Black Buddha

by Richard Waters

  Behind me Carabas was getting closer. ‘I can hear him whispering to us, can you?’

  I could certainly hear something. We weren’t alone. ‘Shut up!’ I spat.

  Inevitably, I lost my concentration, the image of the flame, the clear delineations of the map in my mind; like a rehearsed actor drying on stage and wondering where he is. Midstride I stooped to retrieve the coordinates and in doing so, heard Carabas gaining on me. Then I heard a singing sound as another blade dislodged itself from the faraway wall. I was in the darkness, only he held the lighted taper. It flew past, I could almost feel the wind of its passing it on my back. A scuffle of feet as the Colonel took a quick step back and dodged it. After that he threw his firebrand to the abyss, both of us in darkness. I heard the pad of his feet on the delicate pathway as if he were trying to reach me.

  It was too much. I opened my eyes and turned around; in the primal blackness I could just make out the pale outline of the skull and horns. I had to get those lines back in my head.

  ‘Wait, you said we’d both cross together… you need me to get there!’

  The breath was close, rank as the dragons. I stepped back two paces, sensing the infinity behind my heel.

  ‘I said a lot of things.’ Carabas said stepping toward me. ‘You know, he pissed his pants when we caught him? When I cut him open, he cried for you and the dinosaur woman in front of all my men. It was embarrassing… he was supposed to be a soldier not a baby.’

  ‘You said you kept him alive.’ I stammered.

  ‘He mentioned a summerhouse, said he hadn’t finished building it… There’s a man in the summerhouse now, Alain, it’s lunchtime… your mum’s in her lounge growing old and he’s watching her. When she makes her cup of tea tonight and takes a biscuit upstairs and dreams dirty, fading dreams of your Dad, he’ll slip in the house… he’ll slip into her, in the dark.’

  Then we both heard the laughter again, a keening, sly chuckle from no more than twenty feet away.

  Bats, must be bats, I thought. What else could it possibly be?

  Then another more believing thought occurred to me - just supposing it wasn’t all hokum, that there really was something in all of this religion of his, then that thing would be waiting to join him on the other side of this maze, and then it would all be over. I was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. My hand closed around the Zippo lighter in a final appeal to my father, while the faces of Yin and Skip seemed to race around me before disappearing into the cavern above. I couldn’t see them but I felt them all the same. And they were leaving.

  Carabas was near, no more than five feet away now.

  The golden door. I waited till the last moment then thrust the lighter out to him, heard the metallic click of the lid, the grind of the miniature wheel against the flint as the wick caught and the flame wavered to life. I placed it to his face and threw myself onto the walkway. The whisper of the pendulum flew above my head in a steady arc; he never screamed as it slapped into his skull with the cracking sound of a lobster being prized open. It seemed the Jai-Dam didn’t feel fear, even when they were impaled on the sore end of a seven-foot pendulum.

  I heard the smack of bone on the faraway wall, the air being sucked away as he fell into the darkness to join his newly departed daughter. It wasn’t triumph that coursed through me, more like temporary relief. I was alone now – but for that other unknown entity – in a place with no exit. I sat down on the narrow bamboo walkway, a leg on each side as if I was on a rocking horse, and began to laugh. it filled the chasm, resounded through unseen tunnels and came back to me like a boomerang and finally stopped.

  But then after a few seconds the laughter returned.

  It wasn’t mine.

  ‘Nice try, Alain.’ Carabas came closer. The pendulum had ripped the horns off his head, nothing more… diabolically spared as had been the story of his life.

  There were no more words. I focused my every last fibre of energy at eluding him, making for the direction of the laughter. I stood up, felt both sides of the track with my bare feet, centred myself and began walking toward the conclusion of the maze, Carabas’ breath close behind. A minute later I stepped off into a wider plateau of rock, behind it the wide mouth of a tunnel. I fished in my pocket for the Zippo and ran and stumbled down the tunnel in the wavering light. Behind me I heard him step off the walkway in stealthy, assured pursuit.

