I lay back down and remembered the stillness of the empty temple, the candles burning down, the sound of the laptop whirring as he booted up and clicked on a folder on its desktop page. First he scrolled through a bunch of photos, only three or four. Yin was watching me closely, as if perhaps destiny might not ensure I’d agree to go back in - a flicker of doubt.
I looked at the shots. Sae double clicked on the ‘View’ button to blow them up to full screen and the resolution suffered considerably.
‘Do these mean anything to you?’ he asked matter-of-factly.
‘No. But I’m presuming these are the images you accidentally found?’ I asked. He nodded and gestured for me to look closer.
I shrugged and put my eyes right near the screen. They were old black and whites, in all of them the players were well dressed Asians. In two of the three shots they wore military garb, in the other the characters were dressed in black with chequered scarves around their necks. One of them looked familiar; he had cruel eyes, a large face and a thick mop of black hair. I threw up my hands as if to say so what?
‘Look again,’ said Sae.
And then after a few minutes concentration - like a game of Find Waldo - I noticed something each had in common with the other. There was an extra peripheral player in each communion; always in the background, a shadow figure, but seemingly of choice, as if he were linked but somehow not linked to the men in the foreground.
‘I see a man, a westerner.’ I looked at him this time with the frame at half its size. Now I could really get a sense of him. The face, I knew it from somewhere but I’d never met him. ‘He stands in the background like an underling, but he’s not is he?’
Yin nodded, ‘Go on.’
As I spoke I was conscious of my voice, it sounded older as if perhaps it was addressing us from a distant place. ‘He’s the choreographer. He teaches darkness. They didn’t seek him did they? He made himself available to them.’
Sae beamed as if I were his child and had taken my first steps. ‘Exactly. And the man in black on the third photo, do you know who he is?’
I pointed at the beefy Asian with the glossy black hair and krama scarf around his neck. ‘No.’
‘His name is Saloth Sar, Brother Number One…’
‘Pol Pot?’ I looked at him in confusion.
‘This photo was taken in 1974 before the Khmer Rouge moved on Phnom Penh and began the genocide.’
I made a mental note. That was the year Dad went back, whoever this Blackheart was he must have been busy.
‘But,’ suddenly my role as seer began to fragment; I was back in the corporeal funk of western misunderstanding. ‘Are you saying that he catalysed the killings, this man at the back… like a svengali?’
‘A man like Saloth Sar is born with a poisoned seed, but to make it grow and fluorish as a black weed it needs watering. I’m saying the man in the background helped its irrigation. He made the impossible possible, the unthinkable thinkable. ‘Jesus, that’s beyond…’
Sae nodded. ‘Perhaps his greatest coup; almost three million executed and starved to death in the Killing Fields; children butchering parents… brainwashed, and the country isolated to do whatever it liked away from the eyes of the world… no press, no calendar, year zero - a complete breakdown of civilization. A reversal of the morality mankind took so long to develop. And then the organization began to self-cannibalize with distrust. It ate itself from its inside.
‘Now that takes something,’ said Sae, shaking his head. ‘Imagine if this happened in not one but twenty countries.’ He left me with the thought; let it linger in the dark around us.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the face of the man behind the war generals. In every photo his expression radiated a kind of impish delight that the men before him were bewitched to his magic.
‘The others, who are they?’ I asked.
‘Burma - the junta; East Timor, more recently.’
‘Seems like he only operates in Asia.’
‘This was the place of the first coming fifteen hundred years ago… it’s only natural that he should be in the same place.’
I studied the face, the square shoulders, the blackest of eyes that seemed to have no whites, and the head; a magnificent bald head. ‘He’s the Jai-Dam.’ I said finally, as if the penny had only just dropped.
Immediately Sae clicked on another image. A group of soldiers in a line, a Budweiser sign behind them, perhaps a bar of some kind. They were brown, the shirt cuffs of their fatigues rolled up on their arms. Americans, Asians and then I saw him… the bald Svengali, the Blackheart, as a younger man. I was so absorbed in his face I almost forgot to keep my eye running down the line. ‘Dad!’ I said out loud.
