The 37th mandala : a novel (32 page)

The face of the card showed a strikingly done mandala, and elegant lettering:
Club Mandala (& Gallery 37)
. He could see now that these were not exactly his designs. The images in his book and those Etienne and Nina used in their posters were similar but not identical; they represented the work of different artists portraying the same subjects, and there were slight but appreciable differences in the renditions.

He felt relaxed today, absolved of a tremendous weight. Entering an ambush where he had expected to meet only enemies, he had emerged with two new friends—allies, in fact, who might well help him push his book into realms of actual profitability.

Etienne's beliefs, of course, were as mad as Elias Mooney's, but he seemed to have sound business sense. He was the sort who could make a career of madness—not to mention a fortune.

Derek tucked the card into his pocket, considering it a pleasant coincidence, since he was even now on his way to inspect the club.

The waiting taxi carried him across Market Street, through the brisk mix of scavengers, tourists, and workers who made the downtown district simultaneously so exciting and depressing. The new office towers fell behind, and older commercial buildings rolled past. The cab pulled up in a region of dense shadow, and he had paid and stepped out before he realized why it was so dark down here.

The belly of a freeway hung above him, gray and ponderous, with no sound of cars clacking down from above. It was a section of the interstate, closed off since the last earthquake, awaiting either retrofitting or demolition. Derek hardly grasped the reason for his apprehension, the sudden chill and sense of suffocation. On an ivy-covered bank above the street, close to one of the huge concrete pylons, were a cluster of cardboard houses and ragged blankets; but these barely snagged his eye, for on the pylon itself someone had stenciled an immense mandala, one of the thirty-seven. He spun around, bereft of bearings, and homed in on a grubby brick warehouse that stood beside the freeway, unremarkable except for the elaborate neon sign (dark now) above its door, the tubes of brightly powdered glass forming intricate wheels whose glowing splendor in full darkness he could only begin to imagine. Between two such pale mandalas, awaiting only electricity to come alive, were the words "Club Mandala" in a script like cursive writ in glass; the letters looked almost hieroglyphic.

He rang the bell beside the door but heard nothing. Once more he glanced up at the overpass, noticing another mandala impossibly stenciled on the underside. They were on the street and sidewalk as well, etched in cement like celebrity footprints. Before he could begin to count them, Nina said, "You made it! We were afraid we'd scared you off."

"Now, what could scare Mr. Crowe?" said Etienne, coming up behind her. They opened the door wide, into a shadowy vastness, and Derek entered between them. Nina slid her arm into his, and he thought of Lilith, thankful he had all this to distract him from what otherwise would have been days of gloom and obsession.

"I got your invitation this morning," Derek said. "It came quicker than I'd expected."

"Oh, we mailed it before we met you—we were sure you'd come. Now, the tour!"

The warehouse was divided into a number of rooms on the ground floor. The central room, a dance hall, was two stories tall, with lofts and balconies edging it; there were a number of other smaller chambers on the ground floor, and stairs running up and down. Each wall in the main room was embellished with an immense mandala, smaller mandalas of varying sizes arranged in overlapping orbits around them. He was reminded of the tattooed skin, similarly crowded. A few painters were up on ladders, putting finishing touches on the mandalas. In the center of the dance floor was the largest of all the wheels, the one that figured last in his book and also served as frontispiece, with its central circle of lamprey teeth and its outer ring of speckled eyes. They took a wide path around it, since it was still incomplete; several women were on their knees, painting in the sketched tendrils. The thing was coming to life even as he watched.

"Wow" was about all Derek could think to say. Nina pulled him tighter, beaming with pleasure.

They toured the adjacent rooms on the ground floor, where the walls were hung with framed fine-art versions of the mandalas. They looked too symmetrical to have been done by hand; peering close he could see no ink marks.

"Are these prints?" he asked.

"An artist friend of ours does them on computer—he's the one who sneaked that little program into your system, I'm afraid."

Derek shrugged. "No harm done. It's nice work."

