Casbaron looked across the table at me, Giselle and Lou behind him. ‘There’s the gun, make your choice… one bullet only.’
The scent of urine crept up from my bare thighs, mosquitoes corkscrewed around the hurricane lamp. I checked the gun; there was a bullet in the barrel. Another blank? The rope system lurched, the sound of pulleys followed by animal rasps as Yin’s legs were lowered to the waiting horde. I closed my eyes as the first of the jaws caught deftly around his ankles, heard the crunch of bone and fancied I could smell the released bouquet of bacteria from their acid throats. But it was Yin’s terrible scream that most disturbed me, a terrified old man. Two days ago he was buying croissants and smiling.
Casbaron leaned forward, I instinctively drew back to accommodate his electric presence. ‘Hurry now, your friend will be suffering even more in a moment. One bullet - three choices: first, you kill your friend, but make sure you hit him cleanly in the head otherwise his death will be even more painful.’
Yin must have been seventy feet away to my right. I couldn’t guarantee an accurate shot, until tonight the closest I’d come to handling a gun had been playing ‘House of Death’ on Brighton Pier. Every scream from his mouth cast a fresh welt on my conscience.
‘Second choice, you kill yourself. Think of the peace, no more games, just rest. Still, that would be a shame after all you’ve been through. You would die in ignorance and perhaps that’s the worst fate of all – a blind, misinformed spirit.’
‘Not very helpful for you getting into your mountain though,’ I said.
Casbaron shrugged. ‘It doesn’’t matter now, you’re here. We’ll just cut you open until we find it.’
Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Vong in another banyan tree. He was stood on a platform controlling the rope, binding it to a branch and climbing back down a ladder.
‘Well Alain?’ asked Casbaron, his voice urgent, almost sexually charged.
I looked at them desperately, my body veiled in shame. For a moment I considered the second option. Vong reappeared at the top of the ladder to the treehouse, eyes glittering as he walked past me and stood with Giselle and Snyder behind Casbaron. Now they were assembled, the witch’s familiars beside their seated master; serpent, cat and bearded toad. As I took the gun and raised it in their direction, they joined hands and smiled.
Do the opposite of what they expect, reverse the game. I kept saying to myself… the golden door.
‘There is of course the final option,’ said Casbaron, ‘you can kill me, but then all your questions will go unanswered. The bodycount will still be two. Your friend will almost certainly die… the bacteria’s already in his system.’
I had to go to the maze inside the mountain, if only for Yin. Otherwise it had been another life wasted. I wheeled the gun toward him, cocked the trigger.
‘Go on- kill me. An unspectacular end perhaps and you won’t meet the man you’ve fought so hard to find… but let’s get it over with.’
He knew perfectly well I wouldn’t kill him.
Reverse the game
I aimed at Giselle, a startled look crossed her father’s face.
Another scream from Yin,
Vong took a step toward me reaching inside his white tunic. Then I fired, he flew backward as if he he‘d been pummelled by an invisible haymaker, his white robe flowering in a bloom of red. He fell on Casbaron and they crashed to the floor. The jungle broke its silence, I screamed like an animal and flew at them with my fists.
Giselle covered her face as Lou retreated around the corner of the balcony. I went straight to Vong’s tunic and rummaged inside, my hand brushing the seeping wound in his gut. There was nothing, not even a knife. I looked for Casbaron, but he and his daughter were already gone. But where?
I was over surging with adrenalin, muscles flexing involuntarily as if I’d swallowed twelve wraps of speed. And my hands were bloodstained; I wiped them across my face and screamed like a bastard but everyone seemed to have disappeared.
Then I heard something, a sobbing just around the corner. I crept around it and found him, his hands held up in surrender. ‘Alain please, wait a second! Think about what you’re doing- think!’
I took hold of Lou Knowles by his neck, pushed him roughly through the brittle bamboo boundary and dangled him over the edge by his beard.
