“It’s coming,” said his mother.
“You staying for dinner, son? We don’t see enough of you. Where’s your cute little missus?”
“I’ve got to go,” Michael said under his voice, heading for the door.
“Michael, don’t you be—”
He walked out the back door while she was talking.
Passing the college on the way home, he relaxed a bit. Sometimes, down here, among the old brick buildings covered with frost-bitten ivy, you saw a kid in black leather sporting dyed hair or a mohawk. Not many, but just enough to reassure him that he and Lenore weren’t the only ones in Cinderton who’d survived the previous decade. He cruised down streets lined with ancient thick-trunked trees, bare and lifeless as columns of scaly cement. He was on the lookout for Lenore’s car as he passed the student parking lots. Raindrops spattered the windshield, fattened on groping branches. The sky was patchy, marbled blue and gray. Storms coming; seems they’d been on the way for days, but never quite arrived. He slowed to watch a girl coming down the steps from the student union, long black hair falling over her face, bright lipstick. She glanced up as if sensing his eyes, he stepped on the gas, thinking guiltily of Lenore.
She’d been so weird last night. Nobody could turn weird on you like Lenore. Just when he started thinking he finally understood her, she always came up with something unexpected. They had met four years ago—that was a long time. He’d never done anything for four years in a row—not even lived in the same town. He supposed she was close as he would ever get to finding his ideal type. The sorority girls in fuzzy sweaters, lipstick models with books under their arms—imagine what they’d think of his altar. One glance and they’d probably run screaming, even though it was perfectly innocuous. It wasn’t like he did black magic. He didn’t give evil any credence anyway. That was Christian bullshit, something the priests used to keep people in line, setting down laws to keep folks from thinking for themselves. Michael believed the universe was fundamentally neutral, that you got out of it exactly what you put in. His magical practice stemmed from a heartfelt yearning that couldn’t be satisfied by Christianity or Buddhism or Judaism, with their cores of written dogma and hierarchies of monks and popes and rabbis. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had reached his own understanding of the cosmos and felt it in every nerve.
He wasn’t sure why Lenore’s behavior last night had frightened him. It seemed miraculous now, to think of her incanting something she’d never read. There was nothing in the mandates themselves, or in her behavior, that implied a threat in a neutral universe.
Nevertheless…
When he remembered the knife quivering in the wall, buried so deep that he’d broken the tip prying it out, he couldn’t help feeling a little fear.
He might have known that if Lenore got into magic, she wouldn’t do it halfway. She didn’t do anything unless she did it to the hilt. Literally. It would take some getting used to, though. And he’d have to work on his unexpected jealousy. It struck him as unfair that her first spontaneous effort was so much more powerful than his most practiced ritual. He had the interest and understanding, the discipline… but Lenore had the knack!
Her car was parked in front of the house. Maybe she was sick after all. Last night, after the ritual, he’d helped her off the floor and she’d gone straight to bed without saying a word, acting as if she were drugged.
Drugged…. That would explain her mood last night. In fact, that would explain a lot. What if she’d bought or begged something off Tucker, then dosed herself to enliven a boring lecture?
Lenore was supposed to tell him when she planned to do anything more intense than smoking a jay. He couldn’t forbid her from doing drugs, but he could at least prepare himself for what might follow. Last Thanksgiving, they had gone for turkey dinner at his mother’s house. In the middle of the meal, Lenore had started hyperventilating, dropped from her chair, and lay facedown on the floor. His mother was shitfaced and although she yelled about it at the time, kicking Lenore and trying to pry her off the carpet, she hadn’t remembered anything about it later. Michael went into such a panic that he almost called the hospital until Lenore began babbling nonsense and he realized she was hallucinating. He and Earl had carried her to the car, Earl making some sly comment about how she had to grow up and learn a little self-control while Mrs. Renzler raged around on the porch waving the gravy ladle. When Lenore finally came down, she confessed to eating a dozen psilocybin mushrooms, dreading the evening with Michael’s mother. He had made her promise that in the future she would always give him plenty of advance notice before doing anything of the sort.
But she would never admit to violating their deal. He heard water running in the bathroom. The door was ajar, and Lenore was standing there, both hands on the sink, staring at her face in the mirror.
“Lenore?” he said.
She snapped around to look at him, blinking. “Huh? What are you doing home?”
“Me? I’m off work. What about you?”
She looked down and shut off the water. “I—I came home for lunch. I guess I better hurry if I want to get to work.”
“Lenore…” He stood there for a moment, not sure what she meant. “It’s almost five o’clock.”
She gave him a look that said he was an idiot. “Yeah, right.” She pushed past him, down the hall, into their bedroom. She came out pulling a comb through her hair, slipping into a new sweater. The blood-smudge on her forehead was dark and freshly scabbed. “It’s your night for dinner, remember.”
“Lenore, are you crazy?”
“Fuck you, Michael, I don’t have time for this. I’m already late. What time is it, really?” She slipped the comb in her pocket and opened the front door. She stopped dead as it swung open. It was almost dark. She looked at her wristwatch.
“What’s going on?” she said, turning to look at him. “Michael, what—what’s happening?”
“I told you, Lenore, it’s five o’clock. You missed work. I talked to Cal, he’s been calling all day, and I called too. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been… here.” She looked around as if lost. “I cut out of class and… and came right home… and then… and then…” She put her hands to her mouth. “Oh, my God, Michael, I can’t remember. I just—I just lost the whole day.”
“What do you mean?” He went and closed the door, then gripped her arms. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. This isn’t…”
“Isn’t what?”
“The first time.”
“Lenore,” he said, as steadily as he could, “I’m not accusing you or anything. I just want to know, okay? Have you been doing any drugs? Anything at all?”
“No, nothing.” She crumpled against him. “Michael, I’m scared. I haven’t done anything, but I keep… keep blacking out.”
Jesus, he thought. She hasn’t done anything except… except that ritual.
In Voudoun magic, there was a place called the white darkness. The gods, or loa, came down and rode humans like horses, occupying their bodies, while their minds roamed through a realm without characteristics, a dream without features, a place none could quite remember when they returned. What if something of the sort had happened to Lenore? A mandala invoked and never properly dismissed, free to enter her when it chose?
It was a privilege to be selected by the loa, transfigured ancestral spirits of scary, lively intelligence. Papa Legba, Ersulie Freida, and Baron Samedi could drive their human “horses” to drink inhuman amounts of rum, consume massive quantities of chili peppers, even eat razor blades and broken glass without harm.