Lenore hurried out to the car, afraid to sit where she would have to look at people. Michael returned with a tall cup and a paper bag stuffed full. She unwrapped an Egg McMuffin, but when she saw what it had turned into she set it on the floor for Scabby.
“I saw…” she started to say. “In the rest room just now….”
“What?” He washed down his eggs with a huge swallow of Coke.
“A woman beating her child.”
“I think I saw them. The little snot was making a scene in there; she wanted a milkshake for breakfast. I’d have paddled her too.”
“She was really beating her. I thought she was going to kill her.”
“What? I doubt she would beat her in a McDonald’s.”
“They were in the bathroom. They didn’t know I could see them.”
“Maybe you—maybe you were seeing things, Lenore. You know what I mean? I saw them come out of there, and the girl was quiet, but she didn’t look abused.”
Lenore couldn’t answer, because she wasn’t sure what she’d seen. She’d seen two things: the scene of torture, and then the pair facing her, looking superficially unharmed. She wondered which was real and then realized that both were. The first scene, the one she’d witnessed from above, had been a mental projection, something running parallel to the physical world; she had seen what the mother wished to do in that moment; she had seen the fulfillment of repressed anger; and she had also seen its effect on the child. The attacker’s vicious thoughts, in that realm, took a tangible toll from their victim. It was in this way that the mandalas fed and worked their magic. And since so much of what was thought and dreamed and accomplished in that realm worked its way eventually into the physical plane, the mandalas had established a solid foundation here as well.
“You think you’re okay to drive?” Michael asked suddenly.
“Me? Drive?”
“I don’t know if I can make it all the way to California, Lenore. I mean, if we’re gonna get there in a hurry and all, you should help out. If you’re, you know, lucid.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m perfectly… lucid.”
Even as she said it, the car shifted slightly, becoming something other than she had realized. Usually cars gave her a feeling of security, of speed, all that protective metal pushing them on. But now she had an unwelcome vision of the Beetle as a little death trap. It only waited the right opportunity to buckle and crush inward, trapping the soft things (them) in hard jagged pinchers of torn steel.
No, that’s not real, she told herself. I can see through to reality—I can see clearly enough to drive.
“I’ll take over,” she said. “For a while.”
“Great. I could use some sleep. You let me know if you start to feel funny, all right?”
“Sure.”
But she could not tell him that by the time she climbed into the driver’s seat, the parking lot itself had changed. She caught a glimpse of her guardian in the rearview mirror, black and whirling about her crown. Well, if you can’t keep me from getting in an accident, what good are you?
The thought stung; her head seemed to clog with black bitter smoke. Then it cleared and she saw the landscape with perfect clarity, as if it were an extension of herself, as if she were inhabiting a map. The trees were arranged in intricate symmetry; the clouds had been laid upon the sky and set into deliberate motion. Everything funneled together as in a perspective drawing, pulling her eyes westward. She felt like a god at the wheel….
This is going to be easy.
Then she twisted the key and the car moaned to life, sounding like something resurrected to torment. It screamed when she trod on the pedal, as if the small explosions of gas in its guts were unbearable.
Where McDonald’s had been she now saw a squat, smoldering box like a black concrete bunker with nervous death camp faces peering out from glassless slits in the sides.
The car lurched forward and the ground squirmed away underneath. There was only one road, leading in only one direction, covered with endless rows of flexible dagger caltrops like tastebuds on a demon’s tongue that bowed as she drove over them, and sprang back instantly to prevent her from retreating. If she hesitated even a moment, the road-tongue would curl up like a chameleon’s and suck them back into that black bunker, shrouded in the smell of carrion charred and raw.
Ignoring the car’s apparent agony, she sped toward higher ground.
24
Michael stopped for coffee, Coke, and gasoline, never for sleep. He knew he would need it eventually, but he held off as long as he could.
Letting Lenore drive again was out of the question.
He had tried that for a while; been lulled into dozing; and then awoke, somewhere east of Memphis, just as the car veered off the road toward a slough. He grabbed the wheel from Lenore, who was babbling about stones—singing stones with bloody hearts—and how the clouds were blood and blood rained down everywhere. He barely managed to get back onto the road.
Never again.
“Leave the driving to me, Lenore.”
He had shouldered the responsibility for the entire trip.
Of course, he was just as likely to get them into an accident as Lenore had been—though his reasons were more mundane.
Late at night, the oncoming headlights became a torment, jabbing his eyes like bits of broken glass. They drifted past endless oases of light in the dark of the landscape—gas stations, motels, Western Sizzlin’s. The thought of rest was torture. His eyelids grew heavier, heavier. The sound of the engine was a constant reassurance, lulling him to sleep… sleep….
He swerved onto the shoulder, crashed through a litter of bottles and cans, braked to a halt just short of a road sign showing the distance to Oklahoma City.
“I’ve gotta sleep, Lenore,” he said. “Just a little while, okay?”
She didn’t answer. With her head slumped against the window and her eyes closed, she appeared to be sleeping herself. He couldn’t be quite sure of what that meant in her state.
The overhead light was burned out, but anyway there were no pertinent maps in the car. He couldn’t see his wristwatch. Time didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he find a rest area before he crashed. They seemed to be spaced about every sixty miles, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one. That was probably a good sign; it meant one should be coming up soon, unless he had spaced out and passed it without noticing.
He found it ten miles later and came cruising in past rows of station wagons, family cars, people walking their dogs and stretching under floodlights where a few insects circled in the chill. As soon as he shut off the engine, the cold crept in to exert its claim on everything that dared to cross the plains this time of year. He draped himself and Lenore with blankets, then sank down in his seat and tried to get comfortable enough to sleep.
Comfort, it turned out, made no difference to his exhaustion. He was dreaming within minutes. He stirred once, hearing Lenore’s door slam, but didn’t wake. Her footsteps trailed off in the direction of the rest rooms.
His dreams were a surrealist’s collage of the day’s drive. Faces rushed toward him like pieces of the landscape, streaking around his eyes like the edges of the road. The tires squealed on sharp curves, the car rocked from side to side. His eyes began to burn—literally. Flames filled them, singeing his brain; flames lit the whole world, a ghastly orange scene of smoke and screaming and always the language of The Mandala Rites babbling at him, in Lenore’s voice, in his mother’s. Derek Crowe appeared in a state trooper’s uniform, tearing the door from its hinges, and as he dragged Michael from the car with metal fingers, his features dissolved into bloodred steam.