The 37th Mandala

37

Inside the limo, the four of them sealed off from the driver in a padded compartment, Etienne and Nina stared expectantly at Lenore for several moments, then looked to Derek for explanations.

“Why—where’s Michael?” he asked.

Lenore had fallen against him as they entered the car. She remained that way, with her thigh pressed up against his, as she turned watery, distant eyes toward him.

“We… broke up,” she said.

Derek swallowed, uncertain whether to tender sympathies or press for details he didn’t wish to learn. He wanted to close his eyes and try to orientate himself—everything kept reeling as the streets crawled by—but he was in company now. He must pretend some degree of sobriety, and in fact he was beginning to feel a bit more stable.

Nina took from him the burden of responding, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

“Your boyfriend?” she asked comfortingly.

“My husband.”

“I’m so sorry!” Nina put a finger lightly to the mandala tattoo on Lenore’s forehead and looked at Etienne. He nodded, smiling and smug. “He didn’t understand about this?” She tapped the mandala.

“No, he… he thought he did, but I guess he didn’t.”

“What a shame. He didn’t know what he had! Etienne, maybe she would like some… you know.”

“Of course, excuse me, I’m being rude!” Etienne held out a handful of clear gelatin capsules, tamped full of white powder.

“I don’t want it,” Derek said. “What is it?”

Lenore didn’t ask. She took two, and tossed them down her throat without water.

“Well, well,” Etienne said approvingly. “It’s a designer drug, but that is an insufficient word. My friend, the one who created it, is an artist, an absolute artist with chemicals. He made it especially for patrons of the club. Can you guess what it’s called?”

“Mandala,” Derek said dully.

“Thirty-Seven! Do you like it, Lenore?”

She nodded, still swallowing, her jaws working to pump saliva.

“It has many interesting properties, I’ve been told.”

“You haven’t tried it yourself?” Derek’s momentary promise of sobriety was passing, like a sea rock disappearing under waves. He felt awash himself.

“We’ve been waiting. For tonight. Come along now. Do try it. It’s a synthetic, but it mimics a naturally occurring substance. You know which one I mean.”

Derek shook his head.

“The compound found in the sak!” Etienne touched his chest, meaning his hidden tattoo, and Derek felt his skin start to crawl and writhe beneath his clothes, as if the mandala-brands had begun turning, thirty-seven hands seizing and twisting his flesh in thirty-seven places all at once.

“I’ve had enough already, thanks.”

“I’ll bet you have.” Etienne meant something other than alcohol, judging from his grin.

“Maybe you’d like to go somewhere else, Lenore,” he said. “We’re headed to a rather large party. If you’re not in the mood…”

She looked at him, faintly puzzled. “I’m fine,” she said. “I wanted to be with you. That’s why I came back.”

Derek blushed, wondering what Etienne and Nina would make of this declaration. Wondering, himself, how to take it. “Of course you’re welcome, I just thought…” He wasn’t sure what he thought. She fit in naturally here, as if she had known Nina and Etienne, as if she knew where they were going, as if all this had been planned and arranged.

“I’ll stay with you,” she repeated.

She came to me, he thought. She wanted to be with me.

“All right,” he said, putting an arm around her. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“You’re among friends now,” Nina said.

“That’s right,” Etienne joined in. “A great many friends. And we all know just what you’re going through.”

Do we? Derek thought.

“Now… just relax and have fun. Here we are!”

He looked up through his window then and saw great bright wheels of light spinning overhead, tendrils reaching for him. He took it for a vivid hallucination, then the legs of the freeway stepped into the limo’s headlights. Higher in the dark, where Derek didn’t need to look to see it, the overpass arched above the car like a massive black smirk.

Michael had never worn handcuffs before, but he feared that if he struggled they would tighten up and cut off his circulation. These were already gouging his wrist. It didn’t help that Lilith kept thrashing about, threatening the one-eared man and his thin, sad-eyed driver, in spite of Michael’s pleas to calm her down.

One-Ear sat up front, twisted half around so he could keep his eye—and his gun—fixed on them. Otherwise, he had a distant look, as if he were daydreaming in the midst of his vigil.

“If you don’t quiet down,” he told Lilith, “I will forget about ransoming you to Mr. Crowe. I will just give you to him dead, once he’s given me what I want. Do you know how easy it would be for me to kill you? It’s not hard at all. What’s hard is not killing, once you’re used to it. A dirty habit, maybe; but very hard to break.”

“You might as well. If you don’t kill me, this one will,” she said, jerking so hard on the chain that Michael cried out.

“What do you mean?” he said, hurt and confused. “Why would I hurt you?”

“I heard what you did to that couple back in North Carolina. Were they your friends too?” She glared at One-Ear. “You two should be sitting up front together. You have a lot in common.”

Jesus, Michael thought. She’s talking about Tucker and Scarlet.

“You—you don’t think I did that?” he said.

“Derek told me about you.”

“But he… we…. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t anyone. It was the mandalas!”

That word drew the gun’s exclusive attention. “What about them?” One-Ear asked.

“They killed my landlord and his girlfriend, and left a big bloody mandala on the wall. We had to run from Cinderton because my wife was having problems, and we thought Derek Crowe could help us. I knew we’d be suspects, but I couldn’t help it. We had to run but we didn’t kill anyone. The mandalas would have killed us too, if we hadn’t run.”

“How do you know about… them? The mandalas?”

“From Crowe’s book. That’s where they came from. Well, first from Ms. A—” He glanced nervously at Lilith, who was watching him guardedly.”—whoever she is, and then from the book.”

“But there is no Ms. A,” Lilith said. Michael and One-Ear both stared. “Derek told me. There was no Ms. A. No hypnotic trances. No channeling. He made it all up. It’s time somebody blew this thing out of the water—it’s too far out of control. He invented this whole fucking cult that’s suckered you both.”

One-Ear gave her a sickly grin. “I’m afraid he can’t take credit for that. I’m not sure exactly where he came across it, but I know it existed long before Derek Crowe. I have independent confirmation.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “These things are old. They’re not— they’re nothing he made up, believe me. I’ve seen what they can do.”

“He is involved in this with some other people,” One-Ear said. “You know of Club Mandala?”

“What about it?” Lilith said.

“Mr. Crowe is friends with them?”

“He hates them.”

“Hates? Then he’s had dealings with them.”

“He says he doesn’t know them.”

“He also says he created the mandalas. Can we really trust what Mr. Crowe says?”

“What is it to you, anyway?” Lilith said.

“I have a long-standing interest in these matters. Mr. Crowe or maybe his friends have something I desire. I wish to trade this thing for your safety.”

“Then for my sake I hope he does have it,” Lilith said. “But I’ve never seen anything. He made up the mandalas out of whole cloth. And if he lied about that, then he’s a sadder case than I realized.”

She fell silent then, and Michael watched her, wondered what she was grappling with. She had suspected him of being a murderer, a psycho. On the phone, back in Hecate’s Haven, she must have been calling the police. When she’d ostensibly gone out for her Tarot cards, she must have been planning to run and leave him there for the cops to find.

The car began to slow, pulling to the sidewalk. How long had they been circling around? Michael looked out the window and recognized the battered iron grate of Crowe’s apartment building.

“Now,” said One-Ear, “my driver has a gun, and he is very good with it. I will return shortly. I might have Mr. Crowe along. Or I might have something else.” He allowed himself a smile that looked like an additional scar in his ruined face. Then he opened the door and climbed out.

