The 37th mandala : a novel (20 page)

"
Ah! Good! I knew you were a discerning scholar. Dion Fortune was much kinder to me. You know I feature anonymously in several of her books. Some of the adventures she claims for herself were actually mine. I gave permission. ... I don't suppose we can use those when it comes to writing my story, can we? I'd be accused of stealing my own accounts back from Dion!
"

Mooney laughed long and loud at this, until he broke off muttering at someone.

"Did I call at a bad time?" Derek asked.

"
Oh, no, my nurse is here. You'll have to come by when she's not around, so we can talk freely. Do you have a car?
"

Derek pressed the fast-forward button and listened to the voices squeaking past. When the tape fell silent, he switched it off. Since that conversation two days ago, he had been unable to concentrate on his current project,
Remembering Your Past Lives
. He had felt like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, suspended by one foot; his hands were free to type, but he found nothing to say. His mind was busy with possibilities. He'd had the feeling this encounter would embark him on a swifter road to his fortune. Carlos Castaneda's ludicrous tales of "Don Juan" had sold millions and made their author a fortune. Even a fraction of that success would satisfy Derek. Someday "Elias Mooney" might be a household name, if things worked out; and Derek would be living in a house of his own, instead of his squalid tenderloin apartment....

Of course, at the moment all that was a dream-vision as fantastic as any in Mooney's letter. Derek was well aware that success in any form was a long shot; and this one seemed longer than most. But having spoken to the old man, he'd felt obliged to follow through. He had already boosted Elias's hopes higher than he wished; he didn't want to let him down without a hearing. So he'd swallowed his doubts and hesitations, and set this moment for their appointment.

Carrying a briefcase, the tape recorder tucked in a pocket, he walked up to the house, looking closely for any sign that it was inhabited by a Master of Mysteries. At the top of the ramp was a rubber welcome mat, nearly bare of bristles. He heard a TV behind the wall, voices suspended on an almost inaudible background hum. As he banged on the screen door, the voices died. Then he heard another—the deep one that had spoken on the phone—calling out to him: "Stay right there!"

The door gaped slowly, opening into shadow. Derek peered through the corroded screen and saw the silver gleam of metal spokes. The man in the chair was not so easily resolved.

Derek opened the screen and let himself in. Mooney made room, rolling back toward a sofa that ran along the far wall. It was a small room, with shelves on two walls and the TV on a third, opposite the sofa. There was no other furniture. Mooney needed plenty of room for his chair. Derek set his case down next to the sofa then turned back to Elias Mooney, holding out his hand.

"It's a pleasure, Mr. Mooney."

"Oh, please, call me Elias. Sit yourself down. You didn't have any ...
trouble?
... getting here?"

Derek had the feeling Mooney didn't mean trouble of a simple order—trouble finding the house, or trouble in traffic. He meant trouble of a deep, intractable, cosmic nature, as if the evil powers of the universe might have been busy throwing obstacles in the paths of two Angels of Light, hoping to forestall a meeting that might otherwise lead to the downfall of some Dark Lord. Derek wondered if the uneasiness induced by the gas station and the 7-Eleven qualified as sufficiently sinister, but he decided not to mention them. An ally had materialized, after all, in the form of the vending machine. The elemental forces were in balance.

"None," he said.

Mooney received this news with great relief, then wheeled out of the living room into an open kitchen, heading for a pot of coffee and two cups that sat on a small table.

"Can I help you with that?"

"No, I'm quite able. Make yourself comfortable. The nurse brewed this up before she left; she always makes it good and strong. Do you take anything in it?"

"Black's fine," Derek said. He sat for a moment, then realized that the old man would have to make another trip back to get the cups. He rose again to help.

In the kitchen, he noticed signs of Elias's last wife, referred to in Mooney's letter of introduction. The name "Evangeline" was embroidered on a potholder. A kindly-looking white-haired woman appeared in the photographs of children and grandchildren, among tokens of a domestic orderliness that had been maintained only cursorily by the casual attention of nurses and housekeepers. But Elias seemed comfortable with his current situation, more paranoid than self-pitying. He was surprisingly large-bodied, though his legs were stick-thin in baggy slacks, and his overlarge loafers looked as if they might drop from his feet at any moment.

