The 37th mandala : a novel (22 page)

"There are thirty-seven in all," Eli said, having seen his lips moving. The old man wheeled forward, his expression grim and resolute. "Put it back now—roll it up again. It's not a good idea to stare at the damn thing."

Derek could feel the seeds of a nightmare being planted in his soul, pushed down deeper than the reach of his nerves. It was almost impossible to touch the skin again: cool as a snake, but clammy. He started to furl it up, but the underside was worse than the outside, for he could see and feel traces of tissue where fat and flesh had been flensed away. Finally he merely wadded the thing in a crumpled ball, shoving it back into the box atop the stacked red and black ledgers.

"Wait," Eli said. "Those I want. Bring them out."

Dropping the hide, Derek lifted the ledgers and heaped them on the floor. Then it was easy to stuff the skin into the empty box; he wove the flaps together so the carton wouldn't open on its own.

Feeling nauseated, and somewhat wary of Eli now, Derek sank cross-legged onto the floor next to the box and the ledgers. The old man's dark eyes were full of fear and anxiety. The sight of such trepidation was slightly comforting, though he wasn't sure how to interpret it. If Eli were responsible for this skin, then perhaps he only feared prosecution; but Derek didn't think that was the source of his worry. There was something about the skin itself that unnerved him, as it would anyone. He had never expected to see anything so ghastly in this little suburban house.

Now he thought he had finally begun to glimpse the reason for Elias Mooney's paranoia, a tangible focus for what had previously been a vague sense of dread....

Again he wondered if any possible book was worth exposure to Eli. He'd felt so much safer sitting alone with his research materials, inventing fantasies. There was no sign here of the book he'd intended to write.

"I am responsible for Evangeline's death," Eli said solemnly.

Derek nearly bolted for the door, fearing that Eli was about to throw off his disguise of frail convalescent and leap at him, flaying knife flashing. Mooney the butcher, the suburban cannibal....

But Eli didn't move, and gradually Derek's panic subsided. The skin in the box was not a woman's skin anyway.

"If she'd never come near me, she never would have come to their attention. But she was so pure, so loving, and they

knew how much I trusted her. They knew they could use her as a gate because she never feared the evil in this world. She never had reason to fear a thing until she met me."

In the box, as he spoke, the human parchment rustled, expanding slightly, finding a new position. Like Derek, it might have been settling down to listen as Eli embarked on his story.

(ELIAS'S STORY: A TRANSCRIPT)

"Evangeline had no interest in magic when I met her. She was a cook at a handicapped center where I used to spend time after my second wife's death. While she and I had very little in common, in our hearts we were close from the first. Brother and sister, that sort of warmth.

"We were married twice. Once by a Christian priest we both knew and respected, but first in a much older ceremony. Married in sight of the earth and the stars, our wrists bound with a red silk cord anointed with mistletoe juice and some of my semen and a little of Evangeline's blood. She wasn't a squeamish girl; she understood instantly how these things worked, though no one ever told her a thing about them, and she had never in her whole life cared to peek into the sort of books you and I take for granted.

"She had to put up with all sorts of strange things, marrying me. My children from my first marriages had suffered the loss of their mothers, but they took to Evangeline like blood kin, and she to them. The youngest were grown and on their way soon after we married, and then we had only the years ahead of us, and grandchildren, and life here in San Diablo, listening to the bulldozers coming up through the hills where before we had heard only birds.

"She was so patient. She put up with me and never once called me crazy, which should tell you something right there. When I spoke about where I'd been and what I'd seen in the astral, out traveling, she'd just nod and sometimes ask a question that made me wonder if she hadn't seen the places for herself. We traveled together at night sometimes, though she couldn't remember our trips in the morning. Wherever we went, everyone—every being we met in the universe—loved her instantly. She was so full of compassion, strong and pure as sunlight; you could live on her light without needing anything else.

"Evangeline....

