A Stark And Wormy Knight (9 page)

Strangely, the third floor of the house was dark, too.

“Edward? Uncle Edward? It’s me, Nathan. Are you here?” Had the old man forgotten he was coming and gone out with his caretaker Jenkins somewhere? God forbid, a medical emergency… Nightingale stopped to listen. Was that the quiet murmuring of the old man’s breathing machine?

Something stirred on the far side of the room and his hackles rose; his hand strayed to his inside coat pocket. A moment later the desk lamp clicked on, revealing the thin, lined face of his godfather squinting against the sudden light. “Oh,” Edward said, taking a moment to find the air to speak. “Guh-goodness! Nate, is that you? I must have dozed off. When did it get so dark?”

Relieved, Nightingale went to the old man and gave him a quick hug, being careful not to disturb the tracheotomy cannula or the ventilator tubes. As always, Edward Arvedson felt like little more than a suit full of bones, but somehow he had survived in this failing condition for almost a decade. “Where’s Jenkins?” Nightingale asked. “It gave me a start when I came up and the whole house was dark.”

“Oh, I had him the night off, poor fellow. Working himself to death. Pour me a small sherry, will you, there’s a good man, and sit down and tell me what you’ve learned. There should be a bottle of Manzanilla already open. No, don’t turn all those other lights on. I find I’m very sensitive at the moment. This is enough light for you to find your way to the wet bar, isn’t it?”

Nightingale smiled. “I could find it without any light at all, Uncle Edward.”

When he’d poured a half glass of for the old man and a little for himself as well, Nightingale settled into the chair facing the desk and looked his mentor up and down. “How are you feeling?”

Arvedson waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, fine. Never felt better. And now that we’re done with that nonsense, tell me your news, Nate. What happened? I’ve been worrying ever since you told me what you thought was happening.”

“Well, it took me a while to find a volunteer. Mostly because I was trying to avoid publicity – you know, all that ‘Nightingale – Exorcist to the Stars’ nonsense.”

“You shouldn’t have changed your name – it sounds like a Hollywood actor now. Your parents wouldn’t have approved, anyway. What was wrong with Natan Näktergal? It was good enough for your father.”

He smiled. “Too old country, Uncle Edward. Remember, being well-known gets me into a lot of places. It also leads people to misjudge me.”

Arvedson made a face. He still hadn’t touched his sherry. “Fine. I’m also old country, I suppose. I should be grateful you even visit. Tell me what happened.”

“I’m trying to. As I said, it wouldn’t do to recruit just anyone. Ideally, I needed someone with special training…but who gets trained for something like this? I figured that my best bet was through my Tibetan contacts. Tibetan Buddhists spend years studying the Bardo Thodol, preparing to take the journey of dying, which gave me a much larger group to choose from. I finally settled on a man in Seattle named Geshe, who had pancreatic cancer. He’d refused pain relief and the doctors felt certain he only had a few days left when I met him, but he was remarkably calm and thoughtful. I told him what I wanted, and why, and he said yes.”

“So you had found your…what was your word? Your ‘necronaut’.”

Nightingale nodded. “That’s what I called it before I met Geshe – it sounded better than ‘mineshaft canary’. But after I got to know him it…it seemed a little glib. But he was precisely the sort of person I was looking for – a man trained almost since childhood to die with his eyes and mind open.”

Lightning flashed and a peal of thunder shivered the windows. In the wake, another wash of rain splattered against the glass. “Filthy weather,” said Davidson. “Do you want another drink before you start? You’ll have to get it yourself, of course, since we don’t have Jenkins.”

“No, I’m fine.” Nightingale stared at his glass. “I’m just thinking.” Lightning flashed again and so he waited for the thunder before continuing. “You remember how this started, of course. Those earliest reports of spontaneous recovery by dying patients…well, it didn’t seem like anything I needed to pay attention to. But then that one family whose daughter went into sudden remission from leukemia after the last rites had already been said…”

“I remember. Very young, wasn’t she? Nine?”

“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?”