The 37th Mandala

1

Lilith Allure, true to form, was already an hour late.

She did this to Derek every week, so he kept working long past the point at which he would have switched off the computer in anticipation of any other guest. He had finished writing his lecture days ago, and polished it repeatedly. There was no point in memorizing the thing since he was going to read it verbatim from the page. On the other hand, he had nothing better to do than rehearse it one more time.

Many of you already know this story, but please allow me to recount it briefly for those in the audience who might have attended tonight’s talk as a favor to others more familiar with my work…

Derek imagined scattered laughter in the hall. Always start with a bit of humor.

In November of 199_, a young woman came to me for past-life counseling. This encounter in a professional context was to change not only my personal life but my very outlook on reality. I had recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, finding it more congenial to spiritual pursuits. The Bay Area is a remarkable focal point, where the potent ley-lines of Earth’s magnetism converge among the unparalleled feng shui of surrounding water and rolling hills dominated by the majestic and magical Mount Tamalpais. It is in short an astral omphalos and spiritual retreat for pilgrims the world round. It felt only natural that I should arrive in such a place while writing Exploring Your Past Lives. I found I was able to make a modest living through psychic consultation and hypnotherapy.

My visitor, whom I shall call Ms. A, had also recently moved to the Bay Area from Southern California, and was quite active in the City’s flourishing Neo-pagan community. She had formed alliances with the Temple of Set, the Latest Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., a coven of Gardnerian Witches, and several other more politically conscious Wiccan groups. Perhaps as a result of such an eclectic curriculum, she had begun to experience a series of overwhelming visions, powerful trances that came without warning, whose content did not correlate with the imagery of any known mythology. Several of her acquaintances sought an Atlantean explanation, speculating that perhaps she had been a high priestess in that doomed culture of unmatched magical attainment; they thought her recent spiritual explorations had reactivated psychic abilities left untouched for aeons. Ms. A was advised to find a reputable guide to put her in touch with her prior incarnations. My reputation being more than slightly known among such circles, it was by no means an improbable coincidence that brought her to my office and opened the most amazing chapter of my life.

At our first session, Ms. A stated that she chiefly saw bright whirling wheels of light during her visions, like the mandalas of Buddhist philosophy; but whereas the Buddhist mandalas are sacred diagrams constructed for meditative purposes, these mandalas were living organisms, swimmers in the astral sea, and seemingly intent on communication. She was sharp-witted, intelligent, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s religious iconography, but these images baffled her, as they did me.

I suggested a light exploratory trance, to give her time to acclimate to the hypnotic state. I expected this to take several minutes to attain; but no sooner had I suggested that she might feel sleepy and relaxed than Ms. A began to twitch and murmur like a sleepwalker.

“Write,” she said, in a voice strangely altered. “Write down what we say!”

Obediently, I put pen to paper and began to transcribe the words Ms. A channeled. Thus I received, over the course of several months and numerous hypnotic sessions, what I believe is one of the most remarkable documents in human history….

Yeah, right.

He was sick of looking at the screen. Sick of rereading his own words, but that was hardly new. He’d been sick of them since long before the book came out. Now it was publicity time, salt in the wound. He was supposed to muster some enthusiasm for tomorrow’s flight to the sticks, push the deluxe edition, put on a show for the blue-haired occult groupies. All he really wanted was to lie in bed with Lilith, listen to the rain, and pretend there had never been a Derek Crowe.

He heard the rain splashing in the street as he walked around his desk to the window. The blinds slanted down, giving him a view of Larkin Street and the sidewalk gleaming below his building, streaky drops of water pulling from the wires. A cab was at the curb, its passenger just vanishing under the faded awning. That had to be Lilith. He went to turn off the computer but froze with his hand on the switch.

In the hall, the buzzer rang. Derek didn’t move.

Something was happening on the screen, something he had never seen before. Ordinarily, when the machine sat idle, the screen-saver sent geometric forms tumbling across the screen—lines and pyramids and parallelograms.

Tonight the amber light seemed to strobe, making his vision flicker. The usual linear shapes chased themselves across the screen, twisting back and forth, folding in and out of each other like four-dimensional figures. The patterns were often hypnotic, but tonight the lines moved jerkily, slowing, as if the computer were about to die. Several twitched away from the rest, spasmed and flickered in isolation. The screen filled with wheels, circles, mandalas. One, another, and then still more—tumbling faster and faster, new mandalas appearing before the old ones faded, accreting in layers, an unholy residue clotting on the screen until it looked like a wall worked over by occult vandals.

He backed away from the desk. The buzzer sounded again. He was afraid to move.

Suddenly, with an audible pop, the screen went blank. For a moment he thought it had burned out. Then bright letters flared:

“You fuckers!” Crowe said. The buzzer was blaring. He stabbed at the switch and the screen went black again, this time for good reason. He stormed into the living room and down the short hall, slamming his hand on the speaker button. “I’ll deal with you later,” he muttered.

Lilith’s voice came crackling. “It is later.”

“Not you! Come on up!” He pressed the button to unlock the street door, threw the deadbolts, and paced back down the hall to glare at his blank screen. Those sorry thieves would regret they’d ever messed with him. Crowe’s lawyer had a full view of San Francisco Bay, from forty floors up, where such pathetic trend-hopping ripoff artists could be viewed as the pitiful insects they were and squashed accordingly.

They must’ve come in through my modem, he thought. Fucking with me of the Internet. They figured out my codes or something. That’s got to be illegal. More fuel for the lawsuit. I’ll be lucky if they didn’t plant some kind of goddamn mandala virus to eat my lecture before I print it out.

Just then he heard the door open.

For a moment the sight of Lilith erased his irritation. She was wrapped tight in black plastic, lightly beaded with rain. She hooked her umbrella on the doorknob and came toward him, carrying a bottle of wine in a paper sack. It was uncorked, and from the taste of her mouth, she had been drinking from it. And smoking as well.

He pulled away from her kiss. “Cigarettes.”

“Well, Derek, you’re the hypnotist. Break me of the filthy habit.”

“I haven’t hypnotized anyone… in years.”

“That’s not what your book says.”

“Forget about the book.”

He took a swallow of wine, swished it in his mouth, swallowed; then he set the bottle on the rickety hall table covered with magazines and phone books, and squeezed her.

“So where did you hide her?” she asked. “And why did you bother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your sex slave. You know I don’t mind.”

“Oh—no. It’s those assholes from Club Mandala again. They’re messing with my computer now. You wouldn’t believe what they did.”

She looked disappointed, biting her lip. “Oh, really? No girl?” Pulling away, she walked into the apartment and threw her coat over the couch. “I think I saw them today.”

“Who?”

“Them. Coming out of the shop as I went in. I didn’t recognize them at the time, but then I saw a poster for the club on the bulletin board, and Norman said a weird couple had put it up just before my shift. It was the pair I saw. Norman described them to a T. You know how he’s always writing police reports in his head—everyone’s a suspect in some crime they might commit.”

“He let them put up a poster?”

“It’s business, Derek.”

“Why don’t you tell him I’ll pull copies of the book if he doesn’t tear it down? That’s business too. I’ll start a boycott against Hecate’s Haven.”

“Lovely. Last month we had fundamentalist Boy Scouts picketing us for Jehovah’s merit points. And now you.”

Derek dropped on the couch, steaming.

“Besides,” she said, wrapping an arm around him, waving the bottle under his nose, “we probably sell more copies of The Mandala Rites than any other shop in San Francisco. You’d be cutting your own throat.”

“Signed copies,” he said. “I don’t have to do Norman any favors. He makes his profit too.”

“You can’t battle Club Mandala in Norman’s shop.”

“I don’t intend to,” he said. “That’s what the courts are for. I’ve got an interview with a reporter from the Bayrometer next week, and I’m going to let those club assholes have it with both bores. If they want publicity….”

“That’s the Derek Crowe I know.”

He took her face in his hands. “And love?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You came pretty close.”

“Derek, everyone who ever met you loved you at first sight. Unfortunately, they mistook their first impression for disgust.”

He shoved her away lightly, laughing. “So why do you keep coming back?”

“I’ve told you, my dear. I’m perverted.”

“I only wish you were, Lilith. Underneath your satanic exterior, you’re the embodiment of white bread.”

She shuddered and sat away from him. “Satanic? That’s stale bread. The only real Satanist is a disillusioned Christian.”

“All right, all right, don’t give me that lecture again. Are you hungry?”

“Not that there’s anything in your kitchen worth offering me, but no.” She rose from the couch, walking toward the bedroom which doubled as his office. “Not for earthly fare, anyway. A little of your blood would suit me fine, though. Let’s get to it.”

He followed her somewhat sheepishly, though his skin prickled with anticipation. He shut the door behind him, as if someone in the living room might be watching. He enjoyed the slight claustrophobia that came with reducing his world to this one small cell. He and Lilith, alone. She wore a black one-piece suit, zippered from throat to crotch.

“Speaking of lectures,” she said, her fingers toying with the zipper ring at her neck. “You’re off to where tomorrow?”

“Cinderton, North Carolina.”

“That’s it? That’s your grand tour?”

He shrugged. “I follow the money.”

“You don’t seem too excited.”

He sat down beside her. “I dread having to talk about the mandalas for the rest of my life. In a way, if they’re too successful it will just be a pain in the ass. I want to be anonymous and get on with my next book.”

“And all this time I thought you were just trying to hit the jackpot so you could lie back and do nothing for the rest of your life.”

“Ah… I can’t fool a psychic. But I don’t think this book is going to be the one. That’s why I’ve got to get the next tome started. I might even work on it tonight. Research.”

“Tonight? What’s it called?”

“The Big Book of Sex Magick, ” he said.

Lilith’s laughter merged with the sound of the zipper. “Oh, really?” she said.

“It’s dedicated to you.”

