The 37th Mandala

11

The offices of Veritas Books, a division of Runyon-Cargill International, were located in a refurbished brick warehouse south of Market Street. The window beyond Bob Maltzman’s desk looked out on a small park with a swing set and a toddler’s gym constructed from creosote-soaked posts that looked like recycled telephone poles. There were no children in evidence. The sandpit resembled a cat box that had never been changed. A ragged man hung in one of the swings, not even bothering to look furtive as he put what Derek surmised was a crack pipe to his lips. Several others sat at tables in the park, or guarded their shopping carts from benches where they sat wrapped in rags, some isolated and rocking back and forth talking to themselves, others in actual conversation.

The door opened behind Derek and Bob Maltzman came in with two cups of coffee. “Too cold for the hookers today, I guess,” Bob said, setting a cup down on Derek’s side of the desk, taking his around to the other side.

“The view’s enchanting all the same,” Derek said.

“So…” Bob settled himself in his chair. There were stacks of manuscripts, proof sheets, everything in neat piles. Bob himself was short, rather plump, well groomed; he was dressed for a financial district office, white shirt and black tie, as if his conservative demeanor might help counteract the implicit flakiness of the books he published. Veritas was a respectable house, atmospheres above the amateurish Phantom Books; it had specialized and prospered for many years by publishing Christian writings and modern interfaith philosophy, before acquisition by the Runyon-Cargill empire. Veritas’s recent venture into the New Age market was a risk that rode mainly on Maltzman’s shoulders, and he carried it well. On the walls were several framed enlargements of book covers that Bob had purchased and published in his line: a new improved Egyptian Book of the Dead, its ancient lessons reinterpreted for the forward-looking yuppie; a colorful Qabala for children; and, naturally, a mandala. “How’d it go in North Carolina?”

“Fairly well. Good practice, anyway, if I can get some larger audiences.”

Bob shrugged. “I’ve still got my fingers crossed, but it’s hard with the New Age stuff. I can’t quite convince the accountants that it’s a growth industry. Eventually they’ll see the figures for themselves.”

“And how are the Mandalas doing?”

“What I’ve seen so far looks promising.”

Derek nodded, but he had come to expect these vague replies. Royalty checks were the real proof, and he was a long way from collecting them for this book.

“What I really wanted to talk about is these Club Mandala people,” he said.

“Oh, yes. I’ve seen their posters around town.”

“They’re total ripoffs.”

Maltzman squirmed almost imperceptibly. “It does sort of look that way.”

“What troubles me is that they started appearing just before the book came out. I’ve been trying to figure out how that’s possible.”

“I take it you have some ideas.”

“Well, it looks to me like someone leaked them.” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for Bob to reach the obvious conclusion.

“Someone here?”

“I assume you use temps in your office. Secretaries, receptionists, people who run the photocopiers for instance. People with no particular loyalty to Veritas.”

Bob looked distressed, as if Derek were attacking him personally. “I suppose it’s possible. But we also sent out quite a few review copies, don’t forget. And does it really matter? The fact is, the mandalas are your designs—I mean, insofar as they belong to anyone. Although I suppose the gal who dictated them could make the same claim….”

“The mandalas authorized me to take possession of them, for dissemination,” Derek said rapidly. Bob had asked once, half in jest, to meet “Ms. A,” and Derek had responded that she insisted on anonymity. He suspected Bob had seen through this tale, but he was diplomatic in all things.

“Anyway, you’ve got the rights to them. If you want to enforce those rights, you don’t have to prove how your infringers got ahold of them. But part of the point of the book, I mean, what the mandalas themselves seem to want, is for the widest possible exposure. I know you’re not going to make any money out of this club, but on a broader level, it will bring the mandalas to more people and expand that many more minds.”

“There’s nothing to stop them from distorting the meaning of the mandalas, though,” Derek said. “To use them in a nightclub—it’s offensive.”

“So… insist on involvement. Make sure what they’re doing is in line with the truth. Stay on good terms with them, Derek, and who knows—they might help you promote the book.”

Derek sipped his coffee. Obviously Maltzman wasn’t going to help him ferret out the spy in Veritas. He had been hoping for evidence to intimidate the Club Mandala people when he confronted them. For the moment he was trying to avoid the expense of involving his lawyer.

“Speaking of books,” Maltzman said with a laugh, “how’s the next one going?”

Derek crossed his legs and watched the crackhead staggering away from the sandbox. “I’m still sketching out some ideas,” he said. “I haven’t settled on anything in particular.”

“How about that idea you pitched me a few years ago, before you came up with the mandalas?”

Derek stared at him, feeling blank.

“You remember, that Castaneda thing? You were going to interview that old shaman, do a book on his life, his philosophy? Study with him for a while and share his teachings? Whatever happened with that?”

Derek swallowed. “I thought you weren’t interested in him.”

“Well, at the time… you were an unknown to us, and so was this old guy. But I think we could get up the interest now, if you could come up with the right angle. In a sense, him being unknown would be an asset—you could present him any way you want. Just as you did the mandalas. There’d be no preconceptions.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible now,” Derek said. “He died before I had a chance to interview him. Anyway, I don’t think it would have worked out in the end. He was rather cracked, as it happens.”

Bob looked mildly disappointed. “Oh, well. I thought that might have been a possibility if you were still in touch with him.”

“I’m afraid not.”

He noticed Bob glancing at his watch and was suddenly eager to end the meeting. “Do you have to be somewhere?”

“I have a meeting in about five minutes, but that’s all right.”

“I won’t keep you. I just wanted to get your thoughts about these Club Mandala people.”

“It’s really up to you, Derek. Obviously I’d never encourage anyone to get involved in a lawsuit.”

“No, I’d rather take care of it quietly myself.”

“I hope you do. Good luck.” They shook hands. “Give me a call when you’ve got your ideas in order. It’d be nice to get something in the pipeline, keep up the momentum.”

“Yes,” Derek said. He started to turn away.

“Oh, one more thing,” Bob said, “I almost forgot. I thought I’d bounce the idea off you. What about a deck of mandala cards? You know, a kind of Tarot? Full color, nice stock, for meditation or divination, whatever. You could put together a booklet of interpretations, come up with some layout patterns. It wouldn’t be that hard to do it with what we already have. Your artist on the first one, Neil Vasquez? He’s working up a full-color computer-generated thing, with three-D modeling, I’m not sure what all.”

“Hm.” Derek nodded. It was an intriguing idea—a whole new marketing approach, giving him more reason than ever to make sure that he consolidated his rights to the mandalas and came down hard on the club owners. “Yes, that sounds excellent.”

“If I’ve got your go-ahead, I’d like to bring it up in the meeting today. Is that all right?”

“Fine.”

“The only thing is—at the moment, the deck is sort of limited. The regular Tarot has seventy-two cards—that’s a lot to play around with. With thirty-seven… I wonder if that’s enough to really give people much to work with.”

“It ought to be.”

“I was only wondering… you don’t think you could come up with more mandalas? If they were, say, to channel more texts—if Ms. A might sketch a few more? That could be enough for another book right there, and it’d give us a nice full deck.”

“More… more mandalas?” Derek said. “I don’t think so, Bob.”

“No? Well, think about it.”

“I don’t—there aren’t any more of them. There’s thirty-seven, it’s a fixed number, they’re very insistent on that. No more, no less.”

Had he even read the book? Derek wondered. How could he have missed that?

And then he remembered excising that section from the original notebooks. It had opened into discussions he did not care to reproduce for his New Age audience, ones he had been unable to translate into catchy, optimistic phrases. The original texts were nowhere more baffling than in their discussion of the number 37. So, in fact, he was free to invent more if he wished; he hadn’t publicly painted himself into that particular corner.

“But you never know,” he said. “Maybe they were concealing something from us, and when the time is right—if it ever is—they’ll come forward with more revelations. I’d be the last one to say I know everything about them.”

“It’s no big deal, Derek. If there’s only thirty-seven, I’m sure we can work with that.” They shook again. “I’ll let you know what kind of response I get at the meeting.”

The receptionist called him a taxi. He waited just inside the door, watching the sorry figures in the park, hurrying straight to the cab when it arrived. “Market and Sanchez,” he said. “Hecate’s Haven.”

Hecate’s stood at a crossroads—more accurately, it stood where three roads met, a location Lilith claimed was of particular potency. She had helped select the spot when Norman Argos moved his shop from its original, cramped North Beach location a year before. Market, Sanchez, and 15th crossed like the arms of an asterisk. The spiky orange crest of Corona Heights, also called Indian Rock, dominated the skyline above 15th Street. Indian Rock, too, was an energy vortex, according to Lilith, lending the whole neighborhood an air of magic. And vortex was a good way to describe the traffic jams that arose among the confluence of cars and pedestrians streaming from six different directions.

Perhaps because of all the power swirling about chaotically, the triangular point of land between Market and 14th had proven too much for most businesses. The building that stood there had changed hands several times since Derek moved to the city, and between each new regime it stood empty, covered with movie and concert posters, its windows fogged with graffiti. The latest doomed establishment had been a Thai restaurant, which had gone to great expense to alter the architecture of the place to suit its menu. The building looked like a pagoda now, with a three-tiered roof of flaking gold, whose corners were tapered and upturned. It was exotic, but no more so than the contents of the establishment it now housed.

