DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (49 page)

“Yes I’m awake,” she answered his first question, happy to hear his voice. “Yes Mike. Awake.”

“Just thought I’d call.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Busy day today?”

”Oh sort of. Studying.”

“Okay. No trouble sleeping?”

“No, Mike. None.” She laughed as though they shared a secret, which they did, though not the one Pierce thought they shared
(which made it even funnier and sweeter) and which wasn’t even a secret, she’d tell anybody: that she had no trouble sleeping,
and no trouble waking. It had been promised.

“We have to talk later,” he said. “Will you be at Dynamo tonight?”

“Yes sure.” The cute name for group meetings shamed her a little, and worse were the names that beginners in the group bore,
dynamen and dynamettes, it was worth studying hard just to go up a level and shed them.

“Some amazing things are happening,” he said. “Fast, too. We were talking about you, about what might be next, and where you
might fit in.”

“Sure,” she said, feeling a hot surge of pleasure and anxiety beneath her breastbone.

“So we’ll talk,” Mike said. “See you.”

She hung up and couldn’t remember what she had been thinking.

Oh right. Oh yes. Forgiveness: the bugs and frogs that had inhabited her, all made to come forth and be dismissed, so unimportant.
Walking in the Spirit: she had only found herself able to do it infrequently so far, but she knew that if she asked and if
she practiced she would be in it longer and longer and then at last maybe forever.

Forever.

Pins and needles in her fingertips and a constriction in her throat, as though she sensed a predator somewhere near about
to leap.

On the windowsill lay her father’s Zippo, which she had stolen from his coat pocket the day she left home, and her pack of
Merits. One of
those would end this mood for a time: quell it, snuff it. As though it had already done so merely in the thinking of the thought,
she could feel the Spirit depart from her.

What had Mike meant, what did they want from her? She had given a bad answer when Ray had talked to her about moving up to
the next level of training, she had seen it in his eyes, though he nodded and took her hand and was as kind as ever. She hadn’t
assented with all her heart. She would, she would, but they had to see it would take time. When you’ve been a certain way
for a long while.

There were probably still a lot of things she could not yet remember, lost like dreams. Or maybe they
were
dreams. She dreamed sometimes that she could remember distinctly things that in waking life she had never done: as though
there was a world in there with more than just unreal experiences: with unreal memories too, unreal histories, unreal beginnings,
unreal destinies.

She could remember if she tried. She didn’t
right now
want to, that’s all. She picked up the pack of cigarettes, slid her thumb tip over the slick cellophane, shook one out and
lit it. Smoke eaters: that’s what the group called those who hadn’t yet given up cigarettes. Dog returning to its vomit. Every
time when with Pierce she had lit one she had seen in Pierce’s eyes a small triumph, told you so.

Some cult, she thought, feeling a coldness moving from the outside in, familiar coldness, she shrank from its advance. Aren’t
they supposed to be here, manipulating my mind? Where the hell are they? They give you all this stuff and then leave you alone
with it. Do it if you can.

Suddenly, surprising herself, she arose as though yanked upright, walked swiftly over the cold floor to the sink, turned on
the tap and thrust the cigarette and the half-filled pack under it. There. There. Better, more final, than throwing them in
the trash, that only meant you would be searching there later, pushing through the Tampax and tissues and hair combings to
find them. She stood looking down at what she had done, and a wave of longing and loss swept over her so intense she thought
she might faint.

The phone rang again. She knew who it was.

“I’m sorry if it’s early,” Pierce said. At the sound of the connection made he had felt instantly uncertain, as though the
phone line had tapped him into a well of alien energy. His heart, which for an hour or two had been so placid, rising and
falling like blue sea swells, shrank and began again to drum.

“I was up,” she said. “How are you? Are you all right?”

“Well basically. It’s just that I had something to say, and I didn’t think it could wait. To apologize first, though, and
…”

“Yes well listen, Moffett, I think you’d better be careful. Some very strange and bad things are happening. I was almost set
on fire yesterday.”

“Oh my God.”

“I was boiling water. I was going to put the kettle on. I got this awful feeling, and then I saw that the sleeve of my robe
was burning. I mean flames.” She waited, and when she heard nothing she said: “I got it out okay. But just imagine if it had
reached my hair.”

“Oh my God.” More faintly than before.

“It’s okay,” she said. “The bad stuff can’t hurt me. But I worry about you, Moffett. Listen. When I was driving back from
your house, the window of my car—and there was no wind blowing or anything, and I wasn’t even driving fast—it exploded. It
just exploded. On your side.”

Silence. Rose waited for a reply, but none came.

“Now you can say it’s just coincidence,” she said. “You can go ahead and say that if you want, but …”

“No,” he said. “No, no I won’t say that.”

