by John Crowley
“Oh Christ, Sam,” her mother said. “Oh Sam, how can you do that. Don’t you know.”
“I was being dead,” Sam said. Taking handfuls of her mother’s hair and arranging them to her liking. “I was dead. But now I’m alive again.”
Up on Mount Whirligig the leaves were turning decisively even while others in the Faraways hesitated; the mountain’s heights occupied a sort of climatic microzone of their own, always colder than elsewhere, its flowers blooming later and more briefly, its storms more severe; when you drive up it on a cold rainy night the rain will predictably turn, just past Shadowland, to sleet, then snow.
Quieter at The Woods this morning, the staff tidying up, packing their papers, putting their personal coffee mugs and stuffed animals and snapshots into knapsacks and totes. One therapist at her desk, in tears, inconsolable, but why? Her door closes. Elsewhere a maintenance crew is emptying drains and sealing attics; but in the spring there will be burst pipes and squirrels’ nests to deal with. Or worse.
“Our work done?” said Ray Honeybeare. “Oh no not for a long time. We haven’t hardly begun.”
“I only meant here,” said Mike Mucho. “Just with the closing and all.”
“Yes. Well I’m sorry about that, and we’ll push forward with a solution. Because there is so much sickness and suffering, and we have so much help to give. We haven’t hardly begun. That’s my opinion.”
Ray had a way of stating that something was his opinion which suggested—made clear, actually—that he didn’t think it was just his opinion. This irritated or excited Mike Mucho; made him want to challenge whatever it was, the supposed opinion, and at the same time afraid to.
“Well, Ray,” he said.
“I think of the children now,” Ray said. “You’re treating a lot of young people here.”
“Well, we have been.”
“And you know that it’s the parents who are at the root of these kids’ troubles.”
“Yes,” Mike said. “The early experiences, yes.”
“Often they can’t remember, though, isn’t that right, not without a lot of effort on our part, a lot of inquiry. They can’t remember.”
“Repression,” Mike said, no Freudian himself, his early training had been behaviorist; he knew the concepts though, the language, which Ray seemed often enough never to have heard of.
“It goes so far back and so deep,” Ray said. “You see, parents might not realize it, but it’s their behavior that invites these possessors in.”
Mike neither nodded nor answered.
“Sexual behavior, blasphemy, you know the kind of thing I mean,” Ray said. “Even if they aren’t consciously worshipping the devil, I mean assenting to him, these parents are caught up in these behaviors, and it comes to the same thing. A implicit pact. And the children are the ones to suffer. All across this land. The boys and girls know nothing of it, and maybe won’t know until one day someone calls on those devils within them. I think we’re raising up an awful harvest now, and in ten–twenty years we’re going to start reaping; the devils invited in now by these parents are going to start to speak, though they’ve kept silent all those years. And those kids are going to start to remember what was done to them. We’re going to see terrible things then, hear terrible things said. We are going to find that a generation of devils was laid in the souls of our children like the eggs of some kind of insect.”
He smiled at Mike, and Mike lowered his eyes and smiled too; he knew Ray could sense his ambivalence, this feeling within him that resembled shyness or embarrassment, a not exactly unpleasant feeling.
“These therapists with their therapies made out of doubts and hesitations,” Ray said. “They say that sickness is a matter of belief. And cure is a matter of trust. A matter of changing beliefs by giving people something new to believe in. But I say that it’s not a matter of beliefs, a matter of who you trust. I say it’s a matter of fact.”
“I see what you mean,” Mike said lamely. He wished he were not sitting quite so close to Ray, who liked to sit very close to the person he talked to, for reasons Mike could guess, for reasons he had even been taught about; in his chair, so close to Ray’s that his knees were almost touching Ray’s knees, he felt giddy, as though he might burst into helpless laughter, like a baby tickled; or weep.
“Now it’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Ray said. “If you say something’s a matter of beliefs, a matter of trust, well that shouldn’t be so hard to change. What are beliefs? Are they real? No, they’re artifacts of the mind. They have no real existence. They could change easily, like movie pictures.”
“Well the theory is,” said Mike.
