DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (2 page)

W
hen the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but
passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. The coming of the end might at first lift
and shake just one county, one neighborhood, and not the others around it; might feelably ripple beneath the feet of these
churchgoers and not of these taverngoers down the street, shatter only the peace of this street, this family, this child of
this family who at that moment lifts her eyes from the Sunday comics and knows for certain that nothing will ever be the same
again.

But though the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it—or through whom it passes—will be
able to look back and know that he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though
all around him his neighbors are still living in the old world, amid its old comforts and fears. And that will be the proof,
that in his fellows’ faces he can see that they have been left behind, can see in the way they look at him that he has crossed
over alive.

All that summer a lethargy had lain over the county that comprises most of the Faraway Hills and their towns, farms and waterways.
In the heat and torpid silence unaccountable things came to be, small things perhaps and apparently wholly unrelated. A fisherman
caught a large-mouth bass in Nickel Lake and saw words written in the fading iridescence of its flank; when he wrote them
out for the librarian at Blackbury Jambs she said they were Latin. A Conurbana man building a summer cabin for himself and
his family on a mountain road (was it Bug Hill Road? or Hopeful Hill?) couldn’t one day find the lot he had bought, or the
foundation he had begun the day before, though he was certain he
was on the right road—he went back twice to the crossroads, twice on to the road’s end, bewildered and rageful, it just was
not there, until the next day he returned by the same road (he was quite sure) and there it was.

And other things. But these of course are always happening, whether the world is ending or is not. What was less noticed was
that, here and there, effects were appearing before their causes. Not often, not consistently, or life would have become unintelligible:
just here and there, now and then, and trivial mostly. Hummingbirds ceased suddenly to visit a flowering hedge by a path of
the Sunset Nursing Home, saddening one of the women within, who loved to watch them; not long after, a fool handyman following
what he thought were his instructions went and cut down the hedge. A mother hanging clothes to dry saw her little daughter,
plastic backpack on her back, going down the road—out of her eye’s corner, just disappearing over the hill’s brow; and later
that day the daughter decided secretly to run away from home.

If such things could be gathered and counted, how many would there have been? How many should there be, in a normal year?
Can a sudden rise in pointless coincidences—say a briar springing up just here where last year I lost my briar pipe, or all
the mothers and daughters in Fair Prospect happening to say the word “honey” at the same moment—be charted? Is there a secret
unfolding in unnoticeable things, that might if we could reckon it give us warning of ends, and of beginnings?

“When two people say the same thing at the same time,” Rosie Rasmussen told her daughter Sam, “they do this. Look. Hook your
little finger around mine. No like this.”

Sam, tongue between her teeth, succeeded in hooking her little finger around her mother’s.

“Now answer,” Rosie said. “‘What goes up a chimney?’”

Sam thought. She shrugged.

“Well what does?”

“Smoke,” Sam said.

“Right. ‘What goes up a chimney?’”

“‘Smoke.’”

“‘May your wish and my wish never be broke.’ Hold tight.”

She tugged with her finger, and Sam with hers, until the strong link parted.

“There,” Rosie said. “That’s what you do.”

“To get a wish?”

“Yup.”

“What did you wish?”

“Well you’re not supposed to tell,” Rosie said. “It might not come true.”

What had her own wish been? There had long been but one wish
Rosie could formulate: a wish for something to wish for, something to fill the empty and unfeeling space where (it seemed)
her feeling heart had once been. But then last fall she had gained something new to wish for, something to wish for on every
evening star, to toot her horn for in every tunnel (hand on the car’s roof as her father had taught her). And never to tell.

“I made a wish,” Sam said.

“Good.”

Sam slid across the broad smooth leather seat of the car, which was a Tigress, her mother’s lawyer Allan Butterman’s car.
Allan up front alone drove, and Rosie and Sam played in the back, in the richness of the tinted windows and the honeyed music
of the rear speakers.

“I’ll tell you.”

“It might not come true, though.”

“It might.”

“Well what is it?”

“Not to take medicine anymore.”

“Aw Sam.”

