When he reached his mother's house, he went straight to the garage and popped the hood of her car. He was tightening the cable clamps when he heard the back door slam and her footsteps slogging through the thick mulch of sodden leaves on the unraked lawn. She leaned over his shoulder, her breath reeking of beer and coffee. It wasn't quite ten o'clock.
"What's wrong with Lenore?" she said.
He straightened so fast he caught his forehead on the corner of the hood. "Ow! Jesus! What do you mean?"
"I called over there to see where you were. Phone must have rung twenty times before she answered."
"She's not feeling too good. She called in sick."
She looked skeptical, waiting for him to go on.
He leaned on the hood until it clicked shut. "What are you staring at?"
"What's she got?"
"Flu or something, how should I know? I can't afford to take her to the hospital so some doctor can charge us a hundred bucks to take her temperature."
"She's doing drugs again, isn't she?"
"And you aren't?"
"Don't start that! Your wife is the one with the problem! All I did was ask where you were, and she started raving at me—obscene filth, if you'd like to know. Words I never heard before. God knows she didn't learn them from you; and if she did, you didn't learn them from me."
Michael froze, then turned and headed toward the house. He picked up the phone in the kitchen and dialed his own number. The phone rang a dozen times, twenty, but Lenore didn't pick up. He finally put it down.
"Well?"
"She must be sleeping. You probably woke her up, that's why she sounded incoherent. With fever she gets delirious."
"But with drugs she gets nasty, and she was nasty. She doesn't care what she says to her own mother-in-law! If you heard what she said to me, garbage I can't even pronounce. You can't imagine—"
Suddenly he could imagine the words. Words right out of The Mandala Rites. To his mother's addled ears it could have sounded like any foul thing she wished to imagine.
"I'll talk to her," he said.
"She needs more than talk. If you ask me, she needs psychiatric help."
"Who doesn't? I have to go."
"What about my car? Does it work?"
"See for yourself."
As he crossed through the living room, he surprised Earl in a transaction with a tall young man in a shabby black jogging suit. The kid, who could have been younger than Michael, jumped, startled, and spastically started stuffing a plastic bag into a zippered hip pouch—but not before Michael saw what was in the bag. Black capsules.
Earl smiled defensively, swaying toward Michael. "Hey, buddy boy. You fix up your ma's car?"
"Good as new," Michael said, pushing past him. He wasn't really surprised, and he didn't want to think about what he was seeing. All he cared about at the moment was Lenore.
"Uh, this here's a friend of mine," Earl started.
"Yeah, right." Michael rushed out, leaving the front door open.
Lenore was sitting on the couch, heaps of yesterday's laundry piled up around her. She was still in her bathrobe, her hair wet and tangled. The comb hung halfway down, caught in snarls. Her eyes seemed clear and focused—but they weren't focused on him or on anything else he could see. It took her a moment to realize he was in the room; and then her expression soured, as if she were absorbed in something far more interesting and reluctant to deal with him. It was the look she gave him when he interrupted her at work on one of her math problems, or the puzzles she had worked compulsively when they'd first moved to Cinderton. They had been her only addiction for a brief time.
"Did you talk to my mom?" he asked.
She crossed her arms, narrowed her eyes, watched him with suspicion.
"Lenore ... are you okay? Did you have another—another blackout?"
"Shngaha, " she said.
"What?"
Her eyes strayed to the ceiling, making him glance up. Tucker, he thought. Tucker had bragged once that he had a few designer varieties, new drugs. Anything could happen with those things. Lenore might have taken something like that; and who could guess at the effects, especially when you mixed them with magic? He listened for Tucker's muted voice or footsteps, but heard only the usual muffled music.
"Lenore?" he said.
She didn't move.
He touched her shoulder but she still didn't move. His heart began to pound. Her skin was chill. He began to wonder if the universe were as neutral as he liked to believe ... or if neutrality was a more awful thing than he'd realized.
She caught his hand, a gesture as startling as it was sudden. She pressed his palm against her mouth; he felt her teeth and tongue against his skin.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "You were just sitting here—"
Her pupils were huge; more evidence that she was doing drugs. Tugging harder, she drew him down onto her, shifting back on the couch so that they could lie together in the scattered clothes.
"What're you doing?" he said, though he already knew. Her hands were on his back, pulling at his shirt; her breath felt hot on his neck. He must be crushing her. Her robe fell open. The sounds she made were broken bits of words, nothing that made sense at first, but he wasn't really listening now.
"What's with you?"
There was a trace of a smile on her lips, but little else in her expression except urgency as she worked his pants down over his hips and pulled him closer to her.
Drugs, he was thinking. It has to be drugs. She's never like this except when she's loaded. Never that interested in sex without some extra internal stimulation—or something to numb her....
He tried to throw off the tangle of thoughts for a moment, to let himself enjoy the sensations. He lowered his head, slid his hands up along her back to grasp her shoulders from behind. Her cold hands moved down his back; her nails dug into his buttocks.
Then he realized that she was chanting, making wet, clicking sounds timed with his thrusts.
"Silsiliv zezizn maoan, nylyvyl olornon ahrixir memt-hocha ..."
