The 37th mandala : a novel (9 page)

Her tone was so dismissive that he didn't think of questioning her any further. He couldn't believe this was happening. He had dreamed of sharing his real interests with her. Two soul-mates could go so much farther and faster in the occult realms than any one person traveling alone. He had never quite given up hoping that someday she would kick drugs altogether and really join him on his quest, the spiritual pilgrimage that had given him the strength to pull his psyche into shape.

"I'll show you tonight," he said breathlessly. "We'll do something out of the book if you want. Just a simple ritual to give you a taste of it, see how you like it, okay?"

"Okay," she said.

Yes
, he thought. She said 
yes
! She had affirmed everything he believed in and hoped for. She had stopped saying no, and maybe now there would be an end to her self-destructiveness. An end in sight, anyway.

He could hardly keep from laughing. "Okay," he repeated. "Okay!"

"Michael!" She dug her nails in his arm, nearly slashing him; the shock brought his eyes back to the dark road. He'd been blinded by emotion, a veil coming down over his mind, shutting him off from his eyes, and suddenly he saw the headlights sweeping a sheer rock face, heard the tires screaming around a hairpin curve he knew by heart (—by heart?—then how had he forgotten?—stupid—stupid—we're gonna roll—), felt the Beetle tipping, wheels on one side leaving the ground.

Then the lights swept on into trees, the road straightened, they bounced down again, flat and level, and he could breathe. He slowed gradually, acting as if it were deliberate, as if he'd been in control the whole time, showing off.

Lenore didn't make a sound. Any other night she would have been raging. But something new hung over them tonight, a presence that neither of them wanted to dispel.

Her grip on his arm relaxed at last. She pulled her hand away.

"Just get us home in one piece," she said, and left it at that.

When they walked in the house, they could hear stomping and banging overhead. The stereo was turned up high. It wasn't the kind of music you listened to for the words, but he could almost make out the words anyway. Tuck and Scarlet could make more noise than a houseload of people.

Michael dumped the laundry sack on a spring-shot couch and went straight to the library, which doubled as his temple. He was so excited that his fingers shook. Lenore went off down the hall; he didn't want her getting away, changing her mind, but that was ridiculous. Real change wasn't so fragile. She would come when she was ready; besides, he had plenty to prepare.

A makeshift altar stood opposite the door; the book-lined walls smelled of dust, incense, and mildew. Every summer the humidity attacked his books and every winter the heater dried the spores to green dust. There was also a lingering cat-piss smell from the time he'd spilled civit on the rug doing a lust spell that had sort of backfired.

He lit the pair of tapers on his altar—actually a bureau with a black velvet cloth draped over it—and cleared a space among bowls of salt and water, a brass incense burner, his hand-carved willow wand, and his athame. When he set the book down, it fell open to one of the mandalas.

Hearing a noise behind him, he turned to see Lenore in the doorway, watching. She seemed to be waiting for an invitation. The library was his private territory. He'd made it clear that she shouldn't disturb him when he was meditating or practicing some rite. Now he beckoned her in.

"Come on," he said. "I'll show you something."

She entered slowly, almost shyly, clinging to the doorframe till her eyes had adjusted to the candlelight. Then she joined him at the altar and put an arm around his waist, looking down at his tools. He had explained them all to her before, but he doubted she remembered. He touched his atham
é
.

"Remember this?"

"Yeah, your magic dagger."

"My athame. It represents the mind—double-edged, keen. The element of air."

She reached out and traced the edge of it with a finger. "It's sharp," she said.

"My wand represents the element of—"

"You told me this before," she said, already bored, looking up at the bookshelves, starting to pull away.

"You have to understand what we're doing."

"I don't really care about that witch stuff, Michael. I want to know about the mandalas. How do you call them? Or don't you know?"

"
I know
, " he said, irritated that she would challenge him on his own ground. "You have to use these things to call them, and you have to know
why
you're doing it."

"You mean you don't just call them and they come?"

