The 37th Mandala

22

Daggers of ice grew like deadly fruit in the bare white trees. Sunrise set the water-daggers gleaming, and also lit a frozen poison sheen that caked the highway, forcing Michael to slow down through the steep, winding gorges time had carved in the Smokies. The sheer rock walls to either side were cloaked in mist, bearded with frost. Icicles, layered like shark teeth, dripped from the ledges. He rode the brakes, watched his speed, gave the road exactly what it demanded—no more, no less, his panic held in check for the moment. He had a job to do and he was doing it. Lenore claimed she felt steady, normal, but there was still a trace of the alien in her eyes, and sometimes he thought he saw that whirling shape like a ghostly buzzsaw seething around her head.

Ahead were nearly three thousand miles of unfamiliar road. He couldn’t imagine how many days of travel that meant. He’d heard of people driving it in a few days without stopping, splitting shifts at the wheel, but he didn’t see how he could possibly manage that alone. He had a pocket full of Black Beauties now, thanks to Earl, but you could only ask so much of amphetamines. Eventually the body would enforce its need for sleep.

They had, as Lenore suggested, dragged his mother back to her car; she was breathing drunkenly but steadily, and his fear of concussion had gradually eased. Michael didn’t want to leave her car in the driveway, since he had good reason to make sure no one came around the house for as long as possible, so he’d given in to Lenore’s insistence that she was able to drive. He had driven his mother home in her own car, and Lenore had followed in the Beetle.

Earl was watching TV in his pajamas and bathrobe when Michael hammered on the door, but he’d pulled on a pair of boots and slogged out into the rain to help carry Michael’s mother into the house. They laid her on the bed, snoring now, while Michael explained how her car had come crashing into the driveway and he’d found her there unconscious, apparently having cracked her head in a minor crash. Earl didn’t ask too many questions, and Michael was anxious to get going. Then he remembered what he needed.

He’d already dug into his mother’s purse to take her gas station credit cards; she retained quite a collection from her crosscountry perambulations. He’d also taken what little cash she carried. But he needed more than that.

“Earl, I wonder if you could help me out.”

He had never asked Earl for anything before, and he could see that it warmed the man, as if they were coming closer together, Michael playing the role of son.

“Sure, boy. What can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure how to say this—I really don’t want her to know.” He gestured at the body laid out on the chenille bedspread.

“Well, then, she doesn’t have to.” He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder, easing the door shut. “Come on now, you can tell me.”

“Lenore and I are driving up to Manhattan to see some old friends for a few days.”

“Yeah? That sounds like a blast. Sure wish I could leave the state; I could use a vacation myself. What’s the problem, you need some money?”

Michael hunched into himself but managed to nod. It pained him to ask, but they needed something, and even sucking their checking account dry tonight at an ATM, before leaving town, wouldn’t get them very far. “I sure could use some,” he said. “But I also need some… some of what I saw you selling.”

Earl’s smile was wide and slow. “Well, well, boy, nothing escapes your notice, does it? I heard you had a taste for that sort of thing, but I never saw a sign of it. I thought you were clean.”

“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!

23

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.

24

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.

He found it ten miles later and came cruising in past rows of station wagons, family cars, people walking their dogs and stretching under floodlights where a few insects circled in the chill. As soon as he shut off the engine, the cold crept in to exert its claim on everything that dared to cross the plains this time of year. He draped himself and Lenore with blankets, then sank down in his seat and tried to get comfortable enough to sleep.

Comfort, it turned out, made no difference to his exhaustion. He was dreaming within minutes. He stirred once, hearing Lenore’s door slam, but didn’t wake. Her footsteps trailed off in the direction of the rest rooms.

His dreams were a surrealist’s collage of the day’s drive. Faces rushed toward him like pieces of the landscape, streaking around his eyes like the edges of the road. The tires squealed on sharp curves, the car rocked from side to side. His eyes began to burn—literally. Flames filled them, singeing his brain; flames lit the whole world, a ghastly orange scene of smoke and screaming and always the language of The Mandala Rites babbling at him, in Lenore’s voice, in his mother’s. Derek Crowe appeared in a state trooper’s uniform, tearing the door from its hinges, and as he dragged Michael from the car with metal fingers, his features dissolved into bloodred steam.

Michael woke hearing unintelligible words floating on the night wind. He had sprawled over into the passenger seat, the emergency brake handle gouging his thigh.

Sitting up, wide awake, he found he was alone in the car.

His breath had fogged the windows. With a corner of the blanket he tried to wipe a clear spot in the glass, but the smear was worse than the fog. He found a bottle of Windex between the seats and tried to squirt it on the glass, but the liquid had frozen to an icy slush and merely oozed all over his fingers. He dropped the bottle, cursing, and opened his door. Stepping out into the still air, he looked down the row of silent cars. Silent except for the voice, still chanting. Suddenly a woman rushed out from the open area between the rest rooms, glancing back over her shoulder as she hurried toward the cars.

Michael ran toward the brick shelter, hearing Lenore’s nightmare voice echoing louder, hearing car doors slam behind him.

“What’s going on in there?” a man called.

“Some crazy girl!” a woman answered.

The circular cement plaza was lined with vending machines, maps under Plexiglas, informative displays on the Great Plains. Lenore stood in the center of the circle with her arms reaching out to the sky. The moon, nearly full now, was visible through a weathered plastic skylight. She seemed to be pleading with it, screaming and shouting and weeping, tearing her hair and clothes. Her shirt was open, her breasts bared to the sky and the floodlights. But it wasn’t the moon she addressed.

Like a dark balloon bobbing against the plastic skylight, the black mandala hung tethered to her words, a thick black root buried deep in Lenore’s open throat.

Michael glanced back and saw a man moving cautiously forward from the cars, followed by the woman who had run from the plaza. He grabbed Lenore by the elbow and the mandala vanished. He pulled her into the dark behind the brick way-station. She wouldn’t stop raving, but there was no point wasting strength or time trying to shut her up. As soon as he got to the car, he thrust her in and started the engine. Headlights off, he drove down the short ramp toward the highway, leaning out his window for visibility. Glancing back as he gained the highway, he saw several figures gathering under the plaza floodlights.

It was one more scattered bit of havoc strewn in their trail. How long would it take the law to catch up with them if anyone ever managed to piece the loose links into a single chain? As soon as Tucker was discovered, he and Lenore would be wanted for questioning, no doubt of that; presumably the cops would interview Earl and start searching New York. But how could they ever tie that event to the North Carolina cop shot through the head with his own gun?

They couldn’t, that was a fact. At the very least, they should have time to get answers—and help—from Derek Crowe before anyone started looking for them. Tucker and Scarlet were always jaunting off for days at a time; they didn’t have anyone dependent on them, or anyone who’d come looking very hard.

