Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  “She’s no longer his lawyer,” Allan said. “She was pretty short about it—miffed almost I want to say, maybe there was some disagreement. Mike seems to have new representation.”

  “Who.” Her heart began a sort of warning tap tap tap.

  “The name mentioned was the firm that’s representing this religious group that’s around. The Powerhouse. You know about them. They’re I guess into some real-estate things?”

  “I think.”

  “Well it seems Mike has changed his mind again, and is asking for a hearing. About custody. And this firm is handling it.”

  Rosie’s grip on the phone had tightened, as though on the throat of an animal, a small animal at her flesh. “What do they call that? Is that Christian?”

  “Sorry?”

  “This big Christian group? They have lawyers to take people to court and take away their children? Is that supposed to be Christian?”

  “You’re asking me?” Allan said. “I’m Jewish, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What can I do,” she said. “Is there anything.”

  “Sure,” Allan said. “You can defend against this. I can tell you what you’ve got to do.”

  “Oh Allan.”

  “I have to say one thing, though,” he said. “From this point I am going to have to bill you.”

  She said nothing.

  “The divorce, you know,” he said, “that was dealt with by Mr. Rasmussen. How he described it in his books I don’t know.”

  Rosie still could say nothing.

  “There’s a certain amount of billing already piling up,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Not really a lot.”

  “Well I’ll pay it, Allan. Just send it.”

  “These things can get expensive. If this group is going to involve itself. I have no idea what their resources are.”

  “I said I’d pay. It might take a while.”

  “Well can I make a sort of suggestion?” He seemed to shift in his big chair, a chair she had often watched him revolve thoughtfully in, and swap ears on his phone. “If you could resolve your questions about the Foundation. I mean about taking on the directorship. Not only would your salary go up a good deal. I’m already the Foundation’s counsel. So.”

  Rosie’s breast tightened terribly. Allan too. Defenseless, she hadn’t known how defenseless she was; naked, like a cartoon or silent-movie character whose clothes are blown away by a sudden wind.

  “Fuck you, Allan,” she said.

  “Rosie.”

  “I’ll handle it myself. Can I do that? I can, can’t I?”

  “It was just a suggestion,” he said mildly.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Send me the stuff.”

  She hung up.

  Run. Run from here where she did not truly belong and never could. Run as her father had run so long ago, maybe back to the Midwest. To her mother. She had to have somebody. For an instant she saw the road running that way, straight, divided by white dashes, into darkness.

  No she couldn’t run, it was certainly illegal; anyway Mike was Sam’s father, she had no right, Sam loved him as much as she loved Rosie, maybe more.

  Can’t run. Can’t die. Down the hall the door to the world still stood open. For a moment Rosie perceived Boney Rasmussen standing there before it, not in the green silk dressing gown in which he had died but in the cuff-worn gray gabardine slacks he always wore and one of his big white shirts, too big for his shrunken torso and buttoned to the neck.

  Just for a moment. Then she went down the hall, carefully as though on a dark path, and shut the door; then locked it and slipped the chain.

  That week on Pierce’s TV (bought cheap on the streets of his old slum neighborhood, the spoils of crime no doubt, but he had himself been despoiled more than once and so a rough balance had thereby been struck) the exposure of a West Coast mage and his cult had been proceeding; Pierce watched, twitching and cocking his rabbit ears this way and that to get even a dim glimpse here in the valley between the mountains. The man had entranced an unknown number of followers with his purported powers, especially his powers to heal; and then a young asthmatic among them, who had given himself over completely to the man, abjuring all medical treatment, had died in his company. And the rest had apparently gathered there in the mage’s apartment, with the corpse, and he had promised them that if their faith were strong enough, he and they could raise the dead man.

  Days he had lain there while they prayed and willed. Until at length someone’s faith failed or someone came knocking or the call was made.

