DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (62 page)

“Cliff brought her to me. And told me to go on, not wait.”

Spofford took Sam from her, who cried aloud in delight to see him, climbed up to his neck to circle it with her arms cooing
and laughing. Val laughed too. Spofford carried Sam to the truck, bundled her into the cab, and Rosie climbed in too.

“Val, you got to go on,” she said. “You go on in your car. Drive all over hell. If you see somebody sticking behind you, just
keep driving. Then go home. Don’t go to Boney’s.”

“Where’s Beau?” Val said.

“Beau said to go on,” Rosie said, and now in the light of the truck’s instrument panel coming on Val could see she wept, or
had wept. “He said he won’t be coming back. He said he’ll be all right, and don’t look for him. He won’t be coming back.”

None of them believed that, not even Rosie who had heard him say it. But they said nothing more. Spofford doused his own lights
and turned around in the roadway, and by the moon’s light set off ahead of Val; at the first road he turned down again, not
certain where it led but sure it led somewhere.

“Mike put up no fight?” he said at last. Rosie hadn’t spoken. “What happened in there?”

“We went up in Beau’s car,” Rosie said. “They wanted me to wait. They said they didn’t think it would be long. They told me
to lock the car doors till I saw Cliff again. And Beau said.” She wiped her face with the flannel of Sam’s sleeping bag. “Beau
said he could win her back, he said he thought he could, but might not be able to come back himself. That’s all. A while later
Cliff came out with Sam.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

The small bundle of Sam between them on the seat. She put out an arm and made a soft gesture in the air. “Beau made the lights
go out,” she said. “Do you know Beau?”

W
hen the world ends it ends differently for each person then alive to see it, each person who chances to see it among all the
other things to be seen and felt and understood around us all the time; and then very soon it begins again. And almost everyone
persists, almost unchanged, into the new world, which is exactly like the old in almost every respect, or seems to be in the
brief moment when the old world can still be remembered.

Almost everyone.

The creatures of the passage time do not persist, who only came into existence for the length of time the world wavered undecided
over what shape it would take next; they dissolve or are dismembered like the Golem, or they vacate their bodies and leave
only bones, like the beings of the night sky who have left only bright dotted lines to show where once they were. And there
are those who cannot persist because the new age was made out of their substance; the world ended in their knowledge that
it would, and the new world was born of their ignorance of what it could be.

When the West was endless, a sea reaching into the sunset, that was where the beasts and heroes of an old age went at last,
stepping aboard a ship restless at anchor, the sign of Cancer painted on their sails.
After it had all been swept into the unrecoverable again, Rosicrucian brothers fleeing, the Stone, the Cup, the Rose all blown
away again like leaves
(so Pierce on a May morning had once imagined the unwritten end of Kraft’s last book);
under a fuliginous and pitchy sky (dawn due to come, but otherwhere and elsewhen than there and then) they would be gathered
up, the heroes of that age that would already be growing imaginary, gathered up one by one by an old man, his beard white
as milk and a star on his forehead. Gathered up. Come along now, for our time is past
.

So now too.

Beau Brachman unfolded his map. No West any longer for the heroes and beings of the old age to depart into? There is always
a West. There will be room enough in the 88 for them all, all those whose time is now past or passing: the huntress-spirit
Bobby and her spirit-father Floyd, drawn out from the land they have gone into; and Plato Good-enough the more perfect gospel
bearer; leontocephalic Retlaw O. Walter and his animal angels; Mal Cichy and his: the creatures of the passage time, some
of whom will persist into the time to come but will not be who they have been, will not remember even what they did and suffered
there, or where they journeyed. Overcoming seemingly insuperable ontological difficulties, Beau must separate those persons
who will continue from the very same persons who will not, and then
turn back
with the ones who will not, away from the what-is-to-be, toward the what-has-been. There they will be hidden, unable to be
discovered even by those who knew them, for when the passage time is over, there is no passage time; when the next age has
settled and begun to unfold there are no “ages,” and those who never believed in them are right.

So they are for Adocentyn, white city in the West, in a country once more without a name.
Come along now for our time is past
. It may take long, it may be years still, but Beau will gather them all up, as leaves are gathered: as leaves, or pages,
for
as the generation of leaves so is that of men
, and of the making of many books there really is “when all is said and done” an end.

O
n the green table of turned and painted wood in Pierce Moffett’s dining room in Littleville, atop a staggered pile of other
books, humped slightly by a pencil he had closed up inside it marking the last page he had used, there lay a tall ledger bound
in gray cloth with leatherette corners. Impressed on the cover of this book was a net of geometrical decoration, and the word
RECORD in attenuated capitals. He had bought it on a spring day when he had first moved from New York City to Blackbury Jambs,
at the little variety store and soda fountain on River Street.

