The 37th mandala : a novel

by Laidlaw, Marc

  How had One-Ear come across Elias Mooney's journals in Derek Crowe's apartment?

  That question passed from his mind when he came to the next sheaf, clipped together with a big black spring clip. These were photocopies of Elias's journals, slightly enlarged, and annotated in another hand, in green ink. Hardly a line of Elias's remained unchanged. As he struggled to read the interlineations, the cramped scribbles and substitutions, he realized where he had seen all this before. Elias's words were vaguely familiar, but he recognized the alterations instantly.

  He went cold as he read it. Lilith, leaning over his shoulder, whispered, "Oh, my God."

  " 'We instill your souls with the diamond nectar of wisdom,' " Michael read from the green ink; and Lilith, finding his place, deciphered the black script of the original text: " 'We distill from your sick souls a potent brew of misery.' "

  " 'We tap the fermented juices of insight when you've meditated sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.'"

  " 'We tap the fermented juices of despair when you've suffered sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.' "

  " 'It was we who mixed the joyous brew from the first.' "

  " 'It was we who mixed the bitter brew from the first.' "

  "It's The Mandala Rites," Michael said. "Elias wrote it. But who changed it? Whose writing is this?"

  Lilith said one word, as if it were the foulest she had ever spoken—as if it were corrosive, a flavor to rot her tongue, to poison her soul: "Crowe. "

  Of course, he thought. It came from Derek Crowe's apartment.

  The car slowed. There were no streetlights here. Michael heard a deep thrumming somewhere, like an engine that kept running even after the driver had shut off the car. He looked out the window and saw brick walls, concrete abutments, a parking lot with a Dumpster bin in a corner where a man or woman sat huddled in rags, shrinking from the headlights' glare. On the sidewalk, not far away, a steady stream of people were heading in one direction.

  One-Ear said, "I'll take those papers, please. They may be useful in bargaining with Mr. Crowe."

  Michael gathered what had fallen and shoved it over the seat back.

  "Now," One-Ear said, "we are going in together."

  "In where?" Michael said. Lilith seemed to be in shock much greater than his own. She bent over slowly, dragging her purse from the floor, and then he remembered what she had in it. One-Ear had checked it for weapons, but why would he notice a small key amid the clutter?

  "We're visiting a very busy nightspot. Let's not become separated. I will have a gun in your back, Ms. A."

  "Call me anything but that, " Lilith said.

  One-Ear handed the pile of papers to the driver, then climbed out and opened Michael's door. Michael slid out, pulling Lilith with him.

  "You should hold hands, like very good friends, like lovers," said One-Ear. "Be discreet about the handcuffs."

  "Like this?" Lilith said, pressing close to Michael. She put her hand over the cuff on his wrist.

  "That's very good. Now we will join the crowd."

  They walked around the edge of the building, out of the lot where they had parked, merging with the stream of people. Neon dazzled the night somewhere ahead, but the sky above was black with mist, holding solid slabs of shadow overhead.

  In the car, Michael had felt the inexorable tugging as something irrelevant; he was not in control of his motions, so he let the whirlpool force tug him without resisting. But suddenly, here, it hit him again, nearly snatching him away through the crowd. This time it was too strong to fight. He tried to cast a white circle around himself, but there was no room for it in his mind; it was all he could do to stay upright, to keep from bending forward like a reed in the wind, to stop himself from rolling like a tumbleweed. He could no longer fight the flow, for One-Ear was urging them in that direction.

  One-Ear and the driver were right behind them, but Lilith's fingers were working deftly. Michael felt the key turning in the handcuffs. The band loosened at his wrist; he had to catch it with his fingers to keep it from falling.

  He clutched Lilith's arm as if she could hold him in place; the pull had hold of her too, though she didn't seem to notice it.

