DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (33 page)

“That’s all, now hon. Got to close your eyes.”

“You close your eyes.”

“I will. I’m here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“I love you, Mommy.”

She shut the last light she could shut, lay back against the chair’s hard back. No dreams, please no dreams: the shallow vivid
dreams of nights in bad beds in strange places. Aiken Drum. What was it that was so horrid about him, horrid like those portraits
made long ago, perfectly realistic readable faces made all of birds, or vegetables, or kitchen utensils. Was it that you knew
they really had no inside at all, were just stuff, and yet would not or could not lie still? Dead but alive. Skeletons maybe
were the same, the inanimate part of you, dry bones empty inside, getting up and hanging together, by no means.

Ghosts too. No not ghosts, ghosts are the opposite: they have an inside and no outside. Naked. Cold. More afraid than you
are maybe: what they always said about wild animals, stray cats with bared teeth, moths beating against the pane.

She thought of Boney, almost a skeleton when he died, but alive, alive.

Where was he now, did he mind being dead as much as he had hated dying? She thought of her father—who was Boney’s nephew—hiding
from the knowledge that people die, that his daughter might.

What was it anyway with the Rasmussens, all of them, that they feared death so much; was it death, really, that they feared,
or what? Rosie had lately come to think that the world lay under some kind of curse or spell, a lassitude or inattention to
what is really important, a kind of sleep that could not be shaken off, and that it was up to her to break or lift it: or
rather she didn’t think this at all but caught herself in moments of abstraction assuming that it was so. But maybe it wasn’t
the world at all that lay in the grip of such a spell, maybe it was only her own family.

Herself too: maybe herself.

The Curse of the Rasmussens. As though they were made backwards, thinking they were fleeing what they feared when really
they ran
right to it. It had seemed to her as she grew up that her father was not really actual, that he talked and ate and kissed
her good night and went on business trips and came back with presents but that compared to other people he wasn’t there at
all. Her mother laughed when Rosie asked her what after all her father’s business had been, because it hadn’t been real, he
had not needed or wanted it to be real, only to
seem
real, a ghost business. His real life was unreality: Demerol. Percocet. Morphine, whose name means sleep. Thought he was
lucky, maybe, that he had found a medicine for fear.

And then he was dead himself, really dead: an overdose that her mother was sure was accidental. But then her mother had also
thought he took the stuff for an unremitting pain in his bones, pain no doctor could or would deal with, thus forcing him
to go for relief into what she called—because he did—the Underworld. Where one day he acquired stuff (where and how, in that
nice city in the nice middle of the country in that decade?) that was maybe a little stronger, a little more compelling or
impelling than usual.

So now he knows.

That was what Rosie thought. She thought that the dead know everything, if they know anything. They know what they no longer
have, and what they might have had if they had done things differently, and they know that there’s nothing now that they can
do about it.

She had begun dreaming of her father, after he was dead, dreamed that she talked with him long and intimately but about nothing
in particular; dreamed of him talking to her, at last, about what was in his heart. Sometimes in the dreams he would put his
head on her shoulder, or in her lap, giving up all defenses and pretendings, the self-protective kidding he always kept up
when alive, and became a weary needy lover or tired baby, at which she woke.

One time, though.

One time in a dream she had asked him—the paradox coming for once clear to her dreaming self—if he wasn’t actually dead, for
she knew he was, remembered him dying, dead, in his glossy box of maroon wood. Yes, oh yes, he admitted, he was; he would
have to go back soon, now in fact, the time was at hand. If she wanted, though, she could go back with him.

No, she thought not; no no she would not want to go.

Oh not to stay, he said; just to visit. Just to see where his time was spent; where hers would be too. Wasn’t she curious?
She’d be safe, he said. She had only to take his arm this way—and he wound his arm right around hers, so that their hands
joined together backwards, secure—and not let go. Just don’t let go. And they set off toward that land; and of
course it wasn’t far, though when she came in sight of it—the far tops of its buildings in the distance like the far view
of Cascadia from the turn of the highway—her imagination apparently ran out and she saw nothing more, and then woke. Woke
wondering how, if she was not supposed to release his hand, she could ever have returned.