One candle burned, and that was the only light in the room. It wavered as the flame bent, dipped. Lilith’s hand trembled, and Derek bit his lips, hissing as molten wax scalded his nipple. The plaster wall was cold and clammy against his back and buttocks, arms, and calves. The wax cooled swiftly, but not before the candle darted elsewhere and the next tongue of fire licked his belly. Her hands caressed his inner thighs, her nails traced the cartilege spans that strained from his skin as he flinched and shivered. The handcuffs were cold, and so was the bare floor under his bare feet. The room was drafty and he felt perfectly vulnerable as Lilith whispered the words of some sinister-sounding spell that was probably nothing but a psalm recited in Hebrew. Of course, he didn’t believe in her spells, but that wasn’t the source of the thrilling fear he sometimes felt. The truth was, he didn’t completely trust Lilith. If he had, this game would have held little appeal.

“The demon is with us,” she said. “Arise, demon.”

Her hand cupped his balls. The candle dripped. Derek clenched. Her teeth on his belly, biting sharply, letting go before the cry was even out of his mouth. Her hair brushed his pubes.

“Lilith,” he said, tensing. Her breath on his groin. “Lilith, no.”

She rocked back on her heels, looking up at him, the candle held between her fingers. “You cannot order me about, demon master. For you are in my circle now, and all your familiars are mine to command.” She opened her mouth, making a ring. She set the candle down.

“No, Lilith. No.”

He shut his eyes. He could feel her mouth closing around him.

“Please!” he said, writhing away violently, clenching down so hard that the plaster gave way and one of the hooks tore from the wall. The handcuff flew as he coiled into himself, and the curve of bright metal struck her in the cheek. She tumbled sideways on the floor. His fist, he realized, had also hit her. He hunched against the wall, one hand still pinned high in the air, but no longer angry or frightened enough to rip the second hook free. No longer out of control.

Lilith looked up at him, feeling her jaw. A slash below her eye bled slightly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “God, I’m so sorry.”

She drew her bare knees close to her and started to rise.

“Lilith,” he said, “I warned you…”

“That’s all right,” she said, sullen. “We’ve always skated on the edge of it. I thought I’d take you out on the ice tonight—see how thin it is.”

“Really, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“That’s what happens when you play at pain, Derek.”

“I just… I just…”

“Wait a minute.” She found the key and freed him. He was shivering, so she pushed him toward the bed. “Get in,” she said. She covered him with blankets.

“What about you?”

She looked toward the door. “I’m going to take off.”

“What? Why?” He started to climb out, but she stopped him.

“Derek, it’s nothing. I think you need to be alone.”

“Alone? I’m always alone. What do you mean?”

“Something happened, Derek. We need to process it.”

“What the fuck do you mean? I’m extremely ticklish, that’s what happened.”

She was already in the doorway, gathering her clothes to her, tugging at her zipper.

“It’s more than that,” she said. “Maybe I see it more clearly than you.”

“You and your fucking third eye!” he called. “All right, Lilith, go ahead. I’m sorry I hurt you, but get the fuck out. And stop looking at my aura like that!”

She picked up her raincoat and looked back at him, sadly. “Have a lovely time in North Carolina, dear. Maybe things will be different when you come back.”

The outer door closed a moment later. He knew he had to get out of bed eventually to lock and double-lock it, but he couldn’t make himself move. He kept wondering exactly what had happened, what screwed-up ominous thing Lilith thought it all meant.

Sometimes he thought the little he saw of her was still too much.

She had weird notions; she steeped herself in them. She didn’t mind him laughing at them either. She was tougher than that. Sometimes he thought she was his exact opposite and if they ever truly came together they would explode, like matter and antimatter in bad science fiction. The very idea that one night in North Carolina could somehow change things… now that was even sillier than her demonic invocations.

He sat peeling candle wax from his chest, shaking his head.

My little demon.

“Fucking Lilith,” he said, and laughed.

2

That night it was so cold that Lenore and Michael Renzler sat at their kitchen table with the oven door open. Lenore picked at a congealing pool of creamed chipped beef. Her plate was cold so the glop had chilled instantly. Michael sat across from her, nothing on his plate but a piece of dry toast. He had taken one bite and otherwise ignored his “meal,” too busy flipping through one of his occult books, making notes on a yellow pad and mumbling to himself. Watching her husband read was the highlight of too many of Lenore’s evenings. He hadn’t said one word to her since they’d sat down together. She was getting more pissed by the second.

“You want any shit on that shingle?” she finally asked.

“I’m fasting,” he said without looking up.

“Fasting?”

“For tomorrow night.”

“You’re fasting for a lecture?”

“Not just for the lecture. I’m planning a ritual too.”

He threw her a smile. Lately his rituals were the only thing he got excited about, but for the last two weeks it had been even worse. Michael was in ecstacies, obsessed; he couldn’t talk about anything else. He kept reading and rereading the same book, making notes in it, trying out pronunciations that sounded like gibberish. Derek Crowe was coming to Cinderton. The mandala man. Michael couldn’t contain himself.

“You’ll be so weak you’ll pass out in the middle of the talk,” she said.

“No, by the second day I’m usually flying—I’ll feel great. Today’s just water and bread, but tomorrow I get bread, milk, and wine. It’s my own version of a black fast.”

“Whatever that is,” she said.

“It’s how you get ready for the really important ceremonies.”

“It’s not a ceremony, Michael, it’s just a talk!”

“But I’m doing rituals. One tonight, one tomorrow night, maybe one the next day. Three major rites from his book. It’s hard to memorize them.” This comment sounded like a rebuke. In other words: Shut up.

“Especially when you haven’t eaten all day.”

“No—that sharpens the senses, makes my mind clearer.”

“You look pale,” she said, but he didn’t answer. He had gone back to his book, making it clear that he didn’t have energy to waste on talking to his wife.

She cut a big square of dripping toast and shoved it in her mouth. It was like eating a sponge dipped in glue; she could hardly swallow.

She got up from the table, went down the hall into the living room, shivering even in her sweater since the front of the house was drafty thanks to the badly hung front door and the cardboard stuck in one of the broken windows. Tucker Doakes, their upstairs landlord, was a lousy carpenter, and he did all his own work.

Her textbooks were stacked on the coffee table. She picked up a few of them and tromped back into the kitchen, throwing them down with a thud next to her plate. Michael glanced up.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Math.”

He pursed his lips, nodded. “It’s so great you’re back in school.”

It wasn’t the reaction she’d been hoping for. She threw her plate in the sink and sat down to a calculus text. The exercises looked far simpler than those in the books Michael read, his John Dee and Aleister Crowley and Anton Szandor LaVey. But his books were nonsense, endlessly confusing and arbitrary. Mathematics, on the other hand, was like a glittering crystal-clear landscape for the mind; an infinite path where she could lose herself forever. She had always been good at math, even while failing everything else in school. No matter how bad things got, she could find pleasure in puzzles and logic games. At least they fed the brain, developed her intelligence, unlike Michael’s medieval bullshit, which rotted the mind as far as she could tell.

But tonight the books were opaque to her. The figures lay like insects flattened between the pages, making her feel weary and stupid after five minutes of desultory study. This was not going to work. And tonight Michael was poorer company than usual.

She slammed the book shut. “I’m going out.”

He didn’t look up. “I’ll be in the temple for a while, so don’t, you know, worry about me.”

Don’t bother me, you mean, she thought. He didn’t ask anything else.

Lenore found her heaviest coat in the living room. She couldn’t stand to be in the house another minute. It was horrible to be so cold indoors, where the chill oozed out of every surface and even the floor sucked the heat from your body. At least she expected to be cold outside.

The porch was littered with beer bottles, Cheer Wine cans, and motorcycle parts. A soggy broken-down couch, covered with a greasy sheet, was occupied by Tucker’s automotive tools and a busted color TV set. Tucker had taken fifteen bucks a month off the original rent after Michael complained about the mess. Sometimes in warm weather Tucker came down, pushed the mess aside, and sat on the couch smoking grass and drinking beer, so they had to watch him pacing past their front window and hear him coughing and hacking and spitting over the rails. He was that kind of guy. His rust-eaten pickup truck was pulled up on the dead brown lawn, although he could have pulled it up behind the house or left it in the driveway, which he specifically hadn’t rented to them. An older T-Bird in worse condition sat decomposing at the edge of the yard, half overgrown by brambles. Michael’s crazed VW was parked on the lawn just off the driveway, and Lenore’s dying hulk, a Cutlass Supreme, was on the road out front, beyond the bare hedges. She had the keys in her pocket, but the thought of driving didn’t thrill her. The Cutlass had died too many times, leaving her stranded; she’d never yet been stuck on the roads outside of town, but she wasn’t willing to take the risk tonight. A storm was headed toward the mountains; with her luck it would hit if she went out. Not that there was anywhere she felt like going. Even the nearest video store was a three-mile drive. She wanted to be happy where she was, but that would take some doing.

Music thumped down from upstairs. Even in the cold, Tucker’s windows were open. Shoving her hands in her pockets, she went around the side of the house, down the driveway. As she passed the door to her own kitchen, she saw that Michael was already gone. She tiptoed up the flight of creaking, rotten steps to Tucker’s flat.

The door was unlocked, so she went in. He’d never hear her knocking, but Michael might. Michael didn’t approve of her upstairs visits, since there was only one reason she ever hung out with Tucker.

Tucker’s kitchen was a shabbier version of their own: dishes piled in the sink, pie pans full of crusted cat food on the floor, an algae-colored stream running across the linoleum from beneath the fridge. Scabby, a calico with skin problems, jumped off the sink when she came in and followed her down the hall to the front of the house, until the music grew so loud that the cat refused to go any farther. Since the Renzlers’ stereo was defunct, Tucker’s music was about all they ever heard. Obligingly, he played it loud enough for both homes.

She saw Tucker’s motorcycle boots propped on the foot-locker that served him as a coffee table, among a clutter of ashtrays, lighters, pipes and screens, and a massive, three-chambered red-white-and-blue acrylic bong. After taking a hit from the Patriot, you were required to stand and salute as you exhaled. A nearly full bottle of red wine sat on the floor next to the trunk; her mouth went dry and prickly at the sight of it.