For the time being, they were safe. He felt like a turtle in its shell, his whole world reduced to this tiny compartment that could carry him wherever he wished. His entire existence had sharpened to a single point. He had to stop thinking about his destination. It was waiting somewhere ahead; it would be there when the journey ended. First they had thousands of empty miles to deal with. Miles when he hardly dared sleep and couldn’t use the rest areas for fear of what Lenore would do in a crowd. At least he had this little world of his own, covered with protective symbols inside and out, a pentacle swinging from the rearview mirror, the cryptic Tarot emblem on the steering wheel. It gave him an infantile feeling of security: the roar of the engine was a mother’s heartbeat, a cat’s purr; it felt like a cradle rocking. He had come to resent even the necessity of pulling over to refuel, to eat.

The moon moved steadily ahead of him, downward, westward, followed by all the planets in their course. The car might have been another satellite, pulled by some force beyond his ability to identify—as inexplicable as gravity prior to Newton. Science had not managed to illuminate the universe’s moral nature; there was no road map for Michael’s real journey. But the mandalas knew the way, possessed of some insight that he lacked. Good, bad or neutral, they were, like gravity, irresistible.

25

Nicholas Strete, the reporter from the Bayrometer, was waiting for Derek just outside a North Beach coffee bar in the cold midday fog. At first he thought the kid was loitering, waiting for a bus or spare change; then he came forward grinning, and Derek saw he was carrying a laptop computer. He had expected a serious young man with a pencil behind his ear and a spiral notebook in his hand, ready to take shorthand notes. Strete looked childishly young, with long black hair, a silver nose ring, and clustered loops and gemmed studs in each ear. Bands of symmetrical tribal tattoos ran like chevrons from under the cuffs of his black leather jacket and out over the backs of his hands. But no mandalas, he was glad to see. “Mr. Crowe, I recognize you from your picture!” “Yes, hello.” He peered into the cafe, and Strete opened the door to usher him toward a booth in the corner. There were others at the table already, which caused him to hesitate. Friends of Strete’s? Journalistic parasites, hoping to sit in on the interview? “I hope you don’t mind,” Strete said as they approached the table; the other two rose to let him slide in if he wished, “but for this ‘Mandala Madness’ thing, I thought I’d do sort of a group interview. Originally I planned to just talk to you separately, then it occurred to me, more of a forum thing would be really cool.”

“Cool,” Derek echoed. The couple at the table were not much older than Strete. The male looked Asiatic, but when he extended his hand and greeted Derek, his voice was accented French. Derek’s skin crawled when he realized where he had heard it before.

“Mr. Crowe, at last we meet!” said the young man. “I am Etienne and this is Nina.”

“Club Mandala,” Derek said with undiluted venom.

“I assume you know each other,” said Strete.

“No, no! We have been waiting so long!”

“Too long,” said the woman, Nina. Her hair was black with red highlights, sleek and cut short, curving in toward her jaws like a helmet; she wore horn-rimmed black glasses, lipstick some shade of dark metallic green that reminded him of a tropical insect’s carapace. Her nails were painted to match. As she withdrew the hand Derek refused to take, he saw that her bare shoulder was brightly tattooed with a mandala that might have been taken intact from his book.

“I can’t believe your nerve,” he said in a low voice, glaring from one to the other.

“What’s that?” Strete said, swaying nervously between them. “Did I walk into something?”

“No, everything is fine!” Etienne said. “We relied on you to introduce us, Mr. Strete—this is so much better than a lawyer’s office! But now, I think, you can go.”

Strete bit his lip, looking baffled. “Uh… well, the article…”

“There’s plenty of time for that, don’t you worry,” Nina said, taking Strete by the shoulders and gently walking him away across the restaurant, leaning close to murmur in his ear. Derek watched them go. Etienne’s hand closed on his own shoulder.

“Come, have a seat with us,” he said very easily. “I really wish you would relax.”

Derek stiffened, but what was he to do? He had intended to confront them all along; if he could just shake off his surprise, he could reduce their advantage to nothing. He would come out on top of this with a few surprises of his own. He thought of how he had already sicced Huon on them, and smiled.

“Ah, that’s better! What would you like to drink? Capuccino? Let me get you something. I had an excellent macchiato.”

Derek avoided sliding into the booth, as Etienne seemed to be urging him, and dropped into a chair beside the table. Nina came sauntering back, leaving the journalist staring in at them through the window with vague disappointment; she gestured him away, and he went. She sat down in the booth and smiled sharply at Derek.

“I think Mr. Crowe would like just coffee, Etienne. Am I right?”

Derek nodded, beginning to enjoy this. He lived for these battles, didn’t he? He had never realized until lately just how much he enjoyed them: the sparring, the manipulation, the deceptions just beneath the surface. He almost broke out laughing, and Nina seemed to read his mood with uncanny accuracy, for she smirked and rolled her eyes as if to say Me too. They were all three sharing a nasty little secret.

“You’re all right with us, you know,” she said. “I mean… you’re right to be protective, and it’s good you keep the secrets… but you’re truly among your kind now. Do you understand?”

“Oh, I understand,” Derek said, and indulged himself in an open laugh.

Etienne set a cup before him and slid into the booth beside Nina. They stared at him for a few moments, then glanced at each other.

“Well,” Etienne said, “where do we begin?”

“How about this,” Derek said. “You tell me how you got ahold of the manuscript.”

Now they really gaped at each other. He had been right all along! Someone at Veritas had slipped it to them, sold it probably; he would love to get names, but he doubted they would betray their source. Still, the confirmation of his suspicions was enough.

“You are very well informed!” Etienne said. “I admit, I am impressed.”

“Amazing,” Nina agreed.

“But if you know so much, do you really need to be told that? Does our agent’s name matter? He was dispensable; he did as we directed, and we had nothing further to do with him.”

“You paid him, I suppose.”

“Paid him?” Nina suppressed a gleeful laugh. “We cut him loose, that was his reward.”

Etienne was snorting with mirth. “Yes, completely loose. I don’t think he got very far after that. Not so far from home.”

“That would have been a long walk, I think!” Nina said.

Derek had to backpedal up a bit. They had lost him somewhere, or else he wasn’t catching the full implications of what they were saying.

“And the mines,” Etienne said. “Do you realize how many millions of mines were sown in Kampuchea? How many years it would take to disarm them? Each one costs money, and Cambodia is a very, very poor country.”

“Wait a minute,” Derek said. “Cambodia.”

“Of course, that’s where the manuscript was kept. It was written in Tuol Sleng, and that’s where it stayed.”

Tuol Sleng again? Derek thought. Now he was truly lost—and his fear once again running rampant. It wasn’t just the possibility of blackmail that frightened him; the idea occurred to him that a larger danger was brewing, one that involved him and Huon and these two, and who knew who else besides?

“We got a very good copy though. We found someone with legitimate access and borrowed him for a while.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said. “My lawyer is on the verge of sending you a cease-and-desist letter. It doesn’t take long to get a temporary restraining order, you know. I could shut down your club before it opens.”

Etienne looked hurt. “Mr. Crowe, please… what is the issue?”

