A Stark and Wormy Knight

by Tad Williams

“Yes, a few weeks before her tenth birthday. But of course what caught my attention was when the parents started claiming it wasn’t their daughter at all, that she’d changed in ways that no illness could explain. But when I got in to see the child she was asleep, and although she looked surprisingly healthy compared to my general experience with possession cases, I couldn’t get any kind of feeling from her one way or another. When I tried to contact the family a few days later they’d moved and no one could find them.

  “There were others, too – too many to be coincidence, most of them unknown to the general public. The greatest hindrance in these situations is the gutter press, of course — any real study, let alone any chance to help the victims and their families, is destroyed by the sort of circus they create. These days, with television and the internet, it’s even worse. If I don’t strenuously keep my comings and goings a secret, I wind up with cameras in my face and following me everywhere and looking over my shoulder.”

  “They are vermin,” said Edward Arvedson with feeling.

  “In any case, when I talked to you I had just learned of an accident victim in Minnesota who had recovered from a coma and, like the girl in Southern California, seemed to have undergone a complete personality shift. He had been a mild and soft-spoken churchgoer, but now he was a violent, alcoholic bully. His wife of twenty-four years had divorced him, his children no longer saw him. The front yard of his house in Bloomington was a wreck, and when he opened the door the stink of rot and filth just rolled out. I only saw him for a few seconds through the chain on his front door, but what I witnessed was definitely madness, a sort of…emotionless focus that I’ve only seen in the criminally insane. That doesn’t prove anything, of course. Brain damage can do that, and he’d certainly been badly injured. But he recognized me.”

  “You told me when you called,” said Davidson. “I could tell it upset you.”

  “Because it wasn’t like he’d seen my picture in The Enquirer, but like he knew me. Knew me and hated me. I didn’t stay there long, but it wasn’t just seeing the Minnesota victim that threw me. I’d never heard of possessions happening at this rate, or to people so close to death. It didn’t make sense!”

  “It has my attention, too,” Edward said. “But what I want to hear now is what happened with your Buddhist gentleman.”

  Nightingale let out a breath. He swallowed the last of his sherry. “Right. Well, Geshe was a very interesting man, an artist and a teacher. I wish I could have met him at a different time, but even in our short acquaintance he impressed me and I liked him. That’s why what happened was so disturbing.

  “He had checked out of the hospital to die at home. He’d lost his wife a few years earlier and they’d had no children, so although some of his students and colleagues came by to sit with him from time to time, at the end there was only his friend Joseph, an American Buddhist, and the hospice nurse who checked in on him once a day. And me, of course. Geshe and I didn’t speak much – he had to work too hard to manage the pain – but as I said, he impressed me. During the long days in his apartment I spent a great deal of time looking at his books and other possessions, which is as good a way to get to know someone as talking with them. Also, I saw many of his own works of art, which may be an even better way to learn about another human being – he made beautiful Buddhist Thangkas, meditation paintings.

  “As Geshe began to slip away Joseph read the Bardo Thodol to him. I’ve never spent much time studying it, myself – I think that hippie-ish, “Tibetan Book of the Dead” reputation put me off when I was younger, and these days I don’t really need to know the nuts and bolts of any particular religious dogma to work with the universal truths behind them all – but I have to say that hearing it and living with it, even as Geshe was dying with it, opened my eyes.”

  “There is great truth at the heart of all the great faiths,” Arvedson said solemnly.

  “Yes, but what I truly came to admire was the calmness of the people who wrote the bardos – the practicality, I suppose is the best word. It’s a very practical book, the Bardo Thodol. A road map. A set of travel tips. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen now that you’re dead. Do this. Don’t do that. Everything will be okay.’ Except that this time it wasn’t.