Tucker lay back on the couch, eyes closed. The window above the couch was open; there were no curtains to move in the breeze, but she could feel it. Tucker thrived on the chill. He was almost too tall for the couch. Balding, with long curly hair and a scraggly beard, his beer gut peeping out from under a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, he looked oddly vulnerable. “Tuck!” she said.

He sat up as if a gun had gone off, his eyes bulging and crazed; but instantly, seeing her, relaxed and slumped down again, as if descending straight back into a trance. “Hey, girl,” he said.

“Thought I heard Scarlet up here. Where is she?”

“Scarlet? Naw, she’s not coming tonight.”

“Shit, that’s too bad. I was going to hang out with you guys for a while.”

He opened one eye. “Well, sit yourself down anyway. I’m not doing anything. Where’s your old man?” He reached for the remote control and turned down the volume on the CD player.

Lenore shrugged and sat down in a big broken armchair, folding her legs up close for warmth. Tucker had scrounged up most of the furniture for their downstairs flat when they’d moved in with nothing but a couple bags of clothes and a truckload of books. And their furniture, bad as it was, was in better condition than the stuff Tucker lived with. In his weird way, he was the best landlord she’d ever had.

“You want some smoke?” he offered.

Lenore shrugged. “Wouldn’t turn it down.”

He started loading a small ceramic bong. “Been pretty dry lately, and we’re a long way from summer. You run out of that last bag I give you?”

“Days ago,” she said.

“Wow, girl, you been holding out a good long time. Shoulda come see me before now.”

“Hey, Tucker, I’m not a junkie or nothing. I can do without.”

“Sure you can, babe. Sure you can. Here, taste this.”

He finished tamping something green into the pipe of the bong and passed it to her along with his Harley-Davidson lighter. She burned it down in one deep breath; the stuff was hot and resinous, and immediately expanded in her lungs. She hacked it out in one violent burst, and then the coughing fit began.

“Whoa, girl, you’re aiming high tonight!”

She couldn’t answer. Her eyes were streaming, and her head felt as if it were shooting straight up through the roof of the house. Tucker scooped up the wine bottle by its neck and passed it to her. She knew she shouldn’t; she even hesitated for a minute. Dope was one thing, but alcohol was another entirely, and she’d made a deal with Michael. No drinking. Pot, okay. But no alcohol.

But it wasn’t the first time she’d broken her little rule up here with Tucker, and what the fuck, she was coughing her lungs out. She needed something wet. It didn’t really take her long to make the decision; she put the bottle to her mouth and swallowed. One swig was all she needed. It was all she’d ever needed.

A tight little ball in her stomach uncoiled as soon as she drank; it eased her coughing jag instantly, but then she felt embarrassed because her bowels turned to water and she already knew the condition of Tucker’s toilet. No way would she use it; but she couldn’t go back downstairs. Not yet. She sat very still, holding the bong and the bottle. After a few seconds, she took another swallow. The tension eased. Her guts stopped cramping. She laid back her head and shut her eyes.

She could hear Tucker moving around; he switched the music off and slapped a tape into his VCR.

“So where’s Michael? Did you tell me?”

“Fucking Michael,” she said dreamily, peering out between her lashes. “He’s doing his stuff again.”

“Goddamn, that guy’s a regular devil worshipper.”

“It’s not devil worship, Tucker. He doesn’t believe in that shit. I’m not sure myself exactly what it is, but it’s not the devil.”

“I don’t care. All the heavy metal bands, they’re into that Satan shit. It’s cool with me.”

“It’s fucking lame,” Lenore pronounced. She felt the jug in her lap, cool and comforting, a nice round heaviness.

“You like that stuff?” he said. “Pretty good, huh?”

“Mmm-hm.”

“I’ll give you some, okay? Same deal as last time?”

“Mm-hm, sure.”

“I got a Baggie all ready to sell, but you can have it if you’re sure….”

She was sleepy, drifting. Thoughts were coming to her, thoughts like feelings, drifting up inside her till they burst at the surface of her mind.

“You want a beer?”

At that moment, they both heard a bell ringing downstairs, sharp and pure, penetrating the walls of the house. As the tone faded slowly into inaudibility, she was sure she heard Michael chanting in a deep voice.

Tucker laughed. “There he goes! Let me get you that beer, baby.”

She tried to say no, she had the bottle, but the words didn’t exactly come out in a hurry, and by then Tucker was putting a cold can against her cheek.

“Shoot, honey, you must be feeling pretty good.”

Realizing that she was grinning, she opened her eyes. “Oh, yeah.” Laughing.

“You go right ahead and pop that. I’ll load you up another hit.”

Lenore was laughing hard, and Tucker had the music turned way up again and he was laughing too, and the video was going but there wasn’t any sound from that. Then she knocked over the beer in her lap and reached down to pick it up again, but she wasn’t in the big old chair at all anymore, she was sitting on the couch, and there were a bunch of cans scattered around that hadn’t been there before, so many she wasn’t sure which one she’d been drinking from. The bottle was there; she remembered it like an old friend, wistfully, since it was empty now; and she felt like she was surfacing for a big gulp of air, but then… and then… she looked up and Tucker was standing by the VCR, stepping back from the TV looking over at her with his goofy ugly grin missing a couple teeth and she could see on the screen why he hadn’t bothered with the sound, since there would have been nothing to hear but moaning. He’d slipped in one of his porno tapes. She found her can and swallowed but it was empty, but that didn’t matter because Tucker had read her mind and was pulling the top off another. And then… and then…

And then his arm was around her, and she thought she’d been vomiting because her throat burned and her mouth was sour, but she couldn’t remember it. She opened her eyes and moaned, and sure enough Tucker had his arm thrown across her chest and he was son of helping her, but really more urging her to lie back down. When she realized what was happening she started to fight him, she threw herself forward, but Tucker got rougher then and grabbed her shoulders and shoved her back down on his bed. They were in his room, and what bothered her most was that it all looked sort of familiar, as if she had seen it before in exactly this way but never remembered till now, and would probably forget it all over again—which scared her more than anything that was actually happening yet.

“Tucker!” she said. “Get off!”

He pulled back, looking hurt, as if surprised that she would really object. “Hey, girl….”

She tried to crawl backward. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think? You said same deal as last time. You want the weed or not?”

“The weed?” She stood up, swayed, stumbled but caught herself on the doorframe.

“Well, there’s the rent too, but I wasn’t gonna get into that yet.”

“What, were you gonna come down later and try’n collect?”

“Lenore…“He shook his head, coming back off the bed. “Shit. Don’t do this.”

“I gotta go.” She turned out into the hall, or thought she had. The edge of the doorframe slammed into her face. She stood there with her eyes closed, holding very still but spinning anyway. Just then, from downstairs, she heard the bell again. Michael was finishing up. He could probably hear them up here; he might assume it was Scarlet and Tucker; he was good at wishful thinking. She had to get away—somewhere she could straighten out.

Tucker was right on her, putting a finger to his lips. “Shush, you hear him down there?”

“I hear him. We’re both fucking idiots.”

“Well, baby, takes two to you-know.”

She swerved away, free now. Hoping her clothes were all on, since she didn’t want to have to come back for anything later, she made her way to the kitchen, then out the door into the cold. Her coat.

“Hey, girl, don’t forget this.” Tucker had it; he was right behind her, looking stone sober. “Now don’t be mad at me. You’re a pretty little thing, I’m only doing what comes natural. Besides, I thought we had an agreement.”

She snatched the coat from him.

“I’ll hold onto that Baggie for a while,” he called. “In case you change your mind. But I can’t wait too much longer for the rent. You tell your old devil-man I said so, okay?”

She hardly knew she was going down the steps; her kitchen was empty but she flew on past it. Somehow she got off the driveway and into the bushes, where she had to fight her way through tangles to the Cutlass. The Cutlass was unlocked. She got in and started the engine, put the heater on high, and sat there shaking as if with cold, though really she just felt numb. Same deal as last time, he’d said. What last time? Why couldn’t she remember? What had she done last time? What the fuck was wrong with her mind? She closed her eyes and felt herself spinning as if the car were out of control on a patch of black ice. She put her head down, gripped the steering wheel, and held on tight.

3

The Sisterhood of Incarnate Light had paid Derek’s flat speaking fee up front, before the program. Only now that the show was over, his lecture delivered, did he discover they wanted to cheat him out of his part of the take. That wasn’t quite how the Sisters put it, but Derek knew their scam, time-honored no matter how New Age.

“Your talk was certainly valuable, Mr. Crowe,” one was telling him now, trying to lubricate his goodwill with her buttery Southern tones while another Sister went to enlist the aid of a superior, “but we’re a nonprofit organization. We’re all volunteers here.”

Derek, while seething, was unwilling to waste his rage on an underling. “You might have volunteered to bake cookies and tear tickets,” he said, “but I’m the one who filled this hall tonight, on the strength of my research and hard work, and I did not volunteer.”

Fill was an exaggeration, but one he did not linger over. The only reason the hall had come even close to capacity was because the Sisters had wisely rented a smallish auditorium, something suited to the showing of a midnight movie. Even so, he had no doubt the Sisters had never drawn such a crowd.

“I appreciate that but—”

“You took ten dollars a head and I expect my cut.”

“But that was a donation—it goes toward development of the Incarnation Institute.” She shook her head and changed her tack, as if shame would work better than a bid for sympathy. “None of our other speakers asked any kind of fee.”

Derek had to laugh. “You mean Dr. Spondle doesn’t charge through the nose for his endless discourses on Atlantean astrology?”

The Sister looked slighted. “Everett Spondle is a very popular speaker here. His wife is one of our founders.”

“You work it out.” Derek turned away.

Two old women stood nearby, smiling in his direction and waiting to be noticed. He practiced a form of tunnel vision while wondering how to turn their irritating presence to his advantage. They’d been chatting about him for several minutes, just within his hearing: “Should I?—no, you go first—oh no, I’m too shy—he looks just like his pictures—oh, he doesn’t look at all like I imagined—you can almost see the mysteries in his eyes.”

Such women, all alike, were a redundant human type replicated endlessly across the continent, right down to their pride in how unique they were.

My fans, he thought.

