DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (36 page)

“Animals talked on the solstice-midnight long before there was a Christmas. Because of the blurring of the boundaries.”

“Okay,” Rosie said. “I’ll do it if I can. It might not be the blowout I was hoping for. And I still wish it could have been
Halloween. Less explaining to do.” She looked down at Pierce, and paid him a grateful smile. “No offense,” she said.

“No.”

“Will you come?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Disguised as what?” she asked; then seemed to see that he was preoccupied, or unready to answer, or elsewhere; she patted
his shoulder once and said, “Anyway, good,” and backed away, with a gesture in Rose’s direction, a trill of fingers just like
the trill Rose had made earlier.

Rose returned her look to Pierce. Why had it shut up again, her eyes wide open yet closed.

“Would you,” he asked her, “go with me to that party? If it happens?”

“Sure,” she answered. “Aw. That’s so nice of you. If, though …”

“If?”

“No fine,” she said. “Sure.”

“Are you afraid of ghosts? You know one of the funny things about Christianity or Christian societies is how they hold that
the dead can be in three different places at once—in their graves, in heaven or hell, and walking around as ghosts. A sort
of—”

“Christians don’t,” she said. “I don’t.”

“No? The dead are only in heaven or hell?”

“No. The dead aren’t alive now.” She drew out a cigarette, and regarded it with a sort of fear, or reluctance; then lit it
quickly. “Listen Pierce,” she said. “Can we not talk about it? I guess I could explain, but it’s like. Like telling my father
where I’ve been all night. There’s not really any way I’m going to, what’s the word.”

“Mollify,” Pierce said. “Convince. Convert.”

“No,” she said. “Not any of those.” She put her elbow in her hand, the cigarette pointed his way. “Can we go back now?”

It was late when at last, still restless and flushed, ashtrays full and dishes unwashed, they pulled the covers over themselves
and doused the light; for a while longer they still whispered and joked, too pointedly, trying to release one another from
the throes of their contention, or of his with her.

“No no I want to get this straight,” Pierce said. “So we die, okay, and we lie in our graves and rot. And after a long time—nobody
knows how long—the end of the world comes …”

“Well not the end. I mean it doesn’t disappear.”

“Anyway then, at that time, we all get up out of our graves alive, alive-oh. Like do we fight our way out? Or do we just find
ourselves standing there somehow?” He had never felt as intensely before how much this was a story for the night, a horror
story; never noticed before how, when he thought of it, he pictured it in fact taking place at night: the grave, the dead.

“Well I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Pierce said, wishing he could stop. He tossed one way, another. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter. What Jesus actually
said
, of course, which of course has to be the case, right, is that this end of the world was just about to happen as he spoke.
That some of those who were alive and listening to him would live to see it.”

“I’m alive,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“And what,” he said, “happened to the intervening two thousand years? What, it just stopped being true for a long time, and
now for some reason or no reason it’s true again, for the people alive now?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t care. I don’t care if it wasn’t true, or
when
it wasn’t true, I only know it’s true now for me. Ray says we shouldn’t worry about how it’s all going to end, but that
right now
the Kingdom is close to us.”

Ray? “So maybe it’ll go away again,” he said. “Good. Sure. Maybe it comes and goes.”

“Well isn’t your book the same?” she said. She half-rose in the bed,
gathering the small light there into her eyes and limbs. She gestured toward the dining room, where his messy typescript and
notes were piled. And Kraft’s book too, still waiting to be duplicated. “Doesn’t it say that things that were true once aren’t
true at other times?”

Pierce saw where his argument had led him. “Well,” he said. “Sure. That’s the theory. I mean it’s not exactly
asserted
. It’s a way of looking at things. A metaphor.”

“You mean you don’t think it’s true?”

“Oh I do,” he said. An awful hilarity worse than dread threatened him, a sinking balloonist who has already emptied all his
sandbags, and now tosses out the lap robe and lunch basket as well, the champagne, the compass and altimeter. “I do think
it’s true.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It is true. Sure it is.
In there
it is.”

She lay again beside him, giving up, and he, ashamed, lay still. Then she was still; she threw her arm over him, and after
a time he knew that she was asleep, and was glad; he tried to remove her arm without waking her but it returned. He lay alert
listening to his brain run, not all the drink he had had was able to extinguish it, until at a certain moment his thoughts
turned to nonsense and he passed over too; only aware he had done so when he woke again with a start.

