DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (57 page)

Val suddenly stopped still. Pierce saw that he had spoken a name;
and that it was the name of someone she knew, the name of someone
he
knew even though he couldn’t think who it was or how he knew her.

“Una Knox,” Val said. “Oh my God.” She turned away from the throng in consternation, and gripped her brow: A last firework
was lofted into the air with a long suspenseful whisper, and then popped lazily. “Then. Oh my God it
was
just some kind of joke. She’s not real.”

“She isn’t?
Who
isn’t?” Pierce called after her.

“Rosie! Rosie!” Val cried, catching sight of Rosie’s back, or front. But when the person turned to Val, Pierce saw it was
a different old gent, a real one, who had just come as he was. Val went off looking side to side. And Pierce remembered who
Una Knox was: the woman Boney Rasmussen said he was leaving all that he had to.

Well she was real; real enough. Una P. Knox, great Uthra of the end, third of the three great ones, everyone’s mother and
heir. Rosie Rasmussen had often told him that Boney had refused to admit that he, just like everybody, was bound for that
endless night. But Boney had known all right, he had only resisted; his resistance had of course been futile but he’d known
that too. So one last small joke in the face of it or her: he had left her everything.

He looked up. On the ramparts above appeared Night herself in sable furs.

Rose Ryder came down toward him weaving gracefully, a top slowing down.

“See,” she said, “you let me stay too late. I knew you would.” “No,” Pierce said. “No we’ll go. It’s over anyway.”

No it was not Boney Rasmussen who would not honor Death; it was Ray Honeybeare and Mike Mucho and the rest of them, Dr. Retlaw
O. Walter; it was they who denied her.
O Death where is thy sting
. Rose Ryder could come here dressed as her, as Night, just because it was not who she was. It was who she was fleeing from,
Beau said: but she had fled in the wrong direction, right into the arms of other powers, and all those powers were the same,
all the way down or out; and now Pierce thought she was deeper in than before, and he didn’t know how to reach her, and would
not dare go there if he did.

“So tell me,” he asked her as he helped her toward the boat. “How long were you living in the City?”

“Oh not long. A few months.”

“And when you were there,” Pierce said. “What did you do? Who did you, what.”

“I don’t remember.”

“And when was this? I was there then. Was this after you ran away from Wesley?”

“Who?”

“Wesley. Wes. Your first husband. The one who.”

“Him?” She opened her eyes in surprise and amusement, holding his arm. “Well you tell me,” she said, and laughed. “It was
you who made him up.”

But did she come at last to the party, Una Knox, she herself and not another dressed as her? For wasn’t she invited, or at
least expected? Well that could be her disembarking from the paddleboat now, hugely tall in a drape of sight-drowning black,
a head of stark white bone, not a skull exactly or not a human skull but certainly something from which the flesh has fallen
and which the sun has bleached, anyone who’s lived on earth would recognize it; and bony sockets within which no eye can be
seen or imagined.

It’s very late now and the revellers are actually shedding bits of their getups as inconvenient or already falling apart,
not who they ever were; more people are now going out than in. The band’s about to quit, and does quit just as this personage
comes to stand in the doorway. Everyone, not everyone at once but each group as it is passed, turns to look and wonder, and
stops talking for a moment, the braver ones calling out greetings or acknowledgment, not returned except by a look. Up at
the back on the dais, Rosie stands to see this dark eminence, the last dignitary to be greeted, the one she’s waited for.

Coming in behind, exciting almost as much awe or interest, a spindly wraith in sheepskins, long white hair floating on the
heaters’ airs, eyes so pale they must be sightless yet they look left and right and seem to smile. The bony dark one stops
before Rosie and puts out a big plain human hand. Tattooed on the back—tattooed so long ago it’s grown obscure, though Rosie
knows it instantly—is a blue fish. The hand opens and shows or proffers a large ugly tooth, a canine tooth, a wolf’s tooth.

“For you. All I brought.”

“Oh you,” Rosie says.

