He gathered a little salt on the dagger’s tip and stirred it into the chalice, purifying blade and water alike. Holding the cup, he turned toward Lenore, intending to sprinkle her lightly before purifying the rest of the room.
No sooner had he raised the blade with the water trembling on its tip than Lenore stepped toward him, thrust the knife aside, and knocked the chalice from his hand. It landed without breaking, salt water spilling across the floor; as he knelt to scoop it up again, cursing at Lenore, she lifted the book off the altar and began to read the thirty-seventh rite.
“Lenore, what are you doing? We can’t—”
A movement in the flickering air stuffed the warning back down his throat. Lenore, with her eyes fixed on the page, forehead creased in concentration, didn’t see it. One candle, guttering, spewed smoky webs like a black rope ladder above the altar. As the thin rungs drifted into the room, something crawled out over them, toward Lenore.
She backed away unconsciously, out of its grasp, and knelt to snatch up the dagger. She rose with the athame held out before her, still chanting as if she had memorized the entire incantation.
She commenced carving lines in the air, drawing the thirty-seventh mandala flawlessly, without hesitation, and so quickly—despite its elaborate intertwinings—that he could almost see it hanging there in space above the altar, glowing with a black light, a seeping ultraviolet power that seemed to rush out of the wounded air like luminous blood pouring over her, physically pushing Lenore back so that she staggered and had to take her ground more firmly, planting her feet.
He rose stealthily and stood next to her, looking down at the book. She’s making it up, he told himself, trying to find her place in the text; she’s speaking in tongues, glossolalia.
But then he found her place on the page, toward the bottom of the passage, and saw that her recitation was letter-perfect, impossible as it seemed.
“…nang gjya hehn cheg-cheo…”
He felt his bare skin burning, as if that dark bloodlight had seared him, as if it were still running out of the carved air and pouring over him. He had never felt anything like this in a magic circle—not even when he’d coupled his rituals with psychedelics. This power was all Lenore’s. She had uncorked it tonight.
As she approached the end of the page, he felt grateful that the incantation was about to end. Something about her frightened him. He wanted things back the way they had been: an indifferent Lenore with no interest in magic, not this stranger whose wide blue eyes were fixed far out beyond the tip of his athame, staring at a world to which he was blind.
“…kaolhu,” she said, and that was the end of it, the bottom of the page.
But she kept going.
“…kaolhu kef’n lakthog ranagh…”
And on.
Numb, he turned the page and discovered that the invocation continued for another few lines. These were lines she had not even seen until now.
She recited them without faltering, without a single slip, straight to the end of the passage.
There was a moment’s silence.
That, Michael thought, was the end of it. The webwork of candle soot had dissipated; whatever he’d seen using that frail network for a bridge, it was gone now. Silence hung upon the house, even quieting those upstairs. The music had ended. Lenore’s arm hung at her side, the knife dangling, her eyes shut.
“Lenore,” he whispered, wondering how to end what had not been properly begun.
She didn’t seem to hear him. She stood quite still, a spot of reflected candlelight shimmering over her damp forehead.
“Lenore.” He took her by the shoulders, intending to shake her slightly, but a sudden jabbing in his side made him jump back with a shout.
She’d pricked him with his own blade, warning him away.
He found himself watching her forehead, watching that point of light brighten. He moved between her and the candles, casting his shadow over her face, but the light didn’t dim for an instant. It seemed to writhe, in turmoil, taking on definition; bright lines, thin as capillaries, etched her skin with a glowing light in the shape of a wheel. A mandala.
He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The symbol had separated from her now. Darkening, it floated in a mist of violet droplets. Blood. Lenore’s forehead was also bloody, stamped with the symbol, while the thing itself now floated in the air between them, growing in size as it blackened in hue. Eyes broke out along its rim, viscous and wet as frog’s eggs, dark alert specks floating in each tiny bulb. A second, smaller ring of eyes blinked out from around the crux of teeth. A lamprey mouth irised open as the black spokes, shiny and hard as the stems of black roses, began to revolve.
Michael reached back, groping on the altar for his wand.
The mandala flailed its tendrils and spun forward, eclipsing the room like a huge anemone or flytrap closing on him. The last thing he saw were the spike tips of its black arms piercing the ceiling, as if striking into the apartment above. Then his panicked groping upset the candles and they went out. Bitter smoke stung his nostrils. In the dark, his hand closed around the dorje handle of his Tibetan bell; with no better weapon, he rang it violently. At the first clang he heard a whirring all around him, felt a vast cyclonic gathering of air. Then Lenore shrieked. The whole house filled with screaming. Upstairs, Tucker and Scarlet were howling too. Something rushed past his ear and slammed into the wall—one of the mandala’s questing arms, he imagined. He dropped down and hugged himself in the dark, wondering why Crowe’s book had given no warnings of danger. Nothing in the Rites had prepared him for this.
After several minutes, with no further sound in the room except for Lenore’s gentle breathing and the nearer thud of his own heartbeat, he got to his knees and found the matches on the altar. It occurred to him that what he had heard upstairs were not screams of pain or terror but of pleasure. Tucker and Scarlet were quiet now; he could hear them gasping for breath, a laughing sort of sound. He almost laughed himself, with relief. Weird timing.
As he righted one candle and touched flame to wick, he discovered the athame gleaming above the altar, its blade buried half to the hilt in the plaster wall.
He turned, shivering, and looked back at Lenore. She lay fallen on the carpet, apparently asleep.
“Lenore?” he whispered. “Lenore, are you all right?”
She didn’t answer. Her breathing was steady, her pulse strong, but he couldn’t shake his fright—especially when he saw the dark bloody bruise above her eyes, in the center of her forehead. He returned to the altar for his wand, not wanting to leave anything undone. Lenore, apparently, was sensitive as a lightning rod put out in a storm, attracting more power than either of them could handle. He was frightened for her. An undisciplined mind might warp from the force of so much energy streaming through it.
“You’ll be okay,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.”
He faced the dark air where the mandala had appeared. It was empty now, as if nothing had happened except in his mind. If not for the bruise on Lenore’s forehead, he could have attributed all of this to madness. Even then… she might have slammed herself in the forehead with the athame’s pommel.
As he wondered how to proceed, a movement on the altar caught his eyes. Something slithered with a sidewinding motion across the open pages of the Mandala Rites, across the very lines she had spoken. The pages seemed to stir, the letters to writhe.