26
Purple twilight drenched the cloud-feathered New Mexico sky, pooling in snowmelt that puddled a muddy rest stop edged with barrows of dirty ice. Lenore sat in the car, watching the rest rooms. They had bought Mexican take-out that afternoon, and Michael began complaining of stomach cramps immediately after eating. They had stopped at every rest area since then. She knew he didn’t like bringing her around other people, but this time he had no choice. At least theirs was the only car in the parking lot.
Scabby started scratching at the glass, climbing over the seat-back, yowling. She looked at the cat and saw distress. It occurred to her that Michael had shared his taco with Scabby.
“Thanks for the warning,” she said, and dug their makeshift leash out of the glove box. She tied the length of clothesline to Scabby’s flea collar, then opened her door and got out, burrowing into her coat against the cold desert wind. Scabby ran ahead of her, darting a few steps, sniffing around a puddle, raising her head to taste the wind, then darting on another few yards.
At the far end of the rest area was a livestock corral, as in every rest area they’d visited recently. Michael joked about Texans getting out to walk their cattle, but they couldn’t imagine what else the corrals were for. The wooden boards ran in black lines against the thinning orange band where the sun had set. Scabby tugged Lenore toward the corral. The fenceposts were topped with bright little caps of snow, luminous in this light; the black mud within was trampled and churned.
Lenore tried climbing to the top of the fence, but the leash slipped from her fingers and Scabby scraped under the boards into the corral itself, as into a mucky moonscape. She swore, then jumped down inside after the cat. Her sneakers squelched into mud, trapped, but she didn’t have to hurry. After sniffing at a soggy cowpie, Scabby went into a squat. Lenore snatched up the end of the leash, then went back to the fence, careful to leave plenty of slack so the poor cat wouldn’t get pulled off balance while she poised on her haunches, tail quivering.
As Lenore leaned against the fence rails, looking through the slats, she saw a blue compact car driving slowly down the length of the parking area, headlights extinguished. It glided past the last parking space, turning onto a small length of access road that led right up to the corral. The violet clouds melting into darkness overhead suddenly sprouted fangs and talons, leaning over her warningly as the wood beneath her fingers hardened and sharpened into a thousand jagged, splintered knives. Lenore pressed closer to the fence, taking the warning personally.
She knelt down, reeling in Scabby before the cat could begin piling mud over its turds. The car came to a stop near a big Dumpster, halfway between the parking lot and the corral. A tall, broad-shouldered man got out, seeming bigger than the tiny compartment could have held. In the poor light she could see nothing but his shape. His face was a black blur; his whole head seemed to be wrapped in a caul, soft and shifting, clinging to him like a plastic bag. He moved furtively to the back of the car. Headlights streamed behind him on the highway; his figure seemed to bend and throw the light, like a smoky prism. That smooth head rotated like a camera on an oiled bearing, scanning the parking lot. Lenore held her breath as the cold monitor swept its gaze over the corral, even though she knew she was no more than a shadow among many others. With the black eastern sky behind her, she was all but invisible.
Satisfied that he was alone, the man moved to the rear of the car. The trunk flew up, hiding him. He reappeared carrying two parcels in Mack plastic trash bags. Lenore knew instantly what was in them. She could see exactly how he had wrapped the dismembered parts individually in Sa ran Wrap, then bundled them together and wrapped the bundles again in plastic wound in silver duct tape, then sealed those larger bundles into the trash bags. There were more bags in the trunk. She could smell the blood—smell it in the car, from this and prior trips; she could smell it also on his breath and oozing from his
He trudged straight toward the Dumpster. Reaching ft. he momentarily shifted both bags to one hand and shoved at the cover. She could see him straining, could see the moment he realized it was locked. He cursed and moved back, stood midway between the Dumpster and the car, tense, seeming to darken to a deeper shade of black as the last of the light leached from the sky and the clouds went gray.
Scabby took that moment to dart from the corral the muddy leash slipping through Lenore’s fingers.
She crouched lower, but the cats movement caught the man’s eye. He hurried back to the car, threw the parcels into the trunk, and slammed the hood shut. Then he waited as Scabby came padding toward him. He wasn’t looking at the cat. though: he was staring at the corral.
Lenore saw the black swirl of face condensing around two whirlpools of ink where his eves must have been. They seemed to invert, thrusting out like a snail’s eyes, roving over the seal of dark-against-dark where the fence lay against the night and Lenore huddled within the wooden grid, the only thing that wasn’t utterly rigid and angular. The tarry eyestalks quivered, while in the lower half of the blank face a pit formed slowly, like Mack plastic drawn into a suffocating mouth.
Scabby crouched at the man’s feet, meowing loudly. The man stepped over the calico, taking a few steps toward the corral. He was corning for Lenore now.
Lenore shut her eyes, wanting to escape, to block this out—but she had already made her deal with the mandala. She would see everything; no more blackouts.
Once more she sprang upward, liberated into the sky. She seemed to be hovering just above the fence. She could see the man ahead of her, his features clearer than before, although still hidden inside the murky sac that enclosed his head. This bag now detached itself and came drifting toward her, flattening, spinning, spreading out as it came; it dragged itself along with barely visible filaments, like a crippled jellyfish groping its way among enormous molecules. The man dragged along after it, his ears cocked for the sound of Lenore’s breath; she wondered if he could smell her, as she smelled him.
The man’s mandala stopped and extended itself completely, blazing with darkness against the black nest of the sky. It glowed and flickered with internal colors, as if expressing itself through coded pulses of light; but Lenore wasted no time decipering the message. Her mandala flung itself at its opponent, and as they joined, the man himself stumbled and dropped to one knee.
Lenore felt as if she were riding a vicious steed into battle. She sat apart from the fight, but only by the thinnest of margins. Slashing barbs and irising teeth fought slime and rippling tissue that tensed and purled like infinitely elastic muscle, a liquid form that escaped any possible grip, healing instantly wherever it was cut, so that it could no more be wounded than water. Lenore found herself observing the struggle with something like love for her protector. She had never felt so completely cared for. This was well, for at that moment she could not have moved her body, no more than the man who knelt staring hungrily at her, oblivious to the battle overhead, wanting to reach Lenore but finding his strength and will had abandoned him for no reason he could understand.
Just then there was an explosive, sucking roar from the rest rooms. The man jerked upright, looking over at the building, then back at Lenore. He got to his feet and staggered toward the car, wrenching his mandala away from Lenore’s, the puppet pulling its master along for once. Human fear had resolved the struggle.
He threw himself into the car, slammed the door, and backed out in a slather of mud. Lenore saw the smoky blob of his mandala sinking through the roof of the car, rejoining him. Her own mandala had not given up, however. It threw itself onto the roof and lashed down sharply several times as the vehicle wove away. Lenore could feel it striking into softness within and grabbing at something hard as a polished bone knob, unprotected in the core of a quivering warm blur. It took control of the man as easily as that; and while the other mandala swarmed up and over it—over her—it could find no weakness, no opening by which it could reclaim its pet.