Black Buddha

by Richard Waters

  List of Chapter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  BLACK BUDDHA

  by Richard Waters

  Copyright © 2013 by Richard Waters

  Prologue

  They caught him as he went to pray, communing with the night forces that had powered him since birth (still we have no idea where he came from, nor his parentage). His army of followers waited downstream on the banks of the Luang Namtha River, the wind was howling as the monks drew closer, the ground around the quiet one shifting with vipers. Three young monks - disciples of Buddha – had volunteered to end his plague: the ruination of villages, the raping and killing of parents by their own kin. The brothers knew they would die during or after their enterprise, either be caught and tortured or fall prey to His madness. It was a mission of faith. Two days before they left they prayed, meditated, and were blessed with holy water.

  As they bound his wrists and gagged his mouth the man was laughing, his eyes in the moonlight seemingly black. He made no effort to fight them. Into a longtail boat they hid their poisonous cargo and quietly drifted downstream past his disciples on the other side of the shore. The monks were dressed as fishermen. One of them, barely past novice status but bold as a tiger, was even brave enough to wave at the myriad dark faces of children staring blankly back. His own brother had been turned and slaughtered his parents; he had good reason for revenge.

  They said the black one lit a fire outside of your village. He was friendly to those who passed by at dusk, arousing no suspicion; just a large man with black robes and a bald head, perhaps appearing as a monk of an alternative order. As day turned to night, he waited by the flames for the children to leave their beds. They spent the early hours with him, listening his low mumble. None can say the content of his talk, but by dawn they were back, forever changed. The boys killed their fathers, then left to join the dark crusade. Their sisters went with them, their roles more subtle, for as they grew He used them as spies, watchers, waiting for his call to turn on their hosts. Countless Laotian villages lost their children this way, and all the time His numbers swelled. You never could tell a Jai-Dam (Blackheart) follower but for a small tattoo or branding mark on the wrist or ankle. Far from raggle-taggle fools, they were clever as devils, disguise and subterfuge their weapons.

  The wind followed the monks and their cargo all the way back to the monastery in Huay Xai, two day’s journey south. His Jai-Dam waited for seven days but their leader never came back, just as he had foretold would one day happen. The Buddhists were busy inside Black Dragon Mountain preparing his final incarceration, and now just as the crest of the killings seemed to be reached, the cave was ready. Within three days of completing their mission, the monks died of a fever.

  Even to the last there were snakes wriggling around his ankles and a black fluid that tumbled from his mouth. And so the stone door was locked forever with a key, fiercely hidden by the high order of the sangha. Some say it was dispatched to the lamas of Tibet many years later, others say it was entrusted to the royal family of Laos. no one knows. The first day of the incarceration the abbot sent a note to Lord Buddha that the deed was done, the darkness contained. The messenger got as far as Burma before his throat was slit. Two more were dispatched but the third made it unscarred by the Jai-Dam. Many believed, even with our nascent religion of peace, that their leader should have been killed, burnt, so they could be sure he would never escape. But the Enlightened One disagreed; it was not right to kill anything, no matter how abhorrent. No matter that he wasn’t human.

  Far and wide, throughout Asia they split into cells, carrying the word, refining the secrets taught to them by the fire. They scattered to the four winds pledged to reunite when their leader returned; it might be ten years it might be five hundred. As their grip waned and withered without true leadership, the natural light of Siddhartha, our Lord Buddha, glowed in opposition. Within a few hundred years his peaceful preachings covered much of Asia and the time of Jai-Dam and their dark leader was a yarn, a ghost story told to send children to bed. But it was said that for the next fifty years, those who tried to settle on Black Dragon Mountain either lost their minds, or the wellbeing of their children.

  What we do know is he was the same age as Lord Buddha. They looked the same but for the fact one had black eyes and a strange fluid that would periodically leak from his mouth. Some say it was the souls of those he had sped to the land of the dead, for countless looked into his eyes as he took them by the mouth. Now we forget him, try and believe that inside the maze we designed within the mountain his snakes are still, his bones are dust. Though sometimes things are heard by tribesmen: opium farmers too stupid to listen to their shaman’s warnings who wander too close; stories of ragged laughter in the night… then sometimes a child disappears on Black Dragon Mountain.

  Let us pray to Buddha it will not begin again.

  Abbot Vang Sisavong, Wat Xieng Tong, Luang Prabang, 1911

  - 1 -

  There was a message on the answer machine from my mother - Nana had had another stroke. I’d been expecting it to happen again, but not so soon. Within an hour I was dressed and packed for Paris. I didn’t take much, an old blue raincoat and a pad to scratch some notes on. Nana was a very old woman and in the last ten years I’d seen her only a handful of times. And this last stroke had been followed by complications; her Doctor had politely implied another might follow shortly after and this would be too much for her. Add to that the falls, the hip replacement and constant colds – she was on her way out. After my father became what the Americans call ‘Missing in Action’, we gradually lost contact with her, although I always made an effort to send her a postcard on my travels or a present at Christmas. I’m a travel writer so that makes for a fair few postcards, but gradually, like the memory of Dad, our communications faded.

