The 37th Mandala

16

Wizards, seers, and sorcerers traditionally inhabit dark caves, drafty castles, decrepit mansions with crumbling spires… the sort of places that even when new seem haunted. In the back of his mind, Derek was expecting something along these lines on the day he first drove to meet Elias Mooney. He knew quite well that California offered little in the way of castles—outside of Hollywood, that is. But he pictured finding Mooney ensconced in a ruinous old Victorian or at least a weathered farmhouse.

Disappointment came quickly. Once he crossed the Bay Bridge and passed through the charred Oakland hills, emerging at the east end of the Caldecott tunnel, he saw nothing but new tract homes lining the weedy yellow hillsides. San Diablo lay in a dry region beyond reach of the bay’s fogs. Once farmland and nut orchards, the area had been given over to developers with a penchant for expensive condominiums in artificial woodlands. Once a small, discrete town with an identity and history of its own, San Diablo’s boundaries had blurred with those of its neighbors, becoming one contiguous bedroom community. Only a sign at the freeway offramp remained to distinguish it from the rest of the suburban sprawl.

None of Derek’s maps showed any route finer than the main strip, a minor freeway lined with fast-food franchises and motels, few buildings more than a decade old. He stopped at a gas station where the pump accepted his credit card and dispensed gasoline without human intervention. The young attendant sat secure in a glass booth, indicating with hand signs that his intercom was out of order when Derek asked for directions. It seemed only proper that he remain inside the malfunctioning booth, cut off from all human contact, rather than step out to answer a question. He was secure in his job, and suspicious of the world beyond it.

Likewise, no one shopping or working in the nearby 7-Eleven actually lived in San Diablo. Minor miracle: A vending machine in the parking lot dispensed local maps. With the aid of one of these, he made his way to Blackoak Avenue.

His encounter with the automated and fortified gas station, the apathetic store personnel, and the fortuitous map machine gave him a sense of disorientation that only increased when he realized he was going to meet a man raised in the days of horse-drawn wagons, general stores, and little red schoolhouses. Someone who, in this bland suburban setting, could discourse about astral travel, reincarnation, and alien civilizations yet to arise. On the other hand, it was easy to see how an old man could have grown lonely and loony and paranoid living out here. San Diablo posed exactly the sort of oppressive, lifeless scene that had always sent Derek fleeing toward the heart of the nearest city. The risks of the urban lifestyle were much more obvious and avoidable, he thought, than the insidious dangers of the placid, conformist suburbs.

Mooney’s house was a tiny, neat bungalow with a roof of pink Spanish tile, set back from the sidewalk on a scrap of parched lawn. The driveway was as empty as the street, which presumably meant Mooney’s visiting nurse had already been and gone; still, he parked at the curb across from the house, watching the place for a moment in the afternoon heat, searching in vain for some sign of its inhabitant’s eccentricity. The dead grass was neatly trimmed, the fence pickets not too faded. No pentacles or runes in sight; not even so much as a ceramic dwarf peering out from under the hedge of sharp-tipped, waxy leaves. The only feature that distinguished the place from its neighbors was a wheelchair ramp leading up to the door at the side of the house.

He checked the address against the black iron numbers pinned to the white stucco wall of the house. He started to slot a fresh cassette into his tape recorder, then saw that the one already in it was nearly blank. He reversed to the beginning, and switched it on, realizing at the sound of ringing that this was his first conversation with Elias. He had to tape everything, since he was a lousy note-taker.

He heard the clatter of a phone snatched up, then labored breathing. An old man’s voice, deep and hushed, said, “Yes?”

“Hello, is this Elias Mooney?”

Suspiciously, though he’d sent him the number himself and invited Derek’s call: “Who’s calling?”

“This is Derek Crowe. I just got your card and I didn’t want to waste any time.”

“Oh, good!” And he suddenly sounded delighted, all suspicion fled. “How grand to hear from you. You took my letter in the proper spirit?”

“I can’t tell you how pleased I was to read it. Of course I’ve heard of you, Mr. Mooney.”

The old man grumbled something.

“I’m sorry?”

“Steiger’s book?” he said. “That’s lies, you know. All lies. He twisted everything I told him to fit his imbecilic theories.”

“Well, that was obvious,” Derek said hastily. “But knowing his prejudices in advance, it was easy enough to get past them and see what you really intended.”

“Ah! Good! I knew you were a discerning scholar. Dion Fortune was much kinder to me. You know I feature anonymously in several of her books. Some of the adventures she claims for herself were actually mine. I gave permission…. I don’t suppose we can use those when it comes to writing my story, can we? I’d be accused of stealing my own accounts back from Dion!”

Mooney laughed long and loud at this, until he broke off muttering at someone.

“Did I call at a bad time?” Derek asked.

“Oh, no, my nurse is here. You’ll have to come by when she’s not around, so we can talk freely. Do you have a car?”

Derek pressed the fast-forward button and listened to the voices squeaking past. When the tape fell silent, he switched it off. Since that conversation two days ago, he had been unable to concentrate on his current project, Remembering Your Past Lives. He had felt like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, suspended by one foot; his hands were free to type, but he found nothing to say. His mind was busy with possibilities. He’d had the feeling this encounter would embark him on a swifter road to his fortune. Carlos Castaneda’s ludicrous tales of “Don Juan” had sold millions and made their author a fortune. Even a fraction of that success would satisfy Derek. Someday “Elias Mooney” might be a household name, if things worked out; and Derek would be living in a house of his own, instead of his squalid tenderloin apartment….

Of course, at the moment all that was a dream-vision as fantastic as any in Mooney’s letter. Derek was well aware that success in any form was a long shot; and this one seemed longer than most. But having spoken to the old man, he’d felt obliged to follow through. He had already boosted Elias’s hopes higher than he wished; he didn’t want to let him down without a hearing. So he’d swallowed his doubts and hesitations, and set this moment for their appointment.

Carrying a briefcase, the tape recorder tucked in a pocket, he walked up to the house, looking closely for any sign that it was inhabited by a Master of Mysteries. At the top of the ramp was a rubber welcome mat, nearly bare of bristles. He heard a TV behind the wall, voices suspended on an almost inaudible background hum. As he banged on the screen door, the voices died. Then he heard another—the deep one that had spoken on the phone—calling out to him: “Stay right there!”

The door gaped slowly, opening into shadow. Derek peered through the corroded screen and saw the silver gleam of metal spokes. The man in the chair was not so easily resolved.

Derek opened the screen and let himself in. Mooney made room, rolling back toward a sofa that ran along the far wall. It was a small room, with shelves on two walls and the TV on a third, opposite the sofa. There was no other furniture. Mooney needed plenty of room for his chair. Derek set his case down next to the sofa then turned back to Elias Mooney, holding out his hand.

“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Mooney.”

“Oh, please, call me Elias. Sit yourself down. You didn’t have any… trouble?… getting here?”

Derek had the feeling Mooney didn’t mean trouble of a simple order—trouble finding the house, or trouble in traffic. He meant trouble of a deep, intractable, cosmic nature, as if the evil powers of the universe might have been busy throwing obstacles in the paths of two Angels of Light, hoping to forestall a meeting that might otherwise lead to the downfall of some Dark Lord. Derek wondered if the uneasiness induced by the gas station and the 7-Eleven qualified as sufficiently sinister, but he decided not to mention them. An ally had materialized, after all, in the form of the vending machine. The elemental forces were in balance.

“None,” he said.

Mooney received this news with great relief, then wheeled out of the living room into an open kitchen, heading for a pot of coffee and two cups that sat on a small table.

“Can I help you with that?”

“No, I’m quite able. Make yourself comfortable. The nurse brewed this up before she left; she always makes it good and strong. Do you take anything in it?”

“Black’s fine,” Derek said. He sat for a moment, then realized that the old man would have to make another trip back to get the cups. He rose again to help.

In the kitchen, he noticed signs of Elias’s last wife, referred to in Mooney’s letter of introduction. The name “Evangeline” was embroidered on a potholder. A kindly-looking white-haired woman appeared in the photographs of children and grandchildren, among tokens of a domestic orderliness that had been maintained only cursorily by the casual attention of nurses and housekeepers. But Elias seemed comfortable with his current situation, more paranoid than self-pitying. He was surprisingly large-bodied, though his legs were stick-thin in baggy slacks, and his overlarge loafers looked as if they might drop from his feet at any moment.

“You must tell me, Mr. Crowe—”

“Derek, please.”

“Perhaps I know some of your teachers.” Elias wheeled up next to the sofa, both of them facing the blank television. “I had a wide correspondence at one time.”

“My… teachers.” Derek fidgeted with the clasps on his case.

“I’m self-taught myself, although I’ve had many guides and mentors in the astral. One of my finest teachers was an African priest, handicapped like myself but greatly respected in his tribe. A man of incredible power. I have worked in the silver body with some of the great houngans—both alive and discarnate. You are familiar with the real Voudoun?”

“Yes, of course,” Derek said, grateful for a question he could answer with the proper tone of superior knowledge. “What idiots call ‘voodoo.’ “

Elias nodded solemnly. “Some cultures still respect their visionaries. They don’t judge so much by what they can see with eyes of flesh. Not like ours.”

“Ours has serious problems.”

Elias chuckled. “All the more reason to contribute what I can to its health. I want to leave something behind when I must go, something to show that my time here wasn’t wasted. Something to help those who remain behind. Even if I only reach a few of them, it will be worthwhile, eh?”

He shrugged his shoulders toward the ceiling with a sideways crook of his head and Derek gave a sly wink. Gestures of intimacy, secrecy, as if they were two conspirators signaling their mutual knowledge that the room was under surveillance by invisible technicians and they must encode everything they said.

“Is it safe to talk freely here?” Derek asked. “I know you’re concerned about the phones and the mails….”

“Safer here than most places. I spent a good many years casting the proper barriers around this house, though lately they have weakened somewhat. I’ve been ill. They struck at me through Evangeline, but she’s gone now.” He shook his bowed head. “Their doing, yes. I didn’t realize at first the lengths they’d go to; even at my age I never knew such evil cunning. That lovely, innocent woman—I thought she could speak only truth. When I think of her lips being tainted by their words….”

He broke off suddenly, glancing around him. Derek felt his skin prickling as the old man listened to the silence of the suburbs. Outside was nothing but the sound of a dry wind in the hill streets. Windchimes tinkled tunelessly in the distance, a sound that suddenly recalled a fever dream from Derek’s childhood, lying alone in the trailer at the edge of the desert mountains, a hot Santa Ana wind blowing through his mother’s clacking chimes, whispering something specific that he never could recall, so that the sound of the chimes itself terrified him inexplicably and caused him to wake. He had not remembered that feverish waking in years—if ever. It took him a moment to banish it now.

He looked up and saw Elias watching intently, his eyes black, intense, and liquid, seeming to leap and swim unpredictably within his thick bifocals. His skin was pale as ivory, except for the stains and blemishes of age. His thin hair was combed neatly straight back, like wires of pure silver. He was nodding, and now he smiled.

“You feel it, don’t you?” he said.

Derek swallowed, his neck prickling. “How could I not?” He forced himself to grin, and then Elias burst out laughing.

“We’ve joined forces now!” he said. “They’ll be sorry we’ve gotten together, oh, yes!”

Derek had thought Mooney’s paranoia would be easy to dismiss, but already it was affecting him. It was this banal setting that left him vulnerable. In the city there were so many people raving of the End of Time, so many lunatics talking to themselves and casting their hands in the air with wild laughter, that one quickly learned to walk around them. In this case, he had volunteered to confine himself with one of their tribe. It might not be worth the trouble in the long run. There were other sources from which he could crib his books.

Well, he had come all this way. One afternoon’s interview would lead to no harm.

Derek brought out his tape recorder and set it down on the sofa beside him. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh, no, no! You don’t want to miss a thing. And you’ll let me know if I repeat myself, won’t you?”

