Death Trance Read online

  Michael had occasionally wondered if the gods ever came here any more - the temple was so ruined and the odalan festivals were no longer held here - but he realized that it would be heretical to display doubts to the pedanda.

  The shrines to the greatest deities had eleven layered meru roofs, tapering upward into the darkness. Those to lesser gods had only seven roofs, or five. There were no gifts laid in front of any of these shrines as there were in other temples, no fruit or flowers or bullock’s heads or chickens. Here there was nothing but dried leaves that had fallen from the overhanging trees and a few scattered poultry bones. There were no longer any temple priests to cater to the comforts of the gods.

  The pedanda began to recite to Michael the words that would gradually lift him into a deeper state of trance. Michael kept his eyes open at first but then slowly his eyelids drooped and his body relaxed; gradually his conscious perceptions began to drain away and pour across the courtyard floor like oil.

  The pedanda began to tap one foot on the stones rhythmically and Michael swayed back and forth in the same rhythm, as if anticipating the arrival of celebrating villagers, the way it would have been when the odalan festivals were held in the temple. He swayed as if the kendang drums were beating, and the kempli gong was banging, and the night was suddenly shrill with the jingling of finger cymbals.

  ‘You can walk now among the dead, who are themselves among us. You can see quite clearly the ghosts of those who have gone before. Your eyes are opened both to this world and the next. You have reached the trance of trances, the trance of the dead, the world within worlds.’

  Michael pressed his hands against his face and began to sway ever faster. The clangour of drumming and cymbal clashing inside his brain was deafening. Jhanga-jhanga-jhanga-jhanga-jhanga: the complicated, unwritten rhythms of gamelan music; the whistling melodies of life and death; the rustling of fire without burning, of knives that refused to cut; the swath in the air made by demons who stole children in the dark.

  Great blocks of crimson and black came silently thundering down on top of him. His mind began to burst apart like an endless succession of opening flowers, each one richer and more florid than the last.

  The kendang drums pounded harder and harder; the cymbals shrilled mercilessly; the gongs reverberated until they set up a continuous ringing of almost intolerable sound.

  Michael swayed furiously now, his hands pressed hard against his face. The voice of the pedanda reached him through the soundless music, repeating over and over, ‘Sanghyang Widi, guide us; Sanghyang Widi, guide us; Sanghyang Widi, guide us.’

  It was now - at the very crescendo of his trance - that Michael would usually have stood up to dance, following the steps untaught by priests or parents, or by anybody mortal, yet known by all who can enter into the sanghyang.

  But tonight he was suddenly, and unexpectedly, met by silence and stillness. He continued to sway for a short time, but then he became motionless as the silence and the stillness persisted and the imaginary music utterly ceased.

  He took his hands from his face and there was thepedanda, watching him; and there was the inner courtyard of the temple, with its dead leaves and its abandoned shrines; and there was the incense smoke, drifting thickly into the darkness.

  ‘What has happened?’ he asked. His voice sounded strange to himself, as if he were speaking from beneath a blanket.

  The old man raised one skeletal arm and indicated the courtyard. ‘Can you not understand what has happened?’

  Michael frowned and lifted his head. The smell of burned coriander leaves was stronger than ever. Somewhere a whistle blew, loud and long.

  The pedanda said, ‘You know already that your one body consists of three bodies: your mortal body, your stulasarira; your emotional body, your suksmasarira; and your spiritual body, your antakaransarira. Well, your stulasarira and your suksmasarira have fallen into a sleeping trance, not like the wild and frenzied trance of the sanghyang, but more like a dream. Your antakaransarira, however, has remained awake.

  Your spirit can perceive everything now, unhindered by physical or emotional considerations. You will not be concerned by the prospect of hurting yourself. You will not be concerned by anger, or love, or resentment. In this state, you will be able to see the dead.’

  Michael raised his hands and examined them, then looked back at the pedanda. ‘If I am asleep, how can I move?’

  ‘You forget that your stulasarira and your antakaransarira are inseparable, even after death. That is why we cremate our dead, so that the antakaransarira may at last fly free from its ashes. Your spirit wishes to move your mortal body and so it has, just as your mortal body, when it is awake, can move your spirit.’