That was, in one form anyway, exactly Rosie’s wish. In August Sam had first experienced something that her doctor thought
might be an epileptic seizure, though for a month she’d had no more. Then, just past midnight on the autumn equinox—a night
of wild wind—Sam had her second seizure, a worse one than the first, taking hold of her small body and all its contents for
nearly a minute, and no doubt about it then. And next day in the splendor of the blue morning, amid a pageant of fast-moving
white clouds and the trees still softly gesturing with their turning leaves, Rosie drove Sam again to the doctor’s, and talked
long with him; and then went to the drugstore in Blackbury Jambs. So now Sam took a small dose of phenobarbital elixir, three
times a day. Too young at barely five to swallow pills. Rosie had the bitter liquid with her, and a little plastic syringe
without a needle to draw it up with and squirt it into Sam’s mouth, after a battle, always a battle.

“There it is,” said Allan.

“Look, there it is,” Rosie said to Sam.

They had been driving down the Blackbury River road toward Cascadia, and now at a turning there had come into view an edifice
out on the river, piled on a little island whose pied sycamores were turning to yellow.

“Ha!” said Sam, kneeling on the maroon leather seat, fingertips on the sill of the car’s window. “Ha ha!”

It was a castle, comically dour and yet not uninviting, with three irregular towers rising from the corners of its walls and
a sort of central
keep with a machicolated top. No one could think it was really medieval, but by now it was certainly old, shaggy and squat
and gripping its three-cornered island in midstream like a great black vulture in sullen molt. The wall facing the river road
had tall letters carved in it, letters in that square plain style Rosie knew was called Gothic though she didn’t know why.
The letters said BUTTERMAN’S.

“He said he’d meet us at the what’s-it,” Allan said. “The harbor, the.”

“Marina,” said Rosie.

“Right.”

Allan Butterman claimed that his own name had no real connection to the huge name carved on the castle wall, but Rosie (and
Sam) wouldn’t believe him. Well somewhere there was some ancestor, Allan said. His modesty amazed Rosie; he found it more
satisfying to pretend he had no connection to the most visible surname in the county than to give any appearance of laying
claim to the old pile, or any share in its eccentric provenance. Rosie though didn’t mind claiming her share: for legally
Butterman’s belonged to the Rasmussen family, and Rosie was the last twig on the last branch of that family in the county,
and today she was going to cross the river and go inside it for the first time. She felt a quick dilation in her breast to
think it, and laughed.

Just an old wreck after all.

“Here,” Allan said, and with a pinky flicked the bar that turned on an emerald arrow. Sam watched it blink. Allan turned the
car off the road and into the little marina’s lot.

“Here we go,” Rosie said, and pushed open the tombstone-thick door of the Tigress. “Come on, hon.”

But Sam now was of a mind to hang back, either afraid of the place and the journey now that she was so close, or reluctant
to leave the rich enclosure of the car. Maybe she was unable to laugh, as Rosie had, at her heart’s reluctance.

Only stop staring in that stock-still way, her mother wanted to say and never would say. Don’t freeze and stare, oh don’t.

“My ode house,” Sam said, not quite breaking her spell over herself.

“Oh yeah?” Rosie said. “Well let’s go see it.”

Her old house. Sam had first surprised Rosie with news of her old house when she was three. At first she had just told tales
of it: how in her old house her old family had lived and played. What old house? The house she had lived in before. But then
she began to point out places, not many, that reminded her of it: That’s my old house. That? Rosie would ask, wondering why
she chose just that place—once it was a two-hundred-year-old barn in the process of being dismantled and shipped to be a rich
man’s house in California; another time a caterpillar-like
Airstream trailer weeping rust at the rivets, set up on concrete blocks, with geraniums in pots before it and a green fiberglass
carport. But Sam always said finally about these places when Rosie asked: It’s
like
my old house.

“My ode house,” she said now again.

“Really really?” Rosie asked.

“Really really.”

The heat outside the air-conditioned car was astonishing: the Faraways lay under a heat wave, brilliant Bermuda high, motionless
for days. Yet Rosie shuddered. Any child, she thought, taking Sam’s hand: any child can seem sometimes like she’s from somewhere
else.

