DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (30 page)

That was the doctor who spoke, Oswald Kroll or Croll. Kroll was then at work on the book by which he would be known to the
ages, the
Basilica Chymica
, stone-dead now, as he is himself.

—However it was, Bürgi said, in the following age that tomb was opened. Some say by Alexander the Great; some say Apollonius
of Tyana. And the uncorrupted body of Hermes was found within, holding in its hands a tablet.

—The Smaragdine Tablet, said Kroll. One solid emerald, written on in Phoenician characters.

—Or hieroglyphs of Ægypt.

—It contained the whole of the chemical art in brief.

—
As above, so below
, quoted Bürgi.
Thus is accomplished the miracle of the One Thing
.

—In the longer writings of Hermes it is told how Ægypt failed and died, said Kroll. How the temples were neglected, the rites
forgotten,
until the gods of Ægypt left their homeland. How in that time the world grew old, the air thick and unbreathable; how the
sun weakened, the sea ceased to hold up ships.

—
In illo tempore
, in that time, said Bürgi. Think of it. How in the wreckage of the world Hermes consigned himself to his tomb, with his Tablet,
all that he could hope to bring into the future; hoping to be carried into that new time alive, asleep, knowing that he might
not survive, but that his wisdom might, if there was anyone in that new age wise enough to read it.

They all pondered that, and lowered their eyes; each wondered if he were the one wise enough, or would become so, or if one
of the others here were: or if perhaps the words that Hermes inscribed on emerald had actually died along with their author,
in the centuries that had fallen between his age and this one. They had all worked to make the Stone, and none had yet entirely
succeeded.

Then they lifted their eyes, for Jost Bürgi had lowered a lamp suspended over his workbench so that it illuminated what lay
there.

—He did what he could to save his knowledge for the next age, said Bürgi. So must we. We must save his knowledge, and our
own.

Unfinished, its parts and components around it in various stages of completion. Drebbel’s little humming engine; Bürgi’s astronomical
clock, designed to turn as the stars turned—to turn
because
the stars turned—for centuries, from then on in fact: if, that is, the stars went on turning as they did now, which was not
certain.

It looked like a long strongbox of black ironbound wood, not particularly distinguished; but it was more or other than that.
More than one of them thought it was like those chests or trunks of old in which royal babes were consigned to the sea to
be drowned and lost but who persisted and were saved, and did the deeds we remember them by: this was a boat of that kind,
to carry over the gulf that is fixed between one age and the next the wisdom of its makers, so that it would do work for men
in the new age, if it could.

De Boodt, the Imperial gemhunter, thought: it will be like one of those stones we find in the mountains, dusty and unremarkable,
that when struck with a chisel and mallet break open to reveal a glittering jewelled cave within, purple or green or icy blue,
unseen for how long; and release a momentary odor of another world.

But Oswald Kroll thought of Æsop’s tale of Belling the Cat.

—We know what must be done, he said; we do not yet know who will be the one to do it, or if anyone can. Who will lie here?

—The man whose sign is the Monad, Guarnerius said. He must be the one.

Yes: they nodded, yes. The Emperor whom they all served had given them John Dee’s book and ordered them to study it. But each
of them had come to know this Monad even before then. Seeing it on Dee’s frontispiece, each of them had at the same time remembered
it—one how he had awakened from a vivid dream to find it inscribed on his palm, only to have it vanish quickly; another how
he had without thinking drawn it one morning, or rather something, not quite it, and troubling, irritating, unsatisfying;
another how he had perhaps seen it scribbled in the margin of a book given him, then taken away. Like a whisper in the ear.

—The old man, said Kroll. Joannes Dii.

—No it is not he. Read the book again. He has said it himself, that it was granted him, passed through him; not his. No, he
is the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Vox clamantis in deserto
.

—Who does he cry?

—The other, his companion. Formerly his companion. He has always said the other is the one who sees, who knows. Not himself.
Gelleus? Is that the name? And now we see this Gelleus come into his own, flaunt his powers. As if to signify to us. If there
is one among us who can carry the Tablet of our age …

—
Odoardus Scotus
, said Kroll. Edward Kelley, the Irish knight.

He looked down into the bed of the long black box. There was another thing, of course, that it closely resembled; a very common
thing. Remember, Man, that thou art dust.