“Well.” Pause. “I had a talk with Ray,” she said. “About us.”

Pierce in Littleville, throat thick with panic, thought: Now it comes. What they had all along been planning.

“And what he said was, that if seeing you was making this harder for me, if you were throwing me off, then maybe I might think
about not seeing you.”

“Uh-huh.” A wind blew away his skin and flesh. “Hm.”

“For a while.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s what anybody would say, Pierce,” she said. “About somebody having as much trouble as we are.”

“So is that what you intend to do?” he said at last.

“No. It’s what
he
said I might want to do. For a while.”

“The reason I ask,” Pierce said, and then nothing more for a while, he waited to see what might emerge. “Is. Well. I wondered
if you still want to come here for the Ball. On the river.”

“If you still want me to.”

“I do.”

“Well sure. I really do want to. I do.”

“Come as you aren’t,” he said. “That’s the rule.”

She pondered that till it made sense. “Oh. Okay.”

“It could be anything.”

“Yep,” she said. “There’s a lot of things I’m not.”

Nothing.

“So what was it you wanted to say?” she said. “You said it couldn’t wait.” She had to listen to another and even longer pause,
but then Pierce only said, “Oh. Oh gosh.”

And then: “Well.”

And then: “I’ll tell you when I see you. It wasn’t anything really. I’m sorry.”

N
ext it was Rosie Rasmussen who, late that morning, turned in at the stone gateposts looking for Pierce’s cottage; ghostly
and maybe invented childhood memories of the Winterhalters’ house had led her to it. “Okay,” she said to Sam. “I think it’s
someplace down there. A little house by the river.” She turned the Bison away from the drive up to the big house, and took
the less trodden way down to the fields and the river.

“He should live there,” Sam said, pointing to the tall chimneys of the big house. She wore last year’s winter coat, rabbit
fur matted around the hood and too small, but the warm weather and living in two households had caused the need for a new
one to be missed. She clutched her plastic backpack in her arms, for some reason unwilling to sling it in the back as she
usually did when going to Mike’s.

“That must be it,” Rosie said.

“It’s little,” said Sam.

“Now you’re okay with this?” Rosie said. “It’s just for a visit. I’ll be back really soon.”

Sam said nothing.

In the little house Pierce was wearing his own winter coat, he too needing a new one; he had been out going up to do his duty
and look into the Winterhalters’ house, and on his return had sat again without removing it, safer somehow inside it. He heard
Rosie’s car approach, rising growling sound that almost until it was upon him he did not recognize for what it was, afraid
to get up and look out to see. His door then was flung open suddenly, and he started, clutching the chair’s arms; a small
child came in, and looked at him frankly in summons or command. No it was just Rosie’s daughter Samantha. Rosie too right
after her, calling to him.

“Hi,” he said, unmoving.

They stood before him, making cheerful greetings, the cold air they had brought in swirling gaily through the place. Sam turned
to slam shut the door with awful force. Rosie, arms akimbo, looked around Pierce’s house, where she had not been before, and
at Pierce himself, who had not risen from his chair.

“You don’t look so hot,” she said. “Did you sleep in that coat?”

“I don’t really sleep.”

“Are you okay?”

He wanted badly to tell her that he was not, so badly that the heart within him seemed to vault painfully toward her, and
tears came to his eyes; but he only felt his unshaven jaw, and said, “Coming down with something.”

“Are you eating?”

“Certainly.”

“What?”

“Food.”

He rose and followed her through the tiny rooms as she toured the place. She peeked through the bathroom into the bedroom
beyond with its two beds, the little and the big, but made no remark on them. In the office she ran her long hand over the
blue bosom of his typewriter; she lifted the top page of his typescript, and put it down. She noted Kraft’s, too, in its box.
“You were supposed to copy that,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I will. I haven’t. I will.”

“I mean what if this place burns down.” She lifted the box’s cover, and Pierce had an impulse to warn her, warn her away,
as from a chasm’s lip or a loaded cigar. “Listen,” she said. “This is kind of weird, but I have a favor to ask. I have to
go talk to a lawyer, in the Jambs, and it might take a while; I thought I could leave Sam at Beau’s place, but it’s not one
of my usual days, and Beau’s gone.”

“Yes,” Pierce said. “I know.”

“So I was wondering if Sam could stay and visit for a while. An hour or two.” Sam herself was looking at him over the edge
of the table, only her curls and her eyes visible. Pierce paid her a smile.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked him, mildly.

“Um,” he said. “Gee. Why do you ask?”

“Sam,” said her mother, a warning or a plea.

“Are you a Jew or a Christian?” Sam asked Pierce.

