Daemonomania

  Peter: that’s who Ray was, coarse and big and truthful and plain, whom no evil could approach without his seeing it first for what it was. Safe with him, safe. “Didn’t that guy think he could fly?”

  “He did. He had a trick he played on people, to make them think he could; and then he convinced himself he really could.”

  Mike remembered the movie, the red-robed mage climbing to the top of his tower to jump off, what scary hawk-faced actor had played him. He wondered for a moment if Ray was remembering it too, and calling it history.

  “If Sam’s to beat this thing, Mike, you’ve got to be strong on her behalf. So very strong.”

  Mike took the exit toward the Faraways. It had begun to rain lightly again. “We need to have Sam with us, Mike,” Ray said, looking straight ahead. “We need her right with us from now on. We’re going to put all the resources we have into this for you. I promise.”

  In Pierce’s house Sam drew her plastic backpack closer to her. Without climbing out from under the shaggy and smoky-smelling blanket he had wrapped her in, she turned so that she could open it. She thrust her arm into the darkness inside, dug past her clothes till she came upon the glass ball that she had put in, that no one knew was in here but she. Her fingers touched it and then closed around it as though it crept into her hand, cold and round and brown, and greeted her: a living thing underneath all the things that weren’t alive. Not even Brownie was alive really. But this was.

  She had taken it from the commode in the living room at Arcady, because her mother and her father were going to court and it might be (they wouldn’t say so but she had said it to herself, and thus had seen that it could be said) she’d go and live with him in another house, and she didn’t want to leave it alone behind. She brought it out and lifted it into the window light. If she moved her head to one side, the dart of light in the center of the ball moved the other way.

  Where did they go? she wondered. Maybe out of these rooms, into rooms she couldn’t see.

  She thought of the rooms inside mirrors: as far as you can see into them, they are just like your own, except backwards; you can see through their door and down their hall, but then it must go farther, farther than you can see, and you can’t be sure it stays the same always, or that the outdoors, if there is an outdoors, would be the same and not different. Or even if the house really doesn’t go on but comes to an end and wraps up, smaller than you thought, too small inside to hold you, narrowing like a throat.

  5

  John Dee put away that little globe of moleskin-colored quartz, the first of the stones that Edward Kelley had seen into, the last that he would himself look into. He wrapped it in wool and opened a leather trunk to put it in, only to find that mice had nested there while he was away, amid the papers: four no five minute pink babes smaller than his finger’s end, squirming blindly together, their bed made of his scumbled writings. Poor naked babes. He must think how he would live now. He had left Prague City a rich man and arrived in England with nothing but his wife and children, hungry mouths that he could no longer feed on spirits’ promises.

  After crossing Germany duchy by duchy in his sail-coach—horseless, for he had given his fine Hungarian team as a gift to the Landgrave of Hesse in exchange for a passport through his lands; and by night largely, so his passage might not alarm the people, already so afraid of what they did not understand; with his children asleep and the sails snapping lowly in the chastened wind—he had taken a house in Bremen. For the next months he paid his rent and read and wrote and met with many learned doctors, Heinrich Khunrath among them, and to all of them he said that yes there was a new age to make, and it would be made by no powers but their own; let them, therefore, take up their tools. They could have of him what they wanted, he was dispersing his estate, if they could find anything of use in his fripper’s shop they should take it away.

  No word came from Kelley in Prague. At last Dee hired passage across the narrow sea, and brought his family to England. His great coach lay long in a Bremen stable, dismasted and shut up. It wasn’t forgotten, though: twenty years after, men and women were still telling how they had heard it pass their shuttered houses—had heard the sound of its iron-shod wheels on the road or on the cobbles, and no sound of hooves, as though it rolled unhitched downhill. It was seen, too; scholars in their towers, outwatching the Bear with Thrice-great Hermes, saw from their high windows a sight they might themselves have conjured by their deep studies: either the silvered moonlit road that coiled below had turned river, or. Moreover there was no wind, not a breath, one wrote in his book: it moved as though by memory of some other night, a night when the wind really had blown. Too fast to catch, always gone when they set out after it.