  The tunnel opened up to another cavern, this one with fingers of stalagmites reaching up to the ceiling; a whole wood of them. At least they gave me someplace to hide, to spring him. An ancient firebrand hung from a wall. I took it and lit the end. Amazingly, after centuries, it sprang to life and lit my way. The natural end of the cavern was a cathedral high-wall. A few splinters of light shafted through from a hole in the rock, perhaps we really were close to the conical peak of the mountain. Then I noticed an ancient shrine, a lifesize stone carving of the Buddha in the ‘appealing for rain’ standing position, stood roughly in the middle of this end wall. He looked serenely into the darkness beyond. I wished I could have believed in him. I backed against him as if he was a talisman.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  - 44 -

  Two figures walked toward me in the faraway distance, identical but for the fact one was made of shadow, the other of flesh. It might have been a trick of the light for my enemy also held a burning taper. Once he’d spotted me, Carabas extinguished his flame; now I saw him only intermittently as he passed through the shafts of light. Now, the shadow had gone.

  See - he’s not supernatural, Alain, he’s a man - a psycho, and you can take him.

  Solemn as a church the final moment approached, no words, only movement.

  My fists bunched, my stomach clenched. I felt the balls of my feet on the hard stone and took a breath - seconds out gentlemen, let’s have clean fight - the bell about to ring. A simple gameplan, I’d fly at him so quick he wouldn’t even see me coming. And this time I wouldn’t stop until I killed him.

  And then perhaps twenty feet away he stood in a small shaft of yellow sunlight and my understanding of physics was turned on its head. Into the light beside him, as if to banish all doubt, walked a figure, a black entity; they stood beside each other like bookends. It’s strange but when you need to scream and you know no one will hear you, you remain silent. There were no appeals on my part, only horror.

  I pressed against the Buddha, my fingers reaching behind me for the comfort of his face, a visage that must have endlessly watched the Blackheart as he paced around in the dark waiting to die… waiting. My fingers felt his eyes move like buttons depressed under their touch. My mind raced back to the map, to the words Yin had translated for me but had meant nothing to us. ‘The birth of the Buddha, his eyes and nose.’ I pressed the nose - it too moved into the face only to release itself again. It was so clever, so perfect I almost laughed. But that would have been premature.

  The Buddha was born in 553 AD. As I prayed to gods that had never before heard my voice, not since I was a child beseeching the return of my father, I prayed to them now; that my hunch was correct, that it was all for a purpose; that in admitting a guardian into this blasphemy of darkness, they had also provided an exit route. As I punched the left eye with my index finger, I swore I’d become a devout follower if they would only get me out of here. Five times I pressed it, then five times on the other eye, and finally three times on the nose.

  Nothing. But in those few seconds something was happening in the light; Carabas screamed and clutched his head, the black figure was nowhere to be seen and I could see more of that hellish fluid leaking from his mouth. Perhaps memory is a lie, perhaps he had some form of dreadful cancer and it was no more than bile, but there seemed to be a depth of blackness emanating from him, stealing the light. He rose to his feet, his eyes fixed on me, then he – they - began the final walk for me.

  I turned bac
k to the statue, feeling for more depressable features, but there were none. This time I worked from the left eye to the right and then to the nose. Five, five, three. I howled in frustration as again nothing happened. Carabas was no more than ten feet away now, seemingly larger, younger, but again I’m sure it was just my imagination, creating him this way. In one final appeal, I decided on the eye then the nose, then the eye. I had only time for one more attempt, either working from the left or right. If only I hadn’t stood around gawping as he fitted on the ground. I chose the left eye first, punched it five clear times then went for the nose and completed the date: five, five, three. Almost instantly the slab on which I stood groaned, slid away and I was falling. Like a revolving door it shut upon itself a second later and I fancied I heard a scream like a banshee, like a cat being torn apart; anger, frustration.

  It was perpendicular, a smooth slide down into the belly of the mountain. The breath was stolen from my lungs, I fell with such force I was sure I’d break every bone in mt body; but gradually the tunnel lessened its degree of descent and slowed down in angle, so when I finally plopped into the dark water far below it was little more than racing down a kid’s slide.