It was as far from day as could be, yesterday entirely gone but no hint yet of dawn. The silence was so thick he thought it
must itself have been what awakened him. So deep. He became aware of a sound that had been there before but now was not, that
had ceased or absconded. He knew it was bad news even before he realized what it was.

Water had ceased to flow through the overflow pipe in the basement. He hadn’t heard this sound or silence before but knew
this was what it was.

He threw aside his covers and searched in the darkness for his big robe, stumbling over his shoes and hers; went to the staircase
to the basement, switched on its one baleful light (an ancient round switch you turned clockwise rather than threw up or down,
there had been one in the basement of Sam’s house in Kentucky) and went nearly falling down the stairs.

Yes stopped. Why. The little pump stood mumchance. He grasped the overflow pipe where it left the pump heading for the window,
as though to take its fading pulse. He had to open the valve, this one, no this one.

“What’s up?”

He could glimpse her at the top of the stairs, in his overcoat.

“Stopped,” he said. “It’ll freeze. Maybe it already has.”

He turned the valve all the way one way, all the way the other; it turned only a single full turn in either direction, and
neither had any effect. “If it was on too strong it emptied the cistern. If it wasn’t on enough, the water froze in the line.
I don’t know which way to turn it.”

“Rightie tightie, leftie loosie,” she said.

He mounted the stairs, walking up inside his robe as he had used to do inside his cassock as an altar boy, and fell headlong;
pulled his feet free and went up hand and foot to the top. Searched for his galoshes by the kitchen door, not there, by the
front door; pulled them on over his bare feet.

“I can’t tell what’s wrong. Nothing should be wrong.”

“How about a flashlight?”

“Yes. Right.”

He found one on the floor of the front closet, depressed its button, amazed to see its little beam.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

The night was shocking, the sky clear and the air dry and very cold; his first breath of it burned his throat. With some difficulty—the
flashlight dimmed and brightened irregularly, as though still half-asleep—he found the black pipe and began following it
up the hill toward the woods and the wellhouse. The big robe flapped around his booted feet. He realized that the nameless
dread, unshakeable lately, that had seemed to forewarn or announce some disaster, really had, and this was it. Up, past the
shrouded swimming pool, into the woods beneath the black bulk of the house, four lamps lit now in four windows (set on timers,
factitious residents who turned them on at twilight and off at dawn). No starlight there to give general shape to the scene,
only the flashlight’s beam picking out a startled rock face or bush at every glance. He lost the pipe, found it again; he
came at last, very abruptly, on the wellhouse.

The little hut or pergola, its broad heavy-shingled roof; the big stones of its half wall. Pierce put his head in; his light’s
beam showed a pool deep down. A pebble that his hand brushed from the well’s lip fell far before striking it with a wet clang.
He saw the ripples.

So it wasn’t empty. Or it had been emptied but was now filling again, since the pipe was now clogged with ice. But was it
that cold? Yes it seemed to be. Cold enough to freeze flowing water in a two-inch pipe? How did he know? He looked, hopelessly,
pointlessly, at the phosphorescent dial of his wristwatch, which only told him how long it was till day.

Anyway stuck. Somehow he had failed, or the task had been impossible. He had failed even before he began, no space of time
even to be tested, to watch and ward; first hard freeze of the year, and bang.

He turned to go back, unable to think of anything he might do here. He could see, when he came out of the woods, the little
house that was his, where all the lights were lit; the door open too, and she standing in it, looking and waiting.

W
hen day came it was as cloudless as the night had been, and cold; but the sun’s heat, absorbed by the black plastic of the
pipe, melted the ice that had indeed built up in one or two low-lying bends like plaque in old arteries. By afternoon Pierce’s
water was flowing again.

False alarm, false alarm, he said to himself, not once but many times that day. What would happen though when the sun moved
farther to the south, hurried across the sky weak and old and unable to do that work? He called the plumber the Winterhalters
had listed on their card of emergency numbers and had a brief and unsatisfactory consultation with someone. When it snows
the pipe’ll be well insulated. Yes and what if it doesn’t snow? It hadn’t rained. Hey, the voice told him, no guarantees:
sounding to Pierce’s ears as though it knew this from sad experience.

Later he called Rose in Conurbana to tell her. She had left early, without her coffee, without a bath, her hair wild and undone;
had hurried away, it seemed to him.

“False alarm,” he said.

“Sure.”

“Rose,” he said. “Those things I said, when you were here. About, well, God and. I hope you don’t, I mean I hope …”

“Pierce. Listen. I have to run. There’s so much to do.”

“Sure.”

A silence.

