The 37th Mandala

7

By the time the airport shuttle dropped him in front of his building, Derek felt dizzy with the sort of wired exhaustion that he suspected would keep him awake well past sunrise. Against his better judgment, he had bought a cup of coffee from an airport vending machine, thinking of Lenore when he dropped his quarters in the machine, thinking of her as it pissed a hot thin stream into a paper cup, and thinking of her also as he scalded his lips.

He paid the driver, picked his bags off the sidewalk an instant before they were fingered by a lengthening trail of liquid draining downhill from a dark doorway where someone shifted around in a nest of cardboard and rags. The bars and corner stores were closed up, caged in. A portion of shadow detached itself from beneath the awning of the Prey Svay Cafe across the street, and a tall man dressed in tattered khaki came forward with one hand out, as if to cadge change or a cigarette. A slantwise streak of streetlight lit a face that looked crumpled as paper beneath a greasy watchcap, his forehead raw and blotched with bloody scabs. He was huge but almost fleshless, like an old hulk wasted away to nothing. Derek spun around, looking for help. The shuttle van was gone though he couldn’t remember it going. Even the memory of picking up his bags seemed unreal, as if he’d done it in a dream. When he glanced back to confront the panhandler, the street was empty.

The gate was ajar, wedged open with a rolled up magazine. He kicked it shut and went into a foyer reeking of urine—animal and human—fish sauce, fried pork, brussels sprouts. The sight of the mailboxes reminded him of Michael Renzler, of crackpot letters past and yet to come.

Up in his apartment, he dropped his bags in the hall and went straight to the kitchen cabinet. The red light on the answering machine burned steadily; no messages. He’d been hoping for a call from Lilith at least. She had the keys to his apartment; she could have surprised him, been waiting in bed. But no. He fumbled the cap from a bottle of sweet black rum and let the syrup burn his throat.

He carried the bottle into the bedroom. The lightbulb expired with a pop when he flipped the switch. He turned on the computer screen instead and sat in the amber glow, rubbing his temples. It was all right for a moment, until the new mandala screen-saver began to twitch, an unwelcome reminder of unfinished business. Tomorrow he would deal with the Club Mandala goons. He shut off the screen and lay back on the bed.

Ten minutes later he got up again. Someone was yelling in the street, inarticulate but still frightening, as if the threat were aimed at him, as if he were the only one awake to hear it. He peered through the blinds and saw a man standing in the center of the street shouting up at the sky. Derek moved back out of sight.

Lenore. It was not her name he remembered—it was the girl herself. Her face. The memory of her cold hand. Just as well she was miles away—though it didn’t seem so far, thanks to jet travel. Just as well she was married.

He started wondering about her husband, wondering if he really did have any of Michael Renzler’s letters filed away. And if so, did they mention Lenore?

He found himself leaning into the closet, digging through stacked boxes. The first he dragged out held spare copies of his second book, Your Psychic Allies. The garish cover showed slit eyes in a swirling mist. Once he had naively imagined giving them away in handfuls to all his new friends in San Francisco. But nothing like that had ever happened; he had business associates here, his publisher and his lawyer. Aside from Lilith he had made no friends, nor had he left any behind in L.A. After the book was published, he’d had high expectations of falling in with a close circle of like-minded people, fast friends. Instead, look what he had fallen into. The same old shit, in bigger piles.

Everyone here was so sincere, the others who wrote this sort of book. He suspected there were more than a few like him out there, but naturally they didn’t congregate. They didn’t get together to slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on having suckered in another generation of fools. If they were smart, they never stepped out of character. The performance paid all too well. He consoled himself with the thought that he was different. One day he would lay it all aside and expose himself—once he was financially secure enough to do without that particular audience. He would write searing exposes of the occult world, its shills and scams. He would tour the country, sell his story to the tabloids, make a new living out of notoriety. It was something to look forward to.

Here was the box of crackpot letters. He hauled it from under the empty limbs of clothing, dragging it into the living room, where he sat on the sofa under better light. He didn’t realize his mistake until he pushed his hand through the box flaps and touched something leathery and soft, something that seemed to want to cling to him like a second skin.

Disgust was a spasm that involved his entire being. He jerked back his hand and kicked the box aside, remembering now how he’d shoved it to the depths of the closet months ago, wishing he’d had the nerve to burn it instead. It had been waiting for him all along, hiding in there, calling him, putting the thought in his head that he ought to go digging through boxes, disguising its motive as some mild impulse of his own.

It had wanted his attention.

“Eli,” he said. Elias Mooney. And then it came to him that the kid had spoken of the old man—had even corresponded with him.

Sometimes he forgot what a small circle he moved in. Claustrophobically small. And now the mandala texts were becoming real to many others, and that circle was widening. They weren’t a private nightmare anymore. He had risked sending them out into the world, bastard children, and now they were homing in from all directions, seeking their father; fungus spores drifting on psychic winds, settling and sprouting overnight through all the dark forests of the mind.

Bile and brass mingled in his mouth, but self-disgust won out over fear. He regretted everything, now that it was pointless to do so. If he’d been honest with himself in the first place, he never would have listened to the old man, never humored him, never have answered that first letter. He’d thought himself cynical back then, but he’d been a naive fool.

The box drew him back, first his mind, then his eyes, and finally his hands. It called him constantly, but tonight it was especially loud. He managed to insert his fingers between the flaps of the box and skirt down along the edges without quite touching what mainly filled it. There he pinched a fat envelope between his first and second fingers, and drew it out, feeling almost nostalgic. It was his only letter from Elias Mooney. He imagined Michael Renzler receiving just such an envelope, covered with Eli’s spidery script. Could he recover his own frame of mind from those days, the skeptical delight with which he had received this unexpected piece of mail? It had fallen into his lap like inspiration, when he was desperate for ideas.

The letter—penned on blue-lined paper torn from a spiral binder—began in a spidery, elegant hand that strayed repeatedly into near illegibility. He remembered how he had known outright it was an old person’s writing, for it was scripted in a style he had seen nowhere but on antique postcards—penmanship taught in the old schools. He felt even now, after all that had happened, as he had felt then: that in entering Eli’s world, even for the space of time it took to scan the letter, he had embarked on a journey to a stranger realm than he had ever suspected could exist alongside his own. It was a neurotic, paranoid, fundamentally unhinged world, but Eli’s power and persuasiveness were such that Derek had been sucked into it more completely than he had cared to admit at the time—until the end of their relationship. And it was here, first reading this letter, that he had found himself on the outermost turn of that spiral, about to be drawn in closer and closer to the old man… into his madness.

