Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  Bisect the east and west angles of this triangle and the lines meet in Stonykill, at Arcady in fact, the house built last century by Rosie’s forebears and now the seat of the Rasmussen Foundation. Drop a plumb from the triangle’s peak through its base and it will arrive at length just here, at Butterman’s, right at this tower at the island’s tip, the belvedere where Rosie looked out.

  Secret geometries of earth such as these tend to loosen over time, slide away from true, and become ambiguous. It always happens, was happening just then to these; they would not survive the change just then sweeping unfelt over the county and the world. But since no one had ever discovered them in the days when they still obtained, no one would notice when they failed.

  2

  The worldwide wind that had blown so strongly on the night of the autumn equinox that year (don’t look for it in your almanacs, they date from later on, conscientious editors have already altered these impossibilities and healed the weird lacunæ) resembled autumn storms of the kind we all remember very well, indeed was such a storm in every way—the barometric pressure fell fast, an awful weight was felt on every breast, a black exhilaration too as the front, tall as the night sky, passed over, roaring and stamping; then the bright day following on, littered with tree limbs and tossed shingles, and the sky and the heart strangely, wonderfully clear. That kind of one. They all feel, those autumn storms, as though they blow away something old, and bring in something new.

  When the wind began that night, but was far from full, Pierce Moffett sat in the little sitting room of the apartment he then had on Maple Street in Blackbury Jambs, talking with his neighbor Beau Brachman, who perched in a little velvet slipper-chair; now and then as they talked Beau brushed back with a soft girlish gesture his long black hair from before his face.

  “In Tibet,” Beau said, “they practice on dreams.”

  “Oh yes?” Pierce said. He loved to listen to Beau talk, wasn’t sure he wasn’t half in love with Beau himself. They were talking about whether, or to what extent, the world can be altered by human intent alone. (The world: all this, the surrounding stuff, its laws and bounds and givens, what is, was, will be—they knew what they meant.) All around them, in boxes and bags, in this room and the next, were most of the contents of Pierce’s apartment, for the next day he was to move from Blackbury Jambs to a house in Littleville not far away. On the floor between the two were a tall cylindrical Turkish coffeepot of brass and two brass cups; Beau on his travels had learned to drink it and make it, and Pierce happened to have the pot and cups, never used; and so now they sipped the little sweet strong doses, careful not to let their lips meet the sludge at the cup’s bottom.

  “They learn,” Beau went on, “how to remain conscious in dreams, even though they submit to all the adventures, and experience all the events. But then when some danger comes, or when they get bogged down in some endless circular insoluble problem, you know the kind …”

  “Oh yes. I do.”

  “Or some bad anxiety, or grief—well then they alter the dream so they can pass safely through those things.”

  “Like …”

  “Like oh you’re lost in a dark wood, and you’re threatened by wild animals; you want out, so you consciously summon up a …”

  “A taxi.”

  “Sure.”

  “Take me home.”

  “Sure,” Beau said. “And so by practice you learn to do the same when you’re not dreaming. When you come to a place where you need help, or can’t find a way; or you feel threatened or …”

  “The difference is,” Pierce said, “that dreams are in us, inside. The world though is outside us; we’re in it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Beau said, and smiled; actually he had not left off smiling, he had a sort of permanent smile like that of a hieratic mask, a head of Buddha or an archaic Greek sculpture, foxier though, more teasing.

  Lost in a dark wood. Pierce thought of a long-ago kid’s show on television, where you could send away for a special sheet of plastic to fix over your screen, and a box of crayons; and then when the little cartoon hero of the show (what was his name?) stood baffled before a chasm or a cliff, an urgent voice told you Quick, kids, draw a bridge, or Draw a ladder, kids; and up or over he’d go. Only he also went up or over if you didn’t, through thin air.

  But if you expected you could alter the world, the way Beau said, that you could make good luck in your life or the lives of others, wouldn’t you then have to think that awful and unlikely disasters, just as coincidental, just as perfectly appropriate, were also alterations of the world that you had made, reverse miracles? Or were they the work of other powers, other persons, as good at this as you or better? If you can choose any of it, you might have to believe you choose it all: that at any moment you stand at a crossroads you yourself have drawn.

  Winky Dink, that was the little guy’s name on TV. Helpless little foolish little. Hurry, kids. Hurry and help. Who would do that for him, he wondered, draw him a bridge from here to there, a door to go out by? Would you or could you do it for yourself, would you have to? The trick would be to assume that someone somewhere would, and just set out.

  Set out.

  They both thought at first that the wind, rising, had flung open the street door downstairs with a bang: but right away there came rapid stumbling steps on the stairs leading up to Pierce’s apartment, and they heard his name cried. Then Rose Ryder was at the glass-panelled door, both knocking and working the handle, and in deep distress.

  “What,” Pierce said, opening the door to her, but she was wild, too wild with some grief or disaster even to describe it. She began to cry, or to laugh, raising harsh staccato sobs that could be the prelude to either.

  “What,” Pierce said again. “Hush. What.”

  Beau withdrew his leg from beneath him and rose.

