There was a pause and then Chief Moyne said, 'Randolph, I'm chief of police here in Memphis and I've never heard of any hired army, not like you describe it. I mean, you're a businessman yourself. Have
you
ever heard of such a thing before?’
'I can't say that I have. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.’
'You're right. It doesn't mean that at all. But it kind of makes it less likely, wouldn't you say? A hired army going around bullying people into keeping their prices fixed or whatever? That doesn't ring true, Randolph. Not in an orderly business community like Memphis. Who told you such a thing?’
I’m sorry, I promised to keep his name confidential.’
'Did you pay him money?’
'Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Five hundred dollars.’
'Then I'm afraid that for all your business acumen, Randolph, you've been taken. Somebody's taken advantage of your grief and stung you.’
Randolph insisted, 'All the same, Dennis, four men killed my family, and four men were seen leaving Memphis airport on Monday afternoon before the killing with tickets for Quebec. One of these men was a known criminal and something of a head case, from what I can gather.’
'Randolph, I'm sorry, but scores of men left scores of airports all over the country on Monday afternoon and headed for Quebec, and there were plenty of men already in Quebec who might equally have carried out this crime. It's very important that you don't start playing Sherlock Holmes. You'll only wind up upsetting yourself, aggravating your grief, and quite apart from that, you could seriously jeopardize the official police investigation without even realizing it.’
Charles came in with a whisky for Randolph on a silver tray. He set it down on the table, bowed in that old-fashioned way of his and then withdrew.
Chief Moyne said, 'It would be a genuine help, Randolph, if you could tell me the name of your informant. I could check his story to see if any of it holds water, and if it does, well, we could pursue it in the proper way, with the full assistance of the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’
'I don't think he'd appreciate a visit from the police, especially if he knew I was the one who tipped you off.’
'Come on now, Randolph, your name doesn't even have to come into it. We can talk to him on any pretext we like. Out-of-date licence plate, failure to have his automobile tested, anything.’
'Well…’ Randolph hesitated. 'He did advise me himself to talk to the police.’
'In that case, I may have misjudged him,’ said Chief Moyne genially. 'He may not be a rip-off artist after all. But it's essential for me to check out his story one way or another. I mean, if there
is
some kind of secret army working on behalf of some of our big businesses, I think it's time I knew about it, don't you?’
'I guess you're right,’ Randolph conceded. The man's name is Jimmy the Rib. At least that's the name I was given. I met him at a blues club called the Walker Rooms on Beale Street.’
'So, Jimmy the Rib, huh?’ Chief Moyne repeated. 'It's been a while since I've heard anything out of him.’
'You know him?’ Randolph asked.
'Everybody downtown knows Jimmy the Rib. He's an unpredictable man. You were lucky you didn't upset him in any way.’
'He seemed quite affable to me.’
'Well, you must have caught him in a good mood. When he's roused, he has an unpleasant habit of thrusting knives up between people's legs.’
Randolph said, 'In that case, you just make damn sure he doesn't know it was me who tipped you off.’ He was only half-joking.
Chief Moyne laughed, his mouth crowded with wiener. 'Believe me, Randolph, from this moment on, you don't have anything to worry about.’
Randolph exchanged a few more pleasantries with Chief Moyne and then hung up. He eased back in his chair and swirled his whisky around in its glass. He was beginning to feel tired but the prospect of going upstairs to bed was bleaker than he could bear. He could tolerate his newly imposed loneliness during the day, when there were matters to occupy his attention, but the past two nights had been almost intolerably silent and sad. Last night he had awakened just after the moon had set, when the house was at its stillest and darkest, and the reflection in Marmie's dressing-table mirror had gleamed like a silvery window through to another world, where shadows moved like living people. He had listened and listened, and the most overwhelming thing of all had been the silence. No breathing next to him, no breathing in the children's rooms. A house of silence and empty beds. A house in which death had pressed its finger against the lips of memory and whispered, 'Sssh!’
He had just raised his glass of whisky to his lips when the telephone rang.
'Who is it?’ he asked.
'Mr Clare? This is Dr Ambara of the Mount Moriah Clinic. I understand from Suzie that you were interested in getting in touch with me.’
