Daemonomania by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley [CROWLEY, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC024000, FIC009000
ISBN: 9781468303971
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

8

Above River Street the town of Blackbury Jambs ascends along a number of short streets that traverse back and forth up the heights. Hill Street is the steepest of these, leading up to the Hill Street Church, then tacking off in another direction, having changed its name to Church Street. The Hill Street Church was built in the 1880s by the Original Mission Baptists; when they became extinct, the building (a pretty timbered and shingled church-in-the-wildwood sort of structure) was sold for a dollar to the Reformed E.U.B., though they can’t fill it either and share it now with the Danish Brethren, a small odd sect that holds its weekly services on Saturdays. People, tourists particularly, who don’t know this (despite the sign before the church announcing it) tend to think that surely no one will mind if they park in the church’s lot on the seventh day; and so before services on that day the minister was once again out with some mimeoed notes explaining why this was actually inconvenient for the congregation, and slipping them under the wiper blades of parked cars, some of which looked damn familiar.

“Hello.”

The minister (her name was Rhea Rasmussen) looked up to see a tall man, unshaven or dark-jowled, in a salt-and-pepper overcoat, standing at a distance as though uncertain whether to approach or pass by.

“Hi.”

“You remember me?” Pierce Moffett asked her, and right away she was reminded of the one time they had met—at the funeral of Boney Rasmussen, which she had conducted, or rather at the gathering at Arcady afterward. The two Rasmussens, the quick and the dead, were unrelated, at least not traceably; somewhere far back, no doubt, she’d told Pierce that day.

“You’re up early,” she said, thinking he looked as though he might not yet have slept. “Coming to services?”

“Ha ha,” he said, nodding, oh sure. “Though actually,” he said, taking a step or two closer, “I have a sort of question. Or rather I’d like to have your professional opinion.”

“Yes?” She was a slight woman who appeared tall though she was not, her eyes of palest northern blue at once calming and unsettling; her age was unguessable, her ash-blond hair turning really ashen but only her hands seeming old, large knuckly and worn.

“Have you heard of this—this group or, well this group I guess, called the Powerhouse?”

She ceased her leafletting. “Yes. I have.”

“Well do you think it’s a. I mean how would you characterize it?”

“Professionally?”

“Well.”

“It’s sort of a churchless church, isn’t it?” she said. “With a sort of Christian Science approach. Really quite small, I think.”

He looked at her, dissatisfied. She went back to work. “Do you know someone who’s involved with them?” she asked.

Pierce shrugged. “I think. Flirting.”

“You think it might be a cult.”

Pierce thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat. “I just sort of wondered what their tenets are.”

“I’ve left my Mr. Coffee on,” she said. “You want to come in for a minute?”

He followed.

Of course he thought it was a cult. One

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