  “I flipped the car,” Rose said. And she looked at Beau and Pierce in sudden horror, as though they had delivered this news to her, not she to them.

  “What?”

  “The car,” she said. “I flipped it over.”

  “While you were driving it?”

  She stared at him. Astonishment seemed for a moment to calm her. “Well yes while I was driving it! I mean Pierce.”

  “When?”

  “Just now just this minute. Aw God.”

  “Where?”

  But whatever it was that had happened overcame her again; trembling, she sank to the floor. Her hair, blacker and longer than Beau’s, curtained her face. “Aw,” she said from behind that curtain. “Aw.”

  “Well what,” Pierce began, but then Beau came and knelt beside her. He took her face in his hands to make her look at him, though he said nothing to her. Then he sat beside her on the floor and put his arms around her shaking shoulders, his temple close to hers, till she was quiet. Pierce, hands in his pockets, looked down on them.

  “So,” Beau said at last. “What happened? Where’s the car?”

  Rose buried her face into the crook of her arm to wipe her tears. “On the Shadow River road. Just over the bridge. In somebody’s lawn.”

  “And you’re okay?”

  “I guess. Some black-and-blues I bet.” She looked up at Pierce, and away again. Pierce wondered, not for the first time, at her nighttimes, filled with weird incident, as though she somnambulated. Real, though, usually.

  “I was coming down to town,” she said. “And too fast. And the big sharp turn, you know? And this something ran across the road in front of me.” Once again she was seized, and seemed again suddenly to get the news of what she had done, and looked ready to bawl: but she pressed her cheeks with her two hands and kept it in.

  “Something?”

  “Like a chipmunk, I think. I just couldn’t see it real well.”

  “Chipmunk?”

  “Or a raccoon. So I.” And she wrenched an imaginary wheel. “And.” She turned her hand in midair, showing her sailing car. She wept again, but more softly.

  The two men said nothing. Be
au kept his arm around her; they had questions, but they let her leave them for a moment. She was in the car again, freewheeling, knowing that she and earth had parted, first on the left side, then on the right.

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  Pierce, feeling her horror come and pass, sat too on the floor beside her and took her arm. “You’re okay though,” he said. “That’s all that matters.” For she might have been driving her own car, her little red Asp convertible—that was actually what he had been imagining, the small projectile turning in air, trying to right itself in time … But of course it wasn’t the Asp, the Asp was in the shop (it often was) and she was driving a loaner, a dumpy sedan she had spoken contemptuously of, a Harrier (or Terrier? he hadn’t heard clearly) that was plainly at fault here, maybe. “All that matters,” he said again, and kissed her unhurt head.

  “How did you get from there to here?” Beau asked.

  She seemed not quite to know. It was a long way, several blocks (Pierce still measured in city blocks), a mile at least out to the edge of town and across the bridge over the Shadow River. Her eyes seemed to look back over the distance in wonderment.

  “Ran,” she said, a guess.

  She had first found herself—rediscovered herself—hanging upside down in the seat belt, she didn’t remember buckling it even but apparently had: and it was one of those times again when she exited from a black funnel of unknowing into a place, a place in her life, this place; and she had to reconstruct the rest backwards, without a clue, how, why. Was she still in motion? No that was the wind at the crack of the window. Was this her blood dripping warmly down her leg? No some car fluid decanting. What black being was pressed up against her side window, pressing in, mouth-flap open?

  “I think I knocked over their mailbox,” she said. “Yes. I know I did.” She lit a cigarette, hands still trembling. “And so. I got out of the seat belt, and I guess the door open. And got out.” Got out, revolving as she did so, to stand upside-down beside her right-side-up car? No the dark world turned around with her as she came forth, it was the car that was upside down, one wheel still lazily spinning. “And I was just so scared. And I came here, I don’t know how, and now. Now. Oh shit.”

  “But,” said Pierce. “You’re all right, and nobody’s hurt …”

  “She left the scene of an accident,” Beau said, seeing Pierce’s bafflement.

  “Oh.”

  “Not supposed to do that.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Pierce’s own driver’s license was brand-new, he had only just come to know how fully the world he lived in was adapted to cars and their drivers, how their needs for information and directions, space to park and turn, help when crippled or abandoned, were provided for, he had not really noticed this before; and of course there would be the exactions too, the regulations and controls, just as complete.

  “But,” he said. “I mean. What was it? Were you drunk?”

  “Well Pierce yes of course I was. Am.”

  “Oh.”

  She covered her eyes with the heels of her long hands, her cigarette between two fingers pointing up. “God if I get tested. I’ll lose my license. I just know it.”

  Her little convertible had a number of dings in it where she had tangled with others in minor set-tos, never her fault exactly, but piling up no doubt on the records kept carefully somewhere. Drunk she might now be, but Pierce thought she could probably pass any test given her, her reaction to even a beer or two was strangely psychotropic, Bacchantic even. He knew.

  “Were there people in the house?” Beau said. “Nobody saw?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see lights.” She hugged herself mournfully. “Oh what’ll I do.”

  “Maybe there’s time then.”

  “Time?” she said warily. “What time?”

