She'd been so weird last night. Nobody could turn weird on you like Lenore. Just when he started thinking he finally understood her, she always came up with something unexpected. They had met four years ago—that was a long time. He'd never done anything for four years in a row—not even lived in the same town. He supposed she was close as he would ever get to finding his ideal type. The sorority girls in fuzzy sweaters, lipstick models with books under their arms—imagine what they'd think of his altar. One glance and they'd probably run screaming, even though it was perfectly innocuous. It wasn't like he did black magic. He didn't give evil any credence anyway. That was Christian bullshit, something the priests used to keep people in line, setting down laws to keep folks from thinking for themselves. Michael believed the universe was fundamentally neutral, that you got out of it exactly what you put in. His magical practice stemmed from a heartfelt yearning that couldn't be satisfied by Christianity or Buddhism or Judaism, with their cores of written dogma and hierarchies of monks and popes and rabbis. He wouldn't be satisfied until he had reached his own understanding of the cosmos and felt it in every nerve.
He wasn't sure why Lenore's behavior last night had frightened him. It seemed miraculous now, to think of her incanting something she'd never read. There was nothing in the mandates themselves, or in her behavior, that implied a threat in a neutral universe.
Nevertheless ...
When he remembered the knife quivering in the wall, buried so deep that he'd broken the tip prying it out, he couldn't help feeling a little fear.
He might have known that if Lenore got into magic, she wouldn't do it halfway. She didn't do anything unless she did it to the hilt. Literally. It would take some getting used to, though. And he'd have to work on his unexpected jealousy. It struck him as unfair that her first spontaneous effort was so much more powerful than his most practiced ritual. He had the interest and understanding, the discipline ... but Lenore had the knack!
Her car was parked in front of the house. Maybe she was sick after all. Last night, after the ritual, he'd helped her off the floor and she'd gone straight to bed without saying a word, acting as if she were drugged.
Drugged.... That would explain her mood last night. In fact, that would explain a lot. What if she'd bought or begged something off Tucker, then dosed herself to enliven a boring lecture?
Lenore was supposed to tell him when she planned to do anything more intense than smoking a jay. He couldn't forbid her from doing drugs, but he could at least prepare himself for what might follow. Last Thanksgiving, they had gone for turkey dinner at his mother's house. In the middle of the meal, Lenore had started hyperventilating, dropped from her chair, and lay facedown on the floor. His mother was shitfaced and although she yelled about it at the time, kicking Lenore and trying to pry her off the carpet, she hadn't remembered anything about it later. Michael went into such a panic that he almost called the hospital until Lenore began babbling nonsense and he realized she was hallucinating. He and Earl had carried her to the car, Earl making some sly comment about how she had to grow up and learn a little self-control while Mrs. Renzler raged around on the porch waving the gravy ladle. When Lenore finally came down, she confessed to eating a dozen psilocybin mushrooms, dreading the evening with Michael's mother. He had made her promise that in the future she would always give him plenty of advance notice before doing anything of the sort.
But she would never admit to violating their deal. He heard water running in the bathroom. The door was ajar, and Lenore was standing there, both hands on the sink, staring at her face in the mirror.
"Lenore?" he said.
She snapped around to look at him, blinking. "Huh? What are you doing home?"
"Me? I'm off work. What about you?"
She looked down and shut off the water. "I—I came home for lunch. I guess I better hurry if I want to get to work."
"Lenore ..." He stood there for a moment, not sure what she meant. "It's almost five o'clock."
She gave him a look that said he was an idiot. "Yeah, right." She pushed past him, down the hall, into their bedroom. She came out pulling a comb through her hair, slipping into a new sweater. The blood-smudge on her forehead was dark and freshly scabbed. "It's your night for dinner, remember."
"Lenore, are you crazy?"
"Fuck you, Michael, I don't have time for this. I'm already late. What time is it, really?" She slipped the comb in her pocket and opened the front door. She stopped dead as it swung open. It was almost dark. She looked at her wristwatch.
"What's going on?" she said, turning to look at him. "Michael, what—what's happening?"
"I told you, Lenore, it's five o'clock. You missed work. I talked to Cal, he's been calling all day, and I called too. Where have you been?"
"I've been ... here." She looked around as if lost. "I cut out of class and ... and came right home ... and then ... and then ..." She put her hands to her mouth. "Oh, my God, Michael, I can't remember. I just—I just lost the whole day."
"What do you mean?" He went and closed the door, then gripped her arms. "Are you all right?"
She shook her head slightly. "I don't know. I don't know what's happening. This isn't ..."
"Isn't what?"
"The first time."
"Lenore," he said, as steadily as he could, "I'm not accusing you or anything. I just want to know, okay? Have you been doing any drugs? Anything at all?"
"No, nothing." She crumpled against him. "Michael, I'm scared. I haven't done anything, but I keep ... keep blacking out."
Jesus, he thought. She hasn't done anything except ... except that ritual.
In Voudoun magic, there was a place called the white darkness. The gods, or loa, came down and rode humans like horses, occupying their bodies, while their minds roamed through a realm without characteristics, a dream without features, a place none could quite remember when they returned. What if something of the sort had happened to Lenore? A mandala invoked and never properly dismissed, free to enter her when it chose?
