Death Trance

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Go on,’ Randolph said in a noncommittal voice.

  ‘Waverley, you see, had given special instructions to Reece that Michael Hunter had to be taken alive. Waverley had changed his mind from the time when he wanted him dead. Mind you, he hasn’t changed his mind about you, he still wants you dead.

  Anyway, Neil and I could think of only one reason Waverley would want to keep Michael Hunter alive, and that was to force him to take Reece into one of these special trances so he could deal with Marmie. You know, deal with her for good and all. You have to believe me, Randy, that man wants to see you buried. Don’t ask me why. But I have only to whisper the name “Randolph Clare” within ten feet of that man and he starts to shake like a rabid schnauzer. He hates you like hell.”

  Randolph said, ‘Let me get this straight. You and Neil were going to “collect” Michael Hunter just so Waverley couldn’t get him?’

  Orbus gave an undulating shrug. ‘I’m not discussing motives here, Randy.’

  ‘What you really mean is, you were thinking of playing us both off, Waverley and me, using Michael Hunter as a hostage.’

  ‘This is business, Randy. In business you have to take every opportunity that presents itself.’

  ‘Except that this opportunity turned out to be a bluff, and you and Neil Sleaman were left with egg on your face and your pants around your ankles. And now you’ve come to me snivelling for sympathy and babbling about commandments and Christianity.

  God Almighty, Orbus, if you really had any guts, why didn’t you come and tell me about Reece as soon as you heard that Marmie was dead? Why didn’t you warn me then? Reece nearly killed me in Bali. How many tears would you have managed to squeeze out of those fat eyes of yours if Reece had succeeded? If they’d flown me home in a box? How Christian would you have felt about Marmie then? All you’re worried about now is your own guilty implication in Waver-ley’s madness and the fact that Michael Hunter and I might very well bring back the evidence that will put you right where you belong, in the state penitentiary.’

  Orbus lowered his head and looked sorry for himself. To demonstrate to Randolph how deeply contrite he was, he refrained from taking another cookie, an act of contrition that Randolph failed to notice.

  ‘Randy, you misjudge me.’ Sorrowfully.

  ‘I don’t think so, Orbus. Go on, tell me what you would have done if you and those goons of yours had actually found Michael Hunter at the Shelby Motel.’

  Orbus heaved himself to his feet. ‘Let me tell you something, Randy. I’ve come here today of my own free will and I’ve committed myself. So don’t push it, okay? The deal is simply this, that if you keep my name out of this business, you’ll get all the help you need and more besides. Not just information, but cottonseed oil too, to get you out of this fix with Sun-Taste. And after that, a new beginning for both of us. Maybe a working partnership between Clare Cottonseed and Brooks Cottonseed, completely outside the Association. Come on, Randy, we’re talking mutual benefit here. We’re talking forgive and forget. The future, not the past.’

  ‘And Waverley?’

  Orbus guffawed. ‘Waverley? Waverley’s cracked.’

  ‘So you want me to go into a death trance and find the evidence that will get Waverley indicted and Reece put away, after which you and I will start talking about working partnerships, and the future, and forgive and forget?’

  Orbus winked at him. ‘The cottonseed business is a pie, Randy. The fewer hungry people there are to sit down and share it, the larger the slices.’

  Randolph found the moral and physical excesses of Orbus Greene so overwhelming that he was speechless, unable to answer the man, unable to make any kind of decision about his offers. What do you say to a man who would scarcely have stopped masticating long enough to hear that you were dead and yet who was desperately begging you to help him avoid a punishment he richly deserved?

  Randolph said, ‘Let me think about it, okay? I’ll call you later.’

  ‘And what will you do about Neil?’

  ‘Nothing for the time being, apart from suspend him.’

  ‘He has a very earnest personality. He’s very willing. I hope you don’t do anything to crush his sense of personal worth.’

  Randolph laid a hand on Orbus’s massive shoulder just to irritate him. ‘What would it take to crush your sense of personal worth, Orbus?’

  Orbus laughed. ‘Mount St Helens, I should think.’

