to John Dee’s house in Mortlake with a book he could not read, and a powder
that he had been given, that he claimed to have found among the monks’ tombs at Glastonbury; ever since the hour when he had
pushed aside the books and papers on John Dee’s battered table and looked into the globe of crystal standing there in its
frame.

Possessed. There was nothing more they could teach him, nothing more he needed to hear them say. He was theirs.

—When you have rested, John Dee said. Refreshed yourself.

—No, Kelley said. Never. Never ever.

The angels had promised him safety from the wicked beings who had since boyhood tempted and tormented him. Now he knew the
truth: that the wicked ones, those dog-headed yellow-eyed brown-gowned demons, were not different from the kindly ones, the
beautiful and pious ones who spoke to him out of the glass, who offered him help, comfort, sanctuary: were but their servants,
and did their bidding. Into anyone of them she could transform herself too, if she chose.

He had known it all along, all along: and he knew now that he had known it, perhaps since that first night in Mortlake far
away, night of wind and voices. Oh, sometimes he had backed away from them in fright, and shut his eyes; or he had stood still
for weeks or months in boredom or confusion; but always he had returned and again come closer, until at length he had drawn
close enough, and now they had seized him, and would never let him go.

T
hough the summer seemed unwilling to pass away, lingering at the threshold like a guest who has had too much fun to leave,
Val decided to close the Faraway Lodge on Columbus Day as she always did, last day of the tourist season as it is counted
in the Faraways, tourists being however rarely seen at any time in that secluded and not very inviting saloon by the Shadow
River. It did have a big electric sign before it (to be shut off at midnight that night till the following year) that told
those who happened to come upon it the name: Mama’s Faraway Lodge.

It was a log structure with a broad porch you passed through (smelling the summer-camp smell of pine logs and a musty davenport)
to get to the big barroom, to the left of which was the dining room that every summer nearly closed forever but did not. Behind
the bar hung a sign that said in frank bold letters:
This place is for sale. Inquire at the Bar
. In the past, when more people used to find their way here who didn’t already know of its existence, people had actually
now and then asked the bartender (Val) about the possibility, but everyone who came here regularly knew the sign represented
more of a threat than an offer; it meant that no matter how welcoming it looked around here, and no matter how glad Val might
seem to see you, you were to know how fed up she was, deep down.

Closing night, Val and Mama served a dinner for Val’s friends to signal the end of one more season. The dinner was lamb, which
Val had prepared with as much anxious concern for its outcome and its reception as if she were giving birth to it. The lamb
had been sold to her by Brent Spofford, one of those who gathered in the somewhat cheerless but familiar dining room at Mama’s;
he had raised it, with its brothers and sisters and cousins, on his hillside acres up on Mount Randa and on the grounds at
Arcady, where Rosie’s two strong but uneducated
sheepdogs harried them mercilessly, and (Spofford now observed) produced some damn tough muscles.

“It was in their genes,” Rosie said. “You got stung in that deal, acquiring them, boy.”

“I got their papers,” Spofford said. “All their forebears were delicious.”

Pierce remembered how, on his first day in the Faraways, he had encountered Spofford herding those very sheep through the
town of Stonykill, crook in hand and straw on head. The dinner was a farewell for Spofford as well as for the season. The
loose network of Vietnam veterans to which he belonged had begun circulating news about a couple of men from Spofford’s old
unit who lived now in the unpeopled hills of a far-Western state, and who because of that emptiness or for other reasons had
come to believe, or to construct with the help of some locals and some odd texts, a legend that puzzled and alarmed Spofford.
Who had himself spent time on and off in institutions when his tour of duty ended, trying to figure out what had happened
to him and to his Republic in those years.

“These are guys I kept in touch with because of sheep,” he said, pushing the gnawed bones of one of his own around his plate.
“They were talking sheep. But now it’s not sheep.”

“I don’t know why
you
have to do this,” Rosie said. “Why now.”

“Not sheep,” Spofford said. “Wolves. You know those high northern woods once had wolves. Gone for years. Now they’re coming
back.”

“Right,” said Pierce.

“These guys say government agencies are reintroducing them. They’re not just walking in down from Canada. They’re being put
in.”

“Yes. I think I read.”

“Not about these.”

“I’ve read that the wildlife people wanted to reintroduce wolves in the north out there and the ranchers and farmers don’t
want them.”

“These wolves aren’t wolves,” Spofford said. He drank the last of his wine. “Listen. These guys are very strange. They can’t
live with people, but there’s nothing else they can’t do. They go build a cabin by hand in the mountains and live out there
hunting and trapping like characters in a, a. And they think. And things get very, very clear to them.”