"You must tell me, Mr. Crowe—"

"Derek, please."

"Perhaps I know some of your teachers." Elias wheeled up next to the sofa, both of them facing the blank television. "I had a wide correspondence at one time."

"My ... teachers." Derek fidgeted with the clasps on his case.

"I'm self-taught myself, although I've had many guides and mentors in the astral. One of my finest teachers was an African priest, handicapped like myself but greatly respected in his tribe. A man of incredible power. I have worked in the silver body with some of the great
houngans
—both alive and discarnate. You are familiar with the real Voudoun?"

"Yes, of course," Derek said, grateful for a question he could answer with the proper tone of superior knowledge. "What idiots call 'voodoo.' "

Elias nodded solemnly. "
Some
cultures still respect their visionaries. They don't judge so much by what they can see with eyes of flesh. Not like ours."

"Ours has serious problems."

Elias chuckled. "All the more reason to contribute what I can to its health. I want to leave something behind when I must go, something to show that my time here wasn't wasted. Something to help those who remain behind. Even if I only reach a few of them, it will be worthwhile, eh?"

He shrugged his shoulders toward the ceiling with a sideways crook of his head and Derek gave a sly wink. Gestures of intimacy, secrecy, as if they were two conspirators signaling their mutual knowledge that the room was under surveillance by invisible technicians and they must encode everything they said.

"Is it safe to talk freely here?" Derek asked. "I know you're concerned about the phones and the mails. ..."

"Safer here than most places. I spent a good many years casting the proper barriers around this house, though lately they have weakened somewhat. I've been ill. They struck at me through Evangeline, but she's gone now." He shook his bowed head. "Their doing, yes. I didn't realize at first the lengths they'd go to; even at my age I never knew such evil cunning. That lovely, innocent woman—I thought she could speak only truth. When I think of her lips being tainted by their words. ..."

He broke off suddenly, glancing around him. Derek felt his skin prickling as the old man listened to the silence of the suburbs. Outside was nothing but the sound of a dry wind in the hill streets. Windchimes tinkled tunelessly in the distance, a sound that suddenly recalled a fever dream from Derek's childhood, lying alone in the trailer at the edge of the desert mountains, a hot Santa Ana wind blowing through his mother's clacking chimes, whispering something specific that he never could recall, so that the sound of the chimes itself terrified him inexplicably and caused him to wake. He had not remembered that feverish waking in years—if ever. It took him a moment to banish it now.

He looked up and saw Elias watching intently, his eyes black, intense, and liquid, seeming to leap and swim unpredictably within his thick bifocals. His skin was pale as ivory, except for the stains and blemishes of age. His thin hair was combed neatly straight back, like wires of pure silver. He was nodding, and now he smiled.

"You feel it, don't you?" he said.

Derek swallowed, his neck prickling. "How could I not?" He forced himself to grin, and then Elias burst out laughing.

"We've joined forces now!" he said. "They'll be sorry we've gotten together, oh, yes!"

Derek had thought Mooney's paranoia would be easy to dismiss, but already it was affecting him. It was this banal setting that left him vulnerable. In the city there were so many people raving of the End of Time, so many lunatics talking to themselves and casting their hands in the air with wild laughter, that one quickly learned to walk around them. In this case, he had volunteered to confine himself with one of their tribe. It might not be worth the trouble in the long run. There were other sources from which he could crib his books.

Well, he had come all this way. One afternoon's interview would lead to no harm.

Derek brought out his tape recorder and set it down on the sofa beside him. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Oh, no, no! You don't want to miss a thing. And you'll let me know if I repeat myself, won't you?"

"If I don't, this will," he said, tapping the machine. "Now, why don't we start with some early reminiscences? That will give me some idea of where to begin. A sense of ... of the shape of your life."

"The shape?" The old man chuckled bitterly. "I can tell you that directly. It's a cube, a cell, a locked cage. It has exactly the dimensions of this room. We all inhabit such cages, don't we? I've been unique only in having found a temporary means of release—a furlough, though by no means an escape. Even when I nearly shed this body—I wrote you of the time I nearly entered my teacher's womb, didn't I?—even then, I would have been reborn into this world. I'd still be a prisoner."

