DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (12 page)

“I know,” she heard her mother say “I know. It’s just. You’re going to be gone.”

Sam pushed the armchair’s hassock away, steering it toward the plump and comical commode. And up against its side. It was
a long time ago that she had learned she could do this, before she had begun to take medicine; she had never told her mother,
or anyone else, how she had first learned the secret of the casket atop the commode.

“I never would,” she heard her mother say “Never. You know that.”

She climbed the hassock, holding herself gently against the smooth cold wood of the commode; her sock feet clung unsteadily
to the slippery plush of the hassock, her legs knew it might slide away backwards beneath her and let her fall, but she had
the key in her fingers now, the filigree of its handle matching the filigree of the lockplate. Turned it, one way, the other.
The little door opened.

There was a feeling Sam was beginning to recognize when it came, though not yet to remember between times, that preceded her
jumps. A flavor in the air and in her breathing in and breathing out that she would one day be able to name to people of her
kind, who would instantly say
Oh yes right sure
but which no one else, not even her mother, would ever recognize; one day she would describe it by saying,
A
s
though I had grown as huge as huge as the universe, and my hand was as far away as a planet
(her hand that now was taking out from within the dark den where it lived the worn velvet bag with the solid weight inside
it)
and everything in the universe no matter how far was close to me and yet as far away as possible
: that was the feeling, but not the flavor of the feeling, the flavor that she tasted now.

“She’s right around,” her mother said. “You can talk to her.”

Sam climbed down and went to the far side of the commode, where she was hidden from the view of her mother in the hall, and
upturned the bag into her lap. She remembered how once she had spilled a kitten from a stocking cap into which it had crawled;
this felt the same, a living thing struggling the wrong way to get out, then revealed, happy, happy to be out.

It was a globe of gray-brown quartz, nearly flawless but with a run of bubbles pointing to a tiny starburst not quite in its
center, scar of a wound it took in its childhood, when it was growing, millennia ago. She saw it first the night of the day
Boney was put in the ground, when she had stayed here all day long with Mrs. Pisky, not allowed to go to the church or to
the cemetery to see him put in, even though Boney was her friend too. She had crept down the stairs unheard and from the landing
saw her mother take from the little hiding-box this bag, and let fall into her hand this ball, and look at it a long time
in the dimness of the nighttime room.

Sam took it out herself not long after that, and looked into it as her mother had, and had been interested and unsurprised
by what she saw
there. And not long after that she had her first jump: she called them jumps because she seemed to jump in no time at all
from where she was when it began to where she was when it was over (in her mother’s arms, on the floor, in another room).

She lifted it now in her two hands. A planet, revolving at an immense distance from her; but her head was immense too, and
her hands immense, so it was no farther from her than ever; but at the same time it was across the universe. She looked into
it.

“My ode house,” she said aloud.

She thought she might jump now. Within the globe it was as it always was, that place, changeless, her old house. No it was
not the same, it had changed: somebody looked out at her.

“Sam?” her mother called. “Sam?”

Who was it? Who looked out? She brought her face closer to the ball, her eyes crossing and the flavor of hugeness thick in
her throat; but the closer she drew the smaller the place grew. Who stirred in that room?

“Come out,” she said. “Come out.”

-I
am out, said Doctor John Dee. It is you must come out.

But the girl in the globe of quartz he held, golden-haired child, glimmered and went away as though she heard her name called
from behind her; went away without saying more. Doctor Dee held the ball up before him on the tips of his fingers for some
time, turned it this way and that, but it was empty.

—Gone, he whispered.

It was in this stone of gray-brown quartz that a spirit had first appeared in his house: one of the spiritual creatures whom
John Dee had long courted and prayed to be visited by, whom for years he tried fruitlessly to attract with his glasses, rings
and mirrors, as a beeman attracts bees with his honey pots; not succeeding till he placed this globe before young Edward Kelley
and asked what he could see there.

That first one was, or appeared to be, a fat baby, a girl with golden eyes, bearing a new clear stone in her own hands, like
a child’s toy. So Edward Kelley had described her, who alone could see her. Then for a time she did not come again; when she
next appeared she had grown up by years, though but months had passed, and was a child of seven. She had come forth and walked
about, here in this room (still only Kelley had seen her) going among the books and papers piled here and there, patting them
as she passed. In this very room, when he had lived here at peace and happily. John Dee felt the stab of her absence: as though
she had indeed spent her girlhood here, a child of his flesh, playing with the two grown men.