Looking through the front window, Derek could see the usual crowd milling among the tall shelves and cluttered glass cabinets, browsing through books, shuffling Tarot decks, gathering various weird appurtenances. Jars of candles, herbs, and incense rose to the ceiling. It struck him as intensely boring; his first few times in the place had brought an odd thrill, but familiarity had sapped the occult of its mystery. Now he walked behind the scenes, immune to the illusions.

He went in quietly, hoping that none of the customers would recognize him; but no sooner had he entered than Norman called his name from the back of the shop. Several customers parted to let him through, looking as if they recognized him or his name; but most ignored him, for which he was grateful. The mandalas were only a tiny fraction of Norman’s business; here, countless cults competed for primacy and shelf space, some so old they smelled of mummy dust, others invoking the modern myths of quantum physics, cyberspace….

“I’m looking for Lilith,” he said. “I thought she was working today.”

“She’s in the back,” Norman said.

“Has she had lunch yet?”

“Well, she usually runs out for a sandwich.”

“Could I convince you to let me have her for an hour?”

He could see Norman resisting the idea, but eventually he cocked his head and tried to give in graciously. “I guess I’ve got enough girls here. Sure. If she wants.”

“Thanks.”

He found Lilith in the tiny kitchen, screwing lids on bottles of holy water. A box of empty bottles sat on the counter, and the tap was still dripping. She jumped when he touched her in the small of the back.

“Oh, my God,” she said when she saw him. “I thought you were Norman.”

“You said you wouldn’t do this sort of thing,” he said, picking up a damp bottle.

Lilith looked furious. “Norman isn’t qualified to bless a sneeze. I don’t want anyone jeopardized by his negligence.”

“You’re not a priest.”

“My blessing is better than any Christian minister’s.”

“Still… it is fraud.”

“And as soon as I can find another job that suits me, I’ll be calling the Better Business Bureau. In the meantime…” She shrugged and capped the bottle, wiping her hands on her black jeans. “How was your trip?”

He kissed her on the neck, encircling her with his arms. She smelled of the incense and oils she’d been mixing and measuring all morning. Wormwood, myrrh, and benzoin. “Come to lunch and I’ll tell you all about it. I have permission to steal you away for an hour.”

She pushed him away unexpectedly, arching back to give him a worried look. “Derek…”

“What?”

“I do have to talk to you, but not now. I need more than an hour.”

“Is something wrong?”

“It’s too complicated. I’m coming under suspicion.”

“Suspicion? Of what?”

“People think—they think I’m your woman. Ms. A.”

“They what? That’s ridiculous. Who?”

“I told you, I don’t want to—not right now. Can I see you tonight?”

“Of course. But all you have to do is tell them to fuck off. They shouldn’t be bothering you.”

“That’s easy for you to say. The fact is, people assume she’s out there somewhere, and she must be someone you know. I don’t know if you realize it, but there are a number of lost souls around who’ve become obsessed with these mandalas of yours. They come in every day and hang around asking me questions. At first Norman kicked them out because they hadn’t bought anything since the book; but now they’ve caught on. They buy charcoal or single sticks of incense, so he refuses to bother them. He won’t even let me tell them off. They give me the creeps.”

Derek looked over his shoulder, as if he might see some of them coming down the hall.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m surprised there weren’t any out there when you came in.”

“You’re talking about a bunch of New Age flakes. What are you afraid of?”

“These aren’t… they aren’t the usual crowd, Derek. You’ve managed to attract an element I’ve never met before.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll have to use the back door now.”

“It’s not funny. I need my privacy.”

“But it’s insane. Just tell them to leave you alone.”

“I’m getting too much attention. Yesterday there was an Asian man here, asking about you. Fortunately Norman wasn’t around or he might have let on that I knew you. He came in because we had signed copies of The Mandala Rites, then he started asking if you ever came in, where you lived, things like that.”

Derek’s flesh began to crawl. “Who the hell was he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. He spoke English very well, but with an accent. I don’t know what kind—you know, Pacific Rim. He looked like a businessman, and he wouldn’t let on why he was asking about you.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. But I’m warning you, Derek, I’m going to have to pull out of this situation if it gets any more intense. I don’t need this kind of energy in my life right now.”

“Pull out of what situation? The shop?”

She looked him in the eyes. “No. Us.”

“You can’t—you can’t do that because of other people, Lilith. You’re going to let them rule your life, your relationships? I mean, what do I—is it my fault?”

“Maybe. You created this whole scene, Derek. It’s your livelihood, not mine. I can’t let it take me off my path, and mine has nothing to do with your mandalas. Do you understand?”

He felt as if a cold, blunt metal rod had been thrust straight through him. “Yes,” he said. “I understand. Our relationship is based on what you want; it doesn’t have a thing to do with me.”

“You know how I feel about you, Derek.”

“No I don’t! I don’t know a goddamn thing unless you tell me.”

She reared back, unshaken, cool, as if she had expected him to flare up.

“Even if I told you, Derek, you wouldn’t believe me. You don’t believe anything. That’s your policy. The thing that makes me sad sometimes is it’s painfully obvious that deep down you want to believe everything, unquestioningly. You don’t even know which questions to ask—that’s why you accept all the standard explanations of reality. I think once upon a time you must have been pretty gullible.” She laughed after she said this; he had felt his face change, but couldn’t be sure what he’d given away. “You were, weren’t you? But you’ve built a wall—more like a fortress—around everything in you that’s naive or childlike, everything having to do with trust and faith. And now nothing gets through. Nothing I can imagine, anyway. I’ve tried to reach you, wherever you’re hiding, but it would take more strength than I have. More violence, possibly; and I’m not willing to go that far. Something’s going to bring that fortress down someday, and then look out. I hope nobody’s standing near you when it falls.”

“You’re afraid,” he said coldly. “Afraid of a relationship.”

“That’s not what you want,” she said. “I’m sorry, Derek, but it’s not.”

“Do you love me, Lilith?”

“Love you? I can’t even touch you. You push the whole world away.”

“That’s a convenient way for you to see it, while you’re pushing me away.”

“I have to get back to work.”

She slipped past him, down the hall. He stood there shaking, his face aflame. He couldn’t face the shop again, its fool customers ransacking shelves full of fakery. He made his way out the rear into a small parking lot and strode up 15th Street to the orange crags of Corona Heights. Fog was pouring over the ridge, a gray mass smothering the stones, and soon it smothered him as well. Wrapped in fog, the city hidden from sight below, he could almost believe he was alone in the universe. Almost. Lilith was right.

12

Michael took one last look at the face of the postcard, which he had picked up in Memphis last summer. It was a picture of Graceland. He hoped Derek Crowe wouldn’t think the message itself was a joke. Elvis didn’t seem an appropriate flip side to the mandalas, but it was the only postcard he had been able to find, rooting through drawers while Lenore showered. He had filled it out without telling her, not wanting her to know the extent of his concern, not wanting her to panic or be afraid in any way. He had convinced her to call in sick, and done the same himself, resolving to look after her until he was convinced she was stable. He dropped the card at the mall post office, on his way to Sears to grab a DieHard.

As he drove toward his mother’s house with the battery, he felt alternately stupid and scared. Stupid, because Lenore was apparently fine now; her blackouts, or whatever they were, had not recurred, and they probably had nothing to do with the mandalas anyway. He half suspected that Lenore was simply getting drugs from Tucker and lying about it. Scared, because a moment later he would find himself completely convinced that the mandalas were at work and would return before long—certainly before Derek Crowe could come to their aid. He figured it would take the card three days to get to California. That meant three days minimum before Derek Crowe called. He could hold out that long, but he felt so isolated. Maybe… maybe he should do another rite tonight, try to contact Elias Mooney in the astral or wherever he had gone, and seek the old sage’s assistance. If nothing else, it would make him feel like he was doing something.

When he reached his mother’s house, he went straight to the garage and popped the hood of her car. He was tightening the cable clamps when he heard the back door slam and her footsteps slogging through the thick mulch of sodden leaves on the unraked lawn. She leaned over his shoulder, her breath reeking of beer and coffee. It wasn’t quite ten o’clock.

“What’s wrong with Lenore?” she said.

He straightened so fast he caught his forehead on the corner of the hood. “Ow! Jesus! What do you mean?”

“I called over there to see where you were. Phone must have rung twenty times before she answered.”

“She’s not feeling too good. She called in sick.”

She looked skeptical, waiting for him to go on.

He leaned on the hood until it clicked shut. “What are you staring at?”

“What’s she got?”

“Flu or something, how should I know? I can’t afford to take her to the hospital so some doctor can charge us a hundred bucks to take her temperature.”

“She’s doing drugs again, isn’t she?”

“And you aren’t?”

“Don’t start that! Your wife is the one with the problem! All I did was ask where you were, and she started raving at me—obscene filth, if you’d like to know. Words I never heard before. God knows she didn’t learn them from you; and if she did, you didn’t learn them from me.”

Michael froze, then turned and headed toward the house. He picked up the phone in the kitchen and dialed his own number. The phone rang a dozen times, twenty, but Lenore didn’t pick up. He finally put it down.

“Well?”