Elias Mooney

16043 Blackoak Avenue

San Diablo, California

Mr. Derek Crowe

c/o Phantom Books

New York City

Dear Mr. Crowe:

Please excuse this letter out of the Blue, which may presume too much of your attention. I hope you will find Something in it worth your while. I intend to offer you the Opportunity of your Lifetime!

I have been an avid reader and collector of Occult books for longer than you have been alive. I can assure you I read with an open yet critical Mind, finding much Garbage touted as true Revelation. One must search diligently to find the kernels of Truth hidden in so much Chaff. There are, however, a few Authors whose works I identify with Integrity—such as the late Dion Fortune, with whom I had the good “Fortune” of corresponding for several years prior to her Death. I am happy to have discovered your two excellent volumes, as I can see you are a devoted Seeker of Truth like myself and Madame Fortune; and indeed a worthy Correspondent. (It says on the back of Your Psychic Allies that you live in San Francisco, only a short train ride from San Diablo; so in fact, more than correspondents, we might even strike up a Relationship over the telephone, or possibly in Person!)

I am certain that an Occultist of your stature receives many letters from all over the Globe. Even I myself, who have no Books to my name, receive a great deal of literature (most of it unwanted Trash!) and letters from people who know me by Reputation. Although I am unpublished, I am considered somewhat of an Authority in certain Circles. You may have come across my Name in the course of your Studies.

But in case you have never heard of “Elias Mooney,” let me tell you a little about Myself.

I was born early in this Century, the victim of a congenital Deformity. I have been confined to a Wheelchair for my entire Life. Yet do not Pity me, for despite my confinement, and occasional fits of Epilepsy, my Health has been better than might be expected and I have lived a completely full and active Life, wedding three Wives and having children by two. (I am a Widower currently, choosing not to remarry a fourth time, as I feel my life’s Course nearing its End. My Enemies may say this is long Overdue.)

As you might Imagine, given such restrictions, I have lived largely a Life of the Mind, though not one given over unduly to Phantasy. Very early on, before any Adult could Pollute my Will with discourses on what is and is not Possible, I mastered the art of Astral Projection, with which I am quite sure you are familiar. This Skill—for I believe it is a skill anyone can develop, and not a Talent or Gift as the Old Biddies who write for Fate Magazine would have us believe—enabled me to travel far and wide, not only on this Earth but throughout the Cosmos and even Beyond, into what are quaintly and inaccurately called “Other Dimensions,” so that long before I could speak the Language of my Terrestrial family, I was conversant in the tongues of no fewer than two dozen Alien civilizations presently unknown to Modern Science. Some of these Species are already Extinct, others have yet to Arise; such are the properties of Space-time—stranger than Einstein or Hawking can Conceive—that the Astral Body can travel into Past and Future as easily as it penetrates Distance.

As a Child, I instinctively kept this Knowledge to myself. I was already considered a Freak by many outside my immediate family. But I roamed the country astrally and so grew acquainted with the Lives of my neighbors, gathering Information no one thought I should have. Sometimes even my family Feared me, although this fear was more Painful and Frightening to me than I can possibly convey, and in response I grew more withdrawn than before. At the age when most children are Free to run in the fields and climb Trees, I was closeted in darkened rooms. My only Friend was my Teacher, a very gentle Woman who showed great concern for me and whom I grew to Love tenderly. I often attended her regular schoolhouse classes in the Astral, watching her unobserved, and learned the day’s Lesson before she brought it to me. Once I followed her home to her Husband, and—with very little Comprehension—perceived their most Intimate acts in great detail and with such absorption that I felt my Astral body being sucked into their Passion like a Mote swirling down into a Whirlpool. I shrank to a mere speck of Consciousness, weak as a tiny filing of Iron before a great blind Magnet; thus the disembodied Soul, wandering between Lives, is drawn down to Earth and Rebirth. (I have felt the same Vertiginous suction on the Battlefield, where the Astral body is irresistibly drawn to fresh Blood, to the passion of Death as well as that of Birth.) I loved my Teacher so much, with a Child’s Love, that I almost surrendered my Deformed body to be reborn as her child. Only as Sperm penetrated Egg did I truly realize my great Danger, and like any Animal whose Existence is threatened, fought my way free again, struggling back to my body along a thin silver Thread, to lie Sick in my bed for many days afterward. This was a great Turning-point in my life. I could never again face my Teacher; I used to Scream and Weep when she came near. Soon afterward she gave up teaching and bore a Child, and I did not see her again until I was much older, and her son—who had nearly been Myself—full Grown.

I say it was a turning-point because it taught me the powerful Danger of Truth. It is not an easy thing to Witness that which we cannot understand—and are not ready to Behold. I saw too much. Fortunately, I had already discovered for myself the existence of those Psychic Allies which you describe so well in your book. I called on them to Shield me from things I was not meant to Know until the time was ripe. I understood that I was not like Others; that the Goals and Dreams and Ambitions of the world were less than Useless to me. I had an entirely different Destiny. I thus devoted myself completely to mastery of the Mysteries.

I cannot of course write much of these Here, as you certainly know that letters may be Intercepted. I have good reason to believe that my mail and telephone are monitored by certain geometrically unstable Forces and their human Agents. They cannot physically block my letters for fear of alerting us to their Presence, but they certainly do Scan the contents in search of my supposed Weaknesses. We live in a Dark Configuration, you see, when it is all but impossible for the tiniest flame of Truth to burn in secrecy. That Flame needs Air for fuel, yet some days I hardly dare open a window because of my neighbors and their Suspicions. I think these Days are worse for Us than the Burning Times, for in the Past communities were small and there were many places to work in secret outside the isolated Webwork of Rumor and Betrayal to which the Inquisitors had access; but today the Web extends everywhere, even over the very Computer and telephone lines that are supposed to have Freed us. The tools of Surveillance are so ubiquitous that we are literally Irradiated with aetherial waves of Suspicion and Paranoia, forced to consign our heartfelt messages to channels which by their very Nature Distort and Obscure our intentions with statistical hiss, not to mention the Government’s deliberate manipulation of wave forms. This Perversion is the cause of every modern War, and even most Domestic misunderstandings. You will understand when I say there are Things I can tell you in Person that I would not trust to the postal “service” or telephone company, just as there are Things you cannot print for wide distribution, things I see you skillfully hinting at, and all but defining by their Absence from your Work. Cunningly done! You may rest assured that some few of your Readers can indeed Decode the Cryptograms you bury in your Text; those who can do so are Initiates sworn to put the knowledge to Good use. Others, the Unclean, no matter how hard they search for these Clues, remain constitutionally Blind, forever Ignorant—at least until they admit their Evil and Reverse their Ways, so that etic truth may permeate the shells of their emic reality.

