DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (56 page)

Rosie thought of Mike:
Do you think I’d let harm come to her?

“My lawyer says go easy,” she said. “He said these things take time. He’s trying to get her back. He is.”

Beau nodded, listening. Then he said: “I don’t think you should let him take her out there.” He put his hand on her shoulder,
on Boney’s tweed. “I mean are you comfortable with that?”

“No. No.”

“No. I’m not either.” He was smiling again. “I mean you don’t go to Indiana unless you can’t get out of it. Right?”

“But how,” Rosie said.

“We’ll talk,” Beau said. “There’s help. We’ll do what we need to. Let me look and think.” He drew her to him. “You do too,”
he said.

She watched him go, hearing her name called from elsewhere, duties to do.

Not just for her sake
. She tried to see Sam again, that vision of Sam among the children, but couldn’t summon it, could see in her mind only the
other child, a human child, paper wings on her back and tinsel in her hair.

Beau Brachman sat down beside Pierce, out of the way of the Orphics. “So how’s the world-changing coming?” he asked. His hand
indicated the revels, the transformed people and magic beasts; he patted Pierce’s woolly head. “Have you been practicing?”

Pierce couldn’t imagine what Beau meant. He stared stupidly. Rose had been swept away by other, more tireless dancers, and
his drink was empty.

“Changing the world. You remember we talked. Getting what you need or want. Practicing on dreams.”

Pierce remembered: the night of the big wind, the night—wasn’t it?—where this began. “Aha,” he said. “Yes. You said.”

“Yes.”

In his dreams he had faced them, but he had only fled, or frightened himself awake; or he was an eye and an ear only, not
present, not acting; wishing and hoping only. Which was maybe why he was so helpless now. “You know,” he said, “I don’t know
if you remember, that night. The night Rose flipped her car.”

“I remember,” Beau said.

“She was in trouble then, real trouble. I didn’t realize how much. I don’t mean with the law. She.” He hesitated, knowing
what a dreadful secret he was on the point of revealing; before he could make up his mind to reveal it, he saw that Beau was
regarding the floor solemnly; and he knew that Beau already knew, and had known all along.

“Well,” Pierce said. “Anyway. You know she’s a Christian now.”

“The Powerhouse,” Beau said.

“You know them?”

“Oh sure. Some of the people who’ve stayed at the place have gotten in with them. And some people have come to us from them
too. To get away.” He smiled. “You know Rose stayed at the house once.”

“She did?”

“A long while ago. It was when she first came from the City. She was pretty confused by what happened to her there. So she
stayed with us. A few weeks, I guess.”

“How did she, I mean how did you …”

Beau shrugged. “We met,” he said.

Pierce remembered the first time—the first moment, actually—that he himself had seen Beau: at Spofford’s Full Moon party,
by this same Blackbury River a year and a half ago, not ten minutes before he saw Rose for the first time.
I don’t belong here
, he’d confessed to Beau, Beau with his satyr’s smile, playing on a panpipe to a sleepy child.
I’m actually from somewhere else
.

He took the mask from his head and put it beside him. Beau neither laughed nor ceased smiling. An awful hope arose in Pierce,
that if he dared finally to ask he might be answered.

“Beau,” he said. “What is it? Why have I come into this darkness? What am I doing here? Why has the world turned into this
kind of place?”

“What kind of place?”

Pierce lifted his hand and his eyes, to the night sky obscured by the fire’s smoke and the lights; and then to Beau. “I,”
he said. “I feel like I’ve somehow uncovered an awful secret evil that pervades the world,” Pierce said. “I
feel
like it. I don’t think it. Don’t ask me why.”

“Maybe because you have.”

Pierce stared at him, trying to see past his smile, the mask Beau wore. “That night on the road,” Beau said. “When Rose flipped
her car. She was running away from the powers.”

“Powers?”

“We all try to. The trouble was she ran from those powers right into the arms of other powers.”

“She says now her power’s from, you know. God.”

“All the powers are the same,” Beau said. “Each inside all the others. Pick one to help you and it will, but don’t think it
can save you from the rest.”