“She must be sleeping. You probably woke her up, that’s why she sounded incoherent. With fever she gets delirious.”

“But with drugs she gets nasty, and she was nasty. She doesn’t care what she says to her own mother-in-law! If you heard what she said to me, garbage I can’t even pronounce. You can’t imagine—”

Suddenly he could imagine the words. Words right out of The Mandala Rites. To his mother’s addled ears it could have sounded like any foul thing she wished to imagine.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said.

“She needs more than talk. If you ask me, she needs psychiatric help.”

“Who doesn’t? I have to go.”

“What about my car? Does it work?”

“See for yourself.”

As he crossed through the living room, he surprised Earl in a transaction with a tall young man in a shabby black jogging suit. The kid, who could have been younger than Michael, jumped, startled, and spastically started stuffing a plastic bag into a zippered hip pouch—but not before Michael saw what was in the bag. Black capsules.

Earl smiled defensively, swaying toward Michael. “Hey, buddy boy. You fix up your ma’s car?”

“Good as new,” Michael said, pushing past him. He wasn’t really surprised, and he didn’t want to think about what he was seeing. All he cared about at the moment was Lenore.

“Uh, this here’s a friend of mine,” Earl started.

“Yeah, right.” Michael rushed out, leaving the front door open.

Lenore was sitting on the couch, heaps of yesterday’s laundry piled up around her. She was still in her bathrobe, her hair wet and tangled. The comb hung halfway down, caught in snarls. Her eyes seemed clear and focused—but they weren’t focused on him or on anything else he could see. It took her a moment to realize he was in the room; and then her expression soured, as if she were absorbed in something far more interesting and reluctant to deal with him. It was the look she gave him when he interrupted her at work on one of her math problems, or the puzzles she had worked compulsively when they’d first moved to Cinderton. They had been her only addiction for a brief time.

“Did you talk to my mom?” he asked.

She crossed her arms, narrowed her eyes, watched him with suspicion.

“Lenore… are you okay? Did you have another—another blackout?”

“Shngaha,” she said.

“What?”

Her eyes strayed to the ceiling, making him glance up. Tucker, he thought. Tucker had bragged once that he had a few designer varieties, new drugs. Anything could happen with those things. Lenore might have taken something like that; and who could guess at the effects, especially when you mixed them with magic? He listened for Tucker’s muted voice or footsteps, but heard only the usual muffled music.

“Lenore?” he said.

She didn’t move.

He touched her shoulder but she still didn’t move. His heart began to pound. Her skin was chill. He began to wonder if the universe were as neutral as he liked to believe… or if neutrality was a more awful thing than he’d realized.

She caught his hand, a gesture as startling as it was sudden. She pressed his palm against her mouth; he felt her teeth and tongue against his skin.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “You were just sitting here—”

Her pupils were huge; more evidence that she was doing drugs. Tugging harder, she drew him down onto her, shifting back on the couch so that they could lie together in the scattered clothes.

“What’re you doing?” he said, though he already knew. Her hands were on his back, pulling at his shirt; her breath felt hot on his neck. He must be crushing her. Her robe fell open. The sounds she made were broken bits of words, nothing that made sense at first, but he wasn’t really listening now.

“What’s with you?”

There was a trace of a smile on her lips, but little else in her expression except urgency as she worked his pants down over his hips and pulled him closer to her.

Drugs, he was thinking. It has to be drugs. She’s never like this except when she’s loaded. Never that interested in sex without some extra internal stimulation—or something to numb her….

He tried to throw off the tangle of thoughts for a moment, to let himself enjoy the sensations. He lowered his head, slid his hands up along her back to grasp her shoulders from behind. Her cold hands moved down his back; her nails dug into his buttocks.

Then he realized that she was chanting, making wet, clicking sounds timed with his thrusts.

“Silsiliv zezizn maoan, nylyvyl olornon ahrixir memt-hocha…”

The sounds smothered him. Suddenly it was all too much. What was she invoking? What would be consecrated by the mixture of their juices?

He pulled out and drew back, feeling as if he had just struggled up from the bottom of a lake. Lenore gasped anxiously but made no other sound, lying there with her eyes still closed, hardly seeming to breathe. Her words trailed off, but not before he recognized them.

Somehow she had managed to memorize the whole seventeenth Rite, the major sex ritual in Crowe’s book. How had she pronounced it flawlessly in the midst of passion, and drugged to boot? That ceremony had stumped him; it was the single one he couldn’t do alone. And now, given the perfect opportunity, he’d backed off in fear.

Fear of what?

He couldn’t ignore the fact that he had been aroused; if he could manage to get out of his head for a minute he might still be able to find some satisfaction. Maybe if he took a little of whatever Lenore had taken. He looked around for a joint, even a roach, but saw nothing.

Her eyes were completely shut now, her teeth clenched and starting to chatter. He swept his hand across her brow, brushing her hair aside to feel if she was feverish.

In doing so, he revealed the bright wound on her forehead.

Michael went cold when he saw the mandala burning there like a brand: an intricate, spidery tattoo, as detailed as the illustration in Crowe’s book, down to the central mouth of gnashing teeth, the rim of glistering eyes. It was the thirty-seventh mandala, sharp and clear. He rubbed at it, but it would not smudge. Lenore made a moaning complaint and he pulled his hand away. Flustered and frightened, he hurried down the hall, consoling himself with simple acts. He washed in the bathroom, waiting for his thoughts to clear, but they were dense and thickening. There was too much going on here, more than he could handle alone. He needed some advice.

Elias, he thought. Now.

He went into his temple room and opened a drawer in his altar. There were heaps of loose paper, volumes of his magical journals, bits and pieces of thaumaturgical equipment he wasn’t currently using. At the back of the drawer was a stack of audio cassettes and a few envelopes bound with a thick leather cord. These were the only things he had of Elias Mooney’s. He untied the stack and dug his old tape player from another drawer; he plugged it into the socket beside the altar and inserted a cassette, then sat cross-legged on the floor and set the volume low.

Elias’s voice crackled out in midsentence, bringing back clear memories of the time when Michael had received these taped letters once or twice a month. Those had been troubled times. Worse than these? Perhaps not… but Elias’s words had always filled him with courage and reassurance and spiritual guidance. He needed them as a sort of touchstone for contacting Elias now.

“—now, without offending you, Michael, I have to say once again that it is absolutely essential you forgo drugs of any kind. They do have a place in magic, but they have been so abused by modern practitioners that it is practically impossible to use them properly now. The realms to which they give access have been polluted by the millions of untrained, undisciplined tourists who’ve invaded the astral regions in the last thirty years, with the aid of hallucinogenics. In a way, the so-called nonaddictive drugs—such as lysergic acid and mescaline—are even more dangerous than the opiates, which merely lead to oblivion, for that is a featureless void whose essential characteristics can never be altered, and from whose effects it is sometimes possible to recover. But the undisciplined mind may never recover from an unguided trip through the peyote world, and the reverse is also true. The depredations done to the peyote lands are as terrible and irreversible as those done by modern civilization to the native people’s material environment. Just as the sacred Black Hills were mined and stripped of their soul, the ecology of the astral has been seriously wounded. And as it decays, so must this world, which is no more than a dream of the denizens of that place…”

The words affected Michael like a mild hallucinogen themselves. He closed his eyes and let them wash over him, trying to recover his state of mind at the time this tape first reached him.

He recalled he’d had a very bad experience with some mushrooms, and had actually broken down and telephoned Elias and confessed the nature of his experiments—even knowing the old man’s prejudice against drugs. It had been getting dark and he was all alone in an empty apartment, with night pouring down over the windows like a bottle of ink spilled from the eaves; and he had hugged the phone to his ear and clung to the old man’s gravelly voice with all his soul. Elias had dispatched some of his elementals to watch over Michael, then told him to ground himself by gazing at a piece of polished copper. Michael was afraid to stray beyond the circle of light cast by the single lamp where he sat holding the phone. “There’s something near you,” Elias said soothingly. “Something on your person.” “I don’t even have a penny,” Michael whimpered. “Look down. I see copper. It’s small, but it’s enough.” Looking down, Michael had seen a bright copper rivet on the watch pocket of his blue jeans, and the sight of it had affected him like the touch of a woman’s cool, strong hands. The metal of Venus, its small glow a reassurance and a beacon, held him steady even after Elias hung up. And after eons of sitting in solitude with nothing but that tiny orange sun to warm him, he had heard a key in the lock and light fell into the room down a hall that was at least a thousand miles long, and Lenore came in, amazed when she saw him, laughing and sarcastic when she heard his story, because her terrors were so different from his.

Two days later this tape had arrived. It was partially a reproval, however sympathetic, and partially an esoteric lecture on why a refined white boy like Michael was genetically and culturally unsuited to receive the sacraments of the psilocybin spirits. Elias did not believe there were any drugs suited for Michael; pharmaceuticals were soulless. Best of all was to learn to release the body’s own natural compounds, the subtle chemicals for which receptors had existed in the brain long before anyone had ever chewed a mushroom or ingested poppy tar or smoked the dried, serrated leaf of cannibis. But this required discipline, self-mastery, and patience; which meant that few in this day and age would ever experience these effects except by accident, in moments of extreme pain or pleasure, when the body released them spontaneously.