“So what surprises me,” Honeybeare said, and put his hand over Mike’s, “is that they say it’s just a matter of wrong belief—like believing a magician can saw a woman in half, you can show it not to be so, by exposing the illusion. But they can’t make changes. Not in the hard cases. We say it’s a matter of fact, that the thing that’s wrong is something real in them that has to be got out: and we can do what we say. We can help.”
“Yes.”
“Right here, maybe, we’ll be dealing with them,” Ray said, his eyes not having left Mike, nor his smile altered. “It might be you dismissing them, Mike. I’ll be lying asleep by then. You’ll be seeing them go smoking out every window and chimney of this place.”
“Ray, it’s so easy for you to say these things.”
“Mike,” Ray said. “You’ve seen it.”
He had. On that September night when the wind had blown so furiously he had seen Ray take a woman who was having a bad episode, very bad, and speak—not to her but to some being inside her; and he had seen the thing, the problem, abandon her instantly, and her face soften as though she took off a constricting mask, and her eyes awaken, astonished and grateful. No denying what he had seen. “Yes,” he said.
“Not because of any power I have.”
“No.”
“No. Because of the power of the Holy Spirit in me. Because of the Name I can invoke.”
“Yes.”
“Because I’m possessed too. You see?” He grinned at Mike, and the multitude of his wrinkles radiated out across his face, running through his cheeks as through a dry topography. “I’m possessed. I am not my own.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the power you’re offered, Mike. Not for any unimportant reason. Not for any selfish reason.”
“Yes.”
It had been all laid before him. Mike felt the wonderment of it, and felt also Ray’s impatience with him, or maybe it wasn’t impatience: his eagerness. Mike had only to cease wondering at it, and move.
Ray waited. Everything waited.
“Do you want this, Mike? You can have this. Do you accept this?” “Yes,” Mike said. And time bifurcated. “Yes.”
Easy, it was easy. Holding Ray Honeybeare’s hands, Mike bent his head as though to food. “Yes,” he said again.
“Yes,” Ray said; and after a moment, not releasing Mike’s hand, but leaning back in his chair minutely, he said: “Now this little girl of yours, Mike. Do you want to talk a little about her?”
“I just wish you had a damn phone,” Rosie said to Spofford. He was calling her from a pay phone near the job site, his lunch hour; checking in with her, as he did faithfully but irregularly, so that she expected and waited for his calls more than she would have if he had called every day at ten two and four. What Mike called intermittent reinforcement when in psych lab he’d used it on white rats with twitching baffled noses. She knew Spofford wasn’t calculating the effect.
“No I’m glad,” she said. “It wan’t so bad. Not a bad outcome.” Sam in the great double drawing room watched her mother talking. Saw her mother cover her eyes and turn her face away
Sam thought of Boney: seeing her mother in tears brought Boney to her mind, when her mother had wept, talking on the phone about Boney. And thinking of Boney directed her eyes to a sort of deep-bellied commode that stood between the tall wi
ndows, drawers and doors with pictures of fruit and musical instruments on them made of wood of different colors, and at the top of it, as though resting there but really part of it and stuck on, a little box like a jewelry box with doors of its own. Sam slid from the leather sofa to the rug, and (seeing her mother still turned away) crossed to an armchair of cut plush in another corner.
“I know,” she heard her mother say “I know. It’s just. You’re going to be gone.”
Sam pushed the armchair’s hassock away, steering it toward the plump and comical commode. And up against its side. It was a long time ago that she had learned she could do this, before she had begun to take medicine; she had never told her mother, or anyone else, how she had first learned the secret of the casket atop the commode.
“I never would,” she heard her mother say “Never. You know that.”
She climbed the hassock, holding herself gently against the smooth cold wood of the commode; her sock feet clung unsteadily to the slippery plush of the hassock, her legs knew it might slide away backwards beneath her and let her fall, but she had the key in her fingers now, the filigree of its handle matching the filigree of the lockplate. Turned it, one way, the other. The little door opened.
