Black Buddha

by Richard Waters

  He turned around to face me, put his fingers to his eyes, blinked into them and removed the milky contact lenses. Then he trained his black eyes upon on me. It seemed they were not human, for in the torchlight there were no whites to them. But that was impossible… more trickery?

  I wanted to scream; in all my life I’d never experienced this level of fear, it shot through me in volts, sapping my remnant courage. Here was the man from the photographs, and unless it was more deceit, the contributing architect to millions of lives lost, tortured, brutalized and destroyed. The influencer, magus and svengali… the man who had taken my father from me.

  My hunter looked enormous, I watched as he straightened to his natural height, his theatrical stoop disappearing as he ripped away the prosthetic of the burnt skin. Bald head and black eyes, two particularly conspicuous characteristics that needed to be hidden as I’d asked Maybury and King all those questions. Gerald would have guessed his identity in a flash: ‘What’s he look like?’ He’d said.

  The prosthetics and wig weren’t whimsy, they were an absolute necessity; he would have stuck out in a crowd of thousands. I should have gone for him, but something about his being pushed me back, a subversive charisma. I had a sense how easy it must have been for him to make his followers walk through fire. How hard he must have tried to contain his unearthy presence in my mother’s front room.

  Carabas began to cough, I inched back against the cavern wall but there was nowhere to go. In the periphery of the firelight, the children watched entranced; there must have been about five or six of them at best.

  My breath was stolen, heart beating as the fear on Gerald’s face shot through my memory… that day on the lake, in his café… ‘You’re not Carabas?’ I stammered, ‘they found his body in a tree. His own men killed and flayed him...’

  I was lost in the darkling light behind his eyes, pulling me further and beyond into the dance of insanity. He looked at me mysteriously, a creature not entirely human, not like anything I had ever imagined. Then a viscous blackness like syrup started leaking from his lips. ‘Told you you might get burnt.’ He said quietly. ‘Can you hear him, he’s coming…’

  Again I tried to summon the anger, it should have been flashing inside me but nothing was happening. Mason Carabas, the rotten cancer at the heart of my broken family. The awe, the fear I’d witnessed on others’ faces as they spoke his name. I shot a glance at Giselle weeping into her hand. He reached for his dagger and withdrew it from its sheath, pointing the tip toward my throat, ‘Walk,’

  I crept on ahead.

  We stood before a ledge, the air moist and cold on our foreheads. It felt like a chasm, the squeak of bats high up in the belfry. I accidentally dislodged a stone with my foot, listening as it skittered down the sharp face of the abyss. Carabas stood next to me, the dying light of the taper catching the smooth surface of his bald head. I felt his eyes swivel around to meet me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back at him. I knew if I stared into the dead pools I would see the certainty of my fate, that it was never intended for me to leave this place.

  Giselle stood nervously on my other side, and again I wondered what she’d had to endure at the hands of this man. I felt her warm hand searching for mine in the darkness, at first I thought she wanted to hold onto me but then she passed something cold and small into my palm. I played with it in my hand, felt the grooves of the lettering and knew it to be my father’s old Zippo lighter. I’d misplaced it in Vientiane.

  ‘I saved it for you.’ she whispered.

  ‘So what now?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Across there… somewhere in the darkness he waits. Listen carefully,’

  We listened. I heard nothing but bats.

  ‘Sounds like you made a mistake, that the scriptures in your fucked up religion were wrong.’

  ‘The scriptures were right, they’ve always been right. The second coming meets the first in this place you now stand in. Together they bind, get stronger. But first he needs to be awoken, and for that we need some soul food.’

  Mason Carabas was smiling at his daughter and nodding his head slowly. She started crying. He looked out across the void then back to the dagger in his hand. I felt her body trembling beside me as he spoke. ‘An act of faith, a sacrifice.’

  He handed the knife to her, watching me carefully as it was passed in front of my chest. I made a step backwards instinctively, he didn’t stop me. Before I realized what was happening it was too late.