The first pages record, or once did, the gleanings of his reading and notes to himself sometimes so cryptic as to be useless.
Here he had put down his plan to arrange his book according to the twelve houses of the Zodiac, four Books, three Parts to
a Book, Spring Summer Autumn Winter, Air Fire Water Earth. Astonishing the crust he was then capable of, the nerve. Here also
he copied out possible epigraphs, for chapters, for parts, for the whole book. Pierce loved collecting these, seeming to himself
to have done a good day’s work when he found an aptly gnomic one, and he was ready to write or rewrite a chapter if needed
just to reveal its compact meaning, wrapped suggestively in italics. The last one entered was from Isaiah (though not found
there, found quoted in some other book, which one? He would not remember):

A bit farther on are the pages where Robbie is recorded; Rose too, more cryptically, needing fewer words, because present
otherwise to Pierce, in her flesh, and he quite sure he could not ever forget what his rows of exclamation points and brief
ejaculations signified, what acts, what initiations. He was already beginning to.

He had just returned from his mother’s house in Florida, had not unpacked, nor did he think he would. He shivered and jigged
where he stood looking down at the open book, and from his nostrils came plumes of condensing breath. The radiators of his
little house were cold iron, the steam that should animate them unproduceable; the wood and paper he had fed into the stove
had not yet heated even the stove itself, and the little potbelly would never get the whole house warm. His bedroom, beyond
the frozen bath, was a Yukon where he would not go.

Lying misstacked beside the journal or record book on the green table was the pile of his writings, appearing to him as strange
and unlikely there as the droppings of some huge intruding animal, moose or rhino. He felt a deep reluctance to touch any
of it; if he picked up a page and brought it before his eyes and saw what it said, began to hear in his ear the voice he had
laid down there speak, he might faint in dread and disgust, as though a corpse’s jaw were to begin to wag, its gray tongue
to make words. That sudden strange spasm of production, he could see it now for what it had been, the unreal phosphorescence
of an ignited firework spending itself, dying in its spending. A show, a logorrhea, always pretend and over now.

Well so what. He would get a job, pay back the money somehow. He was unfitted for much but maybe if he humbled himself he
could use what he knew for someone’s benefit somewhere, teach high-school kids maybe to write a decent sentence or parse one.
Almost he imagined himself in such a circumstance, his restless class, the chalkdust on his fingers, the diagrammed sentence
on the greenboard; but he quelled it. No more imaginings, never ever. Do it first, then imagine it.

He was going to have to find somewhere else to live, too.

The long drought was over, and the land was deep in snow. The first big snowfall had come while Pierce was in Florida, he
had watched it fall on the TV at his mother’s house; more was beginning to fall now, he could see it in the windows, a few
messenger flakes come calling, the big army on the way. It would fall and fall, thicken into a great white pelt over all the
county; in the spring it would melt from the mountains and feed the brooks and streams that fed the Shadow and the Blackbury,
and the water meadows would flood and the vegetables grow. But it hadn’t fallen soon enough to swaddle Pierce’s water pipe;
either that or the temperature had fallen sooner. His water, his alone in the neighborhood, was frozen fast.

At the Littleville post office, to which Pierce made his way on foot along the glistening highway, there was a letter from
Rose Ryder, postmarked Indiana on the same day Pierce left for Florida.

This post office is something of a local attraction, often pointed
out to tourists; there is even a postcard of it itself on sale inside it. A puddingstone pile with fairy-tale peaked roofs
covered in varicolored shingles, it was created to be a trolley stop on an interurban rail line that was never built; the
station was too pretty to tear down, and the Postal Service was at length persuaded to buy it. Pierce, standing at the cage
with the letter in his hand and the rest of his (valueless, unintelligible) mail in his arm, asked the postmistress if he
might, please, use the john.

She looked at him somewhat doubtfully; there was a glittering chain on her glasses. “Well it’s not really a public, um. Is
this a.”

“Yes it is. It really is.”

On the cold seat, his clothes unsoiled thank God or chance, Pierce held the letter before him.

There were, Pierce noticed, bars on the miniature window of the toilet, but why. The place happened to be (and Pierce would
remember this when he saw it) just the size and warm buff color of Giordano Bruno’s cell in the Castel St. Angelo in Rome.
There are a thousand prisons
to be stuck in, a thousand deaths after death; and for each one a liberty.

At the bottom of the page, below her rapid signature:

He walked home, the cuffs of his pants snow-wet, her letter crushed in his pocket. He supposed that there would come a day
when her name on an envelope would not have the power to loosen his bowels; when he would see that the saddest thing was not
her capitulation to the Powerhouse, but that she had never had power over the world, and still didn’t; and neither did they.

