DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (22 page)

The desire is boundless, the act a slave to limit: not here though, where Memory endlessly extends or repeats what their combining
flesh could do only once, or only every once in a while, and not for any great length of time. A Moment in Eternity: what
that old ad promised, that ad appearing in the back pages of the timid men’s magazines of his youth, for the Rosicrucians
wasn’t it. He had wondered then what it could mean. Not this that he was up to, certainly. “All right Rose,” he said aloud
in the empty room, the Soft Voice. “All right. Yes Rose. Yes.”

The worst part, Rosie thought, the part this guy feared the most, worse than the pox or the grasping in-laws or the whiny
real wife growing old and sour: the making or leaving of kids. This thing she had in her hands was so old you couldn’t tell,
people then might have been entirely different, but he seemed to know what most men now didn’t really grasp, what maybe most
people she knew had forgotten, with the Pill and stuff: that sex between living men and women was for making babies, and you
had to get to work if you wanted it to be for something else, because those babies will fight to get made, no power greater.
He knew it and he opted out.

Well there were good reasons for that. Like the reason she lay still at Arcady, unable to fly; why she had slept with Sam
in her bed almost every night that Brent Spofford had not been in it with her, Sam’s room at the end of the corridor being
too far away, too far—Rosie without company tended to lie in bed imagining Sam, asleep alone, visited by a seizure of some
new kind, some ultimate kind, and just exiting, like stepping out the window into the night air.
They often happen when we sleep
, Dr. Marlborough had said, as though they were his too.

Babies, crying at the margins of the world, trying to get in, no matter the dangers, no matter what awaits them. If you open
a way for one or some, there’s no getting out of it later, and maybe this guy had known that too, that you will not even
want
to get out of it or turn away, that nothing matters more than seeing this through. You can’t even die, have no right to:
tied to life by the choices you make, that you’ve tried so hard to talk yourself into. She remembered how she used to charge
herself with selfishness in those days when she had lain awake in the grip of regret or whatever the name of the feeling had
been: selfish, selfish, can’t you ever think of anyone else’s happiness for five minutes, if you could look
out
not
in
you’d see a good life there just waiting to be lived.

“Speaking of which,” Rosie said aloud.

She pushed aside her bedclothes and the musty book, and went out and down past Boney’s old room, now kept closed, to the bathroom;
found the pink plastic wheel that Sam had lusted to play with ever since she had seen Rosie using it, and dialed it carefully
to this day, where yes her forgotten pill still remained. She pressed it into her hand. Weirdly minute considering its power.
Lust of the unproductive kind
. With a sip of water from the still-minty tooth glass she swallowed it; and immediately it began forestalling for another
day those processes that Rosie had already, head to toe, felt attempting to begin.

Spofford and Cliff left for the West in the last week of October. They were driving Spofford’s truck, and had Cliff’s motorcycle
strapped down in the bed, covered with a blue tarp. Spofford brought his tools. They came last of all to Arcady so that Spofford
could say goodbye to Sam and Rosie.

“It’s okay,” she said to Spofford. “Really. It’s really a small thing, a test. It’s not like she’s going in for an operation.”

He looked down at her, saying nothing. She knew he would stay if she asked, and therefore she couldn’t ask. And since she
couldn’t ask she had to say it didn’t matter. And the more she smiled and said it didn’t matter the angrier she got.

“So how come you didn’t tell me about,” she said, and made a subtle gesture toward where Cliff was dandling Sam, just out
of earshot.

“Tell you about him? I’ve told you all about him. Took you to see him.”

“You didn’t tell me what he looked like.”

He had brought her to visit Cliff on a summer day, to see if Cliff could alter or intervene in the sadness that had seemed
to possess her
(only she didn’t call it sadness, there was nothing that made her sad, or happy either, nothing: nothing was the problem).
But Rosie had never got to see him, he had been gone the one day they went to his place in the woods, she and Spofford, and
then too many things had happened too fast: for that was the night that Boney died. She had never gone back.

What would she have thought of him if he had come for her out of his handmade house that day. Not scary exactly but imposing,
thin and tall like a wading bird, a heron, no an egret, for his hair, that fell well below his shoulders, was pure white:
so were his shaggy brows. His colorless eyes were like moonstones, almost without pupils in the whites.

“Amazing,” Rosie said. Sam thought so too, gazing up at his pink clean-shaven face, reaching for the long hair that he pushed
away from his face.

“He is,” Spofford said. “He is.”

“What does he think you guys will find?” Rosie asked.

“He doesn’t even say. But.” He sighed, as though having come up to something hard to say. “He did say he thought this might
take a while.”

“You said a couple of weeks.”

“Longer than that.”

Rosie thought: Who is on my side then? Who?

“Well listen,” she said. “I think you better get going then. Soonest started soonest done.” She rose abruptly and left him
sitting there; went to Cliff and took Sam from him. The two of them were best friends already. Men.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.

Cliff regarded her smiling, his long pink hand still on Sam’s boot. “I sort of hope we don’t,” he said. “That would be best.
But thanks. I hope you do too.”