‘Remember the birds at the temple, Lou?’
He was so scared he couldn’t speak. I released my grasp and watched him tumble through the branches till he lay like a broken watch on the forest floor. ‘Now I’ve set you free.’ I said quietly.
I didn’t think about the dragons as I clambered down the ladder and climbed up another platform to where the pulley system was controlled; they took no heed of me. Vong must have been strong, it took all my remaining strength to lift the rope and raise my unconscious friend from the Komodos. One of them still had its teeth fastened around Yin’s leg.
I shouted down to Yin, my voice echoing through the clearing, but he made no reply. A shadow passed across the candle-lit treehouse up in the other tree. I raced back down the ladder, and headed straight to the centre of the lizards. Their smell was intolerable, they moved away from the flame in a hiss. He was surely dead, his arms limp at his sides, the remnants of his legs a pulp of bone and raw meat. As I touched the flame to his arm to wake him his green eyes sprang open.
‘Yin!’
I tried to tell him I was sorry it had come to this, but language had left me. He reached down for my hand grasped it and held up my finger toward the mountainside. Unfinished business. There were tears in his eyes, his mouth moved in an effort to speak but nothing followed. Then he was dead.
I wanted to close his eyes, but he was too far from the ground. My bones slumped as the anger cooled and a lonely breeze swept across me making me shiver. I retreated to behind a tree, removed the key from its corporal hiding place, and looked over the sea of Komodos to the figures who’d emerged into the clearing. Casbaron stood next to Giselle holding a burning taper. And then the children started gathering, blank-eyed waifs seemingly insentient of where they were.
‘Well done, your father will be proud of you,’ he called over their ridged backs, ‘shall we go to the mountain now?’
I made my way toward them.
‘You never knew my father.’
Casbaron contemplated me as if through a glass partition at a zoo; hard to say which of us was the animal after what had just happened.
I walked in silence behind him, Giselle by his side. The mass of the mountain loomed impossibly high above us as we left the ruins behind, and together with the children – perhaps half a dozen of them carrying a package in a black velvet bag - we clambered up a mud slope. As Casbaron turned back to me as we made the final ascent to where the rockface actually began, there seemed something primeval and inhuman about him.
I clutched the key in my hand. It was quiet, the whine of monkeys far behind us. Grey rock rose up in an unscaleable expanse to the starry firmament, like some bacterial tooth flecked in moss and gnarled trees sprouting at unnatural angles. Casbaron pulled away a bush from the limestone face, behind it was a rusted iron door. Prosaic, unpadlocked, certainly not a golden door.
He was the first to enter, Giselle gestured me to follow. I looked up at the stars for the last time, sucked in the air and glanced at her sadly. A wind was building, almost out of nowhere.
‘I’m sorry Alain.’ she said as I entered. Part of me wanted to believe she meant it, that the fear on her face was genuine. ‘Watch the snakes in there, they’re everywhere.’
A narrow chamber led into the mountain for some two hundred metres, the tunnel was damp and slippery underfoot. Just as my back was beginning to ache from being bent double, the ceiling opened up and, as Casbaron lifted his burning torch, I could see we were in an enormous clearing with a ceiling
shimmering in quartz.
‘What is this place?’
‘This is the waiting room.’
Casbaron lit another taper beside a makeshift seat of stone. The flame shone down upon the twisting coil of a boa constrictor, beside its sleeping body, an open cage full of rats. The netted walls were too high for them to escape, but easy enough for the snake to wind in its head and take a mouthful. The parallel wasn’t lost on me.
‘Don’t worry about him, he’s been fed.’ Casbaron said cheerfully, turning around to look at me, ‘Just keep your eyes open for the vipers, the black ones. They run free in here.’
‘More of your pets?’ I asked sarcastically.
He looked surprised. ‘No, they’ve always been here… his, not mine. Please, sit yourself down and hear what I have to say about your father.’
‘I’m beginning to think you never knew him.’
