“Yours…?”
“I grew up in L.A. I was a teenager, just totally lost and fucked up. Drugs, drugs, nothing but drugs. Well, that and sex. I mean… dangerous sex, you know? I was into Magick— with a ‘K.’”
“‘An’ it harm none, do what you will.’” Repeating the old Crowley maxim, Michael laughed.
“Exactly. But I was killing myself.”
“Me too!”
“And someone gave me this phone number. I thought it was a suicide hot line or a Coke-Ender thing, and one night I was so miserable and depressed that I just called it. I was out of my mind. I just wanted to hear a voice. And I found myself talking to this old man. This cool old guy who had the most amazing stories and seemed to know exactly what I was going to say before I said it. I figured out later that he wasn’t exactly as gentle as all that—I mean, he had an edge. He cut right through my sickness and insanity. When I came up here a few years ago, I was going to throw myself at his feet and beg to be his student. But he died before I met him, and all I have left is memories of those conversations we used to have.”
“He could tell you right where you were sitting, what was going on around you….”
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “Elias was like a secret national treasure or something. I’ve never met anyone else who knew him.”
“Me neither.”
He was staring into Lilith’s eyes, and she into his. He felt as if he had just dropped a tab of acid and it was coming on, making the edges of all things electric. He had the strong sense that Elias was with them right then. He could almost hear the old man’s voice.
“Lilith,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“If Elias were here, he’d tell us, wouldn’t he?”
“I think… I think he is here. I think maybe he brought us together. Maybe there’s a reason for all this.”
“Even this?” she said, raising their cuffed hands between them.
Michael’s throat went dry.
“Even magic can’t open Smith and Wesson handcuffs,” she said loudly. Suddenly she broke into tears, slumping against him. Startled, Michael put his free arm around her. The driver’s sad eyes floated in the rearview mirror, suspicious. Michael whispered comfortingly, feeling worse than useless.
Then, between sobs, he heard Lilith whisper. He realized that her face was dry against his neck, and her voice unchoked.
“The thing is,” she whispered, “Smith and Wessons all use the same key.”
“It’s okay,” he said loudly. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I have one in my purse.”
Suddenly they heard the gate crash. They jumped apart. Lilith dragged her hands across her face, knuckling her eyes, smearing her makeup and dragging spit down her cheeks. One-Ear’s face was far from reassuring as he strode toward the car. Under his arm he carried a bundle of red and black notebooks and stapled sheafs of paper. He wrenched open his door and ducked into the car, hurling the notebooks over the seat at them.
“It’s all here,” he said. “So he can’t pretend he doesn’t know. He won’t lie to me again.”
Michael looked down at the papers in his lap. Light fell in from the street, enough to make the manuscript readable:
Elias’s Story — Tape Transcript
Evangeline had no interest in magic when I met her. She was a cook…
One-Ear gave instructions to the driver and the car lurched forward, causing the pages to slide to the floor, uncovering one of the notebooks that lay open in his lap.
At the sight of the handwriting, Michael felt certain that Elias truly had come to them tonight. Here, in the little journal, was the old man’s formal script, stronger and clearer than he had seen it on the envelopes addressed to him and the notes Elias had tucked in with his tape cassettes.
He reached up and switched on the canopy light, to no objection from One-Ear, who was bent on navigating the street ahead of them. The text seemed familiar—vaguely, maddeningly so. As if he had read it in a dream he couldn’t quite remember.
How had One-Ear come across Elias Mooney’s journals in Derek Crowe’s apartment?
That question passed from his mind when he came to the next sheaf, clipped together with a big black spring clip. These were photocopies of Elias’s journals, slightly enlarged, and annotated in another hand, in green ink. Hardly a line of Elias’s remained unchanged. As he struggled to read the interlineations, the cramped scribbles and substitutions, he realized where he had seen all this before. Elias’s words were vaguely familiar, but he recognized the alterations instantly.
He went cold as he read it. Lilith, leaning over his shoulder, whispered, “Oh, my God.”
“‘We instill your souls with the diamond nectar of wisdom,’” Michael read from the green ink; and Lilith, finding his place, deciphered the black script of the original text: “‘We distill from your sick souls a potent brew of misery.’”
“‘We tap the fermented juices of insight when you’ve meditated sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.’”
“‘We tap the fermented juices of despair when you’ve suffered sufficiently to yield the choicest draft.’”
“‘It was we who mixed the joyous brew from the first.’”
“‘It was we who mixed the bitter brew from the first.’”
“It’s The Mandala Rites,” Michael said. “Elias wrote it. But who changed it? Whose writing is this?”
Lilith said one word, as if it were the foulest she had ever spoken—as if it were corrosive, a flavor to rot her tongue, to poison her souclass="underline" “Crowe.”
Of course, he thought. It came from Derek Crowe’s apartment.
The car slowed. There were no streetlights here. Michael heard a deep thrumming somewhere, like an engine that kept running even after the driver had shut off the car. He looked out the window and saw brick walls, concrete abutments, a parking lot with a Dumpster bin in a corner where a man or woman sat huddled in rags, shrinking from the headlights’ glare. On the sidewalk, not far away, a steady stream of people were heading in one direction.
One-Ear said, “I’ll take those papers, please. They may be useful in bargaining with Mr. Crowe.”
Michael gathered what had fallen and shoved it over the seat back.
“Now,” One-Ear said, “we are going in together.”
“In where?” Michael said. Lilith seemed to be in shock much greater than his own. She bent over slowly, dragging her purse from the floor, and then he remembered what she had in it. One-Ear had checked it for weapons, but why would he notice a small key amid the clutter?
“We’re visiting a very busy nightspot. Let’s not become separated. I will have a gun in your back, Ms. A.”
“Call me anything but that, ” Lilith said.
One-Ear handed the pile of papers to the driver, then climbed out and opened Michael’s door. Michael slid out, pulling Lilith with him.
“You should hold hands, like very good friends, like lovers,” said One-Ear. “Be discreet about the handcuffs.”
“Like this?” Lilith said, pressing close to Michael. She put her hand over the cuff on his wrist.
“That’s very good. Now we will join the crowd.”
They walked around the edge of the building, out of the lot where they had parked, merging with the stream of people. Neon dazzled the night somewhere ahead, but the sky above was black with mist, holding solid slabs of shadow overhead.
In the car, Michael had felt the inexorable tugging as something irrelevant; he was not in control of his motions, so he let the whirlpool force tug him without resisting. But suddenly, here, it hit him again, nearly snatching him away through the crowd. This time it was too strong to fight. He tried to cast a white circle around himself, but there was no room for it in his mind; it was all he could do to stay upright, to keep from bending forward like a reed in the wind, to stop himself from rolling like a tumbleweed. He could no longer fight the flow, for One-Ear was urging them in that direction.