The 37th mandala : a novel (42 page)

"No," Lenore choked suddenly. "Go back. You cannot speak. Don't interfere."

She was fighting, somewhere deep inside herself. He saw something familiar—an expression both naive and wise—flash across her features. She sat upright, swinging off the couch, and threw herself at Derek, catching his arms, pulling him out of the chair. He tried to free himself, but the guards could not aid him now; their bodies were tangled between the conflicting struggles of the mandalas. She drew herself to him, gazing into his face with a sad expression, and whispered.

"I remember you now," she said. 'I've come a long way to find you, Derek. They scared me, but they couldn't stop me. I had to talk to you."

Her voice was small and pathetic, and it stirred memories he couldn't bear—didn't dare—to have released. He tried to push away, but she clung too tenaciously. He would rather strangle her than hear another word, but he couldn't move his arms; small as she was, she held him immobilized. With the pressure of the surrounding mandalas, the hallucinations squeezing them in, there was nowhere to flee.

"Don't do this," he said. "Please."

"I have to," she said. "I've waited a lifetime. Longer. ..."

Even before Nina found her wandering the corridors, Lenore sensed that something more would be required of her. The richness and clarity of her vision had turned into total acceptance of whatever happened—everything. She gave Nina a knowing nod, falling in alongside her.

"Etienne's almost ready. This way."

They found him in a bare room with a drain in the center of 
the cement floor. A janitor's cart sat in one corner, propped full of mops, buckets dangling. The floor was wet, freshly sluiced.

"There you are. I'll be right with you."

On the wall were two large Polaroids mounted side by side. Lenore gazed at them while Etienne stripped out of a plastic smock and rubber gloves. The first showed the man they had called Chhith. The second was less recognizable. It seemed to document a war atrocity, something wet and red and horribly chewed. It was so fresh that it still smelled of the instant developing chemicals.

"Before and after!" Etienne sang.

"Our own little Tuol Sleng!" said Nina. "Now the curator's on display!"

"Well, he just wouldn't compromise. We didn't go to all this trouble for one
man
!" Etienne stuffed the smock and gloves down into the trash barrel on the cart; a larger man wheeled it away. Etienne bent to retrieve a ballpoint pen from the floor near the drain. He clicked it several times, then stuck it in his shirt pocket. Nina laughed and clapped her hands.

"That's that," he said, taking Lenore's elbow. "Our gallery is complete. Now as for you, my dear. ..."

"I'm ready," she said.

"Yes, you are, aren't you?" He took something from his pocket, a mirrored disk, round and shiny and incised with a design she knew instantly. It was her black guardian. He held it to her eyes, so she could see herself reflected in the disk. The pattern on her forehead was superimposed on its etched counterpart in the mirror. At the sight, she began to jet forward into darkness, shedding her body, the room rushing away with a quiet hum.

I want to see everything
, she insisted. It had become habit by now. She had seen so much. There was nothing left to shy from, nothing to fear.

But tonight Lenore found herself against a definite wall. The limitless blackness refused to recede. The clarity of her thought processes made the psychic blindness even harder to bear, since now she was able to experience her helplessness to an infinitesimal degree.

I haven't come all this way to be abandoned here, she thought. You can't do this to me!

For the first time in what seemed like ages, she felt herself as something separate from her mandala. The black guardian had used up all its excuses for bringing her here, all the lies it had told to make her feel an integral part of its plan. Now, spinning idly in the dark, she realized that she had been nothing more than a vehicle.

Well... she had kept secrets—told lies—of her own.

Her attraction to Derek Crowe had been largely the mandalas' doing, but at her core she had her own reasons for coming. There was an urge deep inside her, an instinct that had kept her streaking toward him through the darkness like a comet. She had skated through the outer darkness before, orbiting away from him; but now, returning on the inward plunge, feeling his gravity's pull, her inner light blazed brighter than ever, as if reflecting his cold inglorious fire.

She dived deeper into herself, sensing that inward was the only way out. This tiny, secret part of herself was her true navigator. It had guided her through life when she had been of no worth to the mandalas. Before life, before birth, before she had been of any use to them; since she had been nothing more than a cinder tumbling through the void, flung far out, then falling back to earth—back to Derek Crowe, over the course of her life. She had felt a shock of recognition when she saw him in the auditorium in Cinderton; but she had not recognized it then—had thought it stemmed from seeing his picture on a book jacket. But ever since, the feeling had grown that she was destined for him, that she must drag herself back to Derek no matter what the cost. She had thought it was only the mandalas' need for him, but that was only also true. There was something more to it.

She held fast to the charred coal at her soul's core. She pulled herself into it and felt the new fire rising, the light leaking in. Yes, the light. Her entire voyage at the mandala's behest had been an outward one, across landscapes and cities, carrying her guardian out into the world. But the real journey—Lenore's journey—had always been an inward one. She covered its final stretch in a single leap.

Light dawned brutally, in a round room of mirrors.

Derek Crowe clung to her, stumbling to free himself, unable to tear away. Their mandalas held them together, for mandala-reasons; but Lenore clung to Derek for a frail human reason of her own. She had come so far for this, farther than she could conceive. For the moment, the mandalas and their mysterious purposes were irrelevant. It was as if she had used them for her ends, taken advantage of their power to fling herself hard and fast toward Crowe. She could never have gotten to him so quickly on her own.

Not in time for this night of changes, as the New Age dawned.

And now words tumbled out of her, unrehearsed; and as they came she knew them for truth. They were both a discovery and a memory, flowing from a deeper place than the mind of her one short life could encompass. They came with memories of a prior life—and a much shorter one.