He laughed back at me and I was showered in cruelty. ‘Oh, we’ll see about that young man. There’s things you should hear, but it’s not for me to tell, I just serve the leader, our higher interest.’
‘So you’re nothing more than a messenger?’
‘You should sit down for this.’ he said, coughing into his fist.
I did as I was told, thinking all the while about the maze of salt at the temple and Sae; he’d be waiting for Yin, silently praying for the return of his old friend. At the mention of Dad’s name I felt as if destiny had finally caught up with me - I was in the bowels of the mountain as the mural had predicted, and there were rats nearby; the painting of the hanged man was almost complete.
Casbaron’s voice floated softly across the room, he would have been a good bedtime reader. Somehow I doubted he had ever put his voice to use for his daughter’s benefit. ‘When we first met he’d been nibbling at the dragon’s tail, you could see it around the corners of his eyes – they were fuzzy where they should have been sharp.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Opium, but that’s another story. Your father was a traitor.’
The shadows were closing in on me and I was finding it hard to keep a hold of myself; every sentence had the effect of invisible manacles pinioning me to the walls of the cavern. The children meanwhile, waited like filthy mutes beside their master with their black package.
‘I don’t believe you. Why would the king of Laos trust him with his precious key if he wasn’t a man to be trusted?’ Casbaron said nothing, infernal patience within his eyes. ‘I don’t think you have fucking clue what really happened to him.’ I said resolutely.
Casbaron rubbed his face and sat back on his throne like a king among dead things. ‘Real power is a peculiar thing… some of us have sacrificed our entire lives in its pursuit. Imagine being so close to its source you can hear it whispering. Can you hear him Alain, in there?’ I followed his pointed finger to a recess in the rock. ‘Sunlight Alain, Knowledge so bright it could burn you.’
‘That’s not all you’ve sacrificed. What about all those broken families you’ve created… all that unnecessary carnage?’ I felt my teeth grinding, ‘Do you believe in Hell?’ I said coldly.
‘Perhaps by the end of the night I’ll be able to tell you. But I want you to know something - and believe it or not it means something to me - I didn’t kill those people, he did, our leader. The weak must sometimes be extinguished in pursuit of the pure.’
‘Tell me what happened to my father or you’ll never see your fucking sunlight.’ I held the key aloft and made to throw it into the darkness, his glance flicked across me toward Giselle.
Casbaron raised himself and walked to the recess fashioned from the dripping wall. He stuck his head inside, his back turned to me.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I was you, I’m about to show you something.’
‘And what makes you think I want to see it?’ I was up on my feet; Giselle moved nervously toward her Father and the snake. He reached into the hole and shone his flame upon a yellow skull. I looked into its eyeless sockets, there was a crack in the cranium.
Casbaron laughed as he threw it at me. ‘Jacques has waited a long time to see his baby son all grown up.’
The skull smashed in two as it landed on the rock floor beside me. I tried not to look at it, all the while my imagination wrapping it in the tissues and hair that had once made the face of my father. I convinced myself it was another ruse to weaken my defences, that it wasn’t him. ‘What happened to Nathan?’
‘Nathan? Where does the dragon brew his fire?’
‘In his guts.’
‘That’s where you’ll find your man of letters.’
Another man down in the field. I was reliving my Father’s Vietnam all on my own, the last soldier in his ragged platoon.
I moved quickly across the slick floor, hit him hard in the solar plexus, followed by a right hook to the head, coupled with a left jab to his nose. He fell back onto the snake. The dagger had fallen by his feet; before I could reach down for it, it was back in his hands.
Casbaron stroked the snake apologetically, sniffed, shook himself and stood up. ‘Pretty good, but you need to work on your jab. We can fight it out now if you like, the likelihood is I will kill you and you’ll never find out what happened the night your father died.’
‘You and whose army?’ I thought about it a beat, ‘Fuck it… fuck you all. Let’s go to the maze.’ I said.
