DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (52 page)

Pierce Moffett had had two fathers, a first and a second. The one in Brooklyn where he had been born, and the other in the
country into which the first had sent him or allowed him to be carried, northeastern Kentucky. His uncle Sam, in whose bedroom
Pierce had concealed the girl-child he and his cousins had found.

He turned pages.

Closed in the big closet on the second floor of the Bondieu house, smelling of mothballs and fur. She turning the pages, he
reading the words. They looked for pictures, they knew which ones. It’s not only the WITCHES and the DEVIL who are naked (his
hooked or corkscrew penis displayed) but all the GODS too, a calm Hindu DEVA lifting her orbed breasts, APOLLO and HERMES
and the ithyphallic SATYR, and VENUS covering herself, her hand like EVE’s broad leaf, showing and hiding at once. Outside
the closet door his cousin Bird whispering urgently through the keyhole to them, what are you doing, what are you doing.

She was a little sharp-faced girl of about his own age then, ten or nine, but far smaller, quick and stringy. He remembered—just
then remembered them, lifted them as from an archæological dig, brushed
away the dust—her cracked patent-leather shoes, and the way she had walked her socks down beneath her heels, her dirty white
anklets; the gray cold hard tendons of her ankles. What though had her name been; what had they done to her there, he and
his cousins, tormented her somehow or overcome her, used her, saved her. Not saved her.

She had no mother. He remembered that. Neither had his cousins. But she had been his secret, she and what they did together;
the first of that kind of secret he had ever entered into, Rose Ryder being the last or latest. As though he climbed a spiral
track up a mountain, he saw that he had come to the same place where he had once stood, only one turn higher up. He could
see himself now, down there on a former turn, in his own room in that house, bent over a book, this book or another; he could
look with pity down upon himself, at the back of his big shorn head, the vulnerable tendons of his neck. When we can look
at ourselves thus in the past, as though we were spirit revenants, chances are we are inventing; Pierce knew that. He only
didn’t know which way he ought to step, which sight he ought to see. For he was under a compunction to invent the past that
had indeed occurred, the one that led to this present, its original and its
imago
; unless he could do that he would never exit from this, would never sleep again.

Sam Oliphant’s dead wife’s diamond ring, in its tiny box of convolute rose velvet. Its empty box. Did she steal that stone?
Or was it he? Something happened to it that caused Pierce to be bound over to Sam and punished. It was for her sake that he’d
done it, if he had, and even under duress and suffering he had not told; he had not told.

A task, his task, begun in the past and left undone or refused or forgotten, that must or might be completed in the present,
in another form, for another’s sake. Not for his own sake, no, he didn’t think so: not something buried in his flesh and needing
to be removed, like the wounds that psychiatrists say we go on licking all our lives until we heal them in the remembering
of them: not for his sake, nor for that little girl’s, for whom he had actually done his best maybe possibly, anyway had done
what he had done. No not for her sake, or even for Rose’s.

For whose sake then?

Now afternoon was fading, another brief winter day Pierce had not seen pass. At this gray hour sometimes, as at dawn, he had
been able
to sleep for a time, but only if he forbore his bed, sat up in his chair in his clothes as though awake. He lost consciousness
briefly, but dreamed only of the room he sat in, and the book he held in his lap; and found it still there when he awoke.

It was the lights of a car that awakened him, and a dog’s bark, and the thud of the car’s door. He struggled upright, to meet
what he had to meet, whatever it was; and the door was knocked on.

“Pierce, it’s Rosie,” Rosie called at the door. “Can I come in?”

“I was out, that’s all,” Rosie said. “Out and about, paying calls. If you hadn’t been here I’d have gone over to Val’s maybe.
Or.”

She wore a rumpled raincoat over a woolly shirt not probably her own originally, and a crocheted hat from some other era of
her life. It occurred to Pierce that she did not herself look so hot, but he didn’t know if he could trust his perceptions;
almost everything he looked at was getting uglier steadily, or sadder, or weaker.