He waited by the gate for several minutes until a tenant went in. He caught the gate before it closed, and then rushed and caught the inner door as well. He was gone.

The driver sat impassively, facing forward with a mournful look.

“So,” Lilith said after a minute. “You thought Derek was going to help you?”

“I thought he was the mandala expert,” Michael said.

“Lenore was… is possessed. I’d tried everything I knew. Cast a circle. That was a mistake though. You—you’re in a coven, right? Wiccan?”

Lilith nodded. “Among other things. Yeah?”

“So, we cast a circle but the mandalas broke through it. The usual protection is nothing to them. They don’t recognize the old pagan symbols. I thought the mandalas were just symbols themselves, till I saw them.”

“Not part of your basic neo-pagan training,” Lilith said with an edge of sarcasm in her voice that made him realize she was starting to accept his story.

“Tell me about it! I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t reach Crowe. The only real grandmaster I ever knew, this old guy named Elias Mooney, was dead—though I tried to call him up, contact whatever matrix of energy he’d left behind.”

Lilith said, “You knew Elias Mooney?”

“Yeah! Did you? I know he lived out here. I never met him, but he sent me tapes. He helped me through some really bad times.”

“I don’t believe this,” Lilith said, and it was as if the handcuffs that connected them had turned to brilliant glowing gold, an intense bond that cut through all suspicion. “You could be telling my story.”

“Yours…?”

“I grew up in L.A. I was a teenager, just totally lost and fucked up. Drugs, drugs, nothing but drugs. Well, that and sex. I mean… dangerous sex, you know? I was into Magick— with a ‘K.’”

“‘An’ it harm none, do what you will.’” Repeating the old Crowley maxim, Michael laughed.

“Exactly. But I was killing myself.”

“Me too!”

“And someone gave me this phone number. I thought it was a suicide hot line or a Coke-Ender thing, and one night I was so miserable and depressed that I just called it. I was out of my mind. I just wanted to hear a voice. And I found myself talking to this old man. This cool old guy who had the most amazing stories and seemed to know exactly what I was going to say before I said it. I figured out later that he wasn’t exactly as gentle as all that—I mean, he had an edge. He cut right through my sickness and insanity. When I came up here a few years ago, I was going to throw myself at his feet and beg to be his student. But he died before I met him, and all I have left is memories of those conversations we used to have.”

“He could tell you right where you were sitting, what was going on around you….”

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “Elias was like a secret national treasure or something. I’ve never met anyone else who knew him.”

“Me neither.”

He was staring into Lilith’s eyes, and she into his. He felt as if he had just dropped a tab of acid and it was coming on, making the edges of all things electric. He had the strong sense that Elias was with them right then. He could almost hear the old man’s voice.

“Lilith,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

“If Elias were here, he’d tell us, wouldn’t he?”

“I think… I think he is here. I think maybe he brought us together. Maybe there’s a reason for all this.”

“Even this?” she said, raising their cuffed hands between them.

Michael’s throat went dry.

“Even magic can’t open Smith and Wesson handcuffs,” she said loudly. Suddenly she broke into tears, slumping against him. Startled, Michael put his free arm around her. The driver’s sad eyes floated in the rearview mirror, suspicious. Michael whispered comfortingly, feeling worse than useless.

Then, between sobs, he heard Lilith whisper. He realized that her face was dry against his neck, and her voice unchoked.

“The thing is,” she whispered, “Smith and Wessons all use the same key.”

“It’s okay,” he said loudly. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I have one in my purse.”

Suddenly they heard the gate crash. They jumped apart. Lilith dragged her hands across her face, knuckling her eyes, smearing her makeup and dragging spit down her cheeks. One-Ear’s face was far from reassuring as he strode toward the car. Under his arm he carried a bundle of red and black notebooks and stapled sheafs of paper. He wrenched open his door and ducked into the car, hurling the notebooks over the seat at them.

“It’s all here,” he said. “So he can’t pretend he doesn’t know. He won’t lie to me again.”

Michael looked down at the papers in his lap. Light fell in from the street, enough to make the manuscript readable:

One-Ear gave instructions to the driver and the car lurched forward, causing the pages to slide to the floor, uncovering one of the notebooks that lay open in his lap.

At the sight of the handwriting, Michael felt certain that Elias truly had come to them tonight. Here, in the little journal, was the old man’s formal script, stronger and clearer than he had seen it on the envelopes addressed to him and the notes Elias had tucked in with his tape cassettes.

He reached up and switched on the canopy light, to no objection from One-Ear, who was bent on navigating the street ahead of them. The text seemed familiar—vaguely, maddeningly so. As if he had read it in a dream he couldn’t quite remember.

How had One-Ear come across Elias Mooney’s journals in Derek Crowe’s apartment?

That question passed from his mind when he came to the next sheaf, clipped together with a big black spring clip. These were photocopies of Elias’s journals, slightly enlarged, and annotated in another hand, in green ink. Hardly a line of Elias’s remained unchanged. As he struggled to read the interlineations, the cramped scribbles and substitutions, he realized where he had seen all this before. Elias’s words were vaguely familiar, but he recognized the alterations instantly.

He went cold as he read it. Lilith, leaning over his shoulder, whispered, “Oh, my God.”

“‘We instill your souls with the diamond nectar of wisdom,’” Michael read from the green ink; and Lilith, finding his place, deciphered the black script of the original text: “‘We distill from your sick souls a potent brew of misery.’”

“‘We tap the fermented juices of insight when you’ve meditated sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.’”

“‘We tap the fermented juices of despair when you’ve suffered sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.’”

“‘It was we who mixed the joyous brew from the first.’”

“‘It was we who mixed the bitter brew from the first.’”

“It’s The Mandala Rites,” Michael said. “Elias wrote it. But who changed it? Whose writing is this?”

Lilith said one word, as if it were the foulest she had ever spoken—as if it were corrosive, a flavor to rot her tongue, to poison her soul: “Crowe.”

Of course, he thought. It came from Derek Crowe’s apartment.

The car slowed. There were no streetlights here. Michael heard a deep thrumming somewhere, like an engine that kept running even after the driver had shut off the car. He looked out the window and saw brick walls, concrete abutments, a parking lot with a Dumpster bin in a corner where a man or woman sat huddled in rags, shrinking from the headlights’ glare. On the sidewalk, not far away, a steady stream of people were heading in one direction.

One-Ear said, “I’ll take those papers, please. They may be useful in bargaining with Mr. Crowe.”

Michael gathered what had fallen and shoved it over the seat back.

“Now,” One-Ear said, “we are going in together.”

“In where?” Michael said. Lilith seemed to be in shock much greater than his own. She bent over slowly, dragging her purse from the floor, and then he remembered what she had in it. One-Ear had checked it for weapons, but why would he notice a small key amid the clutter?

“We’re visiting a very busy nightspot. Let’s not become separated. I will have a gun in your back, Ms. A.”

“Call me anything but that, ” Lilith said.

One-Ear handed the pile of papers to the driver, then climbed out and opened Michael’s door. Michael slid out, pulling Lilith with him.

“You should hold hands, like very good friends, like lovers,” said One-Ear. “Be discreet about the handcuffs.”

“Like this?” Lilith said, pressing close to Michael. She put her hand over the cuff on his wrist.

“That’s very good. Now we will join the crowd.”

They walked around the edge of the building, out of the lot where they had parked, merging with the stream of people. Neon dazzled the night somewhere ahead, but the sky above was black with mist, holding solid slabs of shadow overhead.

