Death Trance

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Is this the place?’ Bob Stroup demanded.

  'This is the place,’ Mungkin Nanti said flatly. ‘If Michael is giving your friend any death-trance lessons, this is where he’ll be.’

  ‘Looks like the fucking Castle Dracula,’ Jimmy Heacox remarked.

  Richard Reece of course said nothing but stared at the gates of the Pura Dalem with cold, milky eyes.

  ‘You’d better go carefully,’ Mungkin Nanti warned. ‘When he’s in one of those death trances, he’s amazing. He can move so fast you can scarcely see him. One second he’s right in front of you and then he’s waving at you from way across the street and you didn’t have time to blink. It’s time, something to do with time. In a trance, time goes different. That’s what he told me anyway.’

  Reece touched his fingers against Bob Stroup’s shoulder. As if the silent man had somehow managed to communicate a complicated message, Bob Stroup asked,

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘It’s a temple,’ Mungkin Nanti told him. ‘The monks don’t use it any more for some reason. They call it the Temple of the Dead.’

  Reece nodded to Bob Stroup and the three men climbed out of the taxi. Bob Stroup said to Jennifer Dunning, ‘You go back home. And thanks for your help.’ He peeled twenty US dollars from a large roll and handed them to her. She took them reluctantly.

  ‘You’re not going to hurt him, are you?’ she asked, her eyes worried.

  ‘Hurt him? Why should we hurt him?’

  ‘Well, all I want you to do is to stop him from going into any more death trances.’

  Bob Stroup smiled and closed the taxi door. ‘What we said we were going to do - what we agreed on - that’s just what we’re going to do and no more. Now why don’t you get on home? You don’t want your boyfriend to know it was you who told us where he was, do you?’

  The taxi drove off. Reece and Stroup and Jimmy Heacox stood in the sunlit street for a moment, looking around, checking warong stands and shops for potential eyewitnesses, each smiling with that peculiar kind of mirthlessness that tightens the face of men who understand their incontestable power over the rest of humanity, a power that stems simply from the fact that they have no fear of pain and no fear of death. They have seen it all before and they have decided they don’t care.

  Reece gave a nod of his head, and they crossed the street to the gates of the Pura Dalem. Bob Stroup turned the handle and announced, ‘It’s unlocked.’

  Reece held out his hand and Jimmy Heacox passed him a green sports bag.

  Tugging back the zipper, Reece produced three white ice-hockey masks, which they fitted over their faces. They pushed open the heavy copper doors and edged into the outer courtyard one by one, glancing quickly from side to side to make sure no one was lying in wait. Then they closed the doors behind them, pausing for a second to listen, and drew Colt automatics from their combat jackets. The only sound was the clattering of the pistols’ slides as each of them chambered the first round and cocked the hammers.

  Reece beckoned and swiftly they crossed the derelict outer courtyard until they reached the paduraksa gate, which led to the sacred inner temple. Incense smoke was billowing out of the gate, twirling across the outer courtyard and through the broken-down bale agung and bale gong pavilions, where the local villagers had once met and the temple orchestra had once played. But there was no music here today.

  Only the rustling of dried leaves in the faintest of morning winds. Only the muffled sounds of traffic in the city streets. Only the strange, shrill calling of mynahs and parakeets.

  Reece stepped through the inner gate and then lifted his hand. Michael and Randolph were sitting only twenty yards away, half-hidden by the incense smoke, each swaying repetitively back and forth. Michael was chanting the ancient death-trance mantras in Sanskrit, the language of the high priests, in a high, warbling pitch that seemed to set the air trembling. His voice sounded almost like a musical saw, reaching a vocal weirdness that neither Reece nor Stroup nor Heacox had ever before heard in their lives, not even in the jungles of Cambodia.

  ‘What the fuck’s he doing?’ Heacox whispered hoarsely. ‘He sounds like the cat got his balls.’

  Bob Stroup said, ‘The old man made it one-hundred-per-cent clear that he wanted the kid taken alive. You got that, Jimmy?’

