The 37th mandala : a novel

by Laidlaw, Marc

  The second skin felt sticky on the inside; scraps of vestigial tissue clung to him, meshing with his own skin as sweat moistened the hide like mucilage. It writhed against him as if trying to crawl free.

  The dark air was full of motion, vibrating clots like congealed grease and hair, like the specks of dead tissue that swarm across an eyeball when it stares into infinity. But these shapes continued to gain definition. They didn't move off when he stared at them directly; they hung where they were like dark suns or lightless moons. The round room was laced with impossibly thin, nearly invisible silver threads that stretched from wall to wall, spun like liquid silk from the clots. He could almost feel the threads humming through his body, power lines snagging him, except they were too fine for his nerves to perceive. Lenore put her mouth against his ear, distracting him from all he couldn't understand; he allowed his consciousness to shrink down to the limits of her voice, her touch. The things she said made no sense, nor were they exactly endearments, but that didn't trouble him now. They were in the language of The Mandala Rites, but improvised; she was composing, not reciting, this incantation. The silver wires thrummed, sending their signals through the room. Electric currents curled through the second skin, warming him. When he glanced down at himself, he saw all the symbols beginning to glow. Wheels of light, turning slowly, dazzling him until he had to shut his eyes. Even through his closed lids, he saw the mandalas revolving against his flesh. They had become three-dimensional, swelling upward out of the wrinkled plane of preserved skin, spilling into the room, leaving holes seared in the hide as if to destroy the gate through which they had entered the world. His own skin felt fried where they had lain. He knew he had been freshly tattooed in thirty-seven places, like Etienne's father.

  The brightest of the mandalas shone like a fixed star directly above, but when he slit his eyes to peek out, he saw it was the mark on Lenore's forehead, rotating like water in a drain ... but swirling outward, merging with the others. They arrayed themselves in constellations on the shining silver wires. The room grew taut and dense with unbreathable fluid; the walls bowed outward; mirrors shattered, flinging shards across the room; plaster flaked down from the ceiling in an ever steadier drizzle. The room quaked like a cell struggling to replicate, making way for new material, arranging all its elements in accord with the empty heavens and the density of stars and the dictates of biology ... although this was a subtler process, rarely witnessed, requiring not a microscope for viewing but simply the eyes of the chosen. Derek stopped fighting. He searched her face for clues, but her eyes were rolled up. Following her gaze, he saw what she must have been watching. Easy to mistake it for a dance or the hypnotic swaying motion of seaweeds in a deep current, for it was both a random process, at the mercy of nature, and an act of great deliberation.

  Two awesome shapes were wrapped together in the middle of the air. One was the thing of moist gray pores and glistening mouths he had seen before, repulsive to Derek, who hated anemones and slugs and things of the sea. The other was far more appealing, being all nervous glossy black sinew and piercing eyes and polished teeth. The two tumbled slowly end over end, their flailing arms tangled with the all-penetrating silver threads. The creatures pulsed like the chambers of a single heart; the whole room shook to their beating. Lenore reached up with her eyes closed, reached until her fingers were immersed in the core of the coupling organisms. Derek would not have believed such penetration possible, for to him they looked as solid as the walls and the ceiling. He could not see her hands, however mistily, inside them. Then she drew her arms down again, crossing them over her breast, bringing the joined mandalas into her. She spasmed as they sank into her flesh. Her arms flew wide with silver tendrils wrapped from wrist to shoulder, fingers spread and straining, the wires tugging until her muscles grew corded and twisted. The whole room seemed bent on tearing her in two. And Derek, at the sight, knew then that his own part in this was over; it was as nothing. She had let go of him, and now he felt his seed gush uselessly over his belly with a burning twinge. There was nothing else left for him, nothing greater that Derek Crowe would ever produce. The grand evil promise of his inner mandala had been usurped and there was no place for it now. No room in this configuration for a thirty-eighth.

  Lenore had spared his life; spared him from immortality. He would live a brief while longer among the ruins of everything he had erected.

  The fine silver threads snapped completely taut. The air sang. And Lenore, without screaming, without a sound other than the viscous friction accompanying the shucking of her flesh, split wide open. The halves of her yawned until he heard the ribs crack along her spine. For a moment she hung suspended in air on gleaming silver threads as her guts slithered onto him in a warm, steaming pile. Derek had never been closer to anyone.

  But she wasn't just anyone now.

  As her husk toppled, something slipped out of her. It shook off the residue of blood and viscera, spread itself across the silver threads to dry in a warm astral wind. It trembled like a fresh-hatched butterfly and looked down upon Derek with a single liquid eye like an unearthly orange gem in the heart of a violet flower.

  It was not Lenore, of course—no more than attar of roses is a rose. Yet it was she in essence, much stronger now than she had ever been. She was whole, a circle, a world unto herself.

  It was that awareness which started him weeping. She was whole, and he lay here in fragments. The unhatched thing within him was cracked and seeping with a foul odor that would fill the rest of his days. Broken, but a believer now, he had a premonition of the only possible life that could follow from this night, at least until he ended it himself.

  He was, after all, the mandala master. He had inspired a dark mad cult for whose atrocities he must accept the blame.

  Etienne and Nina and the others were already melting back into the obscurity from which they had come. His was the name on the cover of The Mandala Rites. His would be the name splashed all over the world, bringing him notoriety beyond his imagining.

  When he opened his eyes at last, the silver threads had snapped and reeled back into the ether, and she was gone.