Randolph sat up straight and put down his glass. 'As a matter of fact, Dr Ambara, I was. In fact, I was thinking of calling you later this evening. Suzie said you didn't usually get home until late.’
'How are you, Mr Clare?’
'Coping, just about. I'm fortunate that my work keeps me pretty busy.’
Dr Ambara said, ‘That is not always fortunate. You must not forget to be sad for your lost family, you know.’
That was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.’
'Your grief?’ asked Dr Ambara. It was clear from the evasive tone in his voice that he was trying to divert the conversation from the subject of reincarnation and of talking to the dead.
'I wanted to discuss the possibility of seeing my family again.’
'Well, yes, I thought as much,’ said Dr Ambara. 'But would it be possible for me to dissuade you from following this course? I have to warn you that there are very great dangers involved, not only to yourself but to others. Possibly to your loved ones as well.’
'But it can be done? There is a chance I might see them?’
Dr Ambara was silent. Then he said, 'We will have to meet to talk about this properly. Are you free tomorrow? Meet me at the Dixon Gardens at eleven.’ He hesitated again and then said, 'Should you change your mind between now and tomorrow when we meet, please believe me when I say that it will be better for everybody concerned. When you explore the regions of death, Mr Clare, you open a two-way door, a door that can let things in but that can also let things out.’
They met beside a cascade of scarlet azaleas, azaleas as scarlet as freshly splashed blood, in a silvery morning fog the sun had not yet dissipated. The formal gardens covered nearly seventeen acres. Along every path there were flowering magnolias as white as wax, and willows that sadly trailed their branches through the fog like the hair of drowning brides.
Randolph thought, as he watched the tourists moving through the gardens,
Last Year at Marienbad,
a stylized film from a 1960s art-house movie. He felt dislocated, not only by the fog but by tiredness and grief, and by the memories that crowded around him every waking minute of the day. He had dreamed of Marmie and the children again last night, a dream in which they had been beckoning him to join them at a table set with white plates. They had been singing, or chanting, and their voices had been echoing and high-pitched, like the voices of children heard at the far end of a tunnel. He had approached the table and looked down at the plates, and on each of them there had been human organs: a heart, a lung, a liver, all of them garnished with herbs and flowers as if part of a gruesome, ritual meal. An unhallowed Seder, with the bitterest of bitter herbs and the sourest of wines.
He had awakened sweating and shaking, with his sheets twisted around his legs like a rope.
Dr Ambara arrived precisely on time, walking out of the fog in a grey mohair suit that looked as if it had been tailored for him in six hours flat in Okinawa. Under his jacket he wore a white turtleneck sweater. His eyes were tinted by orange sunglasses and under his arm he carried a copy of the
Commercial Appeal.
His silky moustache had been clipped since the last time Randolph had seen him.
'Well, Mr Clare,’ he said, extending his hand, 'I was afraid that you might be here.’
Randolph solemnly shook his hand, which was limp and damp, the hand of a man who was making no attempt to prove anything about his masculinity or his sincerity. Dr Ambara had no need to establish credentials of any kind. Randolph had sought him out, and Randolph would either believe what he had to say about contacting the dead, or not.
'I was very annoyed when I heard that Dr Linklater had asked to have you taken off my case,’ Randolph said. 'Quite frankly, he had no right to do that.’
'I hope you will not allow such a small matter to cause any lasting bad feeling between you,’ Dr Ambara remarked. 'I am quite sure that Dr Linklater was only doing what he considered best for you. He is a careful and considerate man in my experience. Perhaps too careful and too considerate, but all doctors are concerned about malpractice suits these days of course, and in a general practitioner, these apparent failings can sometimes be a virtue.’
'He still had no right. I pay his bills, after all.’
'Ah, Mr Clare, paying a doctor's bills does not always give you the authority to question his professional judgment. Part of what you are paying him for is the fact that he knows a great deal more about your body than you do. And about your mind, too.’
They started to walk as if an off-stage film director had suddenly instructed them to stroll side by side through the gardens, remembering their lines as they went. Randolph found Dr Ambara's conversation peculiarly stilted, as if he were deeply reluctant to tell Randolph anything and yet felt that fate had already dictated that he must.
