Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  He turned back to the cabin. As he pushed aside the slider and came in from the deck her eyes opened: her big eyelids lifting suddenly like a doll’s, the rest of her motionless.

  * * *

  The cabin’s tub was a mingy stained fiberglass affair not long enough for her body; he ran it for her, testing the water with his hand, and led her to it when it was full.

  “Yike it’s too hot.”

  “No it’s okay.”

  She entered slowly. Pierce thought of the dark waters of the quarry on Mount Merrow’s flanks. She lay, knees up, steam dampening her hair and curling it against her cheeks. Her little swelling abdomen like an Egyptian drawing: he studied it, and the cup of her navel, deep enough to retain a minute sip of bathwater when she arose, he could foresee that; maybe before it was poured he would drink it. See how we go on building the impresa by which we capture ourselves. He washed her; together they examined her. Her wrists were red. That would pass. They talked of this and that as he washed her long hind feet, their white bottoms.

  “I did get an offer,” she said. She often opened topics in the middle, as though he really could read her mind, and knew what train of thought she was taking.

  “What kind of offer?”

  “At work. The healing group invited me to join. To start to join, I mean to start the process.”

  “I thought you thought,” he said, “that they were going to fire you.”

  She raised her other foot to him. “This is different. The two things aren’t connected. The healing project is a special group within The Woods. They’re not from here.”

  Why did his antennæ lift? He thought he knew. She was regarding her toenails, where the remains of paint still clung, crimson rose. “Isn’t old Mike a part of this?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “And was it he who.”

  “Yep.” She squeezed the loofah slowly. “He’s changed a lot. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Well you know I don’t actually know him.” Mike Mucho was something of a figure of fun within their nights, the comic relief or satyr-play sometimes preceding their more solemn masques; Pierce had come to know quite a bit about a certain part of Mike’s life, though he was yet to actually make his acquaintance. He remembered that his very first words to Rose had been How’s Mike? back when he knew nothing of either her or him. An imposition, a trick. “How different? Better or worse?”

  “Well it’s amazing,” Rose said. “Having gone through the training.” She pondered, he could see her ponder how amazing. What Pierce knew about the healing project or group at The Woods was that it had something to do with the power of prayer, and that it occupied more and more of Rose’s thought even as she said less and less about it.

  “Training,” he said.

  “You’d be interested,” she said. “Really. It’s a way of power. Like you talk about.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Only from God. Out of the Bible. If you look and read, it’s so clear. The promises are there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you ask for bread,” she said, “God’s not going to give you a stone.”

  “I’ll wash your hair,” he said.

  They were silent a while for this. He was careful to draw the soap only one way through the length of it, to keep it from tangling badly; laving it again and again with water poured from a child’s plastic bucket kept by the tub just for that purpose. When she was done he handed her out, and robed her in a robe of white (a gift or product of The Woods); and then, holding a mug of coffee by its handle and its body, she went out onto the deck. The sun was already red and hot, strange days, surely they would end. She lay on an aluminum chaise, and let her hair hang down behind to dry.

  “I don’t know, though,” she said or murmured.

  “Don’t know what.”

  “The course. It costs a lot.”

  “They charge you for this?”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “Good Lord,” Pierce said. “Hey. I see in the paper that the Shadowland Gospel Church offers a healing service every Saturday. I bet they don’t charge.”

  “Pierce. This is very different.”

  “And you’ve got that much?”

  “Well you know. I’ve got my little emergency stash.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Sure. Getaway money. I always have had. Everybody does.”

  “I don’t,” he said. He thought of her escaping; thought of Wesley. He wondered if the other women he had shared his life with in the past had kept a secret getaway stash. It made, he guessed, a lot of sense, and though a little shocked at the idea, he thought it likely. Get away from him, though? Or with him, fleeing some common disaster? It wouldn’t matter, to the money.

  “But oh I don’t know,” she said again.

  “Well sure.”

  In fact she did know. When Mike had brought her before Ray Honeybeare and Ray had taken her hand in both of his and smiled at her as though he knew something secret about her, something fine and brave that she had never told anyone but that was within her always, something that made her who she was. She was writing home to her father to send her a couple of savings bonds she had been given on big birthdays long ago, which now she would cash to pay for it. Then there would be no going back. The knowledge that she had and would was warm in her breast, warmer than her bath, warmer than this injun-summer sun, warmer than the flesh Pierce had done his work on.

  “I thought maybe you’d have a hard time with this,” she said. She shook her tresses, long enough almost for a fool prince to climb to her window by.

  “With what?”

  “Well healing. The power of God.” She closed her eyes. She seemed near sleep again. “Miracles.”

  “Heck no,” Pierce said. “I’m with Sir Thomas Browne. ‘Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.’”

  She grinned, eyes still closed.

  “An active faith,” he said again, and laughed, and felt the grip of a small hand on his heart.

  When her hair was nearly dry they returned to the cabin, and she doffed the robe again to sit before a little blond vanity with a big half-circle mirror.

  He approached her where she sat. She had taken out comb and brush, an antique set bound in tarnished silver. He chose the comb and went to work, starting with the tangled ends, then going higher.