There was a feeling Sam was beginning to recognize when it came, though not yet to remember between times, that preceded her jumps. A flavor in the air and in her breathing in and breathing out that she would one day be able to name to people of her kind, who would instantly say Oh yes right sure but which no one else, not even her mother, would ever recognize; one day she would describe it by saying, As though I had grown as huge as huge as the universe, and my hand was as far away as a planet (her hand that now was taking out from within the dark den where it lived the worn velvet bag with the solid weight inside it) and everything in the universe no matter how far was close to me and yet as far away as possible: that was the feeling, but not the flavor of the feeling, the flavor that she tasted now.
“She’s right around,” her mother said. “You can talk to her.”
Sam climbed down and went to the far side of the commode, where she was hidden from the view of her mother in the hall, and upturned the bag into her lap. She remembered how once she had spilled a kitten from a stocking cap into which it had crawled; this felt the same, a living thing struggling the wrong way to get out, then revealed, happy, happy to be out.
It was a globe of gray-brown quartz, nearly flawless but with a run of bubbles pointing to a tiny starburst not quite in its center, scar of a wound it took in its childhood, when it was growing, millennia ago. She saw it first the night of the day Boney was put in the ground, when she had stayed here all day long with Mrs. Pisky, not allowed to go to the church or to the cemetery to see him put in, even though Boney was her friend too. She had crept down the stairs unheard and from the landing saw her mother take from the little hiding-box this bag, and let fall into her hand this ball, and look at it a long time in the dimness of the nighttime room.
Sam took it out herself not long after that, and looked into it as her mother had, and had been interested and unsurprised by what she saw there. And not long after that she had her first jump: she called them jumps because she seemed to jump in no time at all from where she was when it began to where she was when it was over (in her mother’s arms, on the floor, in another room).
She lifted it now in her two hands. A planet, revolving at an immense distance from her; but her head was immense too, and her hands immense, so it was no farther from her than ever; but at the same time it was across the universe. She looked into it.
“My ode house,” she said aloud.
She thought she might jump now. Within the globe it was as it always was, that place, changeless, her old house. No it was not the same, it had changed: somebody looked out at her.
“Sam?” her mother called. “Sam?”
Who was it? Who looked out? She brought her face closer to the ball, her eyes crossing and the flavor of hugeness thick in her throat; but the closer she drew the smaller the place grew. Who stirred in that room?
“Come out,” she said. “Come out.”
10
-I am out, said Doctor John Dee. It is you must come out.
But the girl in the globe of quartz he held, golden-haired child, glimmered and went away as though she heard her name called from behind her; went away without saying more. Doctor Dee held the ball up before him on the tips of his fingers for some time, turned it this way and that, but it was empty.
—Gone, he whispered.
It was in this stone of gray-brown quartz that a spirit had first appeared in his house: one of the spiritual creatures whom John Dee had long courted and prayed to be visited by, whom for years he tried fruitlessly to attract with his glasses, rings and mirrors, as a beeman attracts bees with his honey pots; not succeeding till he placed this globe before young Edward Kelley and asked what he could see there.
That first one was, or appeared to be, a fat baby, a girl with golden eyes, bearing a new clear stone in her own hands, like a child’s toy. So Edward Kelley had described her, who alone could see her. Then for a time she did not come again; when she next appeared she had grown up by years, though but months had passed, and was a child of seven. She had come forth and walked about, here in this room (still only Kelley had seen her) going among the books and papers piled here and there, patting them as she passed. In this very room, when he had lived here at peace and happily. John Dee felt the stab of her absence: as though she had indeed spent her girlhood here, a child of his flesh, playing with the two grown men.
He put down the vacant globe. It had perhaps retained only a last brief power, latent and slumbering here while he travelled and labored across the seas; when he found it and picked it up again, it expended the little life remaining in it, the glimpse of her it had retained. If indeed it had been her.
Come out the child had said to him. Then no more.
When he and Edward Kelley had skryed here, he had seen nothing in this glass or in the other: he had merely written down what Kelley alone saw. And now, when he had sight, when he could apprehend them himself, they fled from him, and his stones lost their power one by one.
