Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  “What.”

  “That I want to help. That I want to know how.” She started up toward the cabin. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as we thought.”

  While Rose rummaged through the cabin for the last of her belongings and piled them in the car’s trunk, Pierce was asked to mop out the toilet, which he did, and to drag out from the shed where they were stored the plywood panels that had to be screwed on over the windows, protection against weather and winter predators, human and otherwise.

  “So that’s what this is about?” he asked her. “This healing group? Faith healing?”

  “Well healing, yes. Healing in the Spirit. It works, Pierce. It does. I’ve seen it.”

  “I know it works.” Pierce’s fourth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Philomel, had cured a stomach cancer (she said) by prayer; Pierce’s uncle Sam said there was no doubt it was a cancer; he said that those who believe they will get better sometimes do, against all prognoses. Miracles. Every doctor, he’d say, has seen a few. “Of course it works. It just doesn’t work very well, or very reliably anyway. Not as well, or as often, as say penicillin, or surgery.”

  They worked for a time in silence. Pierce found and carried out the last small plywood sheet. “I thought,” he said, “you were talking about healing the spirit. Psychiatric healing.”

  “Sure.” She zipped a huge duffel. “I mean I don’t know if I could ever do it. But wouldn’t it be amazing if. If I could just take hold of someone sick or screwed up and say Begone! And see them get better.”

  “Amazing,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And just who is it,” he said, “that you would be saying this begone to?”

  She pointed at him, at his breast. “That little one,” she said. “That’s the one for the bathroom window around back.”

  “I want to know,” Pierce said. “I do. I want to know about you, learn what I don’t know.”

  They were in his bed, her jam-packed car outside in the fog, the night weirdly warm again.

  “Well,” Rose said. “You could ask.”

  He pondered this, and laughed; after a moment so did she.

  “Psychological testing,” he said. “That could give me an insight.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll test you now,” he said, and her look altered, a look he knew. I’ll test you, Rose. Then she saw that he meant nothing more than what he had said. “This is a test my older cousin Hildy gave us years ago. She brought it back from school.”

  “What school is this?”

  “Her boarding school. Queen of the Angels, in Pikeville, Kentucky. Hildy,” he said gravely, “is today a nun.”

  “Huh,” said Rose. “Well in that case.”

  “I’ll ask you to imagine a house,” Pierce said, folding his hands in his lap. “This house is your house, but it is not any house you have ever lived in. It’s not your dream house or the house you intend one day to live in. It’s just a house.”

  “I love these,” she said.

  “I’m going to ask you to describe certain things about this house, and you have to answer with the first images that come to your mind. Afterward comes the interpretation.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  They both readied themselves, looking inward, somewhat as they had on Rose’s deck in the October evening when together they had practiced phantasmal transmission. Then Pierce said:

  “You’re walking toward the house, first of all. And there are trees. What kind, how big.”

  “Tall dark pines. A bunch. You can’t see the house.”

  “Hm,” said Pierce wisely. “Okay. The front path.”

  “Can’t see it for the trees.”

  “You go in the house,” Pierce said. Rose observing her own inward progress shuddered slightly. “And in the house is a cup. Where, what kind.”

  In the house in the dark pines, a house like her grandfather’s little one where he lived alone, unpainted and dusty but he didn’t care, not about that or anything. It was that house and every house, like houses in dreams; this one she lay in now too, dark too. In the dining room a cabinet, its insides wallpapered in roses.

  “Just a cup,” she said. “In the china closet. Old. Not mine.” So old or maybe long unwashed that a dark or roughened place could be seen on its lip, where drinkers’ mouths had worn away the glaze.

  “A key,” Pierce said.

  “A bunch,” she said. “On a knotted old twine hung inside the back door. Old black skeleton ones and little trunk keys and clock keys and cabinet keys and all, all tied together. One’s the house key maybe.”

  Pierce smiled on her, good work. “Outside,” he said. “A path leading away.”

  “Little, and unfinished. Just worn by people walking.”

  “There’s water there. Some water in some form.”

  She closed her eyes. “The sea.” It rose, dark too, wholly unexpected, heaving black rollers, at the end of the path away.

  Pierce laughed aloud. “The sea?”

  “Sure.”

  There were, he thought, one or two more items on Hildy’s list but he couldn’t remember them. “Okay,” he said, and told her what the things he had named were supposed to stand for in the mental universe: the front path and the trees your past and those who influenced you; the cup, love; the key, knowledge and its uses; the back path the future. The water, sex.

  “An allegory,” he said.

  “The sea,” she said, and laughed a little too. “But what’s it mean?”

  “Well,” he said, foxy therapist, “what do you think it means?”

  She rubbed her head against his chest. “Ask me another,” she said.

  “I don’t know another.” He circled her cool shoulders with his arm. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  She drew closer. “A story.”

  “This story is about a little girl named Rose.”

  “Ah.”

  “And some of the unfortunate things that befell her.”

  “I know this one.”

  “Yes. Maybe you can help me tell it.”

