The 37th mandala : a novel (28 page)

"Well... not that clean," he said.

"No wonder you didn't want your ma to know. I'd be glad to help you out on both accounts." He went over to a little writing desk in the living room and opened one of the lower drawers. Inside were bags and bottles and a triple-beam scale-Michael tried not to look. "How many you think you want? Black Beauties, right? I got other stuff too."

"Just the Beauties. Could you spare, uh, fifty?"

"Fifty? Jesus!" He howled. "You thinking maybe to make a little profit up there?"

"I was thinking about it, yeah."

"Well, shit. Tell you what, why don't you take a hundred?"

"A hundred?"

"Sure. Sell what you don't use, get what you can for 'em, and if you make a profit, it's yours. Finance your trip, right? Now be sure you ask top dollar—whatever the market'll bear up there. These are pure pharmaceutical—clean stuff." He tossed Michael a big plastic canister with a child-proof lid. "That's a hundred right there. Now ... the cash." He walked into the hall. Michael made a point of not following; he heard the door of the hall closet creaking.

Earl kept talking. "This isn't all mine—I still owe my man. But I've got a bit put by, and you kids need yourselves a good vacation, don't you? Stay in a nice hotel or something, treat yourself. You can pay me back in your own time; or, hell, consider it my gift. I never did get you no wedding present. When's your anniversary?"

"Uh ... it was last month."

Earl walked back into the living room with a rubber-banded stack of bills. Fives on the top, hundreds on the bottom. Grinning, he started peeling from the bottom.

"Wow, Earl, that's—that's way too much." He looked up in amazement, but his surprise dwindled into horrified dismay.

In the flickering light from the TV, he could see a faint round yellowish glow around Earl's head, like a huge pale happy-face beaming at him.

"Happy anniversary, son!"

Michael had swallowed one capsule about thirty miles back and was nearing amphetamine midstream, gliding on the rush, taking everything easy even through his underlying panic. His thoughts were calmer and more ordered than they'd been all night or the day before, and he wasn't gritting his teeth or any of that. It was exceptionally clean stuff. He felt like he could eat a gallon of ice cream, but other than that he was fine.

I'm steady, I'm safe, he told himself as the first full day of their journey dawned.

Then a blue cop-light flashed in his rearview mirror.

There was no mistaking it for the rising sun; his heart struck a new rhythm at the sight, and every bit of habitual drug paranoia rose up in him. He began to grind his teeth uncontrollably and gulp at a thick paste that coated his tongue and throat.

The tailing car was plain blue, unmarked; the blue beacon flashed from the dashboard. He could see the silhouette of the driver as the car pulled closer and filled the Beetle's rearview mirror. He dimly remembered passing the car on the upgrade several miles back, looking over and seeing an ordinary clean-cut guy in a business suit at the wheel: Joe Commuter getting an early start to Knoxville. The fact that the guy was wearing dark glasses before sunrise should have tipped him off.

He glanced over at Lenore. Her eyes were closed. She'd been sleeping since they left Cinderton, Scabby the cat curled up in her lap. It had been Michael's idea to bring the cat, since otherwise he'd have been abandoning her with no food and no master; Lenore hadn't asked him to explain. Scabby had licked herself clean of blood, and now, tired of howling to escape, she slumbered peacefully, as if she had lived all her life in a car.

He braked slowly, angling off the road. There was scarcely any shoulder; he was afraid of scraping up against the icy rocks. The oncoming lanes were worse, though: nothing there but a low rock wall, and beyond it a river chasm full of rising mist and sparse trees clinging to sheer walls in what looked suspiciously like desperation.

Lenore began to mumble. Scabby put her head up.

Michael looked back and saw the driver getting out. Gray suit, white cuffs and collar, black tie; his black hair was greased back and looked stiff as a helmet. Michael held his breath through the interminable approach, gravel crunching louder and louder under black wingtips, until finally the man was leaning against the door, bellowing steam and motioning for him to lower his window. Michael let the window down a few inches, which was enough to let most of the preciously hoarded heat escape. The engine ticked, cooling, as he tried to read the badge the man held loosely in front of his face. He could hardly focus on it, he was so worried about Lenore and the sounds working down in her throat.

"License and registration."

"Yes, sir." Michael reached for the glove box, trying not to disturb Lenore but failing. Scabby meowed and Lenore stretched, yawning, fisting her eyes.

"Mmm?" she said.

"I don't usually pull people over," said the cop or narc or whatever he was. "I usually leave it to my trooper friends to haul folks like you down to the Buncombe County jail. Guess I just felt like doing them a favor this morning. No one ever passes me on that slope."