  Tonight the cameras were pursuing into and out of court a well-known entertainer, a comic in fact, not comic now as she pushed through the crowd surrounded by lawyers. Many of the man’s adherents had been entertainers and actors, some of them famous: magicians themselves, you’d think they would have known.

  But oh Lord in that room with death, trying to defeat it: having willfully gone into the place that cannot be gone into. The dreadful illusion and its exposure, the door broken open, the cops amazed, the sleepers there awakening at last or trying to awaken or never to awaken. The dead one though still dead. Smelling too. What was the horror at the heart of it, something shit-black he tasted in the back of his throat, he could taste but not touch it, what was the name of that horror.

  He turned it off.

  All magic is bad magic. He thought this thought for the first time. To do magic you must take power over others, and you must believe you can do what can’t be done, and make others believe it too. All magic is bad magic.

  Was it so?

  What if he and she had ever, what if in their madness and willingness they were ever to go so far. Folie à deux. It apparently happened, his own father (haunter these days of city bathhouses and dark bars) told him he had heard of male couples who had entered into relations of such force and fascination, athletes or saints of sex, that one had succumbed under the ministrations or exactions of the other. And then the door pounded on, the landlord, the cops, death found to have visited there where he had been invited to come: really death, not death as symbol for deathlessness (unto death) and not death as more vivid life, but death simple, death itself.

  I see your soul when I see you come, he had said to her: had seen it rise to her eyes and stand upon the threshold of her parted lips. Not to step over and out though. No. No es posible. Pierce before the darkened TV felt suddenly afraid; wanted nothing but to embrace her, right now, and say I was kidding, yes, listen listen, I was only kidding.

  He didn’t want power over her; all he had ever wanted with her, what he supposed no magic he could do could ever really grant him, was to be her, to be on the inside of her when she felt the things he caused her to feel, or helped her to cause herself to feel. Not for good of course or permanently, only at that moment, when she arrived at that incandescence; but he wanted it then intensely, unslakably, utterly.

  And what if he had to push a little further every time, a little harder, in order to get her down into the furnace room, the world all heat, and himself with her, there where he wanted to be, had always and only wanted to be, no matter what else he had ever pretended to be about? With her and through her and in her. In ipsam et cum ipsa et per ipsam. Maybe he would on some night push a little too far, vacatio made permanent and irreversible as the subjectivity itself exited from her open mouth, from his too: mors osculi they called it, morte di bacio, the Death of the Kiss, possible (so Marsilius saith, so Don John Picus) for striving souls too loosely adhering to the flesh.

  No again. I tell you three times.

  He went to his bedroom, aroused and afraid, she close by him. On the wall near the bed’s side hung the emblem he had made for her, the old frame and the new little picture. The Marriage of Agent and Patient. It should have been put away, he should not have sat as long as he had before it, but of course by now it was too late. He lay down not on his own bed but on the other, the naked mattress, and inhaled its odor and hers, looking and listening
too within for the same thing, the trace of her. And he felt, even in the midst of his heat, a familiar chill, like the onset of fever: that premonition that soon and unavoidably a whole banquet of symptoms will be brought before you, and you will eat and eat, until you die, or get better.

  Love is magic, Giordano Bruno said; magic is love. The magician and the lover are both venatores animarum, hunters of souls; by emblems and by arts, the magician draws down into his heart the powers of heaven, that is the star-persons through whom the whole of nature and the spirits of men and women are ordered, and have their meaning. He ranges these powers within him and asks: teach me to bind, with bonds like love’s, the things of this world and the hearts of others. And they do, they can. And thus we become like gods.

  But the gods are themselves constantly at work, spinning and weaving with the rays that all things produce. They do not like to be renounced, they will not suffer it; they knit up bonds to bind us to them in love and worship, they are venatores too and come after us with their lures. And we invite them to do it, we pray to them to do it, and they do.

  Give us this day our daily bread, we pray. Give us what we need and what we want.

  And worshipping them we bind ourselves, we are bound to the ones whose gifts we take.

