They brought the court painter with his paints and brushes into the marquee and set fire to the marquee with the sounds of music. Having found himself in fire, the painter hysterically screamed, but the loud music silenced his screams and nobody heard him. This is how he died and there's no trace of him left.
"Serves him right, he deserved it!" Tenjup blurted it out.
"The youth has spoken a word!" the magic dead exclaimed, slipped out of the sack and flew back to the cemetery.
"The games of vitala with man", 4. Ananda the Carpenter.
"May I be led by the Bhagavan Vairochana," I prayed, having picked a quieter and darker place. "May the Divine Mother of Infinite Space be my rearguard. May I be led safely across the fearful ambush of the Bardo1."
It's just a routine - to pray before crossing the border. The Bardo2. This is the way we call it. The people, who are used to give stupid names to anything, call it the border. Actually, it truly looks like an infinite space where the neverending twilight reigns and the insanity-like mirages gleam. Any mirage has nature of an optical illusion, but those who guard it are real enough, and if you don't have a pass...
***
He wasn't an easy client. The associaters never leave home without an apotrepein or even two of them. White masks, black cloaks. Whereas a flair for a dramatic, the mercenaries from the dwarf Bes' office are rightfully notorious (first shoot then ask), but they have weak spots either and I'm one of them.
I used to be an apotrepein as well: I guarded travelers to the word of the living until they left me alone, crippled and bleeding, in a dark dungeon of a ruined temple for saving an kind of important lady who just happened to be out of luck. The long and empty corridor looked perfectly safe, but when the associater put her key in the door... "Oh, my gosh," lady said when she saw me reaching for my gun, and he appeared as beautiful as gosh, neither more nor less. Euphemisms always affect the appearance, especially if it comes to a mental ghost. Consisted of two different-sized orbs like a Japanese snowman, he has splattered me all over the wall just passing by. The lady was hurt too so when my late partner faced a dilemma which one of us he would carry up to the transition point, he had no choice. Yes, he left me his bell, but I called for help in vain. They heard my call, except they were not the ones I was calling for.
When they are burying you alive in the crystal coffin, at least you can see what's happening in details. When you are looking at the orange robes from the bottom up, all of them are similar to poisonous mushrooms, the mushrooms who seek to infinity. Their prior was the first one who has threw a handful of stony earth on the coffin lid. It was him who has in secret dug me up a couple of weeks later. The human bodies which we borrow are disgusting: they are heavy, awkward and unable to come through walls. This is one of the conventionalities of this word. They are biodegradable as well, so when I was recovered on the face of the earth I didn't look good. However, the monk was interested in the content, not the form. The new body he had procured for me looked not much better: a small and skinny dyer with a blue from toxic paint face was so dumb to realized what happened to him. What happened to myself is well known to every inhabitant of Jambudvipa from their childhood: "Once upon a time there lived in a certain country seven brothers. They were knowledgeable about witchcraft and played off each other in the art of magical transformations3". All seven ended up in pain as every human does and the one, who had fooled them, became my client now. I know the rules: then we will be bound together to the death. His death, of course, not mine.
"When you reach the cemetery called "The Chilly Grove", many dead, small and big, will cry: "Take me, take me!" Cast a spell and make a sacrifice in response. The common dead to fall on the ground but the magic one with a cry "Don't take me!" will climb the top of the peach tree. Then pretend to chop the tree with this axe and the vetala will immediately get down to the ground. Put him in the burlap sack, tie the sack with colorful robe and hurry to me taking a rest neither in the daytime nor during the night. But remember: speak a word, and the dead man will fly back to the cemetery again4."
That's the instructions my client has received from Nagarjuna.
"Who's Nagarjuna?" I asked.
"A kind of competing business", the prior explained enigmatically. He was as fat as a Christmas goose, and as ruddy as a girl, but three absent fingers on his right hand ambiguously affect his image of a good-natured monk.
"Why me?"