His head hung forward, eyes fixed on his knees.

"I'm more advanced than others, of course. I've learned a few tricks which I hope to pass on to ease the pain of our incarceration."

Derek hadn't expected Elias to slip into such a bleak mood. He wondered how to distract him into other, lighter veins, telling the sorts of anecdotes the general reader enjoyed. There was little market for occult pessimism.

"I wonder if perhaps you know," Elias said, as if talking to himself. "Is that why we came together?"

Derek almost asked what Elias was talking about, but it was an occult axiom that if you must ask, you are not ready to be told. He decided to feign comprehension and let the old man ramble, filling in the silence. But Elias stopped speaking altogether and sat there staring at his hands.

"Do you think it's wise to dwell on these things?" Derek asked.

"Mm?" Elias's head jerked up. "Wise? No ... no, you're right. We mustn't discourage people—especially not the young. There's always hope, isn't there? That's the example I want to set. Look at me: I've been trapped my whole life, but I've accomplished a great deal. There are things we can do with our lives that amount to more than merely rattling our chains. I don't mean pastimes, but important things. We can change this material plane for the better. Then those who come after us—including our reborn selves—will have a greater opportunity for advancement, for true freedom. But it's a constant battle. ..."

"I certainly agree with that," Derek said, though he felt that he had stumbled into something much vaster than he'd realized at first. Elias Mooney did not speak quite the same language as the rest of the planet; there were all those alien tongues to reckon with.

"Why don't you tell me about some of the places you visited astrally when you were a child," he said, steering stubbornly toward what he hoped would be more accessible topics. "Those other worlds and civilizations you hinted at in your letter. If you don't mind."

"Mind? No, not at all. I'd be delighted. I hope you brought a lot of tape."

"An endless supply."

"Good, good, and—well, I hope this won't be our only time together."

"I'm sure it won't be." Unless, Derek thought, you can't come up with something more commercial than paranoid schizophrenia. "I look forward to a long working relationship."

"All right, then. Well... the first world I remember visiting, the very first, was inside a little bit of cracked knothole in the pine wall near my bed. I used to stare into that crack, that little jag of darkness, until one day I found myself plunging bodily into it. In my astral body, of course, but from the very beginning my silver form has felt as substantial to me as this frail flesh—and as I age it has become even stronger, while my body sloughs away. Oh, every sensation is magnified in the silver twin. ..."

Distant planets
, Derek thought. I've got to get him talking about distant planets, ghosts, and ESP. Things people can grasp right away.

But before he could make others understand Elias Mooney, he would have to understand the old man himself. And that was to be the work of months.

Your Psychognostic Powers!
was not Derek Crowe's first book, nor was
Your Psychic Allies
—the one that brought Elias Mooney's letter—his second. They were his fourth and fifth books, respectively, but the first three had been published under pseudonyms, for which he was grateful. They had been miserable failures.

Sick of the hypocrisy and stress of the advertising agencies where he had worked since college, increasingly repulsed by the clammy handshakes of plump junior executives who, scarcely his senior, were already cutting their way remorselessly and single-mindedly past him in their quest for the shimmering grail of a name partnership (imagine fat white barracudas, and you will have them), Derek had managed to save enough to keep him solvent for a few years of impoverished experimentation while he began a long-planned assault on the bestseller list. He began by composing novels—hastily written but schematically constructed impressions of gothic romances, sci-fi thrillers, and horror epics, based on a thorough reading of the bestsellers and classics in each market. He had read
The Exorcist
,
The Other
,
Ghost Story
,
The Books of Blood
,
Interview with the Vampire
, six or seven tomes by Stephen King, and then sat down to outline and write
Horror Hotel
in three weeks. After reading
Dune
,
Stranger in a Strange Land
,
The Martian Chronicles
, the
Bladerunner
novelization, and
Neuromancer
, he likewise hammered out
Cybernaut's Quest
. He read three gothics, all he could stomach, before turning out his own rendition, titled
Captive Flesh
.