  Dee came home to a cold Christmas: his house broken into and his library taken away—for its safety’s sake, the Queen’s officers said—and Germans and magic not to be talked of. A play written by a mad university wit about a German magician’s awful fall held the stage in London, showing how he signed a compact with the Devil, was granted invisibility, teased the Pope and the Emperor: and it was said that real brimstone could sometimes be smelled when the overreaching mage was dragged down to Hell, and an extra imp or two perceived among the squib-tossing actors in black skins. I’ll burn my books. The magician of the play was meant for Agrippa, with his staff and his schwarzer Pudel; but it touched John Dee too.

  Yet old friends came to lend him money—one of them Edward Kelley’s brother, who did not say how he had come by the ten pounds gold he gave Dee, nor why he could spare it. And the old Queen was kind to him, when she remembered him; she intimated that when the right post fell vacant—it was to be the Chancellery of St. Paul’s, or the advowson of St. Cross at Winchester—it would be his. Nothing happened. Come summer, he and Jane presented themselves to the Queen at Sian House with all seven of their children, from Arthur the oldest to baby Frances; Jane Dee, who had once sat among the ladies waiting upon the Queen, was permitted to kiss her hand, and gave her a petition in her husband’s name. The Queen took it with her own hand, and put it by her on her pillow, and on the long way back home the family talked of these signs and noted them again and again; and yet nothing came of that either. Next Christmas they were still living on the gifts of friends, and the Queen called Dee to Richmond, and said she would send him a hundred angels—she meant those gold coins whose name the poets loved to quibble with, she too, but not he. There was never promise made but it was broken or kept, she told him.

  One office at last appeared: the wardenship of Manchester College, far to the north. It was not anything he had ever envisioned or wanted, such a distance from London and his home. The chief business of the old warden had been the persecution of Catholic believers, many of whom still lay in Manchester prisons. In the dark of winter, earth as hard as iron in the streams, he started north with his family, the new baby whom John Dee named Madimia, their lastborn, swaddled like the Christ-child. In February he was installed. His diary, so full an accounting of every visit, every hope and disappointment, every honor paid him, does not describe the ceremony.

  He met his duties, cared for his College and the people of his city. They came to borrow his books, as they had in London; many dozens he had brought to Manchester College, and the Lancashiremen came and browsed with their hands clasped behind their backs. Justices of the peace came to ask for help in the cases of witchcraft being brought always before them in those days, a woman seen milking an axe handle and filling two hogsheads with good milk, or contrariwise drying up her neighbor’s cow, or things more dreadful, so dreadful that unless men were much more wicked even than Scripture saith, must be the Devil’s work. Dee lent them the Malleus maleficarum when they asked for it (how could he say no?) but gave them John Wier’s De præstigiis dæmonum too, that urged mercy for old women fooled by the Devil.

  Midwinter again; Dee’s curate came to bring him to a widow’s house whose seven children had become possessed, lay shivering in their beds unable to speak or sleep a
s the demon passed from one to another of them.

  —I went in their house, said Matthew the curate as they hurried thither, and what did I see but the woman in a fit, and standing over her the man Hartley.

  Hartley had a reputation for conjuring. John Dee had been careful never to speak to him. Matthew, panting along to the widow’s house with Dee, told his tale.

  —What do you here, says I. Praying, quoth he. Thou pray! says I, why what prayer canst thou say? None but the Lord’s prayer, saith he. Well say it, says I. The which he could not do.

  The house was small and mean, a broken door and a cloth against the wind. Tall John Dee stooped to enter. Dark as a sepulcher, the one window not glazed but only set in with horn. Children moaning under foot, the bed filled with three or four squirmers. The man Hartley a lump kneeling amid them, a little candle quivering in his hand.