He normally despised such creatures, but tonight they provided a welcome opportunity to demonstrate why the Sisters had attracted any crowd at all. They had come not to gather Atlantean wool but to glean the wisdom of Derek Crowe, occultist and author, direct from the source.

Both women carried books under their arms—books he’d once cringed at the sight of, despite being their author. He was used to them now. They were his stock-in-trade, the secret of his success—such as it was.

“Would you ladies like an autograph?” he said, snubbing the whining Sister. She went off, presumably to help find the superior who had yet to materialize.

“If you would, Mr. Crowe/’ said one, leaning forward as if to offer her wattles for inspection. She held a stack of his books. He reached for the sculpted silver fountain pen he kept in his shirt pocket—a gift from Lilith, with a small crystal ball mounted in a taloned claw at one end.

The other said, in rather harsh mountain tones, “We loved your talk, Mr. Crowe, it was so penetrating? Lately I do feel the—the ones you spoke of—or I think I do… the mandalas? I believe they’re watching over us, you know, like guardian angels?”

Every stammered phrase was open-ended, hesitant. He didn’t think this was entirely the product of the local inflection, which twisted up the last word to make even the plainest statement sound like a question. No doubt this sad woman was used to meeting ridicule or contempt when bringing up these subjects. But Derek smiled sublimely, her instant confidant.

“I understand you perfectly,” he said. “It’s not easy to be open to such perceptions, is it? It can be a tremendous burden on the chosen one, the sensitive soul. But we must accept these gifts and put them to work for the spiritual improvement, and not the impoverishment, of humanity.”

The second lady turned to the first. “Isn’t that marvelous? I find such beautiful messages in your books, Mr. Crowe. So many of the mystics these days are concerned with darkness and evil and casting out everything they don’t understand?” She reached out and lightly tapped him on the wrist. “But I think you must be blessed. You’re a channel for the higher things.”

“I’m not even that,” he said with all humility. “I am merely their secretary.” He pretended to jot on the air with his pen. “I take notes.”

The women’s eyes widened. “Now, that Miz A? The one who channeled the messages? Has she spoken any more? Do the mandalas ever get back in touch?”

Derek put a finger to his lip. “Some things shouldn’t be spoken of. I hesitate to upset a delicate balance…”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“…but yes, they do continue to speak through her occasionally, and they have hinted there may be more revelations in the future. More teachings.”

“Another book, you mean? Oh, how wonderful!”

“Well, I hope so. Their visits have meant a great deal to me. More than I can ever put across in words. Thank you so much.” He finished signing off the last of her copies and cleared his throat to interrupt her before she could start in again. He turned his full attention, and an apologetic smile, to the meeker woman.

“Now, to whom should I inscribe these?”

“Oh, goodness, to Opal,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

“That’s a lovely name. Very charming.”

He scrawled “For Opal” across one of her books, a dog-eared copy of Your Psychognostic Powers! That exclamation mark still made him wince whenever he saw it. As he closed the book, his reflection swam up through the coils of a silver-foil spiral embossed on the fluorescent orange cover. It was his first book, and he could never regard it without a tiny prick of shame, no matter how callused and scabbed.

“I can’t help noticing that you have all but my latest,” he said.

She turned away, one hand to her mouth, blushing like a schoolgirl. “I’m so embarrassed. I’ve been meaning to buy a copy, it’s just—”

“Never fear, it’s on sale near the door. I’ll give you a special dedication.”

She looked even more embarrassed now. At forty-five dollars for the deluxe edition—all he had carried—he couldn’t blame her. Neither could he resist rubbing her nose in her foolishness.

Taking her by the elbow, he helped her across the room to a table staffed by one of the volunteer Sisters. Her friend tagged along with nothing to say. Copies of the deluxe, collector’s first edition of The Mandala Rites, in its red cloth binding, were stacked in a small pile; all but a few had sold, he was happy to see. Acquired at cost from Phantom Press, which had arranged with his regular publisher to produce the special limited edition, the books turned a good profit.

He opened one of the remaining copies to the title page and started to write across the top, “Dearest Opal:”

“Oh, no, I really couldn’t ask you—”

“You enjoyed my talk, didn’t you?”

“Well, I—”

“The mandalas will open your life to powers beyond your imagining. My other books simply lead up to this. They opened me to the mandalas—brought me to their attention, so to speak. This is the text I was chosen to bring to public consciousness. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.”

She watched him with an expression of total despair as he finished signing his name below the frontispiece, an ornate red and black symbol that looked like a hood ornament from Hell. The book was full of these designs, intertwined arrow and dagger shapes enclosed in rings, somehow familiar but never quite the shapes one expected from studying traditional mandalas. Some were more reminiscent of Basque symbols or the vevers of Voudoun ritual than of Asian figures—but such familiarity was an illusion. They were wholly unique. That was a big selling point. It was also his chief weapon against the Club Mandala sleazebags, who had ripped off his designs for their nightclub without the slightest authorization and persisted in blithely inviting him to openings, as if he would be delighted to see his creations strobing on the walls for all the world to see.

Angry at the thought of the money he was about to waste on attorneys, he snapped the volume shut and set it in the woman’s tissue-soft palms. For a moment he trapped her hands between his own, holding them clasped around the book.

“I hope you enjoy it,” he said. “This lovely Sister will be happy to take your check.”

“Oh!” Her eyes lit up with relief as she found her escape. “You take checks! I’m so glad.”

But he was already spinning away, certain he heard urgent whispering behind him; and yes, here she came, the Valkyrie who spearheaded the Sisterhood of Incarnate Light. An enormous pale woman with long colorless hair and beet-bright cheeks, watery blue eyes, and no lipstick, she came rubbing pudgy hands together—pudgy but powerful. She could easily break his neck in the crook of her elbow. Well, it wouldn’t come to that. She was smiling, still off balance, quite confident of correcting this little problem—and at his expense.

“Mr. Crowe? I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself earlier. I’m Cerridwen Dunsinane.” She was out of breath from hurrying to fight this threat to her nonprofits. Not a trace of the local accent. No doubt a sworn enemy of the local Baptists.

He bowed slightly at the waist, harking back to a time of courtly manners. Such gestures always seemed to please these social anachronisms, who, while remaining champions for Equal Rights, had retreated from the complexities of the modern world into an idealized fantasy of “medieval” times, from which the Black Death and other discomforts of that age had been conveniently purged. Her real name was probably something like Carrie Dunn.

“Ms. Dunsinane,” he said. “A pleasure.”

“Why don’t we find a quieter place?” She nodded toward a door near the entrance to the meeting hall, and he followed her into a small room where the Sisters shed their street clothes and locked up their purses when they put on the lavender robes of their order. Cerridwen was perspiring heavily, a light mist of sweat on her lips. He found himself wanting to wipe it away like steam from a shaving mirror. Before she could summon the breath to speak, he cut off what was clearly going to be another bid for charity.

“I gather there’s been a misunderstanding,” he said.

“I know, I—”

“Not on my part, though. It was clear in my letter of acceptance, when I agreed to do this lecture, that I take a flat fee plus a percentage of the audience.”

All this she had heard from her minions. She nodded vigorously, determined to point out some flaw in his judgment. “I know when we got your letter—and I didn’t handle that myself, I have to admit, that was Sister Storm and she came down with the flu tonight—we thought it was clear that we would pay your basic fee and you would waive the percentage. This is a benefit, after all, and once we’ve paid for the hall, there’s little enough left as it is. I know ten dollars a head may seem like a lot…”

“I’m only asking a fragment of that.”

“But Mr. Crowe, you were one of four speakers. If you all took your fragment—”

“Who else would dare to ask? Dr. Spondle, like all good Atlantean High Priests, has forsworn money. And your other guests appeared to be facing their first audience tonight.”

She took on a puffed, indignant expression. “They may be inexperienced as lecturers, but they have a great deal of insight to offer.”

He decided that she must have chosen the speakers personally. Still, she had been sloppy about the financial arrangements, and she was going to pay for it.

“Look, Carrie—”

“Cerridwen,” she said flatly, glaring now. He gauged the threat of those enormous arms, decided to risk it.

“Sister—Lady—whatever you are, I’m not going to waive a goddamn thing. You accepted my terms, but I didn’t agree to yours.”

“We paid for your ticket—”

“Which I plan to use as soon as you pay what you owe me.”

“—and we offered accommodations—”

“No amount of money could convince me to stay overnight in this backwoods hellhole, where no one has anything better to do than listen to crap about the thirteenth sign of the zodiac.”

“And you!” she screamed quietly, her voice muffled among the overcoats. “They came to hear you!”

“And they paid for the privilege. I could have drawn that crowd without your Church of White Light bullshit. If anything, your reputation probably repelled more people than mine attracted.”

It had taken a few moments, but Cerridwen Dunsinane now understood him on the level at which he preferred to be understood—at least in material matters. Her comprehension came with a complementary portion of disgust.

“I’m a businessman,” he said soothingly. “No offense. It’s a free country and you can run your church however you like, but—”

“Get out,” she whispered, her dismay white-hot, bending the air.

“I know it’s not much money, but the principle—”

“Just—get—out!”

Her beamlike arm swung imperiously toward the door. He was inclined to follow the lead.

“I’ll have my lawyer call your office in the next day or two, when you’ve cooled down, and make the final arrangements.”

She couldn’t speak a third time, but her eyes clearly repeated her demand: Out.

The last deluxe copy was just selling as he returned to the table near the door. The crowd had thinned to half a dozen diehards waiting for a look, a touch, a few words, an autograph. One young couple looked truly out of place for a hick town. Both had long hair, the woman’s dark and uncombed and streaked with henna, her eyes ringed with fatigue circles black as mascara; they were dressed in ripped black leather, black jeans, silver skulls and daggers dangling from their ears, and a gold ring piercing the male’s nostril. They were skinny as speed freaks, pitiful as a pair of wet alleycats huddling together for warmth and security in an almost visible aura of nicotine. Out-of-style punks, anachronisms in a time-warped town; far too young to have been real punks, they had evolved from the dregs of the old punk culture, much as Haight Ashbury continued to breed twelve-year-old hippies while twentyish Beatniks spawned in North Beach cafes. And these were occult punks… a more rarefied and less predictable breed than the ones who were merely into the modern holy trinity of sex, drugs, and music.

