The 37th mandala : a novel (10 page)

Michael reached back, groping on the altar for his wand.

The mandala flailed its tendrils and spun forward, eclipsing the room like a huge anemone or flytrap closing on him. The last thing he saw were the spike tips of its black arms piercing the ceiling, as if striking into the apartment above. Then his panicked groping upset the candles and they went out. Bitter smoke stung his nostrils. In the dark, his hand closed around the dorje handle of his Tibetan bell; with no better weapon, he rang it violently. At the first clang he heard a whirring all around him, felt a vast cyclonic gathering of air. Then Lenore shrieked. The whole house filled with screaming. Upstairs, Tucker and Scarlet were howling too. Something rushed past his ear and slammed into the wall—one of the mandala's questing arms, he imagined. He dropped down and hugged himself in the dark, wondering why Crowe's book had given no warnings of danger. Nothing in the
Rites
had prepared him for this.

After several minutes, with no further sound in the room except for Lenore's gentle breathing and the nearer thud of his own heartbeat, he got to his knees and found the matches on the altar. It occurred to him that what he had heard upstairs were not screams of pain or terror but of pleasure. Tucker and Scarlet were quiet now; he could hear them gasping for breath, a laughing sort of sound. He almost laughed himself, with relief. Weird timing.

As he righted one candle and touched flame to wick, he discovered the athame gleaming above the altar, its blade buried half to the hilt in the plaster wall.

He turned, shivering, and looked back at Lenore. She lay fallen on the carpet, apparently asleep.

"Lenore?" he whispered. "Lenore, are you all right?"

She didn't answer. Her breathing was steady, her pulse strong, but he couldn't shake his fright—especially when he saw the dark bloody bruise above her eyes, in the center of her forehead. He returned to the altar for his wand, not wanting to leave anything undone. Lenore, apparently, was sensitive as a lightning rod put out in a storm, attracting more power than either of them could handle. He was frightened for her. An undisciplined mind might warp from the force of so much energy streaming through it.

"You'll be okay," he told her. "Everything will be okay."

He faced the dark air where the mandala had appeared. It was empty now, as if nothing had happened except in his mind. If not for the bruise on Lenore's forehead, he could have attributed all of this to madness. Even then ... she might have slammed herself in the forehead with the athame's pommel.

As he wondered how to proceed, a movement on the altar caught his eyes. Something slithered with a sidewinding motion across the open pages of the Mandala Rites, across the very lines she had spoken. The pages seemed to stir, the letters to writhe.

He struck the book violently with his wand, then slammed the covers shut and leaned down hard, as if to trap the incantation.

Fearful of what he might discover, he cast about the room for some lingering sign of the thing he thought he'd seen; but apparently it had gone off on its own. This was fortunate, because he had no idea how to send it away if it didn't want to go. The Mandala Rites, he realized too late, were completely silent on that point.

We are windows on the realm you call Hell which is our hunting ground, and through us the stunting misery-light spills forth into your souls.

—from
The Mandala Rites
of Elias Mooney

We are windows on Heaven, your heritage, and through us golden rays of enlightenment spill forth to encourage the growth of your souls.

—from
The Mandala Rites
of Derek Crowe

By the time the airport shuttle dropped him in front of his building, Derek felt dizzy with the sort of wired exhaustion that he suspected would keep him awake well past sunrise. Against his better judgment, he had bought a cup of coffee from an airport vending machine, thinking of Lenore when he dropped his quarters in the machine, thinking of her as it pissed a hot thin stream into a paper cup, and thinking of her also as he scalded his lips.

He paid the driver, picked his bags off the sidewalk an instant before they were fingered by a lengthening trail of liquid draining downhill from a dark doorway where someone shifted around in a nest of cardboard and rags. The bars and corner stores were closed up, caged in. A portion of shadow detached itself from beneath the awning of the Prey Svay Cafe across the street, and a tall man dressed in tattered khaki came forward with one hand out, as if to cadge change or a cigarette. A slantwise streak of streetlight lit a face that looked crumpled as paper beneath a greasy watchcap, his forehead raw and blotched with bloody scabs. He was huge but almost fleshless, like an old hulk wasted away to nothing. Derek spun around, looking for help. The shuttle van was gone though he couldn't remember it going. Even the memory of picking up his bags seemed unreal, as if he'd done it in a dream. When he glanced back to confront the panhandler, the street was empty.

The gate was ajar, wedged open with a rolled up magazine. He kicked it shut and went into a foyer reeking of urine—animal and human—fish sauce, fried pork, brussels sprouts. The sight of the mailboxes reminded him of Michael Renzler, of crackpot letters past and yet to come.

Up in his apartment, he dropped his bags in the hall and went straight to the kitchen cabinet. The red light on the answering machine burned steadily; no messages. He'd been hoping for a call from Lilith at least. She had the keys to his apartment; she could have surprised him, been waiting in bed. But no. He fumbled the cap from a bottle of sweet black rum and let the syrup burn his throat.