Spofford lifts for a moment the mask from his head (not a skull but a lamb’s pelvic bone, sun-whitened and still smelling
inside of the high plains where he found it) and is seen to be grinning broadly, pleased with himself. The dead tooth in the
middle of his own mouth has come out on this trip somehow at last, leaving a comic hole.

“Oh you bastard,” Rosie says, weeping and laughing at once into his black cloak, holding him tight. “Oh you.”

From down below, where not only spectral Cliff but everyone else has been watching, it looks as though great Death has taken
another
elderly victim from behind, wrenching the man’s poor limbs all out of bent: and they all laugh, for of course it’s not Death
at all, not at all.

“But what
happened?
” she says. The big tooth is hard in her hand. “What the hell happened?”

“I’ll never tell,” Spofford says. A glance Cliff’s way. “It can’t be told.” But he’s still grinning, and it seems that one
day—maybe long after it’s not true anymore—he might.

“See, Moffett,” Rose Ryder said to Pierce. “The difference was. In our relationship. You were mostly interested in the sex.”

Pierce registered the past tense. “Yes?”

“To me there were other things. Things that meant more.”

“There were?”

“Sure.”

What other things had there been, he wondered, had things happened between them that he had had no knowledge of or was she
forgetting how every night, every single night. What would she rather have been doing?

Her black mask was on a chair beside his broad bed, where she lay, pretty drunk and grinning blissfully, moving slowly as
though sunk in clear syrup. The ass’s head was on the floor and yet still affixed to Pierce’s shoulders, where it was to remain
for a long time.

“To
me
,” she said, and raked her long hair with both her hands. “To me there were other things.”

Well he had been wrong so far about everything else, so maybe what she said was so. It seemed likely, suddenly, certain even,
self-evident. It hadn’t been he serving her, laboring to bring her to awareness of her own nature and forcing her assent to
it: no. Out of her own generosity or curiosity or awesome acquiescence, whatever it had been (love, no don’t call it love)
she had bent herself to fill needs that
she
had uncovered or divined in
him
, latent till then.

Sure. All along. Maybe she was glad for him, glad to do it, it being so obvious what he wanted, what he so badly needed. Like
a strong nurse who’s able to put up with excretions and cryings-out, body needs of any kind, her job or role, until it grew
at last too onerous.

But did you like it?
she had asked him, shivering and weeping in his arms after his first exactions.
Did you, did you really like it, did you?

“Well I have to tell you,” he said, and the lump in his throat hurt as though the words themselves scored it in their passage.
“I. I never, you know. I never did those things with anyone else. Never with anyone before.”

“Oh?” she said, smiling. “Hard to believe.”

“I’m not really,” he said, “I mean I don’t really,” and then nothing more, for he could see even despite her unfocussed forgetful
eyes that she did not believe him at all, and never would or could; not that or anything else he said on that score. And he
had taught her that.

“Say listen,” she said, and rose a little on her elbow. “Hic. When you called me before. You said you had something really
important to say. Hic. Then you never said it.”

“Oh ah,” said Pierce, and sat on the end of the bed. Why was it that every day, every hour that passed seemed to fly into
remote antiquity almost instantly, to become so hard to remember, positively conjectural, before it could be acted on or its
consequences grasped? “Well it was crazy, in a way. A crazy idea.” She only waited, still smiling. “Well. I thought. I thought
that there was a way out, or maybe through, our difficulties.”

“What difficulties?”

“I was going to ask you,” and he dove, “to marry me.”

But she had drifted off, to sleep or elsewhere, and returned too late to hear.

“What did you say?”

“I was going to ask you,” he said, and a burble of weird laughter arose in him to reiterate it, it was just so god damn stupidly
sad, “to marry me.”

“Oh.”

“Kids,” Pierce said. “Maybe.”

“Oh. Jeez. God that is just so hic sweet.” Even through the blur of alcohol clouding her face he could see her eyes aglow.
“Pierce.”

“I thought: if you did, if you would, then I.”

“Aw,” she said. “You know though really. I couldn’t marry anyone who didn’t share my faith.”

