DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (63 page)

Spofford went out to bring him back (the Steed was deep in the snow of his yard, for Pierce had taken the plane and the bus
to his mother’s and had made no provision for it; when just out of curiosity he forced open its door and turned the key in
the ignition nothing happened anyway; he would never, though he didn’t know this yet, ride in it again). When Spofford drove
up, Pierce was standing in his overcoat and galoshes at the stone gateposts with a large duffel in his hand and a cardboard
box clutched to his breast. Behind him a long line of footprints in the snow, going in and then back out.

“You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” Spofford said. “I’d of got in.”

“Well.”

“Chains,” said Spofford. “Four-wheel drive.”

“Anyway thanks.”

They went out onto the river road; Pierce listened to the chink of the chains and squinted his eyes against the awful innocence
of the snow in the sun. “Spofford,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“The answer’s yes,” Spofford said. “I know all about it. She told me.” He looked over at Pierce with what Pierce, only daring
to catch his eye for a moment, thought to be amusement. “Happens,” he said. “Fortunately she still likes me best. Surprising.
But she does. So that’s okay.”

Pierce said nothing. This was not in fact what he had meant to ask his old friend about. Spofford had long ago warned him
that the round dance that went on in these parts would eventually lead almost everybody to almost everybody else. His breast
filled hugely, and rested. In the rearview mirror he saw the chimneys of the Winterhalters’ mansion, and then their road and
the town of Littleville, pass backwards away.

“Do you remember,” he said after a time, “the day I came here, the day the bus broke down?”

“Sure. A year ago. Summer before last.”

“Do you remember anything unusual about that day?”

“Only that. Your arrival. Buswrecked.”

“I remember sitting there,” Pierce said, “in front of the store in Fair Prospect. I remember sitting there and drinking a
Coke. I remember that a little breeze sprang up.”

Spofford once again glanced at him. Only after a moment did he realize that Pierce desired to have this detail corroborated.
“Uh-huh,” he said.

“You remember?”

“No.”

“A little breeze,” Pierce said. He had sat there and thought of his Three Wishes, the three everyone deserves, and how he
would treat them; how he would wish for health or wealth or love and the third wish would be to forget he had ever been granted
any wishes. And he had thought that if that were to happen, right then at the moment of his sitting there, then he of course
wouldn’t know it; and yet everything that followed would follow from them, from those wishes, whatever they were. Or had been.

“Just after that,” Pierce said, “you and your sheep came out onto the main road. You with a straw hat on your head and your
crook.”

“My what?”

“Crook,” said Pierce, and drew one in the air. “The thing shepherds use.” But Spofford was already shaking his head, amused.
“No. No way. Never owned one.”

“Yes sure,” Pierce said. “It’s one of your attributes.
Il Pastor fido
. You. It’s what I know about you.”

“You got quite the head,” Spofford said. “A thing I have always admired. It’s a privilege to know you, man, in many ways.
But you know sometimes a sheep is just a sheep. Most times, in fact.”

Arcady was almost comically appealing, its chimneys and fancywork all capped with sugar snow, the winter-woolly sheep milling
at the fence. A fire too burning in the study fireplace. There Pierce put down the box containing the typescript of the so-called
novel that he had shepherded from Fellowes Kraft’s house to his own and now to here. On the big desk were laid out all of
the letters that Fellowes Kraft had sent to Boney Rasmussen over several years; but most particularly from the last trip that
Kraft had taken to Europe, on Boney’s nickel, ten years before: the trip that now Pierce would retake.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Rosie said. “How you’re supposed to wrap this up.”

Pierce had been looking with deep reluctance on the piles of pale blue letters flimsy as ashes. He picked one up, the second
page of one, no date, no place.

“You can have this to take with you too,” Rosie said. She gave him an old leatherbound guidebook of a kind now passé: onionskin
pages nearly pictureless, tiny type picked out with stars, arrows, bullets, and other
notæ
.

“Gee,” said Pierce.

“It’s full of Kraft’s writing,” Rosie said. And so it was, fine spidery penciled annotations that Pierce would need better
light to read, much better light.

“And
this
,” Rosie said, with a gesture of what-the-hell generosity. A little book, also of an old-fashioned kind, privately printed.
“His life.”

