One-Ear and the driver were right behind them, but Lilith’s fingers were working deftly. Michael felt the key turning in the handcuffs. The band loosened at his wrist; he had to catch it with his fingers to keep it from falling.
He clutched Lilith’s arm as if she could hold him in place; the pull had hold of her too, though she didn’t seem to notice it.
They rounded a corner, coming to the club’s entrance. Michael held back for a moment, amazed. A pair of immense neon mandalas hung above the black entryway. Coiled colored tubing, all dark-inflected, in deep violets and bloody reds, oranges like burning flesh, greens that suggested lightless depths… and black tubes, black but glowing. All twisted into spirals and deceptive paths, with radiating sunburst arms. Every inch flickering, pulsing outward in consecutive waves of color and darkness, seeming to writhe against the bricks, melting into the old mortar, throwing wriggling tendrils of neon out against the freeway overpass. One mandala sparkled and whirled around an aperture full of brilliant white and red-tipped daggers like gnashing teeth; the other was covered all over with toothy mouths that champed and noiselessly chattered. These wheels of color spun on either side of the pale and rather subdued lettering of the place’s name: Club Mandala.
Lilith leaned close, kissed him on the cheek. “When we get inside, split up and run.”
“Young lovers,” One-Ear said lightly, “that’s enough of that.”
She parted, giving Michael a crooked smile.
“Go on,” One-Ear said, goading Michael forward none too gently. He jumped to obey but went too abruptly, losing Lilith’s hand.
Their little scheme with the handcuffs was revealed.
Michael didn’t wait to see what Lilith did without him. He expected the bullet at any moment. Maybe it had already come, but his shock was so great he felt nothing. He plunged toward the doors, giving in to the force that reeled him in—flying past the bouncers who were shouting and gesturing, trying to stop him, until they saw One-Ear coming with his gun. Michael dived into the crowd, pushing himself toward its dense heart. The force was stronger than it had been at the cliffside, and giving into it now was exactly like throwing himself over that edge—but this abyss was invisible and, he sensed, bottomless.
He hesitated, trying to find his bearings. Entering that place of raging noise and chaos, he found himself paradoxically at a point of utter stillness, as if he were in free fall.
This was it. The center. The hub.
A stranger with a tattoo on each cheek shoved a drink into one hand and a white gel capsule into the other, and shouted just loud enough to be heard over the rhythmic mechanical thrumming that filled the air: “Welcome to Club Mandala!”
As Lenore entered the club, her mind, which had been whirling, came to a sudden stop. Everything on the edges of her consciousness, every bit of parasitic chatter clinging to her thoughts and distorting her perceptions, was abruptly flung beyond the reach of her mind, vanishing over some horizon she could hardly perceive. She had been only dimly aware of her whereabouts for some time; surrendering to her mandala, she had followed it without question, without resistance. The day, everything leading up to this moment, was a blur. Everything she had said and done, everything that had brought her here, she remembered as if through a filter. And this despite her determination to see and remember everything, to take responsibility—to be a witness. It made her furious.
The cloud had descended when Michael took her away from Hecate’s Haven, as if the separation from Crowe had itself caused her illness. Maybe that was why she felt so lucid now: Crowe stood in Michael’s place at her right hand.
Something had happened to Michael—something she couldn’t recall. She looked around for him, as if he might be entering behind her, as if he might appear at her elbow. She saw no one but strangers.
Strangers and their mandalas….
Her eyes lifted. The air was a riot of seething shapes, mirroring the crowd below. The mandalas fed and groped each other with the barbed tips of whiplike tendrils, in chittering exchanges that must have been some type of communication. They surged together as the human bodies below them fought for position on the dance floor. Sometimes the suction was so great that as they separated, one or the other would evert, exposing bright raw innards, rotating through several dimensions, appearing now as a coil of self-swallowing tubes, now as an array of overlapping rings, flashing with inner lights where she seemed to see stairs leading down into violet caverns, knife-edged mushrooms, oily winged things rising up from motionless black lakes.
The one named Etienne saved her from the visions, leading her by the hand around the periphery of the room, shouting to her all the while, though it sounded like a hoarse whisper in the thunderous murmur of music. The floor was mobbed and chaotic, but periodically the crowd surged in unison, patterned ripples spreading through the mass, and the bodies of the dancers fell into curving lines like the spokes of a wheel, as if they might at any moment join in a carefully choreographed performance. Above them, meanwhile, the mandalas seemed to strive for a similar order, though they found it no easier. Their relations were both violent and tender at once; they struggled blindly, despite perceptions and senses so much finer than Lenore’s that she could not understand a fraction of what they knew. She felt as sorry for them as for herself.
“Later, you’ll see,” Etienne said, “they’ll find it. Don’t worry.”
As if this could have worried her. She had no doubt that all they desired would come about tonight. Somewhere, somehow, the great one was spinning, drawing them all in. Old enmities were suspended for one night. She could sense an immense presence in the room, could almost see it.
And then, between the dancers’ feet, she did see it.
It covered the dance floor, filling the room, black and glistening, glimpsed in bits as the bodies moved past. At the sight, she felt herself tugged up into her own mandala. And then, looking down, she saw the shape of the great one underlying everything; she saw all of them caught in the tightening whorled hollow of a vortex, a tornado’s throat, a single tapering moment into which all were sliding in unison. The substance of the night—of the room itself—was warping, falling inward on that point.
As Derek drifted along behind her, Nina leaned and whispered in his ear. When he saw Lenore’s eyes on him, he gave a slight smile and nod, not realizing that she was watching from somewhere above them all, as she slid toward the center, drawing Derek with her. His mandala hovered close, gray and with its mouths agape, its haste so insistent as to seem desperate. But Lenore—or her mandala—was not yet ready.
They wandered past couples in close conversation, through white rooms with framed black mandalas on the walls, through dark rooms like cubes of smoke where ultraviolet mandalas glowed. Eyes locked onto her forehead and conversations stopped. Many wore tattoos, but they were powerless—tattoos injected with needles and ink. Few, apart from hers, had been administered by a mandala. Etienne wore one such; she could feel it glowing against his skin, beneath his clothes. And Derek’s entire body seemed afire with them, churning just out of reach, crying out to her with something like lust. Later would be the time to reciprocate. She passed others in the crowd, here and there, who carried the true mandala sak (as Etienne called them). She felt the location of each true bearer; she could have closed her eyes and pointed them out. Some were still coming in from outside the club, from all over the city, though most were already here. Almost thirty-six now.