Lenore's voice altered in pitch as she spoke, softening until it was small and breathy and infinitely sad. Squeezing his eyes shut, Derek could see who spoke to him now. Lenore's face was no longer before him; Lenore's hands no longer clutched him with a mixture of pity and vengeance. He saw instead a small and lovely face; felt small, gentle, very cold hands.

"
No
, " he said. "Please."

"Derek. ..."

"No!"

"I've come back to you. I know you've changed, but I haven't. I had to speak to you."

"Don't do this!" He fought, but something held him to her, some horrid magnetism induced by the 37. This was all a terrible dream, a guilt-dream, his private shame playing out in public before an audience of alien shapes who pretended to humanity.

"I forgive you. That's all I had to say."

"No, May, please—"

He collapsed inwardly as he blurted her name, abandoning further denial. He could feel tears coming, but something held them back—disuse, perhaps.

"Yes," she said. "I don't know what happened, or why, but I forgive you. It doesn't mean much, Derek. I know it won't be enough to change you, and I'm sorry for that. But I had to tell you, for myself, that I'm all right. I'm strong and alive and I came back; and now I can move on because you know. But you ... but you...."

"What about me?" he said desperately, believing everything now, believing anything to be possible: believing in mandalas and demons and every god and saint; in lost cities and lost continents, Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria; in levitation and telekinesis and reincarnation; in Heaven and Hell; in black and white magics; in Kundalini and karma; in love spells and curses; in sin and redemption and Yahweh and Allah; in Christ and Sakyamuni and Ahura Mazda and Lucifer; in everything indiscriminately, as if it were all equally probable, even necessary. Believing, as if she could foretell his future, his fate, this oracle from the outer dark, from the inner hell of his past, this innocent soul that had found him at last, still a child and not a fire-eyed Fury.

"You have what you've made for yourself," she said. "So this won't matter to you, no matter how much it means to me."

Crowe's internal collapse continued, crinkling him down; he felt as if his body were deflating beneath the skin, condensing with a horrible crunching of tissue and bone into a dense, solid mass.

"Good-bye, Derek."

"May! No, May, please! I—I want to ask you, I want to—"

"Good-bye."

"
I'm sorry, May! I love you, May! I'm sorry!
"

But he never knew if she heard him. Her face had already gone rigid as the mandalas, winning the struggle, shut her away forever.

Derek choked on his tears. As the destruction in his heart continued, Derek began to scream.

Every girder that had been holding him together, every piece of feeble emotional scaffolding, now fell away. He had always figured that a hollowness sat enthroned at the center of his being. He discovered now that he could not have been more wrong.

Quivering, gulping like a diver surfacing, the mandala within him groped for the outer world. It began to breach. The preserved hide lying against his own pale flesh rippled and parted like a gateway about to open, preparing the way for this latest and freshest of horrors. He threw his eyes to the ceiling, cursing the ones that surged and struggled overhead, knowing it was they who had brought this moment on, catalyzing the quickening, overseeing every step of the process.

He could believe in them now. It was exactly the same as believing in himself.

And Lenore, flung away, falling through the dark again, knew what was coming, what would step in to fill the gulf she had left behind. She saw it with the full awareness of one who had dwelt among the mandalas as consciously as was possible for a human mind to bear.

What she saw coming was worse than she could have imagined. It was Derek Crowe, yes—but a Crowe exaggerated and concentrated, a Crowe intensified to a degree that beggared mere horror. The thing he was about to become, the bursting into full flower of the seed at his soul's center, was unbearable to contemplate.

She tried to slow her free-fall. She had negotiated these realms long enough to have mastered a measure of control. She clung to the hard comet-kernel at her center, herding it about, urging it back to the scene of imminent devastation.

As she drew near, she saw the crowd on the dance floor whirling above the black guardian whose outlines even now shimmered and throbbed with actual life, soaking in the blood-force of those who crowded Club Mandala. She merged with the rhythmic encircling thrum of the dancers' feet and the sourceless music, foreseeing the abattoir this place would become when the thirty-seventh mandala broke through, drawing upon all of them for its power, much as her own guardian had drawn upon Tucker and Scarlet for its first manifestation. The floors would burst, the walls would split, every soul would spurt like a burst blood sac, drawn in on the lines of radiant evil that formed the astral core of the new, the incipient mandala....

And when that one took its place among the other thirty-six, it would compel them to new acts of terror and cruelty. It would usher in a new age of violence on the helpless physical plane, giving shape and direction to the selfish battling of the mandalas, uniting them in a continuation of the process that had brought them spiraling in from outside of time to this point tonight.

Lenore saw only one way to place her own mark on events, to steer them on a less horrific course. It meant giving up everything; but then, she was on her way into the endless dark. This sacrifice might mean another chance at the light. It might mean rebirth, and real power, and who knew what else?

She collapsed into herself, embracing the center of the storm, crushing herself inward until she reached critical mass. And felt at last the inner bloom, the explosion just beginning.

She reappeared as if out of nowhere among the mandalas which had discarded her. She drank up their shock and rage, mixing it with the frenzied glee of the crowd above and the poisonous seepage of Derek Crowe. She made it all her own, subverting Crowe's evil destiny in an attempt to make something new of it.

All of them were fighting her now, both the mandalas and their human slaves. They pushed her back, trying to tear her away from Derek Crowe, trying to suppress her emergence.

In the instant she regained her body, she called for help from the only one in the world who could move invisibly here—her only hope of rescue.

"Michael!"

She couldn't see him. She had no idea if he still lived. But she prayed he was still close enough to hear her.

Michael had huddled against the dark mirror of the wall, ignored by all, in shock, unable to hear what passed between Crowe and Lenore, unable to comprehend any of it. The others, the audience, stood slack and unmoving, but the air above their heads was alive with an astral turmoil so intense that even he could see it.