The 37th mandala : a novel (36 page)

As they walked up to the front of the pagoda-roofed building, Lenore was astonished to see that the windows were full of occult paraphernalia: Goat skulls and the frayed leathery shapes of desiccated bats were the first things to catch her eyes. Derek threw open the doors as if he owned the place.

"Welcome to Hecate's Haven," he said.

The shop was busy. Lenore looked around at the slowly prowling customers, picking through spinning racks of pamphlets and paperbacks, pulling jars from shelves. There was a man in a black cape, as if it were Halloween. A green-haired girl was buying a cinnamon-red candle shaped like a penis and a black wax vulva with a wick. Every day was Halloween in here. The place smelled of incense and paraffin soot and dried, musty herbs—exactly like the stores in New York where Michael had often dragged her on his occult shopping sprees. The long glass cases were full of jars, and the jars afloat with eyeballs, frogs, white snakes pickled in formaldehyde. Candles burned along the far wall; the incense she smelled was smoking in a brazier near the cash register.

Derek held them at the door for a moment, studying the crowd. "That's my friend Lilith over there. Let me see if she's got a moment. It looks busier than I expected."

Lenore slid her hand through Michael's arm and looked up at his mandala. The thing was throbbing; she could almost hear it gasp. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm all right. How about you?"

They were interrupted by a growing murmur from the crowd. Derek, picking his way toward the counter, had become the center of attention. Half a dozen customers had closed in and were bent to him, asking eager questions or simply staring, drinking in the sight of him, their faces bright and eyes wide. Crowe's discomfort was plain, but it had no effect on his fans. Their mandalas bobbed and hovered near the ceiling like whirring balloons, fighting for position, urging them closer to Crowe. For the first time she had a sharp picture of his mandala, gray and damp-looking, sticky as flypaper, covered with roaming mouths that gaped at the room. The other mandalas darted closer to that one, arranging themselves around it, sometimes flicking out their tentacles like coiling tongues, dipping the tips into the mouths of Crowe's mandala as if feeding it or indulging in deep kisses. But sometimes the teeth of his mandala snapped; the mouths champed shut, cutting off the tendril-tips, and the injured mandalas skittered away, dragging their puppets with them, the humans dazed and frightened-looking. Crowe's mandala was gray as a fungus, like something long dead, but it looked like the strongest one in the gathering. The others were eager to pay it obeisance.

"What's going on?" Michael said.

"Whoa!" said a voice to one side. Lenore turned to see a blond boy standing there, a kid with long hair and a downy mustache, gazing enrapt at Derek Crowe. "You know who that is?"

"Derek Crowe," she said.

"Yeah! He looks just like his picture, doesn't he? Man, I was waiting—I thought he'd never come around again! They say he's supposed to be at Club Mandala tonight, for the grand opening! But this is even better—I mean, it's
intimate
!"

His eyes fixed on her forehead. "Awesome!" His finger darted out, as if to touch the mandala, but she jerked away. "You—you're really into it, aren't you?"

Lenore gazed at him, saying nothing. She could feel her mandala moving over the kid, suppressing him, turning down his excited light. He dimmed visibly. His grin shrank a little, and he ducked his head slightly, lowering his voice. "Sorry. Hey, you know who else is here? You see that lady over there? You know who that is?"

She followed the kid's finger. He was pointing at a woman behind the counter, tall and slender, rather severe-looking. She looked angry about the disruption Crowe was causing.

"That's
Ms. A
!" the kid said.

"Ms. A?" Michael said. "Really?"

"It's gotta be her. She's like Crowe's best friend, and her name is Lilith
Allure
. With an A!"

Michael leaned to whisper in Lenore's ear. "This is insane. Look at Crowe. We can't go through that."

Lilith marched out from behind the counter, firmly seized Crowe by an arm, and strode to the rear of the shop, clearing a way through the crowd with sharp commands. She took him through a door and slammed it shut behind them.

"I don't think this is such a good idea," Michael said.

The crowd had begun to whirl about, angrily circling the absence at its center where Derek Crowe at been. Lenore knew it was only a matter of time until they spotted the mandala on her forehead and realized she had come with Crowe. She was about to receive for herself the attention Derek had escaped.