Please forgive me if I wander. I have little occasion these days to Unburden myself to a Sympathetic ear, and I am straying beyond my Original intention in writing this letter.

I have lived an uncommonly full Life in the pursuit of the Mysteries, a life which I think would be an excellent example to others of like inclination. I know the World is full of such Souls, few of them as fortunate as myself in Uncovering their Latent powers, many Abused since childhood, victims of Rape and Incest, in dire need of Healing. They are Alone and frightened, seeking solace in Drugs and books of the so-called Occult, which you and I both Know are largely compendia of Stupidity and even outright Lies, more Harmful than Drugs to the Minds of those poor, vulnerable Souls who encounter them.

I therefore propose a Remedy to some of this world’s Ills. I have long had it in my Mind to compose an Autobiography, detailing all but the inmost Secrets of my Wisdom, and pointing the way to acquiring even these for the Brave souls who wish to follow the Path I have blazed. While it is true that I have not traveled extensively in the physical plane, my Mind has encompassed the Universe, and I have concrete experience of things most people consider purely Illusory. There is more than enough in my life to fill a thick volume—certainly more than I can write. It is very hard for me to hold a Pen. This short Letter has taken me One full Week to write, and has nearly drained my writing abilities. You will notice that the script—once my pride—deteriorates greatly from one page to the next. Yesterday my hand was so Swollen that I could not write at all. I could not be sure if you possessed a Cassette tape player, nor that you would ever Listen to such an Unusual correspondence from one whose name no doubt means Nothing to you.

My intentions were Great when I set out to write this letter. I meant to tell you how I met my first Wife (she Saw my Astral Body quite clearly on a Summer evening and followed it home to where I lay abed!) but I must cut it short now, in the hope that you will contact me at the address above and we may discuss these Matters further, without so much Formality and discomfort.

Yours in the Brotherhood of Truth,

—Elias Mooney

“Eli,” Derek muttered. “You started it all. It’s too late. I can’t take it back. I can’t stop it now.”

Fatigue was finally creeping up from within, insidious enough to alter the world he thought he saw. The room looked softened and blurred at the edges, part of a drifting dreamscape; he couldn’t believe it was dawn already.

Goddamn you, old man, he thought as he threw himself down on the mattress. I wish I’d had a crackpot file back then; your letter would have gone straight into it. It was your fault, writing to me. You should never have let me near you. You should have known what would happen, if you were so psychic.

As he fell into sleep, he dreamed he opened his eyes and saw a mandala following him down. It hung above like a leprous chandelier, a gray wheel covered with a hundred crawling mouths. It was falling faster than he—gaining on him. A hundred mouths opening, tongues lashing out to catch a taste of him.

I know you, Derek thought. You’re in my book.

Small comfort.

8

It was a slow day for Lenore. She had one class at eleven, a course in number theory, and then she worked from one to seven as a waitress at the Cutting Board. Math kept her mind sharp; the job kept her grounded in reality. The rest of her life, the domestic part of it, was vague and confused, its limits ill-defined. She never knew quite what to do to fill the hours. She did not do well with a lot of free time on her hands—time to think, to remember, to dredge up things she would rather forget. Especially now that she had few means of blotting out those memories. She couldn’t drink—couldn’t and wouldn’t. Shouldn’t, anyway. Even when she had pot, she didn’t let herself smoke it before going to school. Maybe some of the discipline she learned there was seeping over into the rest of her life. She’d never had a schedule before, not one she’d chosen for herself. There had been plenty of curfews and house rules in the foster homes and halfway houses. She needed structure in her life, she admitted that now—but those had been poor excuses for it.

Facing herself in the bathroom mirror, she had a moment of queasiness. There was a huge scabby bruise on her forehead, right in the center. It didn’t hurt. She couldn’t remember for the life of her how she might have gotten it; she only knew it must have happened sometime during the night. Had she fallen out of bed, gotten a slight concussion? She must have hit something on the way down to make such a mess. No wonder Michael had kept staring at her all morning before he left for work. Why hadn’t he said anything?

She leaned close for a good look, but it was just a moist scab. Capillaries had burst in her skin, forming delicate red filigrees under the oozing crust, like the tendrily bodies of bloodworms, wriggling.

Get a grip, she told herself. It’s just a scab. It’s not moving.

She was dizzy, though, and a little nauseated as she stepped into the shower.

She found a black wool cap and pulled it low on her brow; anyway, she needed it in the unheated classroom high in the old math building. It wasn’t a crowded class, not at all like the crammed survey course she had taken her first term, before she found she could pass a few aptitude tests and skip entire courses. The other students were mostly younger than she, or seemed that way—if they were older, they’d hardly lived her kind of life, and might as well have been children. Geeks and nerds and quiet, plain girls. She felt like a barbarian among them, except when she was working, and then her mind seemed to whisper along in cool efficiency, and she knew she was as good as any. She knew she intrigued them, but she kept aloof.

The textbook they were using was off-the-wall, she thought; the young, acne-scarred professor had written it himself. He was taking them now through a discussion of the prime numbers represented as visual images, as groups of points. He chalked one dot on the chalkboard, then two, then three, then five, seven, eleven. The dots fell into irregular patterns. Each cluster elicited a running commentary; each had its own quirks and characteristics, its distinct personality. The professor’s voice was monotonous, but it didn’t lull her. The pictures fascinated Lenore. Thirteen: the professor couldn’t resist a short talk on the historical significance of the set, touching on the obvious associations of bad luck, thirteen loops in a hangman’s noose, Judas as the thirteenth disciple, and so on. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-seven. Forty-one. Forty-three.

Thirty-seven.

The professor kept on, drawing his figures, making his dry remarks at which most of the class chuckled knowingly, their furtive secret little math jokes. But Lenore’s mind hung back at thirty-seven.

37.

Suddenly a circular pattern hung in her eyes like the afterimage of a camera flash, an ornate sun-fleck. It was something she’d seen in that Derek Crowe book—one of the mandalas. She hadn’t really paid much attention to how the things looked, not consciously anyway, but apparently it had seeped into her unconscious mind. She was already bent over her notebook, scribbling notes with one ear cocked to the professor’s voice, but now she flipped to a fresh page. She saw the mandala hanging there as if projected from a slide. Fascinated, she set her pencil at the very center of the wheel and began to trace the lines, wondering at the optical illusion, marveling that her memory could be so sharp.