  “The famous teacher Trungpa Rinpoche said the best thing we can do for the dying and the newly dead is maintain an atmosphere of calmness, and that’s certainly what Geshe seemed to have around him at the end. It was raining outside most of that week, but quietly. Joseph read the bardos over and over while he and I took turns holding Geshe’s hand. With my special sensitivities, I was beginning to sense something of what he was sensing – the approach of the Great Mystery, the crossing, whatever you want to call it – and of course it troubled me deep down in my bones and guts, but Geshe wasn’t frightened in the least. All those years of training and meditation had prepared him.

  “It was fascinating to see how the dying soul colors the experience, Uncle Edward. As I said, I have never delved too deeply into Tibetan Buddhism, yet the version of dying I experienced through Geshe was shaped so strongly by that tradition that I could not feel it any other way — it was as real as you and I sitting here in the dark, listening to the wind and the rain.” Nightingale paused for a moment while the storm rattled the windows of the old house. “The thousands of gods, which are one god, which is the light of the universe…I can’t explain. But touching Geshe’s thoughts as he began his journey, although I felt only the barest hint of what he felt, was like riding a roller-coaster through a kaleidoscope, but simultaneously falling through an endless, dark, silent void.”

  “ ‘…When your body and mind separate, the dharmata will appear, pure and clear yet hard to discern, luminous and brilliant, with terrifying brightness, shimmering like a mirage on a plain’, ” Arvedson quoted. “At least, that’s what the bardo says.”

  “Yes.” Nightingale nodded. “I remember hearing it then and understanding it clearly, even though the words I heard were Tibetan. Joseph had begun the Chikkhai Bardo, you see – the bardo of dying. In the real world, as we sometimes think of it, Geshe had sunk so far into himself he was no longer visibly breathing. But I was not really beside him in that little room in Seattle, although I could still hear Joseph’s voice. Most of me was inside — deep in the experience of death with Geshe.

  “I could feel him, Uncle Edward, and in a way I could see what he saw, hear what he heard, although those aren’t quite the right words. As the voices of people I did not know echoed around us – mostly Geshe’s friends and relations and loved ones, I suspect, for I do not think he had many enemies — he and I traveled together through a misty forest. It seemed to me a bit like some of the wild lands of the Pacific Northwest, but more mountainous, as if some of Geshe’s Tibetan heritage was seeping through as well.”

  “Climbing,” said Edward Arvedson quietly.

  “Yes, the part of the afterlife journey the Egyptians called “the Ladder” and the Aztecs thought of as the beginning of the soul’s four-year journey to Mictlan. I’ve never dared hold a connection with a dying soul as long as I did with Geshe, and going so deep frightened me, but his calm strength made it possible. We did not speak, of course – his journey, his encounters, were his alone, as all ours will be someday – but I felt him there beside me as the dark drew in.

  “I won’t tell you everything I experienced now, but I will tell you someday soon, because it was a researcher’s dream come true – the death experience almost firsthand. To make the story short, we passed through the first darkness and saw the first light, which the bardos call the soft light of the gods and which they counsel the dead soul to avoid. It was very attractive, like a warm fire to someone lost in the night, and I was feeling very cold, very far from comfort and familiar things – and remember, I had a body to go back to! I can only imagine what it seemed like to Geshe, who was on a one-way journey, but he resisted it. The same with what the bardo calls the “soft light of the hell-beings.” I could feel him yearning
toward it, and even to me it seemed soothing, alluring. In the oldest Tibetan tradition the hot hells are full of terrors – forest of razor-leaved trees, swamps bobbing with decomposing corpses – but these aspects are never seen until it’s too late, until the attractions of one’s own greed and anger have pulled the dying soul off the path.

  “But Geshe overcame these temptations and kept on moving toward the harsher light of truth. He was brave, Edward, so brave! But then we reached the smoky yellow light, the realm of what the bardo calls pretas…”

  “The hungry ghosts.”.

  “Yes, the hungry ghosts. Found in almost every human tradition. Those who did not go on. Those who can’t let go of anger, hatred, obsession…”

  “Perhaps simply those who want more life,” Arvedson suggested.