  —Exorcizo te, immunde spiritus, the man breathed in a whisper, as though almost afraid he might really be heard. Exabi ea. Go away from her, begone.

  —Cease this, Dee said.

  Hartley, so occupied he had not heard Dee enter, turned to see the Doctor, and the bright fear in his eyes was the same as the fear in the mother’s: who had passed it to whom?

  —Put down thy bell and candle, Dee said. Go away from this place. Call down no more powers.

  —I will send for the watch, Matthew the curate said to Doctor Dee. It is he himself that has let these wicked spirits in, he.

  —No, said John Dee. Let him be gone.

  Hartley was harder to remove than that, by turns disputing with Doctor Dee and his curate and continuing to fuss over the children and mutter his formulæ; but at length he was put out, and the charged air calmed, and the children ceased their crying.

  —Have no more to do with him, Dee told the mother, who was weeping and clinging to her beads and looked ready to chase after her protector and tormentor. Mind now. Give your young ones new bread in milk. Take this shilling, take it. Seek a godly preacher, and with him appoint prayers and a fast. Do no more.

  He went out into the cold clean air.

  —Why do you linger? his curate asked him when he hesitated at the gate.

  —I am an old man, John Dee said. Superannuated.

  Once in Mortlake he had had a serving maid, poor Isabel Lister, troubled by a wicked spirit. She had tried to drown herself in the well, and John Dee had himself pulled her out near dead. After that he had prayed with her many nights, twice anointed her breast with holy oil to expel the wicked one, and put a woman of the house to watch her always; but not long after suddenly and very quickly rising from prayer and going toward her chamber, as the mayden her keeper thought, but indede straight way down the stayrs behind the door, most miserably did cut her own throte.

  Had he done that which he should have done for her? All that he could have done? He had knelt later that night in humility before the glass with Edward Kelley and asked the angel if he had done aright. What should he have done, what should he now do? And the answer came, their fearsome remote compassion: It is not of thy charge.

  Poor wretch, poor wretches. He had wanted to win help for man’s hurts and lacks from God’s holy angels, and had won only passage into the world for powers he did not understand, whose natures were not like his.

  He found suddenly he could go no farther. Not of thy charge. He sat down on the stones of a wall and put his trembling hands upon his knees. It is not of thy charge.

  —That man will be hanged within the year, said Matthew the curate. I doubt not.

  —God have mercy on him then. On our souls too.

  We must not call down the powers from their spheres, John Dee thought, lest they answer us. For they never will be conformable to our wills, and their own wills are no more bent on helping us than is the sea’s, or the wind’s. Job asked God, who had permitted his wife and children to be slain, for help and understanding: and in answer God showed him the greatness of his creatures, and the strength of his arm, and told him to be silent.

  Out of long habit, John Dee went on keeping a record of his daily doings, the books he lent, his children’s illnesses, his dreams. I had the vision and shew of many bokes in my dream, new printed, of very strange arguments. The entries grow shorter as his life grew long; then they begin to cease. They say nothing of his wife’s death of the plague: she whom he thought would long outlive him. The people of Manchester called on God to reveal whose sins had brought the plague upon them, the Papists or the worshippers of Satan; Dee buried his wife, and said nothing.

  Visitors came now and then, and are noted in a phrase, and letters too, with news of Edward Kelley. He is in the Emperor’s prisons; he has fallen from favor, has been restored to favor; newly married to a Bohemian lady of rank; imprisoned again. In March of ’93 Dee dreams of him two nights running, as if he wer in my howse, familiar; with his wife and brother. Dee records a letter from Kelley himself, not in Kelley’s hand though, inviting Dee to come again to Prague and enter the Emperor’s service; all is forgiven. Then on November 25, 1595, Dee enters in his diary a single line: newes that Sir Edward Kelley was slayne.

