The Eidolon (6 page)

A different sound drifts in on a wave of incense: the sound of deep, resonant chanting, almost too deep to be human; the low vibration of a gong, the labyrinthine rumble of horns. In a funny way, it’s calming. I lean down and pull on my boots, sweat collecting in the nape of my neck, the nail driving deeper into my head with the effort.

I take a deep breath and stand, swaying a little, then follow the sound and the smell of incense out of the room, my footsteps echoing in an unlit, empty, wooden corridor. Half way along, I pass a door that stands ajar. I peek round to see if I can find someone. The room is deserted. At one end is an altar with a large golden Buddha sitting on a red cloth. Incense sticks trickle smoke trails into the air. So, I’m in a monastery.

I follow the passageway to a huge hall with a long, wooden table down one side, lined with wooden benches. Several monks are gathered at one end, dressed in orange and red robes, their heads shaved. They’re playing an assortment of weird instruments – huge long horns held to their lips that scoop down to the floor and produce a noise that makes the floorboards tremble, shorter ones which bleat a harsh woody tone like a goat, singing bowls that ring out crystal harmonies. One monk stands over a large, hide drum beating it slowly, almost lazily. They look up at me, and carrying on playing. The largest of the monks sits with his eyes closed and his voice sounds like it’s coming from the caverns of the earth, as the syllables roll slowly from one rumble to the next.

All of it is strange – no, downright weird. There’s nothing familiar here, except... I stop. He stands out like a tourist as he walks towards me, wearing trousers, not a robe, his head not shaved, but a matt of tangled fair hair that falls over his eyes. He’s grinning at me.

“Danny?” I whisper. My voice is weak and scrapes my throat.

Danny nods and the grin widens across his broad face, a bit thinner than I remember, the hollow of his cheeks a little more pronounced. He throws his arms around me and the force of his slaps on my back makes me cough.

“Thought you’d never wake up, mate,” he whispers. “You had me worried.”

“How long?”

“Three days. They’ve been bringing you water, but they wouldn’t let me see you for too long. You feeling okay?”

Three days?
That long?
“I’ve felt better, but at least I’m here. It was a close one, for both of us.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“How about you? You okay?”

“Fine, I was just waiting for you to wake up.” He throws a sideways glance at the monks. “This is no holiday camp. They get you up at four, to eat with the rest of them. I mean, who’s hungry at four o’clock in the morning?”

Small cracks stab at my lips as I smile.

“And the tea...” Danny pulls a face. “If you weren’t sick before, you will be after that.”

“You’re an ungrateful bastard,” I say in a low voice.

“Maybe. They’ve looked after you, alright. One of them keeps asking questions – like he wants to know everything there is to know about you.”

“Really? Which one?”

“Ssh,” says Danny. “Here he comes now.”

An old monk with a round face like crumpled leather smiles and nods as he shuffles towards us, his red robes trailing on the floor. He seems friendly. I smile back. “Thanks for looking after me,” I say.

He presses his palms together and bows a little. The chanting stops and the old monk, still smiling, ushers us to a seat on one of the benches. The other monks gather, and when they sit down, four boys dressed in orange robes, who can’t be much older then ten, bring out wooden bowls of tsampa and butter tea.

“Thank you,” I say to the smallest one as he hands me my bowl. The boy looks about seven years old and stares at me with wide eyes, his mouth open. “Thanks,” I say again, not sure what else he’s expecting, but the boy just stares back until the old monk prods him and he trots off to get more bowls. When all the bowls are placed, the monks bow their heads, saying what must be a prayer. I catch Danny’s eye and he grins. I wait till the monks begin to eat, then pick up my spoon. Danny steels himself, then takes a sip of tea, struggling to keep control of his face. Sometimes he’s got the sensitivity of a doormat.