“The issue is your infringement of my property.”

“Oh, now that is novel,” said Nina. “Infringement? What can you possibly mean?”

“It’s my obligation to defend the mandalas or lose my right to them.”

“Yes, defend them, by all means! We all are defenders, aren’t we? But at the same time… we want them to get around, now, don’t we?” Etienne leaned close, his breath wretched from coffee, like a blast from a cat box. “You’ve seen our posters, our flyers?”

“Your computer viruses, yes. But don’t tell me you didn’t pull them all, steal them from my book.”

“Oh, my,” Nina said, sitting upright, quite serious and startled now. “Etienne, I think we have misjudged Mr. Crowe.”

Etienne looked naively surprised. “Yes, dear, I think so too.” He lit a cigarette, offering the pack to Derek, who declined. “Mr. Crowe… where did you get the designs?”

Derek blinked, uncertain how to answer. “It—it’s in my book,” he said.

“Very good. And it doesn’t suggest to you that the mandalas might speak to more than just your Ms. A?”

“I suppose… in theory.” And this was just what he had told Huon the night before. But he hadn’t believed it himself; nor did he now.

“My dear, perhaps we should show Mr. Crowe the manuscript.”

A conspiratorial look.

“He is one of us, whether he knows it or not. I suppose he ought to see.”

Etienne opened a small leather valise that lay on the seat beside him and took out a velobound folder with black vinyl covers. It looked like a business report, some shareholder’s document, until he riffled the pages and Derek saw they were photocopies of lined notebook paper, covered with handwriting and diagrams. The script was in characters unfamiliar to him, but it came as no surprise to see mandalas scattered throughout. His mandalas.

“I assume you recognize these,” said Etienne.

“What does this prove, except that you copied them?”

“Look at the dates,” Nina said, pointing to the bottom of one page, where Derek saw a thumbprint and small notations in Arabic: 15-10-78. Which, since there was no fifteenth month, must have indicated October 15, 1978.

“We can authenticate them, if you persist in doubting,” said Nina. “But why should you?”

Derek sagged, caught off guard once more. How far could he reasonably pursue his threats of a lawsuit? What would his own story sound like in court? Who would appear the greater idiot before a jury? Assuming they could prove their claims that these mandalas had been drawn a dozen years before he’d even seen Elias Mooney’s collection, what did that tell him, except that the skin and the notebooks and these pages all shared a common origin? He had given enough lip service to reality; he might as well bow to it. Here was the real author of the mandalas.

“The writing is my father’s,” said Etienne. “I assume you do not read Khmer?”

“No,” Derek growled.

“He was not Cambodian, but he was a fluent student of the culture. Many young Cambodian intellectuals and activists came to Paris for an education and ended up studying communism. My father was an anthropologist, but more, he was a Cambodian junkie; he emulated, I think, everything about his exotic friends—even embraced the Communist revolution in Cambodia, which had nothing to do with him. When I was very young, he moved there altogether, leaving me with my mother in Paris; there was no place for a child in what he was doing.”

“Poor boy,” Nina said, patting Etienne’s forearm. “Abandoned at a tender age.”

“Well, he was right. I have no longing for the guerrilla life.”

“Guerrilla?” Derek asked.

“Yes, he lived in the jungles with the Communist Party of Kampuchea—the Khmer Rouge. They were on the run, you know, till they took Phnom Penh in 1975. But it must not have been long before he lost his illusions about politics and returned to his true passion—anthropology. He vanished into a remote plateau, cutting himself off even from the Red Khmer, and lost himself among the phnong, the hill tribes. The older cultures interested him more than politics. He lived with one semi-nomadic group for many years, a tribe that called itself the people of the mandala.” Etienne grinned and nodded when he saw Derek’s eyes. “Oh, yes. That is not the Khmer word, but it will do. It is a good word for our purposes.”

Nina smiled. “It evokes such beautiful feelings,” she said. “Among your readers, for instance.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Crowe. I love what you have done with them! They will reach a much wider audience the way you’ve painted them—a wide and unsuspecting audience. And the emotions released when their true nature is understood… the mandalas will feast on that!”

“Go on,” Derek said in irritation. “Your father lived with this tribe for how long?”

“Well, I think he would be there still if his old friends the Khmer Rouge hadn’t tracked him down and hauled him back to Phnom Penh. They called him a traitor to the party. They accused him of training the tribes for a counterrevolutionary offensive, working for Vietnam or the KGB or the CIA. He expected to be forced to confess his part in a conspiracy to overthrow Democratic Kampuchea, but instead he found himself an object of other attention. His body, you see, was covered with sak. These are magic tattoos he had received among the phnong.”

Derek grew rigid, not out of fear that his own secret was about to be revealed but because at last he had a glimpse of the skin’s original owner—and of its origins. This was a story that not even Elias Mooney had seen, with all his talk of astral investigation. He must be triply careful himself to reveal nothing.

Still, he had to say something: “Tattoos?”

“In Cambodia they were very common, especially among soldiers and the tribal people. The sak are like amulets—most often Buddhist symbols of power and protection. The soldiers of Lon Nol, who held Phnom Penh until Pol Pot seized it, had little training or weapons. They relied on talismans. Many were covered head to toe with sak. This didn’t keep the city from falling, of course. My father’s sak were different. They were unique to his tribe—I mean the phnong who took him. And there was one interrogator in Tuol Sleng who took a particular interest in them.

“Chhith was his name. He treated my father very well at first; the interrogations began to resemble anthropological discussions. Chhith asked my father to write down everything he had learned from the phnong, and in return he became his protector in Tuol Sleng. Of course, Chhith’s motives were not what you would call pure. The mandalas spoke to him, through my father, and he believed he could somehow control and use them for his own ends. The three of us understand that the mandalas wish to be spread—but Chhith worked to keep them to himself. A very selfish man, and doomed because of that. He misunderstood them completely; he wished to take their domain for his own.

“After my father’s death, there were a series of murders in Phnom Penh, which was already a skeleton city, a fraction of its original populace working for the Khmer Rouge under rigid strictures, while the rest were out dying in the countryside. At each of the murder sites, one of the mandalas appeared crudely painted in the victim’s blood. Chhith was sacrificing to them, you see? As if they needed his help in that respect! The killing fields were feeding them plenty. And they must have been fat already after the war in Vietnam, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the Maoist revolution, the Korean war… well, we could go back and back. The twentieth century has been a time of unparalleled feasting, has it not?”

But Derek was thinking of Huon’s story, his concern for his constituents—among them, no doubt, many refugees from the Phnom Penh of those days. “So there are other Cambodians who know about the mandalas? Others who would recognize them in my book or the posters for your club?”

Etienne looked puzzled. “Very few, perhaps. I do not think many. The people in Phnom Penh were kept like prisoners; they wouldn’t have come in contact with Chhith or his sacrifices. And the people of the mandala, the tribe that had kept their secrets for ages, they were wiped out by the same Khmer Rouge who captured my father. It was that act, in fact, which truly set them free.”