"I'll be sure to tell him you said so. He'll be at the opening—you two can meet. He is also, you see, one of us."

One of "us,"
Derek thought. He had come farther down this path than he cared to consider; his relationship with Etienne and Nina was dependent to a certain extent on continued deception, at least as to his own beliefs.

They made their way upstairs, through a connected series of smaller rooms; mandala prints were centered on every wall. Mandalas dotted the floors like the tracks of some strange beast. Everywhere they went, assistants were mounting lights or putting finishing touches on the hand-painted mandalas. A number of them wore mandala tattoos, but apparently these were in reference to the club alone, and not to his book, for when Nina introduced Derek, his name meant nothing to them.

"We've ordered copies of
The Mandala Rites
," Etienne reassured him. "If we can borrow you for a little while, we'll have you sign a few during the party."

"Yes, and we're recording all the keys," said Nina. "They'll be playing all night, right along with the music."

"It will be wild!" said Etienne. "And think of all the drugs! Many very receptive minds ... the total effect will be incredible. We have also commissioned a number of mandala paintings from local artists. They should be arriving very soon."

"And Nicholas Strete tells me his article will be in tomorrow's edition—just in time for the opening!"

"Everything's coming together," Etienne said gleefully, rubbing his palms briskly together. At that moment they were passing a window on a level with the raised freeway; little could be seen outside except the gray concrete slab, but there was a gap visible just below the freeway, through which one could barely see the street.

"Speaking of which," Etienne said, pausing to point down at the pavement, "I saw our friend Chhith—or should I say Huon?—sometime in the night, just down there."

"Did you?" Derek said nervously.

"He must be very curious."

"He must be very angry," Nina said, "to see his precious mandalas let loose like this—given out so freely to everyone."

"Oh, I'm sure he'll come around," said Etienne.

"I'm sorry I gave him your name," Derek said.

"Don't worry about that. I'm glad to see him, actually. He belongs with us. Only his role may not be quite what he expects."

"Etienne!" A fellow with a long ponytail and shaved temples was coming down the corridor. "We're having a problem with the sound."

"Excuse us a moment, Derek," Etienne said. "Feel free to explore."

They left him at the window, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering, voices echoing through the building where everything seemed bright and new and happy, and anticipation was almost a tangible substance.

Derek had a sense, then, of the mandalas as a budding cottage industry. What would Elias Mooney think of this? At least he couldn't have blamed it on Derek, which was some comfort. The mandalas would have surfaced anyway, with or without
The Mandala Rites
. In fact, he supposed his book would have a negligible impact on the public, compared to the exposure the mandalas were about to get at Club Mandala.

What he had done with Eli's notebooks was only a minor mischief.

And he had never actually
sworn
to burn them, had he? He'd tried countless times to remember exactly what he'd said to Elias on their final night together, but the act of remembering seemed to push things around in his head and alter the memories themselves. He was reasonably sure he hadn't promised anything. What the hell. No harm was done, in the end.

It was time to put away his guilt. Swallow his sins and get over it. He was torturing himself, which was pointless.

Except, of course, as Lilith had shown him, he was a bit of a masochist—a martyr without a cause. She loved to point out the pleasure he took from writhing in the hair shirt of his occult hypocrisy, writing books for the praise of people he considered imbeciles. What could be more masochistic than that? By comparison, her candlewax drippings and needle-pricks and plier squeezes were gentle teases, a child's game. It little pleased him to realize he had now created for himself a world based entirely on this masochism. He was in league with fools and madmen who had been taken in by their own con; by coincidence, it was his con as well. Derek was apparently the only one still undeceived.

If he had been a superstitious man, if he really had been convinced by Elias, he never would have published the
Rites
. But by doing so, he had proven to himself that Eli's ranting was nothing but nonsense. The old man was a fool, and everything he thought he'd seen in Eli's house was a ludicrous dream. He had deserted the so-called shaman not out of fear, not because he dreaded some false cathartic confrontation with his "Shadow," but because flight had been the only sure way of preserving his sanity.