Inside her new, clear glass—the one she had herself brought to them—she had gone with them on their travels. And far away in Prague she had grown to womanhood. From babe to woman in—in how long? John Dee looked back over the interval of time and could not calculate it; it had not been long but it appeared a lifetime. Five years? Not long. No matter that in those years the world had ended, and begun again.
She had said to them: Do not quail, do not be afraid, give all that you have and when you have given all, more will be asked of you. And he had not quailed. When she (Madimi she named herself) had ordered him to abandon his house and his country and become a wanderer, all his family too, he had meekly, quickly packed his trunks and departed in the night as though the bailiffs were after him. She had promised the Polish prince Albert Laski relief from his debts and his great troubles, and Dee had assured the prince that the spirits attached to the glass could do what they promised, and yet they had done nothing for him; in Poland John Dee had ventured all the credit of his years of study and his standing with the learned men of Europe, and won an audience with the Polish king Stephen, great good man, so the spirits could speak to him, and like half-trained dogs they had refused to come forth and do their tricks.
She had promised him they would reveal to him what no man had ever known, or what all men had once known and had forgotten: what the angels had shown to Adam in Paradise before they sent him out, the knowledge whose return to men would signal the ending of the world, and its beginning anew.
Had she done so? Perhaps. What he had learned might be what she promised him, wisdom precious above price; or it might be a thing all men knew, a saw; or a jest, or a child’s quibble.
She also promised she would teach them to make gold, which was all that Edward Kelley ever wanted from the spirits he spoke to;
and in Prague she did it. In the house of the Emperor’s physician Dr. Hájek, Thaddæus Hagecius, in Golden Lane: House of the Green Mounds, largest house of that row of houses clinging to the lip of the Stag’s Moat, tiny houses with great chimneys, where gold was worked, or assayed, or forged: made or claimed to have been made.
And where else in Christendom was it as likely gold might be made as in Prague? For matter is a palace, the shut palace of a king, who sits within stolid and inflexible; into that small palace the worker makes his dangerous journey, to awaken that king, vivify him, cause him to be fruitful, multiply; to become his own wife, and bear himself a son. Edward Kelley thought that this action took place not only in the athenor of the alchemists, but continuously in the world all the time, in the toils of the smallest indivisibles, in their tiny shut palaces: matter transforming as black kings divided themselves, generated sons through their chaste passionate intercourse with themselves, allowed their sons to die, be buried, rot, turn to dust, then revive, live, triumph. Maybe this drama went on, in all its grieving and thanksgivings, right through the ladder of creation, through the plants (poor John Barleycorn, son of the grain, slain every year that his own sons may live) and the animals up to the life of the celestial powers and the planets, up to God Himself, and His Son, self-generated. Who could say that God in His heaven did not suffer every pain and grief that His Son underwent, that He did not also die the death with him, enjoy the rebirth too, the wild elation, alive, alive again? Were they not the one God? Every year, every Holy Week. Every day, in the Mass.
And of this action the city on the River Moldau or Vltava was the imago or emblem.
Up in his vast castle on the hill above the silted river the black-clothed Emperor Rudolf had immured himself, King Saturn on his throne; around him in his galleries and closets and Kunstkammern was the rest of the world in small, earth air fire and water: precious stones bearing the fires of distant planets in their tiny bodies; waterworks and clepsydras, pneumatic statues, hubble-bubbles that sang; the skins of birds and animals and fish, all in their orders and ranks; monsters too, snails found with jewels embedded in their shells or the names of saints or demons written on them, the skin of the little bear that a Jewish woman of Prague once gave birth to, which “ran around the room and scratched itself behind the ear and died,” says the chronicler. And there were representations too of all these things and all other things that could be pictured, in paintings, in albums of drawings, on coins, molded in colored wax or blown in glass—glass roses, one of every kind, their leaves and flowers as perfect as summer’s roses, only deathless—and there were catalogues of all these representations, and the covers of the catalogues and the cabinets in which they were kept were covered and cut and molded and painted with further representations. Rudolf loved tiny things, worlds sculpted on cherrystones, clockwork insects, the life inside diamonds.