  Nana lived on a sloping street between the red light district of Pigalle and the ascendant hill of Sacre Coeur. When it rained, as it was when I arrived around four pm that mid September, little rivers worked their way down the narrow street to the heels of transvestites and pimps below.

  She wants to see you Alain, she may not be around much longer… you should go to her. Mum found it painful to mention her name, it jolted her back to the days she used to wait by the phone biting her nails waiting for Dad’s call. One day, perhaps inevitably, another call came, not my father but rather the American voice of some regimental fascist who curtly told her what she’d always been
waiting to hear. The Americans had used him and spat him out, another casualty in a war that shouldn’t have involved them. Another American foray into foreign lands with little reason to go there; foreign policy built on paranoia and megalomania. As you can glean I’m a big fan of Uncle Sam. Mum’s life was left in pieces, elegant rags and faded black and white photos of a man who’d disappeared like a ghost at the behest of others. Not to mention what it did to me.

  I rapped on the door. Last time I was here, the concierge had mumbled something about the English being impatient and perhaps if we were to wait once in a while we might not get ourselves involved in so many wars. The irony her employer’s son was a French war-monger had not been lost on me, as my grandmother shooed her away with a sweep of the hand. But this time no one came. I looked up her apartment on the fourth floor, dim yellow light rolling over the window ledge.

  It was raining hard and the rusted green drainpipes were streaming with overflow. I lit a smoke, watched the rush of blue waft out into the cold air. The smell made me think of the Foreign Legion, dirty fatigues and unrelenting sun, which brought me back to my father again. I didn’t want to be here, too many ghosts, and everything seemed to remind me of him. Some accordion music sparked up in a coffee house up the hill as the front door creaked open.

  ‘Bon soir, Alain. Madame Deschamps sera si content tu es arrivé.’ The concierge was solemn, apologetic. I stepped into a smell of disinfected floors and melancholic darkness. A light-switch glowed like a loose eye on the wall.

  ‘Merci, how is she?’ I asked.

  She pointed upstairs and stared at me through a porcine face of broken blood vessels, ‘Au lit.’

  We shuffled up the spiral staircase, it was dark, the ceilings high and still as a mausoleum. Also this smell, the place reeked as if it had been allowed to slip, the walls had lost their lustre and the black and white marbled floor was chipped and grit-encrusted where tiles used to be. We came to her door. Before I entered my grandmother’s voice travelled in a rasp to meet me, ‘Tu es arrivé mon etoile, venez-ici.’

  I followed the concierge past antique furniture cast in partial shadow by a tiffany lamp at the open window. Some pigeons were trying to get comfortable on the sill outside. There was a scent of old flowers and as I rounded the corner from the living room I saw some long-stemmed irises folded limp about one another in a glass jar. The concierge paused outside the door like a sentry as I went in.

  Nana’s head rested on three pillows propping up her feeble shoulders. The bedclothes were thick and many around her feeble frame, her skin faintly transparent. She looked at me with her blue-grey eyes and held out her arms like the mast of a ghost ship, her nightgown the ragged sails.

  ‘Alain, come here so I can see you… a little closer please.’

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, the smell of dead flowers all the more acute. I stroked her white hair, it was still thick and wavy finishing in a widow’s peak. She raised her eyebrows, ‘Alain c’est un long chemin et la fin arrive pour nous tous.’

  My French just about covered what she was saying, something along the lines of all of us having to reach our end at some time or other. As I heard the door shut and concierge leave I felt weighed down by the certainty of her death, but still I said nothing.

  She cleared her throat and smiled. ‘I see him sometimes,’ she said in English, ‘he has been back to talk to me, we have talked much often these past days.’

  ‘Dad?’ I said as gently as I could,

  ‘Oui. I have seen others too, small children in black… Asiens.’ I humoured her with a smile. ‘I have something for you, c’est le temps precis, when you are forty years old. He wanted you to take it, insisted… guard it with your life. It is not so simple to understand, he would never explain to me everything… I know so little. I think you will be as confused as me.’

  ‘I’m pretty confused already, Nana.’

  She let out a sharp cough. I motioned her not to speak. She looked at me indignantly, for a moment there was clarity, a dart of light crossed her pupils like a ray of fire. I heard some pigeons race off in a flutter of wings next door. She took my hand and drew me closer. ‘I think there is someone here.’

  ‘Only you and I, Nana.’

  She looked at me desperately to see I was listening. I carried on smiling then her talons clasped the skin of my forearm. She spoke in a whisper.

  ‘I can’t hear you Nana.’

  ‘J’ai peu de la fin, et le noir.’

  ‘Ofcourse you do, but I’ll stay with you.’