He was stood on the end of the line-up just as I remembered him; tall, handsome, craggy featured. Only there was a sterner set to his face now, as if perhaps he didn’t want to be there.’
I felt my eyes welling up, suddenly I was four again, ‘The Blackheart worked with my father?’
‘He was the man your father was destined to guard the key against, but of course he couldn’t have known this to start with.’
‘Carabas… but I thought he was supposed to have died?’
Yin looked at me, ‘no one has seen him for a long time. But destiny never lies. And the sign of the dragon in the stars - Ursa Major - its configuration is in the sky again. His sign. Just as it was when they buried Jai-Dam in the mountain one and a half thousand years ago.’
I leant against the central column of the wat for support. ‘I’m going to bed.’
But that was last night, revelations…. it was morning now, a golden morning, and the elephant in the cupboard seemed temporarily stored in the dark hours that would follow. Listening to the birdsong outside and the dog by my side, I felt almost happy. This was the man my father had risked his life to kill, I was sure of it. And he went perhaps because it was a thing that must be done, I was certain it couldn’t have just been about money.
Sae was whistling. In front of him the main altar was stacked with burning incense sticks, beside them a huge bowl of salt. I looked at the murals on the wall, trying to avoid the painting of the rats eating their way to the hanged man, but my gaze naturally fell on it. I wondered how much of a branch I had left to hang from.
‘You like breakfast?’ asked the monk.
‘No, I think I’ll pass.’
He looked disappointed, ‘Too bad. Yin cycled to town this morning to buy you croissants.’
‘I’d love some really. Where’s Yin now?’
‘Back later with breakfast.’
I sat on a cushion and watched him sprinkling salt on the stone floor of the temple. It was hypnotic; he was making what looked like patterns very carefully and stopping occasionally to look at the old map. I was just glad to be somewhere safe. I walked upstairs to look down on his work from an aerial viewpoint. It was a labyrinth certainly, a powder rendition of the illustration on the map. The passages he designed were just wide enough for someone to walk down. After an hour or so he rubbed his chin and scratched his shaved head. ‘Ready now Alain, come here please.’ He looked at me very intensely, studying the lines of my face as if searching for answers. ‘You will follow me now.’
Gingerly I entered the maze behind him, feeling like a kid with two left feet trying to learn the tango. Once or twice I lost my balance and fell over the magical line of the salt.
‘Why are we doing this?’
He shook his head impatiently, a glint of fear in his eyes as he hurriedly corrected the white outline with his fingers and marched me back to the beginning,
‘Not important mistah Alain, again please.’ Once more we began at the beginning, me on my own in the corridors of salt, the monk outside its perimeter as he watched me, his head at a tilted angle, the light slanting on the murals as mor
ning wore on.
An hour later I’d walked the maze at least fifteen, twenty times. I was ready to scream, my ankle was throbbing and the salt route was clearly branded in my head; ten paces forward, left ten paces, forward ten, right ten paces… nine paces forwards, nine paces right...
I tried to systemize it in my head but I couldn’t. Gradually though, the memory muscle limbered up, the measure and course of my footsteps becoming as natural as driving a car. When my steps were too long the monk made me go back and start again. Finally he sat me down on a cushion, lit a candle beside us and told me to stare at it. The sound of the birdsong dropped away, as did the sensation of the cushion beneath my rear, even the cold morning air on my skin. All of it sloughed from my senses as I studied the candle.
‘Watch the flame carefully, then close your eyes; it burns in the centre of your mind… you know and understand the path you’ll take in your mind now, there is no need for light.’
Again and again he repeated his drill, at times I felt as if I was going to burst into hysterics. I knew it was preparation, that they were training me for some purpose, I just couldn’t figure what. Finally, after hours of continual salt-bashing, he tied a piece of black cloth around my eyes and guided me to the beginning of the corridors of salt. ‘No looking Alain, breathe, see the candle in your mind. Feel the path before you, everything is real as you see it in your mind… there’s no need for eyes.’