  Giselle’s body fell limp to the ground, her hands tight around the dagger in her breast. In the flicker of flame her eyes ran to me, then back to her father. He looked at her steadily as she drew her last breath, brushed the black hair from her eyes and removed the blood-sheened knife; not a trace of emotion on his face. The children came to him, brought the package. Carabas removed his shirt so he was now bare-chested, his muscles surprisingly intact for someone in their advanced years. About himself he wrapped a black robe, much like a Buddhist monk’s, then from the bin-liner he withdrew a grotesque looking skull, the horns huge and wide.

  ‘You know, your father and I were partners for a time. It never worked, he couldn’t understand me… too much virtue to be a real soldier, and virtue is an encumbrance. ’

  ‘In your other disguise you were saying he was a traitor.’ I tried to buy a little time to figure what to do next. Whatever his response I conditioned myself not to believe a word of it.

  ‘We were bombing a village in Vietnam, he warned the enemy, saved their lives. Bought himself a silly little disguise as an old mandarin. He honestly thought I wouldn’t find out about it. But disguise is my game… I was already seeing things by remote, seeing through people. That’s when I began to…’ he searched for the word, ‘Realize my potential, the will to power… the knowledge there was a calling beyond the business of war.

  ‘But it was when we your father and I got to Laos that things started to quicken, that the calling became clearer. In the other country I was a blind butcher in a meat factory. After I saw the mountain here it all changed, an epiphany of sort; I learnt to select the choice cuts… and not just to feed myself, but to nourish darkness in others… the power of the second path.’

  He paused. I said nothing because now I knew there was only truth; no more vaudeville disguise, no more games. He had me exactly where he needed me.

  ‘The scriptures said a man would seek me out, a man with a mark on his neck. I thought that man was your father, but I was wrong… he was a fake. He never brought the key and so we had to wait, trust the words, wait for the next guardian to grow up. I was angry as hell, I wanted to kill Jacques but no, I had to follow the code.’

  ‘Code?’ I prompted.

  ‘The stars… it had to be the right time. We had to keep him in torment till the final reveal, till the stars reformed in alignment. Ursa Major – the sign of the dragon.’

  My heart broke. Poor Dad, how long had they kept him in this wretched place before ending his days? All the while we waited in Richmond for him to come home he was still alive, trapped, unable to get word to us. I wanted to cry for him, for us all, but now wasn’t the time.

  ‘What if I hadn’t come here?’ I said unsteadily,

  ‘Oh there was no danger of that; it was your destiny. Of course I encouraged it somewhat… the trail that lead you here. But I could only encourage events so far, this time unlike with Jacques, I had to trust the play of events.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think you’re a very gifted theatre director… that you plan things to the finest detail for maximum effect. I think all this ritual is disguising insanity… you’re a 21st century psycho veiled in mysticism. You revived this cult to increase your personal magnetism, you think it somehow legitimizes you…’ Then I trailed off, knowing that my words meant nothing, were mere posturing in the face of those hideous photos with Po Pot and the rest of
the monsters.

  So we stood there for a time and said nothing. The wall of the tunnel felt cold and hard against my back, the only light was around his infernal frame. His chest rose and fell as he sniffed the air and looked into the darkness. I tried to tell myself I had the upper hand, that he still needed me.

  ‘Out there, what do you see?’ he asked finally.

  Carabas inched toward the ledge directing his torch to scan the area. At first there was nothing but blackness, but then I saw the thin form of a bamboo pathway stretching out from the edge, no broader than a child’s back. There were other pathways that joined it, some of them finishing abruptly and leading nowhere; a network of them snaking into the darkness.

  So this was the maze.

