The 37th mandala : a novel

by Laidlaw, Marc

  "Now, what could scare Mr. Crowe?" said Etienne, coming up behind her. They opened the door wide, into a shadowy vastness, and Derek entered between them. Nina slid her arm into his, and he thought of Lilith, thankful he had all this to distract him from what otherwise would have been days of gloom and obsession.

  "I got your invitation this morning," Derek said. "It came quicker than I'd expected."

  "Oh, we mailed it before we met you—we were sure you'd come. Now, the tour!"

  The warehouse was divided into a number of rooms on the ground floor. The central room, a dance hall, was two stories tall, with lofts and balconies edging it; there were a number of other smaller chambers on the ground floor, and stairs running up and down. Each wall in the main room was embellished with an immense mandala, smaller mandalas of varying sizes arranged in overlapping orbits around them. He was reminded of the tattooed skin, similarly crowded. A few painters were up on ladders, putting finishing touches on the mandalas. In the center of the dance floor was the largest of all the wheels, the one that figured last in his book and also served as frontispiece, with its central circle of lamprey teeth and its outer ring of speckled eyes. They took a wide path around it, since it was still incomplete; several women were on their knees, painting in the sketched tendrils. The thing was coming to life even as he watched.

  "Wow" was about all Derek could think to say. Nina pulled him tighter, beaming with pleasure.

  They toured the adjacent rooms on the ground floor, where the walls were hung with framed fine-art versions of the mandalas. They looked too symmetrical to have been done by hand; peering close he could see no ink marks.

  "Are these prints?" he asked.

  "An artist friend of ours does them on computer—he's the one who sneaked that little program into your system, I'm afraid."

  Derek shrugged. "No harm done. It's nice work."

  "I'll be sure to tell him you said so. He'll be at the opening—you two can meet. He is also, you see, one of us."

  One of "us," Derek thought. He had come farther down this path than he cared to consider; his relationship with Etienne and Nina was dependent to a certain extent on continued deception, at least as to his own beliefs.

  They made their way upstairs, through a connected series of smaller rooms; mandala prints were centered on every wall. Mandalas dotted the floors like the tracks of some strange beast. Everywhere they went, assistants were mounting lights or putting finishing touches on the hand-painted mandalas. A number of them wore mandala tattoos, but apparently these were in reference to the club alone, and not to his book, for when Nina introduced Derek, his name meant nothing to them.

  "We've ordered copies of The Mandala Rites," Etienne reassured him. "If we can borrow you for a little while, we'll have you sign a few during the party."

  "Yes, and we're recording all the keys," said Nina. "They'll be playing all night, right along with the music."

  "It will be wild!" said Etienne. "And think of all the drugs! Many very receptive minds ... the total effect will be incredible. We have also commissioned a number of mandala paintings from local artists. They should be arriving very soon."

  "And Nicholas Strete tells me his article will be in tomorrow's edition—just in time for the opening!"

  "Everything's coming together," Etienne said gleefully, rubbing his palms briskly together. At that moment they were passing a window on a level with the raised freeway; little could be seen outside except the gray concrete slab, but there was a gap visible just below the freeway, through which one could barely see the street.

  "Speaking of which," Etienne said, pausing to point down at the pavement, "I saw our friend Chhith—or should I say Huon?—sometime in the night, just down there."

  "Did you?" Derek said nervously.

  "He must be very curious."

  "He must be very angry," Nina said, "to see his precious mandalas let loose like this—given out so freely to everyone."

  "Oh, I'm sure he'll come around," said Etienne.

  "I'm sorry I gave him your name," Derek said.

  "Don't worry about that. I'm glad to see him, actually. He belongs with us. Only his role may not be quite what he expects."

  "Etienne!" A fellow with a long ponytail and shaved temples was coming down the corridor. "We're having a problem with the sound."

  "Excuse us a moment, Derek," Etienne said. "Feel free to explore."

  They left him at the window, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering, voices echoing through the building where everything seemed bright and new and happy, and anticipation was almost a tangible substance.

  Derek had a sense, then, of the mandalas as a budding cottage industry. What would Elias Mooney think of this? At least he couldn't have blamed it on Derek, which was some comfort. The mandalas would have surfaced anyway, with or without The Mandala Rites. In fact, he supposed his book would have a negligible impact on the public, compared to the exposure the mandalas were about to get at Club Mandala.

  What he had done with Eli's notebooks was only a minor mischief.

  And he had never actually sworn to burn them, had he? He'd tried countless times to remember exactly what he'd said to Elias on their final night together, but the act of remembering seemed to push things around in his head and alter the memories themselves. He was reasonably sure he hadn't promised anything. What the hell. No harm was done, in the end.

  It was time to put away his guilt. Swallow his sins and get over it. He was torturing himself, which was pointless.

  Except, of course, as Lilith had shown him, he was a bit of a masochist—a martyr without a cause. She loved to point out the pleasure he took from writhing in the hair shirt of his occult hypocrisy, writing books for the praise of people he considered imbeciles. What could be more masochistic than that? By comparison, her candlewax drippings and needle-pricks and plier squeezes were gentle teases, a child's game. It little pleased him to realize he had now created for himself a world based entirely on this masochism. He was in league with fools and madmen who had been taken in by their own con; by coincidence, it was his con as well. Derek was apparently the only one still undeceived.

