Michael went cold when he saw the mandala burning there like a brand: an intricate, spidery tattoo, as detailed as the illustration in Crowe’s book, down to the central mouth of gnashing teeth, the rim of glistering eyes. It was the thirty-seventh mandala, sharp and clear. He rubbed at it, but it would not smudge. Lenore made a moaning complaint and he pulled his hand away. Flustered and frightened, he hurried down the hall, consoling himself with simple acts. He washed in the bathroom, waiting for his thoughts to clear, but they were dense and thickening. There was too much going on here, more than he could handle alone. He needed some advice.
Elias, he thought. Now.
He went into his temple room and opened a drawer in his altar. There were heaps of loose paper, volumes of his magical journals, bits and pieces of thaumaturgical equipment he wasn’t currently using. At the back of the drawer was a stack of audio cassettes and a few envelopes bound with a thick leather cord. These were the only things he had of Elias Mooney’s. He untied the stack and dug his old tape player from another drawer; he plugged it into the socket beside the altar and inserted a cassette, then sat cross-legged on the floor and set the volume low.
Elias’s voice crackled out in midsentence, bringing back clear memories of the time when Michael had received these taped letters once or twice a month. Those had been troubled times. Worse than these? Perhaps not… but Elias’s words had always filled him with courage and reassurance and spiritual guidance. He needed them as a sort of touchstone for contacting Elias now.
“—now, without offending you, Michael, I have to say once again that it is absolutely essential you forgo drugs of any kind. They do have a place in magic, but they have been so abused by modern practitioners that it is practically impossible to use them properly now. The realms to which they give access have been polluted by the millions of untrained, undisciplined tourists who’ve invaded the astral regions in the last thirty years, with the aid of hallucinogenics. In a way, the so-called nonaddictive drugs—such as lysergic acid and mescaline—are even more dangerous than the opiates, which merely lead to oblivion, for that is a featureless void whose essential characteristics can never be altered, and from whose effects it is sometimes possible to recover. But the undisciplined mind may never recover from an unguided trip through the peyote world, and the reverse is also true. The depredations done to the peyote lands are as terrible and irreversible as those done by modern civilization to the native people’s material environment. Just as the sacred Black Hills were mined and stripped of their soul, the ecology of the astral has been seriously wounded. And as it decays, so must this world, which is no more than a dream of the denizens of that place…”
The words affected Michael like a mild hallucinogen themselves. He closed his eyes and let them wash over him, trying to recover his state of mind at the time this tape first reached him.
He recalled he’d had a very bad experience with some mushrooms, and had actually broken down and telephoned Elias and confessed the nature of his experiments—even knowing the old man’s prejudice against drugs. It had been getting dark and he was all alone in an empty apartment, with night pouring down over the windows like a bottle of ink spilled from the eaves; and he had hugged the phone to his ear and clung to the old man’s gravelly voice with all his soul. Elias had dispatched some of his elementals to watch over Michael, then told him to ground himself by gazing at a piece of polished copper. Michael was afraid to stray beyond the circle of light cast by the single lamp where he sat holding the phone. “There’s something near you,” Elias said soothingly. “Something on your person.” “I don’t even have a penny,” Michael whimpered. “Look down. I see copper. It’s small, but it’s enough.” Looking down, Michael had seen a bright copper rivet on the watch pocket of his blue jeans, and the sight of it had affected him like the touch of a woman’s cool, strong hands. The metal of Venus, its small glow a reassurance and a beacon, held him steady even after Elias hung up. And after eons of sitting in solitude with nothing but that tiny orange sun to warm him, he had heard a key in the lock and light fell into the room down a hall that was at least a thousand miles long, and Lenore came in, amazed when she saw him, laughing and sarcastic when she heard his story, because her terrors were so different from his.
Two days later this tape had arrived. It was partially a reproval, however sympathetic, and partially an esoteric lecture on why a refined white boy like Michael was genetically and culturally unsuited to receive the sacraments of the psilocybin spirits. Elias did not believe there were any drugs suited for Michael; pharmaceuticals were soulless. Best of all was to learn to release the body’s own natural compounds, the subtle chemicals for which receptors had existed in the brain long before anyone had ever chewed a mushroom or ingested poppy tar or smoked the dried, serrated leaf of cannibis. But this required discipline, self-mastery, and patience; which meant that few in this day and age would ever experience these effects except by accident, in moments of extreme pain or pleasure, when the body released them spontaneously.
As a current example of his poor discipline, Michael realized he had just spent an uncertain length of time lost in his thoughts, unfocused on the task at hand. What drew him back was a change in Elias’s tone, and a faded quality to the sound, as if the old man were drawing far away from the microphone. The words wavered in and out of audibility. Michael couldn’t remember Elias saying anything like what he was hearing now, although he had not listened to the tape for years:
“—the danger cannot be… especially for the inexperienced practitioner… failed miserably to contain… only spreading them… me as a ladder to climb farther into… growing like thorny weeds in the ravaged places… can fight them, but not you… away from crow… stay away—”
Michael pressed the stop button suddenly. Crow, had he said? Crowe?
He rewound the tape a few inches, played it back, and Elias’s voice was even fainter now, barely surviving passage through a barrier of static he had not heard on the first playing. He could not make out a single word. He rewound it again and restarted it. And now there was nothing left: no voice, no hiss, only blank tape that thrummed faintly with a rhythmic thub-thub-thub as the little wheels of the cassette whirled around and around, its machine parts softly creaking.
It was then Lenore began screaming.
13
Michael found Lenore tumbled at the foot of the couch as if she’d been hurled there. She had clawed splinters from the hardwood floor, leaving bloody gouges; with her head and shoulders twisted back, she howled diminishingly. As he got his arms around her, her cries quieted to dry sobbing.
“Lenore?”
She shut her mouth and eyes, moaning. He pulled a rag rug under her, dug splinters out from under her nails.
Bad drugs, he thought. Toxic impurities. This couldn’t be simply the mandala rites; Lenore was too stable, too skeptical to have let them affect her this deeply. He suspected one of the brands of synthetic heroin he’d heard about. Maybe she’d thought she could avoid the drawbacks of actual junk. Designer drugs were notorious for causing comas, seizures. He had to find out exactly what she’d taken. Tucker would know.
He held her face in both his hands, but she wouldn’t keep still.
“Lenore, please…”
“Madze svelvivl soa mudeeth…”
Her mind was stuck in a loop, retracing the syllables of something she’d glimpsed in The Mandala Rites. It confirmed his belief that she’d been drugged during the ritual. She was still tripping on the same shit days later, stuck in psychic playback. The chemicals had triggered changes deep in her mind, far beyond their physical effects. There was enough desperation in the syllables she spouted to convince him that even she believed she was in trouble.