“If I don’t, this will,” he said, tapping the machine. “Now, why don’t we start with some early reminiscences? That will give me some idea of where to begin. A sense of… of the shape of your life.”

“The shape?” The old man chuckled bitterly. “I can tell you that directly. It’s a cube, a cell, a locked cage. It has exactly the dimensions of this room. We all inhabit such cages, don’t we? I’ve been unique only in having found a temporary means of release—a furlough, though by no means an escape. Even when I nearly shed this body—I wrote you of the time I nearly entered my teacher’s womb, didn’t I?—even then, I would have been reborn into this world. I’d still be a prisoner.”

His head hung forward, eyes fixed on his knees.

“I’m more advanced than others, of course. I’ve learned a few tricks which I hope to pass on to ease the pain of our incarceration.”

Derek hadn’t expected Elias to slip into such a bleak mood. He wondered how to distract him into other, lighter veins, telling the sorts of anecdotes the general reader enjoyed. There was little market for occult pessimism.

“I wonder if perhaps you know,” Elias said, as if talking to himself. “Is that why we came together?”

Derek almost asked what Elias was talking about, but it was an occult axiom that if you must ask, you are not ready to be told. He decided to feign comprehension and let the old man ramble, filling in the silence. But Elias stopped speaking altogether and sat there staring at his hands.

“Do you think it’s wise to dwell on these things?” Derek asked.

“Mm?” Elias’s head jerked up. “Wise? No… no, you’re right. We mustn’t discourage people—especially not the young. There’s always hope, isn’t there? That’s the example I want to set. Look at me: I’ve been trapped my whole life, but I’ve accomplished a great deal. There are things we can do with our lives that amount to more than merely rattling our chains. I don’t mean pastimes, but important things. We can change this material plane for the better. Then those who come after us—including our reborn selves—will have a greater opportunity for advancement, for true freedom. But it’s a constant battle….”

“I certainly agree with that,” Derek said, though he felt that he had stumbled into something much vaster than he’d realized at first. Elias Mooney did not speak quite the same language as the rest of the planet; there were all those alien tongues to reckon with.

“Why don’t you tell me about some of the places you visited astrally when you were a child,” he said, steering stubbornly toward what he hoped would be more accessible topics. “Those other worlds and civilizations you hinted at in your letter. If you don’t mind.”

“Mind? No, not at all. I’d be delighted. I hope you brought a lot of tape.”

“An endless supply.”

“Good, good, and—well, I hope this won’t be our only time together.”

“I’m sure it won’t be.” Unless, Derek thought, you can’t come up with something more commercial than paranoid schizophrenia. “I look forward to a long working relationship.”

“All right, then. Well… the first world I remember visiting, the very first, was inside a little bit of cracked knothole in the pine wall near my bed. I used to stare into that crack, that little jag of darkness, until one day I found myself plunging bodily into it. In my astral body, of course, but from the very beginning my silver form has felt as substantial to me as this frail flesh—and as I age it has become even stronger, while my body sloughs away. Oh, every sensation is magnified in the silver twin….”

Distant planets, Derek thought. I’ve got to get him talking about distant planets, ghosts, and ESP. Things people can grasp right away.

But before he could make others understand Elias Mooney, he would have to understand the old man himself. And that was to be the work of months.

17

Your Psychognostic Powers! was not Derek Crowe’s first book, nor was Your Psychic Allies—the one that brought Elias Mooney’s letter—his second. They were his fourth and fifth books, respectively, but the first three had been published under pseudonyms, for which he was grateful. They had been miserable failures.

Sick of the hypocrisy and stress of the advertising agencies where he had worked since college, increasingly repulsed by the clammy handshakes of plump junior executives who, scarcely his senior, were already cutting their way remorselessly and single-mindedly past him in their quest for the shimmering grail of a name partnership (imagine fat white barracudas, and you will have them), Derek had managed to save enough to keep him solvent for a few years of impoverished experimentation while he began a long-planned assault on the bestseller list. He began by composing novels—hastily written but schematically constructed impressions of gothic romances, sci-fi thrillers, and horror epics, based on a thorough reading of the bestsellers and classics in each market. He had read The Exorcist, The Other, Ghost Story, The Books of Blood, Interview with the Vampire, six or seven tomes by Stephen King, and then sat down to outline and write Horror Hotel in three weeks. After reading Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Martian Chronicles, the Bladerunner novelization, and Neuromancer, he likewise hammered out Cybernaut’s Quest. He read three gothics, all he could stomach, before turning out his own rendition, titled Captive Flesh.

The three books appeared under three different names—none of them his own—and vanished within weeks, lingering on the paperback racks for about as long as it had taken him to write them. The problem, apparently, was that scores if not hundreds of other writers were on the same track, taking the same jaundiced approach to literature. There was no way to carve himself a niche without years of hard labor; not to mention dedication, inspiration, and something—however trivial—to say. He might as well have remained a copywriter. Fiction had failed him utterly.

Nights he lay awake thinking of what he might write and publish under his own name. Something real, something true to himself. Writing was all he felt qualified for, but nonfiction seemed like too much work. He didn’t have a specialist’s knowledge of anything. As a layman, he was easily confused by technical explanations, so he couldn’t be one of those popularizers of abstruse knowledge. He had already proven himself a failure in math, despite his early interest in the sciences; he had shown himself lacking in the necessary logical or anal tendencies needed to pursue a career in the law—or at least to pass the LSATs. In everything he’d ever tried or been goaded into trying, he’d managed to undermine himself somehow; there had always been one element indispensible to his success, which turned out to be exactly where his failings lay. And he had many failings. They seemed custom-fit to doom whatever new enterprise he set himself.

But he was determined not to let himself decline any farther. As a writer he was dependent on nothing but his own mind; there was no one to rely on, no one to blame. It was a way of keeping faith with himself, after years of laboring along as his own worst enemy. He would succeed at it somehow.

And so he lay awake wondering: What can I write? Who should I be? What sort of author is Derek Crowe?

At times his own name sounded phony to him, like a stage name, better suited to an old-time magician. An illusionist, or maybe an actual wizard. Who was that one they called the Great Beast? Oh, yes, Aleister Crowley. Similar….

He fell asleep dreaming of magic and sorcery and woke with a new reading plan fully realized. Within the year he was receiving letters addressing him as Adept, Teacher, or even “Grand Master Crowe.”

The only subject Derek had truly mastered was the occult “nonfiction” format. By skimming a hundred such volumes, he learned to distill them to an essence, creating a boilerplate on which almost any sort of flimsy half-baked supposition might be built up into a complete popular philosophy.

It had all succeeded far better than he had dreamed that first morning. No matter how many writers ran the same scam, there was always room for another. Half-literate halfwits who never read novels didn’t mind picking up a book about psychic phenomena, full of tips on securing a better life by developing one’s innate clairvoyance. Most never read the book once they bought it. Those who did might try an exercise or two and blame a lack of results on their inability to concentrate. No one could sue him if latent powers didn’t blossom overnight. And next week, the fools would buy another book that promised to give easier mastery than the first: five easy steps to telepathy, instead of ten. Lay your money down, boys. They were addicts.

The gypsies made their money on these suckers with no regrets. A palm-reader at an L.A. street fair had once told him he was shrouded by a halo of dark luck, which she would be only too glad to dispel by burning eighty candles over the next three months, for the modest price of thirty dollars per candle. He had laughed, admiring her guts, not even bothering to tell her off. Anyone who fell for such crap deserved to be taken. Her example inspired the rationale for his own scam. He need depend on no confederate; the real shill was the idiot mind of the eternally hopeful, prodding them to take another foolish chance because you never know, this might be the one….

Best of all, from a writer’s point of view, popular occult books never went out of print. Tracts from the Dark Ages were still earning money for canny publishers. He relied on the public’s insatiable appetite for the supernatural to keep him solvent, figuring that by the time he was an old man, he’d have sold enough of the things to finance his senility. Did the authors of innumerable volumes on UFOs, ancient astronauts, and oceanic triangles really believe what they promoted? That was a mystery worthy of several more volumes. In the end, these authors were wealthy enough to believe whatever they chose. An audience of believers could bring anything to life… but especially, he hoped, his flagging, fledgling career.

Derek’s first book took scarcely a month to write, and with the income thus gained he was able to spend more time researching and writing the next two. He believed that the general occult readers liked their nonsense embedded in a historical foundation, to support them in arguments with non-believers. (Derek had sustained relatively few such attacks himself; first because his books were rarely taken seriously enough to be reviewed by any major publications, but also because he avoided the occult as a topic of casual conversation. It wasn’t something he thought about when he wasn’t working.) He therefore intended to make his third book especially scholarly. He read nothing but history for three months before getting to work on Remembering Your Past Lives. And once he was working on that, he continually sought topics for his fourth book, while plotting a way into the upper reaches of occult publishing—out of the cheesy lower depths that Phantom Press had come to represent to him. He had seen the slick New Age volumes, glossy and presentable, with covers you weren’t embarrassed to be seen toting about in public, perfect for those businessfolk who were concerned about their image as much as their spiritual development. He knew money when he smelled it.

That was when he received Elias Mooney’s letter. With his keen eye for obscure resources, he saw a new source of material falling into his hands. Suddenly his writing plans extended ahead to books four, five, and six. He might not necessarily wish to pen the old man’s autobiography per se, but books based on Mooney’s eccentric knowledge could easily interest the right publisher. He’d heard that the highly respected Veritas was starting a line of New Age writings; this might be his entree to that house. And the old man had said he was a collector, which meant he undoubtedly owned rare volumes that Derek might borrow and scour in search of even more ideas for his own books.

And Mooney did not disappoint him. He was indeed a fertile source of imaginings….

18

Eli did not trust people readily, so it seemed odd to Derek that he had warmed to him so quickly, as if they were predestined soul-friends. His paranoia level fluctuated wildly according to his mood and medication. One day he sang songs and spun out amusing tales of his psychic exploits; the next, he ranted darkly for hours of how his life was a cage and of how his captors were dragging him closer to the hour of execution. They had taken his wives, scattered his children across the globe, and sabotaged his lines of communication with many of his correspondents.

Derek took to visiting twice weekly, and it was not long before he realized that what the old man wanted, more than a ghostwriter, was a sympathetic ear, someone who would not object immediately to his extraordinary worldview. Derek was eager to play this role. Eli embraced a far more interesting, complex cosmology than any he had encountered before, in or out of popular occultism or the world’s religions. He felt certain that whatever book emerged from these conversations, it would be unique and compelling. He began to scope out possible publishers, leaning more and more toward the budding Veritas line.

Yet Eli was maddeningly vague when it came to spelling out the basic tenets of his beliefs. He would discourse for hours on the minutiae of various esoteric sects but never name any particular gods he believed in or any specific devils he feared, as if naming them would draw their unwelcome attention. With the same scrupulous paranoia, he refused to discuss certain subjects over the telephone, stating that government pawns of these powers monitored the lines constantly, and that the mention of key words or phrases would instantly set off alarms in dark fortresses, both of this world and out of it.

In other words, he exhibited swatches of his philosophy but never the whole tapestry. Whenever Derek tried to piece the fabric together, he was left with gaping holes. Part of the reason for this was that Eli presumed Derek already possessed an Initiate’s knowledge, and Derek had to be careful never to reveal his ignorance.

One evening, hoping to loosen the old man’s tongue, he brought along a bottle of wine. Eli accepted the bottle gratefully but put it aside unopened.

“I was hoping we could toast our partnership,” Derek said hopefully.

“Oh, no, I never touch alcohol except in ritual.”

“Ah, well, of course. I should have realized. And when do you think you’ll know me well enough, Elias, so that we might perform a ritual together?”

The old man’s tufted eyebrows hovered above his eyeglass frames. “Together?”