As a current example of his poor discipline, Michael realized he had just spent an uncertain length of time lost in his thoughts, unfocused on the task at hand. What drew him back was a change in Elias’s tone, and a faded quality to the sound, as if the old man were drawing far away from the microphone. The words wavered in and out of audibility. Michael couldn’t remember Elias saying anything like what he was hearing now, although he had not listened to the tape for years:

“—the danger cannot be… especially for the inexperienced practitioner… failed miserably to contain… only spreading them… me as a ladder to climb farther into… growing like thorny weeds in the ravaged places… can fight them, but not you… away from crow… stay away—”

Michael pressed the stop button suddenly. Crow, had he said? Crowe?

He rewound the tape a few inches, played it back, and Elias’s voice was even fainter now, barely surviving passage through a barrier of static he had not heard on the first playing. He could not make out a single word. He rewound it again and restarted it. And now there was nothing left: no voice, no hiss, only blank tape that thrummed faintly with a rhythmic thub-thub-thub as the little wheels of the cassette whirled around and around, its machine parts softly creaking.

It was then Lenore began screaming.

13

Michael found Lenore tumbled at the foot of the couch as if she’d been hurled there. She had clawed splinters from the hardwood floor, leaving bloody gouges; with her head and shoulders twisted back, she howled diminishingly. As he got his arms around her, her cries quieted to dry sobbing.

“Lenore?”

She shut her mouth and eyes, moaning. He pulled a rag rug under her, dug splinters out from under her nails.

Bad drugs, he thought. Toxic impurities. This couldn’t be simply the mandala rites; Lenore was too stable, too skeptical to have let them affect her this deeply. He suspected one of the brands of synthetic heroin he’d heard about. Maybe she’d thought she could avoid the drawbacks of actual junk. Designer drugs were notorious for causing comas, seizures. He had to find out exactly what she’d taken. Tucker would know.

He held her face in both his hands, but she wouldn’t keep still.

“Lenore, please…”

“Madze svelvivl soa mudeeth…”

Her mind was stuck in a loop, retracing the syllables of something she’d glimpsed in The Mandala Rites. It confirmed his belief that she’d been drugged during the ritual. She was still tripping on the same shit days later, stuck in psychic playback. The chemicals had triggered changes deep in her mind, far beyond their physical effects. There was enough desperation in the syllables she spouted to convince him that even she believed she was in trouble.

“Come on, Lenore,” he said. “Come with me.”

He pulled her up by the forearm, got her into a sitting position against the back of the couch. “Come on, come on.” He gave up trying to pull her and bent to grab her around the middle. She shrieked and shoved him so hard that he skidded backward and slammed into the wall. Then she was on top of him, flailing her arms until he caught her by the wrists. His first thought, however unbelievable, was that she was trying to gouge out his eyes. He didn’t want to test his intuition, though. She was spewing a torrent of nonsense words; it sounded like glossolalia, tongues, as if she were speaking a language she knew and not just reciting something her drug-altered mind had photographed out of a book.

Well, he would use words too. There had to be something in the Rites that would work on her. If she accepted that world-view, that language, then he must try to speak to her in it.

None of the thirty-seven rituals seemed relevant, though. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to feed her craziness by following her logic. She needed purification and then disciplined training to give her some psychic shielding. She was sensitive to a fault.

I should never have let her do that ritual. It’s my fault.

He managed to twist away. Springing to his feet, he grabbed her around the shoulders and dragged her down the hall toward the temple room. When she saw where they were going, she relaxed and allowed herself to be taken.

I should call the hospital, he thought. That’s what I should do. But they’ll just think she’s crazy, and what if they try to commit her? How am I going to make any of this sound reasonable? They’ll lock me up too. Unless they discover what drugs she took, and then they’ll probably arrest her.

Forget that.

He slammed the door, closing them in. Lenore surprised him by sitting willingly on the floor, her head slumped forward. He already had a candle burning on the altar. Now he lit another and touched the flame to a piece of self-lighting charcoal. Sparks sizzled and spat over the disk of black coal. When the whole piece glowed orange, he heaped it with chunks of frankincense and myrrh. The room filled with fragrant smoke.

From one of the drawers in the altar bureau, he took a short smudge stick made of herbs woven together like the straws in a broom; the tip was charred from prior use. He lit it from the candle flame; its smoke joined that of the incense. As he watched the smoke rise to the ceiling, he thought of Tucker Doakes. Damn him.

He passed the stick under Lenore’s nose. Her nostrils dilated but there was no other change. She didn’t cough or blink the smoke from her eyes. He began to walk widdershins around the room to dispel the influences that had taken hold of her. Back at the altar, he took a pinch of salt and let it sift down on her hair and shoulders. Salt for purification; salt to banish evil.

Evil?

He found himself staring at her forehead and thinking of what had materialized in this room the other night. Somehow he’d managed to not really consider the implications of these things. He’d conducted himself as if the things that had happened in here were a momentary delusion, a dream. Maybe, he was willing to concede, a nightmare.

But evil?

He stood before the altar with his head bowed, broken athame in his left hand, and prayed for strength.

Help me, Elias, he thought. But he could find no sense of the old man whose voice had filled his ears several minutes ago. He could feel no visiting presence. He tried not to feed his disappointment.

Instead, he imagined a hole opening in his crown, imagined cosmic power like a warm liquid heavy and thick as mercury pouring into him. When it filled him to brimming, when he could literally feel it tingling through his veins and nerves, he turned and raised the dagger over his head. Lenore’s eyes flickered with candlelight; the glow overwhelmed her eyes and ran down over her cheeks like melting wax. Tears. The spirits around her must have begun to loosen their grip.

I won’t have to call the hospital, he thought.

The mandala in the center of her brow began to glow.

He lowered the athame, aiming it right at her head, right at the throbbing emblem.

“All you uninvited, now begone!” he cried. With his words, he imagined a jet of pure power coursing down his arms and out the blade. He willed it to shatter in the air against the circular scar. He imagined the blast burning all impurities from her aura, from the room, from Cinderton—from the Earth itself. And for that single instant, he couldn’t help but think of the thing he fought as evil. In his viscera, drawing on his animal power, he needed to believe in evil for a moment, if only to strengthen his faith in his own goodness, and the necessity for what he was doing.

Carefully he visualized her sickness being blasted into countless tiny disintegrating pieces that flickered and vanished out among the far reaches of the universe.

He lowered the knife, taking a deep breath.

Lenore’s eyes were closed. She looked peaceful, at ease.

He knelt down before Lenore and kissed her on the forehead, as if making peace with the sigil emblazoned there.

“Lenore?” he said.

She opened her eyes, looking very distant, blinking around as if to see where she was. His heart leapt.

“How do you feel, hon? Everything’s all right.”

She smiled faintly and reached out to him. He started to put his arms around her—but that wasn’t what she wanted. She plucked the dagger from his fingers before he knew what she was up to, then scurried back and knelt with her back to the door.

“Lenore,” he said cautiously. “What are you doing? Put that down, okay?”

She put the athame to her throat, punched the broken tip through the thin skin a fraction of an inch, and held the blade there while little beads of blood and then a steady stream dripped down her neck.

Time seemed to slow for Michael. “Stop it! Lenore!”

He couldn’t tear his eyes from the blade, the blood, until he noticed a gentle motion in the air above her. Something stirring, stroking the atmosphere. It was so faint that he wouldn’t have recognized it if he hadn’t seen it once before, two nights ago. It was smaller now, hugging close to Lenore, its thin arms like spikes radiating from her hair, seen shimmeringly like the halo of a Byzantine saint—but blackly luminous, rather than gold.

Not all of the spikes fanned outward, though. Most of them now curved down and fed directly into her skull. It was in that moment, seeing the thing clearly, he acknowledged once and for all that the problem was not with drugs. It had not involved drugs for a while. He would have preferred drugs, in fact, because he had fought them before.

And unlike this thing, this mandala, drugs had never fought back.

14

They sat for hours in the temple room, in silent confrontation as tense as any hostage crisis. Meanwhile, the weather worsened; the storm was finally hitting Cinderton.

Rain tapped the windows almost politely at first, but he sensed a growing impatience in everything.

He wasn’t sure if he could reason with her. The mandalas spoke a different language, but somehow they had communicated with humans before—such as when they had dictated their commentary to Derek Crowe. He hoped this one would consent to understand him.

He considered it a victory when he convinced Lenore to remove the knifetip from her skin. Blood continued to run down her throat, but the trickle eventually slowed and scabbed over. She kept the knife at her throat, however, holding herself ransom. He told himself that he could see fear in her eyes, that she knew what was happening to her and was as afraid as he; but that was a desperate rationalization, and most of the time he didn’t believe it. The truth was, he couldn’t see anything he recognized in her eyes.

His gaze never moved from the knife, waiting for signs that her arm was tiring, waiting for the blade to shift however briefly. She seemed tireless.

“What could you gain by hurting her?” he asked. But the mandala had not consented to speak. He waited for a faint touch on his own mind, some sign that it was attempting astral communication, but there was only the prickling static of his own jolted nerves. He was trembling with fatigue, hunger, and fear.

“Why won’t you speak to me? What do you want me to do?”