The sounds smothered him. Suddenly it was all too much. What was she invoking? What would be consecrated by the mixture of their juices?
He pulled out and drew back, feeling as if he had just struggled up from the bottom of a lake. Lenore gasped anxiously but made no other sound, lying there with her eyes still closed, hardly seeming to breathe. Her words trailed off, but not before he recognized them.
Somehow she had managed to memorize the whole seventeenth Rite, the major sex ritual in Crowe's book. How had she pronounced it flawlessly in the midst of passion, and drugged to boot? That ceremony had stumped him; it was the single one he couldn't do alone. And now, given the perfect opportunity, he'd backed off in fear.
Fear of what?
He couldn't ignore the fact that he had been aroused; if he could manage to get out of his head for a minute he might still be able to find some satisfaction. Maybe if he took a little of whatever Lenore had taken. He looked around for a joint, even a roach, but saw nothing.
Her eyes were completely shut now, her teeth clenched and starting to chatter. He swept his hand across her brow, brushing her hair aside to feel if she was feverish.
In doing so, he revealed the bright wound on her forehead.
Michael went cold when he saw the mandala burning there like a brand: an intricate, spidery tattoo, as detailed as the illustration in Crowe's book, down to the central mouth of gnashing teeth, the rim of glistering eyes. It was the thirty-seventh mandala, sharp and clear. He rubbed at it, but it would not smudge. Lenore made a moaning complaint and he pulled his hand away. Flustered and frightened, he hurried down the hall, consoling himself with simple acts. He washed in the bathroom, waiting for his thoughts to clear, but they were dense and thickening. There was too much going on here, more than he could handle alone. He needed some advice.
Elias, he thought. Now.
He went into his temple room and opened a drawer in his altar. There were he
aps of loose paper, volumes of his magical journals, bits and pieces of thaumaturgical equipment he wasn't currently using. At the back of the drawer was a stack of audio cassettes and a few envelopes bound with a thick leather cord. These were the only things he had of Elias Mooney's. He untied the stack and dug his old tape player from another drawer; he plugged it into the socket beside the altar and inserted a cassette, then sat cross-legged on the floor and set the volume low.
Elias's voice crackled out in midsentence, bringing back clear memories of the time when Michael had received these taped letters once or twice a month. Those had been troubled times. Worse than these? Perhaps not ... but Elias's words had always filled him with courage and reassurance and spiritual guidance. He needed them as a sort of touchstone for contacting Elias now.
"—now, without offending you, Michael, I have to say once again that it is absolutely essential you forgo drugs of any kind. They do have a place in magic, but they have been so abused by modern practitioners that it is practically impossible to use them properly now. The realms to which they give access have been polluted by the millions of untrained, undisciplined tourists who've invaded the astral regions in the last thirty years, with the aid of hallucinogenics. In a way, the so-called nonaddictive drugs—such as lysergic acid and mescaline—are even more dangerous than the opiates, which merely lead to oblivion, for that is a featureless void whose essential characteristics can never be altered, and from whose effects it is sometimes possible to recover. But the undisciplined mind may never recover from an unguided trip through the peyote world, and the reverse is also true. The depredations done to the peyote lands are as terrible and irreversible as those done by modern civilization to the native people's material environment. Just as the sacred Black Hills were mined and stripped of their soul, the ecology of the astral has been seriously wounded. And as it decays, so must this world, which is no more than a dream of the denizens of that place ..."
The words affected Michael like a mild hallucinogen themselves. He closed his eyes and let them wash over him, trying to recover his state of mind at the time this tape first reached him.
He recalled he'd had a very bad experience with some mushrooms, and had actually broken down and telephoned Elias and confessed the nature of his experiments—even knowing the old man's prejudice against drugs. It had been getting dark and he was all alone in an empty apartment, with night pouring down over the windows like a bottle of ink spilled from the eaves; and he had hugged the phone to his ear and clung to the old man's gravelly voice with all his soul. Elias had dispatched some of his elementals to watch over Michael, then told him to ground himself by gazing at a piece of polished copper. Michael was afraid to stray beyond the circle of light cast by the single lamp where he sat holding the phone. "There's something near you," Elias said soothingly. "Something on your person." "I don't even have a penny," Michael whimpered. "Look down. I see copper. It's small, but it's enough." Looking down, Michael had seen a bright copper rivet on the watch pocket of his blue jeans, and the sight of it had affected him like the touch of a woman's cool, strong hands. The metal of Venus, its small glow a reassurance and a beacon, held him steady even after Elias hung up. And after eons of sitting in solitude with nothing but that tiny orange sun to warm him, he had heard a key in the lock and light fell into the room down a hall that was at least a thousand miles long, and Lenore came in, amazed when she saw him, laughing and sarcastic when she heard his story, because her terrors were so different from his.