“Well, a sorcerer’s ritual style is a key to his whole character, wouldn’t you say? It would mean a great deal to me in trying to capture your essence for the book.”

“No doubt it would, no doubt… but I’m afraid that’s almost impossible. Not to slight your own abilities, but… it would be far too dangerous unless great precautions were taken.”

“Well, certainly, we would take all the precautions.”

“Alone, I am capable of defending against the things that flock around when I cast a circle. But I’m not used to working with others. I couldn’t be sure of safeguarding you.”

“I think I can take care of myself,” Derek assured him.

“Actually…” Eli bowed his head. “The truth is, after Evangeline died, I swore never to work with anyone, ever again. I learned a terrible lesson then.”

It was late in the evening, Eli a shadow in his chair. It took Derek several moments to realize that the old man was weeping.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stir up painful memories.”

Eli shook his head, gathered himself upright, and sighed, as if shrugging off his pain. “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

Derek switched on a lamp, filling the room with a glare that was anything but reassuring; too stark, too bright, it caused his eyes to water.

“I have spoken very little of Evangeline,” Eli said.

“The memories are still… too sad,” Derek said.

“There’s another reason, though. What happened to us was the single most important event of my life. I cannot explain my life, or make sense of my philosophy, without referring to those days; yet I find it almost impossible to speak of them. They involve too many things that must never be published.”

Derek checked the cassette to make sure it was nowhere near the end of a reel. “Yes?” he said helpfully.

“Maybe you can advise me, Derek. There must be a way to speak secretly about these things… to make myself understood without being explicit or too grim. As I’ve said before, I don’t want people to lose heart. I want to improve lives, not fill them with fear. But for me, knowing what I know, it is impossible not to feel fear every moment. Resistance is a constant battle-it takes all my will not to give in. The same knowledge might overcome weaker souls. Evangeline never really understood, for which I give thanks every day; but it was through her—damn the corruptors—through her that I learned the truth.”

Eli was silent a long while. Derek said nothing. He set the recorder on pause, thinking to get up and brew a fresh pot of coffee, then either embark on a new subject or say his farewells.

As he was rising, Eli said, “I’ll need your help.”

“Certainly.” Derek was already up. “What can I do?”

“In the hall closet, on the top shelf. I had one of my nurses put it there after Evangeline’s death, so I wouldn’t be able to reach it, wouldn’t be tempted.”

Derek located the closet in the small hall adjacent to the living room.

“There’s a box,” came Eli’s voice. “You’ll see it. Be careful, though, it’s heavy with books. Bring it down.”

Derek opened the closet, which he had eyed curiously on numerous occasions, expecting it to be full of magical talismans and ritual costumes, carved staves and shamanic animal masks. Instead he found several overcoats and a vacuum cleaner. Above, on a shelf, was a stack of shoe boxes labeled “Snapshots,” “Cards,” “Grandchildren.” Next to these was a larger cardboard box, unmarked, which proved to be not quite as heavy as Eli had led him to believe. He got it down without much trouble. When he set it at the old man’s feet, Eli stared at it without blinking, his lips and jaws trembling.

“Shall I make more coffee?” Derek said.

Eli made no reply.

Derek busied himself in the kitchen. By the time he returned with two full cups, Eli was leaning over, trying to fumble at the folded flaps without much success.

Derek squatted down and quickly threw the flaps open, hearing a sharp gasp from Eli as he did so.

At first Derek wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The box was packed with some loose, soft material—a pliant foam padding, but strangely patterned and colored, like handmade paper. He dug under this stuff, exposing the covers of some old ledger books with red binding and black spines. Thinking these the main object of Eli’s fear, he pulled out the packing material and flung it aside with a swift motion that caused it to unravel.

Eli cried out, rolling backward nearly to the kitchen. Derek stared in horror at what he had so casually drawn from the box. It was as if a third presence had joined them, invited but unwelcome all the same.

A complete human skin, rumpled from long confinement, lay spread out on the carpet.

Had it been an ordinary human skin, repulsion might have been all Derek felt. But this sallow hide was riddled with bright lichenous tattoos in dark blues, brownish reds, and dirty greens. The patterns were circular, wheels of all sizes, and none was identical. They speckled the shoulders, the back, and the winglike shreds that fanned out to either side… wings with nipples centered high on each of them. The circles covered buttocks, thighs, calves, and arms, running right to the ragged hems of ankle, wrist, and neck. Derek found himself counting the blotches, as if the mundane task would restore his sense of proportion.

“There are thirty-seven in all,” Eli said, having seen his lips moving. The old man wheeled forward, his expression grim and resolute. “Put it back now—roll it up again. It’s not a good idea to stare at the damn thing.”

Derek could feel the seeds of a nightmare being planted in his soul, pushed down deeper than the reach of his nerves. It was almost impossible to touch the skin again: cool as a snake, but clammy. He started to furl it up, but the underside was worse than the outside, for he could see and feel traces of tissue where fat and flesh had been flensed away. Finally he merely wadded the thing in a crumpled ball, shoving it back into the box atop the stacked red and black ledgers.

“Wait,” Eli said. “Those I want. Bring them out.”

Dropping the hide, Derek lifted the ledgers and heaped them on the floor. Then it was easy to stuff the skin into the empty box; he wove the flaps together so the carton wouldn’t open on its own.

Feeling nauseated, and somewhat wary of Eli now, Derek sank cross-legged onto the floor next to the box and the ledgers. The old man’s dark eyes were full of fear and anxiety. The sight of such trepidation was slightly comforting, though he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. If Eli were responsible for this skin, then perhaps he only feared prosecution; but Derek didn’t think that was the source of his worry. There was something about the skin itself that unnerved him, as it would anyone. He had never expected to see anything so ghastly in this little suburban house.

Now he thought he had finally begun to glimpse the reason for Elias Mooney’s paranoia, a tangible focus for what had previously been a vague sense of dread….

Again he wondered if any possible book was worth exposure to Eli. He’d felt so much safer sitting alone with his research materials, inventing fantasies. There was no sign here of the book he’d intended to write.

“I am responsible for Evangeline’s death,” Eli said solemnly.

Derek nearly bolted for the door, fearing that Eli was about to throw off his disguise of frail convalescent and leap at him, flaying knife flashing. Mooney the butcher, the suburban cannibal….

But Eli didn’t move, and gradually Derek’s panic subsided. The skin in the box was not a woman’s skin anyway.

“If she’d never come near me, she never would have come to their attention. But she was so pure, so loving, and they

knew how much I trusted her. They knew they could use her as a gate because she never feared the evil in this world. She never had reason to fear a thing until she met me.”

In the box, as he spoke, the human parchment rustled, expanding slightly, finding a new position. Like Derek, it might have been settling down to listen as Eli embarked on his story.

19

(ELIAS’S STORY: A TRANSCRIPT)

“Evangeline had no interest in magic when I met her. She was a cook at a handicapped center where I used to spend time after my second wife’s death. While she and I had very little in common, in our hearts we were close from the first. Brother and sister, that sort of warmth.

“We were married twice. Once by a Christian priest we both knew and respected, but first in a much older ceremony. Married in sight of the earth and the stars, our wrists bound with a red silk cord anointed with mistletoe juice and some of my semen and a little of Evangeline’s blood. She wasn’t a squeamish girl; she understood instantly how these things worked, though no one ever told her a thing about them, and she had never in her whole life cared to peek into the sort of books you and I take for granted.

“She had to put up with all sorts of strange things, marrying me. My children from my first marriages had suffered the loss of their mothers, but they took to Evangeline like blood kin, and she to them. The youngest were grown and on their way soon after we married, and then we had only the years ahead of us, and grandchildren, and life here in San Diablo, listening to the bulldozers coming up through the hills where before we had heard only birds.

“She was so patient. She put up with me and never once called me crazy, which should tell you something right there. When I spoke about where I’d been and what I’d seen in the astral, out traveling, she’d just nod and sometimes ask a question that made me wonder if she hadn’t seen the places for herself. We traveled together at night sometimes, though she couldn’t remember our trips in the morning. Wherever we went, everyone—every being we met in the universe—loved her instantly. She was so full of compassion, strong and pure as sunlight; you could live on her light without needing anything else.

“Evangeline….

“Pointless to say I miss her. That only tells them they triumphed, the sadistic… what? I can’t call them bastards; I’m not sure of their parentage. And sadism surely isn’t the right word. No human terms apply. Misbegotten, yes; despicable; but maybe necessary, in their way. That’s the worst of it. Like blowflies laying eggs in corpses, like maggots and bacteria causing rot and corruption and decay. All these things, so horrible to the humans whose flesh they will someday claim, are indispensable. Without the mandalas we’d drown in our own psychic waste; the fragments of ego and consciousness we leave in our wake as we pass between incarnations would be eternal, like the debris of old rockets and satellites that orbit the earth until they crash down upon it…. No god designed them, you see—they evolved. But the evolutionary forces at work in the astral realms are not so well understood as those in the physical world. I have conducted my own investigations, but my abilities are limited. We have not yet had our occult Newton or Einstein, a genius who can illuminate the basic principles of the realm. Swedenborg came close, perhaps, but his influence on following generations has been slight, and Blavatsky and her brood corrupted it so. Our sick modern culture knows less than many more so-called primitive societies that haven’t invested so much into promoting spiritual blindness. Unfortunately, those societies today are all but extinct, their knowledge as lost as the genotypes once hidden in the rain forests….

“But I was speaking of the mandalas, whose imprints mark that skin. I suspect they are organisms, or something like organisms. Archetypes of decay. There are surprisingly few of them, only thirty-seven, but each I think is a template from which an infinite number can be struck—an astral chromosome, if you will. Thirty-seven ideal forms. They seem like diatoms, single-celled, unified of purpose; yet they are conscious and quite deliberate, far more manipulative than any protozoan whipping particles of food into its mouth, though that’s all we seem to be to them. Our souls are their food, the human race their hunting ground, and they breed in our souls like maggots in carrion, giving birth to flies. As I’m sure you know, our thoughts have an independent existence; thought-forms persist in a realm alongside our own, touching it everywhere. It is here that the mandalas scavenge, and to that extent they are dependent on us. But they have a greater reality than our mere thoughts.

“Sometimes the fact of their existence makes me despise the whole cosmos. Things that once struck me as beautiful now fill me with fear by implication, for the same geometries that gave rise to beauty also bore these creatures. I hate them with a fury too great for my body to contain. Thinking of them, I feel my flesh bloating; my skin begins to stretch and crack, my blood burns hot and smoke pours from my throat. But that’s bad; it does their work for them; it harms only me. I dig my grave that much deeper when I give in to rage.

“Perhaps I could have regarded them calmly once, objectively, like a scientist, but not after the loss of Evangeline. I was responsible for her death, but they are the ones who killed her. They did it. I won’t take the blame, or feed my own guilt. They’d like me to. It would rot me from the inside, and they would feed….

“I first encountered them exactly as you did tonight, and with about the same degree of horror—although I had a better idea of what to expect. I’d been warned by letter, though a description of the things can never quite foreshadow what you feel when you see them. There is something in us that fears and is fascinated by them, something that shies away instinctively even as it’s hypnotized into staring. Just as the sight of a Buddhist mandala may cause tranquility, enjoining one to embark on the quest for enlightenment, so sight of these fiendish wheels gives us glimpses of the hells that await us. They are like thirty-seven windows into other worlds—or thirty-seven other ways of looking at this one. They are alive but also symbols—symbols that draw us into darkness as we contemplate them. The difference is that they are alive, you see, while the mandalas of Buddhism, for instance, are merely pictures to be conjured in our minds. Even calling them mandalas is a misnomer, a kind of blasphemy, for that word means ‘sacred circle,’ and these are only sacred to evil. Perhaps there are benevolent living mandalas as well—the opposite of these. If such exist, I have never encountered them. They must be quite rare. These are plentiful as maggots in a war zone.