Michael suspected there was more to it than that.

"
Urau salu ka oalos
," Lenore said.

The man bent over, peering in. "Beg pardon?"

Michael felt the blood leave his face. "She doesn't speak English, sir."

"
Brolorsor hesook!
" she cried.

The man put his hand on the door latch. "Get out of the car. Both of you."

"Uh, I don't want to let the cat out, sir. We have to hold onto her real good. Would it be okay if maybe just I get out?"

Lenore's voice ratcheted up another notch of gravelly rage. "
Bawnur mosol ilderbeus!
"

Before Michael could pull the latch, the agent wrenched on the door and hauled him out. He twisted Michael around to face the Volkswagen, holding him by the scruff of the neck with his arm crooked up behind him, as if ready to dislocate his shoulder. Scabby was too terrified to bolt for the opening; she cowered under the dashboard.

"All right, now, what do you call this shit?"

He thrust Michael's head toward the car, letting go of Michael's arm long enough to point at a large pentacle painted on the roof above the door.

"Well, sir, that's a five-pointed star, just like forty-nine others you'll find on the American flag."

"Looks more like a
pentangle
to me. You know what that is? I have a feeling you do. I have a feeling you know all about pen-tangles and what you'd do with an inverted crucifix."

Michael groaned. The cop had seized on the only symbol he recognized and interpreted it in the only terms he knew. There was no point arguing with him, but Michael couldn't help himself. Defense of his car was habitual now, and the speed made him think for an idiot moment that he could talk his way out of this rationally.

"If you're talking about Satanism, sir—"

"There you go! You do know, don't you?"

"Satanism is inverted Christianity. I don't follow Satan because I don't follow the Christian religion, or any of the other major western faiths. Nothing against them, I just—"

"You are a fucking Satanist, aren't you, boy?"

"Excuse me, sir, but you saw a biased TV show or heard a lecture down at headquarters from somebody who makes a living feeding your prejudice. These symbols are older than Christianity. Older than the so-called Devil, who I don't happen to believe in anyway,
sir
. But if I did believe in him, that wouldn't give you the right to hassle me. This is America! I'm guaranteed freedom of religion."

"Freedom to perform animal sacrifices?"

"If that
were
part of my religion, then yeah, it
should
be guaranteed."

"So what kind of animals do you sacrifice?"

"I don't. I took a Buddhist oath not to harm any living—"

"Squirrels? Dogs? Maybe
bigger
animals? You think our Founding Fathers went to the wall for you so you could murder babies for the Devil?"

"
They
went to the wall to protect their interests in slaves and tobacco—"

"That's the Devil talking right there!"

"Why don't you go kiss the Devil's big red ass?"

Oh, fuck ... who said that
?

The cop slammed him against the car, catching his jaw on the upper doorframe. "Fuck you, little devil-dick-sucking scum," he grunted in his ear. "There's been some nasty ritual-type killings in these woods lately and you're just the type we're looking for. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I've seen some of these same pretty pictures of yours, these big nasty circles, carved in the skin of the victims. ..."

Michael gasped as his arm was twisted in a way nature never intended. Lenore's voice kept getting louder. The cop's hands moved over his chest, into his jacket, and paused after squeezing the inner pocket, gripping something there. The Black Beauties rattled in their plastic container. Michael's bowels turned to ice.

"Well, well. What have we here?"

"Wait," Michael said, sounding lame even to himself.

Just then, Lenore let out her loudest cry yet. The cop scooped out the canister and simultaneously reached into the neatly pressed suit jacket for his gun. Michael, craning around, saw the gun and squirmed away, unable to hold still; he huddled down into the driver's seat, drawing up his legs.

The man took a moment to uncap the container. Gazing down inside it, he began to grin. "Now, don't tell me. You have a prescription for these. You're on a diet, is that it?" He raised the gun again, aiming into the car.

"Please," Michael begged, opening his hands in supplication. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the gun.

"Out of the car, I said. Both of you."

Lenore's whining and mumbling rose to a high pitch. Michael twisted around and screamed at her: "Shut up, goddamn it!"

She wasn't aware of him. Her eyes were closed and the sounds kept pouring out and the cop was going to arrest them and God knew what would happen then. Maybe they'd already found Tucker; maybe they were already looking for this car.

He looked back and saw the gun still leveled at Lenore. The hand that held the gun was trembling and the barrel wavered, as if the cop were warring with himself. His expression was equally inexplicable—fierce but puzzled.

"Please," Michael said, "you don't have to use that. She's sick. She doesn't mean anything by it. You don't have to threaten us."