“No no Beau, don’t say stuff like that.” He donned his head again. “The worst thing is how it seems to be my fault somehow.”
He tried another little laugh. “I mean of course I know it’s not.”

“It’s not,” Beau said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to fix it.”

Pierce only stared.

“Oh it’s not just you,” Beau said. “Its the same for everybody. For me too. For everybody. Well except for some guys.”

The music arose overpoweringly for a moment, amid whoops and cries of appreciation. Then Beau said, as though changing the
subject: “I bet she’s doing well.”

“Ah, I.”

“You might have noticed—it’s pretty common—that she’s got a lot more beautiful lately.”

He lifted his gaze then, for Rose had come up behind Pierce, flushed and panting, and Pierce leapt up. He saw, behind her
black mask, her liquid eyes pass over Beau without recognition—she being who she was not, and he therefore unknown to her;
and Beau’s smile didn’t alter.

“Listen, Moffett,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to be looking out for me?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Well I think I need a coffee. Pretty quick.”

Partly maybe because they are essentially fake, the towers and ramparts of the castle are unexpectedly complicated, stairs
and doorways and arches multiplying. Pierce pressed through the crowd of phantasts on his errand, and got around somehow to
the less finished service side of the place, or so he imagined. These doors led, he thought, either to the johns or back into
the Keep where the food and dancing were; he chose one and opened it.

Yes he was seemingly now in the backstage area, and just as he perceived this, the Orphics ceased, taking a break, and a busy
quiet followed, through which the ghosts of their chords flitted. Pierce tried to part the dusty and moth-eaten velvets, like
an old mad courtesan’s gown; the head he wore made it hard to see.

“Teasers and tormentors,” said a soft voice near him.

Pierce saw that sitting on a bentwood chair in the dark of the wings was a partygoer, lost or drunk or both. “Come again?”
he said.

“The names of stage curtains,” the person said. His voice a delicate and slightly affected whine. A generous drink in his
hand. “Teasers are those. Tormentors are those. They keep the audience from peeking backstage. Destroying the illusion.”

“I was looking for coffee,” Pierce said. “I think it’s best to go back.”

“Oh no, no. Always best to go straight on.”

“Ha ha,” said Pierce. Masks always make us oracular. The one this fellow wore was a realistic human face, a pleasant tired
older fellow
with crinkly eyes and a shock of molded white rubber hair. Pierce supposed he ought to know the face, politician or movie
star or.

“It’s a pretty little theater,” the mask said. “I always thought it could be used for something.”

“Sure.” Pierce raised his eyes to the darkness of the flies.

“Once I tried to produce Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
here. A huge flop. We got almost to dress rehearsals.”

“It’s a hard one,” Pierce said.

“Lucky,” the fellow said. “‘Faustus,’ I mean. It means lucky in Latin.”

“So it does.” He hadn’t thought of that. He supposed Marlowe had.

“I came to believe,” the man said, and crossed his legs, ready for a chat, “that Marlowe must have been an awful shit.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I think of him as a totally amoral person who liked to arouse people, just because he knew he could. Get them to riot
and go on rampages. His plays did, you know. Against Jews. Catholics. Whomever he could turn a crowd against.”

“Magicians.”

“Oh yes. Poor old Doctor Dee. And I don’t think for a minute he cared anything about the Devil or God’s justice. He was like
a punk rock star today, with a swastika tattooed on his forehead, getting kids to go mad and commit suicide.” He lifted his
drink to his mouth, and drank, or pretended to. “A genius, though. Unlike your rockers. There’s the difference.”

Who was that mask? Pierce knew he had seen the face it was modelled on, in some special context; the boyish snub nose, the
hair that had once been sandy. “What happened?” he asked. “To your production?”

The man sighed hugely, and for a long moment looked around himself, the expression on his false face altering as the light
took it differently. Then he said:

“Well I’ve failed. I failed. Yes I think that’s evident now.” He said this with what seemed great anguish. “The conception
was just too huge, the parts too many. No matter how long it was let to go on, it got no closer to being done.”