“But I was speaking of the skin.

“It arrived through the mails, which I had no real reason to mistrust in those days—days not long past, I might add. The package came from a Japanese acquaintance, a professor with a keen interest in curiosities. He had it from a pathologist, a doctor who kept a professional collection of tattooed human skins, having perfected a method of preserving them intact. Apparently the skin had come to this doctor from somewhere in Southeast Asia; my correspondent was unclear on that point. He suspected Cambodia, and hinted of a secret cult with allegiance to Pol Pot, but that was speculation based on rumor. The truth was, something unsettled even the pathologist, who had been pleased at first to add the skin to his collection. After studying it in detail, he concluded that the circular marks had not been made by any known tattooing process. No pigment had been inserted beneath the dermis. The coloration was caused by chemical changes in the skin itself, and the ornate scarring was the result of molecular changes in the cells. The cause was never ascertained, nor those new molecular compounds identified, but I understand they bear some similarity to certain organic psychoactive drugs, suggesting that whoever bore these emblems may well have been experiencing the world in an altered light.

“All this should have intrigued the pathologist, but it only frightened him. He began receiving requests from strangers to visit his museum of skins—strangers who bore similar mandalas tattooed on their foreheads or arms. Of course he denied them permission; his was a collection for professionals and academicians only. Then the museum was burglarized, ransacked, although nothing was taken. He had loaned the skin to my friend by that time, hoping that with his knowledge of various sects, he might be able to identify the process by which the marks had come to be branded—if not the origins of the symbols themselves. After the burglary, he asked my friend to hold onto the hide indefinitely, and with time he made arrangements to totally surrender it. I gather he was troubled by bad dreams… visitations.

“Now my Japanese friend had mentioned some of these events to me as they occurred, hoping that I might be able to satisfy both our curiosities; and once it was his, he shipped it on to me. I had never seen anything like it; nor did I particularly wish to learn more of it. Had I been able to return it, I would have, but further letters to Japan were returned unopened. I learned later that my friend had disappeared completely.

“So the skin was mine.

“Evangeline, as I said, had no experience with the things that most occupied my mind, but she was willing to assist me in whatever way she could. I asked her help in a ritual to neutralize or contain the power I sensed in the skin. I wished to burn it but feared that doing so would release whatever energy was bound up in the tattoos. I had to banish that first. I included Evangeline in my rite as an innocent, a touchstone. I felt her purity would be protective. I didn’t explain what I was doing; I had never shown her the skin, since I knew how she would react to having it in her house. I could not bear to frighten her. So I wrapped it in a cloth and set it on my altar, and that was all she saw of it.

“At first everything went as I planned. At the height of the ceremony, Evangeline’s aura lit the room. But then her soul-light began to flicker and pulsate, and the candles dimmed. I realized that her radiance had drawn an intruder from the dark. It circled her like a moth, brushing my face with a cold wind… not touching her, but only circling, circling, spiraling closer, casting a shadow between us until everything began to strobe. In the dark intervals I could almost see a shape like a cloudy glass bell, or a jellyfish, or a translucent flower with drooping luminous petals; then it covered her completely. I tried to find an opening, to push through the thing, but a sense of euphoria began to grow in me, and I realized too late that I was about to have a seizure.

“Like many shamans, I am epileptic. The doctors try to keep me medicated, but the only drugs they know are poisons that taint the body and the mind. I preferred to risk the fits—in those days, I mean. Now that I have no one to look after me, I submit to the poisoning. On that day, the mandalas used my weakness to render me helpless. I don’t remember anything past the initial rapture of prodrome that came as I watched the whirling shape swallow my wife. I had never felt so powerless.

“Evangeline saw the seizure begin. She rushed to call an ambulance, and the next thing I knew, I was laid out on a couch with paramedics working over me. I was disoriented, but my first worry was that Evangeline had broken the magic circle without properly banishing the things we called. They had been… released.

“Several days later, she began to speak.

“There’s been a resurgence, in recent years, of so-called channeled, trance mediums, Ramtha and that lot. When I was young, there was a similar interest in automatic writing, Ouija boards—whole novels dictated by spirits, with humans as mere secretaries. Ruth Montgomery, Edgar Cayce, Seth. Some of these people are outright frauds, as you must know from your investigations. Others are earnest enough, but not in genuine contact with any force outside themselves; they speak from regions of their mind that are normally suppressed and allow submerged aspects of their personalities to surface for a time in trance. Only a very few, less than one-tenth of one percent of those who make claims or show evidence of spirit speech, are true gateways for the ones beyond.

“Evangeline was completely in possession of herself; there was no buried fear or neurosis, no guilt or unguarded pockets in her soul. Whatever means the mandalas used were forcible, unsubtle ones. Usually astral forces make their presence known to humans subtly, inducing thoughts, images, or voices. The nervous system is a network with many junctures, many synaptic points at which they may interfere and exert control. But for an astral organism actually to overtake a strong physical body is—or was—almost beyond my comprehension. Astrally, electrochemically, they began to work her like a puppet. My Evangeline, whom of all people I would have thought beyond their power. But then, I never understood what they were until too late; I never had a chance to underestimate them. That’s why I take responsibility for her death. I exposed her to something she would never have encountered on her own, a risk she should never have taken.

“We were sitting here in the evening, just like you and me, waiting for the news to come on TV. All of a sudden, very quietly, she began to speak. I turned off the television to listen, but I needn’t have, for her voice grew louder until it was no longer her voice at all, nothing recognizable. It told me things about myself that she couldn’t possibly have known, secrets I had never revealed in our years of marriage; things more personal than dreams. It spoke of mysteries I had discovered for myself while traveling astrally in the far, ancient reaches of the universe, out near the hot walls of creation, things I had never told anyone, and which are described nowhere on Earth.

“At first, not knowing who spoke, I was amazed. But then she began to frighten me. I switched the TV to a blank channel and turned off the other lights; this gives the perfect radiance for viewing astral forms. After a few moments I perceived something floating above her like a dark crown, its myriad arms forming a cage around her face, some of its tentacles piercing her skull, her throat.

“You know the Voudoun term ‘maître à tête‘—‘master of the head.’ Each of us has a master, a loa or ancestral god who guides and protects him; they are like guardian angels, yet more specific than that. Their character reflects the character of the person they guard.

“It is thus with the mandalas. Each of the thirty-seven suits a particular temperament. The one that held Evangeline was foul beyond description. It was in every way her antithesis. Sickly yet powerful, with grasping palps, spotted with livid stains that glowed in astral colors that have no physical parallel, thank God. And its words were equally alien. Even when she used human speech, it was accented in such a way that to hear it caused me profound fear and nausea.

“Get out of her,” I told it. I used the fiercest banishings I knew, dispatched it to the great black hole at the galactic core. I invoked the Shemhamphorasch. But it did not recognize power in any of the forms of human religions; it paid my banishings no more mind than a bacterium. When finally it did leave her, it left for its own reasons; and as soon as it departed, another arrived. The first had been her particular maître à tête; this second was one of its kin. They were hungry, you see. They all wished to take a turn at my wife.

“All thirty-seven came through in that first night. One after another, they paraded through her body. I threw all my spells at them, without effect. Sometimes, by coincidence, one seemed to leave when I wished it. But there was always another after it. And another.

“They nearly drove me to madness in one night. I had never felt so helpless, not in a lifetime of physical confinement. Even my astral abilities were worthless in such a situation, since I feared leaving my body. Feared to examine my own aura in that revealing light. Feared that one of them was waiting for me out there, my own evil maître à tête, waiting like a huge sea anemone to tangle me in its tendrils the moment I drifted into the astral. There was danger enough in the physical world.

“My only peace came from knowing that Evangeline’s awareness was extinguished while they controlled her. Apparently they could not tolerate any spark of humanity in their puppet while they were present. I didn’t know where her awareness had gone, but I feared it was not pleasant; the vague memories she eventually carried back were nightmarish. She thought they were only bad dreams she’d had in the course of a night’s sleep.

“Shortly after dawn, they left. They stayed on into the light as if to show me that the sun could not dispel them, then they let Evangeline collapse. Both of us slept most of that day right through and woke near evening, disoriented, but glad that it was over.

“And then, just after sunset, they returned. As they did the night after that, and the night after that. They ransomed her. Threatened me with the possibility of threat to her. Forced her to hold a knife at her own throat, while I sat here helpless to resist their instructions, which were simple enough, I suppose.

“I wrote, you see. They dictated through Evangeline, and I wrote down every word. It’s all there, in those ledgers beside you.

“They wished to make themselves known. They wanted to begin a new age of relations with humanity. They were tired of anonymity and wished to leave their signature on the things they touched. Imagine maggots leaving graffiti in a carcass. Their ruthless greed and hunger—if one can even attempt to anthropomorphize them—were beyond comprehension. They wished to canonize themselves and force us to worship in a temple of decay. I was to be only the first of their unwilling apostles.

“I took dictation all night long. In the day, I tried to ask Evangeline about our sessions, but I couldn’t make her understand what was happening. There was a wall in her now, one they had erected, one they hid behind when they weren’t using her.

“That period of my life seemed endless, and although those were my last days with my wife, I cannot treasure them in memory. I was exhausted nearly to the point of death, but Evangeline herself was in perfect health. In fact, she had never seemed stronger or more cheerful. The mandalas induced in her a painful mockery of bliss, tormenting me with a semblance of health and happiness.

“I slept through the days. At first I tried to seek answers in the astral—but I had no strength for the travel, and I sensed the mandalas were always around me. Sleep was less a flight than a fall into a bottomless well. The astral substance turned thick as tar around me. None of my familiars could reach me through it. I found later that many of my old correspondents had died in those months, while I filled ledger after ledger with the revelations and invocations that overflowed from Evangeline like floods of poison. Even today, trying to speak one word of their language is enough to make me puke.

“Fortunately, they couldn’t go on forever. You see, they had specific goals, no matter how endless it all seemed when I was their scribe and Evangeline their puppet. One day, without warning, they did finish.

” That is all for now,’ my Evangeline said. She had never said such a thing before.

“I remember staring in disbelief as her eyes fluttered and her hands stirred in her lap. She looked at the clock and said, “Look at the time, Eli!’

“I couldn’t believe it was over. I had grown accustomed to the monotony of their dictation. I wasn’t sure what to do. It had been so long since our lives were our own.

“Evangeline was sitting right there, on the sofa. She looked… afraid… for the first time. As a parting gesture they must have returned her memory, shown her how they’d used her, so that her moments of freedom were a final torment, a cruel slap. As she reached out to me her eyes closed, and she crumpled and passed on.

“They had drained her like vampires. However many years were left in her naturally, they had fed on them, used them to fuel those nights of torture. They knew her limits to the most infinitesimal degree, and when she was no more use to them, they abandoned her.

“There was nothing I could do. Immediately I set out in my silver body to find her. I opened the western gate for her soul, but I could not find it. I sent up my prayers and went calling, looking everywhere, hoping that at least she had escaped the mandalas. There was no sign of them either.

“I never found her. What that means, I don’t know. Perhaps her release was complete, and she found utter freedom. Or perhaps they never really let go of her, but dragged her along with them so swiftly that—

“But I can’t bear to think of that.

“I never dreamed I would tell this story to anyone—not even to you, Derek. These things have no place in a book meant to ward off despair. But it was the central event of my life, though it shed a ghastly light on every other occasion. Now I know what forces rule us and what sort of world we live in. The thirty-seven are the wardens of our souls. And we… we need have committed no crime to end up in their custody. It is nature’s way. I often ask myself if I can live with that knowledge. But it is even worse to think of what awaits me when I die.”

