DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (48 page)

“Inside is outside,” she said.

“Well will you pray for me then?” Pierce cried in grief and surrender. “Will you pray for me? ’Cause I.”

“I will,” she said, levelly, simply. “I will. And for her too.” She embraced him, somehow able to contain his big self in
her slight arms, and for a long time said nothing more while he wept.

Whether because of Rhea Rasmussen’s prayers, or just the touch of her person, or maybe because of the drink he swallowed (still
weeping a little) when she was gone, Pierce slept for a few hours; and now he had awakened calm in the darkness before dawn.
He had been granted, had been
vouchsafed
, the right thing to do, held it now in his heart and hand.

What he had to do was to ask her, humbly and with all his heart, to come back to the Faraways and live with him instead of
going to school in Conurbana, they would work it out somehow; to live with him from then on, for good. Impossibly, but yes
definitely, he had to ask her—he laughed aloud in the darkness of his bedroom with hopeless understanding—to be his wife.

A simple question. And it didn’t matter if the answer was yes or no. Somehow even if he never asked it, just knowing it was
the right one was enough; he felt a profound relief, like a nearly drowned man’s to breathe air and expel it. But what if
he really could ask it? Why on earth did the mere thought of asking it restore him in this way?

He would ask her, he would. The strong wine of resolution flooded him. He thought of arising now, right now going to the phone
while the world slept, and calling her. But no it was absurd, not yet six in the morning, she would be still wrapped in sleep,
the sweet sleep they promised her. Anyway, he obviously couldn’t just baldly put his question to her, and especially not over
the phone. There was going to have to be some preparation, considering his bizarre, not to say cruel, behavior over the last
weeks. He remembered in shame that he had not kissed her, not once during the whole of that time with her in Conurbana. As
though she had been in fact the eidolon or demon manufacture that he, standing on her corner in the dawn, had imagined her
to be. Instead of merely confused and needy. It was so simple.

He tossed off his blankets and arose in the cold. There had been a little frost, and the windows were silvered. Pierce drew
a bath, standing grinning while the funny old tub filled, clutching himself to calm the shudders that tightened his stomach.

He would not ask that she choose between them, no, she would not have to choose, she could have both; the Lord her God was
a jealous God, he knew, but he, Pierce, was not jealous: so long as she chose him as well, freely and with all her heart,
as he freely offered his to her, that would—it must—place him on an equal footing with
the Old One, a footing he would win by this vast gesture. It seemed to him vast.

There was really only one strength you could bring to bear against your enemies, only one strength anyway that someone shaped
as he was shaped could bring. And it was the same as the only aid he could bring, to her or to anyone.
Love suffereth long, and is kind; love seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil
, heck they said it themselves, didn’t they, even if they didn’t mean it, or maybe they did, maybe it was all all right, perfectly
nice people actually probably most of them, who knew but that they had the compassion, the charity his own cold soul lacked.
What they weren’t were wizards or the slaves of wizards with magic on their side. They shrank even as he grew by the power
of the question he would put, becoming the ordinary size of human acquaintances or strangers; in an imaginary house, his own
house in the future, his and hers, which he could just then see with indistinct vividness, he welcomed them, her crowd. A
little mystery cult such as the poor humans of this planet have been joining for ages; they just wanted what they wanted,
as he did himself, as she did for sure. Happiness. Help for pain. Certitude.

He sank down moaning into his bath. He thought of Rose asleep, ignorant of this new understanding of his, of their new equality;
asleep still in the time before he asked her what he would ask her, still in that former condition, or in none at all really,
innocent, oblivious. He thought of how she had wept in his bed the night before she had moved to Conurbana, how he had not
said then what he should have said, had been unable to do what he ought to have done, not then and never after. The right
way, which appeared before him now. Untaken then and maybe too far behind him now. And maybe not.

Rose Ryder was actually awake, in her little apartment in Conurbana; she had no reason to be and it was crazy early but she
felt she had slept a week; she got up amid the still-unfamiliar odors of her place, and prayed aloud: Holy Spirit be with
me and in me.

She turned and looked around herself.

Awake.

They called it walking in the Spirit, this clarity she saw with sometimes, so clear it was hard to put names to what she saw,
the veins and blood of leaves, the swim of liquid in her cat’s slit eyes, the fluid persistence of the air and the world;
the power of her gaze to know and possess it all; this ærial hum or sung note of exaltation, made in her ears or coming from
the whole great world at once. She had tried to explain it, or describe it, to Pierce for instance, and never could; to
those who knew it no explanation was necessary

She picked up her kettle and brushed the cat from the stove where it liked to sit on the warmth of the pilot light; she lit
the stove with care, holding the blackened and ragged sleeve of her robe out of the way. She would study this morning, she
was all caught up but there was no reason not to get ahead. She could nowadays pick up any book she needed to read and read
and understand it, instead of drifting away constantly into wishing and fearing as she always once had; the facts of her basically
bullshit psychology textbooks walked right off the page in a funny little jostling parade into her head and lodged there,
to answer whenever she summoned them. If that’s what she needed and wanted it’s what she got. Just ask.

And what would he think—Pierce, who had entered her consciousness, had been beside her somehow as she awoke, a black bear
just out of eyeshot—if she told him that all the gifts she had been given (of the Spirit but not only those of the Spirit,
other things too, amazing luck, finding yourself in the right time and the right place to get what you wanted or needed, a
test grade, cash, a parking place even, a wake-up call, there wasn’t anything too small that it couldn’t be made to go right),
that all of it was for the making of that new clarity and certainty and power and for nothing else? What would he think if
she told him (she didn’t think she ever would) about the day she had come home, a raw and hopeless evening not long ago, and
found sitting on the little enamelled kitchen table a small brown box that (she was certain) hadn’t been there at morning;
how her heart had warmed immediately with a funny warmth and a profound interest to see it there, as though she had discovered
a clue, one more left for her to find? She could tell when she picked it up that it was old, something about the printing
on the sides or the weakness of the cardboard flaps she pulled open, it wasn’t modern in some way; she’d parted the greasy
thick paper inside and taken out a small oiled gear or complex toothed wheel, and had known even before she read the box’s
side what it was: a distributor gear for an Asp of the year and model hers was, the part she needed but could not find.