“It’s a corrupted text,” Pierce said. “I believe.” There was, he now saw, another bentwood chair beside the man, exactly like
the one he sat in.

“I so much wanted it to
knit
,” the other said. He interlaced his own fingers. “Past and present, then and now. The story of the thing lost, and how it
was found. More than anything I wanted it to
resolve
. And all it does is
ramify
.

“You take this party, or ball,” he said, lifting his glass as though to toast it. “I mean it’s hardly the
Walpurgisnacht
that was promised for so long.”

“Well,” Pierce said. “I mean.”

“The all-purged-night; the all-perjurers’-night. The transmuting revels, the night machinery out of which we all come different.
Wasn’t that the idea? ‘Where nothing is but what is not.’ What is not yet, or is not any longer.”

“Ah,” said Pierce. “Ah yes.”

The masked man pointed at Pierce with a yellow-nailed smoker’s forefinger. “And take yourself, for another instance,” he said.
“How are you to be understood now? The Golden Ass? Dionysus? There’s Bottom, of course. Whose dream hath no bottom.”

“Well it wasn’t what I planned,” Pierce said. And suddenly weary he sat down where he was so obviously meant to sit. “Not
at all what I intended.”

“No. No. Not at all. I’m so sorry. Well at a certain point invention flags, you see; you begin to repeat, helplessly. You
keep coming upon the same few conceptions over and over, greeting each one with glad cries, yes! Yes! The way on! Until you
realize what it is, oh here I go again, the same story again, as ever. And you feel so damned.”

So damned what? Pierce wished he had a nice drink like this guy’s, who didn’t seem to be drinking his.

“I just hope,” he said, “we won’t all be in here forever, and none of us able to move up, or down.”

Pierce’s heart shrank. “Oh don’t worry,” he said. “No party lasts that long.”

“You,” the fellow said. Somehow his voice had lost the delicate affected whine it had begun with, as though that had been
part of the mask, and this was his own, a flatter voice, with an angry irony in it. “It’ll have to be you that does it. Somehow,
I don’t know how. If you don’t make a contribution, haven’t I labored in vain? Not to speak of your own sufferings.”

“I,” Pierce said. “I was supposed to be getting coffee.” And he rose, feeling the sudden dream horror of having forgotten
for a fatal length of time the mission you’ve set out on, too late, too long. “Gotta run.”

“You’ll have to do it,” the man called after him. “I’m so sorry.” By the sound of his voice Pierce could tell he had removed
his mask, but nothing would have induced him to look back to see who was beneath it.

Meanwhile, the Orphics have set up a theremin, a black box surmounted by a slim antenna, another looping from its side; a
woman plays the tall antenna with her hand, running it delicately up and down inches from the rod, as though it were the central
nerve of an invisible phallus she strokes, from whose possessor she draws eerie wails of bliss
or agony. Night, turning and turning to the music, is being touched by strangers from whose hands she slips away, till the
red DEVIL whispers in her ear and makes her laugh.

“Gotcha,” he says, and “Hello, Mal,” she says back to him. “Knew it was you.”

“Let’s go up on the battlements,” he says to her, “and look see how far down it is.”

“Oh no,” she says. “I know that one, Mal.”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” he says. “Whatcha drinking?”

“Not what you can get,” she says, and her tireless feet have left the paving stones.

“Come on,” he says, “for old times’ sake.”

“You can’t catch me,” she says.

“Later,” he calls, “later,” as she spins away from his touch and from them all to turn and turn in a circle of her own, black
skirt twirling. The lead singer, pale hair streaming, sings:

“
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
,” Pierce muttered inside his ass’s head. “Let’s live and love. We can, we could.”

“What language are you speaking?” Val asked him, with whom Pierce found himself gravely waltzing to the tune. Where was Rose
again?

“Latin,” he said. “Catullus. It’s the song they’re singing, don’t ask me why.”

“They’re singing in English.”

“
Nox est perpetua una dormienda
,” Pierce said. “One endless night’s sleep.
Una nox perpetua
.”