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

she described to
     him the appointment she was headed for today, when she told him about the stuff the hospital sent, the booklet about
Epilepsy and You
she had read or tried to read. He regarded her closely and nodded attentively but couldn’t hide the fact that he had slipped
     away; it wasn’t doctors and medicine he meant or wanted to talk about.
    Sam had always been fine with him, he said. Thank God. Always fine here with him. And he was sure, absolutely sure, she was
     going to be all right.
    And he smiled, not exactly triumphantly, but with a kind of self-satisfaction that was surely intended to pass as reassurance
     but which instead started Rosie’s deepest apprehensions, so deep she could not have said then and almost could not say now,
     even to herself, what she felt: that indeed he had changed, that he had actually been replaced altogether; that when he smiled
     that way his eyeteeth gave him away, so that she knew he meant not to cherish his daughter, if she were his again, but to
     eat her.
    “Whoops, Mom, too late.”
    “Oh
Sam
!”
    “I was kidding!” Sam shrieked, delighted.
    “Oh you. Oh you little.”
    “Oh you big.”
    Maybe she
shouldn’t
have to face it all alone, whether she was able to or not. She didn’t want to, either. But she wasn’t going to let Mike back
     into her life or heart or bed just so she wouldn’t be alone.
    Brent Spofford had never said that aloud to her in all their talks about Sam—had never said that she shouldn’t have to face
     it all alone,that she didn’t need to. He had only and completely offered her and Sam all he had and could do. And yet he’d put the question
     anyway, and her answer to him was the same.
    The occult and back-end ways we get into cities now. Once we rolled into the great railroad stations built at the hearts of
     them, and after an expectant passage underground, came right out into the teem and noise. Rosie cycled the freeways that were
     knotted around Conurbana center, unable to break in; when she chose one likely looking exit she was only sent out again along
     the bypass meant to help you avoid the city altogether; dove finally at random into a blank warehouse district, the city towers
     falling out of sight as she went down, like a fairy city vanishing.
    Now that she had departed from her mimeoed instructions she had no landmarks to look for. Her childhood memories of this city
     did not contain hints for moving around in it, only glamorous or sinister tableaus, unconnected as dreams. A chess set of
     ivory and red jade in the chock-full window of an antique store. The glass-bead curtain of a Chinese restaurant cocktail lounge,
     and the smell of her mother’s Drambuie. The noisome toilet of an overheated children’s theater where one Christmas a bright
     and loud production of
Little Red Riding Hood
had made her ill.
    It was getting late. Sam slid otterlike over the back of the seat into the front next to her, and helped her mother get the
     attention of deaf or uncaring citizens.
    “Pediatric Institute?” a taxi driver she pulled up next to said. He rolled the toothpick in his mouth in puzzlement.
    “A children’s hospital.”
    “You mean little ones?”
    “What?”
    “Little ones. Sure. You’re right next to it.” Horns honked behind him, which he ignored. “This here’s the back side, is all.
     Go around. One way this way, though. Make a circle.”
    She made a circle, or a rough square, and drew up before it, a huge edifice in many parts, fitted cunningly into narrow streets
     laid out for livery stables and chandler’s shops a hundred and fifty years ago. The name was spelled out in shiny metal letters
     laid into the side of a sort of windowed bridge or flown passage that led from one new wing of it over to another, older wing:
     Conurbana Pediatric Institute and Hospital. But on the high architrave of the older building was carved in stone letters another
     name, City Home for Little Ones. The name it had once had,