DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (23 page)

Tonight the cameras were pursuing into and out of court a well-known entertainer, a comic in fact, not comic now as she pushed
through the crowd surrounded by lawyers. Many of the man’s adherents had been entertainers and actors, some of them famous:
magicians themselves, you’d think they would have known.

But oh Lord in that room with death, trying to defeat it: having willfully gone into the place that cannot be gone into. The
dreadful illusion and its exposure, the door broken open, the cops amazed, the sleepers there awakening at last or trying
to awaken or never to awaken. The dead one though still dead. Smelling too. What was the horror at the heart of it, something
shit-black he tasted in the back of his throat, he could taste but not touch it, what was the name of that horror.

He turned it off.

All magic is bad magic. He thought this thought for the first time. To do magic you must take power over others, and you must
believe you can do what can’t be done, and make others believe it too. All magic is bad magic.

Was it so?

What if he and she had ever, what if in their madness and willingness they were ever to go so far.
Folie à deux
. It apparently happened, his own father (haunter these days of city bathhouses and dark bars) told him he had heard of male
couples who had entered into relations of such force and fascination, athletes or saints of sex, that one had succumbed under
the ministrations or exactions of the other. And then the door pounded on, the landlord, the cops, death found to have visited
there where he had been invited to come: really death, not death as symbol for deathlessness (
unto death
) and not death as more vivid life, but death simple, death itself.

I see your soul when I see you come
, he had said to her: had seen it rise to her eyes and stand upon the threshold of her parted lips. Not
to step over and out though. No.
No es posible
. Pierce before the darkened TV felt suddenly afraid; wanted nothing but to embrace her, right now, and say
I was kidding, yes, listen listen, I was only kidding
.

He
didn’t
want power over her; all he had ever wanted with her, what he supposed no magic he could do could ever really grant him,
was to
be her
, to be on the inside of her when she felt the things he caused her to feel, or helped her to cause herself to feel. Not for
good of course or permanently, only at that moment, when she arrived at that incandescence; but he wanted it then intensely,
unslakably, utterly.

And what if he had to push a little further every time, a little harder, in order to get her down into the furnace room, the
world all heat, and himself with her, there where he wanted to be, had always and only wanted to be, no matter what else he
had ever pretended to be about? With her and through her and in her.
In ipsam et cum ipsa et per ipsam
. Maybe he would on some night push a little too far,
vacatio
made permanent and irreversible as the subjectivity itself exited from her open mouth, from his too:
mors osculi
they called it,
morte di bacio
, the Death of the Kiss, possible (so Marsilius saith, so Don John Picus) for striving souls too loosely adhering to the flesh.

No again. I tell you three times.

He went to his bedroom, aroused and afraid, she close by him. On the wall near the bed’s side hung the emblem he had made
for her, the old frame and the new little picture.
The Marriage of Agent and Patient
. It should have been put away, he should not have sat as long as he had before it, but of course by now it was too late.
He lay down not on his own bed but on the other, the naked mattress, and inhaled its odor and hers, looking and listening
too within for the same thing, the trace of her. And he felt, even in the midst of his heat, a familiar chill, like the onset
of fever: that premonition that soon and unavoidably a whole banquet of symptoms will be brought before you, and you will
eat and eat, until you die, or get better.

Love is magic
, Giordano Bruno said;
magic is love
. The magician and the lover are both
venatores animarum
, hunters of souls; by emblems and by arts, the magician draws down into his heart the powers of heaven, that is the star-persons
through whom the whole of nature and the spirits of men and women are ordered, and have their meaning. He ranges these powers
within him and asks: teach me to bind, with bonds like love’s, the things of this world and the hearts of others. And they
do, they can. And thus we become like gods.

But the gods are themselves constantly at work, spinning and weaving with the rays that all things produce. They do not like
to be renounced, they will not suffer it; they knit up bonds to bind us to
them
in love and worship, they are
venatores
too and come after us with their lures. And we invite them to do it, we pray to them to do it, and they do.

Give us this day our daily bread, we pray. Give us what we need and what we want.

And worshipping them we bind ourselves, we are bound to the ones whose gifts we take.

And the greatest of these is Love: Love himself, or herself; Eros,
dæmon magnus
, that son of the morning star, that boy, his other name is Don Cupido, the little lord of all things, he whose avatar or
manifestation (there are others, countless others, one perhaps for each of us) had for a while inhabited Pierce’s house and
heart and then departed, taking Pierce’s sleep with him: his work there done, and well done too.

Always poor, a beggar, shoeless and homeless, says Plato, sleeping out for want of a bed; but because his father is Hermes
he is a clever hunter too, a magician, always devising tricks, scheming to get for himself all that is beautiful and good.

Oh the traps the gods have prepared for us, for us their worshippers; how long and well they’ve worked. We are older than
they, far older than the oldest of them; we have come from farther away, way back beyond where they were born: but we don’t
know that, we have forgotten it—and they know we have forgotten it. And that’s why they can do with us what they like most
of the time, especially when we think we have escaped them. That’s why, in other words, the world has lasted so long, and
why we are all still here.

M
adimi was gone.

Edward Kelley had done what he had so often promised to do: he had ceased to skry. After that day, the day following the night
that he and John Dee had done the great sin they had been ordered to do, he kept the vow that he had made in his anguish,
never to speak to them again. Not her or any of them.

