DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (20 page)

“’Cause if you drive it takes forever and we.”

“Hush. Look.” He placed his big hand on her neck and held her head like a doll’s pointing toward what he had brought her to
see.

She saw. She started to say
Oh no
, laugh and turn away.

“Hush,” he said, and tightened his hold on her. “Look.”

She did so. She ceased to laugh and looked. He watched her look, watched her eyes consume, or drink.

“See?”

The little Polaroid had turned out to be smaller than the picture of
the dead pug had been. So he had made a mat for it of dark rose taffeta, shocking within the dark surround of the frame. He
now bent the flowered shade of the old brass standard lamp to shine athwart it, which brought out the details of the carving
or molding of the frame, the collar, belt and switches; still tenebrous, though no longer funereal. He brought her closer,
to see, to touch if she wanted to.

“Who is it,” she said. “Is it.”

“Yes.”

“How did you, how,” she said.

“Hush,” he said. “Look.”

They looked. If you did not know what you looked at could you actually discern. A shadowed headland, she; pale seafoam of
her discarded slip around her oddly contorted body. Pearl-drops of light where the camera’s flash (Wink-Light, its proprietary
name) had struck her bonds.

What he had made, he saw now as she looked on it, was a seal: an
impresa
, not a changeable one in the soul or the heart but actual and hanging on the wall. One such as the Renaissance made so many
of, thinking they were imitating the hieroglyphs of Egypt, or Ægypt; hoping to make an allegory in paint or stone so potent
and utter that it passed directly through the eye to the heart, where the soul could read it and be moved to virtue or to
action. Giordano Bruno had conceived dozens of them, some he himself cut to be printed, some he only described at length in
words. For in fact they couldn’t be understood without words, not even back then in the picture-book world, at the very least
each needed its motto: the picture was the body, the seal-makers said, the motto was the soul.

What motto for this one, then.

Andromeda
, perhaps.
The Marriage of Agent and Patient
.

“All right,” he said at length, when he thought that it and its lesson had entered her. He put his arm around her shoulders,
to lead her away, as though she were bereaved, had just viewed the open casket. They said no more about it, only tore through
the night in his car; at the reading he watched her listen to the poet, a rapture or spell upon her face that he didn’t think
was all due to the mild verse, plangently read, about rain and the moon.

Then late, late, she watched with a new intensity of attention as he took out and put on her neck where the blood beat a studded
collar of her own, and buckled with some difficulty the creaking new leather (
is this the largest you’ve got?
he’d asked the pet-store clerk, divining suddenly that the man knew exactly what he was up to). There were bright chains,
new too, for the ring that hung from it, heavy enough for any
mastiff bitch, he said to her; and he placed her where she could see the thing on the wall that he had made for her. She looked.
She soon ceased to speak except to say, when required, the assents he wanted from her; otherwise, only the sounds of the universal
language. But when he entered her, when he pushed with gritted teeth into the strangeness of the wrong or back way into her
(inexpressible what constituted it exactly, that harrowing strangeness, he the first who had gone that way with her) she said
softly but distinctly
I love you
.

Who? he wondered. To whom had she spoken? Never had she said those words to him in the light of day or facing him anywhere.
He didn’t think it was to him she said them now, he thought she was sleeptalking, speaking maybe to a figure in a room into
which he had only driven her: a dream she unfolded even as she lay beneath him here gripping the bars of the iron bedstead,
a dream where someone was doing things to her like the things he did, but someone different, someone to whom she could say
or must say what she had said. He didn’t reply. He didn’t ask.

Then the leaves were all down. Now Pierce could see from his window the river he lived beside, the broad brown Blackbury River,
and, on the far side of it, the decaying signals and maintenance sheds of a railroad spur line he had not known was there;
in the deep green time it had been invisible, the mountain seeming to rise straight up from the far bank.