“How do you mean?”

Etienne looked down at the notebook he held. “It is hard to be sure exactly—what I have here are fragments of the whole confession. We wanted to be sure of getting the images, that was the main thing. I’ve pieced together the story from the writing that surrounds my father’s drawings—these pieces here and here. I believe he was initiated into the mysteries of the mandalas gradually, over the years he dwelt with the phnong. Now in the tribe were thirty-seven initiates, each devoted to one particular mandala; when one initiate died, a new one must take his place. My father was honored to receive one initiation, and with it one sak—the mark of his own guardian mandala. It was not created with needles and pigments, like other tattoos; it appeared spontaneously at the climax of the ceremony, along with a rush of clairvoyant visions. I suppose you must have had a taste of those yourself, eh?”

Derek chewed the inside of his cheek, still determined to give away nothing until he knew exactly where he stood. He pointed at Nina’s mandala tattoo. “I suppose that was spontaneous too.”

She looked crestfallen, shaking her head. “This is only mimicry, I’m afraid. I have not yet felt their touch, like Etienne.”

“You?”

Etienne grinned slowly and pulled down the collar of his black T-shirt. In the center of his nearly hairless chest, small and sharp as an engraving, was one of the intricate mandala patterns, a sun disk of radiating lines tipped in barbed hooks.

“Were you drunk when you got that?” Derek asked, figuring that his best bet now was to break the mood of rampant occult insanity.

“Drunk? No. A more lasting and enlightening intoxication nourishes me,” Etienne said. “You must have your own sak, Mr. Crowe.”

“I’m not about to bare my ass in public.”

The couple laughed. At least they had a sense of humor.

“Well,” Etienne said, “my father did have them on his ass. And everywhere else. The night the phnong were massacred, while he lay in captivity, the thirty-seven came to him—through him. He had visions then—visions such as we can never conceive. Imagine your own experience, multiplied by thirty-seven. All of them coming through you, into you, at once. It must have been magnificent! He was the last initiate. He had to become their vehicle, their vessel. They did not perhaps trust him to keep his sanity for long, and so they made sure to impress themselves on my father in a way that was… indelible. What a sight he must have been!”

“You never saw him yourself?” Derek asked cautiously.

“I was only a boy, and in France at the time. It was not until later that I tried to trace him. I was denied access to the records of Tuol Sleng, since he was considered an active member of the Khmer Rouge, not one of its innocent victims. Then one day a man found me, a Khmer himself; he told me some of my father’s story, though not all, and questioned me closely. He was looking for my father’s skin, and thought it might have come to me after the fall of the Phnom Penh.”

Derek strove to sound shocked and surprised. “His… skin?”

“Yes. You see, in the end, Chhith had my father flayed. It was the only way to be sure of preserving the mandalas intact, I suppose. Then when the Vietnamese took Phnom Penh, Chhith escaped but lost the skin. This man said he had been imprisoned beside my father in Tuol Sleng and had befriended him there.”

Etienne began to chuckle, looking over at Nina, who was laughing too. But Derek did not consider at first why they were laughing so hard. He was thinking: My God! It must be Huon!

“Excuse me, but that was the final irony,” Etienne said. “This man who said he was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, himself a victim of torture, I felt very bad for him. I thought he must have suffered as my father suffered. And I still thank him, you know, for setting me on the path that led me to the mandalas. He showed me a few of the designs—I first had them through him. It is all very funny, really.”

“I don’t follow you.”

Etienne put his thumb down on a line of Khmer script. “Here, my father is writing directly to Chhith, thanking him for his interest and protection, sympathizing with his own losses in the service of the Khmer Rouge, ingratiating himself. It is my father’s brief and touching homage to the man who was about to murder and skin him. But when I finally read this passage, I recognized him.”

“Recognized who?”

“My father’s so-called friend, the one who sought me out. He was terribly scarred, you see, and missing one ear.”

Yes, Huon!

“And here,” Etienne said, emphasizing lines that Derek could not read, “my father calls Chhith, fondly, ‘my one-eared fellow sufferer.’ “

Etienne and Nina convulsed into laughter again. It did not sound ironic in the least—it was good-natured, almost whimsical. But Derek could take no part in it. He felt as if the room were sliding away from him; as if some livid wheel were even now appearing in the center of his chest, flooding him with awful insight. Huon was Chhith, the concentration camp interrogator, the torturer and sacrificial murderer. He was still on the trail of the mandala skin, and it had brought him to Derek. He had narrowly deflected the monster… but for how long?

“You do not look amused, Mr. Crowe,” said Etienne.

“I—I know this man,” Derek blurted, because now there could be no joking, nor could he keep this a secret. He must warn them. He swallowed nervously, as if ashamed before Etienne’s look of astonishment, and went on. “He came to me the other night. I think now he was looking for your father’s skin. He thought I had it, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I pointed him in your direction. I even gave him your number.”

“No!” The couple looked at each other again, and Derek expected horror and dismay; but instead the news sent them once again into hysterics, whooping with laughter.

“Chhith is here!” Etienne cried in jubilation.

“He called himself Huon,” Derek said.

“Yes, Huon! The name he used when he said he was my father’s friend.”

Nina said, “I told you! I’ve been getting strange calls, someone hanging up when I answer. He must be waiting to hear your voice.”

“I don’t believe it! Well, it is all coming together.” Etienne looked almost smug. He sat back in the booth, arms crossed, beaming.

“You’re not… nervous?” Derek asked.

“Goodness, no.”

“I mean, if this is the man you think… he tortured and murdered your father, and how many others besides?”

Etienne made a dismissive gesture. “I am ready for him this time. He doesn’t know what we know about him. And he still persists, apparently, in wanting the mandalas to himself. He is pathetic, really.”

“He says he’s a councilman in Orange County.”

“That would be like the Jews nominating a Nazi as their spokesman. Chhith is too well-known. I think he must be traveling inconspicuously. I wouldn’t worry about him, nor should you. The mandalas will take care of us.”

Derek sat rubbing his temples now. He rose with his coffee cup, went to the counter, and waited for them to refill it. When he returned to the table, he felt he had resigned himself to this alliance—this partnership—whatever it was. Well, at the very least, he had saved himself a great deal in legal fees.

“You know,” he said, “I still don’t know what you want with me.”

“From you? My God, nothing! Or I should say, your blessing.”

“My blessing?”

“Yes. For Club Mandala. The opening is near. We could all benefit from this—our club will boost your book, and your book has no doubt drawn attention to us.”

“No doubt.”

“I think when you see the place you will be impressed. It is a tribute to my father. It will do the mandalas’ work in a very modern way, we like to think.”

“You must come by and see,” Nina said emphatically clutching his hand. “We feel very close to you, Mr. Crowe.”