"You hear about those rituals down south?" the kid was saying. "It's really starting now—"

Michael put his arm around Lenore, rushing her out the door before the boy had finished speaking. It pained her to leave Crowe behind, but she knew it was the wisest thing for now.

"Do you mind?" he said when they were outside. "We can come back later. We can look up Crowe when it's not so crazy here. We ... I don't know, Lenore. We have to put our heads together. We have to figure out what we're doing. We have to talk about some stuff."

"I don't mind."

"Because there's some things I have to tell you. I've been keeping from you. I'm not sure why. You really should know."

"Things like what?" she said, suddenly afraid. She didn't like the edge in his voice. What could he possibly know that she didn't? Didn't she see everything—so much more than Michael?

He opened the car door for her. The rocks on the peak above the shop looked black instead of red now, as the afternoon sun sank toward them. An ice-crystal halo blinked into existence around the sun, and she looked for a mandala to fill the outline of that rainbow wheel. It was empty white air, though, an optical effect and nothing more. No shimmering pale sun guardian watched over the city.

Michael took a moment to look at the map, then shoved it into the glove box and started the car. She didn't ask where he was going, but after a while it became obvious that he didn't have any particular route in mind: He just kept heading west. They had been traveling west for days. Apparently he wanted to go until he could go no farther.

More than anything else, Michael worried her. She had seen him as ratlike before, a diseased animal, but now he was not even that. When she reached out for the reassurance of touch, she felt not flesh and bone beneath her hand, but cold machinery. Holes yawned in his skin, festering places where the life had been burned away. Down inside him, gears and pistons worked brokenly like malfunctioning extensions of the car, giving off a scent of sweat and machine oil. She raged silently at his mandala:
What's wrong with you? Why can't you help him?

But that might have been a mistake. It seemed to bring the sickly mandala to the attention of her own. Hers made a few teasing strikes at Michael's faltering guardian, stinging lashes of the black whips. It darted at the ill one like a wheel of razors, slicing deeply into it, dancing back. Lenore pleaded with her mandala to leave him alone, but to no effect. She could not join in the torture; she herself must do something to protect Michael. But what?

They passed out of the crowded streets, leaving behind the clashing walls and screams of traffic. They entered avenues of soothing geometry, tall white blocks with stucco faces and roofs of Spanish tile. They drove past squat windowless hutches, speckled green and brown, which quivered like amphibian eggs about to hatch. Michael had started talking, quite intent, but nothing he said made sense; it was all in a language she had forgotten. Once the words might have meant something—tucker, scarlet, murder, police—but she had left that entire world of signifiers behind.

Suddenly the sea appeared before them, fog pouring in through the mouth of a channel. It was magnificent in any world, but to Lenore's eyes the fusion of dimensions rendered it almost unbearably beautiful. They drove along a narrow road, crawling past violet lawns, through trees of thorn and ivory. Layers of distant hills rose on the far side of a channel; the terrestrial sun glared through momentarily, scorching the fog. Then, taking the star's place, a stark orange orb like a blind eye peered through, dripping a tainted manna, striking at the stunted trees and blighting the foliage, turning the landscape into a desert where only things of scale and metal could possibly survive.

Creaking, he turned to face her. His eyes were gone. When he moved his jaws, she hardly heard a thing. She shrank from the warring mandalas that writhed and gnashed the air above their heads. She had to stop it somehow, before Michael was hurt. She felt no fear for herself, but he was weak.

Suddenly something in the car gave way. There was a raw clanking somewhere underneath them.

"Fucking Crowe's fucking paper clip!" said the Michael-thing. He pulled the car off the road, driving through brush. He yanked his door open and stumbled out, gesticulating at the car with emotions she couldn't grasp. She joined him in a small glade of broken glass and rubbish, just out of sight of the road.

How close they were to the sea! Here the cliffs came up abruptly. She lost herself in the sight of the horizon smothered in coppery mist. In the mouth of the bay, she saw the coiling struggles of huge metallic creatures spouting bloody foam. Great bells rang, deep voices echoing between the cliffs of the channel. A bridge ran over the water, a frail piece of orange metal stretched out to an implausible thinness, with specks of life crawling over it. Cars or insects, or a fusion of both.