In the car, Michael had felt the inexorable tugging as something irrelevant; he was not in control of his motions, so he let the whirlpool force tug him without resisting. But suddenly, here, it hit him again, nearly snatching him away through the crowd. This time it was too strong to fight. He tried to cast a white circle around himself, but there was no room for it in his mind; it was all he could do to stay upright, to keep from bending forward like a reed in the wind, to stop himself from rolling like a tumbleweed. He could no longer fight the flow, for One-Ear was urging them in that direction.

One-Ear and the driver were right behind them, but Lilith’s fingers were working deftly. Michael felt the key turning in the handcuffs. The band loosened at his wrist; he had to catch it with his fingers to keep it from falling.

He clutched Lilith’s arm as if she could hold him in place; the pull had hold of her too, though she didn’t seem to notice it.

They rounded a corner, coming to the club’s entrance. Michael held back for a moment, amazed. A pair of immense neon mandalas hung above the black entryway. Coiled colored tubing, all dark-inflected, in deep violets and bloody reds, oranges like burning flesh, greens that suggested lightless depths… and black tubes, black but glowing. All twisted into spirals and deceptive paths, with radiating sunburst arms. Every inch flickering, pulsing outward in consecutive waves of color and darkness, seeming to writhe against the bricks, melting into the old mortar, throwing wriggling tendrils of neon out against the freeway overpass. One mandala sparkled and whirled around an aperture full of brilliant white and red-tipped daggers like gnashing teeth; the other was covered all over with toothy mouths that champed and noiselessly chattered. These wheels of color spun on either side of the pale and rather subdued lettering of the place’s name: Club Mandala.

Lilith leaned close, kissed him on the cheek. “When we get inside, split up and run.”

“Young lovers,” One-Ear said lightly, “that’s enough of that.”

She parted, giving Michael a crooked smile.

“Go on,” One-Ear said, goading Michael forward none too gently. He jumped to obey but went too abruptly, losing Lilith’s hand.

Their little scheme with the handcuffs was revealed.

Michael didn’t wait to see what Lilith did without him. He expected the bullet at any moment. Maybe it had already come, but his shock was so great he felt nothing. He plunged toward the doors, giving in to the force that reeled him in—flying past the bouncers who were shouting and gesturing, trying to stop him, until they saw One-Ear coming with his gun. Michael dived into the crowd, pushing himself toward its dense heart. The force was stronger than it had been at the cliffside, and giving into it now was exactly like throwing himself over that edge—but this abyss was invisible and, he sensed, bottomless.

He hesitated, trying to find his bearings. Entering that place of raging noise and chaos, he found himself paradoxically at a point of utter stillness, as if he were in free fall.

This was it. The center. The hub.

A stranger with a tattoo on each cheek shoved a drink into one hand and a white gel capsule into the other, and shouted just loud enough to be heard over the rhythmic mechanical thrumming that filled the air: “Welcome to Club Mandala!”

As Lenore entered the club, her mind, which had been whirling, came to a sudden stop. Everything on the edges of her consciousness, every bit of parasitic chatter clinging to her thoughts and distorting her perceptions, was abruptly flung beyond the reach of her mind, vanishing over some horizon she could hardly perceive. She had been only dimly aware of her whereabouts for some time; surrendering to her mandala, she had followed it without question, without resistance. The day, everything leading up to this moment, was a blur. Everything she had said and done, everything that had brought her here, she remembered as if through a filter. And this despite her determination to see and remember everything, to take responsibility—to be a witness. It made her furious.

The cloud had descended when Michael took her away from Hecate’s Haven, as if the separation from Crowe had itself caused her illness. Maybe that was why she felt so lucid now: Crowe stood in Michael’s place at her right hand.

Something had happened to Michael—something she couldn’t recall. She looked around for him, as if he might be entering behind her, as if he might appear at her elbow. She saw no one but strangers.

Strangers and their mandalas….

Her eyes lifted. The air was a riot of seething shapes, mirroring the crowd below. The mandalas fed and groped each other with the barbed tips of whiplike tendrils, in chittering exchanges that must have been some type of communication. They surged together as the human bodies below them fought for position on the dance floor. Sometimes the suction was so great that as they separated, one or the other would evert, exposing bright raw innards, rotating through several dimensions, appearing now as a coil of self-swallowing tubes, now as an array of overlapping rings, flashing with inner lights where she seemed to see stairs leading down into violet caverns, knife-edged mushrooms, oily winged things rising up from motionless black lakes.

The one named Etienne saved her from the visions, leading her by the hand around the periphery of the room, shouting to her all the while, though it sounded like a hoarse whisper in the thunderous murmur of music. The floor was mobbed and chaotic, but periodically the crowd surged in unison, patterned ripples spreading through the mass, and the bodies of the dancers fell into curving lines like the spokes of a wheel, as if they might at any moment join in a carefully choreographed performance. Above them, meanwhile, the mandalas seemed to strive for a similar order, though they found it no easier. Their relations were both violent and tender at once; they struggled blindly, despite perceptions and senses so much finer than Lenore’s that she could not understand a fraction of what they knew. She felt as sorry for them as for herself.

“Later, you’ll see,” Etienne said, “they’ll find it. Don’t worry.”

As if this could have worried her. She had no doubt that all they desired would come about tonight. Somewhere, somehow, the great one was spinning, drawing them all in. Old enmities were suspended for one night. She could sense an immense presence in the room, could almost see it.

And then, between the dancers’ feet, she did see it.

It covered the dance floor, filling the room, black and glistening, glimpsed in bits as the bodies moved past. At the sight, she felt herself tugged up into her own mandala. And then, looking down, she saw the shape of the great one underlying everything; she saw all of them caught in the tightening whorled hollow of a vortex, a tornado’s throat, a single tapering moment into which all were sliding in unison. The substance of the night—of the room itself—was warping, falling inward on that point.

As Derek drifted along behind her, Nina leaned and whispered in his ear. When he saw Lenore’s eyes on him, he gave a slight smile and nod, not realizing that she was watching from somewhere above them all, as she slid toward the center, drawing Derek with her. His mandala hovered close, gray and with its mouths agape, its haste so insistent as to seem desperate. But Lenore—or her mandala—was not yet ready.

They wandered past couples in close conversation, through white rooms with framed black mandalas on the walls, through dark rooms like cubes of smoke where ultraviolet mandalas glowed. Eyes locked onto her forehead and conversations stopped. Many wore tattoos, but they were powerless—tattoos injected with needles and ink. Few, apart from hers, had been administered by a mandala. Etienne wore one such; she could feel it glowing against his skin, beneath his clothes. And Derek’s entire body seemed afire with them, churning just out of reach, crying out to her with something like lust. Later would be the time to reciprocate. She passed others in the crowd, here and there, who carried the true mandala sak (as Etienne called them). She felt the location of each true bearer; she could have closed her eyes and pointed them out. Some were still coming in from outside the club, from all over the city, though most were already here. Almost thirty-six now.

Thirty-six….

For tonight, in this brief interval, this turning point of eons, there was no thirty-seventh mandala.

Her own guardian, the black-fanged mandala, had slain it, and that was what she had forgotten until now:

—Her mandala, slashing down.

—His mandala, dying.

But did mandalas die?

The answer came from deep within, from that part of her which had been among the mandalas for so long that it shared their properties.