Two days later this tape had arrived. It was partially a reproval, however sympathetic, and partially an esoteric lecture on why a refined white boy like Michael was genetically and culturally unsuited to receive the sacraments of the psilocybin spirits. Elias did not believe there were any drugs suited for Michael; pharmaceuticals were soulless. Best of all was to learn to release the body's own natural compounds, the subtle chemicals for which receptors had existed in the brain long before anyone had ever chewed a mushroom or ingested poppy tar or smoked the dried, serrated leaf of cannibis. But this required discipline, self-mastery, and patience; which meant that few in this day and age would ever experience these effects except by accident, in moments of extreme pain or pleasure, when the body released them spontaneously.
As a current example of his poor discipline, Michael realized he had just spent an uncertain length of time lost in his thoughts, unfocused on the task at hand. What drew him back was a change in Elias's tone, and a faded quality to the sound, as if the old man were drawing far away from the microphone. The words wavered in and out of audibility. Michael couldn't remember Elias saying anything like what he was hearing now, although he had not listened to the tape for years:
"—the danger cannot be ... especially for the inexperienced practitioner ... failed miserably to contain ... only spreading them ... me as a ladder to climb farther into ... growing like thorny weeds in the ravaged places ... can fight them, but not you ... away from crow... stay away—"
Michael pressed the stop button suddenly. Crow, had he said? Crowe?
He rewound the tape a few inches, played it back, and Elias's voice was even fainter now, barely surviving passage through a barrier of static he had not heard on the first playing. He could not make out a single word. He rewound it again and restarted it. And now there was nothing left: no voice, no hiss, only blank tape that thrummed faintly with a rhythmic thub-thub-thub as the little wheels of the cassette whirled around and around, its machine parts softly creaking.
It was then Lenore began screaming.
13
Michael found Lenore tumbled at the foot of the couch as if she'd been hurled there. She had clawed splinters from the hardwood floor, leaving bloody gouges; with her head and shoulders twisted back, she howled diminishingly. As he got his arms around her, her cries quieted to dry sobbing.
"Lenore?"
She shut her mouth and eyes, moaning. He pulled a rag rug under her, dug splinters out from under her nails.
Bad drugs, he thought. Toxic impurities. This couldn't be simply the mandala rites; Lenore was too stable, too skeptical to have let them affect her this deeply. He suspected one of the brands of synthetic heroin he'd heard about. Maybe she'd thought she could avoid the drawbacks of actual junk. Designer drugs were notorious for causing comas, seizures. He had to find out exactly what she'd taken. Tucker would know.
He held her face in both his hands, but she wouldn't keep still.
"Lenore, please ..."
"Madze svelvivl soa mudeeth ..."
Her mind was stuck in a loop, retracing the syllables of something she'd glimpsed in The Mandala Rites. It confirmed his belief that she'd been drugged during the ritual. She was still tripping on the same shit days later, stuck in psychic playback. The chemicals had triggered changes deep in her mind, far beyond their physical effects. There was enough desperation in the syllables she spouted to convince him that even she believed she was in trouble.
"Come on, Lenore," he said. "Come with me."
He pulled her up by the forearm, got her into a sitting position against the back of the couch. "Come on, come on." He gave up trying to pull her and bent to grab her around the middle. She shrieked and shoved him so hard that he skidded backward and slammed into the wall. Then she was on top of him, flailing her arms until he caught her by the wrists. His first thought, however unbelievable, was that she was trying to gouge out his eyes. He didn't want to test his intuition, though. She was spewing a torrent of nonsense words; it sounded like glossolalia, tongues, as if she were speaking a language she knew and not just reciting something her drug-altered mind had photographed out of a book.
Well, he would use words too. There had to be something in the Rites that would work on her. If she accepted that world-view, that language, then he must try to speak to her in it.
None of the thirty-seven rituals seemed relevant, though. And he wasn't sure he wanted to feed her craziness by following her logic. She needed purification and then disciplined
training to give her some psychic shielding. She was sensitive to a fault.
I should never have let her do that ritual. It's my fault.
He managed to twist away. Springing to his feet, he grabbed her around the shoulders and dragged her down the hall toward the temple room. When she saw where they were going, she relaxed and allowed herself to be taken.
I should call the hospital, he thought. That's what I should do. But they'll just think she's crazy, and what if they try to commit her? How am I going to make any of this sound reasonable? They'll lock me up too. Unless they discover what drugs she took, and then they'll probably arrest her.
Forget that.
He slammed the door, closing them in. Lenore surprised him by sitting willingly on the floor, her head slumped forward. He already had a candle burning on the altar. Now he lit another and touched the flame to a piece of self-lighting charcoal. Sparks sizzled and spat over the disk of black coal. When the whole piece glowed orange, he heaped it with chunks of frankincense and myrrh. The room filled with fragrant smoke.
From one of the drawers in the altar bureau, he took a short smudge stick made of herbs woven together like the straws in a broom; the tip was charred from prior use. He lit it from the candle flame; its smoke joined that of the incense. As he watched the smoke rise to the ceiling, he thought of Tucker Doakes. Damn him.
He passed the stick under Lenore's nose. Her nostrils dilated but there was no other change. She didn't cough or blink the smoke from her eyes. He began to walk widdershins around the room to dispel the influences that had taken hold of her. Back at the altar, he took a pinch of salt and let it sift down on her hair and shoulders. Salt for purification; salt to banish evil.
The 37th mandala : a novel Page 13