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

had named her
     to be its director.
    It was no fate she expected or desired. He had been kind to her and she missed him terribly. But she had refused his bequest,
     or at least hadn’t agreed to accept it; turned aside all of Allan Butterman’s inquiries about when a decision might be expected,
     while the summer ran out and the house grew cool. Every day that she didn’t decide seemed to her a small hard-won victory,
     and every morning she prepared herself to fail once again to decide. It was a knack, she thought, and one that might have
     come down to her in her genes, for Boney certainly had it. And maybe it would keep her alive till great old age as it had
     Boney. Maybe shecould do here what Boney had somehow longed to do and had not done: maybe by making no decisions she could live forever.
    There was Sam now: an urgent moan as though she had been roughly snatched back from wherever she spent the dark hours.
    “Okay, hon, Mom’s coming,” let her know who’s with her here, sometimes Sam arrived in the waking world in a sort of bewildered
     amazement that Rosie used to find funny. She mounted the stairs by twos, the teapot singing urgently behind her.
    Dr. Bock’s phenobarbital was a stopgap, he said; Sam needed tests to find out what was going on with her, and a program of
     medication tailored to her.
Tailored
was the word he used, a little suit just her size. She needed an EEG, the test where your brain waves are measured with electrodes,
     which might or might not reveal something about what in Sam’s brain could be causing her seizures.
    So today Sam and Rosie were to go to Conurbana Pediatric Institute and Hospital to see a neurologist and have the tests; and
     then (Rosie could feel it already) they would continue in that direction from then on. No road that they could take would
     ever lead back to before that August night when Sam first said
What’s that?
toward something she alone saw in the empty air, and then grew rigid and trembled, blind deaf and absent. The road they parted
     from that night fell steadily behind them, the life Rosie had been living; it went on unrolling, no doubt, she would picture
     it sometimes vaguely but vividly, with a pang of regret and longing nearly unbearable. Her real life, growing imaginary, while
     her new life filled up with obdurate reality.
    Bring a favorite toy or book, said the mimeoed list the hospital had sent her. Sam chose Brownie, a rag doll she’d found in
     a drawer here at Arcady, whose brown yarn hair and gingham dress were sordid with age and whose left eye, a black bead, had
     recently come loose and now hung by a thread, ghastly a little, Rosie promised to fix it and had not. If you wash your child’s
     head carefully the morning of the test this will not have to be done upon arrival. Answer the following questions in consultation
     with your child’s physician. A careful description of the nature of the attacks is necessary to make a proper diagnosis. List
     the medications your child is currently taking with exact dosages and times.
    “No Mommy. No no no no.”
    “Oh come
on
Sam. For just this once no fight. We need to go so we’re not late.”
    Sam slipped from her and started down the hall. Rosie with her dose followed. “Samantha!”
    She hadn’t been told if she was to give Sam her usual medicine.Would it interfere with the brain waves? Make them look worse, or not bad enough? She didn’t dare not give it to her. Dr.
     Bock said that very likely Sam’s seizures weren’t hurting her brain, but Rosie couldn’t bear to see another one, her child
     shaken nearly apart, how could that not damage you. And no number of them she saw thereafter, down the years from that day
     to this (never many in a year, but never none) would make them easier to witness. Or remember. Or envision.
    “Oh Sam damn it. Come here. You little.”
    “Go way you big.”
    Down the front stairs naked and bright against the dark wainscot and purplish carpet, Rosie