  “We’ll go see,” Beau said. “Maybe we can get you back there, before—”

  She was already on her feet, arms around herself straitjacket style, defensive. “No no I can’t. I can’t I can’t.” She sheltered against Pierce, eyes closed.

  Beau regarded them both, perhaps thinking (it seemed to Pierce) how he might interpose himself here to mend this reality. The wind took the house just then and shook it sharply once, as though shouldering past them on its way up Maple Street and out to the mountains. “We’ll go see,” he said. “Pierce?”

  “I’ll get my car,” Pierce said, firmly he hoped.

  “No!” Rose said, and took his arm. “No stay!”

  “We’ll take mine,” Beau said. “I’ll drive by in a minute. Listen for me and come down. I’ve got an idea, if you want it.”

  When he was gone, Pierce guided Rose to the next room, his largest, his bedroom and office, and sat her on the bed.

  “I’m going to lose my job,” she said.

  “Because of this? Oh I bet not,” Pierce said.

  “Not because of this. The place is shutting.”

  Rose worked as an aide and social worker at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy. Pierce had heard the rumors. Large amounts had been spent on the conversion, and staff were said to be well paid, thought to be lucky. It was a huge place, though, and despite the modest solid richness of its public face, the nice graphics and the glossy vans seen in town, the support it gave to community events, it had always also seemed insubstantial; ungrounded, maybe, like its clients.

  “They’ve told you?”

  “Oh they don’t say,” Rose said. “But they told us staff appointments for the spring won’t be announced till the end of the year.” The Woods worked on a sort of semester system, like a college in reverse, most popular in the summer, mostly closed for much of the winter, too hard to heat, too high up the snowy mountain. “They told us this at the party. Well you know.”

  The end-of-season staff party was where she had been this night, he remembered. Jug wine and maybe a keg. Without him to watch over her. She’d asked him not to come.

  “But,” he said. “They didn’t specifically.”

  She lay back on the bed; she raked with both hands her long hair from behind her, and laid it out on the pillows.

  “Oh,” she only said, or keened. “Oh what’ll I do. Waddle I do.”

  He lay beside her to hold her. The wind rolled around them. What would she do? He thought of all those who made their own way nowadays, who like her had come away from universities with degrees in their hands real but useless (hers in American literature), who got jobs in social work or opened shops on shoestrings, learned simple crafts and sold their products or other things or themselves, always knowing it might not last long.

  Well and he too. Strange generation they were, loose seam in the civil fabric, some of them actually bound for big things, some not, some borne away and lost. Optimistic mostly but the abyss could always open before you, you had to wonder and fear.

  And he had long served them, women in that perplexity. He could almost (if he chose) believe that he had been put here just for that reason, to draw their doors and bridges: women looking for something, an art, a craft, a passion, a means of unfolding their selves and turning them to account. Artistic temperaments, certain they possessed powers but with nothing to use them on, predators trying to discover (in tears, in a frenzy, in the dark of night) just what their prey might be. What’s to become of me? What’ll I do?

  He made Rose no answer. He knew what was being asked of him here, and he was not going to give it, he did not have it any longer to give and if he did he would keep it for himself, whose need was just as great. He had served selflessly (not selflessly, no, but recklessly anyway, it came to the same thing when the cost was to be counted); he had served and he would not again. Non serviam. Not this time. Not this damn time.

  “There’s Beau,” he said, and started up.

  Though Rose and Pierce had been lovers for the length of a Faraways summer, they weren’t faithful to each other; at least Pierce assumed she was not to him: her stories weren’t always clear and never complete, she had
a great capacity to deny—to herself above all—what she had been up to or down to, and when she had had a couple of drinks the nights shut up behind her like dreams; men and adventures weren’t always firmly registered. Once she had accepted a ride home from a dim acquaintance (Asp in the shop again?) and, when she pulled out his ashtray, glimpsed the corner of a small container in the gray, and feeling an inchoate burble of memory she put her fingers in, and took out the contact lenses she had been missing for days.

  “Ruined?”

  “No. Just dirty.”

  “And could he explain?”

  “No he couldn’t. How could he if I couldn’t?”

  “And so you don’t know then what else might have happened in the car that other time. Coincident to what happened with the lenses.”

  “Well,” she said. “Actually, no.”

  He could not require faithfulness of her, had nothing in return to offer her for it, and wouldn’t have known, just then, what to do with it if she had proffered it. Every one of those with whom in the past he had made or assumed such a compact, of love, of fidelity, had not kept it, and he thought he was done with making them. Even so, without ever choosing to be, he had all this summer been faithful to Rose, at least in the sense that he had had no other lovers but her. Or only one, and he imaginary, or phantasmic: his familiar spirit, incubus too, and (Pierce was convinced) the pander who first brought Rose and him together.

  That was his son, Robbie.

  “I wish I could meet him,” Rose said. Rose believed Robbie was the child of his body, begotten on a long-ago long-gone lover, raised by grandparents elsewhere, only just come again into Pierce’s life. That’s what Pierce told her. And in telling her this and making it likely, Pierce had come upon some details of Robbie he might not otherwise have discovered.