  Michael sat silent; the pedanda watched him with a patient smile. Although essentially the temple seemed to be the same, now it possessed a curious dreamlike quality, a subdued luminosity, and the clouds above the meru towers appeared to be moving at unnatural speed.

  ‘You have so many questions and yet you cannot ask them,’ the pedanda said.

  Michael shook his head. ‘I feel that the answers will come by themselves.’

  ‘Nonetheless, you must try to put into words everything that you fail to understand.’

  ‘Can I feel pain in this trance?’ Michael asked. ‘Can I walk on fire, or stab myself with knives?’

  ‘Try for yourself,’ smiled the pedanda, and from the folds of his plain white robes he produced a wavy-bladed kris, the traditional Balinese dagger. Michael could see by the way the blade shone that it had recently been sharpened. He accepted the weapon cautiously, testing the weight of its decorative handle. For a moment, as the pedanda handed it to him, their eyes met and there was a strange, secretive look in the old man’s expression that Michael could not remember having noticed before; it was almost a look of resignation.

  In the sanghyang trance, young boys seven or eight years old could stab their chests with these daggers and the blades would not penetrate their skin. But this was not an ordinary sanghyang trance. This was a very different kind of trance, if it was a trance at all. The silence in the courtyard was so deep that Michael could almost have believed the pedanda had deceived him. He wondered if perhaps in some unknown way he had failed his initiation and let the old priest down. Perhaps the only honourable course of action left to a student who disappointed the pedanda was suicide, and perhaps this was what he was being offered now.

  Michael hesitated, and as he did so, a scraggly looking jungle cock stalked into the courtyard, lifted its plumed head and stared at him.

  The pedanda said, ‘You are afraid? What are you afraid of? Death?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Michael replied uncertainly.

  ‘To be irresolute is a sin.’

  ‘I’m afraid but I don’t know why. I’m afraid of you.’

  ‘Of me?’ smiled the priest. He lifted his hands, their long, twisty fingernails gleaming.

  ‘You have no need to be afraid of me. You have no need to be afraid of anything, not even of death. Come, let me show you what death is.’

  Michael glanced down at the kris in his hand. Then he looked back questioningly at the pedanda, who shook his head. ‘Do not strike now. The question has passed. The question will arise again later, never fear, perhaps in a different way.’

  The priest rose to his feet gracefully. For one moment he stood staring at the mask of Rangda, with its embroidered covering. Then he turned and glided across the courtyard, back through the paduraksa gate, across the outer courtyard and into the street. Michael followed him closely, aware of a strange slowness in the way in which his limbs responded, as if he were wading through warm and murky water. The streets seemed to be deserted except for the cigarette ends that glowed in doorways, the murmur of deep, blurry voices and a soft rustling sound that filled the air.

  The pedanda guided him along to the end of the street. Michael felt as if he were pursuing a figure in a dream. He was conscious for the first time in over a year that he w
as half-Western, that he was only half-entitled to know the secrets the pedanda was revealing to him. Although he had advanced even farther in his spiritual studies than most full-blooded Balinese boys, he always felt that he was holding something back, some small, sceptical part of his spirit that would always be white.

  Now the pedanda reached a bronze door set into a crumbling stone wall. He opened it and Michael followed him through. To his surprise, he found himself in a small cemetery thickly overgrown with weeds and garish green moss, curtained with creeper that hung from the trees, silent, neglected, its shrines broken and its pathways long choked up, but elegant all the same, in the saddest and most regretful of ways. The high wall surrounding it must have at one time shielded the graveyard from the sight of every building around it, but now the little cemetery was overlooked by three or four office blocks and an illuminated sign that read ‘Udaya Tours.’ In the middle distance, a scarlet sign said, ‘Qantas.’

  The pedanda stood still. ‘I have never shown you this place before,’ he said. ‘This is the graveyard for a hundred and fifty families who died in the puputan, slaughtered by the Dutch and by the rajas. Families without names, children without parents.