They died, but rarely—when they had weakened to such a point that they could be killed. And each passing marked the end of an age, the beginning of a new one. The thirty-seven, constantly fighting for position, always at odds, always struggling for their own ends, found it difficult to come together even for occasions such as this.

Etienne kept talking, as if to boost her spirits, as if he didn’t realize that cheer was irrelevant. He guided her through the upstairs galleries where numerous mandalas were hung. These weren’t the real Thirty-seven, but impressions executed by different hands.

“These are new,” Derek said as they strolled along.

“Yes, our commissions. Not part of the canon, but still… amazing aren’t they? Here’s an original Mavrides.” Pointing to a wicked mandala painted on black velvet, radiating poisonously under ultraviolet lights, each of its tendrils gripping some awful or banal object: electric appliances, a screaming nun, a smoking pipe. “A Harry S. Robins.” This a sinister wheel of intricate evil perfection, rising from the waters of an underground sea where primordial shadows swam through the ruins of a drowned city of weirdly angled towers. “A Dan Clowes.” Here an incongruous cartoon mandala, in lurid colors and Zip-A-Tone shading, the great one manifesting in a rundown room that could have been a motel or a sparely furnished apartment, with a circle of worshippers bowed down before it, buck-toothed and slobbering in berets and jazz beards, ragged flannels, sagging knit caps. Lenore saw much the same faces hovering around her in the club. “A Krystine Kryttre.” This one so fierce that it seemed to stab her eyes with bolts of black lightning, a woman crucified upon a geared wheel, its spokes tearing through her flesh, lighting her up like an X ray, ripping her open as she laughed insanely.

Lenore tore away from Etienne, away from Derek, and found herself on a balcony, looking down on the crowded dance floor, trying to discern the shape of the great mandala painted there.

A hand on her shoulder. Etienne leaned close: “You’re feeling the Thirty-seven. I wouldn’t recommend eating now. Would you like some wine?”

She nodded, then remembered why she shouldn’t. She must remain clear-headed. She had lost too much to unconsciousness. She felt as if she were still voyaging inward, twisting on an ever tighter downward path into her soul, while external events wound higher and higher on their own corkscrew trail.

“Water,” she said, and Etienne moved off. Derek and Nina remained in the gallery, laughing and talking. Nina was introducing Derek to an artist.

She froze, clutching the rail, her eyes caught by one small fleck of color down in the sea of faces. For an instant she saw Michael, and then he was gone. She started after him instantly, rushing along the balcony, pushing through the crowded rooms to find the stairs, in a panic.

If she closed her eyes and calmed herself, she should be able to pick him out of the crowd.

She tried it, holding to a stair rail, letting people swarm past her. She sent herself floating upward, willing her mandala to enlighten her, knowing that it could lead her right to Michael.

All she had to do was reach out for his mandala.

But no… he no longer had a mandala.

Michael had vanished. Utterly. As if he had ceased to exist, ceased to have any significance, at the moment his own mandala was destroyed. She could find no trace of him, not a memory, in her black guardian. It had not seen him enter. He and he alone moved invisibly among the mandalas. His was the only body in the room lacking a guardian, unattended.

What part of her, then, perceived him still?

Lenore had thought that she was entirely under her mandala’s power, but apparently something else remained. Something clumsy and feeble and pathetically limited… something that was forced to open its eyes and push its body down the stairs, searching for him the hard way—the human way.

Michael was quickly lost in the club, but he thought it was the best thing for now. One-Ear wouldn’t shoot him in this chaos. If he tried, it would be easy to elude him in the crowd.

He moved as far from the door as possible, hoping Lilith had made it in. She would have been wiser to run for help, but there must be a phone in here somewhere. Outside—who knew? It had looked dark and industrial on the street: no bars, no shops—nothing for miles, maybe. So the chaos inside might work to his advantage. Maybe One-Ear would forget him completely, since what he really wanted was something Crowe had. Something, Michael suspected, that Crowe had stolen from Elias. Something besides the notebooks.

He found himself in a corridor too empty for comfort. He rushed to a doorway that opened onto the dance floor. Looking up, he saw a balcony running along the second level. That’s where I’d go if I were One-Ear, he thought. Behind him was a flight of stairs running down into a basement. At the top of the stairs stood a big man, a bouncer, checking invitations. Michael waited until he was wrapped up in a dispute with someone, then leapt the first few steps, skipped around the landing, and slowed as he reached the bottom. He didn’t hear anyone coming after him.

It was quieter down here, the music a vibration he felt with his body and not with his ears. Knots of people moved quietly between rooms. The hall turned and bent, mazelike. After several minutes he was not sure exactly where he stood in relation to the stairs. He heard laughter and turned into a small room, coming upon a dozen or so people watching some sort of video performance on a TV screen.

An image painted on the wall above the monitor caught and held his eyes, restoring in an instant all the faded terror he had first felt days ago, when this nightmare was only beginning.

The mandala on the wall was done in bloodred paint; it appeared glossy and still fresh, dripping. And it was not merely any mandala from The Rites. It was the pattern he had seen on Tucker’s wall—the same one etched on Lenore’s forehead. The mandala had followed him across the country like his personal nemesis.

He didn’t move forward to get a better look, but the crowd shifted anyway, giving him a perfect view. The monitor sat on a pedestal against the painted wall, giving off its cold colors, everything tinted toward blue. There he saw a soundless image, glaring and jerky—a handheld video version of a scene he had relived countless times in his memory since witnessing it in life.

Tucker’s room. The same mandala sprayed in gore across the posters and pictures. The camera roved over it lovingly, tracing the wheel’s perimeter, its inner weave, then pulling back and dropping down to drink in the sight of the bed, substantially drier and blacker than when Michael had seen it last, and with flies a significant presence now. This must be some kind of police video. How had the club gotten hold of it?

The pictures tore at Michael, weakened and dazed him; but after all, he had seen all this before, and the image was no more shocking a second time.

What unnerved him now was the audience.

They were laughing. Watching the screen with enrapt, blue-lit eyes where tiny TV monitors swam. Little mirrored mandalas twirled in their pupils like advertisements.

Blackness gnawed his vision. He backed out of the room and clawed his way along a wall, stumbling up against a cold metal folding chair. He lowered himself into it slowly, hanging his head between his knees until vision returned.

As his eyes cleared, he saw a pair of hard black shoes standing before him.

One-Ear said, “I thought I’d find you down here.”

“What do you want with me?” Michael groaned. “I don’t have anything you want. If Derek Crowe’s in here somewhere, fucking go to him.”

“Assuming Mr. Crowe cares anything about you, or human life in general, I would like to have something more to offer him. Now get up and come with me. I think I know where to find him.”

Michael lowered his head.

“I said get up.”

“I’m sick, you asshole.”

One of the hard black shoes gave him a sharp kick in the shin. Michael gasped and grabbed his leg, but forced himself to stand. No one looked his way. It was as if the scene meant less to them than the art on the walls or the video displays. As if Michael didn’t exist in their eyes. Remembering what had amused them, he realized it would be unrealistic to expect help from such people.

One-Ear trailed him through the maze, nudging him with the gun. Michael turned into a room where several people stood around a woman. She wore a black plastic helmet that covered her face completely. She was engaged in pantomime, touching something only she could see.

“Now, reach in,” a man was saying. “Grab the fucker’s heart. That’s it—twist it! Pull!”

She was murdering someone invisible. Doing it with her bare hands.