You see how clear your mind can be when you’re not fucking it up with drugs? she told herself.

She traced quickly, deliberately; if she blinked, she wasn’t aware of it, but she didn’t think she blinked at all. She couldn’t wait to get home and compare it to the book, find this particular mandala and see how accurate she was. The pencil spun and twirled; she rolled it in her fingers to keep the tip sharpened. The professor was wrong. Thirty-seven wasn’t an ill-formed cluster of dots. It looked like this—like thirty-seven little eyes around a serrated center.

It was then she remembered the feel of the knife in her hand, Michael’s knife, carving liquid light in the wounded air.

Her breath drained out of her and hung in space where she couldn’t reach it. She was suffocating. Sparks tingled in her eyes, and she remembered something coming toward her, wheeling about, a whirling vastness placing her at its center.

Lenore dropped the pencil. Several students glanced over, kept gazing when they saw she made no move to retrieve the pencil, but only sat there trembling slightly. Finally a boy in the next aisle reached down, picked up the pencil, and set it back on her desk. He did it with a slight smile, and turned away blushing after a few seconds when she offered no thanks.

Her hand went to her forehead, fingering the scab.

The mandala, incomplete, seemed to burn on the page as if angry, insistent that she finish it. Instead she shoved her pencil into her purse, slapped the notebook shut, and slid out of the seat. The professor gave her an irritated look. She fled the room, thudding down the square spiral stairs of the central tower in her heavy boots, then out into the sun where it was almost warm. Pines cast cold shade on the parking lot.

As she drove home, her nervousness increased. She kept glancing at her forehead in the rearview mirror, picking at the scab. The skin was bright, raw pink beneath it; she tried to stick the scab back in place. Another blackout, she thought. But she hadn’t done any drugs yesterday. It had been, all in all, a dull day, unremarkable except for Derek Crowe’s lecture—and why that had stimulated her, she still didn’t understand. For a few hours she’d thought she finally understood what Michael saw in all this occult stuff—a way of seeing into the darkness that always surrounded her. She had thought maybe there was some way to get back to the source of her troubles, and undo the harm. As if she could ever escape her depressions, her addiction not to any particular drug, but to oblivion.

She felt like a fool today.

And she had done something foolish last night.

That would teach her to let her guard down. She always had to learn these things the hard way.

The Cutlass was banging and groaning by the time she pulled up in front of the house. It was the only car she’d ever heard of that could overheat in freezing weather. She stumped up the driveway, hearing Tucker’s music. The stereo played perpetually. She checked her watch—she had plenty of time to get to work, but she was already thinking she might call in sick. She felt sick.

She stood in the kitchen, anxious for a little hit of something, anything. She brought down a plastic film canister she kept in a high cupboard, plucked off the lid, found it empty of even the green dust of last summer’s homegrown.

Blackouts when she was drinking, those she could understand. Blackouts for no reason, with no explanation, were another matter. They suggested some sort of chemical or physical problem—brain damage… maybe a tumor. Some long-term effect of the designer drugs she’d tried in New York City—dirty, untested stuff.

She could smell incense from Michael’s temple. She almost gagged at the odor, which brought traces of memory. Again she remembered carving the mandala sign in the air. And something else—an impression of something enormous sharing the room with them.

She went down the hall, pushed open the door to the library, and stopped. She felt suddenly dizzy, almost stoned. Optical illusions flickered in the dark room, coiling and uncoiling like tendrils of ghostly ferns. She shut her eyes. Was this some kind of flashback? Had Michael slipped her something last night—some sort of ritual drug, like peyote?

Even before finishing the thought, she dismissed it. No way. Michael wouldn’t feed her habits. He’d quit actively urging her to give up every pleasure she had, every so-called vice, but he was still a fucking Puritan in black leather. You’d think he was a born-again Christian or something, the way he went after her for doing even the mildest drugs. And him with his magic and witchcraft. Some people thought they were worse than drugs!

He had everything so easy, seeing life in religious terms, in black and white. He was as bad as the Baptists, going door to door converting people. He had no idea how mixed up the world could get, how everything bled over into everything else, forming one enormous gray zone that couldn’t be cleared up with candles or crosses or ritual knives. There was no symmetry in life, nothing so easy as good and evil. Sure, Michael knew all kinds of things—intellectual things, bullshit out of books. But logic and common sense were not his strongest subjects. He was off in another dimension somewhere, going on and on about the astral. But for all his occult knowledge, his philosophical talk about how the essence of life was suffering, he didn’t know shit about pain. He’d never been through anything like what she’d gone through. He’d never suffered the kind of abuse that had been her lot. Mrs. Renzler was a drunken cow, but not violent. He hadn’t been taken away from parents he couldn’t remember and sent to a string of foster homes, bounced from one guardian to another. She didn’t believe his life had ever been that bad. They argued about it sometimes, trying to top each other’s store of suffering. Michael’s mother had gone through three husbands, hauling him all over the place when he was growing up—from Miami, to Buffalo, to Baltimore, to Athens, to D.C. She worked sporadically in jails and prisons, and tended to fall for inmates, though not the violent type. Con artists, small-time crooks, they’d left Michael more or less alone. So his mother married criminals; everybody had their problems. Lenore wished her own childhood could have been half as placid.

“Just because I never got beat up or lost my babies doesn’t mean I haven’t been hurt,” he’d say. “Shit’s happened to me that’s just as hard for a guy to go through, things a woman can’t understand.”

Maybe. Just maybe. But she doubted it.

The ironic thing was that Cinderton people thought Michael was the wild one. To them, he looked dangerous, the sort of kid who’d had a hard life, just because he wore toned-down versions of city styles and lived in a house with a quasi-biker upstairs. Around here, it didn’t take much to stand out from the norm. It was worse when they got out of town and into the sticks. Cinderton tolerated a minimal amount of weird behavior because of the campus; freakish college kids bankrolled the town. Past the town limits, all bets were off.

She took a step into the room, as if it might help her remember what had happened last night.

She walked up to the altar and saw Michael’s knife gleaming down in her shadow. Peering more closely, she saw that the tip was broken off, snapped right across. How had that happened? Michael was usually so careful with his things.

She flipped open the beat-up edition of The Mandala Rites lying next to the knife, upsetting the wooden wand that lay across it. The stick clattered softly on the floor, but before she could bend to pick it up, she saw the black mandala trembling on the page.

She bolted down the hall with a hand over her mouth, making it to the bathroom sink just as she vomited.

She hung there for a minute after it was over, running water from the tap, cupping it to her mouth. She sipped and spat, then splashed her face and reached for a handtowel.

