Марк Лэйдлоу - The 37th Mandala

“Lead us out,” One-Ear barked. “Take us to Derek Crowe.”

“What do you want with him?” she asked.

“Lenore,” Michael said. “Crowe was lying.”

“No,” she said. “He’s playing his part.”

“Shut up!” One-Ear said. “Take me to Mr. Crowe! Now!”

Voices in the hall came up quickly behind them. Michael twisted his head around. One-Ear jumped uncertainly, wondering how to keep his gun on Michael and Lenore and still face this new threat. Around the corner came a young couple, a man and a woman.

“Etienne!” One-Ear said. “Don’t move.”

“What nonsense,” said the young man, Etienne. Without hesitation, he clutched One-Ear by the throat, shoving him against the wall. “Nina, would you please?”

The woman took his gun. “You must be Chhith,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Michael moved closer to Lenore, taking her hand. Her fingers were ice.

“Now, Chhith, you’re not playing the game at all correctly,” Etienne said. “We must straighten you out.”

Chhith spat some words in a language Michael didn’t recognize, but Etienne merely smiled at Lenore. “Will you excuse us for a bit? We’ve put Mr. Crowe to work signing autographs upstairs.”

Nina gestured with the gun, and the man called Chhith stepped away from the wall. They urged him down the corridor, around the corner, out of sight.

“Jesus,” Michael said, sagging with relief. He turned to Lenore. “What happened to you?”

She was looking at the air above his head again; it drove him crazy when she did that. She was as bad as ever. And this place, full of the mandalas and their sick energy, was making her worse.

“What,” he said. “What is it?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You shouldn’t even… exist.”

“What do you mean? I was worried about you. Now I’m terrified.”

“Don’t worry, Michael. Just go.”

“Go where?”

“Out. Away from here. Take your chance. They can’t see you, so they can’t stop you. Don’t get caught in the middle.”

“Of what? What’s happening, Lenore? What is all this?”

She looked around the hall as if she owned the place. “It’s the end for some,” she said. “But for you it’s already over.”

“Come on. Let’s both get out of here.”

“I have to stay.”

“Lenore, come on. Derek Crowe is a fake—a charlatan—a thief. You have to get away from him.”

“I came all this way to find him, Michael. It’s not just the mandalas, I think. I’m doing this for me. Now please, leave me to it. You can’t do anything here.”

“I won’t leave you,” he said.

“You have to. You can’t make me do anything anymore, Michael. I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s all over for us. I don’t want you here, understand? I don’t need you, I don’t love you anymore, I don’t want you. You have no part in this.”

Her words tore into him with surgical, cold precision. He stood there as Lenore moved away. He put out a hand, then let it drop.

“Don’t try to follow me,” she said. “Don’t interfere.”

“With what?” he said, but she didn’t answer. She went off down the hall.

After a while, he stumbled in the other direction, looking for a dark, quiet place to sit down, somewhere to rest and gather himself. He knew only one thing: He was not leaving.

He circled around in the underground maze, avoiding people wherever he came upon them, finally passing a door behind which he heard nothing. He opened it and saw a silvery glimmer of mirrors. It was a vast round room, empty except for an oxblood couch and a red velvet chair in the very center of the floor.

He crept in, closing the door behind him. He avoided the couch and chair. They looked too much like props in the center of a stage. Instead he sank down against one of the mirrored walls and put his head on his arms.

I have to find Lilith , he thought. But she could take care of herself, he realized with relief. She had proven that already.

For now, he wanted nothing but to be alone.

Finally , Derek Crowe thought, a group of fans I’m not embarrassed to he seen with .

Club Mandala had stacks of The Mandala Rites at an upstairs table in one of the gallery rooms, and they were selling faster than he could sign them. It seemed for a time as if everyone in the club were lining up to buy a copy. The woman handling sales stopped periodically to slice open another cardboard box full of copies and stack them on the table before going back to making change and taking cash. Derek, meanwhile, had wearied of writing inscriptions. For a time he had signed his name and made a small circle beneath it, filling it in with dots and wavery lines, crude hieroglyphic mandalas; but that looked so awful, compared to the elaborate designs in the book, that he finally resorted to an unadorned signature. The customers seemed satisfied with this, though few made conversation.

Of course, it was possible to think that despite their fashionable clothes, their lack of any overt affiliation with medieval systems of belief and quackery, these customers were really no different from the ones who flocked into Hecate’s Haven hoping to become Cosmic Masters. His book was the equalizer, after all; if they bought into it, they were every bit as foolish as the neo-pagans and theosophists. On the other hand, maybe they were buying the book as a novelty, a bit of trendy kitsch to go with their mandala tattoos. Copies would circulate as freely as capsules of 37. It was a badge of hipness, as temporary as any, but during the course of the trend’s popularity, there was an opportunity for Derek to climb to greater things. “Mandala Madness!” blared the cover of the Bayrometer , also available in stacks around the room. Once the mandalas faded from favor, his name would hang in the public’s mind and his next project would benefit from his fame or notoriety. The mandalas were a stepping-stone to other and better things, not an end in themselves.

“Mr. Crowe?” said a fellow about his age or slightly younger, either prematurely bald or with shaven pate. He held a small packet in his hands. He wore odd, square little glasses and spoke with a slight lisp. “Bob Maltzman said I should introduce myself. I’m Neil Vasquez, your illustrator? I’ve been working on the concept for your mandala deck.”

“Well, yes!” Derek said. “Come over here, I’d like to talk to you!”

Vasquez smiled nervously, dark eyebrows bobbing. He stepped around the table as the next person in line slapped down their copy for signing.

“Great to meet you! You did a fantastic job on the book, and this Tarot idea sounds terrific!” Derek was giddy, beside himself with tonight’s success.

“I—I brought a prototype deck for you. These are probably smaller than what we’d end up using, but the quality’s pretty good.”

He laid the packet on the table, a deck of glossy cards not much bigger than standard playing cards. Crowe shuffled through them quickly. These mandalas were incredible, three-dimensional and lifelike, floating in a shimmering ether. They looked like photographs, with quicksilver shadings, colored in dark iridescence.

“You did these yourself?”

“They’re computer generated. I’ve worked out a fractal program that does it, based on thirty-seven iterations of the same equation. I—it worked out so well, I started thinking, what if this is how the mandalas are generated? Like, if you see the universe as a vast processor crunching away until these things evolve. Of course, they’d do it in a dimension parallel to time, so they could sort of pop in and out of our dimension and do their stuff without really having to get stuck in it.”