Casbaron motioned to the children who immediately scampered toward him. Thinking of Yin, I followed him past the snake to the back of the cavern.
- 43 -
I held out the key and Casbaron grabbed it with the rapacity of a wild dog, turning it in his titan fists as if it were a delicate pearl. ‘Do you know how many years we’ve waited to be here, waiting to meet our master, the first Jai-Dam? You can’t even begin to imagine.’
I looked at him and summoned a laugh. ‘How did a weserner get involved in all this Asian arcana? Anglican, Mormon and Catholicism not good enough for you?’ You’re hanging from a thread of hope. What if he’s not there, Sammy?’
Perhaps it was pure fancy but I just for a second I felt as if something was moving on the other side of the stone, as if to silence me. A rustle of clothing, a footfall.
‘Good things come to those who wait,’ he said deadly. ‘He tells me he saw you in your mother’s womb the night your parents made love on the beach. He watched the first whispers of you growing in her stomach like a pale ghost, then he waited for you to become a man.’
‘Who?’
‘Him. He’s waiting for us on the other side.’
Casbaron - the genuine asylum article, the case study a psychiatrist dreams he’ll one day unravel from behind the safety of a plexiglass screen. He pointed the flaming torch at a small key socket in the wall of the tunnel. It was finely layered in gold leaf and looked old, very old. Giselle looked up at her Father as the key turned counter-clockwise. Beyond us we heard the movement of shifting weights, then a door that must have been five feet thick, slowly opened and a different quality of air greeted us.
So this is what the monks worked on?
‘Come on!’ he said roughly, ‘Don’t know how long we got before she closes.’
So we crossed our stone Rubicon, passed through the boundary of his dreams. He pushed the children ahead of us; like little blind rats they nosed through the darkness. We’d gone no further than ten yards when the scraping noises in the rock commenced and stilled as the door thundered shut behind us. In the torchlight I could see there was no keyhole on this side, great, last exit to nowhere. I felt a breeze on my face as if I was moving toward an invisible black sea. I focused on what the monk had told me, the lines of salt… the candle I’d been forced to watch. As we inched forward the sound of our breath amplified and I knew the ceiling was opening up above us.
Casbaron hadn’t uttered a sound since enter
ing the tunnel. No more wisecracks. I didn’t want to look at him. It was actually stronger than that; I couldn’t look at him.
‘It’s getting cold.’ said Giselle in a trembling voice. Too late, we were trapped.
Underfoot, the path was ascending steeply. I don’t know how long we walked in a straight line, but I fancied we were near the top of the mountain, that I would soon see the first shafts of morning coming through the cracks of its ceiling. I could hear Giselle whining to herself in front of me, little stutters as the darkness took hold of her imagination. Perhaps her conviction wasn’t as strong as she thought, or maybe noting the deaths of her fellow cabalists in this the final hour, she realized how expendable she was.
‘So where’s your leader, Carabas? Didn’t he show up?’ I said. ‘That’s a shame… I was looking forward to meeting the organ grinder after spending time with his burnt monkey. Just another lie I suppose.’
Casbaron’s eyes were fixed dead ahead, it was as if he couldn’t hear me.
‘Who are you? I want to know!’ I shouted, my voice growing hoarse.
The folds of skin shivered around his neck as he snapped out of his reverie and laughed, his face hidden from view. ‘You really want the sunlight, Alain?’ he said looking at the wall.
‘Yes, I want the sunlight!’ I screamed.
I heard the crick of his neck muscles as he reached up and clutched his hair in an enormous palm, ‘Not much good at puzzles are you? Here’s another teaser, an anagram: Sammy A.Casbaron.’
My brain was rearranging the letters in his name as the black wig fell to the floor. The light danced on his naked skull as if it were made of polished copper. The letters, ‘M A S O N C A R A B A S’ formed themselves into a string of words which seemed to glow with ghostly phosphorescence in the darkness.
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