It was a privilege to be selected by the loa, transfigured ancestral spirits of scary, lively intelligence. Papa Legba, Ersulie Freida, and Baron Samedi could drive their human "horses" to drink inhuman amounts of rum, consume massive quantities of chili peppers, even eat razor blades and broken glass without harm.
But the mandalas were, without exception, benevolent beings, devoted to human spiritual evolution. There was nothing about them of dark aspect, nothing remotely frightening.
Yet Lenore, now, frightened him. And whatever it was that had come into the temple last night had not impressed him as a bright and loving spirit.
He couldn't be sure, of course. The mandalas were new entities. Derek Crowe was the only authority on their nature and behavior. There was really no one else he could turn to for advice, if it came to that.
He hoped it wouldn't.
"It's all right," he said. "You're probably just coming down with a bug." There was no point in explaining his loa theory; he didn't want to put any ideas in her head. He just wanted to observe. "Why don't you get in bed and let me take your temperature?"
"Okay." With lowered head, looking suddenly very small and frail she shuffled down the hall toward the bedroom; he kept his arm around her, helped her out of her clothes, got her into bed and covered. He went for the thermometer and slipped it under her tongue.
"Thank you, Michael," she mumbled, looking pale and vulnerable among the pillows. He felt a pang of concern, as if for a child.
He left her there for a few minutes and went into his temple, taking up The Mandala Rites and skimming Crowe's lengthy exegesis, looking for clues to their current situation. The text yielded nothing new.
It's me, he thought.
I fucked up in a big way. Again. Didn't handle things right. How can Crowe help me when I didn't even follow his instructions? I'm not sure what we did last night, it got so out of hand.
I should have insisted on doing everything my way, methodically, and not let Leno
re participate if she wouldn't cooperate.
Now I've messed up my partner.
Maybe. Maybe.
Okay, yeah. Could be she's really only sick.
Yeah. Don't panic. What would Elias say? Look for rational explanations first. Science is an important power in this world, and for good reason: It works.
Let's try science and see how far it gets us.
He returned to Lenore. Her eyes were half closed; she looked calmer now. She gave him a sleepy smile as he plucked the thermometer out of her mouth.
"How's it look?"
He turned the glass wand until he saw the thin line of mercury. It was numbered on the Celsius scale, rather than Fahrenheit, which always confused him a bit; but there was a red arrow pointing out the normal human temperature, and she was right on it.
"You're fine," he said. "Thirty-seven. That's normal."
10
Derek Crowe stood at the chalkboard, dressed in a white shirt and baggy trousers, a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket, a piece of chalk in one hand. Lenore was alone with him in the drafty classroom, her notebook opened to a blank page. He had drawn a ring of dots on the board, thirty-seven points arranged in a mandala, like thirty-seven eyes watching her. And now, one by one, counting aloud as he did so, he began to erase them.
"Thirty-seven ... thirty-six ... thirty-five ..."
The classroom grew dark, and Lenore found herself on the square spiral stairs of the math building, trudging down them in reverse, moving backward down the stairs. Crowe's voice lowered her into darkness.
"Twenty-seven ... twenty-six ... twenty-five ..."
Lenore's flesh melted from her, underlying lines of power shedding their outermost excrescences, leaving her floating like a skeleton of bare lines in a diamond realm, steeped in orange haze. This fire-lit mist coagulated into lumps of multicolored moving matter, an astral precipitate jumbled and chaotic around her. She glimpsed the bits and pieces of her past, scenes and faces swirling in a colloidal storm. Old agonies rose up to torment her. Scenes from her life fought for primacy, without purpose, but for once they could not draw her in.
"Thirteen ... twelve ... eleven ..."
She had come under the sway of a new influence, an organizing principle, something more powerful than the clamors of her ego. As if magnetized, the fragments of her consciousness began to align themselves along inward lines of power, leading her deep into the center of something she could not apprehend.
"Three ... two ... one ..."
She had reached the beginning of her life—but the center was farther in.
Leaving physical memories behind, she plunged cometlike into a void as impenetrable as unconsciousness. There was something there, some lost part of her, crying to be rescued. She reached for it, hauled it out blindly ... but whatever it was, she could not see it. She had not gone far enough yet.
"Zero."
She felt that if she could only reach the center, she could start back out again and she would be changed. She would be whole. Her true nature waited patiently to be born. Strong and pure, intensely bright and fearless, it had existed before her body, before anything.
But now it had a body.
"Now wake. ..."
She found herself standing outside the door of Michael's temple. The house was all new. The walls, floor and ceiling were pure black. Pure, essential. The world she had inhabited all her life seemed shallow and incomplete, a failure of imagination. This other, dominant world reminded her that oblivion was her true nature. Consider the universe in all the endless ages before her arrival and after her departure. She was like a little cyst of nothingness ensconced in the middle of that span. Worthless, unless something greater found a use for her.
And now something had.