  If he had been a superstitious man, if he really had been convinced by Elias, he never would have published the Rites. But by doing so, he had proven to himself that Eli's ranting was nothing but nonsense. The old man was a fool, and everything he thought he'd seen in Eli's house was a ludicrous dream. He had deserted the so-called shaman not out of fear, not because he dreaded some false cathartic confrontation with his "Shadow," but because flight had been the only sure way of preserving his sanity.

  Once Bob Maltzman had expressed interest in the mandala notebooks, Derek had found himself unable to present them without revision. The old man's basic view of reality was too bleak and strange for mass consumption. He had altered the text of the ledgers not as a precaution against invoking evil, but simply to enlarge his audience and put some of his own work into the final book, so that he wouldn't feel he was simply plagiarizing. It gave him an odd feeling of power to revise Eli's universe in this fashion. By couching the incantations in New Age terms, borrowing phrases and attitudes from other popular books, he had transformed the Rites from something dark and unholy into a message of spiritual hope for an optimistic but easily frightened readership.

  The gibberish of the rites themselves he had left untouched. What difference did that make?

  Derek acknowledged the presence of a tiny part of himself that remained infected with Eli's madness. He hated and resented this irrational mote; it was childish, naive, and potentially dangerous, should it ever mushroom out of control. This region of his psyche had never climbed out of pure animal suffering, onto the lofty intellectual plateau where pain and its causes could be analyzed. This mad, fearful, superstitious part of him never doubted for an instant what Eli taught. It knew what lay in those ledgers; it recognized the signs that blotched the skin.

  Thankfully, this part of his mind was poorly develope
d, in turn-of-the-millennium terms. It was easy to cow the poor shivering thing with all the whips and threats his rational mind had mastered.

  "Derek!"

  "Mr. Crowe!"

  He had come out onto a balcony overlooking the dance floor. Etienne and Nina stood in the center of the room, in the mouth of the black mandala, waving to him.

  "What do you think?" Nina called.

  Derek's grin, unforced and unbidden, surprised even him. He spread his arms to encompass the club, as if it and all within it were his doing.

  "Wonderful!" he called. And then, unsure exactly what he meant, but giving in for once to spontaneity, he added: "Let them come!"

  28

  America, Michael had decided, was mostly wasteland.

  They had been driving through flat arid deserts for an eternity. The last woods he'd seen were in western Oklahoma, and since then it had been flat and rocky, windswept, bare; red rock and white rock, orange, green, and black rock. When they'd gained altitude in Arizona there had been the freshness of pine trees in the night, but that hadn't lasted long, and they came down once again into desert, past cacti draped with snow, under a starry sky so vast that it mocked the emptiness of the desert. Now here they were in California, land of sunny beaches and orange groves and lush green mountains; but the sun was dawning on another endless reach of desert. The mountains were black and alien as a scorched satellite; the rocks themselves looked burned. They skirted the edge of a crusted lakebed that looked as if it had been set on fire in ages past. It reminded him of an early science-fiction dream of Mercury, a desert world whirling close to the sun, only barely inhabitable. He was always amazed when he saw the winking lights of some settlement or other. Who would ever live out here?

  A sign flew past, and he saw the offramp up ahead: GAS, FOOD, LODGING. gas, food, lodging. What wouldn't he have given for the latter? A night in a spring-shot motel bed would have felt like a week in a luxury hotel. He had been so exhausted for so long that he could hardly remember any other mode of consciousness. He had always wondered how humans could whip themselves to feats of great endurance, and now he knew. All it took was desperation.

  He figured they could reach San Francisco tonight, if the car held out. If he held out. It was always a temptation to let Lenore drive, but each time he seriously considered it, he remembered their near-disaster outside of Memphis.

  He followed the off ramp down to a gas-station minimart, an oasis of fuel and junk food. The pump was self-service. He left Lenore sleeping and went into the market to pay in advance for the gas. He went out and started the pump, then went back in. Lenore wasn't eating much these days, but he needed constant replenishment. He picked through pastries and beef jerky, considered a microwave burrito but decided against it when his stomach rebelled at the thought. A pint of milk, cigarettes. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and swigged; it was scorched and bitter, and he could feel the grounds swirling between his teeth. The old man at the register took his money without looking, too busy watching a small TV set on the counter—a morning program, traffic and weather and fragments of news. Michael was scooping up his change and tucking the paper sack into the crook of his arm when he heard the announcer mention ritual murder.

  He couldn't see the screen from where he stood, and the sound wasn't up very loud. He worked his way around the counter past the slush machines and the magazine rack, until he could see the screen. A fuzzy, blurry video image, attributable not to poor camerawork but to lousy reception. A scrubby vacant lot with candles and broken glass and a body covered with a bloody sheet; and on the brick wall above, a large dark circular pattern that made his pulse quicken—then the picture was gone. Fucking media tidbits—never a fully developed thought, or even an image. Everything was subliminal these days. Was it a mandala, or wasn't it? He couldn't hear the talking head, and could barely read his title of "Occult Crime Expert." Then came another picture, painted in wavering, washed-out video tones. He almost dropped his coffee. As the image wavered in and out, he recognized their house. Tucker's house. A woman in a bright red coat stood in the driveway, next to Lenore's Cutlass, holding a microphone.