  Gone, except for the gutted, cast-off body that remained to incriminate him. After tonight, he would deny nothing. All explanations seemed equally likely, and Derek was determined to confess to anything—to everything. Who was he to judge what was possible, or to attempt to discriminate among the infinite shades of truth?

  And anyway, in the largest possible sense, he was guilty.

  And Michael, fleeing the carnage, his mind blank because he had seen too much to ever understand, melted away with the rest of the crowd. He saw Etienne and Nina in the hall, speaking urgently and in low voices, looking only slightly bemused. Etienne flashed him a smile and gave a quick wave of his hand, as if they were passing casually on the street. Michael turned and ran the other way.

  He stumbled on the stairs and nearly crashed into someone coming down.

  "Michael!"

  It was Lilith, grabbing at him, pulling him the rest of the way to the ground floor. He had a glimpse of the dance floor, the crowd milling aimlessly, the music stilled.

  "I've been looking for you," she said. "Let's get out. I called the police a few minutes ago. Something is going on here...."

  "Yes," he said. "Out."

  They pushed through the aimless mob, who were on the verge of a disappointment so immense they would never comprehend it. They had been spurned by a god. They might turn angry, he thought, which was fine with him. Let them tear the place apart.

  They found the entrance and forced their way onto the street, fighting against the tide of people who were still streaming in with hopeful expressions. Beyond the latecomers, the night was filling with the sound of sirens, but Michael and Lilith ran under the freeway, hiding in the shadow of a huge cement column as the first of the squad cars came tearing past, flashing and howling.

  "I should tell them," he said, starting forward. "They have to look in the basement."<
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  Lilith held him back. "They'll look. They'll find whatever there is to find. What ... what's down there?" Then she saw his face. "No, don't tell me. Try not to think about it either. Are you okay?"

  He shook his head. There was no sense in lying.

  "Can you walk? Do you want to wait here awhile?"

  He stood dazed, unsure of what he wanted. He felt as if he had been cut off from everything, from his past and any possible future.

  "Michael?"

  Suddenly he sensed a stirring in the dark air above them. Lilith, sensing it too, looked up. "What is that?"

  A luminous wheel was appearing gradually in the starless dark beneath the overpass, taking on shape and solidity. It was a violet mandala, and a bright orange globe sat at its center, an omniscient eye. It was what had become of Lenore. He could feel something of her in it, beaming at him, questioning....

  "They're real, then," Lilith said.

  "Oh, yeah," Michael answered.

  He put out his hands, gently, as if he could touch the fresh new thing. His fingers trembled. It was asking something—but he couldn't tell what. He only knew he wanted to be close to it; he welcomed its presence. It was offering guidance when he had never felt so lost.

  Violet light flared, the orange eye flashed, and he felt her come over him, into him. For one incredible moment she let him share her awareness....

  The mandala that had been Lenore floated like an angel over Michael, over streets of quaking red flesh, under stars that seemed black holes piercing night's whiteness. At first she had felt fragile and alone, as if any breeze might destroy her; but she had begun to realize that she was invulnerable now, and her loneliness would pass. All human emotions had been released in her evisceration. She had shed care as daintily as she'd stepped free of marrow and muscle and bone. In place of these things, in the stead of passing sadness or flitting joy, she sensed the growth of a quiet majesty and the promise of stranger, more ancient concerns. Human passions were to be her toys now, and then her tools, but never again her masters. What she truly had to master, to harness, was the blind reckless hunger of the other mandalas. She had willed herself free of blindness; she must share this knowledge with them. She must bring them to a new and greater understanding of their nature, their potential.

  Only one so young and naive could have possessed the ambition to change the thirty-seven, but she felt calm and resolved. She had launched herself among them for a purpose; she already had prevented one far blinder than herself from taking form. It would be awful to waste the opportunity she had seized, and she did not intend to do so. But it would take time, human ages, to understand the things of which she was capable and begin to work toward her goal.

  In the meantime, she needed allies. She needed to keep touch with the physical world, to understand and remember it as she had when she was human.

  Michael was the one familiar point among the tugging of a thousand needs, a million empty stomachs. She needed him— although not nearly as much as he needed her.

  As she hovered there indecisively, the guardian of the woman standing next to Michael began to stir, finally noticing the vulnerable target so nearby. Now that the configuration had been restored, Michael was becoming visible to them once again. Lilith's mandala was a wheel of gnarled, knotted blossoms peeling back to show poison barbs secreted inside. It began to spin toward Michael with ferocious possessiveness and a threat of violent lashing, as if to scare off the newborn mandala while she hesitated.

  That threat quickened her decision. Better her than another. This was as good a place as any to take a stand against their reflexive evil.

  She pulled herself over Michael protectively and felt herself swell as she absorbed him. She learned, then, that there were to be no clear rules and that human intentions were meaningless now. For as she took hold of Michael, she felt a fierce, miserly greed well up in her. Delicate violet edges hardened into curving razors.

  He's mine.

  The thirty-seventh mandala prepared to fight for its catch.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marc Laidlaw lives in San Francisco. He is the author of four previous novels and numerous short stories. He will turn thirty-seven in the coming year.

  Marc Laidlaw published his first short stories while still a teenager, and he has gone on to write four acclaimed novels: Kalifornia, The Orchid Eater, Dad's Nuke, and Neon Lotus. He lives with his family in San Francisco.

  Jacket design by Alan Dingman Jacket painting by Ron Walotsky

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