Exasperated, he found his voice rising in pitch. "Lenore, just listen, all right? It's not like blowing a bird call. The gods don't speak English. They communicate with us through symbols, and we can talk back only if we use the symbols right. The tools and gestures are like ... like a code or a pidgin language for the astral world."

"But Derek said the Keys or whatever are already in the mandala language. So you should be able to say the words and they'll come."

"It has a lot to do with your attitude, your intentions—"

"That is
such
bullshit, Michael. Why should it? You're in France, you say words out of a phrase book and people understand you. They don't know jack about your intentions."

"Let me finish, Lenore!"

She fell silent, waiting, and he found himself with nothing to say, no argument left.

"It works," he said finally. "But maybe not the way you think. They act on thoughts ... emanations."

"So let's see something."

His frustration was too much for him. "Why are you so interested all of a sudden? I mean, what do you expect to get out of this?"

"I don't
expect
anything. No more than a guy in a lab coat
expects
some kind of results when he does an experiment. I just want to see what happens."

It was a fair answer, but he wasn't sure he believed her. There was something else behind her sudden interest, something pushing her, but he couldn't see it. The only explanation that made any sense was that Derek Crowe's lecture had flipped a switch inside her and brought out a latent interest that not even Michael had sighted before. He'd been amazed at how she'd practically thrown herself at Derek Crowe. He never would have expected it of Lenore.

"We should really do some kind of purification, a bath or something—"

"Fuck that, I'm not taking a bath. It's freezing. If you can't just do it, then let's forget the whole thing."

His hopes of an effective ritual were dwindling by the moment. Maybe they
should
forget it. She definitely had the wrong attitude. What did she expect? Real magic was nothing like the movies, with powerful shapes appearing in columns of smoke, genies pumping from bottles; it didn't give you miraculous powers or cause objects to vanish or appear in midair. Those were stage illusions. Real magic was subtle. It whispered in your psyche, putting you in touch with sensations you rarely stopped to notice. You might smell flowers that weren't there, or unearthly incense. You might hear distant music, voices; or, with your eyes half open, glimpse faces that formed briefly in the shadows but vanished before you were quite sure you saw them. The real effects of magic were internal: increased self-confidence, a heightened awareness of natural beauty, a lingering feeling of calm excitement. It could be like the best parts of an acid trip, though far milder and longer lasting.

If Lenore wanted lightning bolts, shape-shifting, levitation, then she was bound to be disappointed.

But disappointment was a valuable lesson. He couldn't very well protect her from the experience. She had asked for it, after all.

"We have to undress," he said.

To his surprise, she didn't argue this point. She kicked off her boots and put them near the door, tugged off her jeans and tossed them in a wad with her shirt. Her small breasts looked slightly swollen, nipples protuberant in the chilly room.

"My panties stay on," she said. "I'm still bleeding a little."

"That's fine."

He closed the door and finished undressing himself. When he turned back to the altar, she was paging through the book. He ran his fingers lightly down her spine and felt her shiver.

"Sorry," he said. "My hands are like—"

"This one," she said, her voice hushed. Her finger lit on the frontispiece, drawn in dramatic black and red. It was the thirty-seventh mandala, the last in the book. He'd been working his way through the volume, but he hadn't yet gotten that far. It was a mandala with wavy spokes, a ring of dotted beads circling the circumference, and more of the beads clustered at the center.

"That's a kind of advanced one."

The look she gave him was final. Any further argument would only be destructive. She wanted to do a ritual for the first time in her life. She ought to be free to pick the one she wanted.

He flipped to the final rite. The thirty-seventh mandala.

Lenore moved back from the altar. From the corner of his eye he saw her looking avidly around the room, as if expecting weird creatures to swoop down from the cobwebbed corners. Someone trudged across the ceiling, making him wince; then they heard bedsprings creaking, muffled laughter. Tucker and Scarlet. He forced himself to ignore them, to concentrate.