There was a sense of inevitability about this walk through the Dixon Gardens and about the course of their conversation, as if destiny had required them to come together at last, mismatched partners in what would prove to be an arcane game of Oriental checkers in which the white counters represented the living and the black counters represented the dead.
Dr Ambara spoke quietly and with considerable formality. As they walked, he held his hands pressed together like a closed book that he was unwilling to open.
'As I believe I explained to you at the clinic, Mr Clare, it is believed in my religion that the souls of the dead are not extinguished forever but that they pass through heaven in preparation for their eventual rebirth.’
'But you said that they could actually be reached when they were in heaven… that they could actually be spoken to.’
'I said this more to give you solace in your time of grief than to suggest it as a practical proposition. That, I regret to say, was my misjudgment.’
'But it can be done? There is a way in which I could talk to my family again?’
Dr Ambara looked at Randolph sharply. 'Are you really sure you want to?’
Randolph said, 'Perhaps I could judge that better if you were to tell me something about it, how it's done, what the dangers are.’
'Well, Mr Clare, as I mentioned on the telephone, the dangers are considerable, not only to those who attempt to contact the dead, but to the dead themselves.’
They reached a long, dark yew hedge, immaculately clipped. It was still so foggy that Randolph could see only twenty or thirty feet in any direction, and the temperature had risen well up into the mid-eighties. A solitary man walked past them, regarding them with some suspicion through rimless glasses, his windbreaker rustling like brown paper that has grown soft from repeated folding.
Dr Ambara waited until the man had passed and then said, 'An essential part of our religious activity is the
sanghyang,
or trance. Anybody who is religiously devout and wishes to experience the spiritual ecstasies of closeness to the gods is capable of entering such a trance. And a measure of how powerful a trance can be is that those who enter it are often capable of extraordinary feats such as walking barefoot on fire, or of dancing complicated dances that nobody has ever taught them, often in unison with other entranced persons and in perfect step.’
'I think I've heard something about the
sanghyang,’
Randolph told him. 'Can't people in such a state dig knives into themselves, something like that, and put skewers through their cheeks?’
'Well, perhaps you are getting a little mixed up with the penitents' rituals at Thaipusam,’ said Dr Ambara. 'But essentially you have the idea.’
Randolph started walking again, thoughtfully. 'And it's this trance that enables people to meet their dead relatives?’
'A highly developed form of it, yes. It is popularly known as the death trance. It involves fasting and religious training of an intensive nature, and the chants and the rituals used are very complex and very
sakti,
which means magically powerful.’
'If you haven't had any religious training, is it still possible to enter one of these death trances?’ Randolph asked. 'I mean, could
I
do it? Is there any chance at all?’
Dr Ambara took off his sunglasses and carefully polished them with his handkerchief. 'I suppose that for your own safety I should not really tell you any of this. But in my estimation, you are a man who is capable of taking a hand in his own destiny, as long as you understand that I am not
recommending
that you follow this course of action. On the contrary, for reasons which I will explain to you, you would be far better off if you were to forget that I had ever spoken to you about it.’
He held up his glasses to the foggy sunlight to make sure they were clean and then went on. 'There are only ten or maybe a dozen adepts capable of entering the death trance.
Many try, many fail. The risks of entering the death trance, you see, are similar to the risks of fire-walking. During a trance it is possible for men and women to walk, even to dance, across a glowing pit of coconut husks. Their feet are quite bare, the coconut husks are white-hot, yet they do not even suffer from blisters. Some people do it regularly all of their lives and are never hurt. But sometimes a fire-walker's concentration is faulty, sometimes his faith is weak, sometimes his trance is not sufficiently complete. Who can say why? When that happens, the fire-walker falters both spiritually and physically and the fire burns him. I was at a temple blessing in Djakarta when my cousin lost both of his feet while performing a
Sanghyang Jaran,
which is a trance dance on a wooden hobbyhorse. In the time that it took him to dance from one end of the fiery pit to the other, his feet were burned down to the stumps of his shinbones, yet all the time he kept on dancing and did not cry out.’
The sun was at last beginning to penetrate the fog, and the gardens were transformed to misty gold. Randolph could feel the sweat glueing his shirt to the middle of his back.
