“Wow” was about all Derek could think to say. Nina pulled him tighter, beaming with pleasure.
They toured the adjacent rooms on the ground floor, where the walls were hung with framed fine-art versions of the mandalas. They looked too symmetrical to have been done by hand; peering close he could see no ink marks.
“Are these prints?” he asked.
“An artist friend of ours does them on computer—he’s the one who sneaked that little program into your system, I’m afraid.”
Derek shrugged. “No harm done. It’s nice work.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said so. He’ll be at the opening—you two can meet. He is also, you see, one of us.”
One of “us,” Derek thought. He had come farther down this path than he cared to consider; his relationship with Etienne and Nina was dependent to a certain extent on continued deception, at least as to his own beliefs.
They made their way upstairs, through a connected series of smaller rooms; mandala prints were centered on every wall. Mandalas dotted the floors like the tracks of some strange beast. Everywhere they went, assistants were mounting lights or putting finishing touches on the hand-painted mandalas. A number of them wore mandala tattoos, but apparently these were in reference to the club alone, and not to his book, for when Nina introduced Derek, his name meant nothing to them.
“We’ve ordered copies of The Mandala Rites,” Etienne reassured him. “If we can borrow you for a little while, we’ll have you sign a few during the party.”
“Yes, and we’re recording all the keys,” said Nina. “They’ll be playing all night, right along with the music.”
“It will be wild!” said Etienne. “And think of all the drugs! Many very receptive minds… the total effect will be incredible. We have also commissioned a number of mandala paintings from local artists. They should be arriving very soon.”
“And Nicholas Strete tells me his article will be in tomorrow’s edition—just in time for the opening!”
“Everything’s coming together,” Etienne said gleefully, rubbing his palms briskly together. At that moment they were passing a window on a level with the raised freeway; little could be seen outside except the gray concrete slab, but there was a gap visible just below the freeway, through which one could barely see the street.
“Speaking of which,” Etienne said, pausing to point down at the pavement, “I saw our friend Chhith—or should I say Huon?—sometime in the night, just down there.”
“Did you?” Derek said nervously.
“He must be very curious.”
“He must be very angry,” Nina said, “to see his precious mandalas let loose like this—given out so freely to everyone.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll come around,” said Etienne.
“I’m sorry I gave him your name,” Derek said.
“Don’t worry about that. I’m glad to see him, actually. He belongs with us. Only his role may not be quite what he expects.”
“Etienne!” A fellow with a long ponytail and shaved temples was coming down the corridor. “We’re having a problem with the sound.”
“Excuse us a moment, Derek,” Etienne said. “Feel free to explore.”
They left him at the window, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering, voices echoing through the building where everything seemed bright and new and happy, and anticipation was almost a tangible substance.
Derek had a sense, then, of the mandalas as a budding cottage industry. What would Elias Mooney think of this? At least he couldn’t have blamed it on Derek, which was some comfort. The mandalas would have surfaced anyway, with or without The Mandala Rites. In fact, he supposed his book would have a negligible impact on the public, compared to the exposure the mandalas were about to get at Club Mandala.
What he had done with Eli’s notebooks was only a minor mischief.
And he had never actually sworn to burn them, had he? He’d tried countless times to remember exactly what he’d said to Elias on their final night together, but the act of remembering seemed to push things around in his head and alter the memories themselves. He was reasonably sure he hadn’t promised anything. What the hell. No harm was done, in the end.
It was time to put away his guilt. Swallow his sins and get over it. He was torturing himself, which was pointless.
Except, of course, as Lilith had shown him, he was a bit of a masochist—a martyr without a cause. She loved to point out the pleasure he took from writhing in the hair shirt of his occult hypocrisy, writing books for the praise of people he considered imbeciles. What could be more masochistic than that? By comparison, her candlewax drippings and needle-pricks and plier squeezes were gentle teases, a child’s game. It little pleased him to realize he had now created for himself a world based entirely on this masochism. He was in league with fools and madmen who had been taken in by their own con; by coincidence, it was his con as well. Derek was apparently the only one still undeceived.
If he had been a superstitious man, if he really had been convinced by Elias, he never would have published the Rites. But by doing so, he had proven to himself that Eli’s ranting was nothing but nonsense. The old man was a fool, and everything he thought he’d seen in Eli’s house was a ludicrous dream. He had deserted the so-called shaman not out of fear, not because he dreaded some false cathartic confrontation with his “Shadow,” but because flight had been the only sure way of preserving his sanity.
Once Bob Maltzman had expressed interest in the mandala notebooks, Derek had found himself unable to present them without revision. The old man’s basic view of reality was too bleak and strange for mass consumption. He had altered the text of the ledgers not as a precaution against invoking evil, but simply to enlarge his audience and put some of his own work into the final book, so that he wouldn’t feel he was simply plagiarizing. It gave him an odd feeling of power to revise Eli’s universe in this fashion. By couching the incantations in New Age terms, borrowing phrases and attitudes from other popular books, he had transformed the Rites from something dark and unholy into a message of spiritual hope for an optimistic but easily frightened readership.
The gibberish of the rites themselves he had left untouched. What difference did that make?
Derek acknowledged the presence of a tiny part of himself that remained infected with Eli’s madness. He hated and resented this irrational mote; it was childish, naive, and potentially dangerous, should it ever mushroom out of control. This region of his psyche had never climbed out of pure animal suffering, onto the lofty intellectual plateau where pain and its causes could be analyzed. This mad, fearful, superstitious part of him never doubted for an instant what Eli taught. It knew what lay in those ledgers; it recognized the signs that blotched the skin.
Thankfully, this part of his mind was poorly developed, in turn-of-the-millennium terms. It was easy to cow the poor shivering thing with all the whips and threats his rational mind had mastered.