“Come on, Lenore,” he said. “Come with me.”
He pulled her up by the forearm, got her into a sitting position against the back of the couch. “Come on, come on.” He gave up trying to pull her and bent to grab her around the middle. She shrieked and shoved him so hard that he skidded backward and slammed into the wall. Then she was on top of him, flailing her arms until he caught her by the wrists. His first thought, however unbelievable, was that she was trying to gouge out his eyes. He didn’t want to test his intuition, though. She was spewing a torrent of nonsense words; it sounded like glossolalia, tongues, as if she were speaking a language she knew and not just reciting something her drug-altered mind had photographed out of a book.
Well, he would use words too. There had to be something in the Rites that would work on her. If she accepted that world-view, that language, then he must try to speak to her in it.
None of the thirty-seven rituals seemed relevant, though. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to feed her craziness by following her logic. She needed purification and then disciplined training to give her some psychic shielding. She was sensitive to a fault.
I should never have let her do that ritual. It’s my fault.
He managed to twist away. Springing to his feet, he grabbed her around the shoulders and dragged her down the hall toward the temple room. When she saw where they were going, she relaxed and allowed herself to be taken.
I should call the hospital, he thought. That’s what I should do. But they’ll just think she’s crazy, and what if they try to commit her? How am I going to make any of this sound reasonable? They’ll lock me up too. Unless they discover what drugs she took, and then they’ll probably arrest her.
Forget that.
He slammed the door, closing them in. Lenore surprised him by sitting willingly on the floor, her head slumped forward. He already had a candle burning on the altar. Now he lit another and touched the flame to a piece of self-lighting charcoal. Sparks sizzled and spat over the disk of black coal. When the whole piece glowed orange, he heaped it with chunks of frankincense and myrrh. The room filled with fragrant smoke.
From one of the drawers in the altar bureau, he took a short smudge stick made of herbs woven together like the straws in a broom; the tip was charred from prior use. He lit it from the candle flame; its smoke joined that of the incense. As he watched the smoke rise to the ceiling, he thought of Tucker Doakes. Damn him.
He passed the stick under Lenore’s nose. Her nostrils dilated but there was no other change. She didn’t cough or blink the smoke from her eyes. He began to walk widdershins around the room to dispel the influences that had taken hold of her. Back at the altar, he took a pinch of salt and let it sift down on her hair and shoulders. Salt for purification; salt to banish evil.
Evil?
He found himself staring at her forehead and thinking of what had materialized in this room the other night. Somehow he’d managed to not really consider the implications of these things. He’d conducted himself as if the things that had happened in here were a momentary delusion, a dream. Maybe, he was willing to concede, a nightmare.
But evil?
He stood before the altar with his head bowed, broken athame in his left hand, and prayed for strength.
Help me, Elias, he thought. But he could find no sense of the old man whose voice had filled his ears several minutes ago. He could feel no visiting presence. He tried not to feed his disappointment.
Instead, he imagined a hole opening in his crown, imagined cosmic power like a warm liquid heavy and thick as mercury pouring into him. When it filled him to brimming, when he could literally feel it tingling through his veins and nerves, he turned and raised the dagger over his head. Lenore’s eyes flickered with candlelight; the glow overwhelmed her eyes and ran down over her cheeks like melting wax. Tears. The spirits around her must have begun to loosen their grip.
I won’t have to call the hospital, he thought.
The mandala in the center of her brow began to glow.
He lowered the athame, aiming it right at her head, right at the throbbing emblem.
“All you uninvited, now begone!” he cried. With his words, he imagined a jet of pure power coursing down his arms and out the blade. He willed it to shatter in the air against the circular scar. He imagined the blast burning all impurities from her aura, from the room, from Cinderton—from the Earth itself. And for that single instant, he couldn’t help but think of the thing he fought as evil. In his viscera, drawing on his animal power, he needed to believe in evil for a moment, if only to strengthen his faith in his own goodness, and the necessity for what he was doing.
Carefully he visualized her sickness being blasted into countless tiny disintegrating pieces that flickered and vanished out among the far reaches of the universe.
He lowered the knife, taking a deep breath.
Lenore’s eyes were closed. She looked peaceful, at ease.
He knelt down before Lenore and kissed her on the forehead, as if making peace with the sigil emblazoned there.
“Lenore?” he said.
She opened her eyes, looking very distant, blinking around as if to see where she was. His heart leapt.
“How do you feel, hon? Everything’s all right.”
She smiled faintly and reached out to him. He started to put his arms around her—but that wasn’t what she wanted. She plucked the dagger from his fingers before he knew what she was up to, then scurried back and knelt with her back to the door.
“Lenore,” he said cautiously. “What are you doing? Put that down, okay?”
She put the athame to her throat, punched the broken tip through the thin skin a fraction of an inch, and held the blade there while little beads of blood and then a steady stream dripped down her neck.
Time seemed to slow for Michael. “Stop it! Lenore!”
He couldn’t tear his eyes from the blade, the blood, until he noticed a gentle motion in the air above her. Something stirring, stroking the atmosphere. It was so faint that he wouldn’t have recognized it if he hadn’t seen it once before, two nights ago. It was smaller now, hugging close to Lenore, its thin arms like spikes radiating from her hair, seen shimmeringly like the halo of a Byzantine saint—but blackly luminous, rather than gold.
Not all of the spikes fanned outward, though. Most of them now curved down and fed directly into her skull. It was in that moment, seeing the thing clearly, he acknowledged once and for all that the problem was not with drugs. It had not involved drugs for a while. He would have preferred drugs, in fact, because he had fought them before.
And unlike this thing, this mandala, drugs had never fought back.
14
They sat for hours in the temple room, in silent confrontation as tense as any hostage crisis. Meanwhile, the weather worsened; the storm was finally hitting Cinderton.
Rain tapped the windows almost politely at first, but he sensed a growing impatience in everything.
He wasn’t sure if he could reason with her. The mandalas spoke a different language, but somehow they had communicated with humans before—such as when they had dictated their commentary to Derek Crowe. He hoped this one would consent to understand him.
He considered it a victory when he convinced Lenore to remove the knifetip from her skin. Blood continued to run down her throat, but the trickle eventually slowed and scabbed over. She kept the knife at her throat, however, holding herself ransom. He told himself that he could see fear in her eyes, that she knew what was happening to her and was as afraid as he; but that was a desperate rationalization, and most of the time he didn’t believe it. The truth was, he couldn’t see anything he recognized in her eyes.