Lenore’s eyes cleared. He could see her emerging from some inner fog, looking out at him as if amazed at her surroundings. Still, she held herself rigid, and the knife stayed fixed at her throat.

“Michael… Michael, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know for sure, hon. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“There’s something on—no, in me.”

She was close to tears, the blade trembling. She cut herself again, accidentally this time, and twitched at the pain.

“Make it stop, Michael!”

“I don’t know how.”

“You have to. You started it! You made me go to that lecture.”

This reminder gouged his soul. He was responsible. He wanted to turn away, in shame, but he didn’t dare lose a chance to grab the knife.

“I wrote to Derek Crowe,” he admitted. “For advice. I was hoping he would know.”

“Yes,” she said, voice laden with desperation. “He must know. But I can’t wait. I’m frightened. Anything could happen. We have to get to him now. He knows what to do.”

Michael shook his head. “Lenore, we don’t have the money.”

“We could drive….”

“Drive? That’s like three thousand miles! It would take days. I can’t reach him by phone, and we can’t just wait around. We have to do something else now. Something practical. We’re on our own.”

It was a relief to be talking to her, even with the knife poised so threateningly; but he had to remind himself that this was not necessarily Lenore. The mandala had not let her speak all afternoon. Why would it relax its grip now?

Her eyes filled with tears. “Please, Michael… we have to get to him. He’s the only one….”

He could call Crowe’s publisher, he thought. But he knew they wouldn’t give him Crowe’s number.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said uncertainly.

“How can you say that? You don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m fighting, but I don’t know how long I can hold on.”

“Do whatever you have to. But we’re alone, all right? I—I’ll try to think of something.”

“No. We need help. We need Derek Crowe.”

He shared her conviction but didn’t want to admit it. There was no way to get help in anything like the time they needed it; and certainly no way of getting Crowe to fly out here, once they did get in touch with him. But Michael couldn’t admit defeat when the battle was only beginning.

Lenore crumpled abruptly, pressing at her stomach as if her guts were being ripped out. Instinctively he threw himself at her.

She was ready for him, though. It had been a trap. She thrust the knife at his face. It grazed his cheek, but he managed to knock it out of her hand and push her to the carpet, digging his knee into her back. He had a leather cord balled in his hand, the one with which Elias Mooney’s tapes had been wrapped. He got it around her wrists, wrapped and cinched and knotted it as tight as he could, then released her. There were more twists of leather in the bureau, among the candle stubs and incense packets and broken charcoal bits; he wondered if he should bind her feet. She looked broken now, defeated. Surely he couldn’t have beaten it so easily. But maybe he had won her a kind of freedom by binding her, by rendering her useless to the mandala.

She lay panting, not struggling for the moment. Outside, the storm broke. The wind howled louder, and a banging and lashing began, as if giants with whips had come to flail the sides of the house. It was tree branches, he hoped, mixed with the pelting of hail. He was glad that bookcases covered the windows. For a moment, he felt that they were at the center of the storm, in its calm eye, surrounded on all sides by elements more powerful than themselves—barricaded here, unable to send for help… if help even existed in this world.

He had to do something. He couldn’t sit and wait idly for the next psychic attack.

He should take her to the hospital. The mandalas wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything there. She’d be under observation, clinically confined, no use to them. They would vanish under the prodding of technology, the scrutiny of science, as such things always did. The mandalas would sublimate into mental ghosts, neurosis, psychosis; they would become symptomatic of Lenore’s own sickness.

But could he truly take her, knowing they might lock her away? Wouldn’t that be the deepest sort of betrayal?

Truthfully, he almost welcomed the possibility that she was sick and all they had experienced was shared delusion. Science would labor mightily to preserve his belief in a neutral universe. Thinking in this manner, he grew almost desperate to see the doctors and hear their lofty reassurances.

“I’m sorry, Lenore,” he whispered, apologizing in advance for what he was about to do. The scientists would take things out of his hands. They would take Lenore….

A decision—even the wrong decision—would give him a sense of empowerment.

It was freezing outside. The roads would be treacherous. He had to get her bundled up. The trickle of blood on his cheek reminded him to keep his guard.

He supposed she would be safest in the temple room while he got things ready. He hadn’t actually cast a circle, so he needn’t worry about breaking through it; apparently the mandalas didn’t respect such things anyway. He went into the living room and dug a pair of socks and cotton long Johns out of the heaped laundry. There was no way to get a shirt on her without loosening the cords, and he didn’t think that would be wise just yet. He took her heavy down jacket out of the closet.

Lenore was struggling with her bonds when he got back. She made a fierce effort to rise, her face red with rage and terror.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he said, hurrying over to her.

“Me? What are you doing?”

“Try to remember. You keep going in and out of trances.”

“Trances?” She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Goddamn it, untie me right this fucking minute!”

“Lenore, I’m sorry, I can’t. You took a knife to me.”

She set her jaw and caught her breath, her eyes red and burning, her voice pitched low as she said, “If you don’t untie me by the time I count to three…”

“I can’t.”

“One…”

He shook his head. “Lenore, I won’t do it.”

“Two…”

“Don’t ask me, ‘cause—”

She gained her feet and hurled herself at him, screaming “Three!” The altar shook as he struck it; candles toppled, salt and water spilled. He sank to the ground, Lenore standing over him. She stared down, naked under her robe with her hands tied behind her back, looking as if she’d like to crush his face under her heel. He was glad he hadn’t put shoes on her yet. He tensed for the attack.

But she didn’t move; her breathing slowed. She sank to her knees, weeping.

“Michael… Michael, where am I?” she said. “What’s happening?”

He got up quickly, slid his arms around her. “You’re here, with me. It’s okay.”

With her head against him, she whimpered the words, “We have to go to Derek Crowe.”

Michael sighed. “That’s impossible.”

“Please….”

“I’ll—I’ll take you to the hospital, okay?”

“The hospital? They can’t do anything!”

“You’ll be safer there than here.”

“Doctors can’t help me. I’ll die in there. They’ll kill me. They’ll do things to my brain! Please, let’s go to California.”

“How could you last that long?”

“I’d be all right just knowing we’re going for help—for real help. It’d help me be strong. There’s something here that gives them strength and takes it out of me. We’ve got to get away. Please, Michael!”

“Oh, Lenore.”

Her voice was hoarse, her eyes red-rimmed. But she put on an air of calm and sank forward until he was supporting her entire weight. She moaned against his shoulder.

“You don’t love me anymore, do you? You don’t care what happens to me. You’d let them lock me up in a hospital when you know it’s not even my fault. It’s something you did to me and you won’t take responsibility. You’re such a fucking shit!”

He sighed. It came to him then that he could win her cooperation with a small lie. But he had to make it convincing.

“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m saying this. All right. We’ll go. If it makes you feel stronger to know it, we’ll go.”

He felt her relax with a shudder. “Thank God. Thank you, Michael.”

“You just stay here for a minute. Let me help you put on these clothes. Then I’ll go warm up the car, and ask Tucker to keep an eye on the place, okay? Then we’ll pack whatever we need.”

She looked at him, grateful as a child for a small favor, and let him dress her. Once her underwear and long Johns were on, he zipped up the coat like a straitjacket, her arms trapped inside it. She leaned slightly forward, her face looking green and fatigued.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“I can hold out.”

He went onto the front porch, down the steps, toward her car. It was black night, later than he’d realized. Sleet slashed sideways in an icy wind. It would be cruel to stuff Lenore into the VW; her car was roomy and stable; he felt safer in bad weather. He climbed inside the Cutlass and tugged the heavy door shut, but the engine refused to turn over. He tried as long as he dared, but he didn’t like leaving Lenore in the house; he could barely see lights through the trees. Anything could be happening back there.

So the Beetle won by default. He hurried back to it and the motor turned over easily. He left it purring in the drive and returned to the house, already soaking wet and freezing.

It was true that he needed to pay Tucker a visit, but not for the reason he’d told Lenore. He intended to ask him about whatever drugs he’d been supplying. When he surrendered to the doctors, he would tell them everything they needed to diagnose Lenore’s condition. Only Tucker could say what he’d been dispensing.

From Tucker’s landing, he glanced back at the yard and shivered. The porch lights cast stark shadows through the hedges and trees, making them look artificial. The scene resembled a set from a horror movie, complete with ground fog—actually exhaust from the idling car.

He peered through the plastic storm window into the kitchen. The only light came from the refrigerator, which was ajar. Tucker must be up front. He knocked loudly.

No answer. He tried the knob and it turned. Tucker didn’t usually mind if he walked right in. Opening the door, he unleashed a blast of music.

“Hey, Tuck? Tucker? It’s Michael. You home?”

He shut the door loudly behind him and pushed the fridge shut as he passed.

The doors in the hall were closed. He rapped lightly on Tucker’s bedroom door, which was directly over the temple downstairs. Hearing no answer, he went down the hall into the living room.

It was empty. All the lights were on and the stereo howled. The frozen wind had reached inside, chilling the whole house. He touched the volume knob, cranking the racket down to a bearable level, figuring this would bring Tucker out of hiding—or at least alert him to Michael’s presence.

In the comparative quiet, he grew aware of the house’s exceptional stillness. Maybe Tucker wasn’t home after all.

“Tuck? Scarlet?”