The cop's lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

The hand holding the gun began to shake harder, wavering back and forth between Lenore and Michael. The man's other hand spasmed uncontrollably and opened wide; the container hit the asphalt with a clatter, and black capsules scattered like rain.

The man's face was turning dark red, almost violet. His lips were drawn back in a rictus, as if he were already dead.

The gun twisted around, around.
He is already dead
, Michael thought. The cop fought the gun's inexorable motion with his other hand, but then that second hand betrayed him, caressing the wrist it had formerly opposed. Both hands worked with a common aim, bringing the gun to bear on the cop's face.

In the dim morning light of the Great Smokey pass, Michael saw a spherical squirming around the agent's head. It beat like a heart in time to Lenore's chanted words. The agent fought, fought, pulling his head back as the gun rose toward his lips; but at the last instant he must have surrendered completely, because he bowed his head as if in prayer, going open-mouthed to swallow the barrel.

Michael jammed back deeper into the car, pulling the door shut after him. The slam was lost in the explosion.

For an instant, a balloon of blood-mist inflated around the agent's head; blood neatly colored in the intricate outlines of a translucent mandala, pumping the empty thing full of the man's soul.

When he fell, the sphere lingered in space for a moment, superimposed on the shredded mists and blue-patched sky like a translucent red sun. Then it shrank upon itself and vanished, freeing Michael from his stupor.

Such was his need and determination that for a moment he checked the ground for scattered Black Beauties. Only after seeing how much blood was on them, how they floated in the spreading pool of it, did he abandon that particular hope.

He even considered dragging the body toward the stone wall, pushing it over the verge, but that would have helped nothing. He might be seen. As it was, no cars had yet passed to witness any of this. He hoped the agent hadn't called in the Beetle's license number before making the stop. But he couldn't control that; he could only keep moving. The mandalas had made sure he was free to do that much and no more.name 

He twisted the key, stamped on the gas. The engine roared and they fled. He looked back once, before rounding a bend, and saw what looked like a discarded business suit crumpled in the road, waiting to be found. Then a veil of rock hid it from view.

Soon after, the vapors parted and the sun streamed brightly down upon them, glittering merrily on the ice-lined walls of the mountain pass, melting the ice-slick from the road, singing on the waters of all the little falls they passed, as if the sight of these things could somehow brighten his heart.

Cheer up, all nature seemed to say. The way is clear. You kids are off to a great start!

Lenore woke with a crick in her neck, mouth dry and pasty. She tried to stretch but found it impossible in the cramped backseat with all their luggage. They were winding through traffic, the radio flickering in and out as they drove through a freeway underpass and then up again among city buildings. The tune clamoring out of the tinny little speaker, almost unrecognizable, was Sonic Youth's "Satan Is Boring." Michael had found a college radio station. At first she thought they must be in Knoxville, but then a huge billboard flew past, advertising a used car lot in Nashville. She sat up quickly. Scabby perched on the seatback and meowed at her.

Michael spied her in the rearview mirror. "Hey. You feeling any better?"

"I feel like shit," she said. "What do you mean?"

"You don't remember," he said. It wasn't a question.

As far as she recalled, she'd been sleeping since they left Cinderton. She was ravenous.

"Are we gonna eat?" she asked. "There's a McDonald's up there—you see it?"

He changed lanes, gliding toward the off ramp. His eyes looked bloodshot. "Caffeine," he croaked.

"What don't I remember?"

"The narc."

"What narc?"

"Forget it."

While Michael waited in line to order, Lenore went into the bathroom to wash her face. Looking into the mirror, she saw the little mandala printed on her forehead. It was like a porthole, a window swinging open on another world. A thin dark light poured out of the symbol. Most of the light shone backward into her skull, burning out all the stagnation, hesitation, and pockets of decay that had formed in her mind while she slept.

The metal stalls began to waver. The ceiling darkened to a shade of stained stone, the fluorescents took on a bruised, purplish hue. She felt a sudden terror of meeting her own eyes.

She had forgotten this part—forgotten how the world could melt and run if you looked at it the right way. When it happened in her house it was one thing, but this place was alien. She wanted to run, but everything was too strange, and the car was out somewhere in the foreign landscape. She could get lost between here and there. Instead she retreated to a stall, trying not to notice how the metal door hung at such an impossible angle that it didn't swing straight, but folded into itself like a four-dimensional solid rotating through three dimensions, never quite all there. The toilet was even worse: It slopped and surged, blackish-green slime working like a noxious tongue down in the stained throat. She turned away and leaned against the wall, her eyes inches from a tangle of incomprehensible graffiti, crude mandalas done in Magic Marker; the text of the Thirty-Seventh Key ran down to toilet paper dispensers that gave out pads of waxy sandpaper. She had to shut her eyes not to begin pronouncing the words herself.

