She hated his tools, his occult equipment. It struck her as a wasteful fetish—even basic necessities like incense and charcoal. On the other hand, she didn’t seem to mind when he spent his money on books. It was fortunate for their domestic peace that virtually all of Michael’s spare cash ended up invested in his library.
Maybe she felt some affection for his books because he’d started his collection around the time they met, scavanging treasures from dusty bookshop shelves in Manhattan and environs while he was ostensibly a student in the city. In those days he hadn’t developed much in the way of common sense, but at least he’d possessed enough to ship the volumes to his mother as he acquired them, so they couldn’t be sold again in a moment of weakness or stolen for someone else’s drug money. Drugs had never meant that much to him. They were something to do while he was hanging out. He resented their grip on him and always knew he’d give them up. Magic was his real addiction. He often wished Lenore could have shared his spiritual passions; she didn’t really have any other pursuit to compete with her all consuming interest in drugs.
When he came slinking down to North Carolina with Lenore in tow, all his precious books had been there waiting for him—waiting with his mother poised over them, cigarette lighter in hand. She had threatened to put them all to the torch unless he kicked his various habits. It had been one of her most lucid moments. Since kicking and getting Lenore to kick speed had been his chief aim in fleeing New York, he was able to convince her to spare the innocent pages. His mother must have realized that he’d need some new order in his life. What better than the wealth of magical systems detailed in his books, with their periodic tables of angelic powers and hierarchies of phantom guides and gods all striving toward various grails like players on a vast n-dimensional chessboard?
Despite her distrust and even disgust with anything smacking of religion, his mother had spared the books.
Crowe’s Mandala Rites was only the latest addition to Michael’s library, but already it had pushed all other systems of magic to the edges of his mind. It was the best new system he had ever encountered. Would-be gurus were always inventing new myths and methodologies to suit the current crazes, usually with results as lame as dressing a crone in a Day-Glo neoprene bikini. But the mandalas had an integrity that couldn’t be explained away, as if they had always been lurking about, waiting for the proper time to reveal themselves.
He was more curious than ever to understand what had attracted the mandalas to Derek Crowe in the first place. Why choose him of all people? His first few books had been pure trash. Michael would have sworn they were insincere efforts, bland and uninspired, recycled occult pap cobbled together out of other older books. There was no clue in any of them that Crowe had ever possessed one real insight or would ever produce anything original. Outwardly the man himself seemed as unconvincing as those books. Cold and reserved, difficult to read, Derek Crowe displayed none of the passion that permeated The Mandala Rites, whose diagrams were so intense that they sometimes seemed to vibrate and spin free of the pages.
“So what do you do with these?” Lenore asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.
“Do?”
“Yeah, the mandalas. What are they for? I couldn’t follow everything Crowe was saying tonight—there was just so much of it.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s hard, coming in cold like you did. They’re, you know, symbols. You meditate on them. Each has a certain energy, a—a kind of function. You invoke, I mean, call them and, uh, meditate, and—”
“Call them? Is that what all this is supposed to be? These words here?”
She had the radio on with the sound turned down; enough dim light leaked from the cracked plastic panel to show the pages spread across her knees.
“Yeah, those are the Keys—the Invocations. They’re not in English.”
“No duh.”
He sighed at her mockery. She was setting him up, ready to poke holes in what she perceived as silly superstitions. She tolerated his books, but that didn’t mean she respected their contents. Lenore had never shown the slightest interest in magic or the occult. If he pressed for her opinion, she usually said that all mysticism was bullshit invented to keep people stupid and afraid so they could be conned by hucksters like… well, like Derek Crowe, whose jacket photo she had once satirized for ten minutes. “This guy’s got to be a con artist or an idiot,” she’d said. “Who else would pose like that?” And the photograph was corny, showing his face cloven by melodramatic shadow, his long nose like a beak (it was even more obvious in person, Michael had noticed), a big shiny onyx clasp holding his cloak cinched at the throat as he leaned forward on a carved wooden staff. But Michael had defended Derek Crowe at the time; the mandalas had swayed him.
Now he waited, tensed, not really knowing where the stab was going to come from.
“You’re doing a ritual tonight, right?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I do it with you?”
He tapped the brakes as if her words had leapt out in front of the car. “What?”
In the faint light she had a secretive, even mischievous look. He knew she wouldn’t clue him in on her thoughts until she was good and ready, but he felt he had to press her for more. “Are you kidding?”
“Kidding? Why?”
“You never cared about this stuff before.”
She shrugged. “Don’t you like me taking an interest?”
“Of course I do! God, I’ve been trying to—to involve you for years. I just gave up, it seemed so pointless. I think I’m in shock.”
“Well, get over it.”
Her tone was so dismissive that he didn’t think of questioning her any further. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He had dreamed of sharing his real interests with her. Two soul-mates could go so much farther and faster in the occult realms than any one person traveling alone. He had never quite given up hoping that someday she would kick drugs altogether and really join him on his quest, the spiritual pilgrimage that had given him the strength to pull his psyche into shape.
“I’ll show you tonight,” he said breathlessly. “We’ll do something out of the book if you want. Just a simple ritual to give you a taste of it, see how you like it, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
Yes, he thought. She said yes! She had affirmed everything he believed in and hoped for. She had stopped saying no, and maybe now there would be an end to her self-destructiveness. An end in sight, anyway.
He could hardly keep from laughing. “Okay,” he repeated. “Okay!”
“Michael!” She dug her nails in his arm, nearly slashing him; the shock brought his eyes back to the dark road. He’d been blinded by emotion, a veil coming down over his mind, shutting him off from his eyes, and suddenly he saw the headlights sweeping a sheer rock face, heard the tires screaming around a hairpin curve he knew by heart (—by heart?—then how had he forgotten?—stupid—stupid—we’re gonna roll—), felt the Beetle tipping, wheels on one side leaving the ground.
Then the lights swept on into trees, the road straightened, they bounced down again, flat and level, and he could breathe. He slowed gradually, acting as if it were deliberate, as if he’d been in control the whole time, showing off.