What kind of people read Derek Crowe?

He laughed sardonically to himself, but the male of the pair, a pale and skinny kid, picked up on it and also began chuckling. Then he shoved an open copy of The Mandala Rites at Derek.

“Read the regular edition already,” he said. “Wrecked it up already. It gets like a car repair manual, you know? With candle wax and wine stains instead of motor oil? My working copy. But I’m gonna take good care of this one.”

His accent was as vague and untethered as TV had made all things; he could have been from anywhere. It occurred to Derek that maybe only a local would feel comfortable enough to dress this way in a redneck town, knowing his folks would protect him. He imagined feuds in the hills going on for generations thanks to freaks like this. Of course, all he really knew about hick towns was what he’d learned from TV.

Derek handed back the signed book and started gathering up receipts and cash, all his things.

“You try all the rituals in here?” the boy said. “I mean, I know you transcribed them all, but have you worked them all yourself?”

“Every one of them,” Derek said distractedly, looking for a pay phone.

“Even the—you know?”

The girl was looking at Derek with big eyes, lips slightly parted, as if stunned. Younger than she looked, but at the same time older, burned out deep inside. Nerve-damaged.

“The sexual ones?” the guy said.

An elderly woman gasped and moved quickly away, looking at the red volume in her hands as if she had just paid to poison herself. The others drifted off, sensing that they weren’t going to get autographs tonight, not wanting to stress the brittle edges of their celebrity’s mood. Derek stared at the two punks, weary of the crowd, the questions, the whole fucking charade that was his life and livelihood.

“Look,” he said, “is there a phone around here?”

“You need to call someone?”

He didn’t bother answering that one.

The girl slugged her boyfriend in the arm. “Michael, are you an idiot?”

“No, I mean, since he’s not from around here, if he needs a lift somewhere…”

Not with you, Derek thought. But he didn’t know how long it would take to find a cab. The nearest taxi was probably in Charlotte. There was one flight tonight. If he missed it, he would be stuck here till morning. One of the Sisters was supposed to take him to the airport, but he was reluctant to ask them for anything now. Having already refused hotel accommodations, he found himself saying, “The airport.”

“Hey, we can take you. We’re going that way—we live on the outskirts.”

“He doesn’t want to ride with us,” the girl said. “He’s probably got a limo waiting out front.”

At that moment the Valkyrie shoved past Derek, not deigning to grace him with her icy gaze as she headed toward the back of the hall. Reminded of what waited for him here, he nodded to the kids.

“Actually,” Derek said, “if you’re serious, I might just take you up on that ride.”

“Wow, really?” The poor boy seemed in shock. “Okay, great! Wow, I don’t believe this! Lenore, Derek Crowe is coming with us! Oh, man!”

“We’re right outside,” she said. “You need help with anything?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Can I get your bags? Really, I can’t believe this—there’s like so many questions I want to ask you.”

This is a mistake, Derek told himself, but he went right on making it anyway.

4

The night was colder than he ‘d expected; it cut through the loose shirt to slash his ribs. As he paused on the steps, fumbling for a sweater in one of his bags, the guy said, “Name’s Michael. You know, like the archangel?”

“More like plain old Michael,” said the girl, extending her hand although Derek, caught up in the sweater, couldn’t very well accept it. “I’m Lenore,” she said.

“Like in Poe,” Michael said. “The telltale heart, chopped-up bodies, big swinging razor blades, and rats trying to eat you. Some kids get named for nursery rhymes. Not Lenore.”

Derek finally clasped her hand. It was small, cold, and bony, and studded with garish silver rings, lost-wax skulls and dragon heads, glittering crystal eyes.

“Nope, not my wife,” Michael went on, striding stiff-legged down the steps toward the street. “Lenore’s not like most people.”

Lenore trailed close behind Derek, shadowing him. He glanced down and back, saw her upturned eyes gleaming with moonlight. It was a clear winter night, the waxing moon so bright that only a few washed-out stars managed to burn their way through—and those were near the horizon, competing with streetlights.

“I really liked your lecture,” she said, a bit hesitant.

“Did you?”

“It was—inspiring. I felt something happen to me in there. As if everything you said made sense—as if I’d known it all the time but never realized it, and suddenly it just clicked.” She smiled up at him. “I see everything differently now.”

“Do you really?” he said, trying to hide his disappointment. He was hoping she had more sense than that, but apparently she was just another one of the loonies.

“Whoa, really, Lenore?” said the boy. “Are you serious? Man, Mr. Crowe, she doesn’t usually go for this stuff. I mean, not at all, not Lenore. I sort of had to drag her along tonight.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “I decided to come. I’m glad I did too.”

“Well, that’s very encouraging,” he said. “You two’re married?”

“Sure,” she said.

“It’s just… you both look so young.”

Michael laughed, a hoarse and uncomfortable sound. “We’re old souls.”

“I envy that woman,” she said. “Ms. A. You just had to hypnotize her and the mandalas came, huh?”

“That’s right. I was doing what I thought would be some simple trance work, and she went deeper under than anyone I’d ever seen. Suddenly I found myself… well, out of my element. Everything changed for me then too.”

“I haven’t done any of the rituals in your book,” she said. “Michael’s done most of them I suppose, but I haven’t really been interested. But I think I might like to now. After hearing you talk. You’re really an amazing speaker. You have some kind of animal magnetism. Is that the word?”

It was a phrase that made Derek shudder, but he nodded. “An old word, but outdated. Like mesmerism. Thanks anyway.” Her attention was flattering. He found himself regarding her more generously and finding in her haggard features quite a bit to attract him.

“Wow, I can’t believe this,” Michael said. “You want to do a ritual? Something really must have happened to you tonight.”

“Yeah,” she said, “something clicked.”

Michael laughed and did a little capering step and hurried on ahead of them up the sidewalk.

“So,” Derek said quietly, “do you have any children?”

“I had twins,” she said, even more softly. “Not with Michael. I only saw them for a minute and then they got taken away. I wasn’t on junk, not then, I’d kicked; but the hospital did these tests on my hair and it still showed up, and since I was on public assistance, they—I—they didn’t even tell me they were taking them.”

Derek felt the sickening pang that always came when he pulled too close to reality—when he penetrated the dark, tattered glamour of the streetwise and arrived in the place where illusion was torn away in ragged strips, like a bright circus poster peeling from a gray cinder-block wall. He always ended up facing the reality of hunger and dirt and stupidity—of the addict’s meaningless, driven behavior. So much for the mystique of youth. He didn’t want to ask where her children were, or if Michael was the father. Fortunately, she didn’t say anything more about it. She seemed to feel she had said enough, which was fine with him. He reflected that what struck him as horror was probably all she had. She was one of the new generation, those for whom the future held less than ever before—a polluted, overcrowded world of dwindling resources, few options, not much room even for luck. Derek didn’t like to think about the things these kids would live to see at the tag ends of their lives, when he had passed away. Not that he was much older than they; his perspective was simply greater.

Michael was approaching what had to be their car, a black Volkswagen Beetle with arcane designs painted all over the shell. There were symbols lifted from the Qabala and the Golden Dawn, and Taoist-looking swirls. He wasn’t sure what all the signs meant, although he was glancingly familiar with most of them. He wished he weren’t quite so well versed in useless arcana, but it was a hazard of his occupation. He did a double-take when he realized that the freshest-looking images were mandalas taken straight from his book. Michael had painted out older symbols in order to clear space for the newest images.

Michael saw him staring and must have thought he was admiring the painstakingly copied mandalas.

“What do you think?” the kid asked, as the car keys came out jangling in his hand.

“You drive around here in that?” he said.

“Oh, the local cops don’t bother us too much anymore. They know we don’t, you know, use. Lenore was always more into it than me anyway.”

“Shut up, Michael,” she said.

“I think a magician has to be pure, don’t you?”

“Mm,” Derek said, dropping his bags on hard ground iced with frost; he heard the grass blades snap.

“Maybe that’s why you’re getting interested now, babe. You’ve been clean long enough that your system’s starting to cry out for the real thing. Spiritual sustenance.”

“Are you going to make us stand here freezing all night?” she said.

The backseat looked full of trash; there was hardly room for Derek and his stuff. He wondered if he still had time to call a cab. But Michael started shoving things around inside, and the next thing Derek knew, his bags were in the car.

“Climb in back, Lenore?” Michael asked.

“You don’t have to,” Derek insisted. “I’ll ride back there.”

“You’d never fit,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, it wouldn’t be right shoving you in with our laundry, even if it is clean.”

“I feel terrible,” he said.

“Don’t worry.” She slid in like a wisp of smoke.

Michael pushed the seat back again, closing her in. “I mean, you’ve got to cut those drugs out if you want to do serious magic. Otherwise, how can you tell if you’re hallucinating or if something real is happening? Like Crowley, man, he was always dosed. So how do we know he didn’t just—you know—imagine everything?”

“Would you get in?” Lenore said. “I’m freezing.”

Derek folded over and got in, reaching for the hand-strap over the window as Michael slammed the door on him. Dust and insulation fibers sifted through the ceiling fabric, rasping his nose. Michael got in on the other side and turned on the ignition. The car shook and roared, making conversation all but impossible.

Michael pointed at the steering column, shouting something as he revved the engine. Derek shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t hear. The roar smoothed out. Heat oozed up from pipes beneath the seats, warming his legs. He shivered once, violently, and then began to relax.

“I said, you ever notice the symbols on the steering wheel of these old VW bugs? Look at this thing—it’s like an old mystic Nazi design. You know about Hitler and the occult, right? This is like the Moon card in the Tarot. A castle on the water, and then these wolves… real stylized, real simple, to make it really sink in. Doesn’t register in the conscious mind, but all your life that symbol cooks away, like some kind of sinister survival from the Third Reich. Like Hitler’s still got a grip. I’m kind of glad they don’t make these anymore.”