“What do you mean, not wolves?” Val asked.

They waited. Telling the story seemed to require some care on Spofford’s part, as though he drew it out from the coals of
a fire: as though it could burn him too.

“You know how when you listen to someone,” he said, “and what they say you disagree with; and you listen more, and at some
point it
goes beyond disagreement, something goes up your nose, I don’t know if you know the feeling. You think: The man’s gone.”

“Yes,” said Pierce. “Oh yes.” And the others nodded and shook their heads, oh they knew. We all knew them then.

“As though he’s been hollowed out,” Spofford said. He felt his way toward the quality, his eyes narrowing, remembering. “Hollowed
out, and what they say aloud to you is blowing through them from. From somewhere else, beyond or maybe behind them.”

Rosie thought of the young man who had brought Sam home the other day. Hollowed out, smiling in the certainty blowing through
him from elsewhere.

“Wolves,” said Val.

“Well what scares you,” Spofford said, “isn’t the story so much—I mean this story that there was supposedly a secret unit
formed, a government experiment maybe, I don’t know, now they’re releasing them up there, rather than killing them or putting
them to sleep—it’s not that, it’s the
certainty
they’ve got that scares you.”

“A government experiment?”

“I don’t really get the details, or the big picture,” he said. “I mean all you
get
are details, and they’re supposed to
make
a big picture; but. It’s like the stocks of plague bacillus they say are stored in canisters somewhere, hybrid stuff that
can kill half the planet in a week; somebody—lots of somebodies—spent their working lives on making those little germs. Hard
to destroy your working life.

“Anyway, thats one thought. That they were developed, maybe not even for this war, maybe long before, I’ve heard somebody
mention Hitler; but anyway we, they, had this capability. And in the end they can’t bear to terminate it. So up there in those
gigantic National Forests. Where nobody else is but these crazy vets, living on what they can hunt with an M16 they smuggled
home from Vietnam. And winter coming on.

“Think of that.”

They tried to do that, thinking of those high plains and those forests, colder there than here now; they thought of night,
and living alone. Predators. Waking with memories in the silence.

“So if those guys feel threatened enough,” Spofford said. “And the Hueys start landing with caged animals in the bay. Feds
with trank guns. I don’t know.”

“It’s just a story, though,” Rosie said.

“You can die of stories,” Spofford said.

They said nothing.

“I mean, Cliff says: Why shouldn’t they believe these things? What else were we turned into?” He grinned. “The ones who have
trouble
now are the ones who couldn’t turn back into themselves.”

“
Homo homini lupus
,” Pierce quoted. Cliff was Spofford’s friend or mentor, also a vet, who lived in the woods himself, though these
heimlich
ones hereabouts, not the Wild Wood. Cliff was going with Spofford. These were Cliff’s buddies too.

“Well I don’t know why
you
have to go,” Rosie said.

“Yeah,” Spofford said gently. “Yeah. I know you don’t.” He covered her hand with his. “I won’t be long. A week. A couple.
Not months.”

“Okay so,” Rosie said suddenly. She withdrew her hand from his and pushed her hair from her face. “So. So what strange weather,
huh? How long can it last?” Her back was straight, and she poured herself wine. “What else is new, what’s the talk, what’s
the biz?”

“I hear The Woods is closing. Are closing. Whatever,” Val said.

“Yes?” said Pierce, alert. “Really?”

“Well, being sold. Changing ownership.”

“Who’s buying?”

“Bidding,” Val said. “Not buying yet. The Powerhouse. The Christian bunch.”

“That’s the name of it?” Pierce asked. “The Powerhouse?”

“The Powerhouse International,” Rosie said. “I think they have some groups abroad.”

“The Powerhouse,” Pierce said again, pondering.

“Big secret,” said Val. “I don’t think The Woods wants people to know, and I don’t think the Bible types want to be noticed.
At least not yet.”

Pierce thought of Beau: Something going on up there.

“They’re rolling in dough,” Val said.

“And how come you know all about it?”

Val laughed, and lifted a wise eyebrow: “There is much that I know,” she said.

“Speaking of which,” Rosie said, pushing her chair from the table. “You know it’s a gorgeous night. Let’s go and look at the
stars. Walk a little.”

At the Faraway Lodge the Shadow River widens and meanders almost south for a stretch. Above it a band of sky was open to the
horizon. The moon had not risen.

“Man look at your rosebushes, Val!” Rosie said in wonder. “Look at the rose hips. They’re huge.”