  And the greatest of these is Love: Love himself, or herself; Eros, dæmon magnus, that son of the morning star, that boy, his other name is Don Cupido, the little lord of all things, he whose avatar or manifestation (there are others, countless others, one perhaps for each of us) had for a while inhabited Pierce’s house and heart and then departed, taking Pierce’s sleep with him: his work there done, and well done too.

  Always poor, a beggar, shoeless and homeless, says Plato, sleeping out for want of a bed; but because his father is Hermes he is a clever hunter too, a magician, always devising tricks, scheming to get for himself all that is beautiful and good.

  Oh the traps the gods have prepared for us, for us their worshippers; how long and well they’ve worked. We are older than they, far older than the oldest of them; we have come from farther away, way back beyond where they were born: but we don’t know that, we have forgotten it—and they know we have forgotten it. And that’s why they can do with us what they like most of the time, especially when we think we have escaped them. That’s why, in other words, the world has lasted so long, and why we are all still here.

  1

  Madimi was gone.

  Edward Kelley had done what he had so often promised to do: he had ceased to skry. After that day, the day following the night that he and John Dee had done the great sin they had been ordered to do, he kept the vow that he had made in his anguish, never to speak to them again. Not her or any of them.

  He seemed, anyway, to have no need to. He had been given what he wanted. Though weak and languid at first, unable to rise from his couch, weeping sometimes, laughing sometimes, he had soon grown strong again, stronger than ever; he seemed to grow taller even, his wrists growing out the sleeves of his gown and its hem rising around his ankles, as though he had been replaced by another, a similar but taller man. He needed room; he made it clear to the Duke (speaking loudly and lifting a forefinger, his new temerity alarmed John Dee, but not as much as the faint constant tremor in Kelley’s hand) that from now on he would need apartments of his own.

  Not for a growing family, though: his wife that fall was taken home. The letters she had written long before from Poland had at length arrived in Chipping Norton where she was born, and her brothers had meditated on them, and sold a cottage and an orchard, and equipped themselves (unable to imagine what they would encounter Abroad, brave boys, they had each a pistol and a crucifix of silver and a magistrate’s warrant) and so had come (a year had passed by then) to Tebo to rescue her. Kelley had greeted them with liberality, laughing hugely, loading them with gifts, and they had looked around themselves at the fine painted rooms and the hangings and tableware and the silver ewer of wine Kelley poured and poured from, and for a moment they wondered: but Joanna weeping in the night told them that what she had written was nothing, nothing, compared to what had befallen since, things that she had not and never could write or even speak; they mustn’t ask her, only let them all be gone as soon as might be. Kelley (not in his bed, to which he had told them he was going, but listening at the door) bade her farewell. Farewell farewell he thought, and felt a small fire kindle in his breast; he brought the nails of his hand to his mouth and bit them, as he had not done since he was a boy.

  —She troubled me, he said to John Dee. God go with her, and let her be gone. She kept me from my work.

  As though he had embarked on a task like those laid on the poor lads of old tales, impossible things that had all to be done in a night, he labored ceaselessly, drew up plans in the morning, ordered servants in the evening, read by lamplight all night; seemed to have lost the need for sleep, sure sign of a hectic melancholy—John Dee noted it—but Kelley only grew stronger. He had John Carpio, indispensable workman, begin a new furnace, larger than any they had built before, in a room over the gate of the palace of Tebo: “He used of my rownd bricks,” Dee noted in his journal, “and was contented now to use the lesser bricks, 60 to make a furnace,” it seemed not to matter to him as long as the work went forward quickly, when it didn’t he exploded in wrath, terribilis expostulatio accusatio Dee wrote. He nearly burned his book, working too hastily with spirits of wine, but seemed not to care about that either, waved Dee away when he fussed over the scorched pages.

  —Keep it, he said. Tolle, lege: take it and read.