Michael stepped back, right into the gun.

“Which way?” One-Ear said, growing shrill and irritable now.

“How the hell should I know? It’s a maze down here.”

“You’re not saying you’re lost?”

“Of course I’m lost.”

At that moment, Michael heard a voice he had not expected hear.

“Michael?”

He turned. Lenore was coming down the hall.

“Michael, how did you—what’s happening? Who is he?”

She had seen the gun. One-Ear, indecisively, turned it on her as he fastened his fingers on Michael’s arm.

“Don’t move,” he said.

“Who are you?” She looked up at the air above One-Ear’s head. “What are you doing?”

“Lead us out,” One-Ear barked. “Take us to Derek Crowe.”

“What do you want with him?” she asked.

“Lenore,” Michael said. “Crowe was lying.”

“No,” she said. “He’s playing his part.”

“Shut up!” One-Ear said. “Take me to Mr. Crowe! Now!”

Voices in the hall came up quickly behind them. Michael twisted his head around. One-Ear jumped uncertainly, wondering how to keep his gun on Michael and Lenore and still face this new threat. Around the corner came a young couple, a man and a woman.

“Etienne!” One-Ear said. “Don’t move.”

“What nonsense,” said the young man, Etienne. Without hesitation, he clutched One-Ear by the throat, shoving him against the wall. “Nina, would you please?”

The woman took his gun. “You must be Chhith,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Michael moved closer to Lenore, taking her hand. Her fingers were ice.

“Now, Chhith, you’re not playing the game at all correctly,” Etienne said. “We must straighten you out.”

Chhith spat some words in a language Michael didn’t recognize, but Etienne merely smiled at Lenore. “Will you excuse us for a bit? We’ve put Mr. Crowe to work signing autographs upstairs.”

Nina gestured with the gun, and the man called Chhith stepped away from the wall. They urged him down the corridor, around the corner, out of sight.

“Jesus,” Michael said, sagging with relief. He turned to Lenore. “What happened to you?”

She was looking at the air above his head again; it drove him crazy when she did that. She was as bad as ever. And this place, full of the mandalas and their sick energy, was making her worse.

“What,” he said. “What is it?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You shouldn’t even… exist.”

“What do you mean? I was worried about you. Now I’m terrified.”

“Don’t worry, Michael. Just go.”

“Go where?”

“Out. Away from here. Take your chance. They can’t see you, so they can’t stop you. Don’t get caught in the middle.”

“Of what? What’s happening, Lenore? What is all this?”

She looked around the hall as if she owned the place. “It’s the end for some,” she said. “But for you it’s already over.”

“Come on. Let’s both get out of here.”

“I have to stay.”

“Lenore, come on. Derek Crowe is a fake—a charlatan—a thief. You have to get away from him.”

“I came all this way to find him, Michael. It’s not just the mandalas, I think. I’m doing this for me. Now please, leave me to it. You can’t do anything here.”

“I won’t leave you,” he said.

“You have to. You can’t make me do anything anymore, Michael. I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s all over for us. I don’t want you here, understand? I don’t need you, I don’t love you anymore, I don’t want you. You have no part in this.”

Her words tore into him with surgical, cold precision. He stood there as Lenore moved away. He put out a hand, then let it drop.

“Don’t try to follow me,” she said. “Don’t interfere.”

“With what?” he said, but she didn’t answer. She went off down the hall.

After a while, he stumbled in the other direction, looking for a dark, quiet place to sit down, somewhere to rest and gather himself. He knew only one thing: He was not leaving.

He circled around in the underground maze, avoiding people wherever he came upon them, finally passing a door behind which he heard nothing. He opened it and saw a silvery glimmer of mirrors. It was a vast round room, empty except for an oxblood couch and a red velvet chair in the very center of the floor.

He crept in, closing the door behind him. He avoided the couch and chair. They looked too much like props in the center of a stage. Instead he sank down against one of the mirrored walls and put his head on his arms.

I have to find Lilith, he thought. But she could take care of herself, he realized with relief. She had proven that already.

For now, he wanted nothing but to be alone.

Finally, Derek Crowe thought, a group of fans I’m not embarrassed to he seen with.

Club Mandala had stacks of The Mandala Rites at an upstairs table in one of the gallery rooms, and they were selling faster than he could sign them. It seemed for a time as if everyone in the club were lining up to buy a copy. The woman handling sales stopped periodically to slice open another cardboard box full of copies and stack them on the table before going back to making change and taking cash. Derek, meanwhile, had wearied of writing inscriptions. For a time he had signed his name and made a small circle beneath it, filling it in with dots and wavery lines, crude hieroglyphic mandalas; but that looked so awful, compared to the elaborate designs in the book, that he finally resorted to an unadorned signature. The customers seemed satisfied with this, though few made conversation.

Of course, it was possible to think that despite their fashionable clothes, their lack of any overt affiliation with medieval systems of belief and quackery, these customers were really no different from the ones who flocked into Hecate’s Haven hoping to become Cosmic Masters. His book was the equalizer, after all; if they bought into it, they were every bit as foolish as the neo-pagans and theosophists. On the other hand, maybe they were buying the book as a novelty, a bit of trendy kitsch to go with their mandala tattoos. Copies would circulate as freely as capsules of 37. It was a badge of hipness, as temporary as any, but during the course of the trend’s popularity, there was an opportunity for Derek to climb to greater things. “Mandala Madness!” blared the cover of the Bayrometer, also available in stacks around the room. Once the mandalas faded from favor, his name would hang in the public’s mind and his next project would benefit from his fame or notoriety. The mandalas were a stepping-stone to other and better things, not an end in themselves.

“Mr. Crowe?” said a fellow about his age or slightly younger, either prematurely bald or with shaven pate. He held a small packet in his hands. He wore odd, square little glasses and spoke with a slight lisp. “Bob Maltzman said I should introduce myself. I’m Neil Vasquez, your illustrator? I’ve been working on the concept for your mandala deck.”

“Well, yes!” Derek said. “Come over here, I’d like to talk to you!”

Vasquez smiled nervously, dark eyebrows bobbing. He stepped around the table as the next person in line slapped down their copy for signing.

“Great to meet you! You did a fantastic job on the book, and this Tarot idea sounds terrific!” Derek was giddy, beside himself with tonight’s success.

“I—I brought a prototype deck for you. These are probably smaller than what we’d end up using, but the quality’s pretty good.”

He laid the packet on the table, a deck of glossy cards not much bigger than standard playing cards. Crowe shuffled through them quickly. These mandalas were incredible, three-dimensional and lifelike, floating in a shimmering ether. They looked like photographs, with quicksilver shadings, colored in dark iridescence.

“You did these yourself?”

“They’re computer generated. I’ve worked out a fractal program that does it, based on thirty-seven iterations of the same equation. I—it worked out so well, I started thinking, what if this is how the mandalas are generated? Like, if you see the universe as a vast processor crunching away until these things evolve. Of course, they’d do it in a dimension parallel to time, so they could sort of pop in and out of our dimension and do their stuff without really having to get stuck in it.”

Derek said, “I had the impression they’re more along the line of ancestral spirits, Ascended Masters, or something like that. But mine certainly isn’t the last word on the subject.”

“You see? You have real insight. I’d love to hear your suggestions.”

“We should really ask the mandalas what they think.” At that thought, he looked for Lenore. He hadn’t seen her for a while. “I never got to tell you how much I admired your illustrations.”