Now he did laugh, gently, at himself as much as at her, but certainly at her: her abstracted drunken serious certainty, immemorial
seemingly but only adopted a month or so ago, he wondered what it would be like to be able to speak a new language with such
conviction. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I see.”

“Hic,” she said.

“I just thought it up. Wild hair up my ass. You know.”

“Hic,” she said again, and looking appalled she tried to rise. “Oh hic no. I’ve got the hic hiccups. I hate that. I’ll have
them now for hours. Hic. I always do.”

“Drink water backwards. Breathe into a bag.”

“I tried that once and hic passed out.”

“What I thought was,” Pierce said, “that if you could say Yes to that
question, then I could put up with. With anything.” He folded his hands, and hung them between his knees. “Anything. I don’t
know why I thought it. Why don’t you pray?”

She looked on him, and then turned to lay her head in his lap. He felt the small spasm of her next hiccup.

“What,” Pierce said. “It wouldn’t work on hiccups?”

“Of course it would ‘work,’” she said, laughing. “Of course.”

“If thou be willing, remove this hiccup from me,” Pierce said. “But not my will but thine be done.”

“Pierce.”

“Well.”

She closed her eyes. “Holy Spirit be with me and in me,” she said. “Please let these hiccups stop. I ask this in Jesus’s name.
Amen.”

Her head in his lap was heavy. So small in compass, so huge inside, infinite actually. She breathed in and out. There were
no more hiccups; the hiccups were gone. In a few moments she was asleep.

“I remembered I’d been there before,” Rosie Rasmussen was just then saying to Spofford. By her bed, her own old one still
and not Boney’s former one, lay all of Boney’s clothes in a heap, as though Boney had dropped them there. “When I was thirteen
or so. I was sent there for a cough that wouldn’t stop. The girl in the bed next to mine died. I was there when she died in
the night.”

Spofford’s long bare body like a dark god’s was arrayed on the bed, his head supported by his arm and fist, one knee raised
and his other hand resting languidly on it: a river god, Bernini’s or Tiepolo’s, Rosie was thinking these things with a part
of her mind unenlisted for the telling of what she told or the feeling of what she felt. She wiped her tears with a corner
of the sheet. She had thought she could tell about what she had learned in the hospital, not back then but now, about illness
and being alive and patience and chance, about the odds and how they are different from fate: the odds aren’t fate at all
even though you can be fooled into thinking they are, that the terrible thing or the illness or the wonderful recovery is
not just the odds but something that had been waiting there all along to happen; it’s not. She believed this still but she
was too afraid and drunk and depleted to make it sound true, and she let it pass through her and be lost; but it wasn’t lost,
it would return, it was part of her now.

“I found out then in the hospital, that first time,” she said, “that I didn’t want to die; that I wanted to be in the world.
I hadn’t been before but I wanted to be. Maybe that’s how I got better. I got better when that girl died. Isn’t that strange
to think. Like a trade. But it wasn’t.”

“No,” Spofford said. “It wasn’t.”

“Well it’s not easy for me. Being in the world. It still isn’t.”

“No,” said Spofford, who knew. “It isn’t.”

“You have to learn it over and over. Like finding something you lost again and again.”

“How can I help?” Spofford said.

Rosie thought of the knights Pierce and she talked about, who went out and did things women told them to do, if they could.
She thought it wouldn’t matter if they did it because they had to, or for reasons of their own; it happened at least. When
there was no other way it could.

“I want you to help me take her back,” Rosie said. “It could be weeks till I can do it, you know, through the coutrts. But
I’m so afraid that if I wait … I just can’t wait.”

“What,” Spofford said. “Snatch her?”

Rosie made no answer. They both listened to the winter night and the silence of the house where Sam was not.

“It’s not just for me or her,” Rosie said, thinking of what Beau had said. “It’s more. I can’t explain.” She couldn’t explain
because she hadn’t understood what Beau had meant, but she was willing to say it anyway, on the chance that it might move
Spofford, as it had her; but she didn’t need to, he would have done it for her, he would have done it for Sam alone, which
was the only motive that could actually succeed. But what was it, exactly, that he was to do?