Oh stupid tears, Rosie felt them gather hotly in her eyes even as she grinned the snide grin she had decided on, it had been
easier when Nothing was her only friend and kept between her and everything else. A few months ago. The woods were getting
deeper.

“Kiss,” she said to Sam, and held her up to Spofford. As Sam clung to his neck the phone rang in the house behind them; so
weirdly warm it was that the door stood open.

“I’m gonna get that,” she said. “Come on, Sam.” She patted Spofford’s nose and said: “See you when I see you.”

With Sam waving bye-bye, bye-bye over her shoulder, she went quickly into the house. The old phone in the hall, an ancient
model that must have been there unchanged for decades (the little number on the
typed card beneath a celluloid window on the dial plate bore a letter exchange no one ever used any longer) was as loud as
a fire bell; it always sounded like bad news.

It was Allan Butterman. Rosie had that been-here-before feeling of almost, but not quite, knowing what he would say before
he said it. “I think there are some developments,” he said.

“Yes,” Rosie said. Beyond the open door Spofford’s truck could just be seen, going away. “What.”

“I ran into Mike’s old lawyer at the courthouse in Cascadia. You remember her.”

Rosie would never forget her, and could not forgive her either, though nothing that had been done had been her fault. Like
a dog who once bit you.

“She’s no longer his lawyer,” Allan said. “She was pretty short about it—miffed almost I want to say, maybe there was some
disagreement. Mike seems to have new representation.”

“Who.” Her heart began a sort of warning tap tap tap.

“The name mentioned was the firm that’s representing this religious group that’s around. The Powerhouse. You know about them.
They’re I guess into some real-estate things?”

“I think.”

“Well it seems Mike has changed his mind again, and is asking for a hearing. About custody. And this firm is handling it.”

Rosie’s grip on the phone had tightened, as though on the throat of an animal, a small animal at her flesh. “What do they
call that? Is that Christian?”

“Sorry?”

“This big Christian group? They have lawyers to take people to court and take away their children? Is that supposed to be
Christian?”

“You’re asking me?” Allan said. “I’m Jewish, for Christ’s sake.”

“What can I do,” she said. “Is there anything.”

“Sure,” Allan said. “You can defend against this. I can tell you what you’ve got to do.”

“Oh Allan.”

“I have to say one thing, though,” he said. “From this point I am going to have to bill you.”

She said nothing.

“The divorce, you know,” he said, “that was dealt with by Mr. Rasmussen. How he described it in his books I don’t know.”

Rosie still could say nothing.

“There’s a certain amount of billing already piling up,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Not really a lot.”

“Well I’ll pay it, Allan. Just send it.”

“These things can get expensive. If this group is going to involve itself. I have no idea what their resources are.”

“I said I’d pay. It might take a while.”

“Well can I make a sort of suggestion?” He seemed to shift in his big chair, a chair she had often watched him revolve thoughtfully
in, and swap ears on his phone. “If you could resolve your questions about the Foundation. I mean about taking on the directorship.
Not only would your salary go up a good deal. I’m already the Foundation’s counsel. So.”

Rosie’s breast tightened terribly. Allan too. Defenseless, she hadn’t known how defenseless she was; naked, like a cartoon
or silent-movie character whose clothes are blown away by a sudden wind.

“Fuck you, Allan,” she said.

“Rosie.”

“I’ll handle it myself. Can I do that? I can, can’t I?”

“It was just a suggestion,” he said mildly.

“Forget it,” she said. “Send me the stuff.”

She hung up.

Run. Run from here where she did not truly belong and never could. Run as her father had run so long ago, maybe back to the
Midwest. To her mother. She had to have somebody. For an instant she saw the road running that way, straight, divided by white
dashes, into darkness.

No she couldn’t run, it was certainly illegal; anyway Mike was Sam’s father, she had no right, Sam loved him as much as she
loved Rosie, maybe more.

Can’t run. Can’t die. Down the hall the door to the world still stood open. For a moment Rosie perceived Boney Rasmussen standing
there before it, not in the green silk dressing gown in which he had died but in the cuff-worn gray gabardine slacks he always
wore and one of his big white shirts, too big for his shrunken torso and buttoned to the neck.

Just for a moment. Then she went down the hall, carefully as though on a dark path, and shut the door; then locked it and
slipped the chain.

That week on Pierce’s TV (bought cheap on the streets of his old slum neighborhood, the spoils of crime no doubt, but he had
himself been despoiled more than once and so a rough balance had thereby been struck) the exposure of a West Coast mage and
his cult had been
proceeding; Pierce watched, twitching and cocking his rabbit ears this way and that to get even a dim glimpse here in the
valley between the mountains. The man had entranced an unknown number of followers with his purported powers, especially his
powers to heal; and then a young asthmatic among them, who had given himself over completely to the man, abjuring all medical
treatment, had died in his company. And the rest had apparently gathered there in the mage’s apartment, with the corpse, and
he had promised them that if their faith were strong enough, he and they could raise the dead man.

Days he had lain there while they prayed and willed. Until at length someone’s faith failed or someone came knocking or the
call was made.