  Heacox said nothing. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter whether the kid lived or died. Who cared, so long as he got his bonus at the end of the trip? He sniffed and screwed up his nose in disgust at the smell of the incense.

  Although it was silent in the real temple - in the temple that manifested itself in the physical world - there was crashing gong and cymbal music in the temple that manifested itself in the world of the dead, the temple that Randolph and Michael were now entering. There were drums, whistles and tapping sticks, and the deep, shuddering booms of the gangsa. Randolph, his eyes tightly closed, was hurling himself furiously backwards and forwards now in time to the drumming. His mind was exploding with noise, detonating with janglings and boomings and scintillating ringings. He could no longer think of who he was, or why he was, or what it was that compelled him to sway with the music. He was beyond the threshold of reality and approaching the darkness of absolute trance.

  There was one moment when he was very frightened. The floor of the temple felt as if it were dropping away from underneath him, as if it were vanishing into empty, echoing space. Then the universe collapsed around him in great thundering blocks of noise and colour, deafening avalanches of darkness and mass. He was sped through time and perception so fast that streaks of dazzling light hurtled past his eyes like meteors and then burst apart into a glittering white flower with silver-showered petals that unfolded and bloomed and swelled until it revealed that he was back on the temple floor, his eyes open now, staring at Michael.

  The music had stopped. The temple was silent. Randolph looked around and then back at Michael.

  Leaves stirred on the temple floor like grey and desiccated skin.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Randolph asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  Michael smiled. There was a strange, bright light in his eyes.

  ‘Can we try again?’ Randolph asked. ‘Is it me? Is it me that’s wrong? Do I have to have more practice?’

  Michael said, ‘Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong at all.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It is very easy. You have attained that state which you came out here to Bali to attain. You are in a death trance. Your mind is guided very much by mine, of course, but nonetheless, you will be able to see everything I see and just as clearly.’

  Michael’s voice sounded strangely taut and flat and his phraseology was completely different from before. No more straight, direct, matter-of-fact statements in that nasal American-Balinese accent of his. Instead, a kind of placid Oriental politeness; Kane out of Kung-Fu, only far more elegant.

  ‘Follow me,’ Michael said and his words seemed to blossom inside Randolph’s brain.

  Together they rose from the temple floor and walked back across the inner courtyard to the candi bentar, the split gate.

  With their backs pressed against the carved stone walls, hiding well out of sight behind the curves of the gate, Reece, Stroup and Heacox - three white-faced demons from a different kind of dream - watched them pass and not one of them could believe what he saw.

  Randolph and Michael appeared to be almost transparent. Although they were walking slowly, they reached the outer gates of the temple in less than a blink, and then suddenly the gates were opened and they were gone.

  ‘What in hell?’ Heacox demanded. ‘I didn’t even get time to take a bead.’

  ‘You heard what the girl said,’ Stroup .told him. ‘They’re into one of these trance things. She said they were fast.’

  ‘So what the fuck do we do?’

  Reece lifted a finger to Bob Stroup and nodded towards the inner courtyard of the temple where the mask of Rangda now lay deserted.

 
Stroup spoke for him. The girl said that if they want to get out of the trance, they have to come back to the same place they went in. So all we have to do is wait for them here. Then we pop Randolph and take the kid.’

  They advanced cautiously into the inner courtyard where they prowled around, their automatics stuck in their belts. Stroup bent forward and peered at the incense; then he walked around the shrines.

  ‘You gotta believe these people. They’re even worse heathens than the goddam VC.’

  Heacox approached the mask of Rangda, edged around it in curiosity for a while and then lifted the silk covering with the muzzle of his pistol.

  ‘Jesus, it’s my mother-in-law.’

  Reece snapped his fingers sharply, which meant to leave the mask alone.

  ‘Don’t touch nothing,’ Stroup said by way of explanation. ‘If you mess around with anything here, Clare and the kid may not be able to get back and then you’re going to have to explain that to His Highness, Mr Waverley Graceworthy.’

  ‘Gives me the fucking creeps, this stuff,’ Heacox complained.