  Underwater, nothing but darkness. Above, no light to guide me. I thrashed about for air and finally settled on the surface. It smelt of ancient places older than sin, older than Buddhists and antichrists. Treading water and trying to equalize my breath and steady my heart I looked up to where I’d dropped from, thinking at any moment something might follow me down. But nothing came, and then I had a little more good luck. Far away in the distance I could see a speck - a pinhead of light. Slowly, I began to swim out of the underworld.

  ***

  The tributary ran directly into the Nam Khan River, my ferry back to Nong Khiaw, and far beyond it the civilized city of Luang Prabang. But I hadn’t finished; I still had some unfinished business. Even as I felt myself flow through the jungle toward safety I knew I must go back to Black Dragon Mountain - if only to keep my promise and bury the innocents with a dignity they hadn’t been granted in life. Taking my time, I angled myself across the waters to the bank.

  It was a familiar trudge back to camp. A few dragons kicked around indolently in the shade. Looking at the treehouse and via ferrata it looked like an abandoned film set; but for the fact there was a dead man strung in a web of ropes with half his legs eaten clean. I found a sharp, narrow strip of metal and began to dig a hole, four holes, in the wet ooze of the forest floor. The clay came away easily. By lunchtime I had lifted the lifeless corpses down the ladder one by one, including Yin; all except Stretch, he was too heavy to carry and I had to let him fall. I closed my eyes as his corpse hit the ground with an appalling crunch. Then I sat next to the bodies, their faces deep down in the earth and I suppose I cried.

  The remaining players – Vong and Lou Knowles – I placed on a pyre, doused them in kerosene and tried to get my lighter going. Finally, after I’d left it in the sun to dry, the wick produced a flame and the bodies went up in yellow and orange flame. Next I torched the treehouse. The lizards could please themselves; it wasn’t their fault they were here. It didn’t howl – the fire I mean – like in horror movies. It wasn’t even that dramatic to look at. But I waited till the treehouse burnt itself out, said a few final words to my buried friends and left.

  The sun was westering in the three o’clock sky as I began walking south past the ruins toward the dense jungle. As I looked back at Black Dragon Mountain for the final time I suddenly stopped short.

  A sound… a rasp.

  I waited a beat then slunk behind the tuberous roots of a giant banyan tree. Another game? One last player…

  It was an attempt at a whistle, almost inaudible, like someone trying to make the sound of the wind. It got a little clearer then turned into a rattled, desperate hum. Another trick. My heart beat faster as my mind banished the impossible thought. But the hum kept coming, forming into a tune… I almost sang along.

  “In the port of Amsterdam there’s a sailor who sings, of the dreams that he brings from the wide open sea,

  In the port of Amsterdam there’s a sailor who sleeps, while the riverbank weeps with the old willow tree,

  In the port of Amsterdam there’s a sailor who dies, full of beer, full of cries in a drunken town fight,

  But in the port of Amsterdam there’s a sailor who’s born, on a muggy hot morn by the dawn’s early light.”

  I ran to the ruins, to the sound, searching the darkness for the hidden speaker and wiring that I might track it down to the recorder and throw it on the fire, but there was nothing to be found. The sound brought me to a dark interior in the ruins where I believed, on my first escape, to have seen something in a cage. The hum became inaudible, lost its melody, but now I could see where it was coming from. In the deep shadows an old man was bent over, his face famished. Not Asian, I thought.

  And then I remembered Carabas’ words… ‘We had to keep him in torment till the final reveal, till the stars reformed in alignment.’

  I searched around for something to prize the padlock with, found a stone and beat at it till it gave. He recoiled at first so I waited, my lower lip trembling… thinking all the time this couldn’t be happening. Then I made the sign of the eye with my left hand, the one Dad used to make with his thumb and forefinger when I was a child. Slowly he returned the gesture. Then I reached in, tentatively stroked his face and felt his tears on my fingers. I gently held his hands and pulled him slowly, very slowly toward me. I could hear birdsong. He looked at the blue sky as if it was a gift and then back at me, gripping my hands as if I might disappear again just as he’d done thirty-six years before.

  ‘It’s all right Dad, I’m here now. No one can hurt you anymore… we’re going home.’