As she patted herself dry, she glanced in the mirror. In shock, she put the towel down and leaned closer to the glass.

The scab was hanging from a thread of skin. She twitched it off and dropped it down the drain. The skin beneath was bright as a candy heart, except for the traceries of exploded veins, like the remnants of a hickey. She patted the spot with a damp washcloth. The capillaries looked weird, still oozing. Her eyes hurt from being nearly crossed, but she thrust her face still closer and stared without quite believing what she saw.

Sharp lines like spokes in a wheel, small speckled dots like… like eyes. It was a mandala. The same she’d been drawing that morning—or damn similar. The thirty-seventh mandala, in amazing detail. It looked more like a high-contrast photograph than a tattoo. The harder she stared, the more she saw. She could make out the texture of the spokes, the glistening of teeth in the central mouth, all the moist eyes that seemed to be watching her.

Teeth, mouth, eyes?

Why was she so sure of what she saw?

She stared so hard that the image seemed to change. In the old, stained, badly silvered mirror, it began to warp and waver. The thing’s thin arms rippled and the teeth parted slightly, revealing a midpoint of darkness that held her gaze and deepened, twisting, sucking her in like the water that swirled forgotten down the drain.

9

In addition to Mystery, Science Fiction, Westerns, and Puzzles, Michael was in charge of the Religion and Metaphysics sections at Beagle Books in downtown Cinderton. Several times a week, Michael took his inventory list down the aisles, assessing the history and current state of human spirituality based on titles in print and copies in stock, from Charles Fort to Paul Tillich, from St. Augustine and the Dalai Lama to L. Ron Hubbard and Erich von Daniken. The more outlandish writings had their own long shelf facing Fiction. This stretch was crammed with books on lucid dreaming and dream interpretation, on flying saucers and the Bermuda triangle, on astral projection, clairvoyance, crystal power, healing and visualization. There were tomes on witchcraft by Cotton Mather, Sybil Leek, and Starhawk; a complete set of Max Freedom Long’s kahuna treatises and Franz Bardon’s hallucinatory hermetic confections. No matter how many times he riffled through the section—and taking inventory gave him a good excuse for browsing through more books than he could ever hope to own—he always found something to send him into frenzies of speculation. The Big Five orthodox, received-wisdom cults (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism) had an entire wall to themselves toward the back of the store, around the corner from Metaphysics, and separated from their harebrained cousins by the smallish Science Fiction section. He went more methodically and sedately through Religion, a mere cataloger of defenders and heretics. Dogma did not interest him. Sometimes he cracked open a copy of Ignatius of Loyola, to see how the visualizations worked, if there were any techniques he could borrow; or skimmed Thomas Merton trying to figure out why Chogyam Trungpa had pushed him into a swimming pool; and he had long since moved Blake and Swedenborg into Metaphysics, feeling they would be more comfortable among others like themselves.

He was proud of his Metaphysics section, though it had glaring holes that never failed to frustrate him, representing volumes he considered crucial to any comprehensive occult library, but that were either out of print or unavailable through the distributors he was authorized to use. The Black Pullet, for instance. You could find it only in a cheap pamphlet that looked more like a compendium of love spells and hexes, which was admittedly as far as most people’s interest in occultism went. And just try finding a copy of A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. ELIZ. and King JAMES their Reignes) and Some Spirits: Tending (had it Succeeded) To a General Alteration of most STATES and KING DOMES in the World!

He had ordered another six copies of The Mandala Rites, figuring there would be a run on them after Crowe’s lecture, and this morning he’d moved them to the front counter. It would have been a coup to get Crowe in here to autograph them, but obviously the occultist hadn’t wished to linger in Cinderton for business or pleasure. Two copies had sold by noon, when Michael finished his inventory and took the register. Out of the corner of his eye, as he rang up a stack of magazines, he noticed a large woman standing at the mandala display. When he turned to look at her directly, he saw it was Cerridwen Dunsinane.

“Hey, Cerridwen,” he said. “They’re going good today, after last night. That was a great lecture, wasn’t it?”

The look she gave him was surprising, to say the least. Poisonous. Enraged. She snatched up a copy of The Mandala Rites. “I’d like to tear this thing in little pieces and feed them to my python,” she said. “I’m almost tempted to buy a copy just for the pleasure of mutilating it, except I wouldn’t want six percent sneaking back in that asshole’s pocket. I wouldn’t want to make my snake sick either.”

“Whose pocket?”

She slapped the book face down on the counter. “Derek Crowe’s.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“The guy’s a fraud. A slimeball. I’ve never met a bigger one, and to think I helped him on his greasy way….”

Michael shook his head. “A fraud?” He flashed on Lenore, last night, the power she had summoned with Crowe’s book. That was real magic, more intense than anything he had ever experienced, undeniable and, in retrospect, rather frightening.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have reason to think he’s got something there.”

“Oh, he’s got something going, all right. It’s just not what everyone thinks. He threatened to sue the Sisterhood.”

Another customer came up with a couple paperbacks; he rang them up absently. “Sue you? Over what?”

“Over a few bucks that were supposed to go to charity.”

“That doesn’t sound too enlightened.”

“Enlightened? The man is pitch black. If I were you, I’d purify these books with a little salt and water, a whiff of frankincense, and plenty of fire. I can’t believe anything worthwhile could come from that evil bastard.”

Michael decided not to mention that he’d given Crowe a ride.

Her fun- vented, Cerridwen produced three copies of another book and laid them on the counter. “I couldn’t help noticing these got moved into the remainder bin,” she said, more subdued now.

“Uh, yeah, sorry about that. It wasn’t my decision.”

They were copies of her own book, Weaving With Moonlight, all rather dusty and bearing that sad little gold “Autographed!” sticker, that always reminded him of the stars given to reward second-grade overachievers. Michael had convinced his boss to buy the books direct from Cerridwen, since it was a small press edition with a tiny print run. A few copies had sold to Cerrid-wen’s friends in the first weeks after the book came out, and then no more. He hadn’t read it himself. Cerridwen was a figurehead of local neo-paganism and a frequent patron of certain downtown shops—Wymmyn’s Mysteries and Smoky Mountain Magick. In wanner weather she did Tarot readings for friends (or five dollars) at the sidewalk tables outside the Cutting Board, using the big round cards of the Motherpeace deck, or sometimes the Voyager Tarot. (Michael himself used nothing but the Thoth deck, despite its obvious deficiencies.)