“Like this,” says a young monk sitting next to Danny. He breaks off a piece of tsampa, a rough sort of bread, and puts it in the bowl of butter tea. Then he stirs and kneads it with his hand, turning the bowl, until it forms a dumpling. He nods at Danny, his eyes twinkling like dark beads. Danny takes some tsampa, concentrating hard as he tries to make his dumpling. The young monks stop eating, their eyes on him, exchanging furtive glances. When his dumpling turns into a thick paste that sticks to his fingers and stretches into a long, clay-coloured goo, they lower their heads, trying to stifle sniggers. He’s making a real mess of it. One of them, who’d been struggling more than the others to suppress the giggles, keels sideways, his eyes squeezed shut, threatening to fall off the bench until the monk sitting next to him props him upright again. I grin at Danny. “I thought you’d have got the hang of it after three days.” He glowers at me, flicking the goo back into his bowl.

W
HEN THE SMALL
monks clear the bowls, the rest of the group begins filing from the room and we join the tail of the line.

“So, are you up to a long walk tomorrow?” asks Danny. “The lakes should be something.”

“Ask me tomorrow,” I say. At the moment, I’m focusing on walking back to my room.

“Mr Robert?” I turn back. It is the leather-faced monk. “Can I speak?”

“Of course.”

The monk smiles and looks at Danny but says nothing.

“Oh,” says Danny. “Sorry, I’ll leave you to it.” And he joins the line leaving the hall.

“Please,” says the old monk, gesturing to a bench. I sit down and the monk settles beside me, a wizened old face with sparkling eyes.

“You are well now?”

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

The monk’s eyes smile. Then he says, “You came to Tibet for something, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Why you came here?”

I shrug. “To get away from my life for a while.”

The monk nods and chuckles. “Running away.”

“Well, more just taking a break. I lost my job, you see, and my...”

“And your wife?” says the monk. “I am sorry, your friend tells me.”

“She wasn’t my wife.”

“I am still sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“Your friend say you are a scientist.”

“My friend talks too much,” I mumble, and his face wrinkles into a grin. “Yes, I’m a scientist.”

“What kind of scientist?”

“Physics and computer science. I work... I used to work in research.”

The old monk raises his eyebrows and nods. “Very important work. What is it you researching?”

“We were looking for something called dark matter.”

The old monk frowns and nods, his face serious. “Many matters are dark.” When he looks up, he says, “Which one is it you looking for?”

“No,” I shake my head. How the hell do I explain this to a Tibetan monk?“No, it’s... eh... you know when you look around you and you see things like...” – I cast around for inspiration – “...like the table or the bench or a tree – anything that is solid matter?”

“Yes?”

“Well, we’ve found something else in the universe – something that isn’t solid matter.”

“Yes?”

“Most of the universe is made up of something else, something we don’t fully understand. We’re looking for the missing piece of the universe.”

The monk chuckles and shakes his head.

“What?” It’s difficult not to smile even though I’ve no idea what’s tickling him.

“The scientists are catching up.”

He settles, eventually, and raises his eyebrows, creasing his forehead into a stack of ridges. “Your parents are very proud, I think.”

“Well, I guess my mum is – my dad died when I was three. He was a physicist too, so I suppose he would have been.”

“I am sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

The monk stares at the floor then asks, “Did you find what you come for?”

I got more than I bargained for, but let’s not go into that. “Yeah, you know, the peace and tranquillity and all that. Where I live, we don’t have that much.”

“It is very busy place, your world. But you found your peace on the mountain?”

I hesitate. The memory, the ridiculous memory of the voice comes to me, and the certainty I had then that something else came down the mountain with us, something I found myself trusting. Hypothermia can do strange things to you. “I suppose you could say that.”

“Good. It is a good place to find peace.”

We sit together and neither speaks until the old monk says, “But you are still going back? To your life?”

“Yeah. Of course.” What’s left of it.

“Hmmm. So you run away and you run back again.” He chuckles. “Maybe your life is not something out there.” He waves his arm vaguely to the side. “Maybe it is something in here.” He holds a fist against my chest. “And when you run you take it with you. Sometimes you have to let go the life you planned, to make room for the life that is waiting for you.”

“Is that a Tibetan saying?”

“No. But it is the words of a wise man.”