Fallen leaves burdened Pierce’s brief yard and made it as one with the leaf-littered slope that went up to the big house,
and with the field that went out to the road; Pierce thought of raking up all of his and burning them, but then (he saw) in
the next wind a million more dead souls would be blown downward from the Winterhalter lawns and over his, unless he raked
up all of those too, and so there being nowhere to stop he could not bring himself to start, only stood in the stillness and
listened to the mass of them crepitating. His landlord’s car appeared on the heights above as he stood there, a long golden-bronze
one as large as any, and came down from the house; did not turn outward through the gates, though, but the other way, toward
Pierce’s place.

When Pierce had first met Mr. Winterhalter, emerging now with painful slowness from his car (the more they shrink and shrivel,
Pierce had noticed, the larger their cars become), he was a hale egg-shaped ham-handed man, curious and busy. Now, only a
couple of months later, he was immensely old, ill, and evidently dying. Pierce greeted him.

“We’re leaving,” Mr. Winterhalter said.

“Yes.”

With some effort Mr. Winterhalter put his shaking hand in his pants pocket and drew out a bunch of keys on a piece of ancient
brown twine. “You’ll remember everything,” he said.

“Yes.” Pierce had been given a tour by Mr. Winterhalter, in his former sprightlier form, shown the lights to be left burning,
the fusebox, the oil cutoff switch, the emergency numbers; the house large and expensively furnished in an anonymous style,
faintly shabby and smelling of human occupation.

“That’s all right then.” He pondered. “Have you seen the well?”

Yes, Mr. Winterhalter had shown him the well. Perhaps he’d forgotten he had. A stone wellhouse in the cove of the hill behind
the great house, they both turned to look that way; the black plastic pipe along the ground.

“You’ll keep it flowing.”

“Yes.”

“You won’t turn off the overflow.”

“No, certainly not.”

“It defeats the purpose.”

“Yes.”

Mr. Winterhalter looked around himself at the leaves and the leafless trees. “Good,” he said. “We’ll be gone all winter. In
the spring you’ll see us again.” He looked at his great gold wristwatch, then lifted his eyes, as though to check the constellations
turning unseen behind the white sky, time to go, hurry hurry. Pierce thought it unlikely that the man would ever return here,
and wanted to ask him what then, but he did have a list of emergency phone numbers in case the Winterhalters did not reemerge
with the chucks. A lawyer’s was among them.

“In the spring,” Mr. Winterhalter said again, and made to enter his car. At that moment another car appeared at the far gate
and turned in.

“Who’s this?”

“A friend,” Pierce said. “Actually, we’re headed out just now.”

Mr. Winterhalter stared at the car and at Rose. She was again driving the Terrier loaner sedan, its top somewhat crushed and
rumpled but otherwise not much worse for its adventure on the night the wind blew so hard.

“You’ve met her,” Pierce said. Rose waved.

“No,” said Mr. Winterhalter definitely. “Never.”

Where was her own car? In the shop again, she told him. The mechanic at Bluto’s Automotive could not acquire a certain part
that the foreign-made and long-discontinued little Asp needed to run, did not think he would be able to acquire it except
maybe from some collector or buff somewhere, unless he could machine it himself, which he was more eager to try than she was
to permit. So it sat there.

“The distributor drive,” she said as she drove them away from where Mr. Winterhalter stood beside his car. “Stripped out.”

“What’s that?”

“Some little gear. Is he all right?” She was studying Mr. Winter-halter in the rearview mirror. “He’s not moving.”

“He can stand there,” Pierce said. “It’s his house. He’s just thinking.”

They turned out onto the main road. They were going today to her cabin by the river, which must now be closed up for the winter.
She had asked for his help some time ago and he had agreed, though he had feared this moment, the place where her path once
again ran out, feared it enough that he had given it no thought: where she would go now, what would become of her, the trembling
that he had never been able to still. But she seemed untroubled now, driving too fast through the motionless day, happy, hectic
even; for she knew, she said, what she was going to do. She was leaving the Faraways.

“I’m going,” is what she said, and he at first didn’t know from where. They were parked now in the driveway of her little
cottage, but had not yet got out. Well she had got a chance to go to school in Conurbana, she said, and she was going to take
it. A sort of scholarship. She was going to enroll at Peter Ramus College, the School of Social Work, get a master’s in psychiatric
social work. A real degree. Credentials. She couldn’t really pass on this.

