by John Crowley
On that morning (by John Dee’s later reckoning) was conceived the fifth of their eight children, Theodore, gift of God, born at Tebo in the year the world ended. It must have been that morning he was made, for immediately afterward Jane Dee turned to the wall again, and wept, and would not answer his entreaties; and he was banished from her side until past the summer solstice.
But yes it was enough. When day came it was day in the glass too, brilliant blue sky such as Edward Kelley had never seen before; a field of green, May morning, and a great knight approaching on a milk-white steed, armed with a fiery spear, a long sword, a shield whereon a thousand cherubim circled. A champion, but whose? And Madimi came, and followed that knight away; looked back once to smile, but made no farewell; gone, dew upon her feet. And another woman came instead, all in green, bare-breasted; she hath a girdle of beaten gold slackly buckled, Kelley said, with a pendant of gold down to the ground.
She spoke: that is she opened Kelley’s mouth and spoke. John Dee wrote the words she spoke through Kelley, the last he ever took down.
—I am the daughter of Fortitude and ravished every hour from my youth, she said. For behold, I am understanding, and Science dwelleth with me, they covet and desire me with infinite appetite; few or none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stone and covered with the morning Clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds and my hands are sweeter than the dew. My garments are from the beginning and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered yet a virgin, I sanctify and am not sanctified.
On she came, this great whore goddess they had awakened, who could she be; Kelley trembled violently, speaking in her piping dreadful lovely voice.
—For lo, she said, I am loved of many, and a lover to many; as many as come unto me as they should will have entertainment. Cast out your old strumpets and burn their clothes; abstain from the company of other women that are defiled, that are sluttish, and not so beautiful as I.
Kelley, as though divided into two, himself and her, tried to draw away from the burning glass, yet at the same time went on talking, talking, unable not to: I will play the harlot with you, I will enrich you with the spoils of other men, I will make a dwelling place among you, I will be common with the father and the son, for my youth is in her flower, and my strength is not to be extinguished with man. But disclose not my secrets unto women, neither let them understand how sweet I am, for all things belongeth not to everyone.
Then she altered: She turneth herself into a thousand shapes of all Creatures John Dee wrote: Kelley, knuckles white on the arms of his chair and his eyes like saucers, chin on his breast as though he had been taken by the throat, stared at the globe.
Tabby kitten, stick of elmwood, wriggling trout casting rainbow drops of water; Kelley flinched. Burning ember shedding sparks, gray pigeon, drop of blood on its beak, he could hear the flutter of its wings. Then more things, all things, and all representations of those things, dogs, stars, stones, and roses, cities, towns, and roads; his childhood home, his mother, himself; the Queen and her knights, a picture of the Queen and her knights, a picture of the picture. Beasts and birds, tiger cubs rolling in the dirt, mountain where deer walked, eating apples; wide white lake where longleg dawn-colored birds like herons rose up in their thousands. She became the little spirit Ben that had visited him, and then a hundred other spiritual creatures, and all their names began with B. She became John Dee and Joanna Kelley grappling naked; she became herself, herself and her lover coupling, he the one and she the many, unitary sky coupling with multiform earth; he saw her become the generation of all things that have names, a huge limitless fucking, the noise and crying-out of it, the shame and triumph of it.
He laughed. Laughed and laughed. His prick stood, his chin trembled; an awful terror and delight had arisen in him, and he cried aloud as though he leapt from a height into dark water.
At day’s end John Dee read over to Edward Kelley all that he had written down, all that had been spoken through Kelley.
—She will have us gather here every seventh day, for a hundred days, he said. She will enter here to us out of the stone.
—No, said Kelley. I will never speak to them more.
—What?
—No more, he said. No more intercourse with them. Else I am lost.
John Dee put down his papers and regarded Kelley, lying wrung and inert on his couch, white as death. Your other wife, his wife Jane had mocked him in her rage. Wife, son, brother.
—You have said so before, Edward.
He had said so before; but after this day Edward Kelley truly would not speak to them again. He knew he would not. But it was no matter if he did or didn’t, for he was theirs now, theirs and not his own, as he had feared and hoped he would become ever since that night of March in 1582 when he came to John Dee’s house in Mortlake with a book he could not read, and a powder that he had been given, that he claimed to have found among the monks’ tombs at Glastonbury; ever since the hour when he had pushed aside the books and papers on John Dee’s battered table and looked into the globe of crystal standing there in its frame.
Possessed. There was nothing more they could teach him, nothing more he needed to hear them say. He was theirs.
—When you have rested, John Dee said. Refreshed yourself.
—No, Kelley said. Never. Never ever.
The angels had promised him safety from the wicked beings who had since boyhood tempted and tormented him. Now he knew the truth: that the wicked ones, those dog-headed yellow-eyed brown-gowned demons, were not different from the kindly ones, the beautiful and pious ones who spoke to him out of the glass, who offered him help, comfort, sanctuary: were but their servants, and did their bidding. Into anyone of them she could transform herself too, if she chose.