  They were cremated and so their antakaransariras were freed/, but they have remained here out of sorrow.’

  Michael walked slowly between the lines of weed-tangled shrines. The carving on each stone was sinuous and curving in the style of Ida Bagus Njana, depicting demons and dancers and ghosts and scowling warriors. Each shrine represented one dead family.

  Then he stood still, uncertain of why the pedanda had brought him here. The Qantas sign shone brightly: an uncompromising message that the past was long past and that Bali was now regularly visited by 747s as well as by demons.

  When Michael turned back to talk to the pedanda, his scalp prickled in shock, for the priest was still standing by the cemetery gate, his hands clasped, his head slightly raised, but right behind Michael a family had gathered in complete silence. A father, a mother, two grown-up daughters and a young son, no more than eight years old.

  They wore traditional grave clothes and their heads were bound with white scarves.

  All were staring at him, not moving, and although he could see them quite distinctly, they seemed to have no more reality than the evening air. He stared back at them.

  He knew without a doubt that they were dead.

  Slowly the family turned and walked away between the shrines, fading from sight as they passed the pedanda.

  Then, as he looked around, Michael saw other figures standing equally silent among the creepers: a pale-faced young girl, her black hair fastened with gilded combs; a man who kept his hands clasped over his face; an old woman who kept raising her hand as if she were waving to somebody miles and miles away; children with frightened faces and eye sockets as dark as ink.

  The pedanda came through the graveyard and stood close to Michael, still smiling.

  ‘All these people have been dead for many years. They still remain, however, and they always shall. We refuse to accept the presence of spirits only because we cannot see them except in trances.’

  ‘Will they speak?’ Michael asked. In spite of the humidity, he felt intensely cold and he was shivering.

  ‘They will speak if they believe you can help them, but they are frightened and suspicious. They feel helpless without their mortal bodies, as if they are invalids.’

  There was a young girl of twelve or thirteen standing by one of the nearer shrines.

  She reminded Michael of the girl he had seen sewing at the batik stall. He approached her carefully until he was standing only three feet from her. She stared back at him with wide brown eyes.

  ‘Can you speak?’ Michael asked. ‘My name is Michael. Nama say a Michael. Siapa nama saudara?’

  There was an achingly long silence while the girl kept her eyes on Michael, regarding him with curiosity and suspicion. Something in her expression told him that she had suffered great pain.

  ‘Jam berapa sekarang?’ she whispered in a voice as faint as a gauze scarf blowing in the evening wind.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Michael told her. She had wanted to know what time of day it was and he had explained that it was night.

  Again he asked her name. ‘Siapa nama saudara?’

  But gradually she began to move away from him as if she were being blown by an unfelt breeze. Other families began to move away too, to vanish behind the shrines.

  One young man remained, however, looking at Michael as if he recognized him. He was thin and frighteningly pale but quite handsome, with the thin-featured appearance of a man from the north, from Bukit Jambul.

  ‘He envies you,’ the pedanda said, standing close by Michael’s shoulder. ‘The dead always long to have their mortal bodies restored to them.’

  ‘They seem to be frightened,’ Michael remarked.

  The priest pressed his left hand against his deaf left ear and listened keenly with his right. ‘They are. There must be leyaks close by. Leyaks prey on the dead as well as on the living. They capture their antakaransariras and drag them back to Rangda for torturing.’

  ‘Even the dead can be tortured?’

  ‘Rangda is the Queen of the Dead. She can put them through far more terrible agonies than they have ever suffered during their lifetimes.’

  Michael turned and looked around the graveyard. He heard a rustling sound but it was only the creeper trailing against the shrines. Nonetheless, the pedanda clasped his wrist with fingers as bony as a hawk’s and drew him back towards the graveyard gates.

  ‘It is not wise to tempt the leyaks, especially since we are both in a death trance.

  Come, let us return to the temple.’

  They left the graveyard and stepped out into Jalan Mahabnarata. The street was completely deserted, although some of the upstairs windows were lighted and there was the bonelike clacking of mah-jong tiles, and laughter. The pedanda glanced around and then took Michael’s sleeve. ‘Be quick. If the leyaks catch us in the open, they will kill us.’