  He jumped back as something swung past his ear, missing him by no more than an inch. We listened as it whistled to the other side of the cavern’s ceiling; I barely had time to register the flame of the torch reflecting on its burnished surface. It sounded like it had clicked into some kind of socket on the distant wall. Carabas pointed the taper into the void once more, his body remaining firmly in the tunnel. Once again the pendulum flew past the ledge.

  ‘Booby trap, I expected as much. We’re almost there now,’ he said colourlessly. I heard the sound of metal on flint as the pendulum slotted into its original mooring.

  Yin’s words: ‘You must not use light in the dark’. The morning in the temple began to make sense, in my mind I could hear the birdsong outside, the breathing of the monk close by as he trailed me down the corridors of salt.

  ‘Put out your light or we won’t be able to cross.’ I said.

  Carabas clicked his tongue and two of the kids came forward. He fished in his trouser pocket for a lighter and gave it to the child, still mute and without fear. I watched as the boy lit the flame and started to walk across as if in a dream.

  ‘No - he’s just a kid!’ I stammered. As we heard the familiar whistle, I tried to reach out for him but he was too far down the pathway. As the blade whipped by I drew my hand back. Light as a feather it scooped up the boy with a pop of flesh and exhalation of breath, spiriting him into the darkness. He never screamed. What had Carabas done to them to render them like this? They were barely human. My mind drifted back to the fairytale of the Pied Piper, the green eyed stranger in a yellow and red cloak who came a piping and played all of Hamlyn’s children into the mountain never to be seen again.

  We heard the smash of bones against the walls, ‘For god’s sake,’ I mumbled.

  Carabas smiled, not because the child was dead I fancied, but because he now had a plan to get past the pendulums whilst keeping the light to see where he was going. If it worked he no longer needed me. ‘It is for god’s sake.’ He said, ‘That’s exactly right.’

  I watched him turn around, step over the body of his daughter and walk slowly toward me, the colossal skull still in his hands. It had a strap attached. His head came level with mine and I looked into his black eyes with my last drop of courage. ‘Not much of a father figure were you?’ I said weakly.

  He smiled unblinkingly, the folds of skin around his throat shifting like a nest of vipers beneath a veil. Carabas bent down to his daughter, scooping her in his wrestler’s arms and lifted her to the edge of the abyss. ‘Suffer the little children.’

  My heart dropped as I heard the thud of her bones ricocheting from the dark stone walls. Not because I thought I’d almost loved her, not because I knew there was some remote part of her that felt a level of guilt for what she’d brought upon me; but because I was still a human being and had never felt more so next to the abomination glowing in the light beside me.

  ‘You’re an animal.’ I said bitterly,

  ‘Yes,’ he said, setting the flame on the ground between us and seating himself in a cross-legged position. Carabas shut his eyes, turning the dagger in his palms. It was as if he knew I was powerless to get within a foot of him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said finally, his voice disarmingly soft. ‘What do you know about me?’

  I remained where I was. ‘I know what you’ve done - Pol Pot, the Burmese Junta. You thrive on death and perversion… you steal childhoods. You and your lizards have waited thirty-six years to bring me out here. I’m finished with riddles, what really happened to Jacques Deschamps?’

  ‘Take me across the maze and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘You know what will happen.’

  ‘Do you honestly believe you’re some kind of antichrist? Isn’t that a bit comic book? Like I said you’re just a psycho dressed up as a religious leader… like Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid gang. And that black shit coming out of your mouth? It’s cancer, or more joke shop sorcery.’

  But like my last attempt to defrock him I knew my words were empty, that despite the fact he wasn’t floating through the air, there was something supernatural about him…

  ‘I’ve led an interesting life, amazing what a man can achieve with an absence of fear. I built up the trade in the Golden Triangle, took on the Yakuza. I killed and sacrificed, I swallowed their souls… I knew I was getting closer with every one. After a time I became invulnerable, ofcourse they tried to fell me but it wasn’t written you understand? I was put here. The night before the rout of Phnom Penh I was there in the city waiting behind a shuttered window; watching the people like insects about their daily lives. To know it would soon be ripped apart by Pot’s doctrine, by my suggestions, do you have any idea how beautiful that felt… to be an architect of death?’