“I just want her back,” Rosie said. “I want you to get her back.”

I
t was actually some years, several years, before Pierce saw Rose Ryder again, and they were very different people by then.
It was in the Midwest, actually, which turned out to be quite unlike the place he had imagined it to be; he had never had
occasion to visit there. They walked and talked together by the side of a wide brown river; it was night, but the water seemed
to illuminate it with a glow it possessed, and there were lights too, far off where the river made a sweeping bend, toward
which they went.

He wanted to know first of all if she was all right, of course, and it seemed she was; she talked of those days with a tolerant
humor, it was a long time ago now. Pierce marvelled at the strength of human desire and aspiration, a hunger profound beyond
all these schemes, greater than anything proposed to fill it. She shook her head, and flicked the end of her cigarette with
her thumbnail (never had quit apparently) and told him how she had come through.

“I can’t complain,” she said. “Never complain, never explain. That’s my motto.”

What surprised him most about her now was that she had cut her hair short, he didn’t know when or why and was shy to ask;
had cut it short and yes lightened its color too, it was almost blond, a tawny complex color he could not resolve in the night
and the river light. He lifted his hand to touch it, and she suffered him.

“There’s just a lot you don’t know, Pierce,” she said, and he thought that yes so there was, and he thought without fear that
he wanted to know it, he did: and in his thinking this his heart seemed to return again into his bosom.

They walked the dim towpath. This river, he knew, was a tributary of the same great river into which the river flowed that
received the waters of the Shadow and the Blackbury far away. You could set out on
this one and go back and back until you reached the juncture of those.

“I mostly wanted to say,” he said, “that I’m sorry I was such a. That I managed everything I was given to do so badly. That
I failed. That I was so stupidly unkind.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Anyway it wasn’t a bad experience. They taught me a lot.” A smile of remembrance or anticipation
bloomed in her face, and she seemed to grow young. “Know what I can still do?” she asked. “Watch.”

She had taken out a match, a kitchen match of the largest kind, and held it up in the dark between them, and looked fixedly
at its red head. He knew the look: he had just time in which to recognize it (hieroglyph of his damned state) when the match,
untouched, burst into flame.

The furious hiss and flare of it woke him, mouth open and gulping, heart striking hard. Beau Brachman stood in his living
room, holding a small paper bag and looking through the arch at Pierce lying on the daybed.

“You guys left that party quick,” Beau said. “I never caught up with Rose again.”

“She wanted to get some sleep,” Pierce said. He pulled out the makings for a pot of coffee. “She left pretty early. She had
to be back for something.”

“What something?” Beau asked.

“I don’t know.”

Beau put the paper bag he carried on Pierce’s kitchen table. “You need something to go with that coffee,” he said.

“I’m not really hungry.”

“Ah,” said Beau. “Rosie says you’re not eating right.”

Once again Pierce was surprised, disbelieving actually, to hear that others thought about him, talked about him to one another.
“No no,” he said. “No no.”

Beau had opened the paper bag he had brought and was considering its contents. “Granola,” he said. “We make this. It’s sold
all over. Well all over the county anyway. This kind is …” He sniffed it. “This is Gone Nuts granola, I think. Or Totally
Spirit.”

“Gee,” Pierce said. “Either would do.” He had in fact never eaten granola. He finished making his bitter brew.

“There’s something we’ve got to find out,” Beau said. “We need to know where Sam is.”

“You think Rose would know?”

“I hoped she was still here. So I could ask her.”

“I can call her later. I guess. I’m not sure she’d, she’d …”

“No. That’s not good.” He opened a cabinet and found a bowl suitable for cereal; examined it as though for flaws; and set
it down beside the bag. “When were you going to see her again?”

“I think,” Pierce said, “I’m not going to. At all ever. That’s kind of my plan. I mean maybe someday, when … well.”

“You’ve told her this?”

