Марк Лэйдлоу - The 37th Mandala

Lenore had spared his life; spared him from immortality. He would live a brief while longer among the ruins of everything he had erected.

The fine silver threads snapped completely taut. The air sang. And Lenore, without screaming, without a sound other than the viscous friction accompanying the shucking of her flesh, split wide open. The halves of her yawned until he heard the ribs crack along her spine. For a moment she hung suspended in air on gleaming silver threads as her guts slithered onto him in a warm, steaming pile. Derek had never been closer to anyone.

But she wasn’t just anyone now.

As her husk toppled, something slipped out of her. It shook off the residue of blood and viscera, spread itself across the silver threads to dry in a warm astral wind. It trembled like a fresh-hatched butterfly and looked down upon Derek with a single liquid eye like an unearthly orange gem in the heart of a violet flower.

It was not Lenore, of course—no more than attar of roses is a rose. Yet it was she in essence, much stronger now than she had ever been. She was whole, a circle, a world unto herself.

It was that awareness which started him weeping. She was whole, and he lay here in fragments. The unhatched thing within him was cracked and seeping with a foul odor that would fill the rest of his days. Broken, but a believer now, he had a premonition of the only possible life that could follow from this night, at least until he ended it himself.

He was, after all, the mandala master. He had inspired a dark mad cult for whose atrocities he must accept the blame.

Etienne and Nina and the others were already melting back into the obscurity from which they had come. His was the name on the cover of The Mandala Rites . His would be the name splashed all over the world, bringing him notoriety beyond his imagining.

When he opened his eyes at last, the silver threads had snapped and reeled back into the ether, and she was gone.

Gone, except for the gutted, cast-off body that remained to incriminate him. After tonight, he would deny nothing. All explanations seemed equally likely, and Derek was determined to confess to anything—to everything. Who was he to judge what was possible, or to attempt to discriminate among the infinite shades of truth?

And anyway, in the largest possible sense, he was guilty.

And Michael, fleeing the carnage, his mind blank because he had seen too much to ever understand, melted away with the rest of the crowd. He saw Etienne and Nina in the hall, speaking urgently and in low voices, looking only slightly bemused. Etienne flashed him a smile and gave a quick wave of his hand, as if they were passing casually on the street. Michael turned and ran the other way.

He stumbled on the stairs and nearly crashed into someone coming down.

“Michael!”

It was Lilith, grabbing at him, pulling him the rest of the way to the ground floor. He had a glimpse of the dance floor, the crowd milling aimlessly, the music stilled.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Let’s get out. I called the police a few minutes ago. Something is going on here….”

“Yes,” he said. “Out.”

They pushed through the aimless mob, who were on the verge of a disappointment so immense they would never comprehend it. They had been spurned by a god. They might turn angry, he thought, which was fine with him. Let them tear the place apart.

They found the entrance and forced their way onto the street, fighting against the tide of people who were still streaming in with hopeful expressions. Beyond the latecomers, the night was filling with the sound of sirens, but Michael and Lilith ran under the freeway, hiding in the shadow of a huge cement column as the first of the squad cars came tearing past, flashing and howling.

“I should tell them,” he said, starting forward. “They have to look in the basement.”

Lilith held him back. “They’ll look. They’ll find whatever there is to find. What… what’s down there?” Then she saw his face. “No, don’t tell me. Try not to think about it either. Are you okay?”

He shook his head. There was no sense in lying.

“Can you walk? Do you want to wait here awhile?”

He stood dazed, unsure of what he wanted. He felt as if he had been cut off from everything, from his past and any possible future.

“Michael?”

Suddenly he sensed a stirring in the dark air above them. Lilith, sensing it too, looked up. “What is that?”

A luminous wheel was appearing gradually in the starless dark beneath the overpass, taking on shape and solidity. It was a violet mandala, and a bright orange globe sat at its center, an omniscient eye. It was what had become of Lenore. He could feel something of her in it, beaming at him, questioning….

“They’re real, then,” Lilith said.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael answered.

He put out his hands, gently, as if he could touch the fresh new thing. His fingers trembled. It was asking something—but he couldn’t tell what. He only knew he wanted to be close to it; he welcomed its presence. It was offering guidance when he had never felt so lost.

Violet light flared, the orange eye flashed, and he felt her come over him, into him. For one incredible moment she let him share her awareness….

The mandala that had been Lenore floated like an angel over Michael, over streets of quaking red flesh, under stars that seemed black holes piercing night’s whiteness. At first she had felt fragile and alone, as if any breeze might destroy her; but she had begun to realize that she was invulnerable now, and her loneliness would pass. All human emotions had been released in her evisceration. She had shed care as daintily as she’d stepped free of marrow and muscle and bone. In place of these things, in the stead of passing sadness or flitting joy, she sensed the growth of a quiet majesty and the promise of stranger, more ancient concerns. Human passions were to be her toys now, and then her tools, but never again her masters. What she truly had to master, to harness, was the blind reckless hunger of the other mandalas. She had willed herself free of blindness; she must share this knowledge with them. She must bring them to a new and greater understanding of their nature, their potential.

Only one so young and naive could have possessed the ambition to change the thirty-seven, but she felt calm and resolved. She had launched herself among them for a purpose; she already had prevented one far blinder than herself from taking form. It would be awful to waste the opportunity she had seized, and she did not intend to do so. But it would take time, human ages, to understand the things of which she was capable and begin to work toward her goal.

In the meantime, she needed allies. She needed to keep touch with the physical world, to understand and remember it as she had when she was human.

Michael was the one familiar point among the tugging of a thousand needs, a million empty stomachs. She needed him— although not nearly as much as he needed her.

As she hovered there indecisively, the guardian of the woman standing next to Michael began to stir, finally noticing the vulnerable target so nearby. Now that the configuration had been restored, Michael was becoming visible to them once again. Lilith’s mandala was a wheel of gnarled, knotted blossoms peeling back to show poison barbs secreted inside. It began to spin toward Michael with ferocious possessiveness and a threat of violent lashing, as if to scare off the newborn mandala while she hesitated.

That threat quickened her decision. Better her than another. This was as good a place as any to take a stand against their reflexive evil.

She pulled herself over Michael protectively and felt herself swell as she absorbed him. She learned, then, that there were to be no clear rules and that human intentions were meaningless now. For as she took hold of Michael, she felt a fierce, miserly greed well up in her. Delicate violet edges hardened into curving razors.