  “So what are we going to do with it?” he asked her, lifting it in his hands, black and thick, heavy as a pelt.

  “Oh gee,” she said, watching him and herself.

  “Well we don’t want to just leave it,” he said. “Just free.”

  “No?”

  “I think something tight,” he said. He picked up the brush, and began to brush, firmly and expertly (he had become expert only in this summer, a fast learner). “Don’t you? You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I,” she said. Her legs parted.

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  Pause. His brush raised, waiting.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Yes. When it was smooth and knotless he lifted a section of hair from the top of her head, dividing it carefully into three equal parts. He began to braid the three strands he held, right over center, left over right, center over left. When he had made two turns that way he took up a hank of loose hair from the side of her head, and added it to the one he was braiding. Then the other side.

  Careful not to drop the sections. He didn’t want to have to begin again. It had taken him some time and care to gain her trust before the mirror, more time than to gain it in the bed.

  Other days, or nights, the process at the mirror might be lengthy. She might have to take out from the dark drawer where they lived her slim-jawed scissors like a bird’s skull, and place them on the vanity before her, where she could see them. He would talk to her about them. Sometimes she would take them up. He too might take them up, and if her mood were right, he would, delicately and judiciously, cut.

  A
ll it took were the blades’ snicker and the little clippings falling glittering in the lamplight over her bare shoulders and the tops of her breasts, her eyes consuming these things. All it took. She had told him how when she was a teenager and just learning this about herself she would sit before her mirror by the hour, and just cut, and come, and cut and come.

  He never cut much: a few tiny bites from the hem, unnoticeable. Not only because he was unskilled, which he was, but because if it were truly cut, cut as he talked to her of cutting it—chopped, shorn, removed, and with it her selfhood, will, autonomy; shriven like a penitent, like Joan, like a collaborator made to feel her shame, eyes lowered—then she would no longer be able to imagine it being cut, no longer imagine submitting to its cutting.

  So it had always to be long: always able to be cut.

  “I’ll see you tonight?” he said. “Or …”

  “I’m going to be gone,” she said, watching his hands take up her hair, on one side, the other.

  “Oh?”

  “Over Columbus Day. To Conurbana.”

  “For what reason?”

  “A group from The Woods is going.” She drew from between her parted lips a stray hair that had caught there. “For a sort of orientation.”

  “And you’re travelling there with …”

  “It’s a whole group. We leave from The Woods; we take a van from there. And just go on.”

  For a time he continued to braid in silence. The trick was to keep the tension equal on both sides, or he would end up with one side tight, the other coming free.

  “Well then,” he said, “there’s something I’ll want you to do.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll want you,” he said, “to leave yourself alone.” Tight, tight, a cable, a chain. “Till I see you again. You understand?”

  “But—you mean … Jeez Pierce.” A smile bloomed on her lips, gravely attentive usually at these rituals.

  “That’s what I mean. No touch.”

  “Well what if, you know, I can’t.” Idly, unseriously, she was at it even as they talked.

  “Rose.”

  He took the thick rope he had made and drew her head back. Eve’s apple in her throat rose and fell.

  “You can,” he said. “You will.”

  Holding her, he bent and placed his cheek on hers, his lips on her throat.

  French braid: for her, maybe for her alone, it belonged on the list with those other French things, letters, lessons, kisses. He held her hard, and waited till she had, once again, assented.

  There was, just as Pierce had supposed, a way back over the mountain that didn’t involve returning to the Jambs and going up the Blackbury River road again; before he departed Rose described it to him, the turn to take at Shadowland that would lead to a road that went right east to join the road to Littleville, and what the landmarks would be. He set out that way, up into the hills, as the sun reached its zenith.

  He had commanded her not to touch herself; he himself could not even wait till he reached home. On the road beyond the Shadowland bridge, climbing (it seemed) more or less endlessly upward, Pierce slowed at an entrance to the woods, a logging road, in fact, long abandoned, and with some trepidation turned in there, and went a ways, and stopped.

  Alone.

  There are ordinarily but two instances when spirit—that universal animator that is finer than body yet not quite immortal soul, this quicksilver stuff that enwraps the soul and fills the heart and takes the impressions of the sense organs—can be physically apprehended outside the body. One is in speech, more especially in song: song is in fact spirit, expressed from the body in audible though not visible form. The other is this thick white stuff, spirit double-distilled, cooked up by his heat, clouded into visibility like an egg’s white; also the slick coatings she produced, started by his prohibitions, which she was at that moment revolving in her mind even as she disobeyed them. Precious; exhaustible, supposedly, and hard to replenish—which is why we are instructed not to expend it on phantasms, why we are not to lie alone and soak the sheets with it or fling it onto the earth or this dipstick rag.

  Pneumatorrhæa they called it; sapping the starstuff we are born with.

  But why, then, should there be more of it the more he, the more she. Pierce lay inert for a long while, his head back against the upholstery. Leaves of many colors fell upon the hood. Now and then he heard the rush of a car’s passing. He did not know that he had taken the wrong turning back at Shadowland, had gone left not right, and that he was now lost.