At that moment, she heard the rest room door scream open, and then voices: a woman's, a child's. The room sank into a darker light as the toilets gurgled and cooed; Lenore's mind began to dip into unconsciousness, retreating from the harsh new presence.

No,
she thought.
I want to see everything, remember everything. No more blackouts.

Her mandala must have responded to her sincerity, since the encroaching haze was suddenly blown away. She felt her mind expanding with crystal clarity. Her consciousness hovered somewhere over her body; she hung below the ceiling like a helium balloon, looking down on the open area of the restroom. An enormous woman stood there, foreshortened before the mirror that was now a black window and not a mirror at all; she clutched by the hand a small girl who was screaming and crying and trying to tear her arm away. As Lenore gazed down, the woman slapped the child across the face. The girl fell still, hunching away and backing into a corner between the sinks and the wall. The woman massaged her hand then chased the child into the narrow corner, taking a handful of her hair and wrenching her out into the middle of the floor. The toilets groaned and vomited their contents on the slime-caked tiles. Bloody shit began to flow up the walls. The girl tried to scream again, but the woman clapped her in the mouth and slammed her head against the edge of the sink, catching her by the forearm when she would have slumped.

Lenore was not alone. Two mandalas blistered through the ceiling, drawn in by the spectacle.

The fat woman glanced up for a second, her eyes red, her face aboil with pus, flesh and fat slithering from cheek and jaw. She seemed to be smiling at the mandalas, but Lenore knew she couldn't actually see them. Her attention went back to the girl, now more like a charred monkey dragged along unresisting. The mandalas bobbed lower, wheels of grainy flame. One flailed the mother with tendrils like bullwhips coated with broken glass and razors, goading her on like a horseman whipping its broken mount to impossible feats. The other hung above the child and peeled back filmy lips from a myriad pores that perforated the pulsating disc of its body. Each pore or mouth was a gate into another world, and as they opened Lenore could hear screams from somewhere within that realm the color of a stomach. As it lowered toward the shriveling girl, it began to siphon off a thin mist like smoke or steam that curled wispily from her soul, an aroma of agony visible to Lenore, who could no longer look away or forget or ignore anything. The girl was left with a little less juice, and the mandala looked quite a bit fatter. From the shriveled look of the child, this had been going on for quite a while. Once the one had fed from the girl, the other wrapped itself around the mother and caught at the streaming ribbony flecks of astral tissue, like bloody chunks of soul, that had torn free with every act of violence and now hung around the woman's head waiting to be harvested by her keeper. The mandalas kept the humans like a couple of prize milk cows, like ants tending aphids.

Lenore jarred back into her body. The cold metal walls of the stall clanged in around her, drab and unmarked, the toilet paper hanging in limp strands, the porcelain bowl sparkling, all its chrome recently polished. Thinking herself safe, she opened the door and stepped out.

The mother stood there, running water, holding her daughter to the sink. The woman's face was restored; the girl looked small but not withered; she startled at the sight of Lenore, but otherwise showed no particular signs of suffering. The woman was scooping water into the girl's face, and now she reached for paper towels to dry her daughter's mouth; but Lenore's appearance slowed and distracted her. They both stared at Lenore, openly disgusted by her black clothes, her streaky dyed hair, all of which Lenore could see in the mirror behind them. When the woman's eyes went to the symbol on her forehead, she jerked her daughter away, but her lips were moving and Lenore could hear her muttered obeisances. She ducked and bowed, as if humbling herself before a priestess of her religion. Lenore scraped past them toward the door. It took a conscious effort to continue seeing them as humans, especially when their auras gave off a brittle electric buzz accompanied by the stench of rot and burning hair.

Lenore hurried out to the car, afraid to sit where she would have to look at people. Michael returned with a tall cup and a paper bag stuffed full. She unwrapped an Egg McMuffin, but when she saw what it had turned into she set it on the floor for Scabby.

"I saw ..." she started to say. "In the rest room just now...."

"What?" He washed down his eggs with a huge swallow of Coke.

"A woman beating her child."

"I think I saw them. The little snot was making a scene in there; she wanted a milkshake for breakfast. I'd have paddled her too."

"She was really beating her. I thought she was going to kill her."

"What? I doubt she would
beat
her in a McDonald's."

"They were in the bathroom. They didn't know I could see them."

"Maybe you—maybe you were seeing things, Lenore. You know what I mean? I saw them come out of there, and the girl was quiet, but she didn't look abused."