He had known it all along, all along: and he knew now that he had known it, perhaps since that first night in Mortlake far away, night of wind and voices. Oh, sometimes he had backed away from them in fright, and shut his eyes; or he had stood still for weeks or months in boredom or confusion; but always he had returned and again come closer, until at length he had drawn close enough, and now they had seized him, and would never let him go.
15
Though the summer seemed unwilling to pass away, lingering at the threshold like a guest who has had too much fun to leave, Val decided to close the Faraway Lodge on Columbus Day as she always did, last day of the tourist season as it is counted in the Faraways, tourists being however rarely seen at any time in that secluded and not very inviting saloon by the Shadow River. It did have a big electric sign before it (to be shut off at midnight that night till the following year) that told those who happened to come upon it the name: Mama’s Faraway Lodge.
It was a log structure with a broad porch you passed through (smelling the summer-camp smell of pine logs and a musty davenport) to get to the big barroom, to the left of which was the dining room that every summer nearly closed forever but did not. Behind the bar hung a sign that said in frank bold letters: This place is for sale. Inquire at the Bar. In the past, when more people used to find their way here who didn’t already know of its existence, people had actually now and then asked the bartender (Val) about the possibility, but everyone who came here regularly knew the sign represented more of a threat than an offer; it meant that no matter how welcoming it looked around here, and no matter how glad Val might seem to see you, you were to know how fed up she was, deep down.
Closing night, Val and Mama served a dinner for Val’s friends to signal the end of one more season. The dinner was lamb, which Val had prepared with as much anxious concern for its outcome and its reception as if she were giving birth to it. The lamb had been sold to her by Brent Spofford, one of those who gathered in the somewhat cheerless but familiar dining room at Mama’s; he had raised it, with its brothers and sisters and cousins, on his hillside acres up on Mount Randa and on the grounds at Arc
ady, where Rosie’s two strong but uneducated sheepdogs harried them mercilessly, and (Spofford now observed) produced some damn tough muscles.
“It was in their genes,” Rosie said. “You got stung in that deal, acquiring them, boy.”
“I got their papers,” Spofford said. “All their forebears were delicious.”
Pierce remembered how, on his first day in the Faraways, he had encountered Spofford herding those very sheep through the town of Stonykill, crook in hand and straw on head. The dinner was a farewell for Spofford as well as for the season. The loose network of Vietnam veterans to which he belonged had begun circulating news about a couple of men from Spofford’s old unit who lived now in the unpeopled hills of a far-Western state, and who because of that emptiness or for other reasons had come to believe, or to construct with the help of some locals and some odd texts, a legend that puzzled and alarmed Spofford. Who had himself spent time on and off in institutions when his tour of duty ended, trying to figure out what had happened to him and to his Republic in those years.
“These are guys I kept in touch with because of sheep,” he said, pushing the gnawed bones of one of his own around his plate. “They were talking sheep. But now it’s not sheep.”
“I don’t know why you have to do this,” Rosie said. “Why now.”
“Not sheep,” Spofford said. “Wolves. You know those high northern woods once had wolves. Gone for years. Now they’re coming back.”
“Right,” said Pierce.
“These guys say government agencies are reintroducing them. They’re not just walking in down from Canada. They’re being put in.”
“Yes. I think I read.”
“Not about these.”
“I’ve read that the wildlife people wanted to reintroduce wolves in the north out there and the ranchers and farmers don’t want them.”
“These wolves aren’t wolves,” Spofford said. He drank the last of his wine. “Listen. These guys are very strange. They can’t live with people, but there’s nothing else they can’t do. They go build a cabin by hand in the mountains and live out there hunting and trapping like characters in a, a. And they think. And things get very, very clear to them.”
“What do you mean, not wolves?” Val asked.
They waited. Telling the story seemed to require some care on Spofford’s part, as though he drew it out from the coals of a fire: as though it could burn him too.
“You know how when you listen to someone,” he said, “and what they say you disagree with; and you listen more, and at some point it goes beyond disagreement, something goes up your nose, I don’t know if you know the feeling. You think: The man’s gone.”
“Yes,” said Pierce. “Oh yes.” And the others nodded and shook their heads, oh they knew. We all knew them then.
“As though he’s been hollowed out,” Spofford said. He felt his way toward the quality, his eyes narrowing, remembering. “Hollowed out, and what they say aloud to you is blowing through them from. From somewhere else, beyond or maybe behind them.”
Rosie thought of the young man who had brought Sam home the other day. Hollowed out, smiling in the certainty blowing through him from elsewhere.
“Wolves,” said Val.
“Well what scares you,” Spofford said, “isn’t the story so much—I mean this story that there was supposedly a secret unit formed, a government experiment maybe, I don’t know, now they’re releasing them up there, rather than killing them or putting them to sleep—it’s not that, it’s the certainty they’ve got that scares you.”
“A government experiment?”
“I don’t really get the details, or the big picture,” he said. “I mean all you get are details, and they’re supposed to make a big picture; but. It’s like the stocks of plague bacillus they say are stored in canisters somewhere, hybrid stuff that can kill half the planet in a week; somebody—lots of somebodies—spent their working lives on making those little germs. Hard to destroy your working life.