“It’s Mike,” Rosie said. “She’s getting it from him.”

It took a moment for Pierce to see what Rosie meant: not that Sam had been sent by Mike to ask him these things. “Neither,”
he said. “There’s not just the two.”

“So would that be okay?” Rosie asked. “Just for an hour or two?”

“Sure,” Pierce said. “If you’re okay with me.”

“
Mom
,” said Sam. “What if I have a seizure?” She said this to her mother in her own mom voice, her arms akimbo just like Rosie’s.

“You won’t, hon,” Rosie said. “You took your medicine. Right? Right.” She pointed upward to a shelf. “Is that,” she asked
Pierce, “one of those Russian dolls?”

“It is,” he said, and took it down, and gave it to Sam. She shook it, heard its interior make sounds; Pierce showed her how
it opened. An old crone, and inside her a red-cheeked peasant mom, and inside her a heavy-braided bride, and inside her. Rosie
seeing Sam absorbed took Pierce’s arm and led him to the kitchen.

“It’ll really be all right?” Pierce asked. “About the seizures?”

“What the doctor told me,” Rosie answered, “is that you have
to live as though one will never happen again. Just live as though. Even though they will. I can’t keep her home in bed. Or
me either.”

“No,” said Pierce. “No. But suppose if this morning …”

“It’s not dangerous,” Rosie said. “It’s not like a medical emergency. It’s just her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It lasts a second. A few seconds. Just don’t let her head hit the floor. Even then it’s okay; she has an amazingly hard head.
She’ll sleep afterwards. But Pierce it won’t happen. I promise.”

Being raised in a doctor’s house had imbued Pierce, as it had his cousins, with an unalarmed directness in medical matters,
spurious mostly, but he listened to Rosie calmly and nodded, I see. Okay.

“So now tell me what’s the matter,” Rosie said, sitting at the kitchen table. “Something is.”

“Well,” Pierce said. He drew the unshed overcoat more tightly around him. “You know Rose.”

“Yes, Pierce. I know Rose.”

“Well the Powerhouse.” This name he extruded or secreted only after a struggle. “The Powerhouse International, you know?”

“Oh no,” Rosie said.

“The bunch that, you know …”

“I know.”

“Yes. Well she seems to have. You know.”

“Oh my Lord.”

She looked over at him where he huddled in his chair, seemingly sightless or seeing something elsewhere. “Pierce,” she said
in sudden fear. “You’re not, not …”

“No, no oh no.”

“No. But she is?”

“She seems to be.” He told her in a low voice all about Conurbana, Mike, Pitt, the glossolalia, the rain; she listened as
to a fairy tale or war story, mouth ajar and eyes wide. Oh Lord. Oh my God.

“So,” Pierce said. He would not tell her about calling Rhea in the midnight; nor about how the Devil broke the windshield
of Rose’s car. Nor how he had wept.

“So is he living there now? Mike? In Conurbana?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess.” He had no idea where they hid during the day, Ray and Pitt and Mike, he had thought of them as vanishing,
hadn’t tried to imagine them at their breakfast or bath.

“If he is,” Rosie said. “If he moved there and didn’t tell me. Then that was illegal. Strictly speaking.” She pressed her
fist against her lips in thought. Then she reached out to touch his hand. “Oh man,” she said. “Where’s this going to end.”

“A little angel was last,” said Sam, standing in the doorway. “Inside the baby.”

“Right,” said Pierce. “Nothing inside her.”

“Nothing,” said Sam.

What Rosie needed to talk to Allan about was the submission of her quarterly report to the board of the Rasmussen Foundation
in New York, a simple enough document that Rosie worried long over, she had typed several drafts on Boney’s huge Remington
and now Allan said his own secretary would take it and do it right. They had delicately skirted the issue of Rosie’s hearing
next week, but talked of the Powerhouse and its plans to buy the bankrupt Woods.

“Listen,” Allan said. “If a community doesn’t want something like this to happen, they have resources. You understand me?
There are very many perfectly legal and acceptable ways of countering an unwanted buyer. It doesn’t even need to be public.”

“Like what ways.”

“If you didn’t want them to buy it you could buy it yourself. I mean the Foundation could. It might take some doing to convince
the board, but I think the asking price is about a million. Suppose you offered a million and a half.”

“What are you talking about. The whole Foundation’s hardly worth that much.”

“You don’t pay that much. You take an option to buy for a million and a half. It costs you, say, fifty thousand. The option’s
good for three years. Eventually the other prospects get bored or their resources dry up. They go away.”

“What if they don’t?”

“You think of something else. A lot can happen in three years.”

“The horse could learn to talk,” Rosie said, not quite aloud.