“So,” she said. On the floor by his chair she spied the
Dictionary of Deities, Dæmons and Devils of Mankind
, and bent to pick it up. “Hey, I know this book.”

“Oh yes?”

“Val’s taken it out before. She read to me out of it. About—I forget exactly. Plato and love. About Eros, who’s a little boy,
he says.”

“Yes.”

“Was it Plato who said we’re originally one being, male and female, and then get separated in two?”

“Well. Self and beloved other. Not necessarily male and female.”

“Ah-ha,” she said, flipping pages. “It was in that stupid poem you found. Which I actually read.” She sampled the air, as
her dog had done. “You know, you need to do your laundry,” she said.

“It’s far. The one in Stonykill finally closed. Nasty place, good riddance, but still.”

“Come on over to the house. We have this machine you won’t believe. The kind where you can watch the wash go around through
a little porthole. Sam loves squatting in front of it; she says it’s like TV.”

“I’m not good company, Rosie. I don’t know if I’m up to driving.”

“I’ll take you. And bring you back soon. You can tell me what you’ve been thinking. Tell me all about devils and angels.”

“I’m swearing off thinking.”

“Aw come on,” she said, and he saw urgency in her drawn face, she hadn’t been sleeping either maybe, the whole world awake.
“Come play. Commonna my house-a, my house.”

His windows were black, and the alarm clock’s short hand had not
even crossed out of the left hemisphere, twelve hours and more of dark to go. A small daring awoke in him. It was only his
inwardness that had been devastated, burnt-over country where no one dwelt; his exterior was whole, and needed a chat, and
maybe a drink, and why not. He nodded thoughtfully, not immediately taking steps, but nodding.

So soon enough she had got him into her car with Alf and Ralph the dogs, and tossed his pillowcase of clothes in back; and,
heading toward Stonykill and Arcady, she told him what had happened to her that morning: how she had lost her court case,
and lost Sam to Mike, and to them.

“Oh no Rosie,” Pierce said or keened; “oh my Lord.” He grasped the top of his head, as though to keep this knowledge from
cracking or splitting it.

She told him what Allan had said, that they weren’t going to get away with it, and her voice trembled with doubt or maybe
(he thought) it was only fierce resolve; and he listened intently and wrote Allan’s name inwardly as an ally though he didn’t
believe in his powers now as he might have once, Law and Argument and Reason. He saw Sam, reft away from her mother, and from
him; from the world. The last light went out. Oh those bastards. The way ahead, lit fitfully by the walleyed headlights, seemed
suddenly unfamiliar, as though he’d never travelled it before. Houses went by, dark or cheerily lit, that knew nothing of
Rosie or Pierce or what had happened to them.

“If you told him,” Pierce said helplessly. “Asked him, asked him …”

“He won’t even talk about it. He already said: he can’t have her raised outside his faith. He couldn’t bear it. He said he’d
do anything.” She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt. “I know Sam loves him a lot,” she said. “Probably more than
she loves me. And he’s gotten to be a better father lately than he was.” The gateposts of Arcady appeared, the big house,
one light lit.

“No I bet not,” Pierce said.

“He has. Nicer. Milder. Less, I don’t know, selfish.”

Pierce wanted to contradict her, but he couldn’t; Rose had grown not less selfish maybe but milder somehow, happier, there
was no doubt of it.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Rosie said, coming to a stop. The wagon began the shuddering spasms it always went through
when she turned it off. “People get out of these things. A lot of them do. I read in a magazine.”

“Yes. I heard that too.”

From somewhere nearby Pierce heard a sound like mocking laughter. “They come to, sort of,” Rosie said. “Snap out of it.”

Again, a weird snigger, even closer. Pierce sat upright, looking into the dark. “Just the sheep,” Rosie said. “Spofford’s
sheep.”

Spofford’s sheep. Pierce remembered again the sunlit summer afternoon, a year ago August, when the bus he was riding from
New York City had broken down in Fair Prospect, not ten miles from here; he had been on his way to Conurbana to apply for
a job at Peter Ramus College, there where she now was earning a degree, a
degree
, another mask no doubt for them to do their work behind.

