At our first session, Ms. A stated that she chiefly saw bright whirling wheels of light during her visions, like the mandalas of Buddhist philosophy; but whereas the Buddhist mandalas are sacred diagrams constructed for meditative purposes, these mandalas were living organisms, swimmers in the astral sea, and seemingly intent on communication. She was sharp-witted, intelligent, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s religious iconography, but these images baffled her, as they did me.
I suggested a light exploratory trance, to give her time to acclimate to the hypnotic state. I expected this to take several minutes to attain; but no sooner had I suggested that she might feel sleepy and relaxed than Ms. A began to twitch and murmur like a sleepwalker.
“Write,” she said, in a voice strangely altered. “Write down what we say!”
Obediently, I put pen to paper and began to transcribe the words Ms. A channeled. Thus I received, over the course of several months and numerous hypnotic sessions, what I believe is one of the most remarkable documents in human history….
Yeah, right.
He was sick of looking at the screen. Sick of rereading his own words, but that was hardly new. He’d been sick of them since long before the book came out. Now it was publicity time, salt in the wound. He was supposed to muster some enthusiasm for tomorrow’s flight to the sticks, push the deluxe edition, put on a show for the blue-haired occult groupies. All he really wanted was to lie in bed with Lilith, listen to the rain, and pretend there had never been a Derek Crowe.
He heard the rain splashing in the street as he walked around his desk to the window. The blinds slanted down, giving him a view of Larkin Street and the sidewalk gleaming below his building, streaky drops of water pulling from the wires. A cab was at the curb, its passenger just vanishing under the faded awning. That had to be Lilith. He went to turn off the computer but froze with his hand on the switch.
In the hall, the buzzer rang. Derek didn’t move.
Something was happening on the screen, something he had never seen before. Ordinarily, when the machine sat idle, the screen-saver sent geometric forms tumbling across the screen—lines and pyramids and parallelograms.
Tonight the amber light seemed to strobe, making his vision flicker. The usual linear shapes chased themselves across the screen, twisting back and forth, folding in and out of each other like four-dimensional figures. The patterns were often hypnotic, but tonight the lines moved jerkily, slowing, as if the computer were about to die. Several twitched away from the rest, spasmed and flickered in isolation. The screen filled with wheels, circles, mandalas. One, another, and then still more—tumbling faster and faster, new mandalas appearing before the old ones faded, accreting in layers, an unholy residue clotting on the screen until it looked like a wall worked over by occult vandals.
He backed away from the desk. The buzzer sounded again. He was afraid to move.
Suddenly, with an audible pop, the screen went blank. For a moment he thought it had burned out. Then bright letters flared:
“You fuckers!” Crowe said. The buzzer was blaring. He stabbed at the switch and the screen went black again, this time for good reason. He stormed into the living room and down the short hall, slamming his hand on the speaker button. “I’ll deal with you later,” he muttered.
Lilith’s voice came crackling. “It is later.”
“Not you! Come on up!” He pressed the button to unlock the street door, threw the deadbolts, and paced back down the hall to glare at his blank screen. Those sorry thieves would regret they’d ever messed with him. Crowe’s lawyer had a full view of San Francisco Bay, from forty floors up, where such pathetic trend-hopping ripoff artists could be viewed as the pitiful insects they were and squashed accordingly.
They must’ve come in through my modem, he thought. Fucking with me of the Internet. They figured out my codes or something. That’s got to be illegal. More fuel for the lawsuit. I’ll be lucky if they didn’t plant some kind of goddamn mandala virus to eat my lecture before I print it out.
Just then he heard the door open.
For a moment the sight of Lilith erased his irritation. She was wrapped tight in black plastic, lightly beaded with rain. She hooked her umbrella on the doorknob and came toward him, carrying a bottle of wine in a paper sack. It was uncorked, and from the taste of her mouth, she had been drinking from it. And smoking as well.
He pulled away from her kiss. “Cigarettes.”
“Well, Derek, you’re the hypnotist. Break me of the filthy habit.”
“I haven’t hypnotized anyone… in years.”
“That’s not what your book says.”
“Forget about the book.”
He took a swallow of wine, swished it in his mouth, swallowed; then he set the bottle on the rickety hall table covered with magazines and phone books, and squeezed her.
“So where did you hide her?” she asked. “And why did you bother?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your sex slave. You know I don’t mind.”
“Oh—no. It’s those assholes from Club Mandala again. They’re messing with my computer now. You wouldn’t believe what they did.”
She looked disappointed, biting her lip. “Oh, really? No girl?” Pulling away, she walked into the apartment and threw her coat over the couch. “I think I saw them today.”
“Who?”
“Them. Coming out of the shop as I went in. I didn’t recognize them at the time, but then I saw a poster for the club on the bulletin board, and Norman said a weird couple had put it up just before my shift. It was the pair I saw. Norman described them to a T. You know how he’s always writing police reports in his head—everyone’s a suspect in some crime they might commit.”
“He let them put up a poster?”
“It’s business, Derek.”
“Why don’t you tell him I’ll pull copies of the book if he doesn’t tear it down? That’s business too. I’ll start a boycott against Hecate’s Haven.”
“Lovely. Last month we had fundamentalist Boy Scouts picketing us for Jehovah’s merit points. And now you.”
Derek dropped on the couch, steaming.
“Besides,” she said, wrapping an arm around him, waving the bottle under his nose, “we probably sell more copies of The Mandala Rites than any other shop in San Francisco. You’d be cutting your own throat.”
“Signed copies,” he said. “I don’t have to do Norman any favors. He makes his profit too.”
“You can’t battle Club Mandala in Norman’s shop.”
“I don’t intend to,” he said. “That’s what the courts are for. I’ve got an interview with a reporter from the Bayrometer next week, and I’m going to let those club assholes have it with both bores. If they want publicity….”