“I’m writing you a letter,” she said. “Bye.”

That night and the next he lay awake, as he had been lately doing, but now listening to the whisper of the overflow pipe,
purring steadily. Or was it slackening? He would think so, would get up and fall downstairs to ponder; turn it up, or down,
once turning it entirely off thinking
he had turned it fully on. Rightie tightie leftie loosie. What was he doing here, he of all people.

It wasn’t just the water. He was failing in other responsibilities too, he could feel it though he could not remember or name
them; when he stood in the basement staring at the pump squatting on its concrete blocks he could hear or perceive things
weakening around him, and in danger of failing.

Rose’s letter came. He pulled it from his box at the Littleville post office (about all of official Littleville there was)
along with a card from his mother in Florida, nearer to his birthday than she usually hit it, with a check inside, for twenty-five
dollars. It too made him somehow afraid, caused him to think of things unattended to. He was to be thirty-six.

He pulled off one glove as he walked back along the blacktop to the Winterhalter estate and clamped it in his armpit so he
could rip off the end of Rose’s envelope. He blew into its ragged mouth and teased the letter out. Her peacock-green ink.

Hi
, she began; she told him she had got home okay and was glad his water flowed, she’d known it would be okay. She said she
had been thinking a lot,
nonstop
she said, since she’d got back, and wanted to say so much that she hadn’t been able to say.
When you were sort of ranting at me
, she said.
It makes it hard for me to think
. He found then that he couldn’t both read it and walk, and he slid it back into its envelope and went on to his road, through
the gates, to his house, listening to his heart. Then while he puttered in the kitchen he let the letter lie on his table.
Until he could no longer, and took it out and scanned it quickly.

Pierce holding the little pages felt the world stop, and darken; he knew that a mask had slipped, and that he had glimpsed
something unspeakable, without knowing what it was. What.

Oh Christ, he said. Oh Jesus.
Suffer terribly
. Oh no.

What had they told her in order to cause her to write or believe such a thing, what obscene lies. Who was she, that she could
contemplate such a thing with equanimity, he obviously hadn’t known her at all or she wasn’t any longer herself, they had
hollowed her and refilled her with this, and now she had passed it to him like a contagion, only she slept and knew nothing,
and he alone knew what it was.

And how could he ever talk to her again?

He would have to get away from her. Right away. How? How do you get away from women, what do you tell them? He had never done
it. He was shivering violently. Why was there a kitchen knife in his hand? How had he got outside on the lawn in the cold?
He lifted her letter again before his eyes, no it was not her letter in his hand but a slice of bread. He turned back to the
house and to the lunch he had been making but ceased to make it, poured himself a drink instead but left it on the counter
untouched.

Suffer terribly
. It was just like them, Christians, always their way, to transfer their own endless spleen and self-regard to the Maker and
Sustainer of the universe; to make the settling of their imaginary scores (settled in their favor a thousand times over already,
never enough though) the very last thing the Infinite is to concern itself with in this world—hurting, whacking, flaying,
causing pain. Your enemies your footstool. Maybe gather them all behind barbed wire, sure make them wear gray pajamas and
starve them to skeletons, make them
know who’s boss
or whom the Boss has covered with his favor. Try to say you wouldn’t delight in it, just try to tell me you wouldn’t.

You. Not
she
surely though, not she but they; she could be forgiven,
dumb bunny, surely she could. But
we, us
, was what she had begun to say lately, after so carefully avoiding those pronouns when talking to him about the Powerhouse.

We. Us. He had to call her, tell her. No he couldn’t do that, could not bear the sound of her voice, her small hello, the
pause then into which he must put what must be said.

A letter. He’d write her one back. He sat at his desk and rolled paper into his typewriter, thinking of things. There was
a right way to say this, a smart way, a way that would not drive her deeper in, that would show her that he knew whereof he
spoke and that he loved her. Respected her or at least understood or. The machine impelled forward the ball on which all the
letters and punctuation marks were incised, it struck and spun and struck as though banging its little head in rage. An Alphaball,
a Selectraglobe: it had a name. In a few hours’ time he had written several pages that were not smart, not understanding,
or were too much so; had torn them up, and written more. After an impatient search he found a stamp and an envelope large
enough; he copied her Conurbana address onto it with a species of revulsion he thought he had never experienced before, not
even able to name its object. What was being done to her there in that city. Then he walked again to the post office, its
window closed already but the big letter box out front still uncollected. As soon as he dropped his letter into the box’s
maw he felt a nauseating certainty that he had done exactly the wrong thing, and would have to wait here until the long red
white and blue truck came to collect, and beg for its return. After a time this passed, and he walked home again.