“Well, thanks, I’m glad. But these, I think, are light-years beyond the black and whites.”

Derek spoke to the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the artist of The Mandala Rites! Neil Vasquez! Don’t neglect to add his signature to your copy!” He turned to Vasquez, who looked flustered, smiling nervously, his entire skull flushed and mottled. “Put yourself right here next to me, Neil. We’ll get an assembly line going.”

“Wow,” a girl said, leaning over the table. “Are these like Tarot cards?”

“That’s right. We’ll be putting them out shortly.”

“Cool!” She started flipping through them, and soon others were craning to see over her shoulders.

Derek glanced over at Neil, who was blushing proudly.

“I think they’re a hit,” he said.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Nina appeared at his elbow, placing a glass of wine at his side. “Are you ready for a break?” she asked.

His hand was cramping, so he gave a short nod and stood up. “Neil, why don’t you stay?” he said. “Give them something extra for their money.”

“We have another surprise,” she said. “Etienne’s waiting downstairs.”

On the ground floor, there was scarcely room to move. People had begun to circle around on the dance floor more or less in unison. It was either that or not move at all, apparently. The lock-step pounding of their feet merged with the thrumming music. He found himself thinking of fan blades swinging around and around, slicing heavily at the air: monotonous, hypnotic, a droning rhythmic whir.

While he hesitated at the edge of the dance floor, someone took him by the arm. He turned, expecting another fan, another request for an autograph.

“If it isn’t Derek Crowe, famous author,” said Lilith. “Or should I say plagiarist?”

He couldn’t quite hear her in the noise. “Lilith—I didn’t expect you here.”

“Did he find you?”

“What?”

“Your friend with one ear.”

“One… ear?” Derek went cold.

“Oh, Chhith!” Nina said. “Don’t worry, Derek. Everything’s taken care of.”

“What—how did you know about him?” he asked Lilith.

“He gave me a lift tonight. He says you have something that belongs to him, which I don’t doubt. You seem to have a lot of people’s things. I didn’t realize you had so many secrets, Derek. You were wise to hide them from me.”

He was completely baffled. She couldn’t possibly be referring to all the things he feared she meant.

“Could you excuse us?” Nina said firmly. “Mr. Crowe has to be somewhere else right now.”

“Be my guest,” she said.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” he called as Nina tugged him along.

“Don’t bother,” she replied. And he couldn’t be sure of the words she added, the club was so noisy. Surely it was nothing to do with “Elias Mooney.” He’d misheard her, out of guilt or paranoia. No one knew a thing about Elias. Not even Etienne and Nina.

He was growing intensely aware of the second skin he wore. It fit more comfortably than he would have believed. Was it insane to wear such a thing so close to his skin? No one suspected. It was utterly perverse! The way it rustled against him, tickling and tingling, tightening in places, was very strange, very pleasurable. A comforting, all-enveloping pressure that was more than slightly erotic, as if his entire body were an enlarging sex organ, blood-pumped, sensitive.

He found himself laughing as Nina led him downstairs past what had to be a guard or bouncer. He hadn’t realized there was a basement until now. But this, clearly, was where it was all happening. The party within the party. The coolest of the cool were here, standing and kneeling before small displays of technology and multimedia art pieces, as if worshipping at the very latest altars.

His eyes were hooked briefly by one particularly incongruous sight among the blur of fashion: a pinch-faced, sad-eyed, clearly puzzled man dressed as if for a business meeting, in a shiny Hong Kong suit. He moved haltingly down the halls, peering into rooms. It was not so much the man who interested Derek, as the stack of papers he carried—typescripts, photocopies, even a few red and black notebooks of the sort Eli Mooney had filled with his rant. Derek’s first and craziest thought was that these were his secret mandala files, stolen from his closet. Impossible! The man sidled on, vanishing around a corner, but not before Derek caught a glimpse of his own handwriting.

With a muttered excuse to Nina, he followed the man. His horror knew no bounds. They couldn’t be his papers; how could they? How could some stranger have acquired them?

Chhith, he thought.

Derek looked around the corner and saw an alcove with a door in it. He pushed his way into a dark, purple-lit space. At first he saw ultraviolet patterns glowing and writhing under a black light—mandalas and creepers, vines and skeletons, dragons and carnivores with poisonous diamond eyes. As his pupils adjusted to the low light, he saw that the shapes were imprinted on the skins of two naked figures who coupled vigorously before a small but appreciative audience.

Just then, the sad-eyed man with the bundle of papers opened a door at the far end of the room. Derek saw his silhouette briefly, the bundle of papers clutched to his chest, then the door closed. He stepped in, averting his eyes from the couple who were working their way across the floor of the room. One hurled the other hard against the wall—nearly in his path—and they continued to fuck in a vertical position. Derek sidestepped them and continued on. It was a bad North Beach sex show, redone for the culture vultures. As he reached the far door, it opened under his hand. Etienne smiled in.

“There you are!” Etienne stepped in and closed the door. “I see everyone’s warming up!”

Derek looked back and saw that the crowd he’d moved through, as if wearing blinders, was beginning to imitate the actors—if they were actors. The audience members had begun groping each other and seemed to be shedding their clothes, although given the dim light and the pounding of Derek’s head, it was difficult to be sure of anything he saw.

“Charming, isn’t it?” Etienne said.

“We think heterosexuality is very quaint,” said Nina, emerging from behind Derek, sliding an arm around Etienne.

Derek felt as if some similarly jaunty response were mandatory. “Quaint but effective,” he said. They all laughed together as they steered him out of the room.

“Yes,” said Etienne, “sex still has its uses.”

He must not appear to be terrified, but he was reluctant to let them lead him along anymore. Overhead, the din of pounding feet had settled into a softer, more rhythmic shuffle.

“You—you mentioned a surprise,” he said uncertainly.

“Any guest of honor has certain duties,” said Etienne.

“You are the master of ceremonies!” said Nina gaily.

“And it is time to fulfill yours. Everything is ready, even you must sense that.”

Even I? Derek thought. Was Etienne implying that he was obtuse?

“Of course,” he answered.

They rushed him toward another door where two burly men stood guard. The bouncers opened the door and ushered them through.

Derek found himself in a large round room, lit only by a spotlight at the center. Mirrored walls curved around. At the center of the room sat a couch of oxblood leather, like a psychiatrist’s sofa; and beside it was a padded armchair. It resembled a psychiatrist’s setup.

Lenore Renzler lay on the couch. The chair was empty.

Derek took a few steps forward. “Lenore?” Her eyes were open; she lay there unblinking, without even glancing at him.

“She’s in a trance,” said Etienne. “Forgive me, I know you’re quiet proficient, but I took the liberty of preparing her. To spare you the trouble.”

Derek started to retreat, but Nina and Etienne each held an arm. “This really isn’t my kind of thing.”

“I realize it’s not the therapeutic situation you’re used to.”

“I’m not a party hypnotist. I need privacy for my work. This goes against every professional ethic. I can’t… can’t possibly.”

“But you must, Mr. Crowe. It’s not entirely up to you, you know. They asked to speak to you.”

“They?”

Lenore’s head rolled toward him then, her eyes still gazing upward. “Hello, Derek.”

“Hello, Lenore,” he said softly. Nina and Etienne gently forced him into the chair.

“We are not Lenore,” she said. “She will not speak tonight. It is we who have words for you now.”

He ran his hands nervously up and down his sides, causing the skin beneath to crackle and prick. “I—I should have something to write with.” He started to rise, as if he could flee under pretense of looking for a pen.