He felt sorry for her, and so after checking to make sure he was unobserved, he ran the books through the demagnetizer and slipped them into a bag without ringing them up. don’t you just take them?” he whispered. “No charge.”

She looked surprised. “Really?”

“They’re yours anyway. Sorry they didn’t do better.”

“Well… now I know what sells. Crap.”

At that moment, a tall teenage boy wearing a silver pentacle and a ragged parka came sidling up next to them and slapped a copy of The Mandala Rites on the counter.

“Hey, did you hear this guy last night? Intense! Oh, yeah, I remember you! You gave him a ride in your cool Beetle!”

Michael flinched a bit and grinned sheepishly at Cerridwen. Her friendly look gone, she hugged her sack to her breast and headed for the door. Michael rang up the sale.

After work, Michael was supposed to shop for his mother. Her car was dead. She had called in the morning to give him a grocery list, wasting his coffee break while she tried to decide what she needed. Eleven a.m. and she was already drunk; he dreaded seeing how bad she would be by the time he arrived with groceries. He decided to swing by and see Lenore at work.

The steep hill streets of downtown Cinderton were lined with crumbling brick buildings, most of them abandoned or sparsely occupied, except for a few square blocks rejuvenated by clothing boutiques, art galleries, and New Age shops selling crystals and herbs. Lenore couldn’t stand these places, but Michael found them a welcome oasis among the backwoods people. He kept his car parked where it was, tucked the latest “Frauds & Fakirs” issue of Gnosis under his arm, then went down one hill and up another to the Cutting Board.

There was no sign of Lenore at the bakery counter. He poked his head into the dining room, which was quietly crowded with students, aging hippies, recent Yankee refugees drinking coffee, reading, or writing in notebooks. She wasn’t at the register. Before he got to the kitchen, a man with a graying beard and ponytail came out through the swinging doors.

“Hey, Mike.” It was Cal, Lenore’s boss. “Where’s your old lady?”

Michael stopped. “She’s not here?”

“No. She didn’t call in sick. I tried your number but the phone kept ringing.”

“That’s weird,” Michael said.

“Tell her not to do this to me, all right? I already have a girl out. If she warns me, I can make arrangements. Otherwise—”

Michael started to say she wasn’t sick, but realized he didn’t know if this was strictly true. He hadn’t talked to her yet. After last night, maybe she was feeling out of sorts.

“I’ll check the roads and see if her car broke down somewhere,” he said. “We’ve been having trouble with it.”

Cal gave him an exasperated look. “I don’t suppose you want a job?”

Cal let him use the phone to make another attempt at reaching Lenore; but if she was home, she wasn’t answering. He supposed she could have stayed late at school, to work in the library. Lenore had her own reasons for doing things; she wouldn’t appreciate him getting mixed up with her boss. For all he knew, she was mad at Cal and making him pay for it. She couldn’t afford to lose the job, but she wouldn’t stand for Michael lecturing her about responsibility. He reorganized his priorities in order of increasing unpleasantness, and decided to get his mother’s groceries before dealing with Lenore.

The TV was blaring in the kitchen when he walked in the back door of his mother’s house, a bag of groceries in either arm. She was standing at the sink, pouring vodka into a glass of grapefruit juice. Another TV was going in the living room; he could see Earl’s feet up on the La-Z-Boy.

“Where were you last night?” she asked.

He dropped the bags on the table. She immediately started rummaging through to see if he’d forgotten anything.

“We went out,” he said.

“What am I supposed to do in an emergency? You go out and you don’t even tell me where you’re going? How was I supposed to get in touch with you? Call that neighbor of yours, ask him to give me a hand?”

He started putting cans in the cupboard. “We went out, that’s all. I’m supposed to tell you every time we leave the house? What’s wrong with Earl, anyway? Why can’t he help you?”

“You leave Earl alone. His car got repossessed. He’s feeling low.”

High-pitched laughter from the living room didn’t necessarily contradict her. Michael heard the theme music from some game show. Earl was a moody sort of guy, and never said exactly what he’d been doing in the state prison outside of Cinderton, where his mother had met him. She had been “laid off,” as she called it, shortly after his release, and Earl had been a fixture ever since. At least they weren’t married yet. She’d taken that much control of her life.

“I’m sure one of your neighbors would help you out.”

“My neighbors? Are you crazy? They won’t give me the time of day. I’m lucky I don’t have crosses burning on my front lawn.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“It’s not a matter of liking it. It’s what I can afford. I can’t live just anywhere I want, can I? You tell me how, on what I collect.”

“What’s wrong with your car?”

“Earl says it’s the battery. He was a mechanic, you know.”

“And it took him a week to figure out you need a battery?”

“He doesn’t have his tools, Mike. You leave him alone, I said.”

Michael threw the few vegetables into the refrigerator. “Well, if it’s the battery, I’ll just get you a new one.”

“Would you? That’d be so sweet.” She grabbed the carton of Neapolitan ice milk out of his hands before he could open the freezer. He started to put the six-packs in the fridge, but she said, “Leave one of those out.”

Michael glanced at the clock over the stove. “I’ve got to get home. My night to fix dinner.”

“What about my battery?”

“Sears is open late. I’ll bring it by in the morning, before I go to work.”

“Can’t you do it tonight, Mikey? I just feel marooned out here.”

“You shouldn’t be driving anyway.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Chubby-cakes?” Earl leaned forward in the big chair, peering down the hall into the kitchen. He always dressed like a seedy banker just home from work: white collar open, tie pulled loose. If any social workers or parole officers dropped by, he was prepared to claim he was just on his way to or from a job interview. “Oh, Mikey, how you doing? Did I just hear a pop-top?”

“It’s coming,” said his mother.

“You staying for dinner, son? We don’t see enough of you. Where’s your cute little missus?”

“I’ve got to go,” Michael said under his voice, heading for the door.

“Michael, don’t you be—”

He walked out the back door while she was talking.

Passing the college on the way home, he relaxed a bit. Sometimes, down here, among the old brick buildings covered with frost-bitten ivy, you saw a kid in black leather sporting dyed hair or a mohawk. Not many, but just enough to reassure him that he and Lenore weren’t the only ones in Cinderton who’d survived the previous decade. He cruised down streets lined with ancient thick-trunked trees, bare and lifeless as columns of scaly cement. He was on the lookout for Lenore’s car as he passed the student parking lots. Raindrops spattered the windshield, fattened on groping branches. The sky was patchy, marbled blue and gray. Storms coming; seems they’d been on the way for days, but never quite arrived. He slowed to watch a girl coming down the steps from the student union, long black hair falling over her face, bright lipstick. She glanced up as if sensing his eyes, he stepped on the gas, thinking guiltily of Lenore.