  They rounded a corner, coming to the club's entrance. Michael held back for a moment, amazed. A pair of immense neon mandalas hung above the black entryway. Coiled colored tubing, all dark-inflected, in deep violets and bloody reds, oranges like burning flesh, greens that suggested lightless depths ...and black tubes, black but glowing. All twisted into spirals and deceptive paths, with radiating sunburst arms. Every inch flickering, pulsing outward in consecutive waves of color and darkness, seeming to writhe against the bricks, melting into the old mortar, throwing wriggling tendrils of neon out against the freeway overpass. One mandala sparkled and whirled around an aperture full of brilliant white and red-tipped daggers like gnashing teeth; the other was covered all over with toothy mouths that champed and noiselessly chattered. These wheels of color spun on either side of the pale and rather subdued lettering of the place's name: Club Mandala.

  Lilith leaned close, kissed him on the cheek. "When we get inside, split up and run."

  "Young lovers," One-Ear said lightly, "that's enough of that."

  She parted, giving Michael a crooked smile.

  "Go on," One-Ear said, goading Michael forward none too gently. He jumped to obey but went too abruptly, losing Lilith's hand.

  Their little scheme with the handcuffs was revealed.

  Michael didn't wait to see what Lilith did without him. He expected the bullet at any moment. Maybe it had already come, but his shock was so great he felt nothing. He plunged toward the doors, giving in to the force that reeled him in—flying past the bouncers who were shouting and gesturing, trying to stop him, until they saw One-Ear coming with his gun. Michael dived into the crowd, pushing himself toward its dense heart. The force was stronger than it had been at the cliffside, and giving into it now was exactly like throwing himself over that edge—but this abyss was invisible and, he sensed, bottomless.

  He hesitated, trying to find his bearings. Entering that place of raging noise and chaos, he found himself paradoxically at a point of utter stillness, as if he were in free fall.

  This was it. The center. The hub.

  A stranger with a tattoo on each cheek shoved a drink into one hand and a white gel capsule into the other, and shouted just loud enough to be heard over the rhythmic mechanical thrumming that filled the air: "Welcome to Club Mandala!"

  As Lenore entered the club, her mind, which had been whirling, came to a sudden stop. Everything on the edges of her consciousness, every bit of parasitic chatter clinging to her thoughts and distorting her perceptions, was abruptly flung beyond the reach of her mind, vanishing over some horizon she could hardly perceive. She had been only dimly aware of her whereabouts for some time; surrendering to her mandala, she had followed it without question, without resistance. The day, everything leading up to this moment, was a blur. Everything she had said and done, everything that had brought her here, she remembered as if through a filter. And this despite her determination to see and remember everything, to take responsibility—to be a witness. It made her furious.

  The cloud had descended when Michael took her away from Hecate's Haven, as if the separation from Crowe had itself caused her illness. Maybe that was why she felt so lucid now: Crowe stood in Michael's place at her right hand.

  Something had happened to Michael—something she couldn't recall. She looked around for him, as if he might be entering behind her, as if he might appear at her elbow. She saw no one but strangers.

  Strangers and their mandalas....

  Her eyes lifted. The air was a riot of seething shapes, mirroring the crowd below. The mandalas fed and groped each other with the barbed tips of whiplike tendrils, in chittering exchanges that must have been some type of communication. They surged together as the human bodies below them fought for position on the dance floor. Sometimes the suction was so great that
as they separated, one or the other would evert, exposing bright raw innards, rotating through several dimensions, appearing now as a coil of self-swallowing tubes, now as an array of overlapping rings, flashing with inner lights where she seemed to see stairs leading down into violet caverns, knife-edged mushrooms, oily winged things rising up from motionless black lakes.

  The one named Etienne saved her from the visions, leading her by the hand around the periphery of the room, shouting to her all the while, though it sounded like a hoarse whisper in the thunderous murmur of music. The floor was mobbed and chaotic, but periodically the crowd surged in unison, patterned ripples spreading through the mass, and the bodies of the dancers fell into curving lines like the spokes of a wheel, as if they might at any moment join in a carefully choreographed performance. Above them, meanwhile, the mandalas seemed to strive for a similar order, though they found it no easier. Their relations were both violent and tender at once; they struggled blindly, despite perceptions and senses so much finer than Lenore's that she could not understand a fraction of what they knew. She felt as sorry for them as for herself.