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, the vice of her pin-like fingers tightening their purchase, ‘Non Alain, I fear Him. He waits for me to talk in my dreams to give your father’s secret. He sits in the chair in the corner of the room.’

  I looked about the room and found the chair, my eye catching the photo of Dad on the mantle-piece. He was young, perhaps about forty - my age - looking serious, his hair swept across his generous forehead. The rest of his face fell away like set dressing when you looked at his eyes. He had a handsome, weatherbeaten face, but the glittering eyes of an animal. I was glad he wasn’t around to see Nana in such a sad condition.

  ‘Who watches you?’

  ‘He watches you too. Reviens ce soir, Alain. I have something to give you then, but not until I am plus jolie, oui?’

  I looked back at her, she’d caught me looking at the picture and I felt embarrassed as if she had read my thoughts, as if perhaps I had no right to think about a man whom I barely remembered.

  ‘Oui, something from him, he did not forget you, but he could not get back. He would be so proud of you, you were always going to be a writer.’ She waved me on, ‘Come back later, we shall talk et puis, you shall have your secret… I think you’re ready now and if you are not you must be comme je ne sera pas ici pour plus longtemps.’

  ‘Nonsense, you’ll live till you’re a hundred. When I come back I’ll make us a pot of tea and perhaps we can talk about him.’ I kissed her cheek and made for the door. ‘You really want me to go away for a bit?’

  ‘Yes. How is that pretty girl of yours? What was her name… Matilde?’

  ‘She left me. Maybe I deserved it.’

  Nana shook her head with distaste, ‘Foolish girl. A bientot, cheri.’

  I wondered where I’d go to kill a few hours and why I couldn’t just sit next door with the dead irises. She fished under her pillow and produced a set of door keys. ‘Come to me at eight… and Alain?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lock the door and shut the window.’ I looked at her with a raised eyebrow. ‘As you like.’

  As I bolted the window and turned off the tiffany lamp, I heard footsteps on the roof above. Probably just pigeons, but I decided to check none of her imaginary visiteurs were present. An external wrought iron staircase spattered in pigeon shit led up to the roof. I climbed the short flight that led onto the open vista. A ventilator like some gnarled machine from a Kafka nightmare sat looking useless. Beyond it, stretched out far below was the decadent mass of Paris glittering like a chandelier; to the northeast the Arc De Triomphe and Eiffel Tower. The air was chill and as I wrapped my coat about me, rain started to fall in slanted showers blown off-kilter by a gathering wind. I lit another cigarette and walked around the rooftop. no one was here so I stubbed out my smoke and went carefully back down the steps to the apartment. Old people live in the hinterland between memories and the world around them, maybe it was getting infectious; even I’d started hearing things.

  I happened on a bar around the corner called The Black Windmill, deserted but for a few whores in the corner wiping the rain off their wigs and correcting their make-up in a little mirror. Some of my pals at AA say if you can sit happily in a bar over a decent coffee without falling prey to the spirits, you’re on your way to recovery; it’s not chancing fate, it’s controllin
g it. But why I was sat in a dead-end bar when I could have been leafing through one of the French magazines my Grandmother kept a stack of, I couldn’t fathom.

  I ordered a black coffee. I thought about what her ‘secret’ might be… money perhaps, an old necklace for a future daughter, her stack of Madame magazines? Money would be rather more helpful; I’d always envied friends who suddenly found themselves with thirty grand to play with. Lucre comes easily to some families while for others it’s always out of reach over the next hill. No, she’d said it was something from Him. And like his progeny, Dad hadn’t been too clever with money.

  I rattled the keys in one hand, too distracted to think of generating any work, my Macbook sitting unwanted in my shoulder bag. Graham Greene used to write for an hour every morning before he did anything, just to get the creative muscle flexing. Maybe I would only ever write one book, I was beginning to think the whole thing had been a fluke, that perhaps non-fiction was all I was good for. Only a few sleek foals make it into the royal paddock to become fully-fledged fiction horses. My literary agent was getting tired of fending off the publisher asking for the second book I’d signed for on publication of the first.

  I needed an idea, but like babies, ideas come when you’re least expecting them, not when you’re desperate. My travel pitches were running dry that week too; every article I’d suggested to the pool of Eds I worked for had drawn a blank. ‘Sorry, we’ve just covered that,’ or ‘We’ve got a commission freeze for the next two months, budget restraints. Try us in another couple of months.’

  It was time to get back and author some guidebooks, there were still a few commissioning editors who thought I could write. I tried not to think about money for a moment and looked about me. A man with a small monkey, one of the flea-bitten kinds you see on a beach alongside some spic photographer, came in. It wore a striped, woolly suit like a gondolier’s. Its owner sported a brown corduroy suit and purple necktie, he had thick curly black hair and a distinctive nose like Brando. He set the monkey on the bar and ordered a Crème de Menthe. I watched the green fluid tumble around the oval-shaped glass. His pet sat still and uninterested.