The Michael-thing moved first toward the car, then toward her, then back to the car. It leaned into the car and began pushing the vehicle across a stretch of din. The car rolled, gathering speed, crashing through branches, juddering past her. She watched in joyous release as it flew from the edge of the cliff and toppled out of sight. The sound of its crash was ecstacy.

The Michael-thing stood watching where the car had gone. It swayed like a heap of metal about to topple. She didn't want to touch the thing but it twitched toward her, lifting splintered fingers in supplication or farewell. She realized that it was about to grasp her in a mockery of affection, sinking its corroded grips into her flesh. The thought was more than she could bear. She spun aside, barely eluding it. Her mandala dipped between them, and she felt a moment's human sadness, for the husband-thing could not last much longer. It had served its purpose in bringing her to Derek Crowe. Nothing it did from now on had any meaning whatsoever. Its life was over. It had passed from significance. Nothing of Michael was left in it now; she could hardly remember the affection she might have felt.

Her mandala flew in furious motion, blurring like a black wheel of razors. It sliced into the amorphous mass of the husband-thing's guardian, cutting it open like a seed pod full of tiny rose-colored beads. The specks of life went flying, scattered like jewels from a broken necklace, spraying down the cliffs toward the sea, some floating aimlessly into the sky.

And then the Michael-thing, the husband-thing, disappeared. It didn't run away or cast itself over the cliff; it simply ceased to be. Lenore forgot it had ever existed. She didn't question how she had come to this place, for that was irrelevant now. She had somewhere to go, and her mandala would get her there.

"So," Lilith said, latching the door, turning to face Derek in the narrow hall lined with boxes. "You had to come in here today of all days. You know half the people out there are getting ready for that Club Mandala bash tonight? You're their dream come true, walking in here like that."

"Lilith, I—" Derek was breathless, practically in shock. He had never been mobbed before. "I only came to ask you a favor—"

"I don't hear from you for days, and then you show up like this? You're starting a riot."

"I didn't know this would happen. How could I?"

"If you wanted to talk to me, you should have called me at home. In private. This isn't the place for a discussion. You're making everything worse, as if it weren't bad enough already. And what about this thing in North Carolina?"

"What thing?" he said.

"This ritual sacrifice. Which of your fans is responsible for that?"

"What are you talking about?"

She looked at him in cool disbelief. "I can't believe you haven't heard. It's not exactly in the headlines, but they're all buzzing about it." She pointed down the hall. The store was loud with whistling and disappointed cries. "Weren't you just out in North Carolina?"

"Of course," he said.

"There was a murder there—a double murder actually. I'm surprised you haven't been questioned about it. Someone painted a nice big mandala on the wall in the victims' blood."

Derek went cold, thinking of Chhith/Huon, the ritual murders around Phnom Penh. But Chhith wasn't in North Carolina; and the Renzlers had just come from there, crossed the country so quickly that they might have been in flight.

"Do they know who did it?" he said.

"Some crazed couple, supposedly. But they can't find them."

"A couple," he murmured.

"Now what?" she said. "Derek, where are you going?"

He didn't know himself. He couldn't go out the front door, and what good would it do to escape out the back? The Renzlers already knew where he lived. What he ought to do was find out exactly what the story was with this sacrifice, and then—what? Call the police? If he didn't turn them in, he'd come off looking like another Charles Manson. He'd stopped into Cinderton for one night's lecture, accepted a ride to the airport, and somehow brainwashed his fans into murder. He'd spent a good deal of time with them, time unaccounted for on that dark road. They'd be painted as zombies, his witless slaves, and he the mandala master. Of course, he'd have an alibi, wouldn't he? Their friend had come to fix the broken car....

He mustn't let it get to that point. This was time for extreme damage control.

"I need your help," he said.

"I told you before, I can't get sucked into this. I've tried telling those people out there I'm not Ms. A, that we didn't meet till after you wrote your book. But it's futile. They want to believe in me."