  Orbus’s attendants were waiting for him outside, studiously picking their teeth. One of them opened the limousine door while the other three heaved Orbus inside as if he were so much blubber. He made himself comfortable and then turned to Randolph and said, ‘You take care of yourself, Mr Clare. Whatever you think about me, I’m harmless. Corrupt, possibly. Self-serving, undoubtedly. Cruel, more than likely. But nobody has ever died to further my career and nobody has ever died because I felt vengeful. So a word to the wise and the wildly romantic: watch out for Waverley.’

  The bodyguards glared at Randolph as they climbed into the limousine. Then the doors slammed and with a slewing of gravel, they drove around the drive and through the gates. Randolph stood on the front steps watching them go. Then he turned and went back inside.

  ‘That man,’ complained Mrs Wallace, coming through the hallway with the empty cookie dish. ‘I don’t know what to make of him.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Randolph admitted. ‘I don’t know whether I hate him or like him in a strange sort of way.’

  ‘He’s a beast,’ Mrs Wallace declared unequivocally.

  ‘The world is running with beasts,’ Randolph replied.

  As Randolph returned to his library, Dr Ambara was sitting in the living room of his single-storey house in Germantown, naked, his legs crossed, his palms facing upward, attempting to enter the death trance. The blinds were drawn but the afternoon sunlight illuminated in muted amber the sisal carpeting, the simple bamboo furniture, the Balinese clay pottery and the lamak hangings. On the wall behind the sofa there was a large painting of a half-naked duck shepherdess, done in the style favoured by American tourists. On the mantelpiece above the fireplace there was an intricate selection of root carvings in pale teak: attenuated nudes, lions with wings, and dragons.

  Dr Ambara’s glasses lay beside him on the carpet. Three or four books of Hindu ritual were propped up before him so he could read the Sanskrit mantras as he proceeded. There was a small mask of Rangda on the coffee table, a mask he had bought on impulse four years earlier at the Djakarta airport. He had draped it with silk and surrounded it with wilting azalea flowers and smoking joss sticks.

  He was very frightened, but also very determined. If Michael Hunter refused to take him into a death trance, he would have to enter it by himself. Randolph Clare had entered it and survived, and he was a Westerner. Surely a calm and disciplined Indonesian could enter the death trance with the greatest of ease, arousing no leyaks and talking to any dead spirit he wished.

  Dr Ambara began to sway slowly back and forth, humming the magic mantra Om to begin with but then reciting the words of the Sanskrit chant of the dead. He closed his eyes and rocked like a grieving woman, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, but he found it difficult to empty his mind and every now and then a noisy motorcycle would go past and break his concentration.

  ‘Take me into the world of the dead, O Sanghyang Widi. ‘ Let me speak with those spirits who have entered heaven before me. O carry me into the smoke, O Sanghyang Widi.’

  He went on and on, repeating the same mantras over and over again. He thought of nothing but Ana; and then he thought of nothing but emptiness; and then suddenly he was sliding backwards across a lake of ink under a black , sky, faster and faster, and the real world began to rush I away from him like a rapidly shrinking bubble.

  He saw stars bursting over his head; he heard grinding noises like cliffs colliding with cliffs. He heard screams that were hardly human, if they were screams at all; and then the world began to rumble and shake, and huge ch
unks of blackness began to collapse on him and bury him, until at last a single dazzling silver ring touched the inky surface of the lake and spread outward and outward, one ring after another, brilliant ripples that never connected, like a Chinese metal puzzle.

  He opened his eyes. The sitting room seemed almost the same except that the sunshine was foggier somehow, and the blinds seemed to blow far more slowly in the afternoon breeze. He slowly stood up, naked and brown and thin, and looked around in wonder. He was quite sure now, from the way in which Randolph had described it to him, that he had entered the death trance. He moved across the room as if he were swimming, raised the blind and looked out into the street. Cars were driving past like cars in a dream; a scrap of newspaper tumbled over and over in the road with the measured grace of an unfolding flower.

  Dr Ambara turned away from the window and crossed over to the bamboo chair where he had left his clothes. He found dressing difficult; his clothes clung to his skin as if they were highly charged with static electricity. But at last he managed to finish buttoning his shirt, slip on his mules and walk through the hall to the front door.