Derek did not bother retrieving his hand. Resignation mixed now with thoughts of inflated profits. Maybe they were right—he hadn’t really hit the club-goers with his book, which was too much limited to the New Agers. Besides, he thought, she was pretty sexy. He enjoyed her cool fingers, and found himself suddenly thinking of Lenore Renzler.

A sharper pang ran through him then. These two were like the Renzlers in a way, but so much more polished. Etienne’s demeanor spoke of money—old money. How else could a young kid come up with the cash to open a club in the city? It was odd, because their conversation was, if anything, even more insane than Michael Renzler’s babble; but it was grounded in reality, and he had no problem separating the obvious fantasies and falsehoods from the kernels of fact at the center of those hallucinations. In Michael Renzler’s case, everything had been equally improbable. Lenore was a lost soul, attached to another weaker, unmoored soul; Nina had found a solid place beside Etienne. Nor did he have that sense of losing his mind, which conversations with Elias had always given him; Etienne lacked the psychotic’s edge. They seemed like reasonable types, businesslike, determined. They were getting things done, making their mark on the world. He found to his surprise that he liked them very much.

“You will consider it?” Etienne said. “We will happily acknowledge our debt to your book, if you like. Let’s leave the actual history in the dust. I think your approach is more consumer-friendly; it has a much wider appeal. No one wants to hear about prisoners of war! You needn’t do any work with us, nothing like that, but it would be a great honor to have you in attendance for the opening. Our special guest of honor. Our mentor. What do you say?”

Derek shrugged. “Why not?”

“Wonderful!”

“I should really call back poor Mr. Strete for his interview,” Nina said with mocking sorrow. “Do you have a little longer, Mr. Crowe?”

“I… have nowhere to go.”

She pulled a phone from her purse and quickly punched a number. “Hello, Nicholas? Yes, we’re ready for you now. Oh, let’s do it, yes. We’d really like to see your article in time for the opening.” She looked up at Derek and gave him a wink. “Yes, Mr. Crowe is here too. Come back, darling. We don’t mean to be fickle. We want you. We need you.” Her eyes slid past Derek, out the window, and she waved. “Very good. Hello! Bye-bye!”

Derek twisted around and saw that Strete was sitting across the way, on the steps of a church, waiting with his laptop in his hand, phone to his ear, his hangdog expression turning joyous as he rose and started into traffic.

“Poor little puppy dog,” Nina said. “I told him to stay, and you see how long he obeyed? He’ll write whatever we want.”

26

Purple twilight drenched the cloud-feathered New Mexico sky, pooling in snowmelt that puddled a muddy rest stop edged with barrows of dirty ice. Lenore sat in the car, watching the rest rooms. They had bought Mexican take-out that afternoon, and Michael began complaining of stomach cramps immediately after eating. They had stopped at every rest area since then. She knew he didn’t like bringing her around other people, but this time he had no choice. At least theirs was the only car in the parking lot.

Scabby started scratching at the glass, climbing over the seat-back, yowling. She looked at the cat and saw distress. It occurred to her that Michael had shared his taco with Scabby.

“Thanks for the warning,” she said, and dug their makeshift leash out of the glove box. She tied the length of clothesline to Scabby’s flea collar, then opened her door and got out, burrowing into her coat against the cold desert wind. Scabby ran ahead of her, darting a few steps, sniffing around a puddle, raising her head to taste the wind, then darting on another few yards.

At the far end of the rest area was a livestock corral, as in every rest area they’d visited recently. Michael joked about Texans getting out to walk their cattle, but they couldn’t imagine what else the corrals were for. The wooden boards ran in black lines against the thinning orange band where the sun had set. Scabby tugged Lenore toward the corral. The fenceposts were topped with bright little caps of snow, luminous in this light; the black mud within was trampled and churned.

Lenore tried climbing to the top of the fence, but the leash slipped from her fingers and Scabby scraped under the boards into the corral itself, as into a mucky moonscape. She swore, then jumped down inside after the cat. Her sneakers squelched into mud, trapped, but she didn’t have to hurry. After sniffing at a soggy cowpie, Scabby went into a squat. Lenore snatched up the end of the leash, then went back to the fence, careful to leave plenty of slack so the poor cat wouldn’t get pulled off balance while she poised on her haunches, tail quivering.

As Lenore leaned against the fence rails, looking through the slats, she saw a blue compact car driving slowly down the length of the parking area, headlights extinguished. It glided past the last parking space, turning onto a small length of access road that led right up to the corral. The violet clouds melting into darkness overhead suddenly sprouted fangs and talons, leaning over her warningly as the wood beneath her fingers hardened and sharpened into a thousand jagged, splintered knives. Lenore pressed closer to the fence, taking the warning personally.

She knelt down, reeling in Scabby before the cat could begin piling mud over its turds. The car came to a stop near a big Dumpster, halfway between the parking lot and the corral. A tall, broad-shouldered man got out, seeming bigger than the tiny compartment could have held. In the poor light she could see nothing but his shape. His face was a black blur; his whole head seemed to be wrapped in a caul, soft and shifting, clinging to him like a plastic bag. He moved furtively to the back of the car. Headlights streamed behind him on the highway; his figure seemed to bend and throw the light, like a smoky prism. That smooth head rotated like a camera on an oiled bearing, scanning the parking lot. Lenore held her breath as the cold monitor swept its gaze over the corral, even though she knew she was no more than a shadow among many others. With the black eastern sky behind her, she was all but invisible.

Satisfied that he was alone, the man moved to the rear of the car. The trunk flew up, hiding him. He reappeared carrying two parcels in Mack plastic trash bags. Lenore knew instantly what was in them. She could see exactly how he had wrapped the dismembered parts individually in Sa ran Wrap, then bundled them together and wrapped the bundles again in plastic wound in silver duct tape, then sealed those larger bundles into the trash bags. There were more bags in the trunk. She could smell the blood—smell it in the car, from this and prior trips; she could smell it also on his breath and oozing from his

He trudged straight toward the Dumpster. Reaching ft. he momentarily shifted both bags to one hand and shoved at the cover. She could see him straining, could see the moment he realized it was locked. He cursed and moved back, stood midway between the Dumpster and the car, tense, seeming to darken to a deeper shade of black as the last of the light leached from the sky and the clouds went gray.

Scabby took that moment to dart from the corral the muddy leash slipping through Lenore’s fingers.

She crouched lower, but the cats movement caught the man’s eye. He hurried back to the car, threw the parcels into the trunk, and slammed the hood shut. Then he waited as Scabby came padding toward him. He wasn’t looking at the cat. though: he was staring at the corral.

Lenore saw the black swirl of face condensing around two whirlpools of ink where his eves must have been. They seemed to invert, thrusting out like a snail’s eyes, roving over the seal of dark-against-dark where the fence lay against the night and Lenore huddled within the wooden grid, the only thing that wasn’t utterly rigid and angular. The tarry eyestalks quivered, while in the lower half of the blank face a pit formed slowly, like Mack plastic drawn into a suffocating mouth.