  All Prague soon knew that Kelley was aflame—these things could not be kept secret, though the work itself might be. Since philosophic gold, the new bright gold we make in our alembics and our athenors, is a product of the operator’s soul as much as of the fire and the matter, it is possible through certain signs to tell which soul, like a broody hen, is in a state to produce it; and a worker’s certainty that he is able to produce it—a sudden brilliant confidence, a winged state, a golden aspect, glints of gold even suddenly visible in the iris of the eye—that is the surest sign of all. The aristocratic hungerers who patronized Prague’s alchemists, the great cunning-men around the King, even the smoke-blackened toilers of Golden Lane, all saw it in Kelley.

  Soon there were other signs too, or rumors. Someone who claimed to have seen him do it said he could produce the Mercurius solis in only a quarter of an hour. It was said he gave rings of gold wire to a servant of the Duke’s upon his marriage, and one to each of the guests as well, four thousand pounds’ worth ran the tale by the time it reached England, “openly Profuse,” Elias Ashmole would later write, “beyond the modest Limits of a sober Philosopher.”

  Never less than courteous and kind to John Dee and his family, Duke Romberk nevertheless was drawn as by a lodestone to the younger man. Now when he went to Prague to wait on the Emperor, he often took Kelley with him; when he came to Tebo, after a brief restless call on Dee and his family, he would shut himself up with Kelley in the room over the gate.

  Dee said nothing. He said nothing when Kelley commanded away his own best workmen, said nothing except to his private diary; said nothing when Joanna Kelley was allowed to return home with her brothers, except that he and Jane went with her to church before she left, and took the Sacrament with her, and Joanna afterward “to me and my wife gave her hand in Charitye, and we rushed not from her.”

  He said nothing when under Duke Romberk’s protection Kelley moved house to Prague City, where Dee was still forbidden to go, to grand rooms in the Duke’s palace in the shadow of the Hradschin; nothing when the great and the curious flocked to visit him there, when the poet and courtier Edward Dyer, who had long been Dee’s friend and was his son Arthur’s godfather, arrived from England only to take up exclusively with Kelley and write home to the court of Kelley’s wonder-working. Years later Dee would write of the “most subtill devises and plots laid, first by the Bohemians, and somewhat by the Italians, and lastly by some of m
y owne countrymen”: but he said nothing then.

  He said nothing, but his wife knew he mourned; as for a lost child, she thought (her own child Theodore, hungriest and most eager of all her children, was at her breast) and she was in a sense right: but the child he mourned was not, or was not wholly, Edward.

  The round glass of clear crystal still stood in its frame in the tower room, but cold, vacant: gone out, like a lamp.

  Never once, in all the years he had faithfully attended on them, from the time when he had first acquired a bright black obsidian mirror (cut and polished on the other side of the world for a Mexican lady’s toilet) down to this day—never once had John Dee himself been given sight in chrystallo. Long ago he might sometimes have believed for a day or a week that he had seen, but nothing came of what he saw (a tower, a room, a rose) so it had surely been his own desire only that he had seen, as we see faces in trees and clouds.

  Never once.

  He stood in his nightgown at the door of the tower room, a candle in his hand. He could see the candle flame, like the living spark in an eye, glitter on the cold ball’s surface.

  Why have you refused me that, kept that gift from me? The only one, of all those proffered, that I desired.

  He went into the little room. The table of practice he and Kelley with their own hands had built with such care exactly to the angels’ specifications stood in the middle of the room, each of its four feet resting on a seal of pure wax made in a certain pattern, a sigillum Æmæth, a multiple cross with Hebrew letters on it standing for the words Thou art great forever O Lord. On a larger seal of the same kind (twenty-seven inches in diameter, they had said, an inch and a half thick, how sweetly childish they could seem in their punctiliousness) stood the frame of sweet wood that held the glass.

  And what if it had been for Edward as for himself: that there was nothing at first to see in stones like this, until he taught himself to see them there? What if Edward had not received those spirits out of the glass into his mouth and heart at all, what if they had really proceeded from his heart into the glass, there to reside thereafter, and speak to him his own thoughts?