He took a pot from his kitchen, scooped snow with it, took it inside and set it on the stove. Fire versus water. He would
have coffee at least.

A weary wanderer who had lost his way in a part of the world strange to him came at last to a great house, and asked the lord
of that place for shelter in exchange for labor. Yes, the lord said, you may stay in this small house here as long as you
like. There is only one thing you must be sure to do: you must keep the water flowing in the freezing weather. But how am
I to do that? asked the wanderer. The lord explained how a certain key had to be turned to exactly the right degree, and the
water would flow and not freeze.

All went well. When winter came the lord told the wanderer: I am going away on a long journey to the South. I won’t return
until the winter is over. Remember what I have told you about the life-giving spring and how it flows, for if you do not tend
to it there will be no water for you to drink …

Pierce laughed aloud, skirts of his coat parted and his rump toasting at his stove. King Winter had fooled him, patient and
gullible ass, and lashed him to this unworkable system, no it had never worked and never would.

We live in tales, he thought, and tales have endings but no exits, except into their frame tales. He
had
failed; and yet there was no right thing he could have done, not with his water, not about Rose, not with anything, that
was beyond or different from his attempts to do the right thing; there is no right way for stories to come out, only our struggles
to make them come out right. Well he wasn’t going to stick around to
see how this one came out. He exited now into the unimaginable frame tale of this tale, which held who knew what, another
city and another dawn. He wondered what he should write to the Winterhalters. He felt, like Rose, afraid and happy.

Of course frame tales too have endings, endings of their own; but from them, too, you can exit only into further frame tales.
Yes, Pierce thought: yes, so we figure that out, maybe, finally, about our tales; and maybe we conceive the ambition to make
our way—to think or hope our way—out from the tale we find ourselves in into the frame tale of that tale, where its terms
were first set and its reasons for being told were given; and not to stop there, either, but to make it all the way out, tale
into frame tale into frame tale to the authorial origin, the first onceupon-a-time of all.

Well fine. But to believe you really
have
made it all the way out is an illusion; for the tale has no author.

Rose it is authorless. The outermost one too if there even is an outermost one. That’s Ray’s arrogance with his little black
book, to believe that there is an outermost one and that he knows what it is. To believe he can stand outside the story, with
the Author, the book in his hand. In the beginning was the Word.

All right. But the greater error was the one that had tempted Pierce himself, to believe that we ourselves are the authors
of the tales we live within. That’s the ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all the gods believe themselves
self-created, and believe themselves to be issuing their own strong stories, news to us.

Well we don’t create them, those stories. They are uncreated; they come to us without our willing it, “from a region of awareness
beyond our ken,” beyond even where the Powers are at war: countless tales or the same few tales in countless varieties, enough
to go around, enough for each of us to have his own, only to learn it’s not his own at all. We have not created them—but we
can learn compassion for those who are living and suffering alongside us within them (within the old tales, the old old tales)
and trying to make them come out right, or to come out at all; maybe, after many adventures and much suffering, to exit to
the frame.

You’re not required to finish it, Beau said; but you’re not to give it up either.

Oh I see
, he thought or breathed, his Sagittarian verb, the heart pierced by its own arrow:
I see
.

He picked up his pen, and on the unfinished page of his journal he wrote a new epigraph, not someone else’s this time but
his own, for a book not yet written and now unwriteable:

Far down inside the night lands that are Death, down in the dark where Little Enosh is in Rutha’s prison, there is an infinitesimal
bright spark of knowing that could dissolve all the worlds, if it were ever to be released. But it might never be released.
And just as far outward—farthestmost, out beyond the enclosing circles, where Beau longs to go for good—is the same knowing,
a knowing that could fold the great sad mistaken dark to its breast like a small child and close it up at last in grateful
nothingness, the same nothingness from which it came at first; but that might never happen either.

Meanwhile, no matter what, “deer walk on our mountains,” up on Mount Randa for instance nosing in the snow for the withered
apples of abandoned orchards, near where Spofford’s new cellar-hole is smothered up; meanwhile flamingoes in their hundreds
rise from the waters of the salt marshes in Florida and Africa too, all startled or moved at once by something none of them
alone could have perceived; and the stars turn unseen behind the sun, only seeming to be changeless; and Sam and Rosie watch
the tiger cubs roll and bite on TV at Arcady, and Rosie waits to hear the phone ring.

It was only Pierce calling, this time anyway, and not the law, or vengeful cultists: just calling to say he was homeless now
and so was ready to go do his duty and use his fellowship, or be a fellow, or however it was to be termed. He said he supposed
he could sleep there in his house for one night or two on the floor by the fire, drink bottled water and piss outdoors in
the snow, but he couldn’t do it long, so he had to get going; and Rosie said not to be silly and come stay with them for a
while.