"Pointless to say I miss her. That only tells them they triumphed, the sadistic ... what? I can't call them bastards; I'm not sure of their parentage. And sadism surely isn't the right word. No human terms apply. Misbegotten, yes; despicable; but maybe necessary, in their way. That's the worst of it. Like blowflies laying eggs in corpses, like maggots and bacteria causing rot and corruption and decay. All these things, so horrible to the humans whose flesh they will someday claim, are indispensable. Without the mandalas we'd drown in our own psychic waste; the fragments of ego and consciousness we leave in our wake as we pass between incarnations would be eternal, like the debris of old rockets and satellites that orbit the earth until they crash down upon it.... No god designed them, you see—they evolved. But the evolutionary forces at work in the astral realms are not so well understood as those in the physical world. I have conducted my own investigations, but my abilities are limited. We have not yet had our occult Newton or Einstein, a genius who can illuminate the basic principles of the realm. Swedenborg came close, perhaps, but his influence on following generations has been slight, and Blavatsky and her brood corrupted it so. Our sick modern culture knows less than many more so-called primitive societies that haven't invested so much into promoting spiritual blindness. Unfortunately, those societies today are all but extinct, their knowledge as lost as the genotypes once hidden in the rain forests....

"But I was speaking of the mandalas, whose imprints mark that skin. I suspect they are organisms, or something like organisms. Archetypes of decay. There are surprisingly few of them, only thirty-seven, but each I think is a template from which an infinite number can be struck—an astral chromosome, if you will. Thirty-seven ideal forms. They seem like diatoms, single-celled, unified of purpose; yet they are conscious and quite deliberate, far more manipulative than any protozoan whipping particles of food into its mouth, though that's all we seem to be to them. Our souls are their food, the human race their hunting ground, and they breed in our souls like maggots in carrion, giving birth to flies. As I'm sure you know, our thoughts have an independent existence; thought-forms persist in a realm alongside our own, touching it everywhere. It is here that the mandalas scavenge, and to that extent they are dependent on us. But they have a greater reality than our mere thoughts.

"Sometimes the fact of their existence makes me despise the whole cosmos. Things that once struck me as beautiful now fill me with fear by implication, for the same geometries that gave rise to beauty also bore these creatures. I hate them with a fury too great for my body to contain. Thinking of them, I feel my flesh bloating; my skin begins to stretch and crack, my blood burns hot and smoke pours from my throat. But that's bad; it does their work for them; it harms only me. I dig my grave that much deeper when I give in to rage.

"Perhaps I could have regarded them calmly once, objectively, like a scientist, but not after the loss of Evangeline. I was responsible for her death, but they are the ones who killed her. They did it. I won't take the blame, or feed my own guilt. They'd like me to. It would rot me from the inside, and they would feed....

"I first encountered them exactly as you did tonight, and with about the same degree of horror—although I had a better idea of what to expect. I'd been warned by letter, though a description of the things can never quite foreshadow what you feel when you see them. There is something in us that fears and is fascinated by them, something that shies away instinctively even as it's hypnotized into staring. Just as the sight of a Buddhist mandala may cause tranquility, enjoining one to embark on the quest for enlightenment, so sight of these fiendish wheels gives us glimpses of the hells that await us. They are like thirty-seven windows into other worlds—or thirty-seven other ways of looking at this one. They are alive but also symbols—symbols that draw us into darkness as we contemplate them. The difference is that they are alive, you see, while the mandalas of Buddhism, for instance, are merely pictures to be conjured in our minds. Even calling them mandalas is a misnomer, a kind of blasphemy, for that word means 'sacred circle,' and these are only sacred to evil. Perhaps there are benevolent living mandalas as well—the opposite of these. If such exist, I have never encountered them. They must be quite rare. These are plentiful as maggots in a war zone.

"But I was speaking of the skin.