“No.” She had genuinely delighted in the great Ball, in his attentions, in the fireworks, everything, drinking it in as though
it were distilled just for her. And Pierce knew he would die if he didn’t break off with her.

“Beau, at the party you said,” Pierce began, and then paused, unsure whether Beau really had said this, in so-called waking
life anyway. “You said that it wasn’t my fault. This. All this.”

“Yes.”

“But that it still might be mine to fix.”

“Yes.”

“I think that too. I don’t believe it but I think it.”

“The story’s about you,” Beau said.

“But why would I be so important, why me and not somebody else?” he cried. “It’s crazy to think that. It’s crazy to
think
something you don’t
believe
.”

“Look,” Beau said. “Why did you think it was, that you happened to appear here? Just here, in the Faraways? That day when
you did, last summer, a summer ago. Didn’t you think it was strange how you came into this story?”

“Everything’s strange,” Pierce said. “Or nothing is.” But he thought of it, how on a noontime he had got off the bus on his
way to the city of Conurbana; how he had sat in the shade of a great tree, a huge living thing, whose leaves had lifted in
a breeze that passed through the valley then; a Little Breeze that stirred his hair and his heart. He thought he had been
escaping, escaping at last.

“The world is made from stories,” Beau said, as though imparting a simple truth to a child, who was hearing it for the first
time, first of the many times it would take to become a truth. “And right now it’s this one. And will be till it’s all told.”

“One story,” Pierce said. “That’s what
she
says. What they say. I won’t believe it.”

“You’re not required to finish it,” Beau said. “But you’re not supposed to give it up either.”

“See this is what’s crazy,” Pierce said wildly. “This is the craziness of thinking that the world is a plot, a game, something
to be figured out or solved. Exactly the kind of sick, the kind of. No. No.”

“The world is a game,” Beau said. “And it’s also a world too.”

“I can’t go back there,” Pierce said. “Not to that city. I can’t.” “I’m not saying it’s not hard,” Beau said. “Dangerous even.
Even if it’s only you who thinks so.”

“I can’t,” Pierce said. “I disagree in principle.”

Beau rose, and came to where Pierce stood. For a moment Pierce thought that Beau meant to embrace him, and he waited in dread
and hope for this, whatever it might mean, whatever it would impart. But Beau only slipped his arm through Pierce’s, as though
he thought Pierce might fall; he turned his hand, and took Pierce’s hand in a strong backwards grip.

“Well if you do go, if you go today to find her,” Beau said, as if Pierce had entertained that possibility, even for a moment,
which he hadn’t, “if you go, see if you can learn about Sam. Today. It’s important, and you’re the only connection now.”

When Beau was gone Pierce sat before the bowl and bag.

He supposed you ate this stuff with milk. It was all he had to eat. He got up and looked in the fridge, milk, how about that,
and unsoured.

Sugar too, totally spirit, white as white.

He mixed all these things and lifted a heaping, dripping spoonful toward his mouth.
It’s a game, and it’s a world too
. What Rose had said:
That was only a game
. No matter; they had played for keeps. And now see. Not required to finish it, can’t give it up either.

He bit down. Instantly his mouth was flooded with a taste that was the exact cognate of a smell, one that for a brief time
somewhen had ruled his life with an awful power but that he had not smelled since; now it, and all that time with it, rushed
into his sensorium, he could see, taste, smell nothing else, though he could give it no name or place.

He bit again, shifting the awful bolus in his mouth, and there arose within him in all its detail the summer camp to which
once, at age nine or even eight, he had been remanded by his mother and father, who somehow knew no better, thought maybe
to get him out of the apartment and the city and his books for a while anyway; and the utter exile he had experienced there.
Axel had not reckoned, and Winnie couldn’t have understood, that he didn’t know the first thing about ordinary boyhood, did
not know even the rules of baseball in any but a general way, did not know how to do the Australian crawl or paddle a canoe;
he had not dared to speak to anyone there lest these shortcomings be discovered, had hidden and skulked, had not even been
able to ask where the bathrooms were and had
peed his pants
for the first days of his captivity there (earning the utter scorn and rejection of every other boy who came near him, but
Pierce was too terrorized to regret or even to notice this, even now no single face came back to him of all those happy lads)
until at last and by chance he had come upon the noisome outhouses, and realized nearly fainting with relief and revulsion
what they were: and it was the odor of that row of shacks, their pits, their lime buckets, their soiled paper, whatever exactly
constituted it, that overwhelming acrid odor, that had been released in this bite of granola that Pierce still held between
his teeth, unable for a long moment either to swallow or expel it.