Scabby crouched at the man’s feet, meowing loudly. The man stepped over the calico, taking a few steps toward the corral. He was corning for Lenore now.

Lenore shut her eyes, wanting to escape, to block this out—but she had already made her deal with the mandala. She would see everything; no more blackouts.

Once more she sprang upward, liberated into the sky. She seemed to be hovering just above the fence. She could see the man ahead of her, his features clearer than before, although still hidden inside the murky sac that enclosed his head. This bag now detached itself and came drifting toward her, flattening, spinning, spreading out as it came; it dragged itself along with barely visible filaments, like a crippled jellyfish groping its way among enormous molecules. The man dragged along after it, his ears cocked for the sound of Lenore’s breath; she wondered if he could smell her, as she smelled him.

The man’s mandala stopped and extended itself completely, blazing with darkness against the black nest of the sky. It glowed and flickered with internal colors, as if expressing itself through coded pulses of light; but Lenore wasted no time decipering the message. Her mandala flung itself at its opponent, and as they joined, the man himself stumbled and dropped to one knee.

Lenore felt as if she were riding a vicious steed into battle. She sat apart from the fight, but only by the thinnest of margins. Slashing barbs and irising teeth fought slime and rippling tissue that tensed and purled like infinitely elastic muscle, a liquid form that escaped any possible grip, healing instantly wherever it was cut, so that it could no more be wounded than water. Lenore found herself observing the struggle with something like love for her protector. She had never felt so completely cared for. This was well, for at that moment she could not have moved her body, no more than the man who knelt staring hungrily at her, oblivious to the battle overhead, wanting to reach Lenore but finding his strength and will had abandoned him for no reason he could understand.

Just then there was an explosive, sucking roar from the rest rooms. The man jerked upright, looking over at the building, then back at Lenore. He got to his feet and staggered toward the car, wrenching his mandala away from Lenore’s, the puppet pulling its master along for once. Human fear had resolved the struggle.

He threw himself into the car, slammed the door, and backed out in a slather of mud. Lenore saw the smoky blob of his mandala sinking through the roof of the car, rejoining him. Her own mandala had not given up, however. It threw itself onto the roof and lashed down sharply several times as the vehicle wove away. Lenore could feel it striking into softness within and grabbing at something hard as a polished bone knob, unprotected in the core of a quivering warm blur. It took control of the man as easily as that; and while the other mandala swarmed up and over it—over her—it could find no weakness, no opening by which it could reclaim its pet.

The car sped straight across the highway, jounced violently over the dividing barrier of brushy mud, and swerved into the opposite lane. As the car screeched out into traffic, its headlights were still doused; but it was well lit by the oncoming truck that plowed into it.

The collision surrounded Lenore. She could not quite manage to put herself entirely back into her eyes, which peered blankly through the fence rails. Instead, with a ravenous hunger she hardly recognized, she found herself caught in the crash as the car went twisting and crumpling under the truck’s enormous cab, as the truck careened out of control across both lanes and went off into gravel and ice at the side of the road, shoving the car ahead of it, scraping sparks and trailing smoke, the screams of so many voices dividing up her attention as the cars behind the truck drove into its trailer, which had swung out ahead of them like a sudden wall, metal collapsing into metal, flesh squeezed somewhere in the middle. A dozen souls popped free, desperate and scattered in their shock and agony, and Lenore was there as her mandala swooped down like a bat catching moths, like a bird dipping over a lake at twilight to catch low-flitting insects, nipping a bit of horror here, and there a taste of shock and disbelief, love lost, my children, no this isn’t happening, everything undone… It was the terrible surprise that gave everything its sharpest, most addictive flavor, its intensity, so strong and nourishing that some of it flooded straight through the mandala into Lenore, jolting her all the way back into her body.

She threw herself over the wooden barrier as Michael came running from the rest room, hitching at his pants. The cars and truck had come to rest across the highway, and in the dark it was hard to see more than a tangled heap of smoking shapes, a lick of hidden flame here and there to suggest the horror of the wreck in bright glimpses of bare steel and blood-slicked glass.

Lenore caught Michael by the arm and pulled him toward the Beetle.

“What happened?” he was saying. “What happened?”

“Get going, Michael, please—let’s just get out of here!”

“Someone could be hurt. We should call—”

“Someone else will call. Other people have car phones. Just go!”

She didn’t relax until the flames, growing higher behind them, had faded into distance on the long straight highway.

Soon they passed the first of the ambulances heading east.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Michael said. “Did it have something to do with… with them?”

“No, Michael. It was just an accident. I didn’t see a thing until it was happening. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He doubted her, she knew. It was an awkward lie. But he would have been equally skeptical of the truth.

A hundred miles later, he finally dared to speak again. He looked in the back of the car, then over at her, eyes wide, in a panic. “Where’s Scabby?”

27

On his way out of the building, Derek stopped to check his mail. The foyer reeked of piss; he had found a derelict sleeping in it the night before, and now the carpet squelched underfoot. He had to wrestle with the battered mailbox to get his compartment open; most of the doors had been bent out of shape by check-pilferers, and his was one of the few that even locked. Inside was a wad of junk mail, which he deposited in the paper-recycling bin conveniently located beside the mailboxes. The only other item was a postcard, which he glanced at curiously, since it was hand-lettered and he didn’t recognize the writing. Of course, once he saw the signature he knew who it was:

The face of the card showed a strikingly done mandala, and elegant lettering: Club Mandala (& Gallery 37). He could see now that these were not exactly his designs. The images in his book and those Etienne and Nina used in their posters were similar but not identical; they represented the work of different artists portraying the same subjects, and there were slight but appreciable differences in the renditions.

He felt relaxed today, absolved of a tremendous weight. Entering an ambush where he had expected to meet only enemies, he had emerged with two new friends—allies, in fact, who might well help him push his book into realms of actual profitability.

Etienne’s beliefs, of course, were as mad as Elias Mooney’s, but he seemed to have sound business sense. He was the sort who could make a career of madness—not to mention a fortune.

Derek tucked the card into his pocket, considering it a pleasant coincidence, since he was even now on his way to inspect the club.

The waiting taxi carried him across Market Street, through the brisk mix of scavengers, tourists, and workers who made the downtown district simultaneously so exciting and depressing. The new office towers fell behind, and older commercial buildings rolled past. The cab pulled up in a region of dense shadow, and he had paid and stepped out before he realized why it was so dark down here.

The belly of a freeway hung above him, gray and ponderous, with no sound of cars clacking down from above. It was a section of the interstate, closed off since the last earthquake, awaiting either retrofitting or demolition. Derek hardly grasped the reason for his apprehension, the sudden chill and sense of suffocation. On an ivy-covered bank above the street, close to one of the huge concrete pylons, were a cluster of cardboard houses and ragged blankets; but these barely snagged his eye, for on the pylon itself someone had stenciled an immense mandala, one of the thirty-seven. He spun around, bereft of bearings, and homed in on a grubby brick warehouse that stood beside the freeway, unremarkable except for the elaborate neon sign (dark now) above its door, the tubes of brightly powdered glass forming intricate wheels whose glowing splendor in full darkness he could only begin to imagine. Between two such pale mandalas, awaiting only electricity to come alive, were the words “Club Mandala” in a script like cursive writ in glass; the letters looked almost hieroglyphic.