He carried the bottle into the bedroom. The lightbulb expired with a pop when he flipped the switch. He turned on the computer screen instead and sat in the amber glow, rubbing his temples. It was all right for a moment, until the new mandala screen-saver began to twitch, an unwelcome reminder of unfinished business. Tomorrow he would deal with the Club Mandala goons. He shut off the screen and lay back on the bed.

Ten minutes later he got up again. Someone was yelling in the street, inarticulate but still frightening, as if the threat were aimed at him, as if he were the only one awake to hear it. He peered through the blinds and saw a man standing in the center of the street shouting up at the sky. Derek moved back out of sight.

Lenore. It was not her name he remembered—it was the girl herself. Her face. The memory of her cold hand. Just as well she was miles away—though it didn't seem so far, thanks to jet travel. Just as well she was married.

He started wondering about her husband, wondering if he really did have any of Michael Renzler's letters filed away. And if so, did they mention Lenore?

He found himself leaning into the closet, digging through stacked boxes. The first he dragged out held spare copies of his second book,
Your Psychic Allies
. The garish cover showed slit eyes in a swirling mist. Once he had naively imagined giving them away in handfuls to all his new friends in San Francisco. But nothing like that had ever happened; he had business associates here, his publisher and his lawyer. Aside from Lilith he had made no friends, nor had he left any behind in L.A. After the book was published, he'd had high expectations of falling in with a close circle of like-minded people, fast friends. Instead, look what he had fallen into. The same old shit, in bigger piles.

Everyone here was so sincere, the others who wrote this sort of book. He suspected there were more than a few like him out there, but naturally they didn't congregate. They didn't get together to slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on having suckered in another generation of fools. If they were smart, they never stepped out of character. The performance paid all too well. He consoled himself with the thought that he was different. One day he would lay it all aside and expose himself—once he was financially secure enough to do without that particular audience. He would write searing exposes of the occult world, its shills and scams. He would tour the country, sell his story to the tabloids, make a new living out of notoriety. It was something to look forward to.

Here was the box of crackpot letters. He hauled it from under the empty limbs of clothing, dragging it into the living room, where he sat on the sofa under better light. He didn't realize his mistake until he pushed his hand through the box flaps and touched something leathery and soft, something that seemed to want to cling to him like a second skin.

Disgust was a spasm that involved his entire being. He jerked back his hand and kicked the box aside, remembering now how he'd shoved it to the depths of the closet months ago, wishing he'd had the nerve to burn it instead. It had been waiting for him all along, hiding in there, calling him, putting the thought in his head that he ought to go digging through boxes, disguising its motive as some mild impulse of his own.

It had wanted his attention.

"Eli," he said. Elias Mooney. And then it came to him that the kid had spoken of the old man—had even corresponded with him.

Sometimes he forgot what a small circle he moved in. Claustrophobically small. And now the mandala texts were becoming real to many others, and that circle was widening. They weren't a private nightmare anymore. He had risked sending them out into the world, bastard children, and now they were homing in from all directions, seeking their father; fungus spores drifting on psychic winds, settling and sprouting overnight through all the dark forests of the mind.

Bile and brass mingled in his mouth, but self-disgust won out over fear. He regretted everything, now that it was pointless to do so. If he'd been honest with himself in the first place, he never would have listened to the old man, never humored him, never have answered that first letter. He'd thought himself cynical back then, but he'd been a naive fool.

The box drew him back, first his mind, then his eyes, and finally his hands. It called him constantly, but tonight it was especially loud. He managed to insert his fingers between the flaps of the box and skirt down along the edges without quite touching what mainly filled it. There he pinched a fat envelope between his first and second fingers, and drew it out, feeling almost nostalgic. It was his only letter from Elias Mooney. He imagined Michael Renzler receiving just such an envelope, covered with Eli's spidery script. Could he recover his own frame of mind from those days, the skeptical delight with which he had received this unexpected piece of mail? It had fallen into his lap like inspiration, when he was desperate for ideas.

The letter—penned on blue-lined paper torn from a spiral binder—began in a spidery, elegant hand that strayed repeatedly into near illegibility. He remembered how he had known outright it was an old person's writing, for it was scripted in a style he had seen nowhere but on antique postcards—penmanship taught in the old schools. He felt even now, after all that had happened, as he had felt then: that in entering Eli's world, even for the space of time it took to scan the letter, he had embarked on a journey to a stranger realm than he had ever suspected could exist alongside his own. It was a neurotic, paranoid, fundamentally unhinged world, but Eli's power and persuasiveness were such that Derek had been sucked into it more completely than he had cared to admit at the time—until the end of their relationship. And it was here, first reading this letter, that he had found himself on the outermost turn of that spiral, about to be drawn in closer and closer to the old man ... into his madness.