Down it came, spinning slowly and deliberately, like a vast black sentient ceiling fan, giving off an odor she could almost taste. It gleamed with dark wet liquid, as if recently anointed. Tendrils like drops of thickening blood were oozing, dripping onto her.
She had no fear of blood. Blood had served as carrier for a thousand pleasures. How many times had she watched her own blood backing up a syringe and stared at the ruby liquid, in awe of its beauty and utility?
Nor did she fear needles, for similar reasons, although she had never witnessed anything like the sheer number that now revealed themselves as the palpy tendrils retracted to show their probing tips. Some ancient portion of her brain, something deeply rooted in all the errors and apprehensions of matter, sent a momentary spasm through her muscles, a surge of animal panic—as if there were anywhere to run from the black wheel.
But the flutter of her nerves was too slow; while ions were bridging neural gaps with torturous lethargy, this other thing had already anticipated them and filled those spaces with its own immensities. Then the million or more thin, flexible spikes pierced her soul, delivering her from every care she had ever known.
All weakness in her began to dissolve, old cells giving way before a creative, corrosive tide. As quickly as her vulnerable portions were destroyed, the whirling black wheel replaced them with others of its own manufacture, rebuilding her cell by cell. Healing her, but also changing her.
In tonight's exchange, she had nothing to give and everything to gain. Her mind unfolded in an unending process of expansion centered on one point that hung in space above, quietly gnashing.
Waves of pleasure, immobilizing warmth washed through her, but she needn't worry about moving. There was nothing to accomplish. She need only devote her mind to the intricate inward track. For the true center lay yet a long way from where she stood.
She gazed up at her guardian, wanting whatever it wanted for her.
I'm nothing without you. Heal me, make me whole. I give myself to you.
I surrender.
The mandala had been holding back until she was entirely receptive. Now it moved closer. Pain streamed into her unavoidably, though her guardian increased the flow of pleasure at the same time. She was used to the contradictory mixture. Her whole life had been nothing but pain and the things she took to ease it. At least tonight her pain had a purpose.
A faint gray light came burning through the orange haze. It didn't trouble her as so many dawns had done, announcing the end of a night's escape, the inevitable return to a day's hassles. Her new sense of insight would never wear off and leave her stranded in a gray world. This time dawn hardly registered.
Every wall pointed in her direction. The floorboards rushed to join at her feet. The kitchen tiles sorted themselves with Lenore as their centerpoint, their one aim. When she moved, the center moved with her, and the mandala drifted along like a cluster of black balloons with streamers flowing to her limbs. She climbed into bed and lay very still as she contemplated the great distances yet to be covered.
Minutes passed like hours; she savored the time alone with her guardian, free of distraction.
When she heard Michael's eyes open, she turned to greet him, smiling, and squeezed his hand.
"Hey," he said, "good morning. How are you?"
"Great," she said.
The word was well chosen to fill him with relief, to keep him calm until it was time to goad him on. He squeezed her hand in return, but Lenore was somewhere far away. Something else smiled for her, and kissed his cheek.
PART 3
You are our natural prey, our predestined slaves, and we joyously swear forever to whip you to our bidding until you fall and fail us, when we shall devour you as is our right.
—from The Mandala Rites of Elias Mooney
We are your natural guides, your spirit tutors, and have vowed eternally to spur you on to great accomplishments until the time is ripe for you to transcend the mortal plane and rise with our assistance to your cosmic destiny.
—from The Mandala Rites of Derek Crowe
11
The offices of Veritas Books, a division of Runyon-Cargill International, were located in a refurbished brick warehouse south of Market Street. The window beyo
nd Bob Maltzman's desk looked out on a small park with a swing set and a toddler's gym constructed from creosote-soaked posts that looked like recycled telephone poles. There were no children in evidence. The sandpit resembled a cat box that had never been changed. A ragged man hung in one of the swings, not even bothering to look furtive as he put what Derek surmised was a crack pipe to his lips. Several others sat at tables in the park, or guarded their shopping carts from benches where they sat wrapped in rags, some isolated and rocking back and forth talking to themselves, others in actual conversation.
The door opened behind Derek and Bob Maltzman came in with two cups of coffee. "Too cold for the hookers today, I guess," Bob said, setting a cup down on Derek's side of the desk, taking his around to the other side.
"The view's enchanting all the same," Derek said.
"So ..." Bob settled himself in his chair. There were stacks of manuscripts, proof sheets, everything in neat piles. Bob himself was short, rather plump, well groomed; he was dressed for a financial district office, white shirt and black tie, as if his conservative demeanor might help counteract the implicit flakiness of the books he published. Veritas was a respectable house, atmospheres above the amateurish Phantom Books; it had specialized and prospered for many years by publishing Christian writings and modern interfaith philosophy, before acquisition by the Runyon-Cargill empire. Veritas's recent venture into the New Age market was a risk that rode mainly on Maltzman's shoulders, and he carried it well. On the walls were several framed enlargements of book covers that Bob had purchased and published in his line: a new improved Egyptian Book of the Dead, its ancient lessons reinterpreted for the forward-looking yuppie; a colorful Qabala for children; and, naturally, a mandala. "How'd it go in North Carolina?"
The 37th mandala : a novel Page 11