But the mandalas were, without exception, benevolent beings, devoted to human spiritual evolution. There was nothing about them of dark aspect, nothing remotely frightening.
Yet Lenore, now, frightened him. And whatever it was that had come into the temple last night had not impressed him as a bright and loving spirit.
He couldn’t be sure, of course. The mandalas were new entities. Derek Crowe was the only authority on their nature and behavior. There was really no one else he could turn to for advice, if it came to that.
He hoped it wouldn’t.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re probably just coming down with a bug.” There was no point in explaining his loa theory; he didn’t want to put any ideas in her head. He just wanted to observe. “Why don’t you get in bed and let me take your temperature?”
“Okay.” With lowered head, looking suddenly very small and frail she shuffled down the hall toward the bedroom; he kept his arm around her, helped her out of her clothes, got her into bed and covered. He went for the thermometer and slipped it under her tongue.
“Thank you, Michael,” she mumbled, looking pale and vulnerable among the pillows. He felt a pang of concern, as if for a child.
He left her there for a few minutes and went into his temple, taking up The Mandala Rites and skimming Crowe’s lengthy exegesis, looking for clues to their current situation. The text yielded nothing new.
It’s me, he thought.
I fucked up in a big way. Again. Didn’t handle things right. How can Crowe help me when I didn’t even follow his instructions? I’m not sure what we did last night, it got so out of hand.
I should have insisted on doing everything my way, methodically, and not let Lenore participate if she wouldn’t cooperate.
Now I’ve messed up my partner.
Maybe. Maybe.
Okay, yeah. Could be she’s really only sick.
Yeah. Don’t panic. What would Elias say? Look for rational explanations first. Science is an important power in this world, and for good reason: It works.
Let’s try science and see how far it gets us.
He returned to Lenore. Her eyes were half closed; she looked calmer now. She gave him a sleepy smile as he plucked the thermometer out of her mouth.
“How’s it look?”
He turned the glass wand until he saw the thin line of mercury. It was numbered on the Celsius scale, rather than Fahrenheit, which always confused him a bit; but there was a red arrow pointing out the normal human temperature, and she was right on it.
“You’re fine,” he said. “Thirty-seven. That’s normal.”
10
Derek Crowe stood at the chalkboard, dressed in a white shirt and baggy trousers, a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket, a piece of chalk in one hand. Lenore was alone with him in the drafty classroom, her notebook opened to a blank page. He had drawn a ring of dots on the board, thirty-seven points arranged in a mandala, like thirty-seven eyes watching her. And now, one by one, counting aloud as he did so, he began to erase them.
“Thirty-seven… thirty-six… thirty-five…”
The classroom grew dark, and Lenore found herself on the square spiral stairs of the math building, trudging down them in reverse, moving backward down the stairs. Crowe’s voice lowered her into darkness.
“Twenty-seven… twenty-six… twenty-five…”
Lenore’s flesh melted from her, underlying lines of power shedding their outermost excrescences, leaving her floating like a skeleton of bare lines in a diamond realm, steeped in orange haze. This fire-lit mist coagulated into lumps of multicolored moving matter, an astral precipitate jumbled and chaotic around her. She glimpsed the bits and pieces of her past, scenes and faces swirling in a colloidal storm. Old agonies rose up to torment her. Scenes from her life fought for primacy, without purpose, but for once they could not draw her in.
“Thirteen… twelve… eleven…”
She had come under the sway of a new influence, an organizing principle, something more powerful than the clamors of her ego. As if magnetized, the fragments of her consciousness began to align themselves along inward lines of power, leading her deep into the center of something she could not apprehend.
“Three… two… one…”
She had reached the beginning of her life—but the center was farther in.
Leaving physical memories behind, she plunged cometlike into a void as impenetrable as unconsciousness. There was something there, some lost part of her, crying to be rescued. She reached for it, hauled it out blindly… but whatever it was, she could not see it. She had not gone far enough yet.
“Zero.”
She felt that if she could only reach the center, she could start back out again and she would be changed. She would be whole. Her true nature waited patiently to be born. Strong and pure, intensely bright and fearless, it had existed before her body, before anything.
But now it had a body.
“Now wake….”
She found herself standing outside the door of Michael’s temple. The house was all new. The walls, floor and ceiling were pure black. Pure, essential. The world she had inhabited all her life seemed shallow and incomplete, a failure of imagination. This other, dominant world reminded her that oblivion was her true nature. Consider the universe in all the endless ages before her arrival and after her departure. She was like a little cyst of nothingness ensconced in the middle of that span. Worthless, unless something greater found a use for her.
And now something had.
Down it came, spinning slowly and deliberately, like a vast black sentient ceiling fan, giving off an odor she could almost taste. It gleamed with dark wet liquid, as if recently anointed. Tendrils like drops of thickening blood were oozing, dripping onto her.
She had no fear of blood. Blood had served as carrier for a thousand pleasures. How many times had she watched her own blood backing up a syringe and stared at the ruby liquid, in awe of its beauty and utility?
Nor did she fear needles, for similar reasons, although she had never witnessed anything like the sheer number that now revealed themselves as the palpy tendrils retracted to show their probing tips. Some ancient portion of her brain, something deeply rooted in all the errors and apprehensions of matter, sent a momentary spasm through her muscles, a surge of animal panic—as if there were anywhere to run from the black wheel.
But the flutter of her nerves was too slow; while ions were bridging neural gaps with torturous lethargy, this other thing had already anticipated them and filled those spaces with its own immensities. Then the million or more thin, flexible spikes pierced her soul, delivering her from every care she had ever known.
All weakness in her began to dissolve, old cells giving way before a creative, corrosive tide. As quickly as her vulnerable portions were destroyed, the whirling black wheel replaced them with others of its own manufacture, rebuilding her cell by cell. Healing her, but also changing her.
In tonight’s exchange, she had nothing to give and everything to gain. Her mind unfolded in an unending process of expansion centered on one point that hung in space above, quietly gnashing.
Waves of pleasure, immobilizing warmth washed through her, but she needn’t worry about moving. There was nothing to accomplish. She need only devote her mind to the intricate inward track. For the true center lay yet a long way from where she stood.
She gazed up at her guardian, wanting whatever it wanted for her.
I’m nothing without you. Heal me, make me whole. I give myself to you.