Going back down the hall, he tapped the bedroom door a bit louder than before. This time he heard a scratching sound.

He opened the door a few inches, peeking at a strip of poster-covered wall. He jumped when something brushed his ankle, but it was only Scabby, slipping out of the room. The cat padded away down the bare wood boards, leaving sticky pawprints.

“Uh-oh, Scabby’s in trouble….”

The door swung open the rest of the way.

The first thing he saw was the pattern on the wall. That drew and held his eyes, despite everything else, despite the shattered racks of ribs and torn red meat heaped on the bed below, where two figures lay twisted in the confused and broken pile of their own bones, with their flesh hanging in rags. If nothing else, the design provided a focus for his incomprehension, a welcome distraction from horror.

The pattern might have been lifted intact from The Mandala Rites, from the very frontispiece that had started all his trouble—the same living symbol that had materialized the other night in the room below this one, the same mandala he had seen tonight with its thin tubes sunk in Lenore’s skull. It was like a charcoal rubbing of the mandala, done in dark-red pigments, lacking some details but capturing its essence. The same arrangement of radial arms, that subtle double ring of dots suggesting beaded eyes. For a moment, all he could think was that Tucker Doakes had found a copy of The Mandala Rites and obsessively painted the image on his wall, blotting it indiscriminately over plaster and picture frames and the heavy metal album posters he had tacked and taped up everywhere.

But the color of the mandala matched too closely the gory mess that soaked the sheets.

The mandala must have passed through the wall after rising from the red bath of Tucker’s and Scarlet’s bodies. The plaster had acted as a sieve, separating the physical from the astral substance, leaving this pattern behind.

He couldn’t keep from theorizing; the intensity of his intellectual activity sheltered him from a purely emotional response. This was a horrific problem, yes, but if one applied a disciplined and open mind to its solution, as the doctors surely would when he explained how all of this related to Lenore’s condition, then…

Then…

All thought of science fled. All his illusions about the help he might find in a hospital were instantly destroyed. Now only flight seemed a reasonable solution.

Lenore was right. He had lied to her about where they were going; but now it turned out he’d been telling the truth.

Outside, a horn began to blare.

He stumbled out of the room, not wanting to be found there, seeing a dozen good reasons to plead ignorance of events in Tucker Doakes’s house. In the dark kitchen, he nearly tripped over Scabby. The cat. He snatched her up unthinkingly, wanting only to shield all living beings from the carnage in the other room; too late, he found that Scabby’s fur was matted with stinking gore. By now he was outside, and he could hardly throw the cat into the sleet. From the landing, as wind slapped rain into his face and Scabby kicked to get free, he saw his mother’s car pulling partway into the driveway, coming up at such an angle that it slammed into a hedge and stalled there. He hurried down the steps, forced to go straight through her headlights, hoping that her windshield was sufficiently blurred to hide him from her no doubt blurrier vision. He ran to the back of the house and went in through the utility porch. He couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. Which was good. With everything to juggle, he needn’t keep wondering exactly what had happened upstairs.

He heard the car horn bleat as he rushed down the hall, dropping the cat in the bathroom and slamming the door to keep her there. He rushed into the temple, praying Lenore was lucid. “Hurry! My mother’s…”

The temple was empty. The leather string lay on the carpet; somehow she’d freed herself. Trembling, mouth dry, he started slowly back out of the room; turned to find her standing in the hall, eyes wide.

He tensed, ready for anything now. He hadn’t remembered seeing his athame on the altar. She could have taken it. His eyes dropped to her hands. At that instant she laughed.

She was carrying a duffel bag.

“I’m packing,” she said.

“Jesus….”

“I told you I’d be fine. I’m better now that I know we’re going.”

He swallowed. “We’re going, all right. But my mother’s here.” Even now he heard footsteps on the porch, advancing none too steadily. He wondered if he could reach the door before her, and lock her out. It would give them time—but for what? The only way to get her out of their hair was to convince her everything was fine.

“Hide the bag,” he said. “Act normal. Are you sure you’re all right?”

She nodded, slipping back into the bedroom. A moment later, his mother started pounding on the door. When he opened it, she nearly collapsed in his arms. She managed to stagger past him, catching herself on the sofa back. She stood there, damp and panting, staring suspiciously, red-eyed, around the room.

“What are you doing here?” he said; his impatience came out sounding like disgust, but she didn’t notice. It was a miracle she’d made it this far. Another wave of panic caught him when he realized that she was about to collapse where she stood, forcing him to put her to bed right here. And when she woke in the morning, to find them gone, would she explore the house in search of them?

She started past him, stiff-legged, wheeling about as if scouring the room, trying lamely to make her loss of control look deliberate. “I came t’see Lenore. She’s sick, right? I brought you two some… some soup.” She pointed back at the door, and he opened it slightly to peer at the porch. There was an aluminum pot at the top of the steps, the lid half off, rain and hail pelting into it. Perhaps an inch of liquid was left at the bottom of the pot; if it had ever been full, it must have slopped all over her car on the way over. He slammed the door.

“She’s not that sick,” he said as gently as possible. “You should have called. The roads are terrible. Now I’ll have to give you a ride back. Does Earl know where you went?”

“Course he does.” She looked around at the litter of laundry. “Not much of a housekeeper, is she?”

“Mom….”

She stumped heavily around the room. “It’s freezing in here.”

“I didn’t notice.” He took her by the shoulders, but she lurched out of his grasp, staggering toward the hall just as Lenore walked out of the bedroom in her nightgown. The cuffs of her jeans were visible below the hem.

“Hi, Ma,” she said.

“What are you doing out of bed?” His mother’s voice was abnormally loud. “You’re on drugs again, aren’t you?”

“Mom,” he said, getting her by the shoulders, shaking his head at Lenore to stay out of sight. His mother lurched sideways, knocking open the door of the temple, plunging into it.

“Would you look at this shit?” she cried. “My God.”

“That’s private, Mom. Please come out of there.” He tried to pull her back as carefully as he could, but she wrenched her arm away from him and spun around, lifting her eyes to the ceiling with the weirdest expression he’d ever seen. Giee and malice and something else. As if she knew what was up there.

“Mom, please….”

She stumped heavily toward his altar. He flipped on the overhead light to make the temple look more like a simple library. He stood next to her, fearing she might break something in her strange mood.

She stopped where she was, gazing down at the open copy of The Mandala Rites. She reached out, flipped through the pages. Mandalas flickered past.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing. A book.”

“It looks like Satanism.”

“Satanism is inverted Christianity. I’m not into anything like that. This is totally different stuff.”

“It’s the same nonsense, isn’t it? This crap nobody can read?” She stooped over and picked up the book, and he felt a shudder go through him. “I mean, what is this shit? Can’t even hardly pronounce it: ‘P-sm-mim-nou-o-u-e-u-s-v-ee.’ ‘

“Don’t,” he said.

“You telling me this isn’t garbage?”

He heard a steady pounding somewhere, a rhythmic drumming like a flywheel turning, but loud as a house’s heart beating in the walls. It must be Lenore, hammering the walls.

She was turning very red now, with the strain of pronouncing the mandala keys: “L—Loq vey-vulp-sea—”

“Don’t do that, Mom.” He tried to pull the book away, wondering why Lenore was pounding on the wall, pounding and pounding.

“Do what? I’m not doing azca rod du naalauv…”

“Stop it!” he screamed.

But she wasn’t looking at the book, wasn’t even holding it now. The pounding continued, hard and steady in the walls, and the words came from her throat in thick waves, in gouts of vileness splattering the room. It wasn’t merely the words that sickened him; something rode in on the tide of sound, a seething presence that made the air itself cringe and crawl. The tide picked up his mother and carried her across the room, flung her toward him. No one he knew could be seen in her eyes just then.

But in the air above her he saw something familiar and not entirely unexpected.

It was dim, far dimmer than the mandala Lenore had summoned, but its power was very great. This one was flat and shimmering with membranous light, like a fat decayed snowflake, a rotting sea anemone; it was eyeless, colorless, and lacked the flailing arms of the other. It was gilled like the underside of a mushroom, and the thin folds of its astral tissue quivered and rippled, each one raw and open as a toothless mouth. It clung to her skull like an outrageous hat, attached by suction to her soul—fixed by the pressure of its hideous kiss. It fattened on her rage and anger, guiding her this way and that as she rushed about. Suddenly her eyes did not seem drunken; the mist that clouded them could claim a different source.

He backed into the hall, toward the bedroom where Lenore was pounding. The storm raked the sides of the house, tearing at the walls, shaking windows, screaming almost as loud as he wanted to.

His mother came on with both hands reaching for his throat. He ducked from her grasp and came up hard against Lenore. Her eyes were wide and bright with fear, alert with her own consciousness, thank God.

But the walls continued to pound. Lenore had nothing to do with that. There was something else in the house, invoked by his mother’s words, which kept on coming, shaking the house, splitting the wood planks of the floor, clawing at the foundation, hammering nails out backward with the fingers of the storm.

Lenore covered her ears, her face twisting up in pain and horror.

“Make her stop!” she cried. “Make her stop!”

Suddenly Mrs. Renzler paused, choking off the chant; she staggered sideways, grabbing for purchase on the blank wall. Her eyes rolled up as she shivered and let out a groan. She was waging a battle inside herself, but he could hardly help her fight it. He had to protect Lenore and himself; that was his priority.