  She listened, and after a time Pierce’s big thumbs pulled down her pants, and he went on talking and she responded; but she also walked in that house that she had built, looking for something, something that ought to be there but that he had not named or asked for. The black pines darkened the windows and the sea unfolded on the shore.

  In the far reaches of the night Pierce awoke, and found that she was awake too beside him. Perhaps her wakefulness had awakened him. He watched her reach for her cigarettes, the flare of the match illuminating her shoulders and her downcast eyes like a saint’s or angel’s candle in a devotional painting.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s sad to be going.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s such a nice area. I’ve been happy. Mostly.”

  “You can’t stay?” he asked. “I mean surely there are all kinds of jobs.”

  “Nope,” she said. “Not for me.” She threw back her head, shook free her hair, exhaled invisible smoke. “Hopeless, hopeless. No es posible.”

  They talked more. He knew there was a question it was incumbent upon him to ask now, but not exactly what it was; or he knew what it was (he had to ask her to stay; to ask her, if she had nowhere to go, to stay here, for a while, from now on) but he would not believe it was his to do. She put out the smoke, he fed at her burnt mouth. “Now sleep,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You want some hot milk?”

  “Oh yuck you’re kidding.”

  After a time she seemed to sleep again, though he did not; he lay and studied the familiar strange shapes of his nighttime bedchamber, the shirt and suit people in the wardrobe whose door had been left open, the great jewel that was the glass doorknob. The new inkblot of his seal or emblem or impresa on the wall, unseeable. And late, so late or early that the night had begun to turn silver in the windows, he heard her weeping beside him; felt the mattres
s they shared shaken slightly by her rhythmic sobs.

  Then it was day. She had slept too long, she said, she was late, Pierce didn’t ask for what. He made her coffee hastily. Half-dressed she drank it, near tears again it seemed, while she searched for her keys (they lay on the seat of her car where she had dropped them, the memory had not yet reached her through the wreckage of the intervening night).

  “There’s so much to do. Get an apartment. Do my studying. I have to take GRE’s,” she said. “I took them once before and did terrible. I can’t this time. So I’m going to go take one of those courses they give, to prepare you.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Big pain. I know I’ll do well though. And there’s the course I’m taking with them.”

  “The Powerhouse,” he said.

  “The Bible and Healing,” she said. She smiled, chipper. “It’s a big commitment.”

  “Two hundred dollars,” he said. He jammed his hands in his pockets, and noticed that his heart had begun to beat more rapidly.

  “I paid it,” she said. “A couple of bonds.”

  “Your getaway money.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “No no you shouldn’t have given it to them,” he said with sudden urgency, rising from his chair. “Listen, listen. If you need it replaced, I’ll give it to you.”

  “Pierce I’m not going to need it.”

  “You never know, you never know,” he said. “You can’t be without your getaway stash. What if you need to get away? You have to have it, you have to. Wait, wait.”

  He went to his stained and ragged canvas bag, rummaged in its contents, and pulled out the envelope that contained five old fifties, his share of Kraft’s own getaway fund, ironed flat from their years inside the Life of Gresham, where Pierce had found them. “Here,” he said. “Here take this.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Sure. It’s not even really mine. I mean it came to me by a strange coincidence, very strange, I don’t have any claim on it but nobody else does either. I don’t want it. I want you to have it.”

  “Pierce.”

  “Don’t spend it ever. Keep it. That way if you ever, ever.”

  She wouldn’t take the envelope from him, but she let him stuff it in her bag; she looked not at it but at him, his big lowered busy head. She thought: It’s so.

  When she’d told them, Mike and the others, that two hundred dollars was a lot for her to spend, they had laughed, and had told her it would come back to her: not in a long time either but quickly, so quickly it would astonish her. And here it was already, even before she had spent it. And from Pierce! She wanted to laugh now, or shout aloud: the foolish wonderful gratification of it, the simple trick of it, which just now she got: that it was so even if it wasn’t so. It didn’t need to be so—didn’t need to have come to your pocket right from God’s hand—but it only happened if you believed it could be so. And maybe that was the real, the best reason for its coming to you: just so you could learn that.

  “Okay,” she said, her heart rich within her, the sweetness with which it was topped up rising to her throat. “And if you need it back.”

  “Sure,” he said. “To pay my fee.”

  “Oh Pierce. Listen.”

  But there wasn’t any way to say it, the sudden glistening web of the world’s construction she perceived, all things tied together and connected. So they stood together in the brown yard for a time, and said little, how they would surely keep in touch, even see a lot of each other maybe, how it wasn’t really that far, not that far at all.

  “An hour’s drive. Hour and a half,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, carelessly. He saw in his mind’s eye the freeways, four and even six lanes, their perilous ramps and exits. He had rarely driven his old Steed sedan on any but the dirt roads and two-lane blacktop, never crowded, of the Faraways; to go farther was, he felt, beyond him, not after all a real driver.

  But he said Sure and they held hands and smiled.

  When we have come at last to the center of a maze (Beau Brachman called this one they stood in Heimarmene) it appears of course to be the end we sought. We sit down there (on the little bench of stone, in the sunlight and the odor of boxwood) and wait for a bit. Whatever is to happen to us, we are sure, will happen here. In fact we are inside out, but we don’t know this. We wait. And there, at length, one day—how does it come to be, does it come in at the ear, or out and upward from within, or does it gather in the air around our heated heads, become the air, is it breathed in with a gasp—we see. We say I see. Some do.