He rang the bell beside the door but heard nothing. Once more he glanced up at the overpass, noticing another mandala impossibly stenciled on the underside. They were on the street and sidewalk as well, etched in cement like celebrity footprints. Before he could begin to count them, Nina said, “You made it! We were afraid we’d scared you off.”

“Now, what could scare Mr. Crowe?” said Etienne, coming up behind her. They opened the door wide, into a shadowy vastness, and Derek entered between them. Nina slid her arm into his, and he thought of Lilith, thankful he had all this to distract him from what otherwise would have been days of gloom and obsession.

“I got your invitation this morning,” Derek said. “It came quicker than I’d expected.”

“Oh, we mailed it before we met you—we were sure you’d come. Now, the tour!”

The warehouse was divided into a number of rooms on the ground floor. The central room, a dance hall, was two stories tall, with lofts and balconies edging it; there were a number of other smaller chambers on the ground floor, and stairs running up and down. Each wall in the main room was embellished with an immense mandala, smaller mandalas of varying sizes arranged in overlapping orbits around them. He was reminded of the tattooed skin, similarly crowded. A few painters were up on ladders, putting finishing touches on the mandalas. In the center of the dance floor was the largest of all the wheels, the one that figured last in his book and also served as frontispiece, with its central circle of lamprey teeth and its outer ring of speckled eyes. They took a wide path around it, since it was still incomplete; several women were on their knees, painting in the sketched tendrils. The thing was coming to life even as he watched.

“Wow” was about all Derek could think to say. Nina pulled him tighter, beaming with pleasure.

They toured the adjacent rooms on the ground floor, where the walls were hung with framed fine-art versions of the mandalas. They looked too symmetrical to have been done by hand; peering close he could see no ink marks.

“Are these prints?” he asked.

“An artist friend of ours does them on computer—he’s the one who sneaked that little program into your system, I’m afraid.”

Derek shrugged. “No harm done. It’s nice work.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him you said so. He’ll be at the opening—you two can meet. He is also, you see, one of us.”

One of “us,” Derek thought. He had come farther down this path than he cared to consider; his relationship with Etienne and Nina was dependent to a certain extent on continued deception, at least as to his own beliefs.

They made their way upstairs, through a connected series of smaller rooms; mandala prints were centered on every wall. Mandalas dotted the floors like the tracks of some strange beast. Everywhere they went, assistants were mounting lights or putting finishing touches on the hand-painted mandalas. A number of them wore mandala tattoos, but apparently these were in reference to the club alone, and not to his book, for when Nina introduced Derek, his name meant nothing to them.

“We’ve ordered copies of The Mandala Rites,” Etienne reassured him. “If we can borrow you for a little while, we’ll have you sign a few during the party.”

“Yes, and we’re recording all the keys,” said Nina. “They’ll be playing all night, right along with the music.”

“It will be wild!” said Etienne. “And think of all the drugs! Many very receptive minds… the total effect will be incredible. We have also commissioned a number of mandala paintings from local artists. They should be arriving very soon.”

“And Nicholas Strete tells me his article will be in tomorrow’s edition—just in time for the opening!”

“Everything’s coming together,” Etienne said gleefully, rubbing his palms briskly together. At that moment they were passing a window on a level with the raised freeway; little could be seen outside except the gray concrete slab, but there was a gap visible just below the freeway, through which one could barely see the street.

“Speaking of which,” Etienne said, pausing to point down at the pavement, “I saw our friend Chhith—or should I say Huon?—sometime in the night, just down there.”

“Did you?” Derek said nervously.

“He must be very curious.”

“He must be very angry,” Nina said, “to see his precious mandalas let loose like this—given out so freely to everyone.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll come around,” said Etienne.

“I’m sorry I gave him your name,” Derek said.

“Don’t worry about that. I’m glad to see him, actually. He belongs with us. Only his role may not be quite what he expects.”

“Etienne!” A fellow with a long ponytail and shaved temples was coming down the corridor. “We’re having a problem with the sound.”

“Excuse us a moment, Derek,” Etienne said. “Feel free to explore.”

They left him at the window, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering, voices echoing through the building where everything seemed bright and new and happy, and anticipation was almost a tangible substance.

Derek had a sense, then, of the mandalas as a budding cottage industry. What would Elias Mooney think of this? At least he couldn’t have blamed it on Derek, which was some comfort. The mandalas would have surfaced anyway, with or without The Mandala Rites. In fact, he supposed his book would have a negligible impact on the public, compared to the exposure the mandalas were about to get at Club Mandala.

What he had done with Eli’s notebooks was only a minor mischief.

And he had never actually sworn to burn them, had he? He’d tried countless times to remember exactly what he’d said to Elias on their final night together, but the act of remembering seemed to push things around in his head and alter the memories themselves. He was reasonably sure he hadn’t promised anything. What the hell. No harm was done, in the end.

It was time to put away his guilt. Swallow his sins and get over it. He was torturing himself, which was pointless.

Except, of course, as Lilith had shown him, he was a bit of a masochist—a martyr without a cause. She loved to point out the pleasure he took from writhing in the hair shirt of his occult hypocrisy, writing books for the praise of people he considered imbeciles. What could be more masochistic than that? By comparison, her candlewax drippings and needle-pricks and plier squeezes were gentle teases, a child’s game. It little pleased him to realize he had now created for himself a world based entirely on this masochism. He was in league with fools and madmen who had been taken in by their own con; by coincidence, it was his con as well. Derek was apparently the only one still undeceived.

If he had been a superstitious man, if he really had been convinced by Elias, he never would have published the Rites. But by doing so, he had proven to himself that Eli’s ranting was nothing but nonsense. The old man was a fool, and everything he thought he’d seen in Eli’s house was a ludicrous dream. He had deserted the so-called shaman not out of fear, not because he dreaded some false cathartic confrontation with his “Shadow,” but because flight had been the only sure way of preserving his sanity.

Once Bob Maltzman had expressed interest in the mandala notebooks, Derek had found himself unable to present them without revision. The old man’s basic view of reality was too bleak and strange for mass consumption. He had altered the text of the ledgers not as a precaution against invoking evil, but simply to enlarge his audience and put some of his own work into the final book, so that he wouldn’t feel he was simply plagiarizing. It gave him an odd feeling of power to revise Eli’s universe in this fashion. By couching the incantations in New Age terms, borrowing phrases and attitudes from other popular books, he had transformed the Rites from something dark and unholy into a message of spiritual hope for an optimistic but easily frightened readership.