  Nightingale shook his head. “That makes them sound innocent, but they’re far from that. Corpse-eating jikininki, ancient Rome’s Lemures, the grigori of the Book of Enoch – almost every human tradition has them. Hell, I’ve met them, although never in their own backyard like this. You remember that thing that almost killed me in Freiberg?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “That was one of them, hitchhiking a ride in a living body. Nearly ripped my head off before I got away. I still have the scars…”

  The night-time city waited now between waves of the storm. For a moment it was quiet enough in the room for Nightingale to hear the fan of his godfather’s ventilator.

  “In any case, that smoky yellow light terrified me. The bardo says it’s temptation itself, that light, but maybe it didn’t tempt me because I wasn’t dying – instead it just made me feel frightened and sick, if you can be sick without a body. I could barely sense Geshe but I knew he was there and experiencing something very different. Instead of continuing toward the brilliant white light of compassion, as the bardo instructed, this very compassionate man seemed to hesitate. The yellow light was spreading around us like something toxic diffusing through water. Geshe seemed confused, stuck, as though he fought against a call much stronger than anything I could sense. I could feel something else, too, something alien to both of us, cold and strong and…yes, and hungry. God, I’ve never sensed hunger like that, a bottomless need like the empty chill of space sucking away all living warmth…”

  Nightingale sat quietly for a long moment before he spoke again. “But then, just when I was fighting hardest to hang onto my connection to Geshe, it dissolved and he was gone. I’d lost touch with him. The yellow light was all around me, strange and greasy…repulsive, but also overwhelming…

  “I fell out. No, it was more like I was shoved. I tumbled back into the real world, back into my body. I couldn’t feel Geshe any more. Joseph had stopped reading the Chakkhai Bardo and was staring in alarm. Geshe’s body, which hadn’t moved or showed any signs of life in some time, was suddenly in full-on Cheyne-Stokes respiration, chest hitching, body jerking — he almost looked like he was convulsing. But Joseph swore to me later on that Geshe had stopped breathing half an hour earlier and I believe him.

  “A moment later Geshe’s eyes popped open. I’ve seen stranger things, but it still startled me. He had been dead, Uncle Edward, really dead, I swear he had. Now he was looking at me – but it wasn’t Geshe any more. I couldn’t prove it of course, but I had touched this man’s soul, traveled with him as he passed over, the most intimate thing imaginable, and this just wasn’t him.

  “No, I will not die yet,” he said. The voice sounded like his, but strong, far too strong for someone who had been in periodic breathing only a minute earlier. “There are still things for me to do on this earth.” It was the eyes, though. That same cold, flat stare that I’d seen through the doorway in Minnesota, the one I’ve seen before in other possession cases, but there was none of the struggle I’d seen in classic possession, no sense of the soul and body fighting against an interloper. One moment it was Geshe, a spiritual man, an artist, the next moment it was…someone else. Someone as cold and detached as a textbook sociopath.

  “He closed his eyes then and slept, or pretended to, but already he looked healthier than he had since I met him. I couldn’t tell Joseph that I thought his friend was possessed – what a horrible thing to say to someone already dealing with several kinds of trauma! – and I didn’t know what else to do, what to think. I sat there for most of an hour, unable to think of anything to do. At last, when the nurse came and began dealing with this incredible turn of medical events, I went out to get a drink. All right, I had a few, then went home and slept like a dead man myself.

  “I should never have left them, Edward. When I went back the next day, the apartment was empty. A few weeks later I received an email from Joseph – or at least from Joseph’s address – saying that after his miraculous recovery Geshe wanted to travel to Tibet, the place of his heritage. I’ve never heard from either of them since…”

  The lightning, absent for almost a quarter of an hour, suddenly flared, turning the room into a flat tableau of black and white shapes; the thunder that followed seemed to rock the entire building. The light on Edward Arvedson’s desk flickered once, then went out, as did the lights on his ventilator. Through the windows Nightingale could see the houses across the street had gone black as well. He jumped up, suddenly cold all over. His father’s oldest friend and his own most trusted advisor was about to die of asphyxiation while he watched helplessly.

