Thirty-six….
For tonight, in this brief interval, this turning point of eons, there was no thirty-seventh mandala.
Her own guardian, the black-fanged mandala, had slain it, and that was what she had forgotten until now:
—Her mandala, slashing down.
—His mandala, dying.
But did mandalas die?
The answer came from deep within, from that part of her which had been among the mandalas for so long that it shared their properties.
They died, but rarely—when they had weakened to such a point that they could be killed. And each passing marked the end of an age, the beginning of a new one. The thirty-seven, constantly fighting for position, always at odds, always struggling for their own ends, found it difficult to come together even for occasions such as this.
Etienne kept talking, as if to boost her spirits, as if he didn’t realize that cheer was irrelevant. He guided her through the upstairs galleries where numerous mandalas were hung. These weren’t the real Thirty-seven, but impressions executed by different hands.
“These are new,” Derek said as they strolled along.
“Yes, our commissions. Not part of the canon, but still… amazing aren’t they? Here’s an original Mavrides.” Pointing to a wicked mandala painted on black velvet, radiating poisonously under ultraviolet lights, each of its tendrils gripping some awful or banal object: electric appliances, a screaming nun, a smoking pipe. “A Harry S. Robins.” This a sinister wheel of intricate evil perfection, rising from the waters of an underground sea where primordial shadows swam through the ruins of a drowned city of weirdly angled towers. “A Dan Clowes.” Here an incongruous cartoon mandala, in lurid colors and Zip-A-Tone shading, the great one manifesting in a rundown room that could have been a motel or a sparely furnished apartment, with a circle of worshippers bowed down before it, buck-toothed and slobbering in berets and jazz beards, ragged flannels, sagging knit caps. Lenore saw much the same faces hovering around her in the club. “A Krystine Kryttre.” This one so fierce that it seemed to stab her eyes with bolts of black lightning, a woman crucified upon a geared wheel, its spokes tearing through her flesh, lighting her up like an X ray, ripping her open as she laughed insanely.
Lenore tore away from Etienne, away from Derek, and found herself on a balcony, looking down on the crowded dance floor, trying to discern the shape of the great mandala painted there.
A hand on her shoulder. Etienne leaned close: “You’re feeling the Thirty-seven. I wouldn’t recommend eating now. Would you like some wine?”
She nodded, then remembered why she shouldn’t. She must remain clear-headed. She had lost too much to unconsciousness. She felt as if she were still voyaging inward, twisting on an ever tighter downward path into her soul, while external events wound higher and higher on their own corkscrew trail.
“Water,” she said, and Etienne moved off. Derek and Nina remained in the gallery, laughing and talking. Nina was introducing Derek to an artist.
She froze, clutching the rail, her eyes caught by one small fleck of color down in the sea of faces. For an instant she saw Michael, and then he was gone. She started after him instantly, rushing along the balcony, pushing through the crowded rooms to find the stairs, in a panic.
If she closed her eyes and calmed herself, she should be able to pick him out of the crowd.
She tried it, holding to a stair rail, letting people swarm past her. She sent herself floating upward, willing her mandala to enlighten her, knowing that it could lead her right to Michael.
All she had to do was reach out for his mandala.
But no… he no longer had a mandala.
Michael had vanished. Utterly. As if he had ceased to exist, ceased to have any significance, at the moment his own mandala was destroyed. She could find no trace of him, not a memory, in her black guardian. It had not seen him enter. He and he alone moved invisibly among the mandalas. His was the only body in the room lacking a guardian, unattended.
What part of her, then, perceived him still?
Lenore had thought that she was entirely under her mandala’s power, but apparently something else remained. Something clumsy and feeble and pathetically limited… something that was forced to open its eyes and push its body down the stairs, searching for him the hard way—the human way.
Michael was quickly lost in the club, but he thought it was the best thing for now. One-Ear wouldn’t shoot him in this chaos. If he tried, it would be easy to elude him in the crowd.
He moved as far from the door as possible, hoping Lilith had made it in. She would have been wiser to run for help, but there must be a phone in here somewhere. Outside—who knew? It had looked dark and industrial on the street: no bars, no shops—nothing for miles, maybe. So the chaos inside might work to his advantage. Maybe One-Ear would forget him completely, since what he really wanted was something Crowe had. Something, Michael suspected, that Crowe had stolen from Elias. Something besides the notebooks.
He found himself in a corridor too empty for comfort. He rushed to a doorway that opened onto the dance floor. Looking up, he saw a balcony running along the second level. That’s where I’d go if I were One-Ear, he thought. Behind him was a flight of stairs running down into a basement. At the top of the stairs stood a big man, a bouncer, checking invitations. Michael waited until he was wrapped up in a dispute with someone, then leapt the first few steps, skipped around the landing, and slowed as he reached the bottom. He didn’t hear anyone coming after him.
It was quieter down here, the music a vibration he felt with his body and not with his ears. Knots of people moved quietly between rooms. The hall turned and bent, mazelike. After several minutes he was not sure exactly where he stood in relation to the stairs. He heard laughter and turned into a small room, coming upon a dozen or so people watching some sort of video performance on a TV screen.
An image painted on the wall above the monitor caught and held his eyes, restoring in an instant all the faded terror he had first felt days ago, when this nightmare was only beginning.
The mandala on the wall was done in bloodred paint; it appeared glossy and still fresh, dripping. And it was not merely any mandala from The Rites. It was the pattern he had seen on Tucker’s wall—the same one etched on Lenore’s forehead. The mandala had followed him across the country like his personal nemesis.
He didn’t move forward to get a better look, but the crowd shifted anyway, giving him a perfect view. The monitor sat on a pedestal against the painted wall, giving off its cold colors, everything tinted toward blue. There he saw a soundless image, glaring and jerky—a handheld video version of a scene he had relived countless times in his memory since witnessing it in life.
Tucker’s room. The same mandala sprayed in gore across the posters and pictures. The camera roved over it lovingly, tracing the wheel’s perimeter, its inner weave, then pulling back and dropping down to drink in the sight of the bed, substantially drier and blacker than when Michael had seen it last, and with flies a significant presence now. This must be some kind of police video. How had the club gotten hold of it?
The pictures tore at Michael, weakened and dazed him; but after all, he had seen all this before, and the image was no more shocking a second time.
What unnerved him now was the audience.
They were laughing. Watching the screen with enrapt, blue-lit eyes where tiny TV monitors swam. Little mirrored mandalas twirled in their pupils like advertisements.