Once Bob Maltzman had expressed interest in the mandala notebooks, Derek had found himself unable to present them without revision. The old man's basic view of reality was too bleak and strange for mass consumption. He had altered the text of the ledgers not as a precaution against invoking evil, but simply to enlarge his audience and put some of his own work into the final book, so that he wouldn't feel he was simply plagiarizing. It gave him an odd feeling of power to revise Eli's universe in this fashion. By couching the incantations in New Age terms, borrowing phrases and attitudes from other popular books, he had transformed the Rites from something dark and unholy into a message of spiritual hope for an optimistic but easily frightened readership.

The gibberish of the rites themselves he had left untouched. What difference did that make?

Derek acknowledged the presence of a tiny part of himself that remained infected with Eli's madness. He hated and resented this irrational mote; it was childish, naive, and potentially dangerous, should it ever mushroom out of control. This region of his psyche had never climbed out of pure animal suffering, onto the lofty intellectual plateau where pain and its causes could be analyzed. This mad, fearful, superstitious part of him never doubted for an instant what Eli taught. It knew what lay in those ledgers; it recognized the signs that blotched the skin.

Thankfully, this part of his mind was poorly developed, in turn-of-the-millennium terms. It was easy to cow the poor shivering thing with all the whips and threats his rational mind had mastered.

"Derek!"

"Mr. Crowe!"

He had come out onto a balcony overlooking the dance floor. Etienne and Nina stood in the center of the room, in the mouth of the black mandala, waving to him.

"What do you think?" Nina called.

Derek's grin, unforced and unbidden, surprised even him. He spread his arms to encompass the club, as if it and all within it were his doing.

"Wonderful!" he called. And then, unsure exactly what he meant, but giving in for once to spontaneity, he added: "Let them come!"

America, Michael had decided, was mostly wasteland.

They had been driving through flat arid deserts for an eternity. The last woods he'd seen were in western Oklahoma, and since then it had been flat and rocky, windswept, bare; red rock and white rock, orange, green, and black rock. When they'd gained altitude in Arizona there had been the freshness of pine trees in the night, but that hadn't lasted long, and they came down once again into desert, past cacti draped with snow, under a starry sky so vast that it mocked the emptiness of the desert. Now here they were in California, land of sunny beaches and orange groves and lush green mountains; but the sun was dawning on another endless reach of desert. The mountains were black and alien as a scorched satellite; the rocks themselves looked burned. They skirted the edge of a crusted lakebed that looked as if it had been set on fire in ages past. It reminded him of an early science-fiction dream of Mercury, a desert world whirling close to the sun, only barely inhabitable. He was always amazed when he saw the winking lights of some settlement or other. Who would ever live out here?

A sign flew past, and he saw the offramp up ahead: GAS, FOOD, LODGING. gas, food, lodging. What wouldn't he have given for the latter? A night in a spring-shot motel bed would have felt like a week in a luxury hotel. He had been so exhausted for so long that he could hardly remember any other mode of consciousness. He had always wondered how humans could whip themselves to feats of great endurance, and now he knew. All it took was desperation.

He figured they could reach San Francisco tonight, if the car held out. If he held out. It was always a temptation to let Lenore drive, but each time he seriously considered it, he remembered their near-disaster outside of Memphis.

He followed the off ramp down to a gas-station minimart, an oasis of fuel and junk food. The pump was self-service. He left Lenore sleeping and went into the market to pay in advance for the gas. He went out and started the pump, then went back in. Lenore wasn't eating much these days, but he needed constant replenishment. He picked through pastries and beef jerky, considered a microwave burrito but decided against it when his stomach rebelled at the thought. A pint of milk, cigarettes. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and swigged; it was scorched and bitter, and he could feel the grounds swirling between his teeth. The old man at the register took his money without looking, too busy watching a small TV set on the counter—a morning program, traffic and weather and fragments of news. Michael was scooping up his change and tucking the paper sack into the crook of his arm when he heard the announcer mention ritual murder.