He even considered dragging the body toward the stone wall, pushing it over the verge, but that would have helped nothing. He might be seen. As it was, no cars had yet passed to witness any of this. He hoped the agent hadn’t called in the Beetle’s license number before making the stop. But he couldn’t control that; he could only keep moving. The mandalas had made sure he was free to do that much and no more.name
He twisted the key, stamped on the gas. The engine roared and they fled. He looked back once, before rounding a bend, and saw what looked like a discarded business suit crumpled in the road, waiting to be found. Then a veil of rock hid it from view.
Soon after, the vapors parted and the sun streamed brightly down upon them, glittering merrily on the ice-lined walls of the mountain pass, melting the ice-slick from the road, singing on the waters of all the little falls they passed, as if the sight of these things could somehow brighten his heart.
Cheer up, all nature seemed to say. The way is clear. You kids are off to a great start!
23
Lenore woke with a crick in her neck, mouth dry and pasty. She tried to stretch but found it impossible in the cramped backseat with all their luggage. They were winding through traffic, the radio flickering in and out as they drove through a freeway underpass and then up again among city buildings. The tune clamoring out of the tinny little speaker, almost unrecognizable, was Sonic Youth’s “Satan Is Boring.” Michael had found a college radio station. At first she thought they must be in Knoxville, but then a huge billboard flew past, advertising a used car lot in Nashville. She sat up quickly. Scabby perched on the seatback and meowed at her.
Michael spied her in the rearview mirror. “Hey. You feeling any better?”
“I feel like shit,” she said. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t remember,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
As far as she recalled, she’d been sleeping since they left Cinderton. She was ravenous.
“Are we gonna eat?” she asked. “There’s a McDonald’s up there—you see it?”
He changed lanes, gliding toward the off ramp. His eyes looked bloodshot. “Caffeine,” he croaked.
“What don’t I remember?”
“The narc.”
“What narc?”
“Forget it.”
While Michael waited in line to order, Lenore went into the bathroom to wash her face. Looking into the mirror, she saw the little mandala printed on her forehead. It was like a porthole, a window swinging open on another world. A thin dark light poured out of the symbol. Most of the light shone backward into her skull, burning out all the stagnation, hesitation, and pockets of decay that had formed in her mind while she slept.
The metal stalls began to waver. The ceiling darkened to a shade of stained stone, the fluorescents took on a bruised, purplish hue. She felt a sudden terror of meeting her own eyes.
She had forgotten this part—forgotten how the world could melt and run if you looked at it the right way. When it happened in her house it was one thing, but this place was alien. She wanted to run, but everything was too strange, and the car was out somewhere in the foreign landscape. She could get lost between here and there. Instead she retreated to a stall, trying not to notice how the metal door hung at such an impossible angle that it didn’t swing straight, but folded into itself like a four-dimensional solid rotating through three dimensions, never quite all there. The toilet was even worse: It slopped and surged, blackish-green slime working like a noxious tongue down in the stained throat. She turned away and leaned against the wall, her eyes inches from a tangle of incomprehensible graffiti, crude mandalas done in Magic Marker; the text of the Thirty-Seventh Key ran down to toilet paper dispensers that gave out pads of waxy sandpaper. She had to shut her eyes not to begin pronouncing the words herself.
At that moment, she heard the rest room door scream open, and then voices: a woman’s, a child’s. The room sank into a darker light as the toilets gurgled and cooed; Lenore’s mind began to dip into unconsciousness, retreating from the harsh new presence.
No, she thought. I want to see everything, remember everything. No more blackouts.
Her mandala must have responded to her sincerity, since the encroaching haze was suddenly blown away. She felt her mind expanding with crystal clarity. Her consciousness hovered somewhere over her body; she hung below the ceiling like a helium balloon, looking down on the open area of the restroom. An enormous woman stood there, foreshortened before the mirror that was now a black window and not a mirror at all; she clutched by the hand a small girl who was screaming and crying and trying to tear her arm away. As Lenore gazed down, the woman slapped the child across the face. The girl fell still, hunching away and backing into a corner between the sinks and the wall. The woman massaged her hand then chased the child into the narrow corner, taking a handful of her hair and wrenching her out into the middle of the floor. The toilets groaned and vomited their contents on the slime-caked tiles. Bloody shit began to flow up the walls. The girl tried to scream again, but the woman clapped her in the mouth and slammed her head against the edge of the sink, catching her by the forearm when she would have slumped.
Lenore was not alone. Two mandalas blistered through the ceiling, drawn in by the spectacle.
The fat woman glanced up for a second, her eyes red, her face aboil with pus, flesh and fat slithering from cheek and jaw. She seemed to be smiling at the mandalas, but Lenore knew she couldn’t actually see them. Her attention went back to the girl, now more like a charred monkey dragged along unresisting. The mandalas bobbed lower, wheels of grainy flame. One flailed the mother with tendrils like bullwhips coated with broken glass and razors, goading her on like a horseman whipping its broken mount to impossible feats. The other hung above the child and peeled back filmy lips from a myriad pores that perforated the pulsating disc of its body. Each pore or mouth was a gate into another world, and as they opened Lenore could hear screams from somewhere within that realm the color of a stomach. As it lowered toward the shriveling girl, it began to siphon off a thin mist like smoke or steam that curled wispily from her soul, an aroma of agony visible to Lenore, who could no longer look away or forget or ignore anything. The girl was left with a little less juice, and the mandala looked quite a bit fatter. From the shriveled look of the child, this had been going on for quite a while. Once the one had fed from the girl, the other wrapped itself around the mother and caught at the streaming ribbony flecks of astral tissue, like bloody chunks of soul, that had torn free with every act of violence and now hung around the woman’s head waiting to be harvested by her keeper. The mandalas kept the humans like a couple of prize milk cows, like ants tending aphids.
Lenore jarred back into her body. The cold metal walls of the stall clanged in around her, drab and unmarked, the toilet paper hanging in limp strands, the porcelain bowl sparkling, all its chrome recently polished. Thinking herself safe, she opened the door and stepped out.
The mother stood there, running water, holding her daughter to the sink. The woman’s face was restored; the girl looked small but not withered; she startled at the sight of Lenore, but otherwise showed no particular signs of suffering. The woman was scooping water into the girl’s face, and now she reached for paper towels to dry her daughter’s mouth; but Lenore’s appearance slowed and distracted her. They both stared at Lenore, openly disgusted by her black clothes, her streaky dyed hair, all of which Lenore could see in the mirror behind them. When the woman’s eyes went to the symbol on her forehead, she jerked her daughter away, but her lips were moving and Lenore could hear her muttered obeisances. She ducked and bowed, as if humbling herself before a priestess of her religion. Lenore scraped past them toward the door. It took a conscious effort to continue seeing them as humans, especially when their auras gave off a brittle electric buzz accompanied by the stench of rot and burning hair.