"It arrived through the mails, which I had no real reason to mistrust in those days—days not long past, I might add. The package came from a Japanese acquaintance, a professor with a keen interest in curiosities. He had it from a pathologist, a doctor who kept a professional collection of tattooed human skins, having perfected a method of preserving them intact. Apparently the skin had come to this doctor from somewhere in Southeast Asia; my correspondent was unclear on that point. He suspected Cambodia, and hinted of a secret cult with allegiance to Pol Pot, but that was speculation based on rumor. The truth was, something unsettled even the pathologist, who had been pleased at first to add the skin to his collection. After studying it in detail, he concluded that the circular marks had not been made by any known tattooing process. No pigment had been inserted beneath the dermis. The coloration was caused by chemical changes in the skin itself, and the ornate scarring was the result of molecular changes in the cells. The cause was never ascertained, nor those new molecular compounds identified, but I understand they bear some similarity to certain organic psychoactive drugs, suggesting that whoever bore these emblems may well have been experiencing the world in an altered light.

"All this should have intrigued the pathologist, but it only frightened him. He began receiving requests from strangers to visit his museum of skins—strangers who bore similar mandalas tattooed on their foreheads or arms. Of course he denied them permission; his was a collection for professionals and academicians only. Then the museum was burglarized, ransacked, although nothing was taken. He had loaned the skin to my friend by that time, hoping that with his knowledge of various sects, he might be able to identify the process by which the marks had come to be branded—if not the origins of the symbols themselves. After the burglary, he asked my friend to hold onto the hide indefinitely, and with time he made arrangements to totally surrender it. I gather he was troubled by bad dreams ... visitations.

"Now my Japanese friend had mentioned some of these events to me as they occurred, hoping that I might be able to satisfy both our curiosities; and once it was his, he shipped it on to me. I had never seen anything like it; nor did I particularly wish to learn more of it. Had I been able to return it, I would have, but further letters to Japan were returned unopened. I learned later that my friend had disappeared completely.

"So the skin was mine.

"Evangeline, as I said, had no experience with the things that most occupied my mind, but she was willing to assist me in whatever way she could. I asked her help in a ritual to neutralize or contain the power I sensed in the skin. I wished to burn it but feared that doing so would release whatever energy was bound up in the tattoos. I had to banish that first. I included Evangeline in my rite as an innocent, a touchstone. I felt her purity would be protective. I didn't explain what I was doing; I had never shown her the skin, since I knew how she would react to having it in her house. I could not bear to frighten her. So I wrapped it in a cloth and set it on my altar, and that was all she saw of it.

"At first everything went as I planned. At the height of the ceremony, Evangeline's aura lit the room. But then her soul-light began to flicker and pulsate, and the candles dimmed. I realized that her radiance had drawn an intruder from the dark. It circled her like a moth, brushing my face with a cold wind ... not touching her, but only circling, circling, spiraling closer, casting a shadow between us until everything began to strobe. In the dark intervals I could almost see a shape like a cloudy glass bell, or a jellyfish, or a translucent flower with drooping luminous petals; then it covered her completely. I tried to find an opening, to push through the thing, but a sense of euphoria began to grow in me, and I realized too late that I was about to have a seizure.

"Like many shamans, I am epileptic. The doctors try to keep me medicated, but the only drugs they know are poisons that taint the body and the mind. I preferred to risk the fits—in those days, I mean. Now that I have no one to look after me, I submit to the poisoning. On that day, the mandalas used my weakness to render me helpless. I don't remember anything past the initial rapture of prodrome that came as I watched the whirling shape swallow my wife. I had never felt so powerless.

"Evangeline saw the seizure begin. She rushed to call an ambulance, and the next thing I knew, I was laid out on a couch with paramedics working over me. I was disoriented, but my first worry was that Evangeline had broken the magic circle without properly banishing the things we called. They had been ... released.

"Several days later, she began to speak.

"There's been a resurgence, in recent years, of so-called channeled, trance mediums, Ramtha and that lot. When I was young, there was a similar interest in automatic writing, Ouija boards—whole novels dictated by spirits, with humans as mere secretaries. Ruth Montgomery, Edgar Cayce, Seth. Some of these people are outright frauds, as you must know from your investigations. Others are earnest enough, but not in genuine contact with any force outside themselves; they speak from regions of their mind that are normally suppressed and allow submerged aspects of their personalities to surface for a time in trance. Only a very few, less than one-tenth of one percent of those who make claims or show evidence of spirit speech, are true gateways for the ones beyond.