She’d been so weird last night. Nobody could turn weird on you like Lenore. Just when he started thinking he finally understood her, she always came up with something unexpected. They had met four years ago—that was a long time. He’d never done anything for four years in a row—not even lived in the same town. He supposed she was close as he would ever get to finding his ideal type. The sorority girls in fuzzy sweaters, lipstick models with books under their arms—imagine what they’d think of his altar. One glance and they’d probably run screaming, even though it was perfectly innocuous. It wasn’t like he did black magic. He didn’t give evil any credence anyway. That was Christian bullshit, something the priests used to keep people in line, setting down laws to keep folks from thinking for themselves. Michael believed the universe was fundamentally neutral, that you got out of it exactly what you put in. His magical practice stemmed from a heartfelt yearning that couldn’t be satisfied by Christianity or Buddhism or Judaism, with their cores of written dogma and hierarchies of monks and popes and rabbis. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had reached his own understanding of the cosmos and felt it in every nerve.

He wasn’t sure why Lenore’s behavior last night had frightened him. It seemed miraculous now, to think of her incanting something she’d never read. There was nothing in the mandates themselves, or in her behavior, that implied a threat in a neutral universe.

Nevertheless…

When he remembered the knife quivering in the wall, buried so deep that he’d broken the tip prying it out, he couldn’t help feeling a little fear.

He might have known that if Lenore got into magic, she wouldn’t do it halfway. She didn’t do anything unless she did it to the hilt. Literally. It would take some getting used to, though. And he’d have to work on his unexpected jealousy. It struck him as unfair that her first spontaneous effort was so much more powerful than his most practiced ritual. He had the interest and understanding, the discipline… but Lenore had the knack!

Her car was parked in front of the house. Maybe she was sick after all. Last night, after the ritual, he’d helped her off the floor and she’d gone straight to bed without saying a word, acting as if she were drugged.

Drugged…. That would explain her mood last night. In fact, that would explain a lot. What if she’d bought or begged something off Tucker, then dosed herself to enliven a boring lecture?

Lenore was supposed to tell him when she planned to do anything more intense than smoking a jay. He couldn’t forbid her from doing drugs, but he could at least prepare himself for what might follow. Last Thanksgiving, they had gone for turkey dinner at his mother’s house. In the middle of the meal, Lenore had started hyperventilating, dropped from her chair, and lay facedown on the floor. His mother was shitfaced and although she yelled about it at the time, kicking Lenore and trying to pry her off the carpet, she hadn’t remembered anything about it later. Michael went into such a panic that he almost called the hospital until Lenore began babbling nonsense and he realized she was hallucinating. He and Earl had carried her to the car, Earl making some sly comment about how she had to grow up and learn a little self-control while Mrs. Renzler raged around on the porch waving the gravy ladle. When Lenore finally came down, she confessed to eating a dozen psilocybin mushrooms, dreading the evening with Michael’s mother. He had made her promise that in the future she would always give him plenty of advance notice before doing anything of the sort.

But she would never admit to violating their deal. He heard water running in the bathroom. The door was ajar, and Lenore was standing there, both hands on the sink, staring at her face in the mirror.

“Lenore?” he said.

She snapped around to look at him, blinking. “Huh? What are you doing home?”

“Me? I’m off work. What about you?”

She looked down and shut off the water. “I—I came home for lunch. I guess I better hurry if I want to get to work.”

“Lenore…” He stood there for a moment, not sure what she meant. “It’s almost five o’clock.”

She gave him a look that said he was an idiot. “Yeah, right.” She pushed past him, down the hall, into their bedroom. She came out pulling a comb through her hair, slipping into a new sweater. The blood-smudge on her forehead was dark and freshly scabbed. “It’s your night for dinner, remember.”

“Lenore, are you crazy?”

“Fuck you, Michael, I don’t have time for this. I’m already late. What time is it, really?” She slipped the comb in her pocket and opened the front door. She stopped dead as it swung open. It was almost dark. She looked at her wristwatch.

“What’s going on?” she said, turning to look at him. “Michael, what—what’s happening?”

“I told you, Lenore, it’s five o’clock. You missed work. I talked to Cal, he’s been calling all day, and I called too. Where have you been?”

“I’ve been… here.” She looked around as if lost. “I cut out of class and… and came right home… and then… and then…” She put her hands to her mouth. “Oh, my God, Michael, I can’t remember. I just—I just lost the whole day.”

“What do you mean?” He went and closed the door, then gripped her arms. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. This isn’t…”

“Isn’t what?”

“The first time.”

“Lenore,” he said, as steadily as he could, “I’m not accusing you or anything. I just want to know, okay? Have you been doing any drugs? Anything at all?”

“No, nothing.” She crumpled against him. “Michael, I’m scared. I haven’t done anything, but I keep… keep blacking out.”

Jesus, he thought. She hasn’t done anything except… except that ritual.

In Voudoun magic, there was a place called the white darkness. The gods, or loa, came down and rode humans like horses, occupying their bodies, while their minds roamed through a realm without characteristics, a dream without features, a place none could quite remember when they returned. What if something of the sort had happened to Lenore? A mandala invoked and never properly dismissed, free to enter her when it chose?

It was a privilege to be selected by the loa, transfigured ancestral spirits of scary, lively intelligence. Papa Legba, Ersulie Freida, and Baron Samedi could drive their human “horses” to drink inhuman amounts of rum, consume massive quantities of chili peppers, even eat razor blades and broken glass without harm.

But the mandalas were, without exception, benevolent beings, devoted to human spiritual evolution. There was nothing about them of dark aspect, nothing remotely frightening.

Yet Lenore, now, frightened him. And whatever it was that had come into the temple last night had not impressed him as a bright and loving spirit.

He couldn’t be sure, of course. The mandalas were new entities. Derek Crowe was the only authority on their nature and behavior. There was really no one else he could turn to for advice, if it came to that.

He hoped it wouldn’t.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re probably just coming down with a bug.” There was no point in explaining his loa theory; he didn’t want to put any ideas in her head. He just wanted to observe. “Why don’t you get in bed and let me take your temperature?”

“Okay.” With lowered head, looking suddenly very small and frail she shuffled down the hall toward the bedroom; he kept his arm around her, helped her out of her clothes, got her into bed and covered. He went for the thermometer and slipped it under her tongue.

“Thank you, Michael,” she mumbled, looking pale and vulnerable among the pillows. He felt a pang of concern, as if for a child.