While his mother fought, Michael dragged Lenore into the kitchen, toward the back door. They could get into the Volkswagen, go for the police—go somewhere. The hospital. California. They’d have to go without luggage; but they needed money.

He turned from the door to the phone, back to the door again. He looked to Lenore for advice, and then his mother lurched into the kitchen. She was chanting again, still reaching for him. She must have knocked open the bathroom door on her way, since Scabby was now weaving between her ankles, smearing them with blood. Her eyes were bloodshot and bloodthirsty. Weakened by alcohol, she had already lost her battle.

The horror of seeing her like this paralyzed him. It struck past all defenses, all intellectual barriers. He couldn’t convince himself that something alien impelled her. She was still his mother, and if this was the nature of their relationship, the delicate balance on which the universe stood poised, then there was no reason to live. It was better to surrender to her. Better to bare his throat for her nails.

She moved quickly to fulfill his desire. He let out a choked prayer as her hands closed around his neck. Then he heard a dull clang.

Her hands fell away. She collapsed to the floor.

Lenore stood over her, a heavy iron skillet dangling from her hand. Grease from their breakfast, eggs and hamburger, dripped from the pan as she stood there. It mingled with the blood that oozed through his mother’s matted hair.

At the same instant, as if the sound of the pan had been the final beat in a tuneless song, the pounding in the walls stopped dead.

He rushed to the sink. The sight of blood and grease, the sudden memory of Tucker’s bedroom, the panic of the last hours—it all welled up in him.

When he managed to look around again, Lenore was taking his mother’s pulse. She looked calm and controlled, kneeling like an angel over the prostrate woman.

“I think she’ll be all right,” she said. “I didn’t hit her too hard.”

Michael crouched and touched his mother’s slack face, his heart crying out inside him at the sight. Lenore showed him where the skillet had hit; the skin had split, spilling blood, and a knot was swelling through the ooze. She had cut her lip falling, and that was bleeding too. Scabby crouched nearby, sniffing at the hamburger grease.

“We have to get her to the hospital,” he said.

“No,” Lenore said firmly. “We have to go.”

“What?”

“If we do that, Michael, we’ll get caught here. We’ll never get away.”

“We can’t just leave her here. It’s my mother, Lenore!”

“I’ll throw more stuff in a bag. We’ll take her home, tell Earl she came in—blind drunk—fell and hit her head. Leave it to him, Michael.”

He gazed down at his mother. She was breathing steadily, but what did that prove? “I don’t know….”

“It’s the only way. Now get up. Hurry.”

He started to protest; he could think of a million good, logical reasons against what she proposed. But as he looked up, he saw the mandala floating over her, as if it had aligned itself along a fracture plane in a crystal, invisible except at certain angles. It hovered there, malignantly sculling the air, stroking Lenore with great tenderness, but also threatening her—letting him know what it would do if he hesitated, or opposed it in any way.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

15

Derek ‘s answering machine was blinking when he walked in that evening. “You have one message,” said the snorkeled voice. Lilith, he thought, his heart leaping. But he was furious at her too and luxuriated in the thought of her pathetic excuse, her inevitable apology. Of course, she had never broken up with him before, and he could not be sure these things would follow. They were certainly not Lilith’s style. In fact, it was too soon for her to be calling. She would let him dangle for weeks, probably; just as she went for weeks without calling him even when things were going well.

Having convinced himself that it couldn’t be her, he decided not to play the message at all.

At that moment, the phone rang. He snatched it up with a hopeless wish he recognized too late to stifle. Lilith!

“Hello?”

“Have I reached Mr. Derek Crowe?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar; street noises—a siren, in fact, blasting its way into his apartment. He realized he could hear a siren on the street below too.

“Who is this?”

“I don’t want to alarm you, Mr. Crowe, but I would like to speak to you about the mandalas.”

“Alarm me? Why should that alarm me? Are you a reporter?”

Absently he reached out and touched the button on the answering machine, as if Lilith might rescue him from this caller, if she were there. The machine clicked its way to the start of the message.

“No, no. I am a very ordinary person—well, maybe not so ordinary. I have unusual knowledge; I think you will understand me better if we could talk in person, even very briefly.”

The message began: “Hello, I hope this is the number for Derek Crowe—your machine did not say.” It was another strange male voice, this one speaking with a French accent. “We have been trying to reach you for a very long time now, and I hope this time I am successful.”

“How did you get my number?”

“I can’t really tell you that. Let me assure you, sir, I am a very good citizen. I mean to cause you no harm, no trouble. I only want to prevent trouble.”

“My name is Etienne. I am one of the owners of the Club Mandala, which is set to open here on February sixth—the thirty-seventh day of the year!”

Club Mandala? This was ridiculous! Now they were calling him!

He tried to keep his attention on his live caller. “How do you mean?”

“I and my partner were really wishing very much to get in touch with you, eh, to talk to you about the mandalas, and your part in the whole show.”

“I don’t—it’s not something I wish to discuss on the phone.”

“I don’t have time for games,” he said.

“I think we could have some very interesting information to exchange.”

“I promise, this is no game. I am quite sincere. I have come a long way to see you. I assure you, this problem is very important to me, as a representative of the Cambodian people here in California.”

Cambodia? Derek thought with a start. Oh, no.

He started to respond with a poorly formed objection, but the answering machine, the hesitant yet cocky voice, was maddening, breaking his concentration.

“Please give me a call as soon as you can, so we can meet and discuss these things. We hope we can involve you somehow in the club. There is a place in it for all of us, I think. My number—”

Derek slammed down his hand, switching off the machine.

“What do you mean, a representative?” he said. “A politician?”

“Well, I am active in a small way in politics, yes. But I am not here in a political office. I prefer to be very discreet just now. My constituents might be upset even to know what I have learned about your work with these, as you call them, mandalas. I am here for their sake. I hope to spare them much pain.”

The mention of Cambodia exhumed the specter of Elias Mooney. It was as if Eli were hounding him in death, resurrected by the publication of the book; as if every time the mandalas were introduced to another fresh mind, Eli’s shade grew a bit denser and darker, asserting its connection to the whole mess. Michael Renzler, Bob Maltzman, and now this man. He prayed this did not mean his caller had known Elias too.

It crossed his mind that some sort of blackmail might be shaping up here. He could shut off the Club Mandala lunatics, but he sensed he could not ignore this man. Not until he’d heard his demands, at any rate.

“Where—where are you?” he said after a moment’s pause.

“I am very close,” said the man. “Can I please buy you a coffee? If we could only meet for several minutes, it would be very important.”

“Where?”

“I could not help but notice, there is a Cambodian restaurant across the street from you. We could meet there….”

“How soon?”

“As soon as is convenient.”

“Now,” Derek said. “Let’s get this over with. How will I know you?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I know you from your books.” He laughed, a deep rattle. “Bye-bye.”

Derek put down the phone. He had not yet even taken off his coat. The mandalas were taking over his life, he realized, making it practically unlivable. But maybe all this would lead to some kind of publicity. Maybe he should devote himself to getting the most out of this book, and stop worrying about the next. See where that took him. A foiled blackmail attempt—and surely the Mooney connection was too tenuous ever to be exposed—could be played up in a big way. He would have to figure the man’s angle, that was all. He was sure of his own immunity; for all practical purposes, he was innocent of anything.

He switched on the answering machine to let it finish its message and noted down the number of the Club Mandala owner on a Post-it, which he shoved in his pocket. He’d call them, all right. He was just getting warmed up.

Outside, he crossed the street one step ahead of traffic, arriving at the door of the Prey Svay Cafe just as a man standing there opened the door to him. He stopped and stared at the man, half a head shorter than he, wiry and very dark, with thinning gray hair but otherwise clean-shaven; exuding strength and confidence, but all of it hard won. The skin of his face was so scarred that it looked like pockmarks; the hand holding the door was also covered with knobbly scar tissue. Derek bowed slightly, as if that were the custom in all of Asia, then felt like an idiot when the man put out his free hand and shook.

“I am Huon.”

“All right.”

Derek entered ahead of him. It was a small restaurant with a counter running down the middle, where several isolated patrons sat sipping soup and watching the kitchen or reading newspapers; the opposite wall was lined with booths. Derek slid into the far corner of the last booth. Huon stood for a moment removing a gray plastic raincoat, revealing a neat tweed jacket, a striped oxfordcloth shirt with several pens in the pocket, black tie knotted in a double Windsor. He folded his coat carefully and laid it on the bench cushion. As he sat beside it, Derek saw that the man’s left ear was missing. A gnarled clump of scar tissue was all that remained of it; that and a livid scar like a fresh bruise.

Huon caught him staring and touched the spot with a scarred finger. Derek made a point of not looking away; he would not be squeamish with a man who, after all, had come to stare at him.

“Many suffered,” he said, “under the Khmer Rouge. Physical anguish was often the least of it. I assume you know something of Cambodia? Democratic Kampuchea? The Pol Pot, Ieng Sary regime?”

“I didn’t come here for a history lesson.”

