When he reached his mother’s house, he went straight to the garage and popped the hood of her car. He was tightening the cable clamps when he heard the back door slam and her footsteps slogging through the thick mulch of sodden leaves on the unraked lawn. She leaned over his shoulder, her breath reeking of beer and coffee. It wasn’t quite ten o’clock.
“What’s wrong with Lenore?” she said.
He straightened so fast he caught his forehead on the corner of the hood. “Ow! Jesus! What do you mean?”
“I called over there to see where you were. Phone must have rung twenty times before she answered.”
“She’s not feeling too good. She called in sick.”
She looked skeptical, waiting for him to go on.
He leaned on the hood until it clicked shut. “What are you staring at?”
“What’s she got?”
“Flu or something, how should I know? I can’t afford to take her to the hospital so some doctor can charge us a hundred bucks to take her temperature.”
“She’s doing drugs again, isn’t she?”
“And you aren’t?”
“Don’t start that! Your wife is the one with the problem! All I did was ask where you were, and she started raving at me—obscene filth, if you’d like to know. Words I never heard before. God knows she didn’t learn them from you; and if she did, you didn’t learn them from me.”
Michael froze, then turned and headed toward the house. He picked up the phone in the kitchen and dialed his own number. The phone rang a dozen times, twenty, but Lenore didn’t pick up. He finally put it down.
“Well?”
“She must be sleeping. You probably woke her up, that’s why she sounded incoherent. With fever she gets delirious.”
“But with drugs she gets nasty, and she was nasty. She doesn’t care what she says to her own mother-in-law! If you heard what she said to me, garbage I can’t even pronounce. You can’t imagine—”
Suddenly he could imagine the words. Words right out of The Mandala Rites. To his mother’s addled ears it could have sounded like any foul thing she wished to imagine.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said.
“She needs more than talk. If you ask me, she needs psychiatric help.”
“Who doesn’t? I have to go.”
“What about my car? Does it work?”
“See for yourself.”
As he crossed through the living room, he surprised Earl in a transaction with a tall young man in a shabby black jogging suit. The kid, who could have been younger than Michael, jumped, startled, and spastically started stuffing a plastic bag into a zippered hip pouch—but not before Michael saw what was in the bag. Black capsules.
Earl smiled defensively, swaying toward Michael. “Hey, buddy boy. You fix up your ma’s car?”
“Good as new,” Michael said, pushing past him. He wasn’t really surprised, and he didn’t want to think about what he was seeing. All he cared about at the moment was Lenore.
“Uh, this here’s a friend of mine,” Earl started.
“Yeah, right.” Michael rushed out, leaving the front door open.
Lenore was sitting on the couch, heaps of yesterday’s laundry piled up around her. She was still in her bathrobe, her hair wet and tangled. The comb hung halfway down, caught in snarls. Her eyes seemed clear and focused—but they weren’t focused on him or on anything else he could see. It took her a moment to realize he was in the room; and then her expression soured, as if she were absorbed in something far more interesting and reluctant to deal with him. It was the look she gave him when he interrupted her at work on one of her math problems, or the puzzles she had worked compulsively when they’d first moved to Cinderton. They had been her only addiction for a brief time.
“Did you talk to my mom?” he asked.
She crossed her arms, narrowed her eyes, watched him with suspicion.
“Lenore… are you okay? Did you have another—another blackout?”
“Shngaha,” she said.
“What?”
Her eyes strayed to the ceiling, making him glance up. Tucker, he thought. Tucker had bragged once that he had a few designer varieties, new drugs. Anything could happen with those things. Lenore might have taken something like that; and who could guess at the effects, especially when you mixed them with magic? He listened for Tucker’s muted voice or footsteps, but heard only the usual muffled music.
“Lenore?” he said.
She didn’t move.
He touched her shoulder but she still didn’t move. His heart began to pound. Her skin was chill. He began to wonder if the universe were as neutral as he liked to believe… or if neutrality was a more awful thing than he’d realized.
She caught his hand, a gesture as startling as it was sudden. She pressed his palm against her mouth; he felt her teeth and tongue against his skin.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You were just sitting here—”
Her pupils were huge; more evidence that she was doing drugs. Tugging harder, she drew him down onto her, shifting back on the couch so that they could lie together in the scattered clothes.
“What’re you doing?” he said, though he already knew. Her hands were on his back, pulling at his shirt; her breath felt hot on his neck. He must be crushing her. Her robe fell open. The sounds she made were broken bits of words, nothing that made sense at first, but he wasn’t really listening now.
“What’s with you?”
There was a trace of a smile on her lips, but little else in her expression except urgency as she worked his pants down over his hips and pulled him closer to her.
Drugs, he was thinking. It has to be drugs. She’s never like this except when she’s loaded. Never that interested in sex without some extra internal stimulation—or something to numb her….
He tried to throw off the tangle of thoughts for a moment, to let himself enjoy the sensations. He lowered his head, slid his hands up along her back to grasp her shoulders from behind. Her cold hands moved down his back; her nails dug into his buttocks.
Then he realized that she was chanting, making wet, clicking sounds timed with his thrusts.
“Silsiliv zezizn maoan, nylyvyl olornon ahrixir memt-hocha…”
The sounds smothered him. Suddenly it was all too much. What was she invoking? What would be consecrated by the mixture of their juices?
He pulled out and drew back, feeling as if he had just struggled up from the bottom of a lake. Lenore gasped anxiously but made no other sound, lying there with her eyes still closed, hardly seeming to breathe. Her words trailed off, but not before he recognized them.
Somehow she had managed to memorize the whole seventeenth Rite, the major sex ritual in Crowe’s book. How had she pronounced it flawlessly in the midst of passion, and drugged to boot? That ceremony had stumped him; it was the single one he couldn’t do alone. And now, given the perfect opportunity, he’d backed off in fear.
Fear of what?
He couldn’t ignore the fact that he had been aroused; if he could manage to get out of his head for a minute he might still be able to find some satisfaction. Maybe if he took a little of whatever Lenore had taken. He looked around for a joint, even a roach, but saw nothing.
Her eyes were completely shut now, her teeth clenched and starting to chatter. He swept his hand across her brow, brushing her hair aside to feel if she was feverish.
In doing so, he revealed the bright wound on her forehead.