20

Derek fidgeted with the flaps of the box, more intrigued than ever by the contents of the ledgers, the designs on the skin—yet knowing that the old man would panic if he tried opening the box again. He casually thumbed open one of the black and red books and saw that its pages were densely covered with Eli’s arthritic scrawl; the composition of these books must have been sheer torture. Some of the pages seemed to be commentary, written in English; others were gibberish, a meaningless succession of syllables. It must be phonetic transcriptions of nearly unpronounceable speech.

He opened the box wide enough to shove the ledgers back inside, weighing down the skin.

“I’ll just put this back,” he said.

Eli didn’t seem to notice. He might have been off in the astral, still searching for Evangeline.

Returning to the other room, he found Eli slumped and snoring in his chair. The tale had taken a lot out of him. In any case, it was much later than he usually stayed.

He left quietly, drove home preoccupied, and scarcely slept; once he got up to play back the tape in its entirety. Derek was saddened by the story, but frustrated. There was so much madness mixed up in it that he couldn’t be sure where it bordered on truth. Evangeline was dead, but what of the rest of it? An elaborate hoax, and if so—on whom? Had Mooney filled the volumes with his own occult inventions, hoping to give them credence by concocting a tale of demonic possession? Then why did he insist that Derek not publish this crucial part of his life story? Had Evangeline been the one to spin the web, deceiving her husband with her own ravings? And if so, how and why had she timed her death so cunningly?

No explanation made any sense to Derek. He thought Elias Mooney was a man of honor, however fantastic his beliefs. He was not deliberately deceitful.

The next morning, he called and asked Eli if he could visit again. The old man was anxious for his return.

“We left a great deal undone yesterday,” Eli told him when he stepped into the house. His eyes were bright, his cheeks flushed; he seemed in the grip of fever. ‘T fear I’ve told you too much, and out of turn. There were things I should have done before dragging you into all this. I should have made sure of your own protection. I’m afraid you share some of my personal risk at the moment.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Derek said in what he hoped was a reassuring voice.

“I think, in answer to your earlier request, that a certain ritual is in order now,” Eli said. “I wish to bring you into my spiritual lineage—so that you can receive the protection of my guides and guardians. I should have done this sooner, I realize now; until you are properly initiated, the information I passed to you is all ungrounded. We must make sure it finds its proper path. The last thing we want is to create more unfocused channels for the mandalas’ power….”

“I’ll be happy to participate in any rite,” Derek said.

“Very good. First, we must ensure your purity.” He wheeled uncertainly back and forth in a small space, thinking. “I feel that something more than the ordinary precautions are called for.” Derek wondered about this, but he was on Eli’s turf now and not about to argue. He must appear to know already, or he would learn nothing. “More than salt. More than smoke.”

“I agree,” Derek said knowingly.

“In short, my boy, I’m afraid you need work.”

Derek felt the mood take a creeping turn toward shattering. He must prevent it, somehow.

“I realize that,” he said. “Why do you think I’ve come to you?”

“Then,” Eli said darkly, “you have no master?”

Derek bowed his head. He wished he could have studied the old man’s face, but the moment demanded humility and the appearance of deepest shame. “I thought it was obvious.”

“Hm, and so it was,” Eli said. “Raise your head. Look me in the eye.”

He did so. Eli struck out with his hand and laid the palm on Derek’s brow—a potent blow that never exactly touched him. “It is not the student’s fault when he cannot find a master. I sensed in your books that you were still searching.”

“I always consoled myself with one thought,” Derek whispered. “Every text promises that the devoted student shall one day find his master. Until then I tried to behave as if my master was with me unseen.”

“You were quite correct: That brings the invisible teachers, and it is they who guided us together.”

“I’m afraid I’m not worthy of… of your instruction, Elias.”

“These are matters of great significance, it is true. But it is not me who will judge your worth. Prove your sincerity and the rest will follow.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You are already doing it,” Eli said, and Derek realized that he had been staring Eli in the eyes, unblinking, since the moment he’d raised his head.

Eli said, “I see you in a field, among hills.”

“What do you mean, you see me?”

This was too much like hypnosis. He had lost track of himself, and it frightened him. He wasn’t supposed to lose control like this. He hadn’t yet been sucked into Eli’s web; he’d always managed to stay detached with his tape recorder spinning. It was not spinning now.

“You are very young, Derek.”

“A young soul, you mean?” That was it: Break the spell.

“No, a young man.” Eli smiled, as if to say that what he was doing couldn’t be so easily interrupted. This was like nothing in Derek’s experience; he hadn’t the resources to defend himself against it. No… it was like his first overwhelming memory, his first day in this house, when he’d remembered the fever-dream of the evil chimes. But instead of fading, instead of his taking control of it, it was strengthening now and taking control of him.

“You are standing in a field of thorns, crying very hard. You are in the shadow of something huge.”

“This is all very ominous,” Derek said, “but what do you mean, really?” If this was part of Eli’s purification, it was all nonsense. Yes, that was the way to see it. He struggled to free himself from seeing what Eli described, but it was not easy.

“I see what it is now. It’s a freeway.”

Derek grew very still. No, he can’t be…. But he also saw it. Remembered it.

“It ends here, Derek. Right where you are, in midair over you. That is your shadow, my boy. The shadow over your soul.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This thing must be faced. You must approach it with courage and nobility. I see now why otherwise you seem to be so fearless. There is only one thing you fear: facing this. Anything else is easy by comparison; but anything else will be futile and meaningless to you, until you have done this. You must be pure in order to receive initiation….”

“You’ve lost me, Elias,” he tried to say, but Eli was gone. He had been staring at him, but now it was hot yellow sky he saw, burning out from beyond the shade of the unfinished freeway.

He crouched in the dried weeds, plucking golden foxtails from his socks. Somewhere near was the hum of bees, rising and falling as they made their way through the sagebrush hills. The land was so hot it seemed to crackle like fire all around him. But here in the shade it was cool, with his back to the cement columns towering so high and still above him, where the freeway broke off in midair.

He finally saw May, a small figure in a plain blue dress, coming up the hill toward him, picking her way over rocks and avoiding the sprawling growths of cactus. Behind her, the trailer park blurred in the heat, its smallest details vanishing, except for sharp glints of reflected sunlight. Beyond the trailer rows, the sun flashed on crawling cars, the old two-lane highway clogged six hours a day. Someday the new freeway would carry all the cars at top speed, but it had languished uncompleted since before Mrs. Crowe had moved them here to Glenrock, a developing community southeast of L.A., where tracts were springing up in the fertile flats that had once been orange groves, and where Derek could still smell blossoms from the few remaining orchards on warm nights when the wind was right. The huge concrete snake hugged the hillside to the north, but here it rose high into the air as if anticipating some obstacle yet to come—and sheared off abruptly. Sometimes Derek dreamed that it reared up higher still, swaying toward the trailer park, dipping its head like Tyrannosaurus Rex, coming down to root him out of the thin aluminum shell, to feed….

May spotted him now and paused to wave. He waved back, made sure she was still coming, then went around to the far side of the column where he had dropped his backpack and canteen. He had already spread a beach towel in the shade; now he got out his hypnosis handbook and opened it to his favorite induction, the one that started with the subject floating like a cloud in a wide blue sky. Eventually they got so you could pinch them and they wouldn’t feel a thing. Derek had never tried putting pins in the hypnotized subject’s flesh, but some books said you could do that too. He was afraid to try.

May stepped around the cement leg of the freeway, her freckled face brown from the sun. She saw him kneeling in the shade and came running forward. “Did you bring everything you need?” she asked.

“This is it,” he said, slapping the book against his thigh, then holding it up for her to see. She put out her hands and touched it lightly, almost reverently. The cover was dark, washed-out blue, and showed a pair of gaping eyes floating in mist. Hypnosis in an Instant!—by Quinn Selkirk, the author of Quick Clairvoyance! and ESP—1,2,3! She started to look into the book, but she must have sensed that she was encroaching on Derek’s territory. The secrets were his alone to impart; he had the knowledge, and she dare not try to take it for herself. Besides, he knew that the whole idea of being hypnotized frightened her—she didn’t really want to get too close to the book. Closing it squeamishly, she delivered it back into his tense and waiting fingers.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

May bit her lip ferociously, squinting at him, half scowling and half smiling. As always when he was alone with her, his mind seemed to run slightly out of sync with his body. Part of him was adrift in a delirium, blissfully drinking in every detail of her face, her round cheeks, her long dark hair brushed back from her even darker eyes. Everything about May was perfect; she had seemed to him the embodiment of perfection from the moment she moved into the trailer park. The better he’d gotten to know her, the more his love for her had intensified, and the more perfect she seemed. Now she looked up at him hesitantly and his heart felt as if it were going to burst. She put out her hand and locked fingers with him, pulling close, gazing up at him so soulfully that he couldn’t think of anything but her eyes, the sweet smell of her, the dusty warmth of her hair.

“You—you’re sure it’s all right?” she said.

“Yes.” He put his hands on her bare tanned arms, squeezed. “You talked to Mike and Dinah didn’t you? They said it’s safe, didn’t they?”

She nodded, pressing up against him, shivering. “Mike said it was really fun. He said you made him think he was shrinking down like a bug, and he could crawl around between the grass blades and explore. Dinah said you made her see flying saucers come down from the sky and land right in the middle of the highway!” She laughed, clapping her hands to her mouth. “Did you really do that?”

“Yes. I can make you see anything.”

“But you can’t make me… do anything? Nothing I don’t want, I mean?”

“Oh, May….” He caught her hands again and put his arm around her. “May, that’s totally wrong, everything they told you in church. The subconscious is nothing to be scared of. No one can make you do something you don’t want to do. All I do when I hypnotize you is guide you—I show you how to hypnotize yourself. Maybe if there’s something you want to do but you’ve always been afraid to try, then under hypnosis maybe you’ll be able to do it. But you’d never do anything you don’t want.”

“Well…” He’d seen the battle in her eyes; they’d talked about all this before. But she needed extra reassurance the other kids in the trailer park didn’t. She’d been brainwashed from an early age by her church.

May and her parents were Christian Scientists, part of a little congregation in Glenrock. Derek had read lots of books about the afterlife and telepathy and dream interpretation, and when May first started telling him about her religion, he was very interested. It didn’t sound like the usual boring church stuff. The Christian Scientists believed in faith healing and the power of prayer; they wouldn’t let doctors come near them. He was amazed when he learned that May had never received a single vaccination shot.

For days he asked her constantly about the church. He would have done anything to be with her every minute of every day, so when she invited him to come to Sunday school with her, he happily accepted. To prepare him, and because she didn’t know where the church stood on poltergeists and telekinesis, she lent him her copies of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, whose pages were cluttered with little jangling metal markers and underlined in pale-blue chalk. It didn’t take him long to find passages about hypnosis, mesmerism, and animal magnetism. Mary Baker Eddy, the church founder, went on about them at length, and with great vehemence.

Derek considered himself an expert in hypnosis. He had studied the Selkirk book until he knew the inductions almost by heart. He had looked at several other scientific manuals in the adult sections of the Glenrock Public Library. At one time or another, he had hypnotized all the kids in the park—all except May, that is—without complication, and to everyone’s great enjoyment.

He soon discovered that Mary Baker Eddy was full of misconceptions about hypnosis; her opinions were tantamount to superstition. She believed under hypnosis the subject surrendered his will, falling totally under the power of the hypnotist. She thought the hypnotist enslaved his subject through the use of magical passes. This might have been understandable in Mary Eddy’s case. At the time she was writing, so-called mesmerists had traveled the country performing in side shows, using hypnosis for stunts and entertainment, playing on the primitive fears of their rustic audience. She had been deluded by wild, vaudevillian hype.

But so much time had passed! Hypnosis was a science now. There was no such thing as animal magnetism. Trances were induced not by mesmeric passes but by guided relaxation. Dentists, psychiatrists, and doctors used hypnosis regularly. It was safe. It was scientific. There was no reason in the world for modern Christian Scientists to hold onto Mary Baker Eddy’s antiquated misconceptions, when hypnosis was so safe and practical that even a twelve-year-old could master it!