“I’m boarding them for him, you know. They do that all night.”

“Are they really hungry?” Pierce asked in sudden pity. “Are they okay without him? Are they? Where is he now, is he coming
back, is he all right?”

Rosie told him it was okay, they were okay, and her dog Ralph barked from the back, and was answered by Spofford’s dog out
in the darkness; but it was too late, Pierce was releasing strange sobs, grasping himself around the waist and brow, and she
could only pat his arm and wait.

“I need,” she said. “I think I need a drink.”

“You asked her to the party?” Rosie asked him in amazement. “At the castle?”

She had found Boney’s bottle of Scotch in the bottom of the living-room cabinet, and after some hunting for something she
preferred had settled for this stuff too, top of the line Pierce said but tasting to her of burning leaves. From the basement
came the faint sound of almost all of Pierce’s clothes being thumped and tumbled.

“Yes.”

“Oh man,” Rosie said. “Pierce you got it bad. I didn’t know. Oh Lord.”

“Yes.”

“One sick puppy.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Pierce said. “I didn’t believe that it would. I still don’t believe it. It is just so
foolish.”

“She’s not good enough for you, Pierce. Oh I don’t mean that, that’s not it, but she’s not worth this. She’s. She’s just somebody.”

“Well. So am I.”

“You know what I mean.”

He bent his head. He knew.

“So what’s that like?” Rosie asked after a moment. “To feel that so intensely.” Her smile had altered and her gaze grown more
inquiring. “I never have. Really, ever.”

“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh, Rosie?”

“Well I just never did.”

“It’s not so good.” He drank. “There used to be a disease,” he said, “that people don’t seem to suffer from anymore. A disease
of love. It was called
amor hereos
. Crazy Love.”

“Oh they still have that. But you don’t have it. Come on.”

“It was a disease that some people actually tried to catch. The knights of Provençal, or anyway the poets who wrote about
them, thought there was nothing more glorious.
Un Dieu en ciel, en terre une Déesse
.”

Rosie worked this out. “A god in Heaven, a goddess on Earth.”

“
One
God in Heaven,” Pierce said. “
One
Goddess on Earth.”

“Oh really.”

“Sometimes those knights died of it. Really. There are cases.”

“I thought you at least went out and did good deeds,” Rosie said. “In her name.”

“Sure.”

“She sends you forth.”

“Sure.” A painful warmth started in his limbs and his breast. “My old teacher, Frank Walker Barr, used to say,” and here Pierce
intoned somewhat, “that ‘in the picture-language of mythology, Woman represents all that can be known; Man is the hero who
comes to know it.’”

“To know what.”

“What can be known.”

“And what if she’s not there by the time you get there to know her? What if she’s decided to be a hero herself, and go find
what’s to be known?”

She drank, regarding him, so frank and interested that Pierce lowered his eyes. “Well he wasn’t talking about real men and
women,” Pierce said. “He was talking about
stories
. Allegories in a way. He says Woman
stands for
.”

“Pierce,” Rosie said. “You think you can go on telling stories like that, where men come looking for women to know them, for
a thousand years, and people don’t think
This is about me?
”

She crunched ice in her teeth. Another moment arrived in which Pierce knew that he had been wrong, all wrong, and why, and
how simple it all was; and again it passed, leaving him bereft and ignorant even of why he felt bereft.

“So,” she said. “What did you come to know? By the way.”

“Oh. Oh, well. Oh jeez.” He lifted one bare foot and rubbed it in his hands, cold as a corpse’s. “You know,” he said, “One
thing those old knights always had. When you were lost in the thorny wood, and didn’t know what to do next, there would always
be a hermit, or a friar of orders gray, who would appear, and take you in, and tell you which way to go. Give you a tablet,
or a rhyme, or a sword or a prayer. Heal your wounds.” He thought of Rhea Rasmussen, and felt his eyes fill, as though her
touch could do that, even the memory of it, even if he’d right off taken another wrong turning, no fault of hers.