Марк Лэйдлоу - The 37th Mandala

She collapsed into herself, embracing the center of the storm, crushing herself inward until she reached critical mass. And felt at last the inner bloom, the explosion just beginning.

She reappeared as if out of nowhere among the mandalas which had discarded her. She drank up their shock and rage, mixing it with the frenzied glee of the crowd above and the poisonous seepage of Derek Crowe. She made it all her own, subverting Crowe’s evil destiny in an attempt to make something new of it.

All of them were fighting her now, both the mandalas and their human slaves. They pushed her back, trying to tear her away from Derek Crowe, trying to suppress her emergence.

In the instant she regained her body, she called for help from the only one in the world who could move invisibly here—her only hope of rescue.

“Michael!”

She couldn’t see him. She had no idea if he still lived. But she prayed he was still close enough to hear her.

Michael had huddled against the dark mirror of the wall, ignored by all, in shock, unable to hear what passed between Crowe and Lenore, unable to comprehend any of it. The others, the audience, stood slack and unmoving, but the air above their heads was alive with an astral turmoil so intense that even he could see it.

Suddenly Lenore called his name, and that was enough to wake him. He leapt to his feet and pushed through the crowd; the others swung sideways like dangling puppets, their hands reaching out limply, as if moved only by currents of disturbed air.

He seized Lenore and tried to pull her away from Derek Crowe, but this was not what she wanted. “No,” she murmured, with her eyes rolling up in her head. “Take me—to him.”

He couldn’t believe she meant it, but Lenore was insistent. Crowe fell backward on the couch and lay ripping at his clothes, screaming as if his flesh were on fire. Lenore began pulling at her shirt, baring her breasts.

“Get these off,” she insisted; and numbly he helped her strip naked before the staring crowd, which was too preoccupied with events above their heads to pay attention to this minor conjunction of physical bodies.

Crowe had undressed himself. He lay thrashing but beginning to slow, as if injected with a tranquilizer.

“To him,” she repeated. And when Michael hesitated, because the thought was so gruesome, she insisted: “Now! I can’t make it alone! I can hardly walk!”

He guided her to the couch. And stood while her hands reached out to touch Crowe’s naked chest. He was covered all over with a withered, membranous garment, mandala-scarred, flapping as if in a strong wind. Michael swallowed his revulsion as Lenore straddled Crowe, gripping his penis and squeezing till her knuckles went white.

“No,” she said sternly. “Not you. You’re not coming out.”

Crowe wailed and growled, thrashing as if to throw her; but Lenore held on.

“Lenore,” Michael said.

“Leave,” she said brusquely. “Leave now.”

She gave him a look, and then her eyes filmed over.

Crowe began screaming. Michael staggered and fell. He lay staring at two scenes: Events on the couch were amplified and mirrored in the air overhead, played out in a dimension that kept rotating through this one. He could hardly see Lenore as human now; she was something larger, a strange presence overwhelming the small pale form and filling the room, reaching up into the rhythmic thunder overhead, pulling all that power down here….

Lenore had stopped Crowe’s imminent collapse. He had felt as if he were about to burst, in a moment of orgasm beyond compare, but she had checked all that. The power continued to build toward some climax, but it had nowhere to go. She clutched him so hard that he could find no release. A shrieking laugh bubbled out of her as she held him down.

The second skin felt sticky on the inside; scraps of vestigial tissue clung to him, meshing with his own skin as sweat moistened the hide like mucilage. It writhed against him as if trying to crawl free.

The dark air was full of motion, vibrating clots like congealed grease and hair, like the specks of dead tissue that swarm across an eyeball when it stares into infinity. But these shapes continued to gain definition. They didn’t move off when he stared at them directly; they hung where they were like dark suns or lightless moons. The round room was laced with impossibly thin, nearly invisible silver threads that stretched from wall to wall, spun like liquid silk from the clots. He could almost feel the threads humming through his body, power lines snagging him, except they were too fine for his nerves to perceive. Lenore put her mouth against his ear, distracting him from all he couldn’t understand; he allowed his consciousness to shrink down to the limits of her voice, her touch. The things she said made no sense, nor were they exactly endearments, but that didn’t trouble him now. They were in the language of The Mandala Rites , but improvised; she was composing, not reciting, this incantation. The silver wires thrummed, sending their signals through the room. Electric currents curled through the second skin, warming him. When he glanced down at himself, he saw all the symbols beginning to glow. Wheels of light, turning slowly, dazzling him until he had to shut his eyes. Even through his closed lids, he saw the mandalas revolving against his flesh. They had become three-dimensional, swelling upward out of the wrinkled plane of preserved skin, spilling into the room, leaving holes seared in the hide as if to destroy the gate through which they had entered the world. His own skin felt fried where they had lain. He knew he had been freshly tattooed in thirty-seven places, like Etienne’s father.

The brightest of the mandalas shone like a fixed star directly above, but when he slit his eyes to peek out, he saw it was the mark on Lenore’s forehead, rotating like water in a drain… but swirling outward , merging with the others. They arrayed themselves in constellations on the shining silver wires. The room grew taut and dense with unbreathable fluid; the walls bowed outward; mirrors shattered, flinging shards across the room; plaster flaked down from the ceiling in an ever steadier drizzle. The room quaked like a cell struggling to replicate, making way for new material, arranging all its elements in accord with the empty heavens and the density of stars and the dictates of biology… although this was a subtler process, rarely witnessed, requiring not a microscope for viewing but simply the eyes of the chosen . Derek stopped fighting. He searched her face for clues, but her eyes were rolled up. Following her gaze, he saw what she must have been watching. Easy to mistake it for a dance or the hypnotic swaying motion of seaweeds in a deep current, for it was both a random process, at the mercy of nature, and an act of great deliberation.

Two awesome shapes were wrapped together in the middle of the air. One was the thing of moist gray pores and glistening mouths he had seen before, repulsive to Derek, who hated anemones and slugs and things of the sea. The other was far more appealing, being all nervous glossy black sinew and piercing eyes and polished teeth. The two tumbled slowly end over end, their flailing arms tangled with the all-penetrating silver threads. The creatures pulsed like the chambers of a single heart; the whole room shook to their beating. Lenore reached up with her eyes closed, reached until her fingers were immersed in the core of the coupling organisms. Derek would not have believed such penetration possible, for to him they looked as solid as the walls and the ceiling. He could not see her hands, however mistily, inside them. Then she drew her arms down again, crossing them over her breast, bringing the joined mandalas into her. She spasmed as they sank into her flesh. Her arms flew wide with silver tendrils wrapped from wrist to shoulder, fingers spread and straining, the wires tugging until her muscles grew corded and twisted. The whole room seemed bent on tearing her in two. And Derek, at the sight, knew then that his own part in this was over; it was as nothing. She had let go of him, and now he felt his seed gush uselessly over his belly with a burning twinge. There was nothing else left for him, nothing greater that Derek Crowe would ever produce. The grand evil promise of his inner mandala had been usurped and there was no place for it now. No room in this configuration for a thirty-eighth.