  “Good God, Edward, the electricity…!”

  “Don’t…worry…” Arvedson wheezed. “I have a…standby…generator.”

  A moment later Nightingale felt rather than heard something begin to rumble somewhere in the house below and the desk light flickered back on, although the houses across the street remained dark. “There,” said his godfather. “You see, young Natan? Not such an old-fashioned fool after all, eh? I am prepared for things like this. Power for the street will be back on soon – it happens a lot in this ancient neighborhood. Now, tell me what you think is happening.”

  Nightingale sat back, trying to regain his train of thought. If only the old man wasn’t so stubborn about living on his own with only Jenkins – no spring lamb himself – for company.

  “Right,” he said at last. “Well, I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing as me, Uncle Edward. Somehow these predatory souls or spirits have found a way to possess the bodies of the dying. Which would be bad enough, but it’s the incredible frequency with which it seems to be happening. I can’t possibly investigate them all, of course, but if even half the reports that reach me are real it’s happening all over the world, several times a day.”

  The rain was back now, lashing the windows and tattooing the roof of Edward’s Victorian house. When the old man spoke, there was an unfamiliar tone in his voice. “You are…frightened, my dear Natan.”

  “Yes, Uncle Edward, I am. I’ve never been this frightened, and I’ve seen a lot. It’s as if something fundamental has broken down, some wall between us and the other side, and now the living are under attack. What did the cab driver say to me on the way over, babbling about the weather – ‘the storm door is open’…? And I’m afraid the storms are just going to keep coming thicker and faster until all our houses arre blown down.”

  “But why? And why now?”

  “Why? Because they’ve always been there – the hungry ones, the envious things that hate us because we can still breathe and sing and love. Do they want that back, or do they just want to keep us from having it? I don’t know. And why now? I don’t know that either. Perhaps some universal safeguard has stopped working, or these entities have learned something they didn’t know before.”

  “Then here is the most important question, Nate. What are you going to do about it, now you know? What can one person do?”

  “Well, make sure it isn’t just one person trying to deal with it, to begin with. You and I know lots of people who don’t think I’m a charlatan – brave people who study this sort of thing, who fight the good fight and know the true danger. More than a f
ew of us have dedicated our lives to keep the rest of humanity safe, without reward or thanks. Now I have to alert them all, if they haven’t discovered this already.” He stood and began to pace back and forth before the desk. “And to make sure the word gets out, I’ll use the very same tabloid vultures that you and I despise so much. They’ll do good without knowing it. Because for every thousand people who’ll read headlines that say things like “So-Called Demon Hunter Claims Dead are Invading the Living World” and laugh at it as nonsense, one or two will understand…and will heed the warning.” He moved to the window, looked out into the darkness. “We can only hope to hold these hungry ghosts at bay if every real paranormal researcher, exorcist, and sympathetic priest we can reach will join us — every collector you know, every student of the arcane, every adventurer behind the occult lines, all of those soldiers of the light that the rest of society dismiss as crazy. This will be our great war.”

  Nightingale turned and walked back to his chair. “So there you have it, Uncle Edward. I’ll spread the word. You spread the word, too. Call in old favors. If enough of us hear the truth, we may still be able to get the storm door shut again.”

  The old man was silent for a long time as thunder rolled away into the distance.

  “You’re a brave young man, Nate,” he said at last. “Your parents would be proud of you. I’m going to have to think for a while about the best way to help you, and though it embarrasses me to admit it, I also need some rest. You’ll forgive me – I get tired so quickly. I’ll be all right until Jenkins comes back in a few hours. You can let yourself out, can’t you?”

  “Of course, Uncle Edward.” He went to the old man and gave him a quick hug, then kissed his cool, dry cheek. He carried his empty sherry glass to the sideboard. “Now that I’m back in town, I’ll be by to see you again tomorrow. Good night.” On his way to the door Nightingale stopped and held his fingers up to catch the light from the desk lamp and saw that the darkness there was only dust.