We sit in companionable silence for a while longer, before the monk says, “Do you remember the lake?”

“The lake?”

“We found you by the Crescent Lake. Do you remember this?”

“I remember seeing a lake when we came down the mountain.” Mirror smooth, black. Not a ripple or reflection on its surface. And that feeling...

The old man’s eyes narrow. “You remember nothing else?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” He leans closer, peering into my face; a small, curious creature. “What did you feel?”

I wipe away the beads of sweat that have gathered on my forehead, feeling my lips dry again. “I felt, eh... kind of uneasy.” I shake my head as I think of it. “I thought the sun had gone black, and the sound, it was...”

But he’s frowning at me in a way that’s making me nervous. “You
heard
it?”

“It was like voices, whispering. It felt almost... dark.”

The old monk sags, his face crumpling even further. He stares at me for a long moment as if I’ve disappointed him somehow.

“Listen, I was dry and cold and hallucinating. That’s all.”

“No.”

“Well, what was it, then?”

He takes a long, slow breath. “There are two lakes on the mountain. One, Lake Manasarovar, is shaped like the sun; it is called the Lake of Consciousness. The other, the one shaped like the crescent moon, we call Rakshastal, the Lake of Demons. These two lakes are joined by a thin channel of water. When waters flow from the Lake of Consciousness to the Lake of Demons, all is well. But the signs that came to you tell us the waters are flowing the other way, and this is very bad.”

“So, what does that mean?”

“It means the energies are changing – they are shifting between the worlds.”

I hear a soft scuttling and a shiny black cockroach appears from under the bench. I think about stepping on it, but remember where I am. It scuttles past the monk’s foot, claiming sanctuary.

“You believe that there are other worlds? Like other dimensions?” I don’t know much about Buddhism, only what I’ve picked up from Cora, but I didn’t think this was part of it.

“They are here, right next to us, only a breath away. Very few can sense them, and even fewer understand it when they manifest. You are one of those people, and you believe they are there, I think.”

Don’t drag me into your superstitious folklore.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not what I believe.”

“Then what do you look for, in your work?”

“Dark matter? No, that’s completely different.”

He snorts.

“It’s nothing to do with other worlds.”

“You seem very certain.”

Well, old man, I am. But right now, I don’t have it in me to explain.
I just smile.

He nods. “Perhaps one day you will see for yourself. But I hope you do not see the World you sensed here. I would not wish that on you, or anyone.”

I hear the whispering in my head again and feel a sickening clamminess on my skin as I catch a flash of a black sphere. My mind playing tricks. “So, what’s supposed to happen when these energies shift?”

“The world you sensed will leak into ours; what you felt will become our world, until that is all there is to feel. Unless people like you choose to stop it.”

“What?”

He gets up, slowly. There’s something else in his eyes. Is it fear? “Tell no one, until you listen to it and understand.” He lowers his eyes to the floor. “I am sorry, but you must leave at sunrise.” He bows and turns, then shuffles away and doesn’t look back.

“Y
OU ALRIGHT
?”
SAYS
Danny when I find him waiting in the empty corridor. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m still recovering, remember?” But there’s something inside me that has nothing to do with physical weakness.

“What was all that about, anyway?”

The monk’s words gnaw at me. Bad juju. “Nothing. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Chapter Four

M
Y CARRIAGE PULLS
up in front of the monastery – a small, battered, dark green truck which stutters to a halt with a shudder that rattles its doors. The chances of it making it down the mountain intact are slim. The chances of it making it to Lhasa Airport, which lies several days to the southeast? It would be a safer bet that Danny Mitchell will end up working on Wall Street.

I sling my rucksack into the back, beside some old rugs and faded bundles tied together with ropes. The driver takes the cigarette stub from the corner of his mouth and flashes me a toothless grin, pulling the canvas flap down over the cargo. The wind and sun have left their signature in the creases and texture of his face. There’s mischief in the small, dark eyes that peer out above high cheekbones. He pulls his fur jacket up round his neck and places the cigarette stub in the edge of his mouth, blinking as the smoke rises into his eyes.