By the time Sunday came around, Derek was ready with his arguments. His mother let out the cuffs of his one good suit, teasing him gently about going to church for the sake of a girl when he had never shown interest before. May’s parents pulled up in their big black Mercury—fat with fins and gleaming chrome, but slow and somehow stately. May’s parents were quiet and pleasant but rather starved looking, like apple dolls carved too thin and dried too long. They had lived in the desert for many years before moving here. Derek had never seen May’s father wearing anything except a white shirt, black slacks, thin black tie, and hard black shoes. Her mother dressed simply; her only accessory was a black pillbox hat with a veil. They said very little on the drive into Glenrock. He sat nervously in the back seat, regretting he had come, until May quietly took his hand and gave him a smile that made everything all right.

The Sunday school teacher, by contrast, was plump and quick and merry. After the sermon, she took Derek by the hand and led him downstairs to one of a half-dozen big round tables where children were gathering in groups with other teachers.

She introduced Derek all around, and May blushed when the teacher said that Derek was her special friend, and wasn’t it wonderful that she had brought Derek along to church? The teacher opened to the first passage they’d been assigned to study, but as soon as she asked if there were any questions, Derek politely put up his hand.

“Oh, Derek how wonderful. What do you want to ask?”

“Something about hypnosis.”

“Well, that wasn’t part of the assignment, but—well, you’re our guest today, so go right ahead. Does everyone understand what Derek’s talking about?”

The other children nodded with huge eyes; under the table May squeezed Derek’s hand. He cleared his throat and stood up.

“Mary Baker Eddy has it all wrong,” he said.

The teacher nodded politely, as if she hadn’t heard him, then cocked her head. “Maybe you could tell us what you mean by that,” she said, still very pleasant because he was after all a guest and she was just naturally a very nice lady.

“I know a lot about it,” he said. “I mean—I’ve done it myself.”

“Have you now?”

“And I’ve studied it, and it’s not at all what she says. It’s scientific. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“That’s very interesting, Derek. I’m not sure the other children here have studied the passages about hypnosis; it’s a little grown-up for them.”

“I have,” said a girl at the table.

“It’s animal magnetism!” a boy said giddily.

The fearful thrill in their voices told Derek they had perused those sections most eagerly of all.

“Only God should control your soul,” said another girl, turning livid eyes on Derek. “Hypnosis is evil.”

“Now, Lisa, Derek is our guest—”

“What is animal magnetism?”

“They can turn you into a bar of iron and walk all over you!”

“It’s like when a snake sees a bird and the bird gets hypnotized—”

“I heard about one guy who thought he was a dog—”

“Children…”

“—and it stands there staring until the snake eats it.”

“—and whenever you said ‘Here, boy!’ he’d get down on all fours and start barking!”

“Children, that’s enough now.”

“Evil,” said the girl again, still glaring at Derek.

“He is not,” said May, clutching Derek’s hand harder now. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“Please, May, Samantha, settle down. I think we’d better get back to our lesson plan, if that’s all right with you.” She gave Derek a big smile. “Now if you’d like to put together a presentation on hypnosis, we’d be glad to hear what you have to say. It sounds very interesting.”

He had expected more argument from her. Flustered, he could only nod. He had been hoping to impress May with his arguments, but instead the teacher had avoided an argument altogether; she seemed all too willing to listen, at the proper time.

After the meeting, he expected some repercussion—perhaps the teacher would take May’s parents aside and whisper about him—but nothing of the sort transpired. They bundled back into the car, Derek carrying a handful of literature for church youth. He read articles about faith healing, including one about a boy who’d gotten a terrible haircut and prayed to God to fix it and make everything better; but in fact what happened was God helped the boy be at peace with his haircut, which was a more economical solution than magically transforming the hair itself. Even so, Derek was disappointed to learn that the “miracles” of Christian Science were really rather prosaic.

But if his debate on the truth about hypnosis had lacked a climax, it had at least impressed and intrigued May, who began to question him about what the hypnotic state was like—a question he couldn’t answer, since no one had ever been able to hypnotize Derek himself. He’d let other kids in the trailer park read the inductions from the book, playing the part of hypnotist, but Derek was not susceptible to suggestion. He wanted desperately to go into trances, to have the wild mental adventures he dreamed up for the other kids, but no. He was always the one in control, the wide-awake logical one, concocting dreams but never involved in them. He was able to put himself into mild self-hypnotic states, where he felt adrift and sleepy, but it wasn’t the same as delivering yourself into the hands of a guide.

For weeks May hinted, shyly, that she might like to be hypnotized. They ghosted around the trailer park together, holding hands in the warm evenings, seeking shade in the hot afternoons—often settling down beneath the unfinished freeway to look out over the hot valley, the trailers, the traffic. And one day, recently, they had kissed—tentative, gentle kisses that made Derek feel as if his insides were melting and his skin were tingling all over and he just wanted to somehow pull May inside him or climb into her skin with her, to be closer than their bodies allowed. And that was when, looking at him through slit lids, May had whispered for the first time, “I want you to hypnotize me….”

“I do want it,” she said now. “I’m ready.”

He took her by the hand and brought her over to the towel he’d spread out. She sat with her back to the cool cement of the pylon, and he sat down facing her. They were completely alone on the hillside that seemed to blur up into the empty beige sky, the trailer park and the highway all hidden from view. The immense gray bulk of the freeway seemed to float weightless overhead. He could hear bees and the wind rustling scrub and the distant hum of traffic, but all that would help May go under.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She gave him a smile and a sly look, then did as he said. When he began speaking, telling her to relax, the smile continued to flicker about her lips. Then there came a moment when he saw her let go, and the nervous smile washed away, and she took a deep, sighing breath and seemed to sag a little. May was in a trance.

Next he told her that her right arm was growing lighter than air, floating up like a helium balloon. May’s rose from her lap, drifting up until it was level with her face. When he told her the arm had turned to lead, it fell as abruptly as a metal weight, crashing down on her legs. Now the arm was completely numb, lacking all sensation. He scooted next to her and pinched the back of her hand so hard it left nailmarks in the skin. She didn’t flinch.

Derek didn’t know quite where to go from here. He crouched next to her, listening to the throbbing of insects in the heat, the warm murmur of the wind, feeling suddenly alone and afraid—as if May were no longer here. Waiting for inspiration, he took her hand and stroked it softly, smoothing away the white crescents left by his nails.

“May,” he whispered, “can you hear me?”

She nodded very slowly.

He leaned close to her ear, as if to whisper a secret that even she shouldn’t hear. And indeed it was a secret, something he had never dared tell her:

“I love you,” he said.

She showed no reaction, no more than when he had pinched her.

“I love you, May,” he said again, and this time he thought he saw her smile returning, but from very far away.

He took a deep breath before continuing. “Do… do you love me?” And waited in suspense for her reply. When she made no sound, no move, he quickly added, “You don’t have to answer unless you want to.”

She nodded, but he wasn’t sure what it meant. That she loved him, or that she understood she didn’t have to answer?

“I was afraid to tell you,” he said. “I thought if I told you now, and it made you mad or upset, I could tell you to forget it when you woke up. But you aren’t mad, are you? May?”

She shook her head. He began to sweat with relief; it was like a fever breaking.

He still had hold of her hand. Now he put it to his mouth and kissed her fingers, her wrist, her forearm, the inside of her elbow. Every kiss felt electric; if felt as if she were the one kissing him. She loved him!

“May, I want—I want you to hold me,” he said. Her arms went out. He sank down clumsily beside her. She shifted around with her eyes still closed until she had both arms around him. They lay down together on the towel. He had worked quite awhile to clear the ground of pebbles and stickers, but he could still feel rocks poking through the cloth, digging into his flesh. Considerately, he suggested to May that she not feel these things. “We’re lying on a cloud,” he said. “Can you feel it, soft and fluffy underneath us? Isn’t it wonderful?”

She nodded, giggling. “Like cotton candy,” she volunteered, more herself now.

“Yeah…”

He held very still for a long time, wishing the rocky ground felt like cotton candy to him as well; but there was no one to soften things for Derek. He tried to cushion her weight, pulling May against him; then he kissed her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids; he nuzzled her ears through the fall of soft black hair. He kissed her neck and the hollow place in her throat.

It was all wonderful, but it wasn’t enough.

He propped himself on an elbow, gazing down on her, watching her sleep. “May,” he said, “please… will you kiss me? Touch me?”

Instantly she pulled him to her and began to kiss him—not timidly, as he had done, but voraciously, opening her mouth, drawing in his tongue, slithering her own between his lips as if drinking him in. Even as he tasted her sweetness, something in him drew back in fear; what if this wasn’t all May’s doing? What if she was doing this only because she was hypnotized? What if, despite what all the books said, Mary Baker Eddy was right and she was somehow enslaved to him? Then these kisses were not born of her own free will. She might not really love him at all, but he wouldn’t know until she came out of her trance and they talked about everything. Suddenly he hated himself for his ploy, his weakness, his lack of courage. But May was kissing him, and things were rushing along with a life of their own, as if he’d become caught in her trance and his own will was itself compromised. He held her face in his fingers; but as she continued to kiss him, his hands moved down her body. May responded by clutching him fiercely, drawing him to her. She was moaning, and the sound made him moan, half in dread, because he knew he should stop but he couldn’t.

“I love you,” he said again, and she said nothing. He was afraid to tell her to speak because it would mean less if it came at his prompting. He was desperate for confirmation, but he had already taken things past the point where he could be certain of anything. Meanwhile, he knew May must be able to feel his erection unless she was numb to everything. And to be sure that she felt him, feeling as if he must share this with her honestly, he guided her hand to the place and said, “May, I love you so much!”

She grabbed his penis through his pants, and he pushed against her hand, his own fingers now brushing at the fabric of her dress, trying to feel her nipples through the cloth. Her flesh was very soft and spongy, and he was afraid to squeeze or try working his fingers under the fabric, afraid to unbutton her or do anything she might not have wanted him doing if she weren’t hypnotized. He mustn’t touch her, mustn’t do anything to her, not that he could have gotten her pregnant or anything like that. He knew from books what was supposed to happen, but he wasn’t old enough yet. He had never ejaculated.

But as always with May, his thoughts ran on one track, his body on another. “Yes,” he was saying, “oh, May, yes. There.” He unzipped himself for her, so her hands could get through to him. The sensation he felt when she touched his flesh was almost unbearable. Heat and cold ran through him. He lay back on the towel, afraid to touch her now, afraid of what he might do to her. He saw her slit eyes above him, her face so serious and distant, hair mussed and mouth wet. He looked down at himself and saw her hand still holding him. It was like looking at something happening to someone else. And he sounded like someone else when he said, “Kiss me there, May. Please… put your mouth on me.”

Her face hovered above him for a moment, gentle and sweet, and then she drifted away and he closed his eyes, thinking No! No!

But when her mouth touched him, enveloping him in liquid and warmth, all his inner voices went silent and still and he lay in a quiet hush of anticipation, waiting for something he could not name, something unknown and yet familiar, which he had imagined but never felt….

It came as a hot rush of uncoiling flame, a tingling knot of fire from his groin, burning unexpectedly in a place where he had never felt anything but the merest hint of this sensation.

Recognizing it too late for what it was, uncontained and uncontrollable, he sat up gasping and embarrassed, shouting “Stop!”

May drew back from him, a wet hand at her mouth, thick whitish liquid dripping from her lips and chin. Her eyes were wide and stunned. She jumped up choking and spitting, gagging as he scrambled to his feet, trying to contain himself, his guts already in knots.

“May,” he said, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

She made a retching noise, stumbling back from the column, and vomited in the dirt. He stuffed himself back into his pants, rushed to put a hand on her shoulder.

