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

been blank not long before; how do you go so
fast
, she would marvel, and he would laugh a great laugh and push her before him toward the bedroom.
    Another possibility, which Pierce sometimes entertained as he lay abed, laughing there sometimes outrageously as well, was
     that Time was really decanting into his big brain, unfillable like the conjurer’s trick chalice, the wine of a new revelation,
     one that he was to impart as best he could to those who waited for it, a revelation that might only in this moment, this year
     of this decade, be worth imparting.
    Meanwhile Rosie Rasmussen flew. She leapt from the top of the Ball Building on River Street, where four big stone balls are
     placed; she had always looked up at those balls but had never before been able to touch them, and the cold rough feel of them
     was gratifying as she pushed off and out above the river.
    Whyever had she forgot she could do this? She remembered now, as the wrinkled river spread below her, that of course she could
     and had, many times, in certain seasons, which seasons? Flying weather maybe. She was a little rusty now but oh the easy bliss
     of it when you got your bearings and learned to bank and wheel, kick-turn, dive and rise again!
    There was Butterman’s on its rock, should she alight there? No not where she was headed. She lifted her eyes. Beyond, the
     city of Cascadia spread, the paper mill pouring white smoke, the new treatment plant, the shining pelt of the river draped
     over the dam and gathering in foam at the bottom. No not far enough. She strained somewhat to rise, afraid momentarily that
     she was getting somehow heavier, airlogged, sinking. The straitened river opened again southward. Over earth’s curve came
     the tops of the twofold city, Conurbana, the many old towers on the left bank (gold dome of the Municipal Building catching
     the morning light) and the few higher cold-steel ones on the right bank.
    Oh yes there, Rosie thought, losing altitude. That’s the way she would go. Duty and apprehension gathered in her breast. She
     wondered if she had been wrong, if actually she had been thrown or shot upward and was now not flying but falling: and she
     realized that to think so was to fall; and she began to.
    Landing on her pillow in her bed in the predawn gloom, her eyes gulping light. The alarm clock on the table beside her just
     gathering force to go off, its whir what woke her. Rosie smacked it, forestalling it, and fell back. Groaned aloud in eerie
     horror then as she became aware of some living thing in the bed with her, oh yes Christ, Sam, who had awakened past midnight
     with the terrors and wouldn’t rest till Rosie took her in.
    Oh I don’t want to go, Rosie thought or pleaded. She sat up and felt with her feet for her slippers, couldn’t find them, got
     down on hands and knees and felt under the bed for them (another shiver of eldritch fear as she groped in that dark den) and
     then gave up and went barefoot into the hall. Past Boney’s old room and to the back stairs. Autumn odors, of chilly air and
     last year’s fires waiting to be relit, cold old woodwork, past lives lived here and their meals and linens and furnishings,
     all for some reason vivid in this season. The stairs debouched into the kitchen. Rosie left the door open (why anyway did
     stairs need doors at all?) so she could hear Sam if she awoke; and she filled the teapot at the sink.
    Remembering flying. You always seem to remember, in dreams, that you can, and have before. And of course you have: in other
     dreams. If she could fly today to Conurbana for this appointment she would fly.
    The huge old kitchen, meant more for cooks and maids than a family, was still the place she liked best in this house to which
     she had come to live, and which was in some sense hers. Not hers to dispose of, but hers in trust: for it all belonged to
     the Foundation that Boney had long ago set up, which now possessed all the Rasmussen wealth. In his will he