  "Later, you'll see," Etienne said, "they'll find it. Don't worry."

  As if this could have worried her. She had no doubt that all they desired would come about tonight. Somewhere, somehow, the great one was spinning, drawing them all in. Old enmities were suspended for one night. She could sense an immense presence in the room, could almost see it.

  And then, between the dancers' feet, she did see it.

  It covered the dance floor, filling the room, black and glistening, glimpsed in bits as the bodies moved past. At the sight, she felt herself tugged up into her own mandala. And then, looking down, she saw the shape of the great one underlying everything; she saw all of them caught in the tightening whorled hollow of a vortex, a tornado's throat, a single tapering moment into which all were sliding in unison. The substance of the night—of the room itself—was warping, falling inward on that point.

  As Derek drifted along behind her, Nina leaned and whispered in his ear. When he saw Lenore's eyes on him, he gave a slight smile and nod, not realizing that she was watching from somewhere above them all, as she slid toward the center, drawing Derek with her. His mandala hovered close, gray and with its mouths agape, its haste so insistent as to seem desperate. But Lenore—or her mandala—was not yet ready.

  They wandered past couples in close conversation, through white rooms with framed black mandalas on the walls, through dark rooms like cubes of smoke where ultraviolet mandalas glowed. Eyes locked onto her forehead and conversations stopped. Many wore tattoos, but they were powerless—tattoos injected with needles and ink. Few, apart from hers, had been administered by a mandala. Etienne wore one such; she could feel it glowing against his skin, beneath his clothes. And Derek's entire body seemed afire with them, churning just out of reach, crying out to her with something like lust. Later would be the time to reciprocate. She passed others in the crowd, here and there, who carried the true mandala sak (as Etienne called them). She felt the location of each true bearer; she could have closed her eyes and pointed them out. Some were still coming in from outside the club, from all over the city, though most were already here. Almost thirty-six now.

  Thirty-six....

  For tonight, in this brief interval, this turning point of eons, there was no thirty-seventh mandala.

  Her own guardian, the black-fanged mandala, had slain it, and that was what she had forgotten until now:

  —Her mandala, slashing down.

  —His mandala, dying.

  But did mandalas die?

  The answer came from deep within, from that part of her which had been among the mandalas for so long that it shared their properties.

  They died, but rarely—when they had weakened to such a point that they could be killed. And each passing marked the end of an age, the beginning of a new one. The thirty-seven, constantly fighting for position, always at odds, always struggling for their own ends, found it difficult to come together even for occasions such as this.

  Etienne kept talking, as if to boost her spirits, as if he didn't realize that cheer was irrelevant. He guided her through the upstairs galleries where numerous mandalas were hung. These weren't the real Thirty-seven, but impressions executed by different hands.

  "These are new," Derek said as they strolled along.

  "Yes, our commissions. Not part of the canon, but still ... amazing aren't they? Here's an original Mavrides." Pointing to a wicked mandala painted on black velvet, radiating poisonously under ultraviolet lights, each of its tendrils gripping some awful or banal object: electric appliances, a screaming nun, a smoking pipe. "A Harry S. Robins." This a sinister wheel of intricate evil perfection, rising from the waters of an underground sea where primordial shadows swam through the ruins of a drowned city of weirdly angled towers. "A Dan Clowes." Here an incongruous cartoon mandala, in lurid colors and Zip-A-Tone shading, the great one manifesting in a rundown room that could have been a motel or a sparely furnished apartment, with a circle of worshippers bowed down before it, buck-toothed and slobbering in berets and jazz beards, ragged flannels, sagging knit caps. Lenore saw much the same faces hovering around her in the club. "A Krystine Kryttre." This one so fierce that it seemed to stab her eyes with bolts of black lightning, a woman crucified upon a geared wheel, its spokes tearing through her flesh, lighting her up like an X ray, ripping her open as she laughed insanely.

  Lenore tore away from Etienne, away from Derek, and found herself on a balcony, looking down on the crowded dance floor, trying to discern the shape of the great mandala painted there.