Written by himself, for who to read? It was called
Sorrow, Sit Down
. For a moment Pierce’s eyes filled; but they did that now every day, at something or at nothing; every day. He opened to
the pictures. Three young men in an open truck or jeep on a mountain track:
On expedition in the Giant Mountains
, it said.
1935
.

“Anything else?” Pierce asked, holding these.

“Well,” Rosie said, and looked around herself. “Oh sure. You should see this.”

She led him out into the living room, to a polished cabinet or commode, he had noted its workmanship before, what was the
name of that art whereby pictures were made of bits of different veneers. A violin with a curly ribbon tied to its neck, a
peacock, a pen, a book, an hourglass. Rosie reached up to turn the key in the little casket that surmounted it.

“I’m not going to give it to you,” she said, “because I’m pretty sure it belongs here.”

“Good,” said Pierce. “Fine.”

“I’ve told you about it,” she said. “You know all about it already.” She put her hand in, but after a moment’s puzzled groping
she took out nothing but a velvet bag, black and empty, limp as a dead kitten.

“It’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“It was right here,” Rosie said.

Gone, thought Pierce, well sure.

Gone, Rosie thought too, wondering.

Gone, dreamed Sam, asleep upstairs in her bed;
gone
, she dreamed she said, watching it roll purposefully across her bedroom floor and out across the hall and down the stair.

—Gone, said Doctor John Dee. Gone. Over the hills and far away.

Gone
, Fellowes Kraft had written on the last page he would finish of the yellow typescript that lay now in the lamplight on Boney
Rasmussen’s desk;
gone once more, gone to hide her head where no one knows, until someday somewhere

And then no more.

Pierce Moffett was not cured, no: for he was awake and thinking in the gulf of darkness after midnight, his eyes open and
his heart alert. Thinking about Jesus. It was Solstice Night; the snow falling steadily outside could be sensed more than
seen or heard, perhaps lightening the darkness a little, perhaps making a sound in all its soundless alightings.

Such a funny contradictory moment in the calendar (the old circular one, not the straight-on one of datebooks and newspapers,
though
the abstracted members and limbs of the older one could of course still be found in those). For it’s the end of autumn and
the first day of winter, which in this northern zone has already well begun, and which stretches on from there deep and crisp
and even for many weeks and months: and yet it’s the birthday of the Sun, the day after his long decline and death are over
and he begins, weak as an infant, to grow and flourish again; and so we celebrate, in the cold and the dark.

Maybe that’s why Jesus is a solar myth, or so easily could become one, or attract to himself the properties of one. Born,
to the rejoicing of the whole cosmos; but little and weak and obscure, in a poor part of town.

Rose had told him that
they
didn’t celebrate Christmas the usual way, that
they
made no big deal about its annual recurrence, and why? Because most people act as though it happens every year, the birth
of Jesus, and it doesn’t: it happened once, a long time ago. Once and for all.

In Kentucky once, near Christmas, Pierce and his family had gathered to listen to that radio priest, elsewhere he could already
be seen on TV but not yet in that fastness, what was his name, so perfectly unctuous and shallow; Uncle Sam liked him for
his jokes and his paradoxes and because he was the only one of
ours
on the airwaves amid all the Baptists. And that Christmas he asked them to imagine with him, to imagine Jesus,
picture
Him to ourselves, God becoming incarnate, on His way down to Earth, passing through all the starry waste cold and dark that
lay between His home in Heaven and that womb He would inhabit, that stable in Palestine. Oh Beloved what a long long journey
for our sakes.

Fulton Sheen: yes.

And Pierce for that one moment, the only one he remembered, had been held and shaken by the story that he had all his life
assented to; grateful and appalled by God’s great painful goodness at Christmas.

The journey we all take, down through the spheres, gathering our human natures around us as we come; Pierce had told Val and
Spofford and Rosie about it in the yard of the Faraway Lodge. But He the one father’s son who didn’t need to take it; and
did anyway.

He wondered if Beau would say that He too got ensnared by the Archons and the princes of this world, as every messenger always
does. Well sure, by the Pope and the Powerhouse, sure. So that He has to keep setting out, every year; every year arriving
here small and bare and wailing in the dark of the sun.