  9

  The leaves of the oaks at Arcady turned brown and fell reluctantly, would still be hanging on after the first snows fell, even till spring buds pushed them off; the brilliant leaves of the maples though, especially the old ones, fell in sudden glad drifts as though by common consent. It was exhilarating in a melancholy way to lift your eyes and see them, so high, let go their hold on their branches all at once and sail. Whee, death. The other trees (a great variety, associated here by a long-ago landscape architect and grown old together, but not ever really become friends, Rosie thought) shed their leaves of many shapes and many colors at different rates. Bright yellow willow and coppery Japanese maple, golden birch, greeny-brown ash, and a double row of flame trees (they needed pruning) beet-red and hardest of all to rake.

  Rosie had taken a huge bamboo rake from the carriage house, easy and graceful in use despite its size, a well-made tool in fact, they’d known what they were doing back then when all this yardwork had been done by hand. Of course she didn’t need to rake Arcady’s leaves; Allan Butterman had urged her to get a lawn service to do this and all the other jobs that a huge house like this would always need doing, and she said sure yes, she definitely would; but for now she piled the leaves in great spicy-smelling piles, for the pleasure of it and to slow her racing blood: and for Sam to jump in, she’d promised.

  “More, Mommy! Higher!”

  “Higher, okay, higher and higher.”

  Sam had a date now to go back to Little Ones and have the test Dr. Marlborough had described, where they wired her up for three days and tried to see where the seizures were coming from. So it had not been a bad dream, Little Ones, or if it was a bad dream it was one that was going to continue. And there was the possibility of real bad news, a possibility arising in Rosie’s consciousness at unexpected times, having to be routed before the day’s work or the night’s sleep could be continued: like being surrounded by hostile tribes or the eyes of hungry animals in the dark. Keep the fire going.

  The worst part of it—the part Rosie couldn’t cease regretting even though it was shamingly unimportant, relatively—was that the great party she had planned at Butterman’s was off. The only time Sam could be scheduled for the procedure was the very days on which Halloween fell. The weekend before—not quite Halloween but close enough—wouldn’t do either. Rosie didn’t trust herself to plan and hold a huge affair just before she went back to Little Ones; it seemed she had to focus and bind all her energies on what would happen there, on that floor, Dr. Marlborough’s floor, though it was evident that nothing she could think or feel beforehand would alter the results of what he did there. But doing that work of anxious pressing on futurity seemed to make it impossible to carry forward a great and messy event at the same time, to say nothing of the awful bad omen if she dropped the ball and the party failed; so she gave it up.

  “Throw me in! Throw me!”

  “Throw? Throw?” She lifted shrieking Sam under the arms and hauled off as though to toss her a mile; waved her in the pile’s direction, then backed off and began again. The anticipation was what made you laugh so helplessly: Rosie had learned that watching Mike toss his daughter in the air. Higher, Daddy.

  Mike, when she told him the party was off, was relieved. That stuff’s not funny, he said. What stuff? Halloween, he said; witches and ghosts. Be careful what you play around with; you don’t know what you’ll attract. Rosie laughed, and asked if he was serious, and he hadn’t answered, onl
y kept a minatory silence that suggested he could say a lot if he chose to: another Mike trick Rosie was familiar with.

  “Whee!” She dropped Sam gently after all, into the middle of the pile. “Okay?”

  “Now cover me,” Sam said, and lay back; Rosie could smell as though through her daughter’s nostrils the smell of the leaves, hear through her ears the dry crackle of their crushing. You never forget. When she had first come back to the Faraway Hills and to Arcady after her years in the Midwest, it was fall; Boney was ill then and using a rented wheelchair, and Rosie raked, then as now to have an occupation. He watched her for a time toss the leaves like salad. That’s one thing I’ll never do again, he said. His head on its long turtle’s neck reached toward her, toward the leaves and the day. I wish I’d done it more, he said.

  Oh I don’t know, she’d replied; you do it once, you’ve done it a hundred times, right?

  I wish I’d done it more, he only said. I wish I’d done everything more. Leaning forward in his chair, his face as though pressed against a glass beyond which the world was taking place, his mouth open a little in grief or yearning or maybe just unable to breathe easily. He just loves life, his old housekeeper Mrs. Pisky used to say.

  The tumulus was high now over Sam; Rosie couldn’t discern even her outline beneath the heap.

  “Okay,” Rosie said. “Okay? Deep enough?”

  Rosie waited. No leaf stirred.

  “Okay Sam?”

  No answer.

  She felt a violent black rush to her heart, and plunged her arms within the leaves; she pushed them aside, they had become heavy as gold; Sam’s exhumed face was still. The day in an instant ceased also to stir, and went cold. Rosie took hold of Sam’s coat, full of Sam’s heaviness, but not, she knew it, of Sam.

  “Sam!” Rosie bellowed, a voice she had never used or heard before, drawn from somewhere down inside, loud enough to call her daughter back. She pulled her up, and Sam’s head fell heedless to her shoulder. How long was it—Rosie thought later it was only a second or two or three, but the seconds had stopped falling away—till Sam’s eyes opened, and she smiled.