“Really?” Val said, peering at the hedges that bordered the walk down to the river. The roses were Mama’s, not within Val’s
provenance.

“You ever use them?”

“For what?”

“Tea. Rose-hip tea. Lots of vitamin C.”

“No. Nope. Red Rose yes. Rose hips no.” She offered them to Rosie with a big gesture. “You want some? Take all you want. I’ll
go get a basket.”

“Oh no wait. Don’t go back. Wait. Look. I’ll use my hat.”

Rosie had a collection of hats, old and new, big and small; she had a face for hats, and liked herself in them, though after
the first gratifying moment when she put it on in the store and looked at herself improved, made more mysterious or interesting
or distinct, she rarely wore them. Not enough functions. She took off the broad-brimmed flatcrowned one she wore tonight,
and began plucking the bright brown globes, red-cheeked like elfin faces, from the rose canes, careful for the thorns.

“What stars do we see?” Spofford asked Val.

“Oh God,” Val said. “I’m so bad at that. It’s embarrassing, I know. But when I do learn it just confuses me and I forget again.
I know the Evening Star is Saturn now. It said in the papers. Isn’t that the Milky Way?”

“Yep,” Pierce said. “There’s Cygnus, the Swan, flying down it. See, the big cross.”

“Oh,” Val said. “Oh well hell. Yes.”

“Cassiopeia,” said Spofford, turning, looking up. “The big W.”

“Right. A chair, actually. Over on its side. The mother of Andromeda. And she’s there herself too. See? Bound.” He told them
the story, showed them the Great Square, the wings of Pegasus, Perseus on his way to the rescue, nick of time.

“And down there,” Pierce said, turning again and pointing (this early autumn sky was the one he knew best, the only one he
happened to have studied), “above the Milky Way, is Sagittarius. Like a rearing horse.”

“Hey,” said Rosie. “It really does look like one.”

“Aw,” said Val. “I don’t get it.” She squinted and bent forward, as though to bring her head closer to the black page whereon
it was printed.

“Well it hasn’t always been a horse, or not everywhere,” Pierce said. “Though everybody sees something there. In some places
it’s supposed to be the gate from Earth to the Milky Way, the way that souls take to the land of the dead. That river or road.”

“The door we leave by,” Spofford said.

“Right. There are peoples who believe that once upon a time the doorjamb rested on the earth, without the big gap you see
below the,
well the shape; and in those days the gods and the ancestors could come and go on the earth.”

“Not now,” Val said.

“Only one way now,” said Rosie.

“Only one way now.” Pierce passed momentarily in thought again through Frank Walker Barr’s classroom, where he had acquired
some of the tales he retailed here and elsewhere: Barr, who was the only man Pierce had ever known who could talk as though
that door were open still, who saw the gods passing and repassing, appearing in history, then returning to the stars, to be
stars themselves.

Old Barr.

The universe we live in, he’d say, is made of space and matter, but it wasn’t always. Once it was made not of matter but of
time. The coordinates of our universe are places, the coordinates of that older universe were moments: solstice and equinox,
the sun’s passage from Sign to Sign, the moon’s from Mansion to Mansion. And though a world made of space and matter can’t
just end, to be replaced by another one, a world made of time can. A cosmic disaster can in a moment alter the measure of
the dance; a hero can right the world again. Silently, unnoticeably, new measures can be given to the repetitions by which
the shape of the universe is maintained; one world vanishes without a whisper, and a new one comes to be. And no one the wiser
except the wise.

“We come in through Cancer,” Pierce said, and moved his pointing finger uncertainly. “Can’t see Cancer now I guess. But our
souls are supposed to come down into this world by way of the door open in Cancer …”

“Starting from where?” Spofford asked.

“Well I don’t know. Just newly minted by God. From Heaven I guess. Beyond the stars.”

“Okay.”

“Your soul comes down through the lower heavens, that is through the solar system, heading for your mother’s womb on Earth.
On the journey down or in, you pass through the spheres, one by one …”

“Spheres?”

“Sure, the spheres of the planets. You have to pretend now that the planets are these gigantic sort of crystal spheres, nested
one inside the other, with the earth in the middle.”

“You mean they’re not?” Val said, and brayed.

“As it goes through each sphere, the soul gets a gift, or a wrapping, a sort of coat or coating of materiality, which gets
thicker as it comes down. These coats or gifts are the qualities of the spheres you go through.
They are the characters of the different planets, and make you what you are, make you the way you are.”

“Are you making this up?” Rosie asked. Still plucking rose hips into her hat.

“No. Nope.” He clasped his hands behind him. “It’s not made up. That doesn’t mean it’s true.”