Lenore couldn't answer, because she wasn't sure what she'd seen. She'd seen two things: the scene of torture, and then the pair facing her, looking superficially unharmed. She wondered which was real and then realized that both were. The first scene, the one she'd witnessed from above, had been a mental projection, something running parallel to the physical world; she had seen what the mother wished to do in that moment; she had seen the fulfillment of repressed anger; and she had also seen its effect on the child. The attacker's vicious thoughts, in that realm, took a tangible toll from their victim. It was in this way that the mandalas fed and worked their magic. And since so much of what was thought and dreamed and accomplished in that realm worked its way eventually into the physical plane, the mandalas had established a solid foundation here as well.

"You think you're okay to drive?" Michael asked suddenly.

"Me? Drive?"

"I don't know if I can make it all the way to California, Lenore. I mean, if we're gonna get there in a hurry and all, you should help out. If you're, you know, lucid."

"Sure," she said. "I'm perfectly ... lucid."

Even as she said it, the car shifted slightly, becoming something other than she had realized. Usually cars gave her a feeling of security, of speed, all that protective metal pushing them on. But now she had an unwelcome vision of the Beetle as a little death trap. It only waited the right opportunity to buckle and crush inward, trapping the soft things (them) in hard jagged pinchers of torn steel.

No, that's not real
, she told herself. I can see through to reality—I can see clearly enough to drive.

"I'll take over," she said. "For a while."

"Great. I could use some sleep. You let me know if you start to feel funny, all right?"

"Sure."

But she could not tell him that by the time she climbed into the driver's seat, the parking lot itself had changed. She caught a glimpse of her guardian in the rearview mirror, black and whirling about her crown.
Well, if you can't keep me from getting in an accident, what good are you
?

The thought stung; her head seemed to clog with black bitter smoke. Then it cleared and she saw the landscape with perfect clarity, as if it were an extension of herself, as if she were inhabiting a map. The trees were arranged in intricate symmetry; the clouds had been laid upon the sky and set into deliberate motion. Everything funneled together as in a perspective drawing, pulling her eyes westward. She felt like a god at the wheel....

This is going to be easy.

Then she twisted the key and the car moaned to life, sounding like something resurrected to torment. It screamed when she trod on the pedal, as if the small explosions of gas in its guts were unbearable.

Where McDonald's had been she now saw a squat, smoldering box like a black concrete bunker with nervous death camp faces peering out from glassless slits in the sides.

The car lurched forward and the ground squirmed away underneath. There was only one road, leading in only one direction, covered with endless rows of flexible dagger caltrops like tastebuds on a demon's tongue that bowed as she drove over them, and sprang back instantly to prevent her from retreating. If she hesitated even a moment, the road-tongue would curl up like a chameleon's and suck them back into that black bunker, shrouded in the smell of carrion charred and raw.

Ignoring the car's apparent agony, she sped toward higher ground.

Michael stopped for coffee, Coke, and gasoline, never for sleep. He knew he would need it eventually, but he held off as long as he could.

Letting Lenore drive again was out of the question.

He had tried that for a while; been lulled into dozing; and then awoke, somewhere east of Memphis, just as the car veered off the road toward a slough. He grabbed the wheel from Lenore, who was babbling about stones—singing stones with bloody hearts—and how the clouds were blood and blood rained down everywhere. He barely managed to get back onto the road.

Never again.

"Leave the driving to me, Lenore."

He had shouldered the responsibility for the entire trip.

Of course, he was just as likely to get them into an accident as Lenore had been—though his reasons were more mundane.

Late at night, the oncoming headlights became a torment, jabbing his eyes like bits of broken glass. They drifted past endless oases of light in the dark of the landscape—gas stations, motels, Western Sizzlin's. The thought of rest was torture. His eyelids grew heavier, heavier. The sound of the engine was a constant reassurance, lulling him to sleep ... sleep....

He swerved onto the shoulder, crashed through a litter of bottles and cans, braked to a halt just short of a road sign showing the distance to Oklahoma City.

"I've gotta sleep, Lenore," he said. "Just a little while, okay?"

She didn't answer. With her head slumped against the window and her eyes closed, she appeared to be sleeping herself. He couldn't be quite sure of what that meant in her state.

The overhead light was burned out, but anyway there were no pertinent maps in the car. He couldn't see his wristwatch. Time didn't matter. All that mattered was that he find a rest area before he crashed. They seemed to be spaced about every sixty miles, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen one. That was probably a good sign; it meant one should be coming up soon, unless he had spaced out and passed it without noticing.