  There was a colour photograph of Ana in the hall, over the telephone table where the dried flowers stood. He had gathered and dried those flowers himself the week after Ana died. He stared at her for a moment: that dark, oval-shaped face; that black, braided hair; those red lips that were just about to break into a smile, and those eyes that had looked at him every day for three years and had never seen him.

  He could almost smell her perfume sometimes at night when he lay in bed. He could almost feel her stirring in her sleep. The worst agony of all was to call her name and then wake up and realize that she would never answer, never again.

  He opened the door and stepped out into the hazy sunshine. He did not live in the best part of Germantown, and he had never attempted to have his name put forward for the Farmington Country Club or the Memphis Hunt & Polo Club. But he lived in a smart collection of new pine houses not far from the Neshoba Community Centre, within easy reach of US 72 and just ten minutes away from the Hindu Garden of Temples, where Ana’s deified soul was now resting.

  In accordance with Hindu practice, Ana’s body had been cremated and her ashes scattered on the Mississippi. Twelve days later, a second funeral, a nyekah, had been held in order to release her spirit from her emotions and her earthly thoughts.

  Her purified spirit remained in the Ambara temple, a temple which, because the Ambaras had been childless, would never contain any other than her spirit and that of Ida Bagus Ambara. Dr Ambara often wondered who would mourn him when he was dead, who would cremate him and make sure that all the offerings were made to Yama, the god of the dead.

  He glided through the streets beneath the dappled shadows of newly planted sugarberries and September elms. Children were playing on the sidewalk and they lifted their heads and turned around as he passed by, sensing that somebody had disturbed their games but not quite understanding who. A scruffy brown-and-white spaniel barked at him but then stopped abruptly, cocked its ears and uttered an apprehensive whine.

  The afternoon was glaring and hot but Dr Ambara felt curiously chilled. A slightly built figure with glasses and a bronze-coloured Thai-silk shirt, he moved through the noisy streets of Germantown like a half-remembered spirit. He was keeping as calm as he could, remembering what Michael had said about arousing the leyaks. But all the same, he felt a tightening sensation in his chest, a feeling of terror and happiness together, and a dizzying feeling of triumph, too, that he had managed to enter the death trance unaided. Perhaps he had omitted some of the necessary prayers; perhaps he had failed to recite the sacred mantras in the traditional order; but his sheer obstinate belief had carried him through from the world of men into the world of spirits, and his sheer obstinate belief was keeping him there, an inexperienced and frightened explorer in the land of the dead. The streets he crossed were not

  ‘Real Germantown’ but ‘Death Germantown,’ and his passing stirred up long-past memories as well as dust.

  He reached the Hindu Garden of Temples. It was a small garden, a quarter of a mile back from Hacks Cross Market, overshadowed by sassafras and surrounded by a high chain-link fence. He passed through the open gates and went along the concrete pathway around the Temple of Prayer. The sun glared from the temple’s whitewashed walls. The temple had been built five years earlier by Hindus living in and around Memphis; it was a simple block building based on the plans used for the local health clinics but altered by the architects to give it the proper proportions of the viharna, a perfect cube, with a sikhara sanctuary that was exactly twice its height built close by.

  Dr Ambara walked swiftly and silently through the gardens, between rows and rows of elaborately carved stone shrines. As he did so, he became aware of blurred white figures standing beside each shrine, each figure with its head covered, not moving but waiting patiently next to the memorial where its deified soul had been laid to rest.

  As he approached, he tried to look into their faces, but one by one the figures turned away from him, as if ashamed to be seen by a mortal.

  Dr Ambara hesitated for a moment and then said a short prayer to Siva, the Hindu god of destruction and re-creation, the god that he, as a high-caste brahmana, personally favoured. O Siva, smile on me. O Siva, protect me. Then he glanced around, half-expecting the figures to turn and face him. But they remained unmoving and speechless, their robes blowing white in a silent and mystical wind.

  He was only two pathways from Ana’s shrine now, and he knew that he should have been excited and glad. Yet a strange coldness settled over him, an inexplicable feeling of dread. Something was wrong, although he could not understand what it was. There were no leyaks here as far as he could tell. The death trance had not wavered, and his belief in seeing Ana remained unshaken. Yet the white figures beside each shrine were so mute that they somehow seemed threatening now, and he passed each succeeding figure with increasing fear until he was almost running; he turned around again and again to look behind to see if the figures were staring at him as he hurried past.