The gibberish of the rites themselves he had left untouched. What difference did that make?

Derek acknowledged the presence of a tiny part of himself that remained infected with Eli’s madness. He hated and resented this irrational mote; it was childish, naive, and potentially dangerous, should it ever mushroom out of control. This region of his psyche had never climbed out of pure animal suffering, onto the lofty intellectual plateau where pain and its causes could be analyzed. This mad, fearful, superstitious part of him never doubted for an instant what Eli taught. It knew what lay in those ledgers; it recognized the signs that blotched the skin.

Thankfully, this part of his mind was poorly developed, in turn-of-the-millennium terms. It was easy to cow the poor shivering thing with all the whips and threats his rational mind had mastered.

“Derek!”

“Mr. Crowe!”

He had come out onto a balcony overlooking the dance floor. Etienne and Nina stood in the center of the room, in the mouth of the black mandala, waving to him.

“What do you think?” Nina called.

Derek’s grin, unforced and unbidden, surprised even him. He spread his arms to encompass the club, as if it and all within it were his doing.

“Wonderful!” he called. And then, unsure exactly what he meant, but giving in for once to spontaneity, he added: “Let them come!”

28

America, Michael had decided, was mostly wasteland.

They had been driving through flat arid deserts for an eternity. The last woods he’d seen were in western Oklahoma, and since then it had been flat and rocky, windswept, bare; red rock and white rock, orange, green, and black rock. When they’d gained altitude in Arizona there had been the freshness of pine trees in the night, but that hadn’t lasted long, and they came down once again into desert, past cacti draped with snow, under a starry sky so vast that it mocked the emptiness of the desert. Now here they were in California, land of sunny beaches and orange groves and lush green mountains; but the sun was dawning on another endless reach of desert. The mountains were black and alien as a scorched satellite; the rocks themselves looked burned. They skirted the edge of a crusted lakebed that looked as if it had been set on fire in ages past. It reminded him of an early science-fiction dream of Mercury, a desert world whirling close to the sun, only barely inhabitable. He was always amazed when he saw the winking lights of some settlement or other. Who would ever live out here?

A sign flew past, and he saw the offramp up ahead: GAS, FOOD, LODGING. gas, food, lodging. What wouldn’t he have given for the latter? A night in a spring-shot motel bed would have felt like a week in a luxury hotel. He had been so exhausted for so long that he could hardly remember any other mode of consciousness. He had always wondered how humans could whip themselves to feats of great endurance, and now he knew. All it took was desperation.

He figured they could reach San Francisco tonight, if the car held out. If he held out. It was always a temptation to let Lenore drive, but each time he seriously considered it, he remembered their near-disaster outside of Memphis.

He followed the off ramp down to a gas-station minimart, an oasis of fuel and junk food. The pump was self-service. He left Lenore sleeping and went into the market to pay in advance for the gas. He went out and started the pump, then went back in. Lenore wasn’t eating much these days, but he needed constant replenishment. He picked through pastries and beef jerky, considered a microwave burrito but decided against it when his stomach rebelled at the thought. A pint of milk, cigarettes. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and swigged; it was scorched and bitter, and he could feel the grounds swirling between his teeth. The old man at the register took his money without looking, too busy watching a small TV set on the counter—a morning program, traffic and weather and fragments of news. Michael was scooping up his change and tucking the paper sack into the crook of his arm when he heard the announcer mention ritual murder.

He couldn’t see the screen from where he stood, and the sound wasn’t up very loud. He worked his way around the counter past the slush machines and the magazine rack, until he could see the screen. A fuzzy, blurry video image, attributable not to poor camerawork but to lousy reception. A scrubby vacant lot with candles and broken glass and a body covered with a bloody sheet; and on the brick wall above, a large dark circular pattern that made his pulse quicken—then the picture was gone. Fucking media tidbits—never a fully developed thought, or even an image. Everything was subliminal these days. Was it a mandala, or wasn’t it? He couldn’t hear the talking head, and could barely read his title of “Occult Crime Expert.” Then came another picture, painted in wavering, washed-out video tones. He almost dropped his coffee. As the image wavered in and out, he recognized their house. Tucker’s house. A woman in a bright red coat stood in the driveway, next to Lenore’s Cutlass, holding a microphone.

“No,” he whispered. The man looked over at him, and Michael snatched up a copy of Guns and Ammo.

“I’ll take this too,” he said, holding it up. The man looked suspiciously at him now, as if he were waving an actual gun. As he rang up the sale, he blocked Michael’s view of the TV. Michael gave him the money, trying for another clear shot of the screen. But the story was over, and now there was nothing on but advertisements. He looked down at the rack, but there was nothing on the cover of any newspapers he could see, nothing about occult murders.

He rushed out with his purchases, trying to see if the North Carolina plates were visible from the market. He hooked the pump back into the machine, dripping gasoline over his shoes, twisting the cap into place with his other hand. He drove away in a panic, nearly taking the wrong off ramp, which would have carried them east again.

Are they looking for us now? he wondered. Could they possibly know we’ve gotten this far? Do they have a description of our car? Wouldn’t every highway patrolman who’s passed us, all the way across the country, remember this Beetle in an instant?

Are we suspects?

How could we not be?

Michael’s temple room, directly under the murder scene, was full of ceremonial knives, everything the North Carolina cops knew a black magician needed for his sacrificial killings. And on his altar, Jesus, Derek Crowe’s Mandala Rites lay open wide, probably to the very mandala that was splattered on Tucker’s wall.

Should he ditch the car somewhere out here in the desert? Find a dirt road and drive it over the edge of some ravine? They could hitchhike into the next town, catch a Greyhound going to San Francisco. But how long would all that take? Maybe he could get some spray-paint, paint the car black.

Ridiculous.

The only thing to do was to get to San Francisco as swiftly as possible and hope the cops were still treating this as a local thing, checking North Carolina and the immediate states. People got away with murder all the time—actual murderers. They turned up weeks or months or years later, far from the crime scenes, having lived anonymously and without being recognized until their story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries or America’s Most Wanted.

That’s us, he thought. We’ll be on both shows. Our faces will be everywhere eventually.

But in the meantime, they had a chance to get to San Francisco. Certainly the mandalas would be doing their part to keep the way open, keep the cops off their backs.

The main thing was to get to Derek Crowe. To get help for Lenore from the one man who might understand her condition. Once she had been cared for, then they could worry about the law—figure out whether to run or turn themselves in with some story that sounded less than utterly insane.

The car whined as it climbed toward the sinister serrations of a coal-black range. He decided to tell Lenore nothing. Headlights appeared behind him, pulling out of the sun; approaching quickly, then passing in a rush that rocked the car. It was a trooper, bent on other business. He could hardly have passed the Beetle without recognizing it, if he was looking for such an unlikely vehicle. But the taillights turned to tiny beads and vanished up ahead.

It didn’t help. He couldn’t relax. They still had the length of the state to travel. Anything could happen.