“I never noticed,” Derek said, wishing there’d been room for him in back. Michael seemed too unstable, a little bit frightening. Even without drugs, someone so manic had to have a bitter, depressive side. Lenore was probably the steady one in their relationship, Michael’s touchstone with reality.

He found himself remembering the cold, frail touch of her hand. Wanting to feel it again.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw her eyes glimmering. He looked away quickly, though she hadn’t been looking at him. How old was she, exactly? Twenty-five? Was that long enough for the world to drain someone as she appeared to have been drained? No doubt it was. Derek kept glancing at her as the streetlights, flicking past, picked out her eyes.

He saw little distinction between the center of town and the outskirts, where the airport lay. Cinderton was the kind of landlocked place that made him glad he lived in San Francisco, where freezing and hundred-plus temperatures were all but unknown. Cinderton probably spent part of the year locked up in ice, the ground so hard it could chip a shovel, sidewalks filthy with muddy salt and snow that never quite melted till spring, when the potholes came out like flowers in the thaw, to be followed shortly thereafter by unbearable heat pressing down on the land like a steam iron. So he imagined the cycle of seasons; but his actual experience was limited to the temperature climes of California and a few bus trips to Reno where he’d watched the snow from inside a casino. He always wondered what kept people in places like this. Didn’t they know the world offered options besides the ones they’d been brought up to expect?

Probably not. Some found release in music, in weirder drugs than alcohol or barbiturates. A few—his current hosts apparently among them—sought escape in a synergistic combination, mixing all of the above with occultism, whose effects were more unpredictable than any drug. The typical young occultist migrated to a big city as soon as he was old enough to hitchhike, drive a car, or buy a one-way bus ticket. The older occultists, late bloomers, were usually simple souls, so near the grave that they had begun to scrutinize the plot with the intensity of a prospective tenant, hoping to find in their future something more rewarding than four windowless walls and a lid that screwed down from the outside.

Michael said, “I can’t get over this. I’ve written you letters; maybe you remember me. Last name’s Renzler?”

Derek shook his head. “Sorry, no. Can’t count on the publishers to forward mail, unfortunately.”

“Huh, yeah, thought maybe it was something like that. Or you get so many letters you can’t answer them all.”

Close, Derek thought. Countless lunatics wrote to ask his advice—as if he were a psychic Miss Manners. He kept a fat file of absurd letters, scheming someday to publish them all and let the sane mainstream public have a laugh at the expense of his cult following. That would be years from now, when his career had run its course and he could afford to admit his hoax, when that alone would be enough to catapult him into talk show fame. Confessions of a Hack Mystic. He would do it as a way of unburdening himself, showing his admirers how ludicrous they looked. In his files were deranged descriptions of psychosomatic maladies; formulas for curing every known disease, from warts to AIDS, with crystals or incense or the powder of bottlebrush trees collected on Thursdays at three in the afternoon when the moon was void-of-course.

He supposed he might easily have a letter or two from a Renzler tucked in his copious crackpot file. He didn’t pay much attention to the names.

“Hey, did you ever know a guy named Elias Mooney?”

Derek stiffened, never for a moment having dreamed that he would hear that name in such surroundings. He had hoped—and fully expected—that he would never hear it again from anyone, ever.

“What?” he said, forcing himself to stay calm.

“Elias Mooney. He was an old shaman out in California, I can’t remember the name of the place but I think it was near San Francisco. I corresponded with him a little, till he died a couple years back. Helped me out a lot.”

“No,” Derek said. “No, I don’t think I knew him.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s pretty ridiculous thinking you would. California’s pretty big, huh?”

“Big.”

“I just thought, you know, maybe the occult scene out there in Frisco—maybe you all know each other. Can’t be that big a circle, right?”

“Bigger than I like.”

“It’s not like he was a celebrity or anything—just a real helpful guy. He helped me out during a real rough time—and I never even met him, you know? Just through letters and tapes and stuff. I guess he had correspondents all over the world. And… this would sound funny to most people, but I bet not to you. We used to meet up in the astral, in dreams. I learned a lot from him then.”

I can’t believe he’s going on about this, Derek thought. What’s he really getting at? Could Elias have mentioned me in their correspondence? Is this some kind of clumsy attempt at blackmail?

He decided to say nothing more, to avoid feeding Renzler’s interest. The ploy seemed to work. The kid seemed at a loss for words. Derek wanted to find out exactly what his relationship with Elias had been, but he was afraid to stir up something that had lain quiet for so long. Finally Michael started off on a wild occult tangent, and Derek began to relax.

It was then the car made a terrible grinding sound.

“Holy mother,” Michael swore.

“What’s wrong?” Lenore said, leaning forward. Michael was jamming frantically at the stick shift, just pushing it around in big loose circles.

“The shift is gone! Hold on!”

He swerved sideways onto the shoulder of the dark road. They went bumping and jouncing over what felt like boulders and fallen tree branches. This is it, Derek thought. This is how it would end. Well, I guess I deserve it….

They came to a rough halt and the engine died immediately. They sat in the dimming glow of the VW’s headlights, facing a thick wall of bare trees and brambles. Michael reached past Derek, pulled a penlight from the glove box, then got out of the car and went around to the back.

Derek looked at Lenore, but she was craning around to peer out the rear window. Finally Michael banged down the engine cover. “Shit,” he said, his voice carrying clearly in the icy night.

“What is it?” Lenore called.

“I don’t know, I’m no mechanic.” He came around to the door and peered in at them. “Mr. Crowe, I hate to ask you this, but… how soon does your plane leave? Are we cutting it close?”

Derek pushed the button that illuminated the face of his watch. “I’ve got a couple hours, actually.”

“You were just going to sit at the airport?”

“It was preferable to sitting in the auditorium. Is the airport a long way from here?” He imagined hiking down dark country roads carrying his bags for half the night, or dying of exposure, or ending up in a scene out of Deliverance.

“Too far to walk, yeah. But just down the road’s a diner with a phone. Lenore, I’m gonna go call Tucker, see if he can come help us out. At the very least give Mr. Crowe a ride. Why don’t you two just sit here and take it easy, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Tucker’s pretty good with cars.”

Derek closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

“We’ll be all right,” Lenore said, and Derek felt his spirits rising. Alone with her, he’d be fine indeed. He welcomed the occasion, unexpected as it was. As long as he made his plane on time, what harm could come of it?

“Great.” Michael zipped up his jacket, gave them a weak salute, and headed off down the road. For a minute they could see him fading out beyond the headlights, and then he was gone.

“So,” Lenore said after a while, “where you from?”

“Originally Los Angeles, but I’ve lived in San Francisco a few years. How about you?”

“Oh, uh, I grew up in upstate New York—little towns you probably never heard of. Lived in New York City for a long time, before I met Michael and we moved down here.”

“So you are a city girl.”

“I guess. No. I’m not from anywhere, really. Lived in a lot of different houses when I was a kid. Foster homes and stuff. Bouncing around.”

He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. With regrets?

“You think you could hypnotize someone like me?” she said abruptly.

Derek laughed, taken by surprise. “Hypnotize you? Why?”

“I don’t know, just to see what it’s like. I’ve always wondered.”

Derek winced. “I suppose I could,” he said. “Some people are resistant. Children, soldiers, people used to taking orders—they can be very good subjects. But I have a feeling you’re the independent type.”

She smiled. “You do, huh? How about Ms. A? What type was she?”

“Well—also very independent, but I believe the mandalas must have been stronger. They had a use for her, and they might have made her more susceptible to hypnosis.”

“Could you do me?” she said.

“Right now, you mean?”

“Sure. While Michael’s gone. We’re gonna be here awhile. Just try. No pressure if it doesn’t work. I’m curious.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Maybe the mandalas will come through me,” she said, mischievously now, and he felt certain she was mocking him, that all this was an elaborate tease. “Maybe there’s something else they want to say to you.”

“I don’t—I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

She made a disappointed sound, and he could see the beginnings of a pout. She reached across the seat, then, and turned out the headlights.

“Good idea,” he said.

“I feel like I know you,” she said in the dark, in a hushed voice. “How could that be?”

“I—I don’t know. Do you really?”

“As soon as I saw you up there tonight, I just sort of felt this click.”

Derek cast his eyes down the road, half expecting to see Michael coming up from the total darkness. Lenore’s mouth was right beside his ear.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I don’t know. Maybe you recognized me from my book.”

“It wasn’t that. I felt like I had to talk to you. Like, you’d understand me.”

“Talk about what?” he said.

“Don’t you ever want to talk to someone who doesn’t know you? Someone who’s not involved in all your problems?”

“I think we all feel that way sometimes.”

“It’s because you’ve looked into all these things, with the counseling you’ve done, the hypnotherapy and all—I could use some advice. God knows I could probably use some therapy too. I need some help quitting drinking, I know that, but that’s only part of it. There’s things going back—way back—I can’t remember how far back. Maybe that’s where my problems all started. Maybe you could help me remember, you know? Under hypnosis? Because I can’t. There’s like this blank area, early in my childhood. I don’t remember my mother or any of that. I was already bouncing from home to home by then. I was a troublemaker, I guess you’d say. A difficult child. I want to know—what happened to me? When did the trouble really start?”

“Memories from very early childhood may not be accessible to you, even under hypnosis. The infant brain is separate from the adult’s. It stores and processes memory very differently. I’m not so sure I could help you.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe you’re helping me without knowing it. Just talking to you, I feel better. Like I could tell you stuff and you’d understand.”

“I’m flattered you feel that way.”

“But you still won’t hypnotize me.”

“Look, Lenore… I can teach you to do it yourself. How would that be? It’s all self-hypnosis anyway. The hypnotist is only a guide.”

“But I need a guide!”

“It’s nothing to do lightly. It has to be taken slowly, over time. I can’t just put you under right now and clear up all your problems. You have a lifetime to deal with. One little session, here and now, might be worse than nothing. I’d have to see you regularly, over time. Maybe there’s someone around here who could do it.”

“No,” she said, slumping back into her seat. “There’s nobody.”

“I doubt that’s true.”