He stood, gulping, brimful of self-pity. How could they have, how could they. How could he, but he only a little kid after
all, ah poor little son of a bitch. He realized he was to weep again, and the rage not to weep, to weep no more, made the
sobs when they came out the more awful.

Oh that place. The dreadful company of his fellows, the penitential meals, the round of meaningless activity that could not
be refused, rarely avoided. He had not, ever after, felt so whittled away, so at a loss, so subject to inescapable and unfeeling
others, not until the army, which that camp resembled in every respect, down to the burr haircuts and the noise level.

No he had not gone into the army, what was he thinking. He lifted his head. He had not been a soldier, had made himself appear
undesirable, undraftable according to the standards of the day, by what should have been a transparent ruse, but that he had
made convincing maybe by his apparently frank cooperation—he had actually asked the recruiting officer if it were possible
to appeal their decision to reject him.

Had he even gone to that camp? It seemed impossible that he could have.

He looked down at his inoffensive bowl of grains, but didn’t dare take another bite. A horrid thought fled through him: that
Beau had given him the stuff for a reason
. A pawn in a game of Beau’s own, he was caught now, captured. No now
that
was crazy for sure. What reason, anyway.

He sat again. He remembered how he had left the Army Recruiting Station on Whitehall Street in bottommost Manhattan and been
unable to go more than a block, just out of their sight, before he had to sit down on the curb amid the crowds and weep in
relief and gratitude. Out.

Unthinking he ate more of the granola. One bite, another.

Assent and escape. That had been his gambit with powerful figures of every kind, hadn’t it, not only with the army, the church,
but with teachers and employers too, with his advisor Frank Walker Barr, his agent Julie Rosengarten: being too timid to deny,
to dismiss, to fight back, Pierce had only assented, finding no reason not to assent. As he had to his uncle Sam’s commandments
too, under whose rule he found
himself without his choosing and yet without any reasonable grounds on which to protest;
seeming
to assent anyway, trying to assent, crafting the absolute dissent of his heart into something that looked like assent: cunningly,
out of motherwit and doubletalk, metaphysical quibbles, extended metaphors and evasive anagogies, until it was convincing
even to himself. And by that means escaping the judgment of those to whom he must seem to assent.

Of course there was One who could not be escaped by those means; and that One had taken his beloved, and embraced her, and
now she was His, and beckoned Pierce too to assent; and he couldn’t, no more, not this time. And so he must turn away and
hide, or stand and fight. Fight or flight. That was all.

Was he going to have to believe that?

It apparently didn’t matter what he believed, only what he did.

Well he would do it then. In the face of its impossibility and asininity, which was the very point.
A fool’s errand
, the only kind he would ever be sent on or chosen for; if he did not accept it he would be chosen for none.

So he went and washed and dressed warmly and put some whiskey in his flask, his silver flask, and left his house early that
afternoon. He went out to his old Steed, spavined Rosinante, and took his place behind the wheel. Then he got out again, and
went back to the house, for he had forgotten his car key.

The
front path
of my house is beaten by my own footsteps, there is no other.

The guardian
trees
are long gone if they were ever there. The
cup
I find is plain and much-used, and through it runs a dreadful crack; it is the one I asked might pass from me; I drink from
it still, last thing before I go. The
key
is on the desk among my papers, and it is this one, the key to my car, that I need for the journey. Outside my back door
is another
path
, the path we first came up together, going the wrong way; the
water
that is there is the endless river, it wells up amid the rocks and flows through the pumps and hoses of my house, the same
river that runs far under the earth and in the heavens too.