“May, you—you’re still in a trance,” he said, forcing himself to be calm, wondering what he could do to make things okay, whether he could tell her to forget it, if he could make her remember nothing of this when she awoke. Or if instead he should wake her up instantly. “Deep, deep in a trance,” he insisted, as if he could salvage everything that way. She didn’t look like a person in a trance. Her face was red, her eyes full of tears, and she was still coughing and choking.

“May, I love you,” he said desperately. “Everything’s okay! You’re safe, May. May! I didn’t know that would happen. Are you okay? Please, May!”

She got to her feet unsteadily, her eyes sleepy and distant again, although now she was weeping. She pushed past him, coughing, still making gagging sounds. He followed her past the cement leg of the freeway, clutching at her hand but letting it drop when she didn’t squeeze his fingers in return. Was she in trance or awake now? He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know what he had done.

Passing from the shadow of the unfinished freeway, she lit up as if the sun had set her on fire. She became one with the burning landscape, too bright to look at. He shaded his eyes and stood waiting for the sobs he felt building in his chest, watching her hurry down the hill through brush and rocks and cactus. Would she tell on him? Could he stop her somehow? He covered his eyes completely and whisper-howled her name.

As if in reply, she started screaming.

He bared his eyes, saw her standing halfway down the hillside between the freeway and the trailer park, beating at the air. She stood rooted to one spot, her hands making thrashing motions as if she were trying to swim straight up. Then she began to leap and dance around, brushing at her dress, her hair, jerking and twitching. She took a few steps one way, then another, and then she toppled.

The air around her was blurred with bees; they closed on her face in a swarming ball.

Derek ran, jumping over rocks and cactus, plowing through bushes, straight for the spot. He had no particular fear of bees; he knew if you were calm they wouldn’t sting you, and in fact he’d never been stung. But he had never seen so many at once, rising in a pall over the spot where May had fallen. The swarm darted away, thinning out, and then he saw her blue dress down in the sagebrush between some cracked slabs of rock that had tumbled here during the freeway’s construction. He swatted at the air, still hung with bees like drops of solid fury, and jumped down beside her.

May lay curled in a ball, her hands covering her head, her head tucked in toward her chest. There were red welts on her arms and hands, on the back of her neck and her calves. She was sobbing, choking, as he put his arms around her middle and tried to pull her up. “May, May, it’s all right! I’ll help you!”

She started to rise, then crumpled again, landing on her side with her head twisted up to him. Her mouth was still smeared and wet, and now caked with dirt; he wiped it with a hand, careful around her swelling lips. She had been stung on her eyelids, on her cheeks and chin.

“May, please, let’s go—we’ve got to get help. Can you walk? I can’t leave you here.”

She didn’t answer except to sob, and then she started screaming again.

Desperate, he pulled her to her feet, bent and took her weight on his shoulder, then started off downhill toward the trailers, hardly able to keep his footing but knowing he must not falter. “You feel no pain,” he told her insistently as they went, as if he could somehow redeem the hypnotic state for her. Since he had sent her sleepwalking into the hive, the least he could do was relieve her pain. In fact her cries began to soften as they went.

May’s screams had already brought Derek’s neighbors into the open. These were mainly old men and women, retired, living alone in their trailers. Some of them started up the hill to meet Derek, but most stood around on the road at the edge of the park, waiting for him to come down. Someone must have called May’s mother, because he could see her hurrying up the road.

By the time Derek reached the trailers, a crowd had gathered; they’d come so quickly that they might have been waiting impatiently for something like this to happen. Dr. Grand, a lanky old man who made model ships, slipped May from Derek’s shoulder and laid her on a chaise longue in a bit of shade. When he saw her face, he gasped. “My God, someone call an ambulance!”

“She—she walked right into a hive,” Derek said.

Dr. Grand leaned over her. “May? May, dear, tell me how you’re feeling.”

May’s eyes were completely swollen shut. She opened her mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out except a ghastly rattle, a wretched moan that made Derek think for a horrible moment she was choking on what she had swallowed. May’s mother was calling out now, harsh birdlike cries as she came running.

“She’s going into shock,” the old man said. He turned around to look at the others. “Watch her! I’ll be right back.”

Dr. Grand rushed off to his trailer, leaving Derek to hold May’s hand. Her fingers suddenly clenched, crushing the bones of his hand together; her whole body arched and she began to writhe about, clutching at him with her other hand as if she were drowning and he might bear her up.

“May!” he cried. “May, don’t!”

Her eyes were rolling up so hard they pulled her poor swollen lids open. Her tongue crawled in her gaping mouth. She continued to choke and rasp; he grabbed her around the chest and shook her, as if he could dislodge whatever it was. At that moment, May’s mother tore him away. He stood back almost gratefully; she would know what to do, she would save her daughter. May’s mother got to her knees besides the chaise longue and put her hand on May’s blistered brow and took one of her hands and began, very softly, to pray.

Dr. Grand trotted back with his leather valise. He had already taken out a syringe and a small glass vial. He threw the case onto a patio table, working the hypodermic needle into the vial. As he drew back on the plunger, filling the syringe, he walked up behind May’s mother and said, “Give me room.”

May’s mother didn’t move; she seemed not to hear him.

“Out of the way, Beryl. Did you hear me?”

May’s mother saw the needle. It seemed to snap her from her calm. “What are you doing?”

“This is epinephrine.”

“Absolutely not.”

Dr. Grand began to bellow. “She’s having an allergic reaction—”

“Yes, she’s allergic to bee stings.”

“She’s been stung before? Goddamn it, move out of the way—she needs this now!”

“Leave us be! She needs prayer, not your blasphemies!”

“Prayer? I’ll show you—” He made a grab at May’s mother, but several other men converged on the doctor and pulled him away: “Now, Grand, you can’t go forcing your beliefs on her!”

“I’m not treating the mother! This girl will die without treatment. Can’t you see she’s suffocating?”

Derek had been distracted by the commotion. Now he looked back at May, who lay writhing and struggling with her head thrown back, her face darkening, and her mother bent above as if to shield her from the sun. Her mother’s lips were moving very quietly, and there was great concern in her face, but also great calm and certainty. She looked up at Derek suddenly, saw his terror, and took a moment to give him an encouraging smile.

“May needs you to pray for her too, Derek. Come now, won’t you?” She put out her hand to drag him down to his knees.

May’s face was turning purple. He couldn’t believe her own mother could look on calmly at such a time. He watched in disbelief as Dr. Grand was wrestled away from the chaise longue. He looked down on May with the dirt smeared on her swollen lips, her eyes bulging, her fingers digging into her mother’s arms. May, dear May.

“God will heal you, dear,” the woman was saying, stroking May’s hair so mechanically that Derek felt certain her mind had snapped.

This realization freed him somehow; he broke from his own paralysis and ran toward Dr. Grand, whose hand was still outstretched, trying to keep the syringe out of reach of those who restrained him. Derek snatched the syringe and turned back toward May, determined that nothing would stop him, not even her mother.

“There’s no place for fear,” she was saying urgently in May’s ear as he rushed up beside her. May’s lips were blue, hideous blue. Bubbles burst from her mouth in a bloody froth. She was sagging. “There, there.” Softening. “God will make you well.” Sinking back onto the cushion in her mother’s arms, as Derek’s arm fell to his side and he heard the syringe drop, the needle snap. “Our Father who art in Heaven…” May needed prayers now, yes. Prayers to send her on her way.

“No,” he said, frozen there. He could not bear to look at her. His eyes went to the gray monstrosity that rose above the trailer park, rearing up incomplete and never to be finished, its shadow somehow to blame for all this—as much as anything. As much as bees or Christian Science or hypnosis or Derek himself. That shadow where he had gone so furtively, to do what he would never have dared in open light, seducing May to her death, ensuring he would never know if she had loved him or not.

“The ambulance is coming,” someone said.

“No hospitals,” May’s mother said with ruthless consistency. “We don’t need hospitals.”

But the ambulance wouldn’t reach them in time anyway. It was miles off, caught in traffic on the two-lane highway, unable to advance; and so May’s only other possible source of rescue had also been thwarted by the unfinished freeway.

“No,” he said again, louder now, because he could not let his eyes fall. He could not see her again; he had chased that sight from his memory and all this was a terrible lapse, he could not believe he had indulged it so thoroughly after consigning the events of that day to a place in his mind he had taken daily precautions to avoid for more than twenty-five years. He stared at the freeway and refused to see what lay below it, although he knew full well.

But what did Eli know?

He opened his eyes.

The old man sat staring at him, quiet and intent, gripping the arms of his wheelchair. Derek had the impression that somehow Eli had seen all of it, had relived it through him, reading his every thought, every sensation. And then he wondered if Eli might not have deliberately propelled him through the memory, playing it back like a videotape, not for Derek’s benefit but for his own, to see what sort of man he was, exactly how far he could trust him….

Eli nodded. It was like waking from a dream beside your lover and knowing you had shared the dream exactly.

“All right, Derek,” Eli said. “It’s a beginning.”

“What?” Derek felt obliged to plead ignorance, to refuse to honor Mooney’s crazed currency of occult implications. It was impossible, what he’d just thought—impossible that Eli could have witnessed an event from Derek’s past.

“The beginning of purification. But we must do more. We have opened the gate to healing, but you are quite vulnerable now. We must finish up the work before proceeding. Now, I want—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eli. Honestly.”

He stood up restlessly and began to pace, determined to shake the old man’s psychotic spell. It was time to leave anyway; the hour was much later than he usually stayed. He began to pack his briefcase.

“Don’t run from these things, Derek.” Eli sounded as if he were on the verge of pleading.

Don’t run from you, you mean, Derek thought. But I can’t be your sole entertainment.

“Sorry, Eli, I have to get moving. It’s later than I realized. I have some other obligations tonight.”

“Cancel them, Derek. This is critical. I insist. Too much is at jeopardy here—”

“Oh, come off it, old man,” he said harshly, his tone surprising even to him.

Eli took it like a slap in the face. “I’m serious. I cannot reveal any more to you without being sure of your commitment to the path.”

“How can you doubt it? I’ve sat here day after day, recording every word while you drone on and on. I should think I’ve more than proven my commitment by now.”

Eli took the implied insult without blinking, as if eager to join in battle. “You’ve only proven your commitment to a book,” he said caustically. “And that, only to the extent you can figure out some way to cash in on my madness, as you see it.”

“Oh, Christ,” Derek said.

“You don’t even believe in him,” said Eli, “yet his name comes easily enough to your lips. Is it that way with everything you do?”

Derek said nothing, stung to think that Eli had finally seen through him. His thoughts were in turmoil, because he realized that what was happening now might be permanent. He was turning his back on the old man; he was on the edge of abandoning his project, and it pained him not only because he had believed in the book more than in anything else he’d begun, but also because he had begun to feel friendship for Eli, which it surprised him to admit. Friendship and sympathy and, of course, pity for an old lunatic.

“Like it or not, aware or unaware, you have taken the first step on the path,” Eli said portentously, as he said all things. “You cannot leave it now. Willingly or not, you must travel it to its end. I suggest you master yourself, my friend, or you will be mastered by others. In fact, I hope that you have not already been overmastered. That could even be… Good Lord…. I took you for an ally against evil; but what if you have always been their agent?”

“Don’t be ludicrous.” He said it coldly, but at the same time he was overcome with guilt. His motives were false; he could believe—truly, skeptically, rationally believe—at most one word in ten of Eli’s tales. He was here entirely on a pretense. And yet he had grown fond of the old man, and this admission of mistrust hurt him deeply, though he certainly deserved it.

“I would never do anything to hurt you,” he said as sincerely as he could. “You may not think highly of me, but I’m a peaceful man. I’m certainly not evil. And I think of myself as your friend.”

Eli nodded, his own face full of pain now, tears starting from his eyes. “I know that. Believe me, Derek, I know you far better than you wish. I know you think that much of what I say is nonsense.”

