The car sped straight across the highway, jounced violently over the dividing barrier of brushy mud, and swerved into the opposite lane. As the car screeched out into traffic, its headlights were still doused; but it was well lit by the oncoming truck that plowed into it.
The collision surrounded Lenore. She could not quite manage to put herself entirely back into her eyes, which peered blankly through the fence rails. Instead, with a ravenous hunger she hardly recognized, she found herself caught in the crash as the car went twisting and crumpling under the truck’s enormous cab, as the truck careened out of control across both lanes and went off into gravel and ice at the side of the road, shoving the car ahead of it, scraping sparks and trailing smoke, the screams of so many voices dividing up her attention as the cars behind the truck drove into its trailer, which had swung out ahead of them like a sudden wall, metal collapsing into metal, flesh squeezed somewhere in the middle. A dozen souls popped free, desperate and scattered in their shock and agony, and Lenore was there as her mandala swooped down like a bat catching moths, like a bird dipping over a lake at twilight to catch low-flitting insects, nipping a bit of horror here, and there a taste of shock and disbelief, love lost, my children, no this isn’t happening, everything undone… It was the terrible surprise that gave everything its sharpest, most addictive flavor, its intensity, so strong and nourishing that some of it flooded straight through the mandala into Lenore, jolting her all the way back into her body.
She threw herself over the wooden barrier as Michael came running from the rest room, hitching at his pants. The cars and truck had come to rest across the highway, and in the dark it was hard to see more than a tangled heap of smoking shapes, a lick of hidden flame here and there to suggest the horror of the wreck in bright glimpses of bare steel and blood-slicked glass.
Lenore caught Michael by the arm and pulled him toward the Beetle.
“What happened?” he was saying. “What happened?”
“Get going, Michael, please—let’s just get out of here!”
“Someone could be hurt. We should call—”
“Someone else will call. Other people have car phones. Just go!”
She didn’t relax until the flames, growing higher behind them, had faded into distance on the long straight highway.
Soon they passed the first of the ambulances heading east.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Michael said. “Did it have something to do with… with them?”
“No, Michael. It was just an accident. I didn’t see a thing until it was happening. I don’t want to talk about it.”
He doubted her, she knew. It was an awkward lie. But he would have been equally skeptical of the truth.
A hundred miles later, he finally dared to speak again. He looked in the back of the car, then over at her, eyes wide, in a panic. “Where’s Scabby?”
27
On his way out of the building, Derek stopped to check his mail. The foyer reeked of piss; he had found a derelict sleeping in it the night before, and now the carpet squelched underfoot. He had to wrestle with the battered mailbox to get his compartment open; most of the doors had been bent out of shape by check-pilferers, and his was one of the few that even locked. Inside was a wad of junk mail, which he deposited in the paper-recycling bin conveniently located beside the mailboxes. The only other item was a postcard, which he glanced at curiously, since it was hand-lettered and he didn’t recognize the writing. Of course, once he saw the signature he knew who it was:
Dear Mr. Crowe:
This card is your complimentary pass for the grand opening of Club Mandala. Please come as our guest—and bring as many as you like! February 6—the 37th day of the year! Present this card at the door—or better yet, come with us!
The face of the card showed a strikingly done mandala, and elegant lettering: Club Mandala (& Gallery 37). He could see now that these were not exactly his designs. The images in his book and those Etienne and Nina used in their posters were similar but not identical; they represented the work of different artists portraying the same subjects, and there were slight but appreciable differences in the renditions.
He felt relaxed today, absolved of a tremendous weight. Entering an ambush where he had expected to meet only enemies, he had emerged with two new friends—allies, in fact, who might well help him push his book into realms of actual profitability.
Etienne’s beliefs, of course, were as mad as Elias Mooney’s, but he seemed to have sound business sense. He was the sort who could make a career of madness—not to mention a fortune.
Derek tucked the card into his pocket, considering it a pleasant coincidence, since he was even now on his way to inspect the club.
The waiting taxi carried him across Market Street, through the brisk mix of scavengers, tourists, and workers who made the downtown district simultaneously so exciting and depressing. The new office towers fell behind, and older commercial buildings rolled past. The cab pulled up in a region of dense shadow, and he had paid and stepped out before he realized why it was so dark down here.
The belly of a freeway hung above him, gray and ponderous, with no sound of cars clacking down from above. It was a section of the interstate, closed off since the last earthquake, awaiting either retrofitting or demolition. Derek hardly grasped the reason for his apprehension, the sudden chill and sense of suffocation. On an ivy-covered bank above the street, close to one of the huge concrete pylons, were a cluster of cardboard houses and ragged blankets; but these barely snagged his eye, for on the pylon itself someone had stenciled an immense mandala, one of the thirty-seven. He spun around, bereft of bearings, and homed in on a grubby brick warehouse that stood beside the freeway, unremarkable except for the elaborate neon sign (dark now) above its door, the tubes of brightly powdered glass forming intricate wheels whose glowing splendor in full darkness he could only begin to imagine. Between two such pale mandalas, awaiting only electricity to come alive, were the words “Club Mandala” in a script like cursive writ in glass; the letters looked almost hieroglyphic.
He rang the bell beside the door but heard nothing. Once more he glanced up at the overpass, noticing another mandala impossibly stenciled on the underside. They were on the street and sidewalk as well, etched in cement like celebrity footprints. Before he could begin to count them, Nina said, “You made it! We were afraid we’d scared you off.”
“Now, what could scare Mr. Crowe?” said Etienne, coming up behind her. They opened the door wide, into a shadowy vastness, and Derek entered between them. Nina slid her arm into his, and he thought of Lilith, thankful he had all this to distract him from what otherwise would have been days of gloom and obsession.
“I got your invitation this morning,” Derek said. “It came quicker than I’d expected.”
“Oh, we mailed it before we met you—we were sure you’d come. Now, the tour!”
The warehouse was divided into a number of rooms on the ground floor. The central room, a dance hall, was two stories tall, with lofts and balconies edging it; there were a number of other smaller chambers on the ground floor, and stairs running up and down. Each wall in the main room was embellished with an immense mandala, smaller mandalas of varying sizes arranged in overlapping orbits around them. He was reminded of the tattooed skin, similarly crowded. A few painters were up on ladders, putting finishing touches on the mandalas. In the center of the dance floor was the largest of all the wheels, the one that figured last in his book and also served as frontispiece, with its central circle of lamprey teeth and its outer ring of speckled eyes. They took a wide path around it, since it was still incomplete; several women were on their knees, painting in the sketched tendrils. The thing was coming to life even as he watched.