Death. She had never thought of it as a land, she knew it wasn’t, and yet she could dream that it was, that her father could
return and take her there. Maybe we have to think it’s a land, can’t help it, where all the dead are alive. It wouldn’t be
far, even: she was as close to it here in her chair as it was possible to be, in this half-light; here where so many had died
so young. She heard their footfalls in the halls, their voices in the whisper of the intercom.

Bobby looked in as her double shift was ending, stepped softly into the room lit by the night-light and the green glow of
numerals counting things, heart rates, brain waves, life. Everyone was for the moment asleep. Bobby stood for a time watching
Sam and her mother breathe almost in unison; then she left.

There have been, at different times, ways by which living men and women have gone down into the land under the earth—not down
through the soil and stones underfoot but into the earth that is the deepest circle of creation, a circle not different from
the earth that we live on, that we lie asleep on, only its shadow. And once there they can placate the dead, the greedy dead,
even sometimes win back from them the souls of those they hold in thrall.

To do that, those who go down to the dead have often had to die themselves, or undergo sufferings like death (didn’t Jesus—greatest
of all the magicians, Bruno thought—have to suffer and die in order to go down and free us from death, to free not just one
grieving supplicant’s child or parent but all of us?). Elsewhere or at other times they have not needed to suffer and die
but have had to cease to be themselves and to become animals, and why animals? Because animals do not die: wolves die but
Sir Wolf never dies, not born for death. And when the time is past when those who go down into death are able to turn themselves
into animals, still there are those who are able—while remaining asleep in their beds—to go out, in spirit, in the
form
of an animal, or riding on one. And when that time is also over, we can still remember that it was once done or can be done.
Some of us can.

Jean Bodin, who wanted to find and burn all witches, all those who took animal form or believed they did—all those who had
illicit or unregulated dealings with the dead—was in fact a modern man, a man of the time to come: he was fighting against
the tendency to slip back
into the older ways, the old world in which persons can be in two places at the same time, the world where Sagittarius sat
on the horizon and the doors were still open: the old world that rationality is always fighting against, trying to mop it
up, or leave it behind. Dam it or damn it. Clearheaded men like Bodin, Catholic and Protestant, antiphantasmic warriors, pushed
back the dark together, rejecting the age-old truce between the Church and the pagans, both with their old philosophers and
their old gods, with the small gods of everyday life, with the warning and helping dead.
No more
, said Bodin, Calvin, Mersenne.

And it worked too. Frightened or ashamed, those who investigated Nature or nature drew in their researches, shut out the universal
rays, narrowed their questions to those that had some promise of clear answers, and to whose formulation no powers could object.
If they hadn’t done so the plain stepping-stones of science couldn’t have been uncovered, and swept. One by one. So successful
was that enterprise that by the time Pierce Moffett discovered the old arts (or discovered that others had discovered or never
forgotten them) the world in which they had been practiced was centuries gone and they couldn’t really be used. Pierce didn’t
believe they had ever really worked.

But
(he typed on his big blue typewriter, alone on All Saints’ Eve as night fell)
suppose the world is in fact now coming to an end, the world of Meaning we have always lived in. And suppose that the Powers
who must make from it a new one—one that will be just like the old one in most but not all respects—are mulling just now over
what sort the new world might be, and what garb they themselves might appear in too. If that’s the case, then that old multilayered
earth and its shape-shifting travellers would have to be among the worlds from which they could choose
—mutatis mutandis,
the same but never exactly the same, take a little out of the waist and plump the shoulders. More likely not, though; more
likely they’ll choose something entirely different this time, something in a fierce hound’s-tooth maybe, or a moiré taffeta,
eye-fooling, iridescent: can’t you see them (I can) moving amid the racks and counters fingering the goods, unable to decide,
all possibilities laid out before them once again before they make their choice, thereafter to pretend (once again) that everything
has always been this way, that they themselves have all along had these aspects and not others, rank on rank, the army of
unalterable Law?

