“But I was speaking of the mandalas, whose imprints mark that skin. I suspect they are organisms, or something like organisms. Archetypes of decay. There are surprisingly few of them, only thirty-seven, but each I think is a template from which an infinite number can be struck—an astral chromosome, if you will. Thirty-seven ideal forms. They seem like diatoms, single-celled, unified of purpose; yet they are conscious and quite deliberate, far more manipulative than any protozoan whipping particles of food into its mouth, though that’s all we seem to be to them. Our souls are their food, the human race their hunting ground, and they breed in our souls like maggots in carrion, giving birth to flies. As I’m sure you know, our thoughts have an independent existence; thought-forms persist in a realm alongside our own, touching it everywhere. It is here that the mandalas scavenge, and to that extent they are dependent on us. But they have a greater reality than our mere thoughts.
“Sometimes the fact of their existence makes me despise the whole cosmos. Things that once struck me as beautiful now fill me with fear by implication, for the same geometries that gave rise to beauty also bore these creatures. I hate them with a fury too great for my body to contain. Thinking of them, I feel my flesh bloating; my skin begins to stretch and crack, my blood burns hot and smoke pours from my throat. But that’s bad; it does their work for them; it harms only me. I dig my grave that much deeper when I give in to rage.
“Perhaps I could have regarded them calmly once, objectively, like a scientist, but not after the loss of Evangeline. I was responsible for her death, but they are the ones who killed her. They did it. I won’t take the blame, or feed my own guilt. They’d like me to. It would rot me from the inside, and they would feed….
“I first encountered them exactly as you did tonight, and with about the same degree of horror—although I had a better idea of what to expect. I’d been warned by letter, though a description of the things can never quite foreshadow what you feel when you see them. There is something in us that fears and is fascinated by them, something that shies away instinctively even as it’s hypnotized into staring. Just as the sight of a Buddhist mandala may cause tranquility, enjoining one to embark on the quest for enlightenment, so sight of these fiendish wheels gives us glimpses of the hells that await us. They are like thirty-seven windows into other worlds—or thirty-seven other ways of looking at this one. They are alive but also symbols—symbols that draw us into darkness as we contemplate them. The difference is that they are alive, you see, while the mandalas of Buddhism, for instance, are merely pictures to be conjured in our minds. Even calling them mandalas is a misnomer, a kind of blasphemy, for that word means ‘sacred circle,’ and these are only sacred to evil. Perhaps there are benevolent living mandalas as well—the opposite of these. If such exist, I have never encountered them. They must be quite rare. These are plentiful as maggots in a war zone.
“But I was speaking of the skin.
“It arrived through the mails, which I had no real reason to mistrust in those days—days not long past, I might add. The package came from a Japanese acquaintance, a professor with a keen interest in curiosities. He had it from a pathologist, a doctor who kept a professional collection of tattooed human skins, having perfected a method of preserving them intact. Apparently the skin had come to this doctor from somewhere in Southeast Asia; my correspondent was unclear on that point. He suspected Cambodia, and hinted of a secret cult with allegiance to Pol Pot, but that was speculation based on rumor. The truth was, something unsettled even the pathologist, who had been pleased at first to add the skin to his collection. After studying it in detail, he concluded that the circular marks had not been made by any known tattooing process. No pigment had been inserted beneath the dermis. The coloration was caused by chemical changes in the skin itself, and the ornate scarring was the result of molecular changes in the cells. The cause was never ascertained, nor those new molecular compounds identified, but I understand they bear some similarity to certain organic psychoactive drugs, suggesting that whoever bore these emblems may well have been experiencing the world in an altered light.
“All this should have intrigued the pathologist, but it only frightened him. He began receiving requests from strangers to visit his museum of skins—strangers who bore similar mandalas tattooed on their foreheads or arms. Of course he denied them permission; his was a collection for professionals and academicians only. Then the museum was burglarized, ransacked, although nothing was taken. He had loaned the skin to my friend by that time, hoping that with his knowledge of various sects, he might be able to identify the process by which the marks had come to be branded—if not the origins of the symbols themselves. After the burglary, he asked my friend to hold onto the hide indefinitely, and with time he made arrangements to totally surrender it. I gather he was troubled by bad dreams… visitations.
“Now my Japanese friend had mentioned some of these events to me as they occurred, hoping that I might be able to satisfy both our curiosities; and once it was his, he shipped it on to me. I had never seen anything like it; nor did I particularly wish to learn more of it. Had I been able to return it, I would have, but further letters to Japan were returned unopened. I learned later that my friend had disappeared completely.
“So the skin was mine.
“Evangeline, as I said, had no experience with the things that most occupied my mind, but she was willing to assist me in whatever way she could. I asked her help in a ritual to neutralize or contain the power I sensed in the skin. I wished to burn it but feared that doing so would release whatever energy was bound up in the tattoos. I had to banish that first. I included Evangeline in my rite as an innocent, a touchstone. I felt her purity would be protective. I didn’t explain what I was doing; I had never shown her the skin, since I knew how she would react to having it in her house. I could not bear to frighten her. So I wrapped it in a cloth and set it on my altar, and that was all she saw of it.
“At first everything went as I planned. At the height of the ceremony, Evangeline’s aura lit the room. But then her soul-light began to flicker and pulsate, and the candles dimmed. I realized that her radiance had drawn an intruder from the dark. It circled her like a moth, brushing my face with a cold wind… not touching her, but only circling, circling, spiraling closer, casting a shadow between us until everything began to strobe. In the dark intervals I could almost see a shape like a cloudy glass bell, or a jellyfish, or a translucent flower with drooping luminous petals; then it covered her completely. I tried to find an opening, to push through the thing, but a sense of euphoria began to grow in me, and I realized too late that I was about to have a seizure.