He said: The man might refuse.

—He must not, said Bürgi. He may not.

He put his hand on the book.
To those who have, more will be given
, he said.
From those who have not will be taken even the little that they have
.

—I will bring him here, said Dr. Kroll. Assign me a troop of guards, and a sergeant at arms. If he has powers around him,
I will deal with them. We must be certain, though, that we are right, that this is the man.

—We are certain, said Bürgi.

—And if we are wrong? Kroll said.

—If we are, said Bürgi, then neither he nor we will ever know of it.

E
ach new age that has befallen us has been very different from the age it succeeds. But passage times—those times that fall
in between ages, through which we pass in going from one age to the next—are always in certain ways alike.

Passage times, though separated perhaps by centuries, seem (to those within one) to follow immediately upon one another rather
than upon the ages they close, or open; they are successive visits to the same place, which at first we don’t recognize, though
we know it’s familiar: like days of fever, whose onset we feel but don’t at first identify, what air is this, what earth;
after a time of wary puzzling we say Oh yes I know this kind of life, it’s fever, and we allow ourselves to fall back or lie
down into it, its former instances accumulating behind us to be remembered, the only days we
can
distinctly remember as the numbers mount and the mercury bar crosses into triple digits.

Like the way Bobby always remembers that one time, always comes upon it when a fever begins, that time in the little house
in Bondieu, the kids’ little house attached to the big house: in their bed, those children staring at her, certain she was
to die among them.

In all passage times the gate of horn is open, between dreaming and remembering, between being and meaning; the gate between
wanting and having, between fearing and having too. Things that had been coming together to become one thing, perhaps coming
together for a long time, fall apart again into two. Soul and body, for instance; male and female; pursuer and pursued; children
of God and orphans, nobody’s children. But things that had always been different fall together then too, and are shown to
be one thing after all: the fleeing one looks back, and sees she is the one she flees; the orphan turned out to weep is the
same as the master of the house. The last is the same as the first. That (Bobby thought) is what that hard saying means. Nobody
has to switch
places at all; we throw ourselves out of our own chairs, and sit ourselves down instead.

She laughed at herself, giddy already, and with a deep thirst starting that water would not reach, as though her throat were
turned to lint. A fever in her could rise high and fast, and aspirin not stop it, she knew for a fact, it was the way she
was made; her kids the same, her son deaf in his left ear ever after from a fever. But anyway she had to get to work; if it
got worse later maybe she would go and ask for a healing. There was an outreach tonight at the Bypass Inn, they would all
be there. She hadn’t heard of them lowering fevers by putting on hands but why couldn’t it do that. Supposed to cure cancer
and insanity.

She remembered how her grandfather told her he had nearly died of a fever once as a babe, how they had wrapped him in a quilt
and taken him up the mountain to a little cabin; and an old woman there had taken out a stone, a madstone she called it, and
said it was taken from the belly of a deer. And she rubbed the madstone all over him and there: the fever passed.

She was a witch
, her grandfather said.
I seen her later and I struggled with her. I know
.

“Bobby.”

“Yes darlin.”

“Bobby I’m hungry.”

“Okay hon.” After he went deaf he couldn’t ever talk right either; he said bobby and boon for mommy and moon. Odd that Bobby
was her name anyway. She had never called her grandfather anything but Floyd after she was grown. Because she was no blood
of his.

She went on working on her toes. Why it mattered she couldn’t say, her feet would be unseen within white sneakers all night.
It did matter. She sat on the floor, resting her heel on a fat Mopar catalogue left behind by Lars when he departed; she put
the filter of a cigarette butt between her big toe and the next toe. Then another filter between the next two toes, and the
next two.

“Bobby.”

“Soon as Mommy’s done, sweetheart,” Bobby said to the boy, who lay on the coverless mattress that took up much of the floor.
“Get you a cookie. But you gotta wait.”

She undid the long-handled brush of the little wine-red bottle and, tongue between her teeth, spread a careful first coat
over the big toenail. So rich it always seemed to her, thicker than blood, gleaming on the brush with the shine that it promised
to impart. She wished it would stay this way, so liquid and bright, never grow hard and dull.

