Death Trance (36 page)
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.
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.
Waverley nodded and Reece got up and brought a chair over for him. Above their heads in the white iron framework of the conservatory, birds fluttered and sang and the sun shone saffron through the elaborately patterned glass. Waverley's conservatory was spectacular. Built onto the back of his house in 1914, it was a hundred-foot-long cathedral with a spire, an upstairs gallery and two winding staircases, one at each end. Rare tropical and subtropical plants had been brought from all over the world, including the finest collection of palm trees in the mid-South: rattans and doums, coco de mer and raphia. Waverley admired palms because they were useful and profitable as well as attractive; they yielded everything from vegetable ivory to sago.
'You should feel at home here,’ he told Michael, leaning on his cane. 'The atmosphere is not dissimilar to Bali, I shouldn't suppose.’
Michael nipped out his cigarette and flicked the butt on the floor. 'In Bali,’ he said, 'people have respect for each other's freedom.’
'But, my dear friend,’ said Waverley, 'I have no intention of keeping you here against your will. The only reason Mr Reece brought you to see me in a rather more pressing manner than usual was because I was somewhat concerned that you might have misconstrued my intentions.’
'I don't think so,’ Michael said. 'Reece here - or Ecker, or whatever he calls himself - has already killed one man that I know of and probably several more, and he tried to kill me, and from what I understand so far, he did all of it on your instructions.’
Waverley pursed his lips. 'Richard does tend to be impetuous.’
'You call wholesale murder
"impetuous"?’
'Perhaps impetuous isn't quite the word. But Richard is certainly no more than headstrong. Correct, Richard?’
Reece grinned and attended to his nails.
Michael said to Waverley, 'All right then, what the hell's happening here? You've dragged me to this place for some reason; don't you think I ought to know what it is?’
Waverley nodded. 'Commendably direct of you. I like directness. That's why I can never bear to do business with the Japanese. I brought you here because I understand that you have a very unusual talent. I understand that you are capable of meeting and talking to people who are no longer with us, people who have gone on to a higher spiritual plane, so to speak.’
'You mean the dead,’ Michael put in.
Waverley raised his hand to indicate that 'dead' was a word which, for reasons of taste, he preferred not to use.
'I understand that you can not only achieve this remarkable condition yourself, but that you can guide others into it.’ Waverley paused and then said, 'For recompense.’
Michael remained where he was, hunched forward on the bench, his hands clasped together, his grubby sneakers tapping out a soft rhythm on the tiled floor.
Waverley said, 'Some years ago - thirty-one years ago, to be precise - I lost my dear wife after a series of family misfortunes.’
He paused again and swallowed, and then he took off his glasses. 'Her name was Ilona. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty and charm and grace. I always knew that I would miss her deeply, but I had no idea that my grief for her would never fade and that it would forever be a burden to me, a heavy weight that would never leave my heart. I miss her as much today, Mr Hunter, as I missed her in nineteen fifty-three, the year she died, and I have to tell you that I would give anything to see her again.’
Although the request itself remained unspoken, Michael knew this was a clear demand for him to take Waverley into a death trance. He sat back, reached into his shirt pocket and shook the last Lion cigarette from a crumpled pack. As he propped it between his lips, Waverley snapped his fingers to Reece and said, 'Light him.’ Michael, however, ignored Recce's proffered Zippo and lit his cigarette himself with book matches.
'Well?’ Waverley asked at last.
'Well what?’
'I wish to see Ilona again. Will you help me?’
Michael shook his head. 'I'm already committed.’
'You mean to Randolph Clare?’
'You've got it. And besides, I don't much care for your way of doing things. All this violence and guns and leaning on people. A person who does things the way you do wouldn't be safe in a death trance. Too many negative thoughts going on in your head, too little calmness, too little repose. The leyaks would come after you the moment you passed through the gate.’
'The leyaks?’ Waverley queried. 'Now what on earth are leyaks?’
Take it from me,’ Michael said, 'you don't want to know what leyaks are, not now, not ever.’
Reece made two or three quick gestures in sign language. Waverley frowned as he tried to interpret them and then looked back at Michael and asked, 'Demons? Is that what he's trying to say?’
'Demons of a kind, yes.’
'Mr Hunter, I'm not sure that I believe in demons.’
'You'd believe in leyaks if one of them started to rip your heart out.’
Waverley stood up and walked in a little circle around the conservatory floor. 'So there's danger,’ he said thoughtfully. 'Well, I'm sure that even demons can be overcome if we handle things properly. You've been into these death trances before, you've met these demons. How do you usually cope with them?’
'I run,’ Michael said.
Reece tugged at Waverley's sleeve and gave him a brief description in sign language of what had happened at the gates of the Temple of the Dead in Denpasar, when the leyaks had been pursuing Michael and Randolph and Michael had used the mirror to fend them off.
Waverley said to Michael, ‘I didn't quite understand all of that but apparently you used a mirror.’
Michael said, ‘The only way to defend yourself against a leyak is to take his picture and then burn the picture in front of him. There was a time when I actually used to go hunting for leyaks, a little matter of revenge I guess you could call it. In those days I used to take a Polaroid camera with me. It was risky, but it worked pretty well. Think of the priests who used the same principle in the old days, before photography. They used to take pen and brushes with them and try to sketch the leyaks' portraits. Most of the time they were butchered before they managed to finish even a rough outline. There's a famous sketch in one of the private vaults of the Museum Bali: a leyak half-drawn on a sheet of paper spattered with dried blood. That was brought back over a hundred years ago from a death trance by one of the most famous of all
pedandas.’
