DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

her for a row, and they had come to this house, which was unoccupied then; and they broke and entered.
     She was with him too when he answered an ad for a house to rent, and found it to be the same one they had violated in the
     moonlight: they went together through the small and faintly smelly bathroom and into the unexpected bedroom, as they had before.
Oh secret
she said this time too, and Pierce embraced her as he had done before, and said to her
Now you must remember
. And she said
Yes
in a whisper.
    And yet (Pierce thought, as he lay now on this late-September morning looking at that very bedroom from within his own bed,
     his own curtains now hanging at the windows and his own pictures dim onthe walls in the dawnlight) maybe even then she had not remembered. She had answered Yes: but had he not made it a rule that
     in certain circumstances she never answer No to him?
    In his broad bed in the midnight—not here, but on Maple Street in the Jambs—he had placed the rule on her:
Don’t say no to me, Rose. You don’t want to say no. Only yes. Do you understand?
    Yes
.
    Say it
.
    Yes
.
    So it may be that she had really not recognized the place, and therefore had not felt the queasy pressure of Fate on her inward
     parts as he felt it on his to have returned here. Perhaps she even
chose
not to remember it. She could do that. She had a talent that way.
    Most secret of all is what’s forgotten.
    He rose, wide awake—she in her bed in her cabin within the sound of the Shadow slept on—and stood in thought, long, naked
     and pale where his skin was not darkened by black hair. Tonight they would meet, dinner on her deck by her young cold river.
     He would have to lay some plans then for the evening, could not go up there all unready.
    At that he lay down again to think.
    Pierce had no alarm clock. He awakened when his dreams were done, plenty early. Lately he had ceased to sleep much at night:
     he commonly fell into a deep paralysis for two or three hours after climbing into his great bed, and then awoke as though
     he had been shaken, to lie alert and humming like a switched-on appliance for hours, thinking, thinking, weaving, weaving;
     sometimes rising to scribble, or smoke, or just stare out at the sinking moon. Another hour or two of sleep after first light
     began to touch the windows; then up and busy in the kitchen, at work already even while he clattered the coffeepot and skillet.
    For a long time after he received the publisher’s advance for the book he was to write about magic, secret histories, and
     the End of the World, money that (along with some from the Rasmussen Foundation) bought his daily bread, Pierce had made no
     progress on it. He had climbed to the high diving board in proposing it, and thereupon found that he could neither jump nor
     back down. He scribbled notes and lined them out, typed pages and almost immediately crushed them.
Why i
s
it we believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes?
he would begin; or
There is more than one history of the world
: and then he’d lie down, or go out, or give up.
    But then summer had come, hot as hell, fecund and various, inspiring in him maybe an imitative abundance. Robbie too, summoned
     byhis powers, powers he hadn’t known he had, a being himself made of powers that Pierce did not know how to calculate. And then
     Rose, whom he was now nearly done thinking of for this idle morning. Like a wise investment, the more time he spent on Rose
     or with her the more returns he seemed to get; he pretended a lordly annoyance at her calls and impetuosities during his hours
     of working or spellbinding but he had grown superstitious about her too, couldn’t be sure his productivity didn’t actually
     depend on her, found himself talking her into forgoing other possibilities in favor of dates with him; and when she came at
     evening she would find him often enough still in his dressing gown, shaken and glowing like an athlete, with a new yellow
     pad filled that had