He returned to his desk. It was, he thought, remarkably dark for the hour, the year had grown so late, was that it? On the
desktop and on the floor around him were the torn members of the drafts of his letter; he could read words and phrases, like
overheard bits of a distant furious argument or tirade.
wicked lies you have accepted if you didn’t mean that what could not love someone who you can’t tell me it’s true what Gibbon
said, that Christians I know very well bigoted cruel can’t you see
Meanwhile the letter he had mailed lay in the dark waiting to be collected, right on top of a Dear John letter from a Littleville
woman who had just left her husband for a preacher. No one would ever know of the coincidence.

It was in this week that Pierce began noticing distinctly the two special symptoms of his condition (he wouldn’t have named
them thus then, but that’s what they were). One was the tap tap tapping of his invaded or infected heart, a
tachycardia
without any physical or physiological cause (he would eventually take himself to a physician, found
in the phone book, who dismissed his fears). And the other was this image, or sensation, an inescapable feeling amounting
almost to an assumption, that the world had become terribly small, that just above his head, not much higher than the tops
of the Faraway Hills, a field of black clouds continually roiled and seethed, oppressing the land; and that just above
them
, pillowed on them, was the awful God of her socalled religion, the Lord God Jehovah and his interfering hosts. He actually
caught himself looking up, not infrequently either, at the empty sky. It was not that he thought they were there; he just
could not help but now and then look up. In the fat New York Sunday paper which he went to the Jambs every week to get, holdover
from his city days, he read a schizophrenic’s memoirs: how for years, though she was well aware that she lived in a city apartment
and then in a clinic, though she knew that she walked its streets and climbed its stairs, at the same time she had also known—had
known
—that she was crossing the Arctic on an endless voyage: because the world was that cold, that empty, the wind that incessant,
the struggle that hard.

And O my God look at this.

In the local New York news a small story about the city college Pierce had formerly taught at, back in what today seemed to
him a long-out-of-print volume of his life. The place had been taken over by an evangelical group, and from now on it would
be offering courses in Bible Languages, Ethics and Morals for Today, Archæology (!) and Earth Science (!!), “in addition,”
the article said, “to a full complement of college-level course work,” including a new pre-dental course.

Pierce rose out of his chair, the masses of the Business and Sports sections slipping from his lap to the floor.

Barnabas College. It had been a hardworking little place whose entrance requirements were low and study load high when Pierce
first came to teach there, then became a rainbow-hued caravanserai at which the wandering young paused, to study astrology,
new journalism, Eastern religious traditions, and ecology (Earth Science), and to get credit for courses of their own devising.
It had then turned again, this time into a back-to-basics outfit, repainted in putty and white, about the time Pierce jumped
ship, or was pitched overboard. Now look. The new Christian management declared that as soon as they took possession there
would be a rededication of the school, staff and students to Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ. Secular Humanism could be studied
in plenty of places, but here it would be de-emphasized. There was to be a dress code, said Dean of Students Earl Sacrobosco—a
recent convert to the gospel group—and loving but watchful supervision of the students. “It’s a new age,” he was quoted as
declaring. “All that stuff is coming back.”

Earl. If Earl Sacrobosco had gone over to them it was evident that they had, for the moment anyway and maybe for the indefinite
future, the whip hand. Pierce could divine clearly the Barnabas gym, an evil-smelling place he had always avoided, now full
of students in skirts and ties, a new cross over the stage. There was nowhere to run that way.

The one thing he could not have conceived, would not have believed if he had heard it predicted: that bigoted religion and
willed ignorance would return in strength, and not even in new and outlandishly intriguing forms, just the same old wine,
the same old bottles, people believing impossible things in the manner of athletes inuring themselves to pain or soldiers
to bloodshed. And for what gain, what power or delight.

War in Heaven.
A war of all against all; if you are not of one party they will make you of another
.

No. No.

He sat again. He dropped the paper, unable to turn further pages. He laid his hands along the rough warm arms of his chair,
the same napless wine-colored velveteen armchair that years before he had rescued from a New York street and repaired, the
same in which he had sailed away to surprising climes once upon a time, his oldest friend now, its motherly clasp unchanged
at least. The light in his house moved steadily from east to west; the rhomboids of sun that fell on and were broken by the
furniture on one side were steadily withdrawn, after a time reappearing, to creep similarly over the stuff on the other side
as Pierce watched unseeing.