This too always carried her back, by a straighter path, to when she
was a kid. A bottle of cheap polish at the dime store in Bondieu cost a quarter or so. In July she’d catch fireflies in a
fruit jar, and paint her broken and dirty nails with the thick paint, and before it was dry take out one of the green-glowing
bugs (already fading in the jar) and press it onto the gummy nail, and then the next, and the next, and they would be trapped
there; and she would go out into the night with them attached to her, and miraculously they would come alive again and brighten,
turning on and off in patterns like electric bulbs in signs. Glow, glowbugs, glow. In the pines a million others turning on
and off too. Hard part was cleaning them off her fingers. Smear of their glow-stuff on the oilcloth of the table, still greenish
for a time.

Temperature going up. She moved her eyeballs in her head and felt the pain.

If she went in to the hospital they would probably send her home anyway but she didn’t want to call in sick, she had done
that too often lately when she wasn’t sick and they knew she wasn’t sick: and besides, she was afraid of the long night that
lay between her and dawn.

Bobby always signed up for nights at certain seasons of the year, times when she wanted to be awake all night; Christmas and
the days after, the end of June and of October. Her grandpap had known the names of those nights, how to find them in the
almanac; he located them just as much though by another, inward sense, and she had that one as he did. On those days she made
sure it was her duty to get up from sleep as the sun faded from the sky, get in her car and head for work on the empty side
of the road, her fellow humans filling the opposite side, rolling toward their dinners and their beds. She was comforted by
the willed reversal of day and night, liked watching the hours of deep darkness, which should be passing unwitnessed, go by
one by one on the big clocks while she and her colleagues busied themselves in the bright halls and artificial day. Safe,
awake.

Sometimes, though, those nights came upon her unawares, only revealing themselves to be what they were when they had covered
her, like nights of fever, what is this? What’s at my back? And when she was taken that way she did things that she couldn’t
always remember afterward, or couldn’t always tell if she had done them or dreamed them.

So on this night she dressed and made up her face, clipped her ID badge to her smock, dropped her son off to the baby-sitter,
with a sack of jelly sandwiches and cookies and the sucker that was forever in his mouth if nothing else was, and drove downtown
toward Route 6 and the hospital.

Route 6 was one of the roads Kentucky families used to know, one of the ways they took coming out of the Cumberlands, where
Bobby was
born. Men from Pike and Floyd and Harlan and Clay counties headed north to Ohio to make tires and steel or to Detroit and
Flint to build Chevies and Oldses, or west to the mills of Hammond and Gary and East Chicago. If they went east they followed
the Little Sandy River up to the Ohio and across Pennsylvania on the turnpike, up through the Delaware Water Gap by Route
6 and on to the city of Conurbana, which had been a city of mills once, where firearms and bicycles and cardboard boxes were
made, hospital hardware, candy, golf clubs, adhesives, children’s games with famous names the newcomers had never heard. She
had used to dream of Route 6 long before she took it herself, pregnant and fleeing; dreamed of it, long, winding, leading
out of the broken woods into the blue distance, a glitter of lights, unresolvable, at its end.

Actually that road, the old road, was now called 6A when it came close to Conurbana. Route 6 had become the new four-lane
bypass around the city, carrying long-distance travellers in a wide disdainful curve around so that they need not become entangled
in the shabby outskirts and warehouse districts. The new way had created a new strip, on a larger scale than the old one,
lots where the new cars and not the used were sold, where the bright big signs of the national franchises were, and the windowless
low concrete buildings like bunkers on wide landscaped lots, some of them factories where who was making what, others nightclubs
or motels. Nabco. Tuff-hold. Pendaflex. Chilly Willies. Bypass Inn.

She only touched new 6 for a mile or two before returning to old 6A, following the way she had first gone to the hospital,
the only way she knew; like a squirrel who knows only one way back to its hole, or a piglet to its momma, she had learned
what she needed to know and just got quicker at it. On this night of fever she didn’t think about it, and found herself back
on 6A, the dark unpopulated strip, unaware of the turns she had taken and for a moment unsure which way on it she was travelling,
toward downtown or outward toward the scrabbly orchards and lumberyards. Before she could draw herself fully back down to
this place and this night she saw the Tempest ahead, off the shoulder, canting a little downward toward the ditch.

