He could believe in them now. It was exactly the same as believing in himself.
And Lenore, flung away, falling through the dark again, knew what was coming, what would step in to fill the gulf she had left behind. She saw it with the full awareness of one who had dwelt among the mandalas as consciously as was possible for a human mind to bear.
What she saw coming was worse than she could have imagined. It was Derek Crowe, yes—but a Crowe exaggerated and concentrated, a Crowe intensified to a degree that beggared mere horror. The thing he was about to become, the bursting into full flower of the seed at his soul’s center, was unbearable to contemplate.
She tried to slow her free-fall. She had negotiated these realms long enough to have mastered a measure of control. She clung to the hard comet-kernel at her center, herding it about, urging it back to the scene of imminent devastation.
As she drew near, she saw the crowd on the dance floor whirling above the black guardian whose outlines even now shimmered and throbbed with actual life, soaking in the blood-force of those who crowded Club Mandala. She merged with the rhythmic encircling thrum of the dancers’ feet and the sourceless music, foreseeing the abattoir this place would become when the thirty-seventh mandala broke through, drawing upon all of them for its power, much as her own guardian had drawn upon Tucker and Scarlet for its first manifestation. The floors would burst, the walls would split, every soul would spurt like a burst blood sac, drawn in on the lines of radiant evil that formed the astral core of the new, the incipient mandala….
And when that one took its place among the other thirty-six, it would compel them to new acts of terror and cruelty. It would usher in a new age of violence on the helpless physical plane, giving shape and direction to the selfish battling of the mandalas, uniting them in a continuation of the process that had brought them spiraling in from outside of time to this point tonight.
Lenore saw only one way to place her own mark on events, to steer them on a less horrific course. It meant giving up everything; but then, she was on her way into the endless dark. This sacrifice might mean another chance at the light. It might mean rebirth, and real power, and who knew what else?
She collapsed into herself, embracing the center of the storm, crushing herself inward until she reached critical mass. And felt at last the inner bloom, the explosion just beginning.
She reappeared as if out of nowhere among the mandalas which had discarded her. She drank up their shock and rage, mixing it with the frenzied glee of the crowd above and the poisonous seepage of Derek Crowe. She made it all her own, subverting Crowe’s evil destiny in an attempt to make something new of it.
All of them were fighting her now, both the mandalas and their human slaves. They pushed her back, trying to tear her away from Derek Crowe, trying to suppress her emergence.
In the instant she regained her body, she called for help from the only one in the world who could move invisibly here—her only hope of rescue.
“Michael!”
She couldn’t see him. She had no idea if he still lived. But she prayed he was still close enough to hear her.
Michael had huddled against the dark mirror of the wall, ignored by all, in shock, unable to hear what passed between Crowe and Lenore, unable to comprehend any of it. The others, the audience, stood slack and unmoving, but the air above their heads was alive with an astral turmoil so intense that even he could see it.
Suddenly Lenore called his name, and that was enough to wake him. He leapt to his feet and pushed through the crowd; the others swung sideways like dangling puppets, their hands reaching out limply, as if moved only by currents of disturbed air.
He seized Lenore and tried to pull her away from Derek Crowe, but this was not what she wanted. “No,” she murmured, with her eyes rolling up in her head. “Take me—to him.”
He couldn’t believe she meant it, but Lenore was insistent. Crowe fell backward on the couch and lay ripping at his clothes, screaming as if his flesh were on fire. Lenore began pulling at her shirt, baring her breasts.
“Get these off,” she insisted; and numbly he helped her strip naked before the staring crowd, which was too preoccupied with events above their heads to pay attention to this minor conjunction of physical bodies.
Crowe had undressed himself. He lay thrashing but beginning to slow, as if injected with a tranquilizer.
“To him,” she repeated. And when Michael hesitated, because the thought was so gruesome, she insisted: “Now! I can’t make it alone! I can hardly walk!”
He guided her to the couch. And stood while her hands reached out to touch Crowe’s naked chest. He was covered all over with a withered, membranous garment, mandala-scarred, flapping as if in a strong wind. Michael swallowed his revulsion as Lenore straddled Crowe, gripping his penis and squeezing till her knuckles went white.
“No,” she said sternly. “Not you. You’re not coming out.”
Crowe wailed and growled, thrashing as if to throw her; but Lenore held on.
“Lenore,” Michael said.
“Leave,” she said brusquely. “Leave now.”
She gave him a look, and then her eyes filmed over.
Crowe began screaming. Michael staggered and fell. He lay staring at two scenes: Events on the couch were amplified and mirrored in the air overhead, played out in a dimension that kept rotating through this one. He could hardly see Lenore as human now; she was something larger, a strange presence overwhelming the small pale form and filling the room, reaching up into the rhythmic thunder overhead, pulling all that power down here….
Lenore had stopped Crowe’s imminent collapse. He had felt as if he were about to burst, in a moment of orgasm beyond compare, but she had checked all that. The power continued to build toward some climax, but it had nowhere to go. She clutched him so hard that he could find no release. A shrieking laugh bubbled out of her as she held him down.
The second skin felt sticky on the inside; scraps of vestigial tissue clung to him, meshing with his own skin as sweat moistened the hide like mucilage. It writhed against him as if trying to crawl free.
The dark air was full of motion, vibrating clots like congealed grease and hair, like the specks of dead tissue that swarm across an eyeball when it stares into infinity. But these shapes continued to gain definition. They didn’t move off when he stared at them directly; they hung where they were like dark suns or lightless moons. The round room was laced with impossibly thin, nearly invisible silver threads that stretched from wall to wall, spun like liquid silk from the clots. He could almost feel the threads humming through his body, power lines snagging him, except they were too fine for his nerves to perceive. Lenore put her mouth against his ear, distracting him from all he couldn’t understand; he allowed his consciousness to shrink down to the limits of her voice, her touch. The things she said made no sense, nor were they exactly endearments, but that didn’t trouble him now. They were in the language of The Mandala Rites, but improvised; she was composing, not reciting, this incantation. The silver wires thrummed, sending their signals through the room. Electric currents curled through the second skin, warming him. When he glanced down at himself, he saw all the symbols beginning to glow. Wheels of light, turning slowly, dazzling him until he had to shut his eyes. Even through his closed lids, he saw the mandalas revolving against his flesh. They had become three-dimensional, swelling upward out of the wrinkled plane of preserved skin, spilling into the room, leaving holes seared in the hide as if to destroy the gate through which they had entered the world. His own skin felt fried where they had lain. He knew he had been freshly tattooed in thirty-seven places, like Etienne’s father.