“No,” said Etienne. “We speak not for the ages tonight—we speak for you alone. Your time has come.” His voice was almost identical to Lenore’s—distant, grainy, but growing closer and louder. Dozens of people ringed him in. Everywhere he looked, the mandala signs were glowing, sak so powerful they cast their light through clothing.

“My time,” he repeated. The tramping overhead had grown indistinguishable from the music. He glanced at the ceiling and saw something bobbing there, something gray and glistening, acrawl with dark blotches moving crablike upon it, hissing and gaping and drooling down on him.

He did not quite register—or believe—what he saw. Not until he realized that someone must have slipped a dose of 37 into his drink. The hallucination was vivid as any he could imagine; and realizing it was only a vision freed him to watch it with remote fascination. A product of his mind and nothing more.

It was then, in the air above Lenore, that he saw the second shape swimming. Black arms; speckled eyes at the tips of radiant tendrils; a central mouth of lamprey fangs. It was bright as black crystal, as if an actual being had unfolded itself from nowhere and now dominated the room. He must congratulate his hosts on the spectacular special effects.

But when he turned to look for Etienne and Nina, he saw nothing of them—or of the crowd. A horde of mandalas filled the room like a jostling crowd, blotting out the pale human shadows; their tendrils dangled from the ceiling like the stinging arms of a multiform man-o-war, like poisonous party streamers strung from evil balloons.

“No,” Lenore choked suddenly. “Go back. You cannot speak. Don’t interfere.”

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

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

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

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please.”

“I have to,” she said. “I’ve waited a lifetime. Longer….”

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

“Etienne’s almost ready. This way.”

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

“There you are. I’ll be right with you.”

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

“Before and after!” Etienne sang.

“Our own little Tuol Sleng!” said Nina. “Now the curator’s on display!”

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

“That’s that,” he said, taking Lenore’s elbow. “Our gallery is complete. Now as for you, my dear….”

“I’m ready,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light dawned brutally, in a round room of mirrors.

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

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

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

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

“No, ” he said. “Please.”

“Derek….”

“No!”

“I’ve come back to you. I know you’ve changed, but I haven’t. I had to speak to you.”

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

“I forgive you. That’s all I had to say.”

“No, May, please—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Good-bye, Derek.”

“May! No, May, please! I—I want to ask you, I want to—”

“Good-bye.”

“I’m sorry, May! I love you, May! I’m sorry!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Michael!”

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

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

Suddenly Lenore called his name, and that was enough to wake him. He leapt to his feet and pushed through the crowd; the others swung sideways like dangling puppets, their hands reaching out limply, as if moved only by currents of disturbed air.

He seized Lenore and tried to pull her away from Derek Crowe, but this was not what she wanted. “No,” she murmured, with her eyes rolling up in her head. “Take me—to him.”

He couldn’t believe she meant it, but Lenore was insistent. Crowe fell backward on the couch and lay ripping at his clothes, screaming as if his flesh were on fire. Lenore began pulling at her shirt, baring her breasts.

“Get these off,” she insisted; and numbly he helped her strip naked before the staring crowd, which was too preoccupied with events above their heads to pay attention to this minor conjunction of physical bodies.

Crowe had undressed himself. He lay thrashing but beginning to slow, as if injected with a tranquilizer.

“To him,” she repeated. And when Michael hesitated, because the thought was so gruesome, she insisted: “Now! I can’t make it alone! I can hardly walk!”

He guided her to the couch. And stood while her hands reached out to touch Crowe’s naked chest. He was covered all over with a withered, membranous garment, mandala-scarred, flapping as if in a strong wind. Michael swallowed his revulsion as Lenore straddled Crowe, gripping his penis and squeezing till her knuckles went white.

“No,” she said sternly. “Not you. You’re not coming out.”

Crowe wailed and growled, thrashing as if to throw her; but Lenore held on.

“Lenore,” Michael said.

“Leave,” she said brusquely. “Leave now.”

She gave him a look, and then her eyes filmed over.

Crowe began screaming. Michael staggered and fell. He lay staring at two scenes: Events on the couch were amplified and mirrored in the air overhead, played out in a dimension that kept rotating through this one. He could hardly see Lenore as human now; she was something larger, a strange presence overwhelming the small pale form and filling the room, reaching up into the rhythmic thunder overhead, pulling all that power down here….

Lenore had stopped Crowe’s imminent collapse. He had felt as if he were about to burst, in a moment of orgasm beyond compare, but she had checked all that. The power continued to build toward some climax, but it had nowhere to go. She clutched him so hard that he could find no release. A shrieking laugh bubbled out of her as she held him down.

The second skin felt sticky on the inside; scraps of vestigial tissue clung to him, meshing with his own skin as sweat moistened the hide like mucilage. It writhed against him as if trying to crawl free.

The dark air was full of motion, vibrating clots like congealed grease and hair, like the specks of dead tissue that swarm across an eyeball when it stares into infinity. But these shapes continued to gain definition. They didn’t move off when he stared at them directly; they hung where they were like dark suns or lightless moons. The round room was laced with impossibly thin, nearly invisible silver threads that stretched from wall to wall, spun like liquid silk from the clots. He could almost feel the threads humming through his body, power lines snagging him, except they were too fine for his nerves to perceive. Lenore put her mouth against his ear, distracting him from all he couldn’t understand; he allowed his consciousness to shrink down to the limits of her voice, her touch. The things she said made no sense, nor were they exactly endearments, but that didn’t trouble him now. They were in the language of The Mandala Rites, but improvised; she was composing, not reciting, this incantation. The silver wires thrummed, sending their signals through the room. Electric currents curled through the second skin, warming him. When he glanced down at himself, he saw all the symbols beginning to glow. Wheels of light, turning slowly, dazzling him until he had to shut his eyes. Even through his closed lids, he saw the mandalas revolving against his flesh. They had become three-dimensional, swelling upward out of the wrinkled plane of preserved skin, spilling into the room, leaving holes seared in the hide as if to destroy the gate through which they had entered the world. His own skin felt fried where they had lain. He knew he had been freshly tattooed in thirty-seven places, like Etienne’s father.

The brightest of the mandalas shone like a fixed star directly above, but when he slit his eyes to peek out, he saw it was the mark on Lenore’s forehead, rotating like water in a drain… but swirling outward, merging with the others. They arrayed themselves in constellations on the shining silver wires. The room grew taut and dense with unbreathable fluid; the walls bowed outward; mirrors shattered, flinging shards across the room; plaster flaked down from the ceiling in an ever steadier drizzle. The room quaked like a cell struggling to replicate, making way for new material, arranging all its elements in accord with the empty heavens and the density of stars and the dictates of biology… although this was a subtler process, rarely witnessed, requiring not a microscope for viewing but simply the eyes of the chosen. Derek stopped fighting. He searched her face for clues, but her eyes were rolled up. Following her gaze, he saw what she must have been watching. Easy to mistake it for a dance or the hypnotic swaying motion of seaweeds in a deep current, for it was both a random process, at the mercy of nature, and an act of great deliberation.