This question got him thinking for quite a long time but vetalas can wait. Vetala. This is the name that people give to the creatures like me - another one stupid human word which cannot describe the situation of someone who was unable to obtain a rebirth. The priest who had flatly refused to absolve me before the execution, promised the sinner Hell, but the place where I've found myself looked more like a Chinese circus. Screaming sounds of the hidden orchestra, the colorful whirlpool of flying skirts, the operatic monsters in the blue toothy masks made of paper-mache and as sticky as soot, greasy blacking gloom outside of the brightly lit circle. I don't know how much time I've spent among stillborn babies, confused suicides and paleface ghosts of European settlers who did not survive the first winter in a foreign land until dwarf Bes put his eye on me. They say, he eats stones like a crocodile, sleeps alternately by one half of his brain after another like a dolphin and copulates with the dead like а Rhinella proboscidea frog. All of this is naturally there, in the word of the living, but here he seemingly doesn't differ from the others - a clouded with hallucinations principle of consciousness, but the principle of consciousness that's got it all figured out. "Our reality is walled by three conclusions, - he briefly explained me the current situation. - "There is cause and effect", this is how the first of them sounds, and what's inside of it the people call life. The second wall surrounds the world when only cause exists but effect is illusory. This is the world of death or whatever's being held by it. "There is neither cause nor effect" - this is the conclusion #3, the third wall, and, notwithstanding the imaginary material it is made of, neither the living nor the dead can get over it."
"Too much knowledge makes a man bald and dead," the prior finally replied with a grid. Very funny. The Buddhists have a specific sense of humor in general. They laugh at death and predict future reincarnations by means of the balls which are contained in remains of the cremated bodies. One of such balls I held in my mouth, another one (one of 108, to be precise), strung on the blackened of time cow's vein, the prior was turning between his thumb and forefinger for a long while before answering my question. I could make him talk but what is a talk but the way of misleading both the listening and the talking? Having aligned yourself with a bunch of Buddhists, you start talking in a paradoxical manner against your will.
To put it briefly, the prior wanted me to do something in return for my freedom. All of this seemed a little silly, but the prospect to spend eternity at the bottom of an anonymous grave would seem even more silly, wouldn't it?
So, I repeat: the client wasn't easy. This is not rather simple - to kill an associater even if he pretends to a shrimpy youth. A couple of heavily armed apotrepeins who accompanied him made my campaign even more complicated. Whatever, I had plenty of time. I have already escaped them several times (the pearl of eloquence can loosen anybody's tongue), but the stubborn fellow again and again came back in the cemetery and took a swing with his axe at the innocent tree. Siting in the dark of the burlap sack, I was just telling a lovely story about Ananda the Carpenter, when suddenly felt... I didn't have time to feel: the reality shuddered, and the wave of hot air rolled over me. My carrier screamed and dropped the sack on the ground, having hit my head on a rock.
When I've came to myself, it was quiet. The awkward human fingers cannot undo an easiest knot so I had to use my teeth to get out of the sack. All three were dead or, to be precise, empty. One of the apotrepeins seemed to pull his gun, but if he even had happened to shoot what a harm the pathetic pieces of lead could have caused the mental ghost, who passed here a minute ago. It definitely was him: the trail, which led across the road, seemed as it were a wildfire: a black, charred strip.
A mental ghost is a mysterious essence. "This is neither a creature not a feature but kind of a feature and a creature5," the Stoics wrought. A few of us saw him but those who did are hardly to say something about him. I heard, they guard the sources. Correction, the Sources. The sources of what? Power? Wealth? Eternal life? I had no idea. They say as well, that the associaters come down in this world for searching the sources, and if they find them...
"Wait," I said to myself, "something's wrong in a here". What's a hard thing to think hard! Over there, behind the second wall, all you have to do is focus your attention on the phenomenon you are interested in, and you know all about it, inside and out, but here you must seek the assistance of a more primitive tool. The human mind looks like a knife - dull on one side and sharp on the another, but the dyer's mind was dull on the both. Let's try to have it to some good use in any way. Having sat down on a stone not far from my satellites who were still smoking, I started thinking.
So, I have met the mental ghost twice during one moon but still somehow walk on my legs. Why did somebody need a dead dyer? And what, as the matter of fact, have I do? The questions without answers, as similar to each other as the sculls put in line on the edge of the plague cattle grave. The useless freedom that makes no sense. What about to return on the top of the mango tree to think things through properly?
