The Wheel of Darkness

Vaguely, he was aware of the entity searching the emptiness, drifting, malevolent, eyes like glowing cigarette tips. It thrashed about, seeking an anchor, like a cat sinking in a bottomless ocean. It was already defeated.

It ceased thrashing—and suddenly, like lightning, it wrapped its greasy tendrils around him, sinking fangs directly into Pendergast’s mind.

A jolt of terrible pain seared through him. He responded immediately with the opposite tack. He would fight fire with fire, create an impassible mental barrier. He’d wall himself off with pure intellectual noise, deafening and impenetrable.

In the dark void, he summoned a hundred of the world’s most important philosophers and set them all to conversation: Parmenides and Descartes, Heraclitus and Kant, Socrates and Nietzsche. At once, dozens upon dozens of arguments sprouted—of nature and consciousness, freedom and pure reason, truth and the divinity of numbers—forming a storm of intellectual noise stretching from horizon to horizon. Scarcely breathing, Pendergast maintained the construct through sheer force of will.

A ripple coursed through the susurrus of dialogues, like a drop of water on the surface of a black pond. As it spread outward, the nearest conversations of the philosophers fell silent. A silent hole formed in the center, like the eye of a storm. Implacably, the smoke ghost drifted through the hole, coming closer.

Instantly, Pendergast dissolved the innumerable debates, drove the men and women from his mind. With great effort, he purged himself of conscious thought once again. If such a purely rational approach would not work, perhaps a more abstract one would.

Quickly, he arrayed in his mind the thousand greatest paintings of the Western tradition. One after another, in chronological order, he allowed them to fill up to the edges the entire frame of his consciousness; he willed their colors, brushstrokes, symbols, hidden meanings, allegories subtle and obvious, to flood his entire consciousness. Duccio’sMaesta; Botticelli’sBirth of Venus; Masaccio’s Trinity; Fabriano’sAdoration ; Van Eyck’sBetrothal of Arnolfini burst again and again upon his mental landscape, drowning all thought with their complexity, their ravishing beauty. He continued through them, faster and faster, until he approached the present, Rousseau and Kandinsky and Marin. Then he went back and started over from the beginning, moving still faster now, until all was a blur of color and shape, each image simultaneously held in his mind in overwhelming complexity, allowing the demon no foothold . . .

The blur of colors wavered, began to melt. The low rough form of the tulpa shouldered its way through the kaleidoscope of images, a sink of darkness, sucking everything in as it grew ever nearer in his mind.

Pendergast watched it approach, frozen like a mouse under the gaze of a cobra. With a huge effort, he tore his thoughts free. He was aware of his heart beating much faster now. He could sense the thing’s ardent appetite for his essence, hissoul . Desire radiated out from the smoke ghost like heat. This awareness sent a prickle of panic through him, little poppings and blisterings at the edges of his consciousness.

It was so much stronger than he had ever imagined. Clearly, anyone without the unique mental armor he now enjoyed would have succumbed to the tulpa immediately, without struggle.

The thing came closer still. With something close to despair, Pendergast fell back into the realm of absolute logic, releasing a torrent of pure mathematics across the increasingly fractured landscape of his mind. The tulpa glided through this defense more quickly than ever.

It remained unaffected by every device he had tried. Perhaps it was, in fact, invincible . . .

And now, quite suddenly, the full extremity of his peril was laid bare. For not only was the thing attacking his mind but his body as well. He could feel his muscles jerking in uncontrollable spasms; feel his heart labor; feel his hands clench and unclench. It was terrible and terrifying, a double possession of mind and physical form. Dissociation from his body, so vital to maintaining the state ofstong pa nyid , grew ever harder to uphold. His limbs fell increasingly under the control of the tulpa; the effort needed to ignore his physical form became increasingly acute.

And then came the moment when it grew impossible. All his carefully constructed defenses, his feints and ploys and stratagems, fell away. And all Pendergast could think about was mere survival.

Now the old family mansion on Dauphine Street rose before him, the memory palace that had always promised refuge in the past. He ran toward it with desperate speed. The yard was crossed in a heartbeat, the front steps taken in a bound. And then he was inside, panting with exertion, fumbling with the locks and door chains.

He turned, back pressed against the doorframe, looking around wildly. The Maison de la Rochenoire was silent and watchful. Ahead, at the end of a long and shadow-haunted hallway, he could see the curve of the grand foyer, with its matchless collections of curiosities and objets d’art, and the double-curved sweep of staircases leading to the second floor. Still farther on, wrapped in gloom, lay the library, its thousands of leather-bound volumes dozing beneath a thin mantle of dust. Normally, this prospect filled him with tranquil pleasure.

Right now, all he felt was the atavistic dread of the hunted.

He raced down the refectory hall, heading toward the foyer, forcing himself not to look over his shoulder. Reaching the foyer, he wheeled around, eyes searching desperately for a place of concealment.

From behind came a shiver of cold, clammy air.

His gaze fell on an arched doorway, little more than a tracery of black against black in the polished woodwork of a far wall. Beyond, he knew, lay the stairway leading down to the basement and—beyond that—to the rambling chambers and catacombs of the mansion’s sub-basement. He knew of literally hundreds of niches, crypts, and hidden passages down there in which he could secret himself.

He moved quickly toward the closed door, then stopped. The thought of cowering in some dark, damp cul-de- sac—waiting, like a cornered rat, for the thing to find him—could not be borne.

With increasing desperation, he raced down the back corridor, through a set of doors and into the kitchens. Here there was a confusing warren of dusty pantries and maids’ ports, and he tore through them, searching for some safe haven. It was fruitless. He whirled around again, gasping for breath. The thing was here, he could feel it—and growing closer all the time.

Without wasting another moment he ran back to the foyer. He hesitated only a second, staring wildly around at the polished wood cabinets, the glittering chandelier, the trompe l’oeil ceiling. There was only one possible bolt- hole, one place he might be safe.

He raced up the curving staircase to the second floor and ran as quickly as he could down the echoing gallery. Reaching an open door halfway down on the left, he leapt through it and slammed the door behind him, turning the lock savagely in the key and throwing the deadbolt.

His room—his own room. Although the mansion had burned long ago, he had nevertheless always been safe