Dr Ambara continued. 'The risks involved in the death trance are similar but much greater. If the fire-walk goes wrong, you may lose your feet. If the death trance goes wrong, you will certainly lose your life. Of those ten or twelve adepts capable of entering the death trance, perhaps fewer than four have survived its dangers often enough to be capable of guiding a less-trained person into the realms beyond the veil. Out of those four, perhaps two could be persuaded to actually do it, although it is impossible to say whether they could be found and what they would charge for such a service. Needless to say, it is illegal in Indonesia for a death-trance adept to sell his services for money, and the government does everything it can to discourage such practices. I have heard, however, that several wealthy American families have paid death-trance adepts to contact their deceased relatives, families whose names you would recognize; and I know for certain that attempts were made to hire an adept to contact Howard Hughes in order to ascertain where his will might be. Nobody knows if Hughes was actually contacted or whether the adept failed to find him. Perhaps he was found and had something to say that did not please the parties who had been trying to get in touch with him. You must understand, Mr Clare, that meetings with the dead can be deeply distressing and frequently terrifying.’
Randolph said tightly, 'You mentioned dangers.’
'Yes, although I have tried not to be too specific. You have little or no knowledge of our religion, Mr Clare, and so far I have not wished to sound patronizing. Perhaps you could compare me with a Western mechanic who is trying to discourage an Indonesian villager from driving a car by frightening him with the mystifying details of what happens when you strip the gears.’
Randolph smiled. 'You can be as mystifying and as detailed as you like, Doctor. I've listened to you so far, haven't I, without any outward signs of skepticism? I think I'm prepared to accept your basic premise that the dead are not irrevocably dead, that they've simply been removed for a while from the physical world that the rest of us inhabit. So, whatever else you have to say, it can hardly be any more difficult to swallow than that.’
'Very well,’ Dr Ambara agreed. 'What you have to know is that when you enter the world of the dead, you are also entering the world of what I can only describe to you as demons. Well, you raise your eyebrows. I expected you would. But in their own realm, they are as real as the spirits of your loved ones are real.’
'And these… demons… they're dangerous?’ Randolph asked. The word 'demons' felt as awkward in his mouth as an obscenity. He was a cottonseed processor, a businessman, a churchgoer and a pragmatist; for all his urgent need to believe that Marmie and the children were still reachable, could he really bring himself to believe in demons? Could all those childhood legends and all those dungeons-and-dragons fantasies really have some foundation in fact?
It was bizarre. And yet here was a highly qualified doctor telling him quite calmly that they did, in Dixon Gardens, in Memphis, on the most ordinary of days.
Dr Ambara said, 'Of course I do not expect you to be able to immediately accept what I am saying. For those brought up in the ways of Christianity and in the ways of modern Western education, the notion of demons must seem fanciful, even ludicrous. But whether you care to believe in them or not, they do exist, and if you choose to enter the realms of the dead, you will risk encountering them.’
'What exactly do they do? If that's the right question?’
'They are the acolytes of a goddess we call Rangda,’ Dr Ambara explained. 'They are a form of what, in popular terms, you might call zombies, the living dead. They are the wandering spirits of those whose souls were not separated from their mortal bodies by cremation and over whose remains the proper religious rites were never spoken. The Goddess Rangda promises them freedom from their misery if they snare fresh spirits for her, and that is what they do. They capture the dead and, whenever they can, the living, in order to feed their mistress. But she, of course, never keeps her promise to them and never releases them.’
Dr Ambara paused for a moment, uncertain of how to explain the dangers of disturbing the Goddess Rangda to a man whose belief in Jehovah was far from unquestioning. Yet Randolph waited, eager to understand, anxious to hear the words that would convince him of Dr Ambara's truths.
'You see,’ Dr Ambara explained at last, 'when a living being manages in a death trance to enter the realm of the dead, his physical presence alerts the demons. He sets up ripples, twitches, in the same way that a fly alerts a spider when it lands on its web. The demons will at once pursue the intruder and drag him back, if they can, to Rangda. A living being, for Rangda, is a rare prize, and she may richly reward the demons who brought him to her. She is the Witch Widow, the queen of all those evil spirits and ghouls who haunt the graveyards at night. Usually she has to be content with dead flesh and faded spirits. A living being is a feast.’