“Anyway, thats one thought. That they were developed, maybe not even for this war, maybe long before, I’ve heard somebody mention Hitler; but anyway we, they, had this capability. And in the end they can’t bear to terminate it. So up there in those gigantic National Forests. Where nobody else is but these crazy vets, living on what they can hunt with an M16 they smuggled home from Vietnam. And winter coming on.
“Think of that.”
They tried to do that, thinking of those high plains and those forests, colder there than here now; they thought of night, and living alone. Predators. Waking with memories in the silence.
“So if those guys feel threatened enough,” Spofford said. “And the Hueys start landing with caged animals in the bay. Feds with trank guns. I don’t know.”
“It’s just a story, though,” Rosie said.
“You can die of stories,” Spofford said.
They said nothing.
“I mean, Cliff says: Why shouldn’t they believe these things? What else were we turned into?” He grinned. “The ones who have trouble now are the ones who couldn’t turn back into themselves.”
“Homo homini lupus,” Pierce quoted. Cliff was Spofford’s friend or mentor, also a vet, who lived in the woods himself, though these heimlich ones hereabouts, not the Wild Wood. Cliff was going with Spofford. These were Cliff’s buddies too.
“Well I don’t know why you have to go,” Rosie said.
“Yeah,” Spofford said gently. “Yeah. I know you don’t.” He covered her hand with his. “I won’t be long. A week. A couple. Not months.”
“Okay so,” Rosie said suddenly. She withdrew her hand from his and pushed her hair from her face. “So. So what strange weather, huh? How long can it last?” Her back was straight, and she poured herself wine. “What else is new, what’s the talk, what’s the biz?”
“I hear The Woods is closing. Are closing. Whatever,” Val said.
“Yes?” said Pierce, alert. “Really?”
“Well, being sold. Changing ownership.”
“Who’s buying?”
“Bidding,” Val said. “Not buying yet. The Powerhouse. The Christian bunch.”
“That’s the name of it?” Pierce asked. “The Powerhouse?”
“The Powerhouse International,” Rosie said. “I think they have some groups abroad.”
“The Powerhouse,” Pierce said again, pondering.
“Big secret,” said Val. “I don’t think The Woods wants people to know, and I don’t think the Bible types want to be noticed. At least not yet.”
Pierce thought of Beau: Something going on up there.
“They’re rolling in dough,” Val said.
“And how come you know all about it?”
Val laughed, and lifted a wise eyebrow: “There is much that I know,” she said.
“Speaking of which,” Rosie said, pushing her chair from the table. “You know it’s a gorgeous night. Let’s go and look at the stars. Walk a little.”
At the Faraway Lodge the Shadow River widens and meanders almost south for a stretch. Above it a band of sky was open to the horizon. The moon had not risen.
“Man look at your rosebushes, Val!” Rosie said in wonder. “Look at the rose hips. They’re huge.”
“Really?” Val said, peering at the hedges that bordered the walk down to the river. The roses were Mama’s, not within Val’s provenance.
“You ever use them?”
“For what?”
“Tea. Rose-hip tea. Lots of vitamin C.”
“No. Nope. Red Rose yes. Rose hips no.” She offered them to Rosie with a big gesture. “You want some? Take all you want. I’ll go get a basket.”
“Oh no wait. Don’t go back. Wait. Look. I’ll use my hat.”
Rosie had a collection of hats, old and new, big and small; she had a face for hats, and liked herself in them, though after the first gratifying moment when she put it on in the store and looked at herself improved, made more mysterious or interesting or distinct, she rarely wore them.
Not enough functions. She took off the broad-brimmed flatcrowned one she wore tonight, and began plucking the bright brown globes, red-cheeked like elfin faces, from the rose canes, careful for the thorns.
“What stars do we see?” Spofford asked Val.
“Oh God,” Val said. “I’m so bad at that. It’s embarrassing, I know. But when I do learn it just confuses me and I forget again. I know the Evening Star is Saturn now. It said in the papers. Isn’t that the Milky Way?”
“Yep,” Pierce said. “There’s Cygnus, the Swan, flying down it. See, the big cross.”
“Oh,” Val said. “Oh well hell. Yes.”
“Cassiopeia,” said Spofford, turning, looking up. “The big W.”
“Right. A chair, actually. Over on its side. The mother of Andromeda. And she’s there herself too. See? Bound.” He told them the story, showed them the Great Square, the wings of Pegasus, Perseus on his way to the rescue, nick of time.
“And down there,” Pierce said, turning again and pointing (this early autumn sky was the one he knew best, the only one he happened to have studied), “above the Milky Way, is Sagittarius. Like a rearing horse.”
“Hey,” said Rosie. “It really does look like one.”
“Aw,” said Val. “I don’t get it.” She squinted and bent forward, as though to bring her head closer to the black page whereon it was printed.
“Well it hasn’t always been a horse, or not everywhere,” Pierce said. “Though everybody sees something there. In some places it’s supposed to be the gate from Earth to the Milky Way, the way that souls take to the land of the dead. That river or road.”
“The door we leave by,” Spofford said.
“Right. There are peoples who believe that once upon a time the doorjamb rested on the earth, without the big gap you see below the, well the shape; and in those days the gods and the ancestors could come and go on the earth.”