  They circled around the inner courtyard one more time. They peered into every leaf-silted corner. While he was examining an erotic bas-relief on the side of one of the shrines, however, Bob Stroup thought he saw something flicker out of the corner of his eye. A shadow, no more than that, close to the mask of Rangda. His reflexes were so high-strung, however, that he twisted around fast, ducked onto one knee and covered the mask with his automatic before the others realized what was happening.

  Reece whipped out his automatic too. They waited tensely, and then Reece gave Stroup a ducking motion with his head that meant, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I could have sworn I saw something. Just there, beside the mask. Like somebody moving, just for an instant.’ ‘Nerves,’ Heacox said. ‘There ain’t nothing there.’ Stroup was completely unmoved by this scepticism. There was something there. I saw it. A shadow, I don’t know.’

  Heacox walked across to the centre of the courtyard with his hands planted on his hips. To make fun of Stroup, he waved his arms from side to side through the empty air as if he were feeling for the Invisible Man. ‘I don’t feel nothing yet,’ he said loudly.

  ‘No, I definitely don’t feel nothing at all.’

  Reece pointed quickly across the width of the courtyard to indicate to Stroup that if anybody had been there, he would have had to walk right in front of all of them to reach the mask. A flap of his hand said, ‘Maybe a bird? Maybe a butterfly?’ Trigger-happy GIs had fired whole belts of M60 ammunition at rustling insects in the jungle trees. They were understandable, these jitters, at least to anyone who had been there. And even after ten years, you never got rid of them completely.

  Slowly Stroup pushed his automatic back into his belt. ‘Could be you’re right. Maybe a plane passed overhead, or a cloud or something.’

  Heacox picked up the mask of Rangda and arranged the silk scarf around it so that its face was showing. ‘Now it really looks like my mother-in-law. Gives you the goddam creeps, doesn’t it? I mean, these people worship these things. They really believe they’re real. Can you imagine saying your prayers every night to something with a face like this?’

  The Goddess Rangda glared at Heacox with unadulterated viciousness, her eyes protruding, her lips drawn back, her curved fangs shining.

  Stroup said a little nervously, ‘Put it down, Jimmy.’ ‘It’s a mask, that’s all. They put them on their heads and they jump around in them to scare the shit out of their kids.’

  Reece gave a quick shake of his head and Stroup translated, ‘Put the mask down, Jimmy, will you? Richard wants you to put it down.’

  Heacox tossed the huge mask up into the air, caught it and then challenged both Reece and Stroup with a lopsided grin. ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared of it? Come on, Bob. Don’t tell me that. How about you, Richard? Chicken?’

  As a last defiant gesture, he lowered the mask over his head and shuffled from side to side, shouting, ‘Grrr! I eat fat-assed Americans like you for breakfast! With stir-fried noodles!’

  He laughed harshly and raised his hands to remove the mask. But his laugh suddenly changed and he let out a horrifying scream, the kind of scream that Bob Stroup had not heard since three of his men had dropped into a punji trap full of sharpened stakes in Vietnam. Heacox clawed wildly at the sides of the Rangda mask and staggered around the courtyard.

  ‘Jimmy!’ Bob Stroup shouted and caught hold of him. For one moment Stroup found himself staring straight into Rangda’s face and he could have sworn he felt a chilly blast of sour breath. But then Heacox buckled and collapsed and the mask hit the stones of the courtyard with a hollow, wooden sound and rolled away.

  As it rolled, the mask left a batik pattern of bright scarlet blood on the ground. It came to rest against the plinth of a nearby shrine.

  Stroup turned around slowly to stare at Jimmy Heacox. He had seen some horrific injuries during the war: men with half their bodies blown away, yet still capable of smiling at you; men with no arms; men with no legs. But he was completely unprepared for the sight of Jimmy Heacox. Even Richard Reece, when he came up and stood beside him, looked apprehensive and the two of them were silent and unmoving for almost half a minute.

  Heacox’s head had been torn off his neck, leaving nothing but his larynx and his tongue: a long ribbon of red, torn-off tongue, like a grisly necktie.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Stroup breathed at last. And then they turned simultaneously towards the mask. Reece made the gesture they had used during silent advances through the jungle to indicate that there might be booby traps around.