He put down the vacant globe. It had perhaps retained only a last brief power, latent and slumbering here while he travelled
and labored across the seas; when he found it and picked it up again, it expended the little life remaining in it, the glimpse
of her it had retained. If indeed it had been her.

Come out
the child had said to him. Then no more.

When he and Edward Kelley had skryed here, he had seen nothing in this glass or in the other: he had merely written down what
Kelley alone saw. And now, when he had sight, when he could apprehend them himself, they fled from him, and his stones lost
their power one by one.

Inside her new, clear glass—the one she had herself brought to them—she had gone with them on their travels. And far away
in Prague she had grown to womanhood. From babe to woman in—in how long? John Dee looked back over the interval of time and
could not calculate it; it had not been long but it appeared a lifetime. Five years? Not long. No matter that in those years
the world had ended, and begun again.

She had said to them: Do not quail, do not be afraid, give all that you have and when you have given all, more will be asked
of you. And he had not quailed. When she (Madimi she named herself) had ordered him to abandon his house and his country and
become a wanderer, all his family too, he had meekly, quickly packed his trunks and departed in the night as though the bailiffs
were after him. She had promised the Polish prince Albert Laski relief from his debts and his great troubles, and Dee had
assured the prince that the spirits attached to the glass could do what they promised, and yet they had done nothing for him;
in Poland John Dee had ventured all the credit of his years of study and his standing with the learned men of Europe, and
won an audience with the Polish king Stephen, great good man, so the spirits could speak to him, and like half-trained dogs
they had refused to come forth and do their tricks.

She had promised him they would reveal to him what no man had ever known, or what all men had once known and had forgotten:
what the angels had shown to Adam in Paradise before they sent him out, the knowledge whose return to men would signal the
ending of the world, and its beginning anew.

Had she done so? Perhaps. What he had learned might be what she promised him, wisdom precious above price; or it might be
a thing all men knew, a saw; or a jest, or a child’s quibble.

She also promised she would teach them to make gold, which was all that Edward Kelley ever wanted from the spirits he spoke
to; and in Prague she did it. In the house of the Emperor’s physician Dr. Hájek, Thaddæus Hagecius, in Golden Lane: House
of the Green Mounds, largest house of that row of houses clinging to the lip of the Stag’s Moat, tiny houses with great chimneys,
where gold was worked, or assayed, or forged: made or claimed to have been made.

And where else in Christendom was it as likely gold might be made
as in Prague? For matter is a palace, the shut palace of a king, who sits within stolid and inflexible; into that small palace
the worker makes his dangerous journey, to awaken that king, vivify him, cause him to be fruitful, multiply; to become his
own wife, and bear himself a son. Edward Kelley thought that this action took place not only in the athenor of the alchemists,
but continuously in the world all the time, in the toils of the smallest indivisibles, in their tiny shut palaces: matter
transforming as black kings divided themselves, generated sons through their chaste passionate intercourse with themselves,
allowed their sons to die, be buried, rot, turn to dust, then revive, live, triumph. Maybe this drama went on, in all its
grieving and thanksgivings, right through the ladder of creation, through the plants (poor John Barleycorn, son of the grain,
slain every year that his own sons may live) and the animals up to the life of the celestial powers and the planets, up to
God Himself, and His Son, self-generated. Who could say that God in His heaven did not suffer every pain and grief that His
Son underwent, that He did not also die the death with him, enjoy the rebirth too, the wild elation, alive, alive again? Were
they not the one God? Every year, every Holy Week. Every day, in the Mass.

And of this action the city on the River Moldau or Vltava was the
imago
or emblem.

Up in his vast castle on the hill above the silted river the black-clothed Emperor Rudolf had immured himself, King Saturn
on his throne; around him in his galleries and closets and
Kunstkammern
was the rest of the world in small, earth air fire and water: precious stones bearing the fires of distant planets in their
tiny bodies; waterworks and clepsydras, pneumatic statues, hubble-bubbles that sang; the skins of birds and animals and fish,
all in their orders and ranks; monsters too, snails found with jewels embedded in their shells or the names of saints or demons
written on them, the skin of the little bear that a Jewish woman of Prague once gave birth to, which “ran around the room
and scratched itself behind the ear and died,” says the chronicler. And there were representations too of all these things
and all other things that could be pictured, in paintings, in albums of drawings, on coins, molded in colored wax or blown
in glass—glass roses, one of every kind, their leaves and flowers as perfect as summer’s roses, only deathless—and there were
catalogues of all these representations, and the covers of the catalogues and the cabinets in which they were kept were covered
and cut and molded and painted with further representations. Rudolf loved tiny things, worlds sculpted on cherrystones, clockwork
insects, the life inside diamonds.