Waverley waited for Michael to continue but when Michael fell silent, he said a little sharply, 'The plants in here are very rare, you know. They don't much care for tobacco smoke.’
'Did you see me offer any of them a cigarette?’ Michael retorted. ‘If you don't want any smoke in here, sir, I suggest you let me go.’
'Well, well, smart remarks,’ Waverley said tightly. 'But I regret that I cannot - or will not - release you until you take me into a death trance with you.’
Michael shook his head. 'I'm not doing it. I already made up my mind last week. I'm going in for only one more death trance, and that's the trance Randolph Clare asked me to do. At least his mind is clear and calm, not fucked up with killing people the way yours is. Taking somebody like you into a death trance would be suicide for both of us.’
'Even with a camera?’ Waverley asked, trying hard to control his temper.
'In a death trance you have to use your camera the same way a deer hunter stalks a deer. You have to pick your leyak and you have to take his picture before he realizes what you're doing, and then you have to keep out of range of his claws and his teeth long enough for the picture to develop, and then you have to hold it up in front of him and you have to burn it and make sure it burns quick. Believe me, it isn't a picnic.’
Waverley said, 'You'll be very well paid. Whatever Randolph Clare has offered you, I'll double it.’
'No go,’ Michael insisted. 'It doesn't matter how much money you pay me. If I get killed, it won't be worth it.’
'I could have you killed right now,’ Waverley told him coldly.
'Well, I'm sure you could,’ Michael agreed, although not with bravado. He was intimidated by Reece, and he found Waverley disconcertingly polite and cruel and unpredictable. But there was little option. To enter into a death trance with Waverley Graceworthy would be nothing short of offering himself to Rangda as a sacrifice. All he could possibly look to for survival would be the sheer spiritual and geographical distance that lay between Bali, 'the navel of the world,’ and Memphis, Tennessee, 'the city of good abode.’ Perhaps the distance was great enough to allow entrance into the realm of the dead without arousing the leyaks.
After all, as far as Michael knew, nobody in Memphis or anywhere in the continental United States had attempted to enter a death trance, certainly not recently, and so the leyaks probably had had no interest in it as a feeding ground. The nearest place in the Western Hemisphere that leyaks preyed was Haiti, where voodoo adepts still entered a kind of death trance and gave the leyaks occasional live spirits to snare. In Haiti, of course, they called the leyaks by another name, zombies.
Waverley said, 'You're thinking, aren't you? You're weighing the odds. Perhaps it's not quite as dangerous as you were trying to suggest.’
'It's not only how dangerous it is,’ Michael told him, 'but I have another obligation to meet, one to Randolph Clare.’
'Randolph Clare is not the kind of man you should be doing business with, not in Memphis,’ Waverley advised sternly. 'Randolph Clare is - how shall I put it? - something of a pariah.’
Michael stood up unexpectedly. Reece banged the two front legs of his chair on the floor and stood up too, instantly threatening.
'It's still no go,’ Michael said.
'This is very unfortunate,’ Waverley told him. 'Unfortunate for me, of course, because I still wish to meet my Ilona again, but even more unfortunate for you because I shall have to keep you here, locked up, until you agree to take me.’
'You can't hold me here. That's kidnapping,’ Michael challenged.
'My dear boy, I can hold you here for as long as I like, and there isn't a single damned thing you can do about it. Who's going to come looking for you? Your precious Randolph Clare?’
'I have plenty of friends in Bali,’ Michael retorted. 'If they don't hear from me soon, they're going to start checking with the American Embassy. I have friends at the embassy too.’
Reece communicated something to Waverley in sign language and Waverley suddenly smiled.
'I hope all your friends in Bali aren't as reliable as your American girlfriend.’
'Who are you talking about?’
'The pretty one.’
'Jennifer Dunning? What about her?’
'According to Richard, Miss Dunning was the one who told him where to find you when you were in your death trance.’
Michael stared at him and then at Reece. 'What kind of crap is that?’
Reece grinned and made a suggestive circle between finger and thumb. Then he uttered an extraordinary throaty laugh that sounded like a baby choking.
'You're all crap, do you know that?’ Michael snapped at him. 'You and him, the both of you. A couple of crocks of crap.’
'Richard assures me that he's speaking the truth. It
was
Miss Dunning who gave you away.’
Michael hesitated for a split second; then his sneakers squealed on the tiled floor as he dodged, feinted and made a dive for the nearest doorway. Reece was after him instantly, vaulting over the white iron bench. Michael reached the door and was struggling with the handle when Reece caught up with him.
'Don't hurt him!’ Waverley called.
Reece hooked his arm around Michael's neck and then gave him a devastating punch in the kidneys. Michael dropped to the floor, hitting his face against the tiles and chipping one of his front teeth. He lay there paralyzed for almost half a minute, staring in helpless agony at Waverley's approaching shoes. Waverley stood over him for a moment - two handmade golfing shoes in pale beige kid, and immaculate trouser cuffs - and then he prodded Michael with his cane.
'I want you to do what I ask, my friend, and take me into a death trance.’
Michael shook his head. Bloody saliva trailed from his mouth to the grouting on the floor. 'No,’ he managed to say.