“The Foundation could even inspire a joint community action to raise the option money,” Allan said. He gazed thoughtfully
out the window, hands linked behind his head, enjoying this, she thought. “Some people are already nervous about this bunch.
To say nothing of the fact that having it bought by a nonprofit takes it off the tax rolls.”

“Well gee,” Rosie said. “I’d help with that. Where do I sign.”

“Well let’s think this through,” Allan said, swivelling toward her. “The Foundation yes could have a lot of influence in keeping
these people out. But it could also help make a case for them in the community. It could offer to try to swing opinion in
their favor.”

“But why would I. Oh. Oh yes.” She perceived Allan’s train of thought just as it went out of sight. Yes. Then she thought
of herself going to them, to Mike; sitting with them around some table somewhere, and making these deals. The Foundation’s
help in swinging the Woods deal—in exchange for permanent custody of Sam. The nerve it would take, the lies she would have
to tell. Maybe she wouldn’t have to do it herself; Allan might do it, he might be able to make it sound reasonable and proper,
the way some people can offer bribes or tips for favors and make it sound just like business as usual. “But I don’t
want
them here,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Well then,” Allan said. “You go and try your best on their behalf. And you don’t succeed.”

Rosie shuddered profoundly, not knowing why. “It’s just too weird to think about,” she said. “I can’t.”

Allan shrugged, somewhat theatrically.

“He’s not a bad guy,” Rosie said. “I do know him. He isn’t, really.”

Meanwhile Sam showed Pierce how to lie back on a bed and hang your head down almost to the floor, so that you could see the
house upside down, the floor as the ceiling, the dusty empty rooms where lamps sprouted, the furniture stuck up above you,
all the same but different.

“See?” she said.

“Yes,” said Pierce. “Wow.”

When lunchtime came he gave her tomato soup with chunks of cheese in it, food he had come to know in Kentucky and still sometimes
ate when he needed comfort; after a first hesitant bite she ate it willingly.

“My daddy has a new house,” she said as she ate.

“I heard that,” he said.

“I have my same ode house.”

“Yes. Lucky.” He wanted to say that when his parents separated he lost his old house, and all Brooklyn too. “Are you going
to his new house today?”

She shrugged, eating. Pierce tried to remember what it had been like to be suddenly parted from his father, but what he mostly
remembered about it was the one thing that was most unlike now: that it couldn’t be spoken of.

He put Oreo cookies before her, and she marvelled, reaching out for them in slow awe as though for spilled treasure; Pierce
suddenly thought maybe he was flouting a family food rule.

“Do you love God?” she said, after scraping the white innards from one with her teeth.

“Um sure,” Pierce said.

“I love God. He can cure everything. Like epsa lepsy.”

“Ah,” Pierce said. “Tell me something. Is it after lunch you take your nap?”

“
You
sually,” she said. “But. First I have a story.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Do you have any stories?”

“Well I know some.”

“I’d rather have a real story,” she said. “From a book.”

“Oh. Well see I don’t have kids, so my books are. Well you know the kind.”

“Yets see,” she said. She slipped from her tall chair (why don’t we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly
outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, doorknobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

Maybe because it happened to be one she could both reach and take hold of: she drew out a ragged paperback, saw that at least
it had pictures, and held it out to Pierce.

“This one?” Pierce said. It was the bound edition of the once well-known comic strip
Little Enosh: Lost Among the Worlds
, for the year 1952. Pierce used to receive these every year on his birthday, sent to Kentucky from his father in Brooklyn,
at least so he thought at the time; it was actually his mother who had bought and wrapped them. In Brooklyn at the beginning
of his life Axel used to read Enosh to him nightly, in the
New York World
. He accepted this one from Sam, remembering immediately its contents and the times too when he had read it and the others
(he saved them all, spine-broken and held together with rubber bands) for comfort and delight from that year down to this.

“You’ll like it,” he said; but she would make no such assumption, only waited till they sat side by side and he had opened
the book to the middle.

“Start at the beginning,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter where you start,” he said. “It’s been going on so long.”

So here’s Little Enosh in his lenticular starship, as usual hurtling over a planet’s pocked surface; behind him the planet’s
sleepy sun goes down.
Dok dok nite
says Enosh, a little fearish (his eyes rolled up and leftwards, what danger might come from there, the Uthras maybe in their
own starships bristling with weapons). He lands.
Wherein have I been thrown?
he wonders, though this desolate surface, these random stars, this crescent moon just climbing over the horizon with knowing
hooded eyes, and the hints of mushroom-shaped cities or villages far away that Enosh never reaches—these are always there
wherever Enosh lands, and he is always surprised; above his round head and round clear helmet floats the eternal Enosh question
mark, which sometimes sets off on adventures of its own.