  They began to walk along the street as fast as they could without alerting hostile eyes. They passed two or three tourists and a fruit seller, all of whom seemed to be moving on a different time plane, moving so slowly that Michael could have snatched the durian fruit from the market woman’s upraised hand without her realizing who had taken it. One of the tourists turned and frowned as if sensing their passing, but before he could collect his wits, they were gone.

  They were no more than three hundred yards from the temple gates when the pedanda said, There. On the other side of the street.’

  Michael glanced sideways and caught sight of a grey-faced man in a grey suit, with eyes that shone carnivorously orange. He looked like a zombie out of a horror movie, but he walked swiftly and athletically, keeping pace with them on the opposite sidewalk; as he reached the small side street called Jalan Suling, the Street of Flutes, he was joined by another grey-faced man. Their cheeks could have been smeared with human ashes; their eyes could have been glowing lamps from the night market.

  Taster,’ the pedanda insisted. Now they made no pretence of walking but ran towards the gates of the Puri Dalem as fast as they could. The priest held up his robes, and his sandals slapped on the bricks. Michael could have run much faster but he did not want to leave the old man behind. There were three or four leyaks following them now, and Michael glimpsed their glistening teeth.

  They had almost reached the temple gates when three leyaks appeared in front of them. They were larger than Michael had ever imagined and their faces were like funeral masks. The pedanda gasped, ‘Michael, the gates! Open the gates!’

  Michael tried to dodge around the leyaks and reach the gates. One of the creatures snatched at his arm with a hand that felt like a steel claw. The nails dug into his skin but somehow he managed to twist away and cling to the heavy ring handle that would open up the temple. The leyak snatched at him again, viciously scratching his legs, but then Michael heaved the
gate inwards and tumbled into the temple’s outer courtyard.

  The pedanda was not so lucky. The leyaks had jumped on him now; one of them had seized his left forearm in his jaws and was trying to pry the flesh from the bone. The other leyaks were ripping at his robes with their claws and already the simple white cotton was splashed with blood.

  Michael screamed, ‘No! No! Let him go!’ but the leyaks snarled and bit at the old pedanda like wild dogs, their eyes flaring orange. Blood flew everywhere in a shower of hot droplets. The noise was horrendous: snarling and screeching and tearing.

  Michael heard muscles shred, sinews snap, bones break like dry branches. For a moment the pedanda was completely buried under the grey, hulking leyaks and Michael thought he would never see the old priest again.

  But then, like a drowning man reaching for air, the pedanda extended one hand towards the temple. Michael desperately tried to grasp it, missed the first time but then managed to seize the pedanda’s wrist.

  ‘Barong Keket!’ he shouted, although it was more of a war cry than an appeal to the sovereign of the forests, the archenemy of Rangda. ‘Barong Keket!’

  At the sound of the deity’s name, the snarling leyaks raised their heads and glared at Michael with burning eyes. And as they raised their heads, Michael tugged at the pedanda’s, arm and managed to drag the old man into the safety of the temple courtyard. There were screams of rage and frustration from the leyaks, but none of them could walk on sacred ground. Their nails grated against the bronze doorway and they howled like wolves at bay, but they could come no further. Michael slammed the door and stood with his back to it, panting. The pedanda lay on the courtyard floor, his robes crimson with blood, gasping and shivering.

  ‘We must leave this trance if we wish to survive,’ he gasped. ‘Quickly, Michael. Take me back to the inner courtyard.’

  Michael helped the priest to his feet. He could feel the sticky wetness of blood, the sliminess of torn muscle. The pedanda~felt no pain because he was still deeply entranced, but there was no doubt that he was close to death. If Michael could not bring him out of the trance and take him to the hospital, the old priest would die within an hour. Breathing as deeply and as calmly as he could, Michael dragged the pedanda through the inner gate, the paduraksa, and back to the silken mats. The mask of Rangda was still there, covered by its cloth; the incense still smoked.