I made my first step over a precipice of the imagination; my foot stepped once, twice, three times… ten paces then I turned. I could hear his breath close behind. I stopped again, made my turn to the left then walked on another ten paces.
The door opened at the front of the wat, I could sense the quality of the light changing on my closed lids; I tried not to be distracted. A few minutes later I was at the end of the maze, the sun was high in the sky outside and I realised we’d been working for nearly four hours. Yin had returned, as he smiled at me I wondered what his real job had been in his service to the King.
He had a brown paper bag in his hand; he lifted it toward me as if it were a rare and cherished thing. ‘Dr Pepper, croissant, pain au chocolat and banana.’ He looked at the salt-maze spread across the temple floor and the grin vanished from his impossibly lined face. ‘You do well today, but tonight you experience the real thing.’
‘Thank you. Hang on - what do you mean “tonight”? I’m going into the mountain tonight?’
He nodded and removed my lunch. ‘Last supper,’ he said, softly gripping my arm. ‘After this no food, you must be empty and pure for the path.’
‘And these predictions, do they come out positive in our favour?’
He shook his head, for a moment he looked like an Asian Norman Wisdom, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Marvellous. So you could predict that my dad and then me end up there, but you can’t tell me if it will be worth it.’
I tried to extrapolate his immaculate plan; I was going into the tunnel system depicted on the map, but to what end? Looking at the maze of salt it was impossible to tell where the other corridors ran; so complex were their twists and turns. The path I had taken was like climbing the face of an invisible temple. I said this to Yin.
‘You walk to the house of darkness tonight. He will come with you but you must lose him in the maze… and then you must escape.’
‘Simple as ABC, Yin.’ I said, not knowing why I was being so flippant. Perhaps I was past caring, or was it that I didn’t honestly think I’d agree to it when the ultimate hour came? All I wanted was the chance to avenge my father and friends’ deaths; I wasn’t interested in the bloody maze, nor the Buddha.
‘But no guns, no violence.’ He said as if he’d been reading my thoughts.
‘You want me to go back into that forest and you’re telling me I can’t take anything to protect me? I’m sorry but that’s insane.’
The haze of last night’s revelation cleared away, the absurdity of my situation came back to me with bitter clarity; I was in a leprous temple with a blind dog, a monk who spent too much time surfing the net and drew lines of salt on the floor as if his life depended on it; and the king’s old servant who told me I was some sort of guardian like my father before me. Bollocks to this, I thought, this is the twenty first century, not some re-run of The Water Margin.
Yin unscrolled an old parchment and showed it to me. It was written in Lao or Thai or something. ‘Perhaps this will help explain something for you,’
I sighed impatiently, shook my head and motioned him to continue.
‘This was written by Abbot Sisavong in 1911 in Luang Prabang; he wrote it a long time after it happened. A little like Homer writing of the Trojan War in the Third Century b.c.’
“Please, just read it, Yin.’
He coughed and started: ‘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 or 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 those 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, a day’s journey south. His Jai-Dam waited for seven days but their leader never came back, just as their Lord had predicted would one day happen. The Buddhists were busy inside Black Dragon Mountain preparing his final incarceration – it had taken fifteen years of secret labour - and now the cave was ready.
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. Within days of completing their mission, the three monks died of a fever. Many believed, even with our nascen
t religion of peace, that Jai-Dam 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 sometimes 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.’
When Yin had finished, I got up, went to the squat toilet and puked violently. Neither of them followed me.
Later, Yin and I were sat on the steps looking down the hill on the valley below, the map beside us like a spectral monkey on the shoulder. A reminder of what must be done. It ruined any peace the gentle aspect of the blue sky and birdsong created. He looked at me disapprovingly as I lit the last of Nathan’s cigarettes with a match, grabbing it deftly before I could blow it out and touching it to the curled corners of the map.
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