  Stroup frowned at the mask in disbelief. ‘A booby trap? What kind of booby trap can tear your head off? There wasn’t any kind of explosion.’

  They approached the mask cautiously. Reece prodded it with his foot, trying to roll it over so they could see inside it. Eventually they pressed the soles of their boots against it to try to topple it away from the shrine. They jumped back as a sensible precaution against a rigged explosion, but also out of fright. They could deal with danger they understood, but this was something different. Both of them knew there was no antipersonnel device ever invented that could have torn off Jimmy Heacox’s head like that. Reece made a quick sign to Stroup that the way Heacox had been decapitated reminded him of a shark bite.

  ‘Something with teeth anyway,’ Stroup agreed.

  They bent forward and peered inside the open neck of the mask. Stroup took off his mask so he could see better. But the sunlight at this corner of the courtyard was quite bright and the illumination inside the mask was enhanced by the two glowing pinpoints that shone through the Goddess Rangda’s eyeholes.

  ‘It’s empty,’ Stroup whispered. ‘Where the hell’s his head?’

  Reece kicked the mask again but it was obvious that it was totally empty. Jimmy Heacox’s head had been torn off, devoured, and was gone.

  ‘I never saw anything like this,’ Stroup said in wonder.

  Reece looked back at the body and shook his head in a way Stroup understood to mean, The stupid jerk should have done as he was told and left the goddam mask alone.’

  ‘He was scared of it,’ Stroup remarked. ‘He was only trying to prove to himself that he was tough.’

  Reece nodded towards the place where Randolph and Michael had been sitting, where Stroup had glimpsed the shadow. He did not have to make any gestures for Stroup to know what he was thinking. This death-trance business was a lot more hair-raising than either of them had realized. A lot more difficult too. And even if they did manage to bring the kid home for Mr Graceworthy, would Mr Grace worthy thank them for it? Christ Almighty, a mask that could bite a man’s head off? People who could walk across a courtyard faster than you could even lift your gun to take aim at them? Devils and demons and who the hell knew what?

  Stroup scratched the back of his neck and stared around the temple. ‘We gonna stay?’ he asked. ‘Supposing there’s worse.’

 
; Reece, behind his expressionless mask, indicated that they had a job to do, a job for masters who would not be patient if they failed. Heacox had disobeyed the first two laws of safety and survival: Do not touch unless you have to, and then do not touch until you’ve checked. And maybe here in the Temple of the Dead there was one more law, even more important: Do not touch until you understand it.

  What neither Reece nor Stroup knew was that the shock of Rangda’s attack on Jimmy Heacox had rippled through the realm of the dead like a minor earthquake, rousing up fear and funeral debris, disturbing corpses in their graves, making ashes shift in urns. The dead suddenly raised their faces to the sun that never shone and listened, and through the world of veils and half-forgotten memories, there was a sharpened rustling sound. The leyaks had been alerted. Eyes glowed. Feet hurried through leaves and bone dust.

  Randolph and Michael had just reached the corner of Jalan Vyasa, opposite the plain brick wall that surrounded the Dutch Reform Cemetery. Randolph had found their progress there hypnotic. They had walked in a curious gliding motion through the streets of Denpasar, and the sunlight had seemed blurry as if his face were covered with a translucent scarf. Noises had been strangely indistinct. Yet he had been able to see Michael clearly, and he was aware of a sharply heightened sensitivity, not to the everyday things around him, but to feelings and emotions in the air. At one street corner he had suddenly sensed regret. Not his own, but the regret of a woman who was sitting at a second-floor window staring out over the market and fanning herself.

  Michael had said, ‘You feel it? That’s good. She has just lost her husband; there are still complicated emotional ties between him and her. Eventually they will Unravel, you know, but right now they’re still strong enough for you to be able to pick them up.’

  Now, on the corner of Jalan Vyasa, both Randolph and Michael felt a sickening, prickly sensation, a sudden lurch of uncertainty.