The Emperor had his own furnace, at which he labored over the
Work by himself in blackened gloves and apron while his counsellors shook their heads over him; and on the table in the Emperor’s
bedroom, at the heart of the great castle from which he issued less and less frequently, lay the book of John Dee’s called
Monas hieroglyphica
, explicating the sign for the same process or action:

And on one summer’s day in 1586, while the Emperor stared at the seal, and the clocks in his chamber ticked away, counting
out the new endless-ribbon style of time, John Dee and Edward Kelley had indeed made gold. Using a “powder of projection”
that Kelley had carried for years, and following the angelic instructions they had received. They alone, among all those on
that street of that city who spent their lives and fortunes attempting it. It was but a minim or two in the vessel’s bottom,
not a
thaler’s
worth, but it was gold that had not existed in the world before; it shone up at them, a little twisted embryo, sophic, wonderful.

Too small though; fruitless little mass, sterile, unable to generate more, a masturbator’s vain squib. What was wrong?

Maybe this kingdom was, after all, a sterile one; or this old earth was, or this age. This Emperor who had never married,
though his counsellors begged him; who had no heirs, no legitimate bed. He had produced children, though, many of them, with
his many concubines.

Then maybe it was Kelley who was the sterile one.

Kelley had begged the spirits and Madimi to free him from these hard duties, if this was to be the upshot, this little gob
of gold; and she refused him.
Not for a short time have I yoked you two together
. When he wept, beating his fists on the faldstool’s lip in impotent child’s resentment, she took him by the collar (a grown
woman now, imperious in her gown of red and white, her breasts bare, her skirt parted) and stilled him.
Whatever you want I have in my gift. Will you stop now, when the hart is fainting before you and the dogs are belling and
the scent of blood is on the air? Come for me, for I will welcome you, I promise you, as I ever have. As I ever have
.

John Dee kneeling with Kelley before the glass that night had bowed his head, abashed; but Edward in her grip laughed aloud
gleeful
and terrified, like a child snatched up by a laughing mighty captain astride a great horse, to ride along with him.

John Dee remembered how he had laughed.

—Ah Christ Jesus forgive me that I loved her, John Dee whispered to the empty globe in his study in his ransacked house in
England. Forgive me, Jane, that I loved them both. And do so still.

He had given all he had, and got much, and given all that too: and he was here again where he’d begun.

He sat down amid the litter of papers and broken-backed books. He could hear Jane his wife, weeping, in the farther end of
the house, coming on fresh villainies. Those who had broken into his house in his absence to destroy his works and smash his
tools (sparing this glass but not his great astronomical staff, his sphere of the heavens, his stores of medicines and distillations,
he had not reckoned it all up yet) had not shut the doors behind them when they departed, and the thieves who then came in
stole his spoons and cups and even the crucifix from over the door.

She—Madimi—had told him his house would be safe in his absence, and she had not been able to protect it, not against her enemies,
nor against his.

His enemies, his neighbors. It was his neighbors who in his absence had invaded his house and broken his instruments and despoiled
his books: they had convinced themselves, as foolish unlearned people could do, that because he studied deep matters and the
stars he served the Devil, and conjured.

Nor was it only the vulgar who thought in this way. The learned too saw damned spirits everywhere now; mad old women who muttered
or cursed their neighbors for their unkindness were driven away from home or imprisoned and put to torture for being the Devil’s
servants. Old Mother Godefroy, who lived near the stile by Richmond field, from whom John Dee had bought his herbs and simples—she
was gone now, her small house fallen in, and when Doctor Dee asked after her, the Mortlake townspeople looked away, and said
they knew nothing. She had kept a cat, and had a blind eye: it was enough.

The Queen herself, once his friend, whom he had taught, to whom he had opened mysteries: she could not now openly support
her old physician and friend. Though her counsellors had sent him letters privily, in Prague and T
ebo
, it was unwise for
a monarch in these times to be seen to favor one who might later be shown, or be believed, to have sold himself to the Enemy.