The 37th mandala : a novel (16 page)

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.

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.

Evil?

He found himself staring at her forehead and thinking of what had materialized in this room the other night. Somehow he'd managed to not really consider the implications of these things. He'd conducted himself as if the things that had happened in here were a momentary delusion, a dream. Maybe, he was willing to concede, a nightmare.

But evil?

He stood before the altar with his head bowed, broken athame in his left hand, and prayed for strength.

Help me, Elias, he thought. But he could find no sense of the old man whose voice had filled his ears several minutes ago. He could feel no visiting presence. He tried not to feed his disappointment.

Instead, he imagined a hole opening in his crown, imagined cosmic power like a warm liquid heavy and thick as mercury pouring into him. When it filled him to brimming, when he could literally feel it tingling through his veins and nerves, he turned and raised the dagger over his head. Lenore's eyes flickered with candlelight; the glow overwhelmed her eyes and ran down over her cheeks like melting wax. Tears. The spirits around her must have begun to loosen their grip.

I won't have to call the hospital, he thought.

The mandala in the center of her brow began to glow.

He lowered the athame, aiming it right at her head, right at the throbbing emblem.

"All you uninvited, now begone!" he cried. With his words, he imagined a jet of pure power coursing down his arms and out the blade. He willed it to shatter in the air against the circular scar. He imagined the blast burning all impurities from her aura, from the room, from Cinderton—from the Earth itself. And for that single instant, he couldn't help but think of the thing he fought as evil. In his viscera, drawing on his animal power, he needed to believe in evil for a moment, if only to strengthen his faith in his own goodness, and the necessity for what he was doing.

Carefully he visualized her sickness being blasted into countless tiny disintegrating pieces that flickered and vanished out among the far reaches of the universe.

He lowered the knife, taking a deep breath.

Lenore's eyes were closed. She looked peaceful, at ease.

He knelt down before Lenore and kissed her on the forehead, as if making peace with the sigil emblazoned there.

"Lenore?" he said.

She opened her eyes, looking very distant, blinking around as if to see where she was. His heart leapt.

"How do you feel, hon? Everything's all right."

She smiled faintly and reached out to him. He started to put his arms around her—but that wasn't what she wanted. She plucked the dagger from his fingers before he knew what she was up to, then scurried back and knelt with her back to the door.

"Lenore," he said cautiously. "What are you doing? Put that down, okay?"

She put the athame to her throat, punched the broken tip through the thin skin a fraction of an inch, and held the blade there while little beads of blood and then a steady stream dripped down her neck.

Time seemed to slow for Michael. "Stop it! Lenore!"

He couldn't tear his eyes from the blade, the blood, until he noticed a gentle motion in the air above her. Something stirring, stroking the atmosphere. It was so faint that he wouldn't have recognized it if he hadn't seen it once before, two nights ago. It was smaller now, hugging close to Lenore, its thin arms like spikes radiating from her hair, seen shimmeringly like the halo of a Byzantine saint—but blackly luminous, rather than gold.

Not all of the spikes fanned outward, though. Most of them now curved down and fed directly into her skull. It was in that moment, seeing the thing clearly, he acknowledged once and for all that the problem was not with drugs. It had not involved drugs for a while. He would have preferred drugs, in fact, because he had fought them before.

And unlike this thing, this mandala, drugs had never fought back.

They sat for hours in the temple room, in silent confrontation as tense as any hostage crisis. Meanwhile, the weather worsened; the storm was finally hitting Cinderton.

Rain tapped the windows almost politely at first, but he sensed a growing impatience in everything.

He wasn't sure if he could reason with her. The mandalas spoke a different language, but somehow they had communicated with humans before—such as when they had dictated their commentary to Derek Crowe. He hoped this one would consent to understand him.

He considered it a victory when he convinced Lenore to remove the knifetip from her skin. Blood continued to run down her throat, but the trickle eventually slowed and scabbed over. She kept the knife at her throat, however, holding herself ransom. He told himself that he could see fear in her eyes, that she knew what was happening to her and was as afraid as he; but that was a desperate rationalization, and most of the time he didn't believe it. The truth was, he couldn't see anything he recognized in her eyes.

His gaze never moved from the knife, waiting for signs that her arm was tiring, waiting for the blade to shift however briefly. She seemed tireless.

"What could you gain by hurting her?" he asked. But the mandala had not consented to speak. He waited for a faint touch on his own mind, some sign that it was attempting astral communication, but there was only the prickling static of his own jolted nerves. He was trembling with fatigue, hunger, and fear.

"Why won't you speak to me? What do you want me to do?"

Lenore's eyes cleared. He could see her emerging from some inner fog, looking out at him as if amazed at her surroundings. Still, she held herself rigid, and the knife stayed fixed at her throat.

"Michael ... Michael, what's happening?"

"I don't know for sure, hon. I'm trying to figure it out."

"There's something on—no,
in
me."

She was close to tears, the blade trembling. She cut herself again, accidentally this time, and twitched at the pain.

"Make it stop, Michael!"

"I don't know how."

"You have to. You started it! You made me go to that lecture."

This reminder gouged his soul. He was responsible. He wanted to turn away, in shame, but he didn't dare lose a chance to grab the knife.

"I wrote to Derek Crowe," he admitted. "For advice. I was hoping he would know."

"Yes," she said, voice laden with desperation. "He must know. But I can't wait. I'm frightened. Anything could happen. We have to get to him now. He knows what to do."

Michael shook his head. "Lenore, we don't have the money."

"We could drive. ..."

"Drive? That's like three thousand miles! It would take days. I can't reach him by phone, and we can't just wait around. We have to do something else now. Something practical. We're on our own."

It was a relief to be talking to her, even with the knife poised so threateningly; but he had to remind himself that this was not necessarily Lenore. The mandala had not let her speak all afternoon. Why would it relax its grip now?

Her eyes filled with tears. "Please, Michael ... we have to get to him. He's the only one. ..."

He could call Crowe's publisher, he thought. But he knew they wouldn't give him Crowe's number.

"It's going to be all right," he said uncertainly.

"How can you say that? You don't know what I'm feeling. I'm fighting, but I don't know how long I can hold on."

"Do whatever you have to. But we're alone, all right? I—I'll try to think of something."

"No. We need help. We need Derek Crowe."

He shared her conviction but didn't want to admit it. There was no way to get help in anything like the time they needed it; and certainly no way of getting Crowe to fly out here, once they did get in touch with him. But Michael couldn't admit defeat when the battle was only beginning.

Lenore crumpled abruptly, pressing at her stomach as if her guts were being ripped out. Instinctively he threw himself at her.

She was ready for him, though. It had been a trap. She thrust the knife at his face. It grazed his cheek, but he managed to knock it out of her hand and push her to the carpet, digging his knee into her back. He had a leather cord balled in his hand, the one with which Elias Mooney's tapes had been wrapped. He got it around her wrists, wrapped and cinched and knotted it as tight as he could, then released her. There were more twists of leather in the bureau, among the candle stubs and incense packets and broken charcoal bits; he wondered if he should bind her feet. She looked broken now, defeated. Surely he couldn't have beaten it so easily. But maybe he had won her a kind of freedom by binding her, by rendering her useless to the mandala.