It was just sitting there
, she told her group when they were all witnessing that evening, around a different kitchen table in a different part of town;
each of them having a story to tell, many of them no more than a moment of hope or certainty, but some weirdly circumstantial
like her own. And they had all smiled when she was done, some shaking their heads in calm awe or softly clucking their tongues,
amazing; she studied their faces to see if one of them was going to admit to having found the car part somewhere and brought
it to her house when she wasn’t there (no one had then or since) but the most amazing thing was
that
it didn’t matter
whether God Himself had put an antique car part on her kitchen table (in its original box, with the manufacturer’s name and
part number on it, just like the stuff Santa supposedly made in his shop at the North Pole that always came complete with
cellophane-windowed box and famous brand name) or if finally somebody (Mike?) confessed he’d brought it to her—she could see
or imagine the warmth of his smile, the laugh they would have over it—because the joy, the kindness, in it would be the same,
and that was the whole point and the whole gift: and now her car ran too, and what could she say except that faith in God
and his power and willingness to do anything, anything at all for her, had brought that about? And how could she tell Pierce
that?

She made tea and sat at her table, the cat materializing silently there on the Formica to be given a pellet of bread she rolled
in her fingers. Winter light in a place that was hers, a life at last her own or becoming her own. Because she had given it
away, this time though for real.

Who loses his life shall have it.

For so long, since some time in college maybe, she had come to lose great stretches of time, nights and days but mostly nights,
unable to describe them to herself or replay them except as you might memories of what you had heard someone else had done
once. Waking up beside people she did not remember meeting, listening to them talk and not understanding them, searching in
memory through night streets for the moment or the place she had met or chosen them. She told herself, she told them, that
it was the beer, but it wasn’t really the beer, she thought, it was the night.

She believed that she had collaborated in this forgetting, so as to deny what she had done even to her most inward awareness,
though she could not imagine how she could do this without knowing it still in an even deeper part of herself; psychology
said you could successfully deny reality, and she believed it was so just as she believed other things she didn’t know or
that seemed impossible to her, things said in the group, things Pierce had told her, that the universe was made of nothing
but electricity or that the peepers of spring nights weren’t bugs but frogs. Frogs! Yes! Tiny frogs! She thought this surely
couldn’t be so, and she’d studied his face for signs that he knew it wasn’t, that he was mocking her or himself in that way
he was always doing: as though someone else were listening, to whom the joke would be funny, and funnier because she didn’t
get it or even get that it was a joke.

Was that cruel, or what? She laughed, forgiving him, laughing because it was so easy to forgive. So easy. She could remember,
and she could forgive: forgive because she could remember, and thus be forgiven herself for
all that she had once denied. Everything, everything she had done and believed she had not done, all able to be opened and
studied, like the cooked books of some shady enterprise, transparent to God, and so to her at last.

Mr. Cichy, Mal, his tinted glasses and pointy beard. Reading what paper in his train seat across the aisle from her, she could
almost even at this distance see the name of it.
See-shee
he pronounced his name but she had already heard it differently in her inward ear when he wrote it and his phone number on
a page torn from his leather notebook; Mal Cichy, the man she had set out to meet, apparently, and could not refuse once she
had come across him. Into the tunnel under the river, down into the city toward which she had bent her soul.
Mal sent me
she was to say when the apartment door was opened to her, a palatial building somewhere; in its windows the high city gleamed
and glittered ceaselessly. Mal was there already. It was there at that party, or later, at another place or party, that she
had been asked to be in the film, the Japanese film; a producer or director she met, they were all producers or directors
or something, had bought a Japanese film and wanted to add some scenes. She would be masked. A loft somewhere, black-velvet
hangings, naked men and other women in masks too. Tenderly, carefully that older woman (the director’s lover or friend) had
bound the false face on her, just a silk handkerchief really but painted with a Japanese dollface, through which her own face
showed faintly, animating it. He paid her at the end of the shoot, counting out fives from a fat wallet. Later he offered
her a hundred dollars to let him spank her, and she accepted that money too as she accepted everything else, every assent
confirming that there was something inside that could not be reached or soiled.

Somewhere that film must still exist. She had not remembered it or Mal’s name or his newspaper (
Observer!
) or the mirrored elevator in which she had arisen to go to that party or the other party. Now she did.

She wondered if it was possible to be possessed from the outside in. When she thought of possession, when they talked about
it in the group, she thought of something entering you and taking, yes, possession of your inmost self, something which then
drives your outside actions and your speech and whatever. But if something possessed her, and maybe it did or had, it had
not crept within her like a germ but had fallen upon her and covered her over, then going on doing things that she herself
did not do, herself staying still, amazed at what she could bear, alone insidemost.

And if that was possession, and if it could be lifted, then it would not be the casting out of something that was rooted deep
within like a
carcinoma, the way some of them talked about it; no the outside one would crack or peel like a shell or a skin or a suit of
armor, and then the one inside, the one that nothing had reached, would be the outside: the hidden patent and the inside out.

The phone rang, strange in the half-light, and she went to it slowly, tugging her robe around her protectively. But it wasn’t
Pierce; it was Mike Mucho.