He gathered a little salt on the dagger's tip and stirred it into the chalice, purifying blade and water alike. Holding the cup, he turned toward Lenore, intending to sprinkle her lightly before purifying the rest of the room.

No sooner had he raised the blade with the water trembling on its tip than Lenore stepped toward him, thrust the knife aside, and knocked the chalice from his hand. It landed without breaking, salt water spilling across the floor; as he knelt to scoop it up again, cursing at Lenore, she lifted the book off the altar and began to read the thirty-seventh rite.

"Lenore, what are you doing? We can't—"

A movement in the flickering air stuffed the warning back down his throat. Lenore, with her eyes fixed on the page, forehead creased in concentration, didn't see it. One candle, guttering, spewed smoky webs like a black rope ladder above the altar. As the thin rungs drifted into the room, something crawled out over them, toward Lenore.

She backed away unconsciously, out of its grasp, and knelt to snatch up the dagger. She rose with the athame held out before her, still chanting as if she had memorized the entire incantation.

She commenced carving lines in the air, drawing the thirty-seventh mandala flawlessly, without hesitation, and so quickly—despite its elaborate intertwinings—that he could almost see it hanging there in space above the altar, glowing with a black light, a seeping ultraviolet power that seemed to rush out of the wounded air like luminous blood pouring over her, physically pushing Lenore back so that she staggered and had to take her ground more firmly, planting her feet.

He rose stealthily and stood next to her, looking down at the book. She's making it up, he told himself, trying to find her place in the text; she's speaking in tongues, glossolalia.

But then he found her place on the page, toward the bottom of the passage, and saw that her recitation was letter-perfect, impossible as it seemed.

"...
nang gjya hehn cheg-cheo
..."

He felt his bare skin burning, as if that dark bloodlight had seared him, as if it were still running out of the carved air and pouring over him. He had never felt anything like this in a magic circle—not even when he'd coupled his rituals with psychedelics. This power was all Lenore's. She had uncorked it tonight.

As she approached the end of the page, he felt grateful that the incantation was about to end. Something about her frightened him. He wanted things back the way they had been: an indifferent Lenore with no interest in magic, not this stranger whose wide blue eyes were fixed far out beyond the tip of his athame, staring at a world to which he was blind.

"...
kaolhu
," she said, and that was the end of it, the bottom of the page.

But she kept going.

"...
kaolhu kef'n lakthog ranagh
..."

And on.

Numb, he turned the page and discovered that the invocation continued for another few lines. These were lines she had not even seen until now.

She recited them without faltering, without a single slip, straight to the end of the passage.

There was a moment's silence.

That, Michael thought, was the end of it. The webwork of candle soot had dissipated; whatever he'd seen using that frail network for a bridge, it was gone now. Silence hung upon the house, even quieting those upstairs. The music had ended. Lenore's arm hung at her side, the knife dangling, her eyes shut.

"Lenore," he whispered, wondering how to end what had not been properly begun.

She didn't seem to hear him. She stood quite still, a spot of reflected candlelight shimmering over her damp forehead.

"Lenore." He took her by the shoulders, intending to shake her slightly, but a sudden jabbing in his side made him jump back with a shout.

She'd pricked him with his own blade, warning him away.

He found himself watching her forehead, watching that point of light brighten. He moved between her and the candles, casting his shadow over her face, but the light didn't dim for an instant. It seemed to writhe, in turmoil, taking on definition; bright lines, thin as capillaries, etched her skin with a glowing light in the shape of a wheel. A mandala.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The symbol had separated from her now. Darkening, it floated in a mist of violet droplets. Blood. Lenore's forehead was also bloody, stamped with the symbol, while the thing itself now floated in the air between them, growing in size as it blackened in hue. Eyes broke out along its rim, viscous and wet as frog's eggs, dark alert specks floating in each tiny bulb. A second, smaller ring of eyes blinked out from around the crux of teeth. A lamprey mouth irised open as the black spokes, shiny and hard as the stems of black roses, began to revolve.