Two awesome shapes were wrapped together in the middle of the air. One was the thing of moist gray pores and glistening mouths he had seen before, repulsive to Derek, who hated anemones and slugs and things of the sea. The other was far more appealing, being all nervous glossy black sinew and piercing eyes and polished teeth. The two tumbled slowly end over end, their flailing arms tangled with the all-penetrating silver threads. The creatures pulsed like the chambers of a single heart; the whole room shook to their beating. Lenore reached up with her eyes closed, reached until her fingers were immersed in the core of the coupling organisms. Derek would not have believed such penetration possible, for to him they looked as solid as the walls and the ceiling. He could not see her hands, however mistily, inside them. Then she drew her arms down again, crossing them over her breast, bringing the joined mandalas into her. She spasmed as they sank into her flesh. Her arms flew wide with silver tendrils wrapped from wrist to shoulder, fingers spread and straining, the wires tugging until her muscles grew corded and twisted. The whole room seemed bent on tearing her in two. And Derek, at the sight, knew then that his own part in this was over; it was as nothing. She had let go of him, and now he felt his seed gush uselessly over his belly with a burning twinge. There was nothing else left for him, nothing greater that Derek Crowe would ever produce. The grand evil promise of his inner mandala had been usurped and there was no place for it now. No room in this configuration for a thirty-eighth.

Lenore had spared his life; spared him from immortality. He would live a brief while longer among the ruins of everything he had erected.

The fine silver threads snapped completely taut. The air sang. And Lenore, without screaming, without a sound other than the viscous friction accompanying the shucking of her flesh, split wide open. The halves of her yawned until he heard the ribs crack along her spine. For a moment she hung suspended in air on gleaming silver threads as her guts slithered onto him in a warm, steaming pile. Derek had never been closer to anyone.

But she wasn’t just anyone now.

As her husk toppled, something slipped out of her. It shook off the residue of blood and viscera, spread itself across the silver threads to dry in a warm astral wind. It trembled like a fresh-hatched butterfly and looked down upon Derek with a single liquid eye like an unearthly orange gem in the heart of a violet flower.

It was not Lenore, of course—no more than attar of roses is a rose. Yet it was she in essence, much stronger now than she had ever been. She was whole, a circle, a world unto herself.

It was that awareness which started him weeping. She was whole, and he lay here in fragments. The unhatched thing within him was cracked and seeping with a foul odor that would fill the rest of his days. Broken, but a believer now, he had a premonition of the only possible life that could follow from this night, at least until he ended it himself.

He was, after all, the mandala master. He had inspired a dark mad cult for whose atrocities he must accept the blame.

Etienne and Nina and the others were already melting back into the obscurity from which they had come. His was the name on the cover of The Mandala Rites. His would be the name splashed all over the world, bringing him notoriety beyond his imagining.

When he opened his eyes at last, the silver threads had snapped and reeled back into the ether, and she was gone.

Gone, except for the gutted, cast-off body that remained to incriminate him. After tonight, he would deny nothing. All explanations seemed equally likely, and Derek was determined to confess to anything—to everything. Who was he to judge what was possible, or to attempt to discriminate among the infinite shades of truth?

And anyway, in the largest possible sense, he was guilty.

And Michael, fleeing the carnage, his mind blank because he had seen too much to ever understand, melted away with the rest of the crowd. He saw Etienne and Nina in the hall, speaking urgently and in low voices, looking only slightly bemused. Etienne flashed him a smile and gave a quick wave of his hand, as if they were passing casually on the street. Michael turned and ran the other way.

He stumbled on the stairs and nearly crashed into someone coming down.

“Michael!”

It was Lilith, grabbing at him, pulling him the rest of the way to the ground floor. He had a glimpse of the dance floor, the crowd milling aimlessly, the music stilled.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Let’s get out. I called the police a few minutes ago. Something is going on here….”

“Yes,” he said. “Out.”

They pushed through the aimless mob, who were on the verge of a disappointment so immense they would never comprehend it. They had been spurned by a god. They might turn angry, he thought, which was fine with him. Let them tear the place apart.

They found the entrance and forced their way onto the street, fighting against the tide of people who were still streaming in with hopeful expressions. Beyond the latecomers, the night was filling with the sound of sirens, but Michael and Lilith ran under the freeway, hiding in the shadow of a huge cement column as the first of the squad cars came tearing past, flashing and howling.

“I should tell them,” he said, starting forward. “They have to look in the basement.”

Lilith held him back. “They’ll look. They’ll find whatever there is to find. What… what’s down there?” Then she saw his face. “No, don’t tell me. Try not to think about it either. Are you okay?”

He shook his head. There was no sense in lying.

“Can you walk? Do you want to wait here awhile?”

He stood dazed, unsure of what he wanted. He felt as if he had been cut off from everything, from his past and any possible future.

“Michael?”

Suddenly he sensed a stirring in the dark air above them. Lilith, sensing it too, looked up. “What is that?”

A luminous wheel was appearing gradually in the starless dark beneath the overpass, taking on shape and solidity. It was a violet mandala, and a bright orange globe sat at its center, an omniscient eye. It was what had become of Lenore. He could feel something of her in it, beaming at him, questioning….

“They’re real, then,” Lilith said.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael answered.

He put out his hands, gently, as if he could touch the fresh new thing. His fingers trembled. It was asking something—but he couldn’t tell what. He only knew he wanted to be close to it; he welcomed its presence. It was offering guidance when he had never felt so lost.

Violet light flared, the orange eye flashed, and he felt her come over him, into him. For one incredible moment she let him share her awareness….

The mandala that had been Lenore floated like an angel over Michael, over streets of quaking red flesh, under stars that seemed black holes piercing night’s whiteness. At first she had felt fragile and alone, as if any breeze might destroy her; but she had begun to realize that she was invulnerable now, and her loneliness would pass. All human emotions had been released in her evisceration. She had shed care as daintily as she’d stepped free of marrow and muscle and bone. In place of these things, in the stead of passing sadness or flitting joy, she sensed the growth of a quiet majesty and the promise of stranger, more ancient concerns. Human passions were to be her toys now, and then her tools, but never again her masters. What she truly had to master, to harness, was the blind reckless hunger of the other mandalas. She had willed herself free of blindness; she must share this knowledge with them. She must bring them to a new and greater understanding of their nature, their potential.

Only one so young and naive could have possessed the ambition to change the thirty-seven, but she felt calm and resolved. She had launched herself among them for a purpose; she already had prevented one far blinder than herself from taking form. It would be awful to waste the opportunity she had seized, and she did not intend to do so. But it would take time, human ages, to understand the things of which she was capable and begin to work toward her goal.

In the meantime, she needed allies. She needed to keep touch with the physical world, to understand and remember it as she had when she was human.

Michael was the one familiar point among the tugging of a thousand needs, a million empty stomachs. She needed him— although not nearly as much as he needed her.

As she hovered there indecisively, the guardian of the woman standing next to Michael began to stir, finally noticing the vulnerable target so nearby. Now that the configuration had been restored, Michael was becoming visible to them once again. Lilith’s mandala was a wheel of gnarled, knotted blossoms peeling back to show poison barbs secreted inside. It began to spin toward Michael with ferocious possessiveness and a threat of violent lashing, as if to scare off the newborn mandala while she hesitated.

That threat quickened her decision. Better her than another. This was as good a place as any to take a stand against their reflexive evil.

She pulled herself over Michael protectively and felt herself swell as she absorbed him. She learned, then, that there were to be no clear rules and that human intentions were meaningless now. For as she took hold of Michael, she felt a fierce, miserly greed well up in her. Delicate violet edges hardened into curving razors.

He’s mine.

The thirty-seventh mandala prepared to fight for its catch.