  A hand on her shoulder. Etienne leaned close: "You're feeling the Thirty-seven. I wouldn't recommend eating now. Would you like some wine?"

  She nodded, then remembered why she shouldn't. She must remain clear-headed. She had lost too much to unconsciousness. She felt as if she were still voyaging inward, twisting on an ever tighter downward path into her soul, while external events wound higher and higher on their own corkscrew trail.

  "Water," she said, and Etienne moved off. Derek and Nina remained in the gallery, laughing and talking. Nina was introducing Derek to an artist.

  She froze, clutching the rail, her eyes caught by one small fleck of color down in the sea of faces. For an instant she saw Michael, and then he was gone. She started after him instantly, rushing along the balcony, pushing through the crowded rooms to find the stairs, in a panic.

  If she closed her eyes and calmed herself, she should be able to pick him out of the crowd.

  She tried it, holding to a stair rail, letting people swarm past her. She sent herself floating upward, willing her mandala to enlighten her, knowing that it could lead her right to Michael.

  All she had to do was reach out for his mandala.

  But no ... he no longer had a mandala.

  Michael had vanished. Utterly. As if he had ceased to exist, ceased to have any significance, at the moment his own mandala was destroyed. She could find no trace of him, not a memory, in her black guardian. It had not seen him enter. He and he alone moved invisibly among the mandalas. His was the only body in the room lacking a guardian, unattended.

  What part of her, then, perceived him still?

  Lenore had thought that she was entirely under her mandala's power, but apparently something else remained. Something clumsy and feeble and pathetically limited ... something that was forced to open its eyes and push its body down the stairs, searching for him the hard way—the human way.

  Michael was quickly lost in the club, but he thought it was the best thing for now. One-Ear wouldn't shoot him in this chaos. If he tried, it would be easy to elude him in the crowd.

  He moved as far from the door as possible, hoping Lilith had made it in. She would have been wiser to run for help, but there must be a phone in here somewhere. Outside—who knew? It had looked dark and industrial on the street: no bars, no shops—nothing for miles, maybe. So the chaos inside might work to his
advantage. Maybe One-Ear would forget him completely, since what he really wanted was something Crowe had. Something, Michael suspected, that Crowe had stolen from Elias. Something besides the notebooks.

  He found himself in a corridor too empty for comfort. He rushed to a doorway that opened onto the dance floor. Looking up, he saw a balcony running along the second level. That's where I'd go if I were One-Ear, he thought. Behind him was a flight of stairs running down into a basement. At the top of the stairs stood a big man, a bouncer, checking invitations. Michael waited until he was wrapped up in a dispute with someone, then leapt the first few steps, skipped around the landing, and slowed as he reached the bottom. He didn't hear anyone coming after him.

  It was quieter down here, the music a vibration he felt with his body and not with his ears. Knots of people moved quietly between rooms. The hall turned and bent, mazelike. After several minutes he was not sure exactly where he stood in relation to the stairs. He heard laughter and turned into a small room, coming upon a dozen or so people watching some sort of video performance on a TV screen.

  An image painted on the wall above the monitor caught and held his eyes, restoring in an instant all the faded terror he had first felt days ago, when this nightmare was only beginning.

  The mandala on the wall was done in bloodred paint; it appeared glossy and still fresh, dripping. And it was not merely any mandala from The Rites. It was the pattern he had seen on Tucker's wall—the same one etched on Lenore's forehead. The mandala had followed him across the country like his personal nemesis.

  He didn't move forward to get a better look, but the crowd shifted anyway, giving him a perfect view. The monitor sat on a pedestal against the painted wall, giving off its cold colors, everything tinted toward blue. There he saw a soundless image, glaring and jerky—a handheld video version of a scene he had relived countless times in his memory since witnessing it in life.

  Tucker's room. The same mandala sprayed in gore across the posters and pictures. The camera roved over it lovingly, tracing the wheel's perimeter, its inner weave, then pulling back and dropping down to drink in the sight of the bed, substantially drier and blacker than when Michael had seen it last, and with flies a significant presence now. This must be some kind of police video. How had the club gotten hold of it?