He got up quickly, slid his arms around her. “You’re here, with me. It’s okay.”
With her head against him, she whimpered the words, “We have to go to Derek Crowe.”
Michael sighed. “That’s impossible.”
“Please….”
“I’ll—I’ll take you to the hospital, okay?”
“The hospital? They can’t do anything!”
“You’ll be safer there than here.”
“Doctors can’t help me. I’ll die in there. They’ll kill me. They’ll do things to my brain! Please, let’s go to California.”
“How could you last that long?”
“I’d be all right just knowing we’re going for help—for real help. It’d help me be strong. There’s something here that gives them strength and takes it out of me. We’ve got to get away. Please, Michael!”
“Oh, Lenore.”
Her voice was hoarse, her eyes red-rimmed. But she put on an air of calm and sank forward until he was supporting her entire weight. She moaned against his shoulder.
“You don’t love me anymore, do you? You don’t care what happens to me. You’d let them lock me up in a hospital when you know it’s not even my fault. It’s something you did to me and you won’t take responsibility. You’re such a fucking shit!”
He sighed. It came to him then that he could win her cooperation with a small lie. But he had to make it convincing.
“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m saying this. All right. We’ll go. If it makes you feel stronger to know it, we’ll go.”
He felt her relax with a shudder. “Thank God. Thank you, Michael.”
“You just stay here for a minute. Let me help you put on these clothes. Then I’ll go warm up the car, and ask Tucker to keep an eye on the place, okay? Then we’ll pack whatever we need.”
She looked at him, grateful as a child for a small favor, and let him dress her. Once her underwear and long Johns were on, he zipped up the coat like a straitjacket, her arms trapped inside it. She leaned slightly forward, her face looking green and fatigued.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
“I can hold out.”
He went onto the front porch, down the steps, toward her car. It was black night, later than he’d realized. Sleet slashed sideways in an icy wind. It would be cruel to stuff Lenore into the VW; her car was roomy and stable; he felt safer in bad weather. He climbed inside the Cutlass and tugged the heavy door shut, but the engine refused to turn over. He tried as long as he dared, but he didn’t like leaving Lenore in the house; he could barely see lights through the trees. Anything could be happening back there.
So the Beetle won by default. He hurried back to it and the motor turned over easily. He left it purring in the drive and returned to the house, already soaking wet and freezing.
It was true that he needed to pay Tucker a visit, but not for the reason he’d told Lenore. He intended to ask him about whatever drugs he’d been supplying. When he surrendered to the doctors, he would tell them everything they needed to diagnose Lenore’s condition. Only Tucker could say what he’d been dispensing.
From Tucker’s landing, he glanced back at the yard and shivered. The porch lights cast stark shadows through the hedges and trees, making them look artificial. The scene resembled a set from a horror movie, complete with ground fog—actually exhaust from the idling car.
He peered through the plastic storm window into the kitchen. The only light came from the refrigerator, which was ajar. Tucker must be up front. He knocked loudly.
No answer. He tried the knob and it turned. Tucker didn’t usually mind if he walked right in. Opening the door, he unleashed a blast of music.
“Hey, Tuck? Tucker? It’s Michael. You home?”
He shut the door loudly behind him and pushed the fridge shut as he passed.
The doors in the hall were closed. He rapped lightly on Tucker’s bedroom door, which was directly over the temple downstairs. Hearing no answer, he went down the hall into the living room.
It was empty. All the lights were on and the stereo howled. The frozen wind had reached inside, chilling the whole house. He touched the volume knob, cranking the racket down to a bearable level, figuring this would bring Tucker out of hiding—or at least alert him to Michael’s presence.
In the comparative quiet, he grew aware of the house’s exceptional stillness. Maybe Tucker wasn’t home after all.
“Tuck? Scarlet?”
Going back down the hall, he tapped the bedroom door a bit louder than before. This time he heard a scratching sound.
He opened the door a few inches, peeking at a strip of poster-covered wall. He jumped when something brushed his ankle, but it was only Scabby, slipping out of the room. The cat padded away down the bare wood boards, leaving sticky pawprints.
“Uh-oh, Scabby’s in trouble….”
The door swung open the rest of the way.
The first thing he saw was the pattern on the wall. That drew and held his eyes, despite everything else, despite the shattered racks of ribs and torn red meat heaped on the bed below, where two figures lay twisted in the confused and broken pile of their own bones, with their flesh hanging in rags. If nothing else, the design provided a focus for his incomprehension, a welcome distraction from horror.
The pattern might have been lifted intact from The Mandala Rites, from the very frontispiece that had started all his trouble—the same living symbol that had materialized the other night in the room below this one, the same mandala he had seen tonight with its thin tubes sunk in Lenore’s skull. It was like a charcoal rubbing of the mandala, done in dark-red pigments, lacking some details but capturing its essence. The same arrangement of radial arms, that subtle double ring of dots suggesting beaded eyes. For a moment, all he could think was that Tucker Doakes had found a copy of The Mandala Rites and obsessively painted the image on his wall, blotting it indiscriminately over plaster and picture frames and the heavy metal album posters he had tacked and taped up everywhere.
But the color of the mandala matched too closely the gory mess that soaked the sheets.
The mandala must have passed through the wall after rising from the red bath of Tucker’s and Scarlet’s bodies. The plaster had acted as a sieve, separating the physical from the astral substance, leaving this pattern behind.
He couldn’t keep from theorizing; the intensity of his intellectual activity sheltered him from a purely emotional response. This was a horrific problem, yes, but if one applied a disciplined and open mind to its solution, as the doctors surely would when he explained how all of this related to Lenore’s condition, then…
Then…
All thought of science fled. All his illusions about the help he might find in a hospital were instantly destroyed. Now only flight seemed a reasonable solution.
Lenore was right. He had lied to her about where they were going; but now it turned out he’d been telling the truth.
Outside, a horn began to blare.
He stumbled out of the room, not wanting to be found there, seeing a dozen good reasons to plead ignorance of events in Tucker Doakes’s house. In the dark kitchen, he nearly tripped over Scabby. The cat. He snatched her up unthinkingly, wanting only to shield all living beings from the carnage in the other room; too late, he found that Scabby’s fur was matted with stinking gore. By now he was outside, and he could hardly throw the cat into the sleet. From the landing, as wind slapped rain into his face and Scabby kicked to get free, he saw his mother’s car pulling partway into the driveway, coming up at such an angle that it slammed into a hedge and stalled there. He hurried down the steps, forced to go straight through her headlights, hoping that her windshield was sufficiently blurred to hide him from her no doubt blurrier vision. He ran to the back of the house and went in through the utility porch. He couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. Which was good. With everything to juggle, he needn’t keep wondering exactly what had happened upstairs.