“Oh, but this is not history—it is more like current events. The Khmer Rouge are a power in Cambodia today.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

Huon sighed and tilted his head to one side, folding his hands. The waiter appeared at the end of the table. “That is what I would like to know,” he said. “Coffee only?” Derek nodded. Huon ordered for the two of them, speaking what Derek supposed was Khmer. The plump little waiter nodded, his eyes lingering on Huon at least as openly as Derek’s had, then he moved away slowly, glancing back at them twice in the time it took him to reach the kitchen. He continued to look over occasionally from beyond the counter. When he returned he carried two water glasses with a half inch of condensed milk at the bottom of each and steel coffee filters perched on their rims, draining into the milk. Derek found such stuff undrinkable, cloying and bitter at the same time; he hated the taste of the canned milk. He pushed the glass away from him. “Just bring me a cup of black coffee,” he said. “You can take this away.”

“I’m sorry,” Huon said. “I thought you might be more of a connoisseur.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Mr. Crowe…” Huon blinked several times, as if finding the right place in a teleprompted script.

“Mr. Huon…”

“No, that is my first name. I prefer not to give you my last, just now. I am a city councilman in Southern California, and I wish to keep all this very quiet, in order to protect my people—Cambodian refugees, I mean—from more harm.”

“What can I possibly do to harm your voters?”

“You have already done a great deal, I’m afraid, merely by printing your book.”

“I don’t follow you at all.”

“I think you must.” Huon’s voice, warm and conciliatory, suddenly opened to expose a reach of colder, deeper levels—those depths in which he had weathered privation and suffering yet found the strength to survive. Nothing in his outward appearance had changed, but suddenly Derek realized that the man was graver than he had suspected. He felt another twinge of fear. Did this really have to do with Elias after all?

“I think you must, because you have the mandalas. You have them exactly. And there is only one place you could have had them from.”

Derek’s coffee arrived. He gulped it hastily, burning several layers of tissue inside his mouth but hardly feeling it as he tried to anticipate Huon’s next words and plan his response. He must get Huon off his track somehow, if what he feared was coming… .

“What does the name Tuol Sleng mean to you?” Huon said.

Derek relaxed, because the name meant nothing to him. He shrugged, pleased to be able to appear wholly innocent now.

“Another Cambodian restaurant?” he asked.

He was glad to see Huon look disappointed. “Tuol Sleng,” he repeated. “The name means, in Khmer, the Hill of the Poison Tree. It is a district in Phnom Penh, but more importantly, it was an interrogation center in that spot, established by the Khmer Rouge during their control of Cambodia, between about 1975 and 1979. Where were you during those years, Mr. Crowe, if I may ask?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I was in college and then working in an ad agency. I certainly wasn’t gallivanting about Southeast Asia like one of those hippy mystics you must have mistaken me for.”

“No one went ‘gallivanting’ in Cambodia during those years. Do you know where I was, Mr. Crowe?”

“If I could hazard a guess, I suppose I’d say you were in Tuol Sleng.”

“Very good! But only at the very end of the regime. No one lasted very long there. Only a few survived its collapse. I escaped, yes—first Tuol Sleng and then the Vietnamese invaders. I fled to Thailand, collecting some of these scars on the way to the border.” He raised his scragged hand. “We were not supposed to leave the path, you see; it was mined all around. But whenever shells went off around us, someone always panicked and jumped for cover. In this case it was several children I was looking after. Orphans. I chased after, trying to stop them, but too late. Their bodies shielded me from worse damage. They all died. These lumps—” He touched some of the grainy scars on the back of his hand—“These are shards of their bone, along with shrapnel, buried in my flesh. All that remains of those children.”

Huon held Derek’s eyes, as if daring him to look away. “That was at the border, among friends.” His hand traveled slowly to the left side of his face; he laid the finger along his blackened jaw. “This I lost in Tuol Sleng.”

Derek’s coffee tasted cold and bitter. He realized he had been holding it in his mouth without swallowing; he almost gagged as he forced it down.

“One man I knew there, just before the end, lost more than this. You could say he lost almost everything he had, before they found they could keep him alive no longer. This man, I think you know a great deal about him.”

Derek groped clumsily for the face he’d put on a few moments ago, but it seemed inappropriate now. The best he could manage was to look stupid and horrified.

“Maybe you did not know him. How could you, after all, being a young… what, copywriter? But what he had, everything he had to give, came to you, I feel. I am not sure how that could be. but I will not question too much. Is it not strange how things come together, as if with a will of their own? Look how far I have come, Mr. Crowe—all the way from Cambodia to Long Beach, and now to you. I think there is a reason for this. I think it is because you are meant to give me what you have. It never truly belonged to you, and you have done enough damage with it already. I am begging you to give it to me, so that I may destroy this awful thing.”

Derek realized he had to get a better grip on the situation, or Huon would surely drag him into an endless circle of accusations.

“Could you possibly be any vaguer?” he said. “If I had the slightest idea what you were talking about, or getting at, I might have broken off this conversation before now. As it is, the only reason I’m still sitting here is to marvel at how one man can say so much without making a shred of sense. It’s all very touching, I assure you; I feel for the refugees, and I’m sorry your people are in their present plight. But the rest of it—you haven’t said a single word that means a thing to me.”

“Mr. Crowe—”

“No, wait a minute, please, Huon. Have you read my book?”

“I have seen the mandalas, as you call—”

“That’s not what I asked. Have you read it?”

Huon shook his head reluctantly, as if it pained him to concede any ground. Oh, he is a politician, Derek thought.

“If you’d read my book, you would know how the mandalas came to me. They were channeled, by forces I was unaware of until the moment they announced themselves, through a woman I was seeing for spiritual counseling.”

“I thought you were in advertising.”

“That was in the seventies. In the eighties I turned to spiritual pursuits. My point is, if you think you recognize these symbols, maybe it’s because they have revealed themselves to both of us from the same source.”

Huon’s face darkened. “That is… scarcely possible.”

“I would have said so myself, a few months ago.” And here he had it: the inspiration that would draw Huon off his scent and send him on an even more insane and complicated trail. It was exactly what he needed! “But then I began to see the mandalas around town. On posters, billboards, flyers. The mandalas from my book—but having nothing to do with me.”

Huon’s fingers tightened around his water glass, still full of coffee he had not touched. The bone scars, mine scars, stood out like white kernels beneath the flesh.

“My book had yet to be published, you see? No one else knew of the designs. Until that moment I still might have half-believed they were a delusion of my patient—‘Ms. A’ I call her—but these came from an independent source. There is, even now, a nightclub preparing for its grand opening, with no other purpose than to dazzle the city with a huge display of mandalas. And they are not my mandalas, as you call them. They belong to everyone. They’ve revealed themselves everywhere.”

Huon’s mouth gaped. “This cannot be.”

“Club Mandala,” Derek said, smug and confident now. Oh, it had worked well and truly. “I suggest, if you’re going to stay in the city another day or two, you check them out. Perhaps they know your friend from Poison Hill.” He fumbled in his pocket and found the Post-it. “Here you go. You can call them right up.”

He laid the yellow square on the table between them. Huon stared at it in disbelief. Derek had never felt quite such a feeling of triumph; it was a small battle, but who knew where it might have led had he lost it?

“A nightclub… ?”

“Horrible, isn’t it? If you ask me, that would be far more disturbing to your people than anything in my book, which has only noble intentions behind it.”

He watched as Huon picked up the scrap, which clung stickily to his fingers.

“The fellow you want to talk to is called Etienne,” Derek said.

Huon rose abruptly, upsetting his glass. Derek grabbed a handful of napkins from the steel canister and slapped them down in the pool, but not before some of it had leaked over into his lap. He slid out of the booth, cursing, but there was no one left to blame. Huon’s form was vanishing out the front door, and now the waiter was coming toward him with a towel, looking faintly suspicious at the other man’s sudden departure.

Derek grimaced and dug in his pocket for his wallet. So Huon had stiffed him for the tab. It was a small enough price for getting the politician off his back, but it still rankled.

The aftermath of his victory was equally hollow. As he climbed the stairs to his apartment, he realized how many pitfalls surrounded him, gaping like sudden sinkholes in what had seemed the solid surface of his life. He had to reduce his risks somehow. It was time, perhaps, to remove the tangible evidence that would tie him to Elias Mooney. He didn’t know why he’d clung to it so long, except that the notebooks might still contain enough unused material to yield a second book—maybe enough to turn into a nice fat Mandala Tarot. Well, the notebooks were one thing; they were only words on paper. But there was no reason at all to hang onto the worst part of Elias’s legacy, the part at which he was quite sure Huon had been hinting.

The box was still sitting where he had left it, next to his couch, partially open. He had avoided looking at it, dealing with it, but now was the time. He wondered at the best way. Fire? Burial? The garbage disposal?

He went into the kitchen for rubber gloves. When he got back into the room, the box was opening slowly of its own accord, the flaps creaking up. Well, he’d disturbed them, they were unfolding under pressure. It was creepy but explicable. He stood watching the flaps, waiting for the thing inside to emerge, his hands hanging at his sides in bright yellow gloves.

Come on, he thought. Show yourself, you ugly thing.

Then he chuckled, disgusted with himself. He was clearly insane!

How had it come to this? How?

“You know very well,” he muttered. “Don’t pretend you don’t.”