And who is that littlest one among them, wide-eyed, just awakened and believing he has never made this choice before? You
know, don’t you?

He rolled this out of the typewriter and read it over; and after a long moment of gazing on it he tore it in two. Too extravagant,
too
clever, too. Daring? Taunting? He put his hands in his lap, afraid. Years before, when he had finally and wholeheartedly abjured
the Church and all its pomps and works, had denied wholesale and at large all judgments it could make or had made on him,
he had remembered the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, which no one could define but which Jesus was very clear in stating could
not be forgiven, and he had said in his mind
All right, whatever it is, I hereby commit it
: and had felt a sudden chill nakedness, as though he had been taken notice of, and his statement recorded. Which was what
he felt now too.

He left his desk and went to lie down. His head was a bread box, his heart was a birdcage. Every page he had written this
week he had torn up and thrown away. And as he lay there, from Littleville to the Jambs and Stonykill to Fair Haven and to
the old neighborhoods of Cascadia where the Victorian houses stand at the top of steep stairs, the little dead were out in
their flocks—all over the eastern standard time zone in fact, and coming out elsewhere successively as night swept westward:
some of them being the dead as they have always been seen (vague, sheeted); some of them the old undead, zombies and ghouls
and vampires, and some the new undead of science, the Frankensteins and robots and medical disasters. Fictional characters
too, heroes and villains both, and costume-ball princesses and consumer products and jokes. Their parents often followed,
hovering not too far behind, afraid for their little imps, but not because of the roaming dead whom they might meet, only
because of the darkness, the traffic, and maybe the wickedness of the living: and still on this night of this year eighty
percent of them believed—according to a recent poll Pierce had read, appalled, astonished—that God had personal care for them,
and that they would somehow live on after their deaths, to be rewarded for the good they had done, and punished for the evil.

For another two days Sam stayed linked to her machine, getting more daring with it and trundling it from playroom to bedroom
skillfully, Rosie lagging behind; neuro patients came and went from their beds and rooms near hers; her roommate went, and
an anxious couple with a newborn came, so stricken that Rosie dared ask them nothing: they were kids themselves almost, standing
looking into their baby’s clear plastic box and holding tight to each other as though they stood on a cliff’s edge looking
down.

Nothing in the end was learned about Sam; nothing extraordinary. The doctor (still not Dr. Marlborough, who was beginning
to seem somewhat fictitious or hallucinatory to Rosie) went over the results with her and showed her that the same anomalies
were still present, and no
more explainable. He suggested a slight change in her medication. Rosie packed up as soon as he was done and got them out,
feeling the place fold up and disappear behind them as they walked (almost ran) down its halls and out.

She stopped to get the dogs out of the kennel in Cascadia, Spofford’s and her own two, they filled up the car with their eagerness
and their lolling tongues and odors, making Sam laugh uncontrollably as they poured from back to front over the seat backs.
When they got back to Stonykill, Rosie found, amid the spill of mostly inconsequential mail from the Foundation’s big box
at the post office, a long envelope she was required to sign for, which turned out to be a notice that the custody hearing
was scheduled. Oh well oh well. Lastly there was a small envelope with a small letter in it, written in Spofford’s very small
but very legible and open hand. The postmark date was Halloween.

Sam wouldn’t let her stop to read it, insisted on hurrying home—home, home, she said, and each time she said it was like a
little theft out of Rosie’s breast. Sam ran inside in delight as soon as Rosie opened the doors, chasing away with the dogs
through the rooms, touching the chairbacks and newel posts, the telephone, the hassocks in recognition or reclamation. Home.