  "No," he whispered. The man looked over at him, and Michael snatched up a copy of Guns and Ammo.

  "I'll take this too," he said, holding it up. The man looked suspiciously at him now, as if he were waving an actual gun. As he rang up the sale, he blocked Michael's view of the TV. Michael gave him the money, trying for another clear shot of the screen. But the story was over, and now there was nothing on but advertisements. He looked down at the rack, but there was nothing on the cover of any newspapers he could see, nothing about occult murders.

  He rushed out with his purchases, trying to see if the North Carolina plates were visible from the market. He hooked the pump back into the machine, dripping gasoline over his shoes, twisting the cap into place with his other hand. He drove away in a panic, nearly taking the wrong off ramp, which would have carried them east again.

  Are they looking for us now? he wondered. Could they possibly know we've gotten this far? Do they have a description of our car? Wouldn't every highway patrolman who's passed us, all the way across the country, remember this Beetle in an instant?

  Are we suspects?

  How could we not be?

  Michael's temple room, directly under the murder scene, was full of ceremonial knives, everything the North Carolina cops knew a black magician needed for his sacrificial killings. And on his altar, Jesus, Derek Crowe's Mandala Rites lay open wide, probably to the very mandala that was splattered on Tucker's wall.

  Should he ditch the car somewhere out here in the desert? Find a dirt road and drive it over the edge of some ravine? They could hitchhike into the next town, catch a Greyhound going to San Francisco. But how long would all that take? Maybe he could get some spray-paint, paint the car black.

  Ridiculous.

  The only thing to do was to get to San Francisco as swiftly as possible and hope the cops were still treating this as a local thing, checking North Carolina and the immediate states. People got away with murder all the time—actual murderers. They turned up weeks or months or years later, far from the crime scenes, having lived anonymously and without being recognized until their story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.

  That's us, he thought. We'll be on both shows. Our faces will be everywhere eventually.

  But in the meantime, they had a chance to get to San Francisco. Certainly the mandalas would be doing their part to keep the way open, keep the cops off their backs.

  The main thing was to get to Derek Crowe. To get help for Lenore from the one man who might understand her condition. Once she had been cared for, then they could worry about the law—figure out whether to run or turn themselves in with some story that sounded less than utterly insane.

  The car whined as it climbed toward the sinister serrations of a coal-black range. He decided to tell Lenore nothing. Headlights appeared behind him, pulling out of the sun; approaching quickly, then passing in a rush that rocked the car. It was a trooper, bent on other business. He could hardly have passed the Beetle without recognizing it, if he was looking for such an unlikely vehicle. But the taillights turned to tiny beads and vanished up ahead.

  It didn't help. He couldn't relax. They still had the length of the state to travel. Anything could happen.

  PART 6

  In us all is shattered and twisted. And never forget that we hold you in our jaws.

  —from The Mandala Rites of Elias Mooney

  In us all is rapture and bliss. And never forget that we hold you in our hearts.

  —from The Mandala Rites of Derek Crowe

  29

  The first time the buzzer rang, Derek ignored it. He had just switched on the ten o'clock news and was expecting no visitors. Bums on the street were always pressing buttons just to irritate those with homes. Usually they didn't bother any one apartment more than a time or two.

  This time, however,
the buzzer persisted. The only possible unannounced visitor he could think of was Lilith. He jumped up and pressed the intercom switch in the hall.

  "Who's there?" he said.

  He heard nothing but traffic.

  Once more: "Who is it?"

  This time a voice, blurred and unintelligible. Some drunk or crackhead. If he started insulting them over the intercom, they might well come back to the buzzer all night. He knew of people who'd been killed for smaller offenses.

  He went back to the sofa, but the buzzer sounded before he could sit. Now it rang continuously.

  He stormed down the hall and out the door, convinced that by the time he got to the street the pesterer would be long gone. He rushed down two flights of spiraling stairs to the lobby, followed by the buzzing from his apartment. Reaching the glass doors, he saw two shapes silhouetted in the entryway, one of them fingering the button. He threw open the inner door, but not the cage that kept them out. "What do you want?"

  Michael Renzler stepped back into streetlight, translated from shadows.

  "Jesus ..." Derek clung to the door, only shock preventing him from slamming it in their faces. They looked as if they'd hitchhiked all the way from North Carolina; exhaustion had carved the flesh from the boy's already bony face. His wife's eyes were sleepy and seductive, looking him up and down. She gave him a soft, worn-out smile. He twisted the latch on the iron gate and let her in—she drew Michael with her.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "You got my card?" Michael said in a low voice as he passed Derek. They trudged up the stairs as invited. Derek fell in behind them. "I didn't have your number, uh, so we had to just come. When I wrote it I didn't really have any idea how bad it could get."