Pierce turned over on the bed he had been given, which had been Rosie’s, and which smelled of her too; his ear pressed against
it, he listened
to the mattress’s ticks and tocks, another country down deep. What’ll I do, he asked. Oh what’ll I do.

After a time he got up. He pulled on his pants and sweater in the dark, and went out into the hall, the house silent and unstirring
and his footsteps making no sound, solid old oak floors and long runners. He thought he had turned in the direction of the
bathroom, but the door he opened was a stair, leading down, a light at the bottom, and he took it. It came out in the kitchen,
where a light had been left on over the stove, and last night’s glasses and dishes squatted unwashed by the sink.

In the study at the end of the hall another light left burning, nobody paying attention, too much to think about. In there
he had sat once with Boney Rasmussen and told him about finding the unfinished manuscript of Kraft’s last book.
Maybe you should finish it
, Boney had said.

Well how?

With Hermes Mercurius, Messenger and Trickster, Shepherd of men into the land of death. At the end of every age he comes to
ingather the gods and heroes of that age, who won’t survive its dissolution, to his City, which will at that time come to
be in the westernmost limit of his disappearing land. Come along now it’s time.

That’s how Pierce used to think he would end the book, if he were to end it, if it could be ended.

One of their number though left behind in the storm of the world. They seal him in a boat and set him afloat on the years,
to be both the message and the messenger. Like Jor-El amid the vastation of Krypton, sealing his son within the capsule that
will carry him into the far future and another world, to grow up not knowing his name or nature, the only one of his kind.

One time it was the man-king Hermes himself, the Thrice-great, self-interred or maybe helped into bed by his even greater
progenitor, ibis-headed Theuth. Found centuries later, the Smaragdine Tablet gripped in his white hands. In a cave or something
supposedly. And then there’s the Rosicrucians’ story of their founder, discovered in a tomb in a room in a cave.

Kraft should have put that stuff in. Maybe he meant to. If Pierce were writing it, he would. Set it in Prague maybe, where
whatever it was that was supposed to happen was supposed to happen; where Dee and Bruno and the others were for a moment gathered.

Where Pierce this winter was to journey.

If he were to finish it, he would put that in: the depths of Rudolf’s castle, the Brotherhood gathered, all those magicians
with their weird
but real names, Drebbel and Bragadino and de Boodt. Oswald Kroll and his black box. Yes and in the box perhaps the.

Yes.

An actual box or trunk or chest which actually could play that part appeared just then to Pierce, a chest that had, yes indeed,
survived and been carried from that very city, yes! To the New World for no good reason or maybe a real good one, yes, still
freighted with its freight, maybe, which was in Pierce’s telling to be who or what? And opened when?

Now. If he, Pierce, were to finish it, it would end not then but now.

Pierce in the house where all but he were asleep sat down on the chaise longue of buttoned leather where Boney had spent his
last days, and pulled over his lap the afghan that Boney had vainly tried to warm himself with.

Far down the snowy night then, above the town of Pikeville in eastern Kentucky, in the creepy Victorian mansion that the Infantine
sisters had turned into a boarding school called Queen of the Angels, the Supervisor, Sister Mary Philomel, knelt before that
very box, long black and beeswaxed, which in Pierce’s time had resided in the Bondieu hospital. Often in this autumn, not
every night but many nights, Sister had come down the stairs at hours like this, unable to rest; had come here to listen,
ear against the cold slick wood, to the sounds inside. Since the night of the Equinox when she discovered that she herself
possessed the key to this box, and had gone and turned the key in the lock, she had been able to hear noises like clockwork
or machinery, faint but distinct, altering in rhythm and tenor over time, and reminding Sister of the model machines she saw
as a child in exhibits at the World’s Fair, which at the end of their whirrings and clankings and tickings turned out a pretend
car, or a cigarette, or a breadloaf, or a cement block. And then another and another. She told no one what she had done and
what she heard, bearing the secret within her like the worst sin she had ever committed, but she kept coming to this hall
in the silence of the night and kneeling and listening to the sounds, and she could not deny (as she could in the busy bright
day) that they were there, and changing too: moving—definitely, obviously—to their end.