  ‘Don’t you feel anything?’ I said recoiling,

  ‘Feeling never contributed to a single crowning achievement,’ Carabas said quietly, as if his sermon were solely addressed to his own mind.

  ‘But all this to meet a man who was buried in here fifteen hundred years ago… a man who must now be dead. And now we’re stuck in here and you’ll never design any more genocide, Carabas. You’re trapped. Wasted talent.’

  This time I heard something, another sound, like material rubbed together, rattled breathing. It couldn’t have been the kid; he was taken the other way and that was minutes ago. I pointlessly scanned the dark of the void.

  I sensed his gaze on my back studying me with his glittering eyes; in the flicker of light electricity seemed to be bouncing off his head. Sweat was running down my spine, my breath tasted metallic and the curdling swim of my stomach had begun its revolutions again.

  Carabas soundlessly appeared beside me on the ledge. When he finally spoke his voice cut the silence with the grace of a knife. ‘I’m going to do something more generous than I’ve ever done before,’ he whispered as if we were in a church, ‘I’m going to allow you to lead me across this maze and learn the answer to the mystery of your unhappy life.’ Carabas cricked the muscles in his taurine neck and smiled at me affectionately, ‘And then you will die.’

  ‘And you?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Put out your fire or we won’t be able to cross,’ I said.

  ‘Wrong.’ He clicked his tongue and another child appeared. He gave it a fresh lighter - he obviously had a pocket full of them - and sent the girl across. ‘When the blade takes the kid, we have to rush. Linger and I’ll push you off.’

  Just as before the next child walked into the gloom like Orpheus into the Underworld… then the singing of the blade and the cold slap of bone against the faraway wall. As it took him Carabas ushered the next victim ahead of us. The little girl got no more than fifteen yards and another blade flashed out of the darkness and ate her flame.

  ‘That was someone’s child.’ I said with resignation.

  Carabas pushed me forward gently, taking with him the burning taper. The three other kids waited at the lip of the drop as we moved forward.

  ‘Your Mother will die Alain, show me across the maze and I can stop that happen
ing. You can still save her.’

  ‘What, you’re going to make a phone call? Somehow I don’t think the reception will be much good in here.’

  When I looked around he’d strapped the hideous skull over his face. So now I had my very own Minotaur. Time to move, I had no choice. ‘Take ten steps ahead, then stop.’ The corridors of salt burned in my mind, I never looked down. With my eyes firmly shut - I had a better chance that way - I kept walking. At one point I dislodged another stone with my foot and sent it skittering into the depths; it must have been ten seconds before it rang far below in what sounded like water. How the hell had the monks designed this place?

  I’d walked the first twenty steps. I told Carabas to make ten forward and turn left and walk another ten. Then I continued. A bat whistled past my shoulder, and like a trapeze artist I put out my hands to steady myself. We followed the first fifty steps verbatim, till we were almost halfway through the maze. Only once did I teeter and lose the imprinted white path in my head. I had no idea what I’d do once we got to the end of the maze; I’d been given no exit route by the map. And I was sure if there was a clue of escape Yin would have given it to me. Poor man, he was probably little more than a skeleton now.

  I resolved to bury him and my friends if I ever got out of here. Then I’d torch the place with a drum of kersosene I’d noticed in the ruins; it must have been used to power a generator. But that seemed a far cry from the present; I was in a colossal cave, my charismatic fellow spleunker one of the greatest, uncelebrated butchers of the 20th Century.

  Then I heard something - that flutter of robes from another direction, mid-air in the dark. Carabas was quiet as a cat but I could faintly hear him. No, this new sound came from dead ahead, where my mental map reckoned to be the end of the labyrinth. Something like laughter or wind began to follow the movements.