“Scholarship?”

“Help,” she said. “They want to help me, and I can work with them there too.”

“Them.”

“The healing group. I explained it all.”

She wiped her cheeks with a rapid movement, perhaps there were tears there; she smiled. She had not explained it all or even
any part of it completely.

“But won’t you be coming back to work at The Woods? I mean if you get this degree …”

“Maybe.” She looked at him for an instant sidelong, then away. “What I guess is, I’m not really going to be the one to decide.
But I don’t know if you could really understand that. Even if I could explain it.”

“Uh-huh,” Pierce said. “God walks into your life and you just walk right out of mine.”

“We can’t have a static relationship, Pierce,” she said. “You don’t want that.”

Why? he thought. Why can’t we? Static, endless, it’s what he did want: an active relationship certainly, urgent even maybe,
but yes static, a furious stasis of immediacy encompassed by a bed, four walls.

“And why,” he said, “do they have an interest in paying for your education?”

“Why do you need to make it sound sinister?” She pushed open the Terrier’s door. “They’re committed to healing. If you want
to hear about what they’ve done in institutions, helping people who nobody else can help. I mean maybe this is something you
never understood about me,” she said.

“What.”

“That I want to help. That I want to know how.” She started up toward the cabin. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as we thought.”

While Rose rummaged through the cabin for the last of her belongings and piled them in the car’s trunk, Pierce was asked to
mop out the toilet, which he did, and to drag out from the shed where they were stored the plywood panels that had to be screwed
on over the windows, protection against weather and winter predators, human and otherwise.

“So that’s what this is about?” he asked her. “This healing group? Faith healing?”

“Well healing, yes. Healing in the Spirit. It works, Pierce. It does. I’ve seen it.”

“I know it works.” Pierce’s fourth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Philomel, had cured a stomach cancer (she said) by prayer; Pierce’s
uncle Sam said there was no doubt it was a cancer; he said that those who believe they will get better sometimes do, against
all prognoses. Miracles. Every doctor, he’d say, has seen a few. “Of course it works. It just doesn’t work very well, or very
reliably anyway. Not as well, or as often, as say penicillin, or surgery.”

They worked for a time in silence. Pierce found and carried out the last small plywood sheet. “I thought,” he said, “you were
talking about healing the spirit. Psychiatric healing.”

“Sure.” She zipped a huge duffel. “I mean I don’t know if I could ever do it. But wouldn’t it be amazing if. If I could just
take hold of someone sick or screwed up and say
Begone!
And see them get better.”

“Amazing,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And just who is it,” he said, “that you would be saying this
begone
to?”

She pointed at him, at his breast. “That little one,” she said. “That’s the one for the bathroom window around back.”

“I want to know,” Pierce said. “I do. I want to know about you, learn what I don’t know.”

They were in his bed, her jam-packed car outside in the fog, the night weirdly warm again.

“Well,” Rose said. “You could ask.”

He pondered this, and laughed; after a moment so did she.

“Psychological testing,” he said. “That could give me an insight.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll test you now,” he said, and her look altered, a look he knew.
I’ll test you, Rose
. Then she saw that he meant nothing more than what he had said. “This is a test my older cousin Hildy gave us years ago.
She brought it back from school.”

“What school is this?”

“Her boarding school. Queen of the Angels, in Pikeville, Kentucky. Hildy,” he said gravely, “is today a nun.”

“Huh,” said Rose. “Well in that case.”

“I’ll ask you to imagine a house,” Pierce said, folding his hands in his lap. “This house is your house, but it is not any
house you have ever lived in. It’s not your dream house or the house you intend one day to live in. It’s just a house.”

“I love these,” she said.

“I’m going to ask you to describe certain things about this house, and you have to answer with the first images that come
to your mind. Afterward comes the interpretation.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They both readied themselves, looking inward, somewhat as they had on Rose’s deck in the October evening when together they
had practiced phantasmal transmission. Then Pierce said: