The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  Sometimes we’d go together and watch the rituals for hours. But .. .”

  She hesitated.

  “There was something else, something that made me do what I did. The feeling’s gone now. But when he shot Sonam, I felt as though something took me over.”

  “Anger?”

  “No, more than that. Something quite different. I can’t explain.”

  “There’s no need. Come on, we’ve got to get moving. You still have to explain to me how we’re supposed to get out of Dorje-la.”

  From the Tara chapel, a series of wooden steps and short passages led them down to the gon-kang. The small crypt-chapel was empty, save for the stuffed animals and gods that kept watch over it. A few lamps were lit, filling parts of the room with a creamy, yellow glow.

  Chindamani explained to Christopher the details of the escape route described by Sonam. He listened to her grimly, unable to guess how much of the old woman’s story might be true and how much mere legend.

  They tightened their travelling clothes and tied on the items of equipment Chindamani had prepared. Christopher found a short rusty sword among the small clutter of weapons left in the gonkang and slipped it into his belt.

  “William,” he said. The boy was close by his side, determined not to let his father out of his sight again. Christopher reached into a fold of his chuba and drew out something soft. It was a small and very battered teddy-bear.

  “I’ve brought old Samuel from Carfax,” said Christopher, holding the ragged toy out to the boy.

  “I thought you might like to have him with you. To remind you of home.”

  The boy took the bear and hugged it to his chest. It had always been his favourite toy, his inseparable bedtime companion, repaired, restuffed, restitched half a dozen times. He looked up at his father and, for the first time, smiled. With Samuel, he could face any number of dangers.

  Samdup watched, bewildered. Stuffed animals were nothing new to him, but he had never seen one like this before. And why did the strange pee-ling boy want to carry one round with him? Was it some sort of god?

  William put Samuel into his bag.

  “We’ll soon be back in Carfax, Samuel,” he said. Christopher smiled.

  How he wished he could believe that.

  They rolled back several rugs in front of the main altar. Underneath, they could make out the shape of a narrow hatchway set flush with the floor and provided with a brass ring.

  Christopher turned to Chindamani. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes gleamed in the sickly light. He scarcely dared look directly at her.

  “You don’t have to come,” he said.

  “You or Samdup. You’ll be quite safe, I’m sure of it. Tsarong Rinpoche is dead. You were a threat only to him. Zamyatin will find it better to let you live. He’ll use you as a symbol, but you will be alive. And the boy he’s more use to Zamyatin alive than dead. You don’t know what there is down there. Or what could be waiting on the journey.”

  “I was responsible for the Rinpoche’s death,” Chindamani said.

  “Or at least that is what the monk who was with him will say. His followers won’t stand for that. And Samdup wouldn’t be safe with Zam-ya-ting. You know that. You know why.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. She was right: he knew why.

  “Very well,” he replied.

  “We’ll go together. We can’t afford to wait here any longer they’ll already be looking for us everywhere.

  I don’t know what’s down beneath this hatch. It may be nothing;

  it may be something more dangerous than anything Zamyatin and his men have to offer. But we’ve no choice. If we’re going out, this is the only way left open to us.”

  He turned to Samdup and spoke to him directly for the first time.

  “What about you, Samdup? Do you feel up to this?”

  The boy did not answer at once. He looked back at Christopher with an unsettling seriousness in his eyes. Since his discovery as a trulku and his installation here at Dorje-la, he had never really been treated as a child. He had clearly recovered his composure quickly since the scene in Chindamani’s room.

  “You should not call me “Samdup”,” he said finally.

  “My proper name is Dorje Samdup Rinpoche. You may call me Samdup Rinpoche or, if you prefer, Lord Samdup. Only those who are very close to me may call me by my given name alone. And you must use the proper verbal forms at all times when addressing me.”

  There was that in the boy’s look and tone of voice that endowed his words with an adult seriousness few British children of his age could possibly have emulated. Christopher felt thoroughly rebuked.

  “I’m sorry .. . my Lord,” he said.

  “There are many things I have to learn.”

  “Don’t worry,” the boy said.

  “I will teach you. As for leaving here - I don’t think we have much time to waste.”

  Christopher said nothing. The die was cast. They were going into the passages beneath the gon-kang. He bent down and lifted the ring of the hatch in his right hand.

  The hatch was heavy. It came up slowly, without a sound.

  There was nothing below but darkness, black, clammy, and cold.

  A stale smell rose out of the pit, or perhaps it was a mixture of smells, not quite identifiable in themselves, not quite reducible to ordinary odours. It was an evil stench and it clung to the nostrils with grim tenacity. Chindamani turned her face away and made a brief gagging sound. Christopher pulled his heavy scarf up over his mouth and nose. The others followed suit.

  “I’ll go first,” whispered Christopher.

  “Then William, then Lord Samdup. Then Chindamani. We’ll all carry lamps, and if anyone’s goes out they’re to say so immediately and get a fresh light from someone else. Make as little noise as possible. And close the hatch behind us.”

  Peering into the hole with the help of his lamp a large one that Chindamani had found on a side altar Christopher made out the first few rungs of a wooden ladder.

  They went down slowly. The ladder took them about ten feet below the floor of the gon-kang. When Christopher, William and Samdup reached the bottom, Chindamani tossed the more bulky baggage down to them before closing the hatchway and climbing down herself.

  The darkness was absolute, a thing in itself, an object and not a mere absence of light. It seemed to breathe and live and grow stronger every moment. The light of their lamps was swallowed up in it and rendered flat and insubstantial. It clung to them like a dim halo, scarred and denatured by the all-encompassing blackness.

  They were in a small stagnant chamber about fifteen feet by ten.

  Against one wall, Christopher made out the shapes of lacquered chests and boxes. Beside them stood a huge, jewel-encrusted throne. He stepped across to a tall box ornamented with bright red peonies and lifted the lid. For a moment, it seemed as though the light thrown by his lamp had been shattered into a thousand fragments. Everywhere, tiny specks of coloured light danced in the darkness. Rubies, emeralds, diamonds and amethysts lay packed in the chest like pebbles on Brighton beach.

  Christopher picked up a handful and let them trickle back through his fingers. They felt cold to the touch and curiously light, as though all their substance lay in colour and luminosity. The colours shifted and flew about, like the quick wings of hummingbirds in a forest glade, shimmering in a sudden ray of sunlight.

  He picked up a second handful. They would need money for their journey. And after that, money to look after Chindamani and the boy. Out there, in what Christopher regarded as the real world, to be a representative of a goddess or an incarnation of the Maidari Buddha counted for nothing.

  “Are you hungry?” It was Samdup’s voice, close beside him.

  Christopher looked down and shook his head.

  “No, my Lord,” he said.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have no need of them. There is food in our bags: we will not starve. Ther
e is snow: we will not go thirsty. If you take them, they will become a heavier burden than the whole of Dorjela.”

  Christopher opened his fingers and the jewels dropped one by one back into the box. This time, for no real reason that he could see, they seemed trivial to him, like pieces of coloured paste or red and green candies for a greedy child. He closed the lid and raised his lamp again.

  The walls were alive with paintings: among the usual gods and demons were vividly coloured mandalas and charms in the shape of lotus-flowers covered in fine writing. Little square flags printed with the image of a winged horse bearing a mystic jewel on its back had been hung at intervals; they were faded and tattered and covered in dust. Thick cobwebs hung everywhere, some ancient and tattered like prayer-flags, others clearly fresh.

  They listened for the sound of something living, but the room was occupied only by inanimate objects. Christopher began to think that talk of a guardian was little more than a ploy to deter would-be thieves. But in that case, why had the story been kept so quiet?

  In the wall opposite the spot where they had entered the room was the entrance to a broad tunnel. It had obviously not been used in some time: a thick, dusty spider’s web covered most of it.

  “At least,” Christopher whispered, ‘we don’t have to make up our minds which way to go.”

  Using the short sword, he swept away the web: it tumbled down, leaving the gaping opening free for them to pass through.

  Christopher went ahead, holding his lamp out in front of him in his left hand while hefting the sword in his right, ready to strike out at the first signs of life. His heart pounded heavily in his chest:

  he thought he could hear it echo off the walls of the tunnel. The stench was more pronounced here and seemed to be growing stronger all the time.

  The passage was not quite high enough for Christopher to walk in un stooped but it was sufficiently wide to allow him to pass through without difficulty. He felt certain that they were already passing out of the monastery. The chill that pervaded the tunnel was unlike that in any of the passages they had come through on their way from Chindamani’s apartment. That had been icy, but tinged with a residual warmth that seemed to have seeped through the walls from the inhabited areas through which the tunnels passed. This was a fetid, uneasy chill, raw and bitter, as though nothing human had breathed the air down here for centuries.

  Christopher’s foot touched something. Something hard and slightly brittle. He lowered the lamp slowly, trying to hold it at an angle in order to shed light on the ground in front of him.

  He could not make it out at first. It seemed to be a bundle of some kind, about five feet long, angular in places, dirty and grey.

  Then he held the light closer and all at once it became clear to him what it was ... or what it had been.

  The small body had shrunk beyond all reason, as if something had sucked it dry over a long period. Nothing was left but dry skin stretched over old bones. Thin hands like talons clutched at the throat. The head was pulled back acutely, away from the body, as if death had been an agony. From head to foot, the corpse was covered in dust-laden strands of something like rotten fabric, similar to the cobwebs they had seen earlier. The whole thing resembled a cocoon, neatly packaged and left to dehydrate here in the tunnel. It had been down here a long time. Perhaps as long as five centuries. Christopher shuddered and lifted his lamp.

  “What is it, Christopher?” Chindamani whispered.

  “Why have you stopped?”

  “It’s nothing. Just ... an obstruction in the tunnel. Keep to the right and you’ll be able to get by.”

  He walked on, hesitant now, on the alert for whatever might be waiting further along the tunnel. Sonam’s guardian was slipping out of the mists of legend and growing into a thing of substance.

  Behind him, he heard the others gasp as they caught sight of the obstruction.

  The next body was a few yards further along. It had died in a seated position, propped against one wall. Its arms were thrust out in front of it, as thought fending off something coming out of the darkness. Like the other corpse, it was shrivelled and shrunken.

  Pieces of leathery flesh, dark brown in colour, could be glimpsed beneath layers of the dusty fabric. It seemed to Christopher as though something had trussed it up and sucked it slowly dry.

  “Who are they, Christopher?” Chindamani’s voice came from close behind him. She was standing, one arm around Samdup, looking down at the little corpse. The boy seemed disturbed, but not frightened. Christopher remembered that he had been brought up in a culture that had little fear of the paraphernalia of death.

  Instead of Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty, the walls of Samdup’s nursery would have been painted with dead flesh and mouldering bones. Instead of a teddy-bear, he would have been given a statue of Yama to place by his bedside.

  “I think this one was a child,” he said. But it was only a guess, based on the corpse’s apparent height.

  “It seems .. . more recent than the other. Less dusty.” He paused.

  “There may be more. Do you want to go on?”

  “Of course. We have no choice you said so yourself.”

  About five yards after that, Christopher encountered a heavy web that all but blocked the tunnel. He swept it aside only to meet another and then another. Vast, heavy strands of cobwebs filled the air. The miasmatic odour was growing in intensity. Christopher was beginning to have a good idea what had trussed up the bodies they had found. But surely no ordinary spider could have sucked them dry as well.