It was there. It proceeded toward her (she rather toward it, but she felt motionless). A white Tempest, sleek as ice; its
red ragtop up, as it had been. Her headlights swept it as she came upon it, it altered rapidly in their shifting light. It
was there, there, though she had abandoned it in the mountains a hundred miles and more away: still there.

Then she was past it. She didn’t slow. She looked though in her rearview mirror, unable not to; and saw him, him too, beside
the car, turning her way as though he could see—far behind her though he
already was—right into her eyes by way of the little mirror she looked into. Eyes like the eyes they all had when they looked
at her, asking or answering a question she did not know how to answer, never would; a question she herself was.

So I did get him, she thought. She looked ahead, at the road, then back at the mirror, but it had gone black, winked out like
a light. By damn I did get him, and he’s dead.

Night sped around her. She wouldn’t stop or turn, no way she would.

She could remember it as though the heavy gun had burned the flesh and the bones of her hand, and those burns hadn’t healed:
how after she had ordered him out of the car, his own car, after she had slid over to the driver’s seat to take the wheel,
after she had shifted to Drive, she had lifted the gun and, as though it had desired this of itself and made her do it, had
flung her hand toward where he stood pleading by the road’s edge, and looking away had fired; and at the same moment pressed
her foot down on the gas and leapt ahead, lights still unlit.

And when she fired she had hit him and killed him. Tony, no Tommy. Ted.

She hadn’t looked back then to see, she had thought she had probably hit him but she hadn’t been sure. She knew now. She had
killed him and she didn’t even remember his right name, could not ask his forgiveness for that night, could not speak to his
shade and say I was crazy, crazy, crazy, please in Jesus’s name forgive me.

For a long time she had believed that for the kind she was there was no forgiveness. She thought, at other times, that for
the kind she was there was no sin. She thought that her kind went unmentioned in the Gospels, were not warned or welcomed
there, that the Word was not spoken to her.

Floyd Shaftoe her grandpap had believed in the Word: had used to sit for hours in his chair with his parents’ big brown Bible
in his lap as though reading it, his eyes often elsewhere. He had no truck with any church, though; no truck with his neighbors
either, lived alone on his father’s old worn-out hill farm with just her and a succession of half-wild dogs that she believed
he understood, or at least cared for, more than he ever did for her.

Her grandpap had known what kind she was. So he always said. For—he said—he was of a like though opposed or opposite kind.
He had used to wonder aloud how it could have come to be that his granddaughter could have a share in that other life he also
led, because (he told her, when she was too young to know what he was talking about but not too young to remember and ponder)
she was no blood of his.
The woman who was the mother of her mother was already carrying that girl-child when Floyd married her, and it wasn’t by him;
he never did lie with her as husband to wife.

And yet surely there was a reason he had been drawn to her, a reason he had taken her in and given of himself to her for as
long as she stayed.

Where was she, Bobby asked, this woman, her grandmother?

Dead. Had bad blood or some weakness. He had met her in a hunky town in Clay County, he told Bobby. She wasn’t bohunk herself.
But that said nothing about who the father was of the child she carried, Bobby’s mother. Who grew up to be another like her,
and had gone off to Detroit fast as she could go and there got herself with child—that was Bobby, yes Bobby was herself a
woods-colt, a come-by-chance child. And she came back to Hogback just long enough to leave Bobby with Floyd. Floyd pretended
to have never known the man’s name, or no longer to remember it.

So there was no knowing now what blood was in her.

You’re of that kind
he’d say to her, when she flouted him, when she lied to him so brazenly he had to know, when she lay out all night in the
pines and wouldn’t come when he called; and though he had legally adopted her, was her father therefore as well as her grandfather,
though she slept in his bed until she was ten, she never believed he loved her: used to catch him now and then looking at
her as though there was a deep enmity fixed between them, deeper than any commandment to love or honor could reach.

When she was twelve she left his house up on Hogback Mountain for good, and walked to Clay County in search of her mother,
who maybe had people there. She never found her, but people took her in, as they always would, drawn somehow to help her,
to melt the hard thing they saw in her pale eyes, the reserve in her tight-drawn mouth. They got little good of their kindness.
That was her nature too—so her grandpap said—and she had been content to believe that then, though she was not content to
believe it anymore.