He seemed, anyway, to have no need to. He had been given what he wanted. Though weak and languid at first, unable to rise
from his couch, weeping sometimes, laughing sometimes, he had soon grown strong again, stronger than ever; he seemed to grow
taller even, his wrists growing out the sleeves of his gown and its hem rising around his ankles, as though he had been replaced
by another, a similar but taller man. He needed room; he made it clear to the Duke (speaking loudly and lifting a forefinger,
his new temerity alarmed John Dee, but not as much as the faint constant tremor in Kelley’s hand) that from now on he would
need apartments of his own.

Not for a growing family, though: his wife that fall was taken home. The letters she had written long before from Poland had
at length arrived in Chipping Norton where she was born, and her brothers had meditated on them, and sold a cottage and an
orchard, and equipped themselves (unable to imagine what they would encounter Abroad, brave boys, they had each a pistol and
a crucifix of silver and a magistrate’s warrant) and so had come (a year had passed by then) to T
ebo
to rescue her. Kelley
had greeted them with liberality, laughing hugely, loading them with gifts, and they had looked around themselves at the fine
painted rooms and the hangings and tableware and the silver ewer of wine Kelley poured and poured from, and for a moment they
wondered: but Joanna weeping in the night told them that what she had written was nothing, nothing, compared to what had befallen
since, things that she had not and never could write or even speak; they
mustn’t ask her, only let them all be gone as soon as might be. Kelley (not in his bed, to which he had told them he was going,
but listening at the door) bade her farewell.
Farewell farewell
he thought, and felt a small fire kindle in his breast; he brought the nails of his hand to his mouth and bit them, as he
had not done since he was a boy.

—She troubled me, he said to John Dee. God go with her, and let her be gone. She kept me from my work.

As though he had embarked on a task like those laid on the poor lads of old tales, impossible things that had all to be done
in a night, he labored ceaselessly, drew up plans in the morning, ordered servants in the evening, read by lamplight all night;
seemed to have lost the need for sleep, sure sign of a hectic melancholy—John Dee noted it—but Kelley only grew stronger.
He had John Carpio, indispensable workman, begin a new furnace, larger than any they had built before, in a room over the
gate of the palace of T
ebo
: “He used of my rownd bricks,” Dee noted in his journal, “and was contented now to use the lesser
bricks, 60 to make a furnace,” it seemed not to matter to him as long as the work went forward quickly, when it didn’t he
exploded in wrath,
terribilis expostulatio accusatio
Dee wrote. He nearly burned his book, working too hastily with spirits of wine, but seemed not to care about that either,
waved Dee away when he fussed over the scorched pages.

—Keep it, he said.
Tolle, lege
: take it and read.

All Prague soon knew that Kelley was aflame—these things could not be kept secret, though the work itself might be. Since
philosophic gold, the new bright gold we make in our alembics and our athenors, is a product of the operator’s soul as much
as of the fire and the matter, it is possible through certain signs to tell which soul, like a broody hen, is in a state to
produce it; and a worker’s certainty that he
is
able to produce it—a sudden brilliant confidence, a winged state, a golden aspect, glints of gold even suddenly visible in
the iris of the eye—that is the surest sign of all. The aristocratic hungerers who patronized Prague’s alchemists, the great
cunning-men around the King, even the smoke-blackened toilers of Golden Lane, all saw it in Kelley.

Soon there were other signs too, or rumors. Someone who claimed to have seen him do it said he could produce the
Mercurius solis
in only a quarter of an hour. It was said he gave rings of gold wire to a servant of the Duke’s upon his marriage, and one
to each of the guests as well, four thousand pounds’ worth ran the tale by the time it reached England, “openly Profuse,”
Elias Ashmole would later write, “beyond the modest Limits of a sober Philosopher.”

Never less than courteous and kind to John Dee and his family, Duke Ro
mberk nevertheless was drawn as by a lodestone to the
younger
man. Now when he went to Prague to wait on the Emperor, he often took Kelley with him; when he came to T
ebo
, after a brief
restless call on Dee and his family, he would shut himself up with Kelley in the room over the gate.

Dee said nothing. He said nothing when Kelley commanded away his own best workmen, said nothing except to his private diary;
said nothing when Joanna Kelley was allowed to return home with her brothers, except that he and Jane went with her to church
before she left, and took the Sacrament with her, and Joanna afterward “to me and my wife gave her hand in Charitye, and we
rushed not from her.”

He said nothing when under Duke Ro
mberk’s protection Kelley moved house to Prague City, where Dee was still forbidden to
go, to grand rooms in the Duke’s palace in the shadow of the Hradschin; nothing when the great and the curious flocked to
visit him there, when the poet and courtier Edward Dyer, who had long been Dee’s friend and was his son Arthur’s godfather,
arrived from England only to take up exclusively with Kelley and write home to the court of Kelley’s wonder-working. Years
later Dee would write of the “most subtill devises and plots laid, first by the Bohemians, and somewhat by the Italians, and
lastly by some of my owne countrymen”: but he said nothing then.

He said nothing, but his wife knew he mourned; as for a lost child, she thought (her own child Theodore, hungriest and most
eager of all her children, was at her breast) and she was in a sense right: but the child he mourned was not, or was not wholly,
Edward.