The 37th mandala : a novel (31 page)

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

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

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

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

Derek shrugged. "Why not?"

"Wonderful!"

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

"I... have nowhere to go."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What happened?" he was saying. "What happened?"

"Get going, Michael, please—let's just get out of here!"

"Someone could be hurt. We should call—"

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

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

Soon they passed the first of the ambulances heading east.

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

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

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

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

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