Derek tried not to squirm or blurt an immediate defense. He couldn’t very well compound Eli’s mistrust with lies.

“But underneath all your scorn, you do believe, and wisely fear the truth in what I say. Beneath your superficial rationality, your skin of skeptical calm, I believe you are hysterical with fear. It lends you perfectly to their errands….”

“Please, Elias!”

Eli bowed his head and growled, “So… they brought you to me. They needed someone to take the ledgers, someone who can… enlarge their following. I’ve carried their words as far as I can, fighting all the way. All I’d done for them, until I met you, was preserve the skin and the books. It would be futile for me to destroy the ledgers, after all, when they’d simply find someone weaker to corrupt, another life to ruin. I would not wish that on the world. It seems clear now. They put your books in my path and perhaps even clouded my mind, so that for a time I perceived your words as full of truth and light. I am often clouded and confused from the medications I take. They made you seem understanding, a sympathizer, an ally, when the truth may be otherwise. It’s not too late to fight them, though, Derek. If you will only face these things in yourself which have delivered you into their service.”

A slow sickness began to pervade Derek. God, how the old man must loathe him! Seen in such a light, the whole discourse, the story of the mandalas, might easily be taken as a hoax, a cruel fable thrown in his skeptical face.

He had never felt at such a loss. Accused, yet unable to plead his own case, which was after all founded on lies.

“I don’t know what to say,” he whispered.

“Tell me what you think is the truth.”

“I… I would never hurt you.”

“Evangeline held a knife to her own throat. Do you think that was her will at work, or theirs!”

Derek leapt from the sofa. “I think I’d better leave,” he said. “If you distrust me so much.”

“It’s not you, for God’s sake. I don’t distrust you—no more than I distrusted Evangeline! But how can you resist telling my story, putting it out into the world—spreading their words, so that many more may learn to pay them the filthy respects they so desire?”

“Publishers aren’t interested in that sort of thing.”

“There—you see? Already you’re wondering how to do it. You’ll find a way to pitch it, Derek; that’s your talent. People believe what you sell them; I believed you myself. That’s why the mandalas wanted you. I was a fool not to see it sooner.”

“There are a million other books I can write.”

“You think that now. But one day you’ll find yourself staring at a blank page; the words you need won’t come. It will seem as if the only ideas left in the world are the ones they put in your head—the ones I’ve given you. You will write that story, believe me. I cannot stop you. I’ll be dead soon enough myself. All I can do is limit the damage.”

He sensed Derek’s curiosity.

“Yes, limit it. What if I told you you’d have nothing but the memory you bring away tonight? What if I asked for the return of your tapes?”

“You can have them.” Derek dug into his case and thrust a handful of the rattling cassettes at Eli. But the old man swept them aside, sent them scattering over the carpet.

“What if I said I’m burning that box tonight? I should have done it ages ago.”

Derek found himself unable to speak. Something hot and choking burned in his throat, something he couldn’t name.

“You see?” Eli said. “The idea frightens you, doesn’t it?”

Derek spat out the words: “If it meant so much to you, I’d burn them myself.”

Eli straightened in his wheelchair. “Would you really? No matter what happens to me? Can you swear it?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“No? Then why do I feel like an empty vessel, now that I’ve told you what they wished?” He stared around the room, eyes bulging. “It was their doing all along, wasn’t it?”

“Old man, you’re crazy!” Derek knelt to reclaim his tapes. He would record over them, destroy all these records, leave Eli alone to his madness, anonymous and unremembered. “But you’re right about one thing,” he said from the floor. “I don’t believe any of this. I made up all my damn books—they’re garbage, cynical trash. No one with any brains believes them. I don’t believe them. And I don’t believe in your thirty-seven astral jellyfish. I think a heart attack killed your wife. We’re all going to die eventually, but it won’t have a thing to do with these mandalas. That’s bullshit, all of it.”

Eli’s voice remained deep, unshaken, as if he had been expecting this. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes I do. I’m trying to reassure you, Eli. I want you to get in touch with reality.”

Eli said nothing. Derek began to pace the length of the room, clutching his case, starting toward the door and then turning away again and again.

“You—you’ve been cooped up in here, an outcast your whole life, taking hold of any fantasy that offered itself. Now you’ve found the flip side of escapism. It’s like some nightmare where you can’t wake up, isn’t it?

“You need help, but not from me, not from someone who feeds your fears by nodding and taking notes and agreeing with you. You need someone to tell you honestly that you went over the edge somewhere in the past, maybe when you were a kid; someone who can bring you back to reality while there’s still time. But I’m not that guy, Eli. Maybe you should talk to your children, your family, people who know you. I’m just… just a hack, okay? I’m not going to hurt you, but I can’t help you either. Except by refusing to write your book. From this point on, I’ll be out of your life, Eli. I’ll leave so you can get in touch with people you trust.”

Eli’s eyes were dark hollows. Derek scarcely dared to glance at him. His hand was on the doorknob and he turned it, aware of that distant bone chime chattering somewhere out there, in a dry wind that made no sound in the skeletal trees. The sound of an ambulance crept in as he opened the door. Eli stiffened as if he heard the banshee coming for him.

“Good night, Elias,” Derek said. He had to get out; he was close to weeping.

Eli didn’t answer.

Walking out, closing the door, continuing on to his car: These were among the hardest things he had ever done. He started the engine, looking over at the house. With the shades drawn, it seemed lifeless, empty. All up and down the street were dozens exactly like it. No comfort there. Madness mushroomed in the rows of stucco and Spanish tile bungalows. On Blackoak Avenue, sanity had gone the way of the black oaks themselves.

He flew home toward the city, anxious for its noise and disorder, the reassuring sounds of fermenting humanity. Cars swerved in a high wind among the gray girders and whistling cables of the Bay Bridge, cutting each other off with blaring horns; a wino hurled a bottle on the sidewalk when he was locking up his car, splashing the cement with shattered glass and wine that smelled like vinegar; arguments brewed in the walls of his building, while somewhere above or below him, or out in the street, a woman cried rhythmically, her voice a pulse of sexuality. The sanity here was impossible to ignore, and the insanity was all standard issue. This was a world for humanity: They filled it to brimming with their sweat and their swearing, their wars and their anxious arts. No room here for invisible things, myths of dread, or acts more sadistic and improbable than the ones humankind already encompassed. The skies were empty; even the stars hid in fog.

I’m not afraid, he told himself, wondering why he should lie awake feeling fear and shame coursing through him in waves, thinking of Eli, the mandalas, of May and the cold shadow of the freeway.

I’ve been with him too much, listening to his tapes, hearing his voice in my head. I can still hear it now. But it will go away eventually. I’ve been under his spell; gullible as one of the fools who read my books. Or his book, if I’d agreed to write it.

But it’s over now.

No voices in my head.

I’ll write what I want to write. I don’t need to crib from his ledgers or copy from a disgusting piece of skin.

As Derek lay reciting this litany, the phone began to ring. He had shut off the answering machine.

Leave me alone, old man. I can’t help you.

It rang ten times, twenty times, thirty.

He waited, counting, sure it would stop at exactly thirty-seven. But Elias gave up before that.

21

Late in the morning, the phone rang again, bridging the gap between night and day. He couldn’t remember what dreams he might have had; his mind was sucked empty. Groggy, thick-tongued, he mumbled into the phone and heard a woman’s voice he didn’t recognize.

“Is this Derek?” she said.

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry, all I have is your first name. Are you a friend of Elias Mooney’s?”

He remembered the previous night’s argument. All his self-loathing and rationalizations returned to him now.

“Why?” he asked.

“Your name and number were written on a pad by Mr. Mooney’s phone. I thought you might have talked to him recently.”

“And?”

“I’m his visiting nurse.”

He suddenly knew why she’d called. He sat up, throwing off the sweat-soaked sheets. “Is he all right?”

“Elias passed away during the night.” She let her news sink into silence for a moment, then said, “Did he call you last night—is that why your number’s here?”

Dead….

“Can I come over?” he said, forcing the words through a choked throat. “Are you going to be there awhile?”

“Not very long; I have another patient to attend. I’ve notified his daughter up in Auburn, that’s all I can do. I thought if you’d spoken to him recently, you might want to know. Actually, from the way he talked about you, I thought you were his son. But you’re not on the list of relatives to contact, so I figured you must be a very good friend of his. You saw a lot of him recently, didn’t you?”

“A lot, yes,” Derek said, numb.

“I’m sure it meant a great deal to him. He was very much alone.”

“Can… can you please stay there a little longer? A half hour? I need to—”

He wasn’t sure what he needed. To see Eli’s house before his daughter arrived, perhaps. Before anything was touched or rearranged.

“He’s not here anymore, you know. The coroner’s already come and gone.”

“Still, I—” He glanced at the clock. “I can get there in half an hour.”

“Well, all right, if you hurry. But I’ll have to leave right away.”

At that hour, there was little traffic on the bridge. He scarcely saw the other cars. Before he fully realized what he was doing, he plunged out of the fluorescence of the Caldecott tunnel and descended into the suburbs that had subsumed San Diablo and, as of last night, Elias Mooney as well.

Suicide, he thought.

The old man killed himself to dramatize his point. To get at me. To fulfill his own prophecy. But the nurse would have mentioned any suspicious circumstances, wouldn’t she? She would have asked if he’d seemed depressed.

He was expecting a matronly middle-aged woman in a white cap, white dress, white sneakers, but the nurse was younger than Derek, colorfully dressed, her white coat draped over the arm of the sofa. He stepped inside hesitantly, as if it were her house now. She watched him sympathetically, saying little, following from room to room as he looked restlessly for… what?

The bedclothes were slightly rumpled, though the bed did not look slept in. Then he saw the wheelchair folded up in the corner and realized that Eli must have been laid out here to await the coroner.

He turned around quickly and came face to face with the nurse.

“How did he die?”

She shrugged, pursed her lips. “He was very frail. The coroner suspected a heart attack.”

Derek slipped past her, toward the far end of the hall, where he had often noticed the closed door of Eli’s temple room. He glanced at the closet as he passed but made himself go on without letting the nurse see him falter. How long would it take to drive from Auburn? he wondered. And when had Eli’s daughter been called? It was twenty minutes to two.

He opened the door at the end of the hall.

The room was dark and spare. A small votive candle guttered in a glass holder on the center of a plain black table pushed up against the north wall. Pale blurred patches on the paint showed where pictures or objects had once hung. One shape marked where a round mirror might have hung; the spot looked faintly scorched.

What did the candle represent? A last offering? Something to light the old man’s way and dispel a bit of the darkness his madness had drawn in around him?

It was painful now to think of Eli as insane. He’d been a visionary, imaginative, extremely sensitive—not a madman. If he was deluded, it was because his mind was so vast, so open to the myriad unadmitted possibilities of nature. Mad only in comparison to the bland assumptions of a dwarfed, stunted society.

He backed out of the room and closed the door.

“Would you like to wait here for his daughter?” the nurse asked.

“I don’t know her but… I’d be glad to stay. If you have to go on, I’ll take care of things here. His daughter might be glad to know he had some friends nearby.”

The nurse smiled, nodded, squeezed his arm gently. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Crowe. He was a remarkable man.”

“I know. I…”

He couldn’t finish, but she didn’t expect him to. How many such scenes had this young woman witnessed? Death was a prosaic fact of her career. So she left him there, another friend of another deceased, in another empty bungalow.

When she was gone, he went directly to the closet and took down the box.

He listened for Eli’s voice, bearing advice or warnings, but his head felt clear. He heard nothing, not even himself, as he carried the box outside and put it next to him on the front seat of the car.

He had something precious now—the only thing in the little house that meant the least thing to him; the only link, however tenuous, with Eli Mooney.

The box seemed absurdly important, almost a second person in the car. And as he drove away he shrugged off the thought that, like a passenger with a destination of its own, the skin inside might be giving him directions.