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

right. We will. They can have it and fix it up. We can help fix it up,
     the Foundation can. But I want to have a party first.”
    “Halloween?” Allan said. “Halloween night?” He was so patient, so willing to try at least to entertain the things she wanted.
    “Witches, Allan,” she said. “Can’t you see it?”
    “Bats,” he said.
    “And ghosts.” Rosie laughed, at the lands below her, the height of air above.
    “Ghosts,” Sam said.
    It was a big view, the river winding lordly to the north, to the jambs, disappearing around the bend through David’s Gate,
     the illusory portal that seems cloven into the mountains, but which widens and falls away as you come close, no gate after
     all.
    Up on Mount Whirligig (which was named, some say, for the winding mists that rise on currents of warmer air from the Shadow
     River and seem to spin around it or cause the mountain to seem to spin; no one really knows why) was The Woods Center for
     Psychotherapy, the refurbished summer retreat where Mike Mucho worked as a therapist, where he was this day probably; he’d
     told Rosie he had been practically living there lately. A lot to do. Rosie couldn’t see The Woods from here, but she knew
     just about where it lay; someone standing on its roof might be able to see her standing here.
    From the beginning she’d told Allan that she would have custody, that there was no question about that, none that she would
     entertain. And Mike had not raised any question then. What had happened, what was the matter, what was he thinking, of his
     child only, or of something else?
    I’ll bring her here and keep her, she thought, lock that big door behind us. Never ever ever.
    An equilateral triangle could be drawn, in that summer, from summit to summit of the three mountains she looked at—Mount Merrow,
     east of the Blackbury; Mount Whirligig, west of the Shadow; and, tallest in the center, Mount Randa to the north. More exactly,
     the points of the triangle lay respectively on a bluff on Mount Randa’s western height, where a monument stood, a monument
     to a long-dead freethinker of the county, once somewhat famous or notorious; on the central gateway of The Woods Center for
     Psychotherapy; and on a red 1959 Impala sedan submerged in the waters of an abandoned quarry halfway up the wooded slope of
     Merrow.
    Bisect the east and west angles of this triangle and the lines meet in Stonykill, at Arcady in fact, the house built last
     century by Rosie’s forebears and now the seat of the Rasmussen Foundation. Drop a plumb from the triangle’s peak through its
     base and it will arrive at length just here, at Butterman’s, right at this tower at the island’s tip, the belvedere where
     Rosie looked out.
    Secret geometries of earth such as these tend to loosen over time, slide away from true, and become ambiguous. It always happens,
     was happening just then to these; they would not survive the change just then sweeping unfelt over the county and the world.
     But since no one had ever discovered them in the days when they still obtained, no one would notice when they failed.

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    T he worldwide wind that had blown so strongly on the night of the autumn equinox that year (don’t look for it in your almanacs,
     they date from later on, conscientious editors have already altered these impossibilities and healed the weird lacunæ) resembled
     autumn storms of the kind we all remember very well, indeed was such a storm in every way—the barometric pressure fell fast,
     an awful weight was felt on every breast, a black exhilaration too as the front, tall as the night sky, passed over, roaring
     and stamping; then the bright day following on, littered with tree limbs and tossed shingles, and the sky and the heart strangely,
     wonderfully clear. That kind of one. They all feel, those autumn storms, as though they blow away something old, and bring
     in something new.
    When the wind began that night, but was far from full, Pierce Moffett