  Three tales the people of Prague like to tell visitors: the story of the doomed magician Jan Faust, whose house they can point out, sometimes it’s this one in this part of town and sometimes a different one somewhere else; and the Golem made by the Great Rabbi Loewe, who saved the Jews in time of peril, or who imperilled them itself, or both; and the story of the Irish knight-alchemist Kelley, who lived on Goldmaker’s Street with his beautiful Bohemian wife, Joana, and who fell to his death attempting to escape from the White Tower or another prison when he failed to make gold, or enough gold, for the Emperor.

  But Faust never lived in Prague; all his magic was done elsewhere. There is no knowing what the Great Rabbi was capable of, but in fact the Golem was really made by a rabbi in Chelm, fifty years before the Great Rabbi of Prague was born. Edward Kelley was indeed brought after many adventures to the high tower a prisoner of the Imperial guard: but there his fate broke in pieces.

  There was one fate where he escaped from the tower and ran; changed his name, vanished, lived somehow somewhere a long time by his wits, an unchanged man.

  Or he fell, having got partway down the tower, fell and broke one or both of his legs, the bone coming through the flesh, and was not found till he had bled almost to death, or to death.

  Or he was put to his task again there in the tower, like the girl in the story who was put before the pile of straw and told to spin it into gold, and he did it: what he had said he could do, what he knew he could do. He even wrote a rhyming treatise on his methods while in prison, and that has actually come down from that time to this. Go burn your Bookes and come and learne of me.

  Or he tried but failed. In a sweat of terror trying night after night to insert himself again into the lives of those powers, and unable to make them live, make the play begin.

  Or Oswald Kroll came to him in the tower, and talked long with him, putting to him again the plea or offer that the Emperor’s sapientes wished to make to him. The long box and its engine and its uses. Talked at first gently and with elaborate politeness, making a dreadful kind of sense. Kelley huddled on his pallet, more afraid than he had been in the presence of any of the spirits whom he had summoned and discoursed with, and said nothing, only shook his head. Kroll came again, and then again. At last he said that there was but one way Kelley could refuse the offer made him: and he began to talk of that hypothegm or notion of Alcindus—Kelley had read Alcindus, had he not? De radiis?—that the net of rays in which we have our beings, the net of time and space and quality and form, may be escaped, or transcended for a moment. And how? Alcindus says the reason the ancients practiced animal sacrifice was that in the sudden extinguishing of a life a sort of hole was for a moment torn in that net, that net so light yet so strong; and through that hole the priest, the operator, might look or even step, to see the twistings that had tied this bleeding being to the ladder or web of all being?
??perhaps even, the hole being large enough, to move himself through it as though down a chute or up a ladder, to a far time or place. For a moment.

  He said (still speaking with cool politeness, Kelley wide-eyed in the corner, arms wrapped tight around his knees listening) that any blood sacrifice could cause such an opportunity, but that the sacrifice (made with all solemn preparation) of a being of great worth and fullness, one whose nature and fate were bound in a hundred thousand ways to the whole, a being poised halfway between the worms and the angels, a soul that had itself ranged far over time and space and still retained the knottings and knittings that such journeys create: well, who knew how great a hole his sudden passing might open?

  Had Sir Edward understood him, Kroll wished to know. Did he understand that they would not let him refuse the offer they made him, and go his way? If he would not be agent, and take up his burden and bear it to the future, then he would be patient, and suffer otherwise. He must see that it was not for their own sakes or even for the sake of the present age that they asked this of him.

  —Not for my sake either, Kelley said; it was all he said.

  —You have no sake now, Kroll said. You are not your own. Whose you are, or may be, is the last motion your will can make.

  But that was the night that, with the help of the turnkey’s daughter, Kelley let himself down from the high window on twisted sheets, and fled, or fell. Or it was the night he was strangled in his cell on the Emperor’s orders—“almost a common Practice in the Empire,” one later report of him says.