“There’s nobody, all right?” she yelled. “I know what I need, what I’ve been looking for, and I never felt it until now, but you’re not interested, so just shut the fuck up and leave me alone, all right?”

Lenore reached over the seat, switched on the radio full blast, then got out and paced along the opposite shoulder, smoking a cigarette. Every now and then a car swept past, but no one slowed.

Jesus, Derek thought. That’ll teach me.

He sat quietly, deafened by country music. He was tempted to go out to her, but that little teasing dance of codependency frightened him; he already felt snared, involved in something he couldn’t stop. Best just to wait here, hold his tongue, let her anger burn itself out. He was hardly the savior type, but he couldn’t fault her for unrealistic expectations. He’d set himself up for it, painting himself as the great hypnotherapist when in fact he hadn’t used hypnosis (outside of his books) for years. Not since his boyhood, in fact. And in response to that thought, which threatened to propel him into deeper silence, darker reveries, he switched off the radio and opened his door.

“Lenore,” he said into the sudden quiet.

She stopped pacing. He could see her cigarette flare, then her steps came crunching back to the car.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—I can’t tune out a call for help that easily. It’s true you need guidance. But I can teach you how to do it yourself, and maybe that will start you on the way.”

“Hypnotize me, you mean? You’ll do it?”

“One trance. And I’ll give you the commands you need to do it to yourself. Then you can—well, explore.”

She crouched before him on the roadside, her cigarette dangling between her knees. “Seriously?”

“Sure. Come on, why don’t you get in the car?” He stepped out and pulled his seat forward, and she slid past him into the back, arranging herself on the long cushion. Derek returned to his seat and pulled the door closed.

“Don’t you have like a pendulum or something?” she asked.

“Don’t need it,” he said, trying to remember the basic steps. But what was there to it, really? “I’m just going to talk you through some visualizations. The real work you’ll be doing yourself. Are you ready? Get comfortable.”

“Go,” she said.

He began to count backward from one hundred, very slowly. He told her that with every number he counted off, she was falling deeper and deeper asleep. Between the numbers of his count, he told her that she was floating down a long tunnel. He told her that she was becoming lighter and lighter, until she weighed nothing. He told her she was dissolving into the sky, melting away. “Your fingers are melting, melting away. Your arms are melting, melting away. Eighty-eight. Your shoulders melting, melting away.” He watched her chest rising and falling softly, her head slumped forward, eyelids trembling, breath steady and slow. “Your chest, melting away.” His eyes lay on her breasts for a long while, hardly more than the faintest curve beneath the stiff fabric of her leather jacket. “Eighty-seven.”

It took a long time. He was more careful than he had ever been. He instructed her that as she went deeper into the trance, her thoughts would become brighter and sharper. She was asleep but acutely aware. With every breath she went deeper into trance, but that did not mean she lost consciousness. Deeper and deeper, seeing more and more, doors opening before her, paths into her past, into her secrets; he told her that she had the confidence and strength and courage to explore them all, to heal herself completely. Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper, farther and farther back….

“You can do this to yourself,” he told her. “Now that you have come to these places, you can return here anytime simply by willing it. You can recover this mental state at will and make use of it to heal yourself. And every time you induce this state, you will find yourself able to go deeper, faster, than the time before.”

Deeper and deeper. Deeper and deeper….

At last he reached zero. How much time had passed? He had lost himself in the study of Lenore, a pale sexual ghost in the backseat. And what now? His voice seemed preternaturally loud, at odds with the mood. She lay there blank, so blank that he could almost see a smile on her lips, could almost hear her invitation.

Stop it, he told himself.

What now?

She was as deep as he dared take her; deeper than he had ever intended to go. Surely something should be accomplished while she was at this level—some work begun. It occurred to him only then that he had begun to believe his own lies! He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing; he had no reason, and certainly no right, to take anyone through this process. Not again. The hypnotic method worked because it was a method—purely mechanical. It had nothing to do with him.

“I remember…” she whispered.

“Yes?” He searched her still face, her closed eyes.

“…you…”

“Lenore?” He touched her hand, worried. It was time to wake her; he was an idiot to have agreed to this. Who knew what changes, deep within her, he might have set into motion? “Listen, Lenore. Take great care…”

But she didn’t seem to hear him. She was whispering something in a small, distant voice that filled him with fear for no reason he understood. His panic intensified when he heard footsteps outside the car, and an instant later the driver’s door flew open. He looked up and saw Michael staring in at him. It was too dark to see much more than the white oval of his face, but a crazy smile seemed to float there.

“Didn’t mean to creep up,” he said. “Flashlight died on the way back. Tucker’s on his way, though. Should be along any minute. Hey, Lenore? You asleep?” He jerked her shoulder roughly and she jerked up with a grunt.

“What? You’re back already?”

“You were sleeping.”

She turned toward Derek. “Was I?”

He couldn’t tell if she meant it or not; if she was pretending for Michael’s sake, or genuinely didn’t remember. He hadn’t instructed her either to remember or to forget.

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“Oh. God.” She squeezed out of the car, lighting another cigarette after a moment. Derek watched her closely, to see if she was going to reassure him somehow or otherwise betray her state of mind. Michael sat behind the wheel and began to babble again, picking up his inane conversation where he’d left off, although now Derek was able to pay even less attention thanks to a horrible free-floating sense of something left undone, something he might never be able to put to rights….

It was a relief when a truck came rattling up the road and pulled onto the shoulder facing them, blinding Derek with its lights. Lenore went toward it and returned a moment later with a tall, shaggy-looking hulk.

“Let’s take a look,” he said. “Scarlet’s waiting on me.”

“Mr. Crowe, this here is Tucker Doakes. He’s going to take care of everything.”

“Hey. You one of Mikey’s Satan-lovin’ friends?”

“Cut it out, Tuck,” Lenore said. “Mr. Crowe’s famous.”

“Not exactly,” Derek said.

“Either way, I’m gonna have to get to that backseat. Can you come out of the car? Thanks. What about this laundry, Lenore?”

“Throw it in the well.”

“No engine parts in there or anything? No KFC buckets?”

“It’s clean.”

Derek moved away from the car, watching Doakes lean into it and shove the piled laundry into the little well under the rear window. Then Doakes pulled up the entire backseat, hauled it out of the car, and laid it on the roadside. Michael aimed his flashlight into the dark compartment thus revealed. Derek heard the clank of metal parts in the shadows.

“It’s what I thought,” he said. “Broken cotter pin. This whole assembly just fell apart. Easy to fix, though. You got a bobby pin, Lenore?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I knew I shoulda brought Scarlet along on this expedition. Well, come on, something.”

“How about a paper clip?” Derek suggested.

Doakes shrugged. “I guess, sure, I could wrap it around—might hold for a while.”

Derek dug into his valise, removing the paper clip from the manuscript of the evening’s lecture, and handed it to Doakes, who went back into the car and worked there for a few more minutes. When he was done, he wiped his hands on his jeans and picked up the seat, shoving it back into the car.

“That should get you home,” he said. “I’ll put a real cotter pin in there tomorrow.”

“We’ve got to get to the airport first,” said Michael.

“Whatever. You try that out, see if she’s okay. Come on, I got a feeling Scarlet’s cooling fast.”

“Sure.” Michael started the car, put it into gear. It lurched forward, then into reverse. “Working!”

Tucker was already climbing into his truck. “See y’all later.” The truck backed into the road, then screeched around and drove off.

Derek held his seat up so Lenore could climb in; she did so without looking at him.

“How are we on time?” Michael asked. “Airport’s another fifteen minutes, ten if I floor it.”

“We should just make it,” Derek said.

Lenore didn’t say another word on the drive; she didn’t need to, because Michael more than filled the silence until the stark white lights of the airport finally appeared through trees ahead of them. In the mirror, ovals of glare slid over Lenore’s cheeks like dislocated eyes. She seemed oblivious to their conversation; he wished he could be equally detached. He wished he could speak with her in private again; wished he could somehow take her back into trance, tie up any loose ends, wake her up properly. But she seemed fine, and what did he expect? It wasn’t as if he’d been performing brain surgery.

Instead of heading straight toward the terminal, Michael brought the car into the short-term parking lot. Derek assumed it was because he was distracted by his own chatter.

“You can drop me off at the door,” he said.

“No problem. We’ll keep you company till your plane leaves. Nothing else to do.”

Derek sank back. “If you say so.”

“I guess I wasted my breath in those letters I sent, huh? I have some ideas about the mandalas, maybe I could bounce them off you sometime if you wouldn’t mind, you know, giving me your address? They’re questions you could ask the mandalas next time they come around. I swear I won’t abuse the privilege.”

The privilege? Derek smirked, thinking of all the winos who had been “privileged” to puke in the piss-stains on the front steps of his address.

“All right,” Derek said. “It’s the least I can do in exchange for the ride.” He picked up the paper sack that held Michael Renzler’s copy of The Mandala Rites and scrawled his address on it, taking care not to include his phone number. The car jerked to a halt. In the backseat, a match flared and a cigarette began to burn.

“You want one?” Lenore said, putting her hand between the seats. He was tempted even though he didn’t smoke. Michael took the cigarette absentmindedly, as if he had summoned it out of midair. Most of his attention was on Derek’s address.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll send you something.”

“Wonderful.” Derek opened the door.

Outside, he started to freeze again instantly. He hauled his bags over the seat, helped slightly by Lenore, then hurried toward the terminal, the Renzlers following. As he waited on a curb for another car to pass, he felt one of his bags taken from his hand. It was Lenore, smiling at him now; he could read almost anything in those eyes.

In the city, he would hardly have noticed her among so many of her kind. But he would have been wrong to dismiss her. Here, displayed to best advantage in the watery light of a small-town airport terminal, was an original, an archetype of which all the others were pallid derivatives. Lenore was like a human essence, distilled in secrecy; a fragile bottle waiting to be uncapped, to release her scent. He wished, with a pang, that he could have been the one to free her.

“You better hurry,” she said. “You’re gonna miss your plane.”

He took her hand. “Good-bye,” he said.

“See you later.”