The marina offered a few party boats with striped awnings for rent, and berthed a few sailboats and motorboats. Allan in his
fine black shiny shoes walked with care down to where an aged boatman fiddled with the outboard motor of a pretty little one
of varnished wood and shiny chrome. A Chris-Craft, for bearing a child across a river.

“Oh Sam. This’ll be fun.” Sam’s eyes were that drink-it-all-in wide that touched her mother nearly beyond bearing. When Allan
and the geezer motioned to her and smiled, Sam walked to them fearlessly and took Allan’s hand and the boatman’s and allowed
herself to be boarded.

“She needs a life jacket,” Rosie said. “Okay?”

“Sure,” said the boatman. “You bet.” With arthritic hands, oil-stained and nail-broken, he fixed it on her, her armor. She
watched, still and interested. Rosie, her squire, boarded last.

“There’s a dock still standing on the downriver side,” said the boatman, taking up a blunt cigar end from a tin-can ashtray
on the seat beside him. “Okay?”

“Fine,” said Allan. The motor started.

Once, when the Faraway Hills had been filled with tourists, when the hills were just far enough away from Conurbana and Philadelphia
and New York to seem a forest fastness and yet easily reachable by train and steamboat, Butterman’s was a pleasure-garden,
a sort of tiny and primitive theme park. There were band concerts and Japanese lanterns and fishing from the piers and views
taken from the towers. Now the Faraways aren’t far enough, and the word “tourist” (to Rosie’s ear anyway) had a comically
old-time sound, an air of small safe excursions undertaken with maximum fuss, Tourist Cabins, Tourist Homes. And Butterman’s
has been deserted and decaying for decades. Once briefly, fifteen years before, when Rosie still lived in the Midwest, the
novelist and local celebrity Fellowes Kraft had laid plans to reopen the place, use its theater for a Shakespeare festival,
plans that were far too large in the end; Rosie knew that a play had nearly been put on, not Shakespeare
but old, the one about devils and magic, what was it. Then closed up again, returned to sleep for good.

It loomed, it really did loom over them as they putt-putted beneath its walls around to the dock, their wake lapping against
the rocks and the concrete pilings wherein huge rings rusted away. They all lifted their heads to look up. The narrow ogive
windows were shuttered, the shutters rotting. Rosie thought of Nancy Drew mysteries. The Secret of Castle Island. She had
a flashlight in her bag.

“Last stop,” said Charon the boatman. The boat dock had stairs, still sound-looking, and there he tied up his boat. His passengers
got out, but he said he’d stay. Sam looked back at him, studying him, seeming to be deciding if that was all right, that he
stay; and then she led the rest of them up to the great shut doors. They were scarred and cut as though in imprecation or
beseeching with two decades’ worth of initials, names, obscenities, notices of love-couplings, Greek letters.

“Fools’ names,” Rosie said.

“What?” Allan asked.

“Fools’ names, like fools’ faces, oft appear in public places. My mother used to say.”

How were they to open these doors, swing them back on their huge hinges? They didn’t have to: there was a small door inset
in the big door (Pierce Moffett would name this small door for her when later she told him of the visit, it was a
wicket
), and as Allan approached it he took from the pocket of his suit, absurdly, a rusty iron skeleton key as big as a spoon.

She had been opening long-closed doors ever since she returned to the Faraways: that’s what Rosie thought. This one; and the
door to Fellowes Kraft’s house in Stonykill, that had been shut since his death. Doors too to her earliest childhood, lived
in these hills, doors that she came upon unexpectedly in odd corners, before which she would stand in puzzlement till the
key to their combination locks occurred to her or in her. Doors too in herself that she had found but not opened, doors that
might have, she feared, nothing at all behind them.

Lord how sad and strange: stepping over the wicket’s jamb let them into a wide weedy courtyard set with tables and benches,
ready for company but gone gray and warped and fallen, littered with leaves and bird dung. Around the borders, cedars loitered,
outgrown and shaggy, that had once been neat rows of toy-land topiary. At the back, on a dais, sat a pair of wooden thrones,
his and hers.