  All at once the tunnel ended and opened out into an area of undefined proportions. The light from Christopher’s lamp shed illumination over a limited radius, but as the children and Chindamani added their lights to his, the nature of their surroundings became gradually clear.

  It was a chamber thick with spiders’ webs, huge structures of ancient manufacture that looped a fantastic tracery from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The lamplight played complicated shadow-games among the interlacing cords and filaments. Some hung like hammocks, others billowed from the wall like grey lace curtains. No matter where they looked, the room was thick with them.

  And no matter where they cast their eyes, they could make out the bundled, mummified remains of human beings. The webs were full of them; they hung like flies, light and grey and bloodless. The room was a subterranean larder of God knows what antiquity. In places, body had been piled upon body, the mouldering remains sewn together in huge packages. In one corner, what seemed to be a relatively recent addition to their meat supply was being drained of its remaining fluids by a small army of spiders that moved across their prey with quick, quivering motions. To his horror, Christopher estimated the size of the spiders: the largest had a leg-span longer than a man’s forearm, from fingertips to elbow.

  Everywhere black shapes were walking in the shadows. The webs were alive with them, trembling as they crawled from thread to thread on huge, misshapen legs.

  “For God’s sake, get back into the tunnel!” Christopher cried. He had seen stings on the ends of the bulbous bodies and he guessed that the spiders had not overpowered their prey by brute force.

  Woodenly, they stumbled back, past the webs at the entrance to the food-chamber, as far as the first body. William was shaking with fright and loathing nothing in his worst nightmares had prepared him for such a sight. Samdup too was rigid with fear.

  “The horror of it! The horror of it!” Chindamani kept repeating.

  She was brushing and brushing her arms and body, desperately trying to rid herself of anything that might be clinging to her. She could feel their soft bodies and cold legs against her flesh. To be poisoned and pinned down and sucked dry by such creatures .. .

  Christopher checked for spiders. None seemed to have dropped on them or followed them so far. These, then, were the guardians set over the Oracle’s treasure. A species of spider, mutated by the thin air and the darkness, discovered or placed down here to sting and kill intruders
. But why had there been none in the treasure chamber And where did their victims come from?

  “Chindamani, Samdup,” Christopher ordered.

  “Get out any extra items of clothing you have in your bags. Wrap your hands and faces tightly. Leave no gaps, just a space for your eyes. Help each other. And hurry. We’ve disturbed them it won’t be long before they start investigating.” He bent down and quickly repeated what he had said to William. The boy had taken Samuel out of his bag and was clutching it to him nervously.

  “Put Samuel away,” Christopher said softly.

  “You’ll need your hands free.” William complied reluctantly.

  Feverishly, Chindamani and Samdup wrapped each other up, using spare scarves and leggings they had packed. When they were ready, Chindamani helped William bind himself, then Christopher.

  “We can still go back,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said.

  “Zam-ya-ting is waiting for us there. It’s death whichever way we go.

  But perhaps we have a chance down here.

  That place is their lair. The stairs of Yama must be beyond it. If we can make it that far, we’ll be all right.”

  Christopher prayed she was right.

  When they were ready, he led the way down to the exit from the tunnel. He could hear the rustling of their legs in the darkness, stiff wire bristles on paper a host of spiders coming to investigate the disturbance.

  If only he could make out an opening somewhere that would enable them to make a straight run for it. There was a risk that, if they became entangled in the vast network of spiders’ webs and confused by fighting off their hideous inhabitants, they would lose their lamps and be plunged into absolute darkness. And that would almost certainly be fatal.

  A large spider, its legs moving jerkily, like a badly oiled machine, came scuttling towards him at shoulder height along a swathe of tattered web. He swept at it with the sword and sent it tumbling back into the shadows. Another ran at his feet with a queer sideways motion. He kicked down hard and felt it give way beneath the heel of his boot.

  “Which way do we go, Christopher?” Chindamani asked, pressing against him from behind.