He left her there for a few minutes and went into his temple, taking up The Mandala Rites and skimming Crowe’s lengthy exegesis, looking for clues to their current situation. The text yielded nothing new.

It’s me, he thought.

I fucked up in a big way. Again. Didn’t handle things right. How can Crowe help me when I didn’t even follow his instructions? I’m not sure what we did last night, it got so out of hand.

I should have insisted on doing everything my way, methodically, and not let Lenore participate if she wouldn’t cooperate.

Now I’ve messed up my partner.

Maybe. Maybe.

Okay, yeah. Could be she’s really only sick.

Yeah. Don’t panic. What would Elias say? Look for rational explanations first. Science is an important power in this world, and for good reason: It works.

Let’s try science and see how far it gets us.

He returned to Lenore. Her eyes were half closed; she looked calmer now. She gave him a sleepy smile as he plucked the thermometer out of her mouth.

“How’s it look?”

He turned the glass wand until he saw the thin line of mercury. It was numbered on the Celsius scale, rather than Fahrenheit, which always confused him a bit; but there was a red arrow pointing out the normal human temperature, and she was right on it.

“You’re fine,” he said. “Thirty-seven. That’s normal.”

10

Derek Crowe stood at the chalkboard, dressed in a white shirt and baggy trousers, a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket, a piece of chalk in one hand. Lenore was alone with him in the drafty classroom, her notebook opened to a blank page. He had drawn a ring of dots on the board, thirty-seven points arranged in a mandala, like thirty-seven eyes watching her. And now, one by one, counting aloud as he did so, he began to erase them.

“Thirty-seven… thirty-six… thirty-five…”

The classroom grew dark, and Lenore found herself on the square spiral stairs of the math building, trudging down them in reverse, moving backward down the stairs. Crowe’s voice lowered her into darkness.

“Twenty-seven… twenty-six… twenty-five…”

Lenore’s flesh melted from her, underlying lines of power shedding their outermost excrescences, leaving her floating like a skeleton of bare lines in a diamond realm, steeped in orange haze. This fire-lit mist coagulated into lumps of multicolored moving matter, an astral precipitate jumbled and chaotic around her. She glimpsed the bits and pieces of her past, scenes and faces swirling in a colloidal storm. Old agonies rose up to torment her. Scenes from her life fought for primacy, without purpose, but for once they could not draw her in.

“Thirteen… twelve… eleven…”

She had come under the sway of a new influence, an organizing principle, something more powerful than the clamors of her ego. As if magnetized, the fragments of her consciousness began to align themselves along inward lines of power, leading her deep into the center of something she could not apprehend.

“Three… two… one…”

She had reached the beginning of her life—but the center was farther in.

Leaving physical memories behind, she plunged cometlike into a void as impenetrable as unconsciousness. There was something there, some lost part of her, crying to be rescued. She reached for it, hauled it out blindly… but whatever it was, she could not see it. She had not gone far enough yet.

“Zero.”

She felt that if she could only reach the center, she could start back out again and she would be changed. She would be whole. Her true nature waited patiently to be born. Strong and pure, intensely bright and fearless, it had existed before her body, before anything.

But now it had a body.

“Now wake….”

She found herself standing outside the door of Michael’s temple. The house was all new. The walls, floor and ceiling were pure black. Pure, essential. The world she had inhabited all her life seemed shallow and incomplete, a failure of imagination. This other, dominant world reminded her that oblivion was her true nature. Consider the universe in all the endless ages before her arrival and after her departure. She was like a little cyst of nothingness ensconced in the middle of that span. Worthless, unless something greater found a use for her.

And now something had.

Down it came, spinning slowly and deliberately, like a vast black sentient ceiling fan, giving off an odor she could almost taste. It gleamed with dark wet liquid, as if recently anointed. Tendrils like drops of thickening blood were oozing, dripping onto her.

She had no fear of blood. Blood had served as carrier for a thousand pleasures. How many times had she watched her own blood backing up a syringe and stared at the ruby liquid, in awe of its beauty and utility?

Nor did she fear needles, for similar reasons, although she had never witnessed anything like the sheer number that now revealed themselves as the palpy tendrils retracted to show their probing tips. Some ancient portion of her brain, something deeply rooted in all the errors and apprehensions of matter, sent a momentary spasm through her muscles, a surge of animal panic—as if there were anywhere to run from the black wheel.

But the flutter of her nerves was too slow; while ions were bridging neural gaps with torturous lethargy, this other thing had already anticipated them and filled those spaces with its own immensities. Then the million or more thin, flexible spikes pierced her soul, delivering her from every care she had ever known.

All weakness in her began to dissolve, old cells giving way before a creative, corrosive tide. As quickly as her vulnerable portions were destroyed, the whirling black wheel replaced them with others of its own manufacture, rebuilding her cell by cell. Healing her, but also changing her.

In tonight’s exchange, she had nothing to give and everything to gain. Her mind unfolded in an unending process of expansion centered on one point that hung in space above, quietly gnashing.

Waves of pleasure, immobilizing warmth washed through her, but she needn’t worry about moving. There was nothing to accomplish. She need only devote her mind to the intricate inward track. For the true center lay yet a long way from where she stood.

She gazed up at her guardian, wanting whatever it wanted for her.

I’m nothing without you. Heal me, make me whole. I give myself to you.

I surrender.

The mandala had been holding back until she was entirely receptive. Now it moved closer. Pain streamed into her unavoidably, though her guardian increased the flow of pleasure at the same time. She was used to the contradictory mixture. Her whole life had been nothing but pain and the things she took to ease it. At least tonight her pain had a purpose.

A faint gray light came burning through the orange haze. It didn’t trouble her as so many dawns had done, announcing the end of a night’s escape, the inevitable return to a day’s hassles. Her new sense of insight would never wear off and leave her stranded in a gray world. This time dawn hardly registered.

Every wall pointed in her direction. The floorboards rushed to join at her feet. The kitchen tiles sorted themselves with Lenore as their centerpoint, their one aim. When she moved, the center moved with her, and the mandala drifted along like a cluster of black balloons with streamers flowing to her limbs. She climbed into bed and lay very still as she contemplated the great distances yet to be covered.

Minutes passed like hours; she savored the time alone with her guardian, free of distraction.

When she heard Michael’s eyes open, she turned to greet him, smiling, and squeezed his hand.

“Hey,” he said, “good morning. How are you?”

“Great,” she said.

The word was well chosen to fill him with relief, to keep him calm until it was time to goad him on. He squeezed her hand in return, but Lenore was somewhere far away. Something else smiled for her, and kissed his cheek.