  What Pierce knew about mazes, what he had gleaned from his researches but had not yet had to test, was that the way to exit from a maze (at least one of those built in the great age of mazes) is simply to follow the right-hand wall. Just put out your right hand and keep to that wall. If there had not been such a simple key or trick then the makers themselves would not have been able to get out.

  But Pierce had never been able to tell left from right. It was a comical trait that many who knew him, Rose among them, had laughed at. If asked a direction he always pointed, for if he named it the word that popped out of his mouth might be either, a penny flipped; given the name of a direction in which to turn, he was as likely to turn the opposite way. He could not name the hands of his body without a moment’s deliberation, every time, every single time.

  17

  Imagination! Potent Sprite

  That brings to every yearning Wight

  What most he wants, and instantly!

  Imagination! Let me see

  Discovered in thy Sacred Glass

  The Image of that Perfect Lass

  Intended from the Flood for me,

  My lawful wedded Wife to be!

  She died a thousand Year Ago?

  Will not be born till Hell sees Snow?

  I’ll wed her yet in Fancy’s Bow’r,

  Enjoy her, ev’ry Leisure Hour;

  Build her a House or Mansion fair

  Of Substance thinner than the Air,

  And, solitary, doubled be

  By blessed Possibility!

  It was dark at Arcady, its cupola and tower just visible against the moon, one yellow window lit, like the cover of a Gothic novel; the window was Rosie’s room, and she lay in bed, a flannel shirt over her nightgown and her knees up to hold the big old book. A week till Halloween, and Sam’s appointment at Little Ones. Sam slept beside her, a little bear, facedown but knees drawn under her, her blond curls alone visible, as still as though dead. She’d wanted to sleep in her own bed tonight but Rosie had asked her to stay. Aw cmon Sam please. From far, far below (just the basement, but another country to Rosie) she heard the furnace awake, and go to work. Getting colder. How was it doing down there, anyway, did it need seeing to, by whom? Never done, she thought.

  Ars Auto-amatoria; or; Every Man His Own Wife. A Very Heroick Epyllion in Four Fits. There was a jokey Preface full of wretched puns, some she guessed were there but didn’t get, and a few epigraphs from sources she doubted really existed; there was a list of Persons in the Drama though the thing wasn’t a play at all (The Brothers Ballock, a Pair of Hangers-on; Scrotum, a wrinkled old Retainer) and then the first Fit started. Rosie turned the thick sheets, wondering why it was printed in such large type; maybe old Anon was just terrifically pleased with himself, proud of what he had produced, and all by himself too.

  Art thou a Separated Twin?

  Then find thy Better Half within

  And join in Union Sphericall

  Thyself to self, as Plato’s Ball.

  She remembered that idea from college philosophy—she would have guessed Aristotle though—that we were all really once beings of both sexes, and round (why round? Because the circle was supposed to be the most perfect shape, whatever that meant; Pierce would know). Then somehow divided, like eggs cut in half with a thread; and ever after restless, unsatisfied, looking for our lost halves. Bedeviled eggs. Lucky if you found him, or her; lucky, probab
ly.

  No ancient Goody weighs thy Bed;

  Betrothed art daily, nightly wed.

  See where she stands! In Shift of white,

  Meek as upon her Wedding Night,

  Forever young, though thou grow old,

  Never jaded, never cold

  Cold. She thought of what Pierce had said, the triumph of hope over experience: all those young wives, dead in childbirth, dead from a cat scratch, dead from the plague or the flu. There could be reasons why the prospect was scary, or unsettling. Maybe the writer was not, as she had been imagining, someone old, crabbed and saturnine, but someone young. Maybe very young.

  There was a time just after she was married herself (not a short time either, it had seemed endless to live through) when she had been half-certain she had made a very big mistake. The conviction had appeared first at the altar—not really an altar, a bureau with her mother’s lace tablecloths over it and flowers heaped on it, she and Mike had refused every church and minister proposed to them. Just as the retired judge, her mother’s friend, had bound her to him, she felt an overwhelming awful rush like a hit of bad acid coming on, a nightmare sense of having done something so wrong, so stupid and irrevocable she might have been jumping off a cliff. And it persisted, came and went through the week they spent biking in Vermont and their first weeks in a barracks-like graduate-student housing complex—a barracks in fact, having been thrown up twenty years before for returning vets and their families; Rosie could sense, and envy, their plain hopes and hard work and troubles, which had soaked into the Celotex and the linoleum. She lay awake nearly all night every night memorizing the pine branch that hung in the bedroom window, saying almost but not quite aloud I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t. Until one night came when she lay wishing with all her might that she could know the future, the next ten years, know if she was to see this through and be happy, or if not what: and had realized with sudden force that if she really were allowed to glimpse herself ten years down the road there might be nothing to see: the future—her future—might have come to a stop some time before that moment. Blank. Nothing.