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

sat in the little sitting room of the apartment he then
     had on Maple Street in Blackbury Jambs, talking with his neighbor Beau Brachman, who perched in a little velvet slipper-chair;
     now and then as they talked Beau brushed back with a soft girlish gesture his long black hair from before his face.
    “In Tibet,” Beau said, “they practice on dreams.”
    “Oh yes?” Pierce said. He loved to listen to Beau talk, wasn’t sure he wasn’t half in love with Beau himself. They were talking
     about whether, or to what extent, the world can be altered by human intent alone. (The world: all this, the surrounding stuff,
     its laws and bounds and givens, what is, was, will be—they knew what they meant.) All around them, in boxes and bags, in this
     room and the next, were most of the contents of Pierce’s apartment, for the next day he was to move from Blackbury Jambs to
     a house in Littleville not far away. On the floor between the two were a tall cylindrical Turkish coffeepot of brass and two
     brass cups; Beau on his travels had learned to drink it andmake it, and Pierce happened to have the pot and cups, never used; and so now they sipped the little sweet strong doses, careful
     not to let their lips meet the sludge at the cup’s bottom.
    “They learn,” Beau went on, “how to remain conscious in dreams, even though they submit to all the adventures, and experience
     all the events. But then when some danger comes, or when they get bogged down in some endless circular insoluble problem,
     you know the kind …”
    “Oh yes. I do.”
    “Or some bad anxiety, or grief—well then they alter the dream so they can pass safely through those things.”
    “Like …”
    “Like oh you’re lost in a dark wood, and you’re threatened by wild animals; you want out, so you consciously summon up a …”
    “A taxi.”
    “Sure.”
    “Take me home.”
    “Sure,” Beau said. “And so by practice you learn to do the same when you’re
not
dreaming. When you come to a place where you need help, or can’t find a way; or you feel threatened or …”
    “The difference is,” Pierce said, “that dreams are in us, inside. The world though is outside us; we’re in it.”
    “Uh-huh,” Beau said, and smiled; actually he had not left off smiling, he had a sort of permanent smile like that of a hieratic
     mask, a head of Buddha or an archaic Greek sculpture, foxier though, more teasing.
    Lost in a dark wood. Pierce thought of a long-ago kid’s show on television, where you could send away for a special sheet
     of plastic to fix over your screen, and a box of crayons; and then when the little cartoon hero of the show (what was his
     name?) stood baffled before a chasm or a cliff, an urgent voice told you Quick, kids, draw a bridge, or Draw a ladder, kids;
     and up or over he’d go. Only he also went up or over if you didn’t, through thin air.
    But if you expected you could alter the world, the way Beau said, that you could make good luck in your life or the lives
     of others, wouldn’t you then have to think that awful and unlikely disasters, just as coincidental, just as perfectly appropriate,
     were also alterations of the world that you had made, reverse miracles? Or were they the work of other powers, other persons,
     as good at this as you or better? If you can choose any of it, you might have to believe you choose it all: that at any moment
     you stand at a crossroads you yourself have drawn.
    Winky Dink, that was the little guy’s name on TV. Helpless little foolish little. Hurry, kids. Hurry and help. Who would do
     that for him, he wondered, draw him a bridge from here to there, a door to go out by?Would you or could you do it for yourself, would you have to? The trick would be to assume that someone somewhere would, and
     just set out.
    Set out.
    They both thought at first that the wind, rising, had flung open the street door downstairs with a bang: but right away there
     came rapid stumbling steps on the stairs