  At last, however, he reached the end of the row where Ana’s shrine stood, only twenty yards away. It was a miniature temple modelled on the Pura Puseh in Batubu-lan, where Ana had been born. And there in front of it, her head bowed, stood a white-draped figure. Dr Ambara knew that at last he had found his dead wife.

  He whispered, ‘Ana,’ and cautiously walked towards her. Then he said, ‘Ana,’ even louder and held out his arms.

  The figure did not turn around. She remained standing in front of her shrine with her head bowed as if deep in meditative prayer.

  Dr Ambara’s footsteps slowed. The hot afternoon wind rustled in the leaves of the sassafras trees. He halted only two feet from his beloved Ana, unsure now, half-inclined to turn around and run away.

  ‘Ana.’ A name spoken so quietly that it was scarcely audible over the sound of the insects and the distant murmur of traffic on the highway.

  ‘Ana, this is me. Ana, my beloved.’

  Slowly, carefully, Dr Ambara reached out to touch Ana’s shoulder. His heart was whipping wildly against his rib cage and he felt cold and sweaty at the same time. A sudden gust of wind seemed to ripple through Ana’s white robes and through the robes of all the other figures standing watch over their shrines. Then Ana turned her head to look at him, and at the same time, she lowered the shawl from her head. Dr Ambara stared at her in utter terror because this was not Ana at all. Instead, he found himself confronted by an ashy-coloured face with snarling grey teeth and eyes that burned as ferociously as blast furnaces.

  He knew then that he had been deceiving himself, that he had blundered into the death trance as an amateur, and that the leyaks must have been following him ever since he left his house. He had probably recited his mantras so clumsily that, unaided, he could not have entered into the death trance at all. Rangda and her running dogs had helped him and then they had accompanied him here to the Garden of
Temples, every step of the way slavering, salivating and licking their lips in anticipation of a living spirit.

  ‘Siva, preserve me,’ he said with utter simplicity. His terror was so great that he was unable to cry out. He knew that they would tear him down and drag him to Rangda; he knew that he would suffer unspeakable agonies for all eternity. He dropped to his knees on the pathway.

  The leyak who had been standing beside Ana’s shrine approached him, snarling quietly. There was a moment’s pause and then its right hand arched back and raked across Dr Ambara’s face. Dr Ambara felt the claws as hot as fire, and muscle snapping away from his cheekbone. Then the leyak clawed at him again with both hands and blinded him. Dr Ambara accepted his mutilation submissively, almost philosophically. He was fully aware that there was no escape, and he was fully aware that if he struggled, the leyaks would rip him to pieces here and now. He tried to think of Ana and of ecstasy, of life everlasting and of Siva, and he tried to forget that the skin of his face was hanging down in bloody tatters and that the leyak’s filthy talons had ripped into one eye and burst it and dragged the other eye out of its socket onto his cheek.

  He stayed where he was, kneeling, and recited his prayers. He was still praying when the leyak who had blinded him was joined by three other leyaks who seized him with vicious claws and began to drag him away.

  He cried out once, out of despair. Then he allowed the leyaks to take him back to their mistress without complaint.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Waverley Graceworthy entered the double doors of the conservatory and walked across its Turkish-tiled floor with neat, precise, clicking footsteps. He reached the white-painted cast-iron bench where Michael was sitting, stopped and drew back his cream linen coat to reveal a canary-yellow vest with a gold watch chain attached.

  ‘Well, then, here you are,’ he said as if he had been searching for Michael all over the house. He took off his Panama hat and hung it on an iron torchere. Michael, who was sitting hunched forward and smoking a cigarette, raised his eyes cursorily but did not reply. A few yards away, Reece was watching over him, filing his nails, smiling and tilting his chair back and forth. Reece was wearing a ‘Memphis Showboats’ T-shirt instead of his combat fatigues, and his masklike face was unusually contented. Waverley had rewarded him well for bringing Michael back to Elvis Presley Boulevard.