5

“This is a beautiful book, ” said Lenore, flipping through The Mandala Rites as streetlights lit the pages in a protracted strobe.

Michael shifted into fourth on the dark narrow road he knew by heart and quietly said, “It is, isn’t it?” Her comment sounded like the opening to an attack; she was trying to lull him. Next she was going to ask how much he’d paid for it, and if he told the truth—which he’d have to, slipping it in between the grinding of gears—the battle would begin.

“Really, really beautiful,” she said.

Oh, no, he thought helplessly. She’s onto me. This is going to be bad. Maybe the worst yet.

He knew they couldn’t afford it; knew it wouldn’t help to say he’d been secretly saving money all along, collecting spare change here and there for expenses like this. Lenore would have spent his stash by now if she’d known about it. She’d been griping for days that she was out of pot and desperate for more, but couldn’t buy from Tucker till they paid their rent. And forty-five bucks was a sizable chunk of the rent they owed.

But her attack never came—or at least not from the expected direction. He glanced over and saw Lenore gazing down at the open pages, dark now that the last of the streetlights were behind them and only a thickness of trees stood along the road, branches bare but so densely woven that they blotted out the moonlight.

Maybe she would humor him for once; she was unpredictable that way. She flipped out if Michael bought a crystal ball or a magic dagger; she would battle nonstop about him wasting money on occult tools, with much the same ferocity he reserved for fighting when Lenore blew money on drugs. And, like him tonight, sneaking to buy the deluxe Mandala Rites, she had learned to make her purchases secretly and present them as a fait accompli. She no longer told him when she’d scored a fresh bag of pot, leaving it up to him to determine her chemical state by observing alterations in her behavior, her typically manic mornings and dark depressed afternoons. They’d been weaving this pattern in their relationship for so long that now, even in a dry spell, he could no longer look into her eyes without wondering where her mind was at… if she was straight or stoned.

She hated his tools, his occult equipment. It struck her as a wasteful fetish—even basic necessities like incense and charcoal. On the other hand, she didn’t seem to mind when he spent his money on books. It was fortunate for their domestic peace that virtually all of Michael’s spare cash ended up invested in his library.

Maybe she felt some affection for his books because he’d started his collection around the time they met, scavanging treasures from dusty bookshop shelves in Manhattan and environs while he was ostensibly a student in the city. In those days he hadn’t developed much in the way of common sense, but at least he’d possessed enough to ship the volumes to his mother as he acquired them, so they couldn’t be sold again in a moment of weakness or stolen for someone else’s drug money. Drugs had never meant that much to him. They were something to do while he was hanging out. He resented their grip on him and always knew he’d give them up. Magic was his real addiction. He often wished Lenore could have shared his spiritual passions; she didn’t really have any other pursuit to compete with her all consuming interest in drugs.

When he came slinking down to North Carolina with Lenore in tow, all his precious books had been there waiting for him—waiting with his mother poised over them, cigarette lighter in hand. She had threatened to put them all to the torch unless he kicked his various habits. It had been one of her most lucid moments. Since kicking and getting Lenore to kick speed had been his chief aim in fleeing New York, he was able to convince her to spare the innocent pages. His mother must have realized that he’d need some new order in his life. What better than the wealth of magical systems detailed in his books, with their periodic tables of angelic powers and hierarchies of phantom guides and gods all striving toward various grails like players on a vast n-dimensional chessboard?

Despite her distrust and even disgust with anything smacking of religion, his mother had spared the books.

Crowe’s Mandala Rites was only the latest addition to Michael’s library, but already it had pushed all other systems of magic to the edges of his mind. It was the best new system he had ever encountered. Would-be gurus were always inventing new myths and methodologies to suit the current crazes, usually with results as lame as dressing a crone in a Day-Glo neoprene bikini. But the mandalas had an integrity that couldn’t be explained away, as if they had always been lurking about, waiting for the proper time to reveal themselves.

He was more curious than ever to understand what had attracted the mandalas to Derek Crowe in the first place. Why choose him of all people? His first few books had been pure trash. Michael would have sworn they were insincere efforts, bland and uninspired, recycled occult pap cobbled together out of other older books. There was no clue in any of them that Crowe had ever possessed one real insight or would ever produce anything original. Outwardly the man himself seemed as unconvincing as those books. Cold and reserved, difficult to read, Derek Crowe displayed none of the passion that permeated The Mandala Rites, whose diagrams were so intense that they sometimes seemed to vibrate and spin free of the pages.

“So what do you do with these?” Lenore asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.

“Do?”

“Yeah, the mandalas. What are they for? I couldn’t follow everything Crowe was saying tonight—there was just so much of it.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s hard, coming in cold like you did. They’re, you know, symbols. You meditate on them. Each has a certain energy, a—a kind of function. You invoke, I mean, call them and, uh, meditate, and—”

“Call them? Is that what all this is supposed to be? These words here?”

She had the radio on with the sound turned down; enough dim light leaked from the cracked plastic panel to show the pages spread across her knees.

“Yeah, those are the Keys—the Invocations. They’re not in English.”

“No duh.”

He sighed at her mockery. She was setting him up, ready to poke holes in what she perceived as silly superstitions. She tolerated his books, but that didn’t mean she respected their contents. Lenore had never shown the slightest interest in magic or the occult. If he pressed for her opinion, she usually said that all mysticism was bullshit invented to keep people stupid and afraid so they could be conned by hucksters like… well, like Derek Crowe, whose jacket photo she had once satirized for ten minutes. “This guy’s got to be a con artist or an idiot,” she’d said. “Who else would pose like that?” And the photograph was corny, showing his face cloven by melodramatic shadow, his long nose like a beak (it was even more obvious in person, Michael had noticed), a big shiny onyx clasp holding his cloak cinched at the throat as he leaned forward on a carved wooden staff. But Michael had defended Derek Crowe at the time; the mandalas had swayed him.

Now he waited, tensed, not really knowing where the stab was going to come from.

“You’re doing a ritual tonight, right?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I do it with you?”

He tapped the brakes as if her words had leapt out in front of the car. “What?”

In the faint light she had a secretive, even mischievous look. He knew she wouldn’t clue him in on her thoughts until she was good and ready, but he felt he had to press her for more. “Are you kidding?”

“Kidding? Why?”

“You never cared about this stuff before.”

She shrugged. “Don’t you like me taking an interest?”

“Of course I do! God, I’ve been trying to—to involve you for years. I just gave up, it seemed so pointless. I think I’m in shock.”

“Well, get over it.”

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

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

“Okay,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”

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

“Remember this?”

“Yeah, your magic dagger.”

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

She reached out and traced the edge of it with a finger. “It’s sharp,” she said.

“My wand represents the element of—”

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

“You have to understand what we’re doing.”

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

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

“You mean you don’t just call them and they come?”

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

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

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

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

“Let me finish, Lenore!”

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

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

“So let’s see something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We have to undress,” he said.

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

“My panties stay on,” she said. “I’m still bleeding a little.”

“That’s fine.”

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

“Sorry,” he said. “My hands are like—”

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

“That’s a kind of advanced one.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Lenore, what are you doing? We can’t—”

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

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

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

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

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

“…nang gjya hehn cheg-cheo…”

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

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

“…kaolhu,” she said, and that was the end of it, the bottom of the page.

But she kept going.

“…kaolhu kef’n lakthog ranagh…”

And on.

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

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

There was a moment’s silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael reached back, groping on the altar for his wand.

The mandala flailed its tendrils and spun forward, eclipsing the room like a huge anemone or flytrap closing on him. The last thing he saw were the spike tips of its black arms piercing the ceiling, as if striking into the apartment above. Then his panicked groping upset the candles and they went out. Bitter smoke stung his nostrils. In the dark, his hand closed around the dorje handle of his Tibetan bell; with no better weapon, he rang it violently. At the first clang he heard a whirring all around him, felt a vast cyclonic gathering of air. Then Lenore shrieked. The whole house filled with screaming. Upstairs, Tucker and Scarlet were howling too. Something rushed past his ear and slammed into the wall—one of the mandala’s questing arms, he imagined. He dropped down and hugged himself in the dark, wondering why Crowe’s book had given no warnings of danger. Nothing in the Rites had prepared him for this.

After several minutes, with no further sound in the room except for Lenore’s gentle breathing and the nearer thud of his own heartbeat, he got to his knees and found the matches on the altar. It occurred to him that what he had heard upstairs were not screams of pain or terror but of pleasure. Tucker and Scarlet were quiet now; he could hear them gasping for breath, a laughing sort of sound. He almost laughed himself, with relief. Weird timing.

As he righted one candle and touched flame to wick, he discovered the athame gleaming above the altar, its blade buried half to the hilt in the plaster wall.

He turned, shivering, and looked back at Lenore. She lay fallen on the carpet, apparently asleep.

“Lenore?” he whispered. “Lenore, are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. Her breathing was steady, her pulse strong, but he couldn’t shake his fright—especially when he saw the dark bloody bruise above her eyes, in the center of her forehead. He returned to the altar for his wand, not wanting to leave anything undone. Lenore, apparently, was sensitive as a lightning rod put out in a storm, attracting more power than either of them could handle. He was frightened for her. An undisciplined mind might warp from the force of so much energy streaming through it.

“You’ll be okay,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.”

He faced the dark air where the mandala had appeared. It was empty now, as if nothing had happened except in his mind. If not for the bruise on Lenore’s forehead, he could have attributed all of this to madness. Even then… she might have slammed herself in the forehead with the athame’s pommel.

As he wondered how to proceed, a movement on the altar caught his eyes. Something slithered with a sidewinding motion across the open pages of the Mandala Rites, across the very lines she had spoken. The pages seemed to stir, the letters to writhe.

He struck the book violently with his wand, then slammed the covers shut and leaned down hard, as if to trap the incantation.

Fearful of what he might discover, he cast about the room for some lingering sign of the thing he thought he’d seen; but apparently it had gone off on its own. This was fortunate, because he had no idea how to send it away if it didn’t want to go. The Mandala Rites, he realized too late, were completely silent on that point.