I looked around. Living stars over my head, the dead and dry anthill by the road, the road going downhill. Stand up and walk, obeying the pressure of gravity, until you reach the foot of the hill, and further, through the forest as impenetrable as a constipation, and the river as warm and fetid as a broken through sewerage. "No way," said I suddenly, surprised at myself, "you'd better start at the beginning."
The moon light came through ruined dome of the crypt, but all I could see was my nose in front of my eyes because the dyer turned out to be a little near-sighted. A slight draft touched blue hairs on my head and shreds of the black mold hanging off the cell. From time to time the heavy and as round as stones sounds came from the dark depth of dendritic and intersecting corridors. The darkness in one of them smelled like rot of decay and I turned into it. Why not? After all, any cause and effect are just two sides of one medal, the medal which is being tossed by... I didn't get to finish my thought, having stepped with crunch on a decayed skeleton of a creature who had found here its final rest. Аt the end of the corridor there was the door and the new bright key sticking out in the rusty keyhole.
The greenish light of the luminous mushrooms which grew on walls was barely enough to see a big arched chamber with the stone made parallelepiped right in the center, a big enough to put an average height man on. As it happened, there was a man too.
"I knew you would come," the prior said, taking a step out of the darkness. "It's amazing, how an anthropomorphic form surprisingly affects the curiosity!"
His eyes sarcastically glittered from the deep of his hood.
"Do you recognize this place?" he asked.
I shook my head, but among the foggy blackout that fills the cranium of creatures like me, there really were two or three black and white fragments of memories from my past life.
The knife.
The cold hands of the executioner.
The follow-up curses.
"They have slit your throat here but found you an enduring beast," said the prior, pulling back his hood. "Some of us have been still wondering how you managed to tear up your ropes, open the door and get into the corridor to dye."
"Why?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing special. You've killed a half of the local community and set fire to the monastery, that's all."
Feelings? Memories? Nothing. Only emptiness in the heart and the blacking gloom.
"You promised to let me go," - said I.
"Not so fast, my friend," the prior chuckled. "Perhaps, your skills might come in handy. How about this: kill Nagarjuna and may be then..."
"I don't think so," suddenly I heard a voice behind his back and a man, having appeared right from the air, slapped on the monk's bald head. The principle of consciousness can skip to any point of space as easy as a man bents his elbow. I didn't know that it was possible in the word of the living.
Quietly, like a towel slipped from the chair back, the prior fell on the floor.
"Dead?" I thought.
"No," the stranger smiled. He turned out to be similar to the prior as two beads in the Buddhist rosary. Only his maroon robe and ten fingers on both hands let tell the difference of the original from its copy. "I would say, he has reached his soteriological goal and now would sleep the sleep of the dead until, as western people say, an angel of the Lord shall trump the end of the word. I am Nagarjuna," the man called himself, "his twin brother."
He took off hi cloak, put it under the sleeper's head and, having said a short prayer over him, turned to me.
"Well, ask you question." - he said as if he read my mind.
"Why me?"
Instead of answering, Nagarjuna put his hand on my forehead, and I flinched at the insufferable warmth of human flash. I was horrified hearing my dead heart started beating. I felt buzzing of my tired feet that were no need to hurry any more. I remembered the things I thought I'd never remember.
A man's life is a knot tiered on a robe, the one among the many ones. Undoing them one by one, some of them - easily, most of them - broking nails, I moved to the past, following the bloody trail of the one who had passed here before me. Doomed to existence just because it exists, I killed, died and been born again to kill - somebody in passing, someone for fun, someone else for the good: gassed the Jews, eradicated the counter-revolution, beheaded the rebellious archers, slaughtered the Huguenots, burned witches, christened the Russians by fire and sword and the Flemish by hammer and pincers, dog hunted runaway slaves in the ancient Egypt and sacrificed humans in the sanctuary of Enlil, - killed, kept killing, multiplying an infinite number of the dead until it merged with impenetrable blackness of the long past plusquamperfectum, where one man for the first time had picked up a stone to kill another man.
"From there the source begins," Nagarjuna said, having interrupted my journey into the past. "And this source is you."
I had nothing to say, but he, having abolished any words by a gesture of his hand just in case, pulled the gun from inside of his clothes and held it to my head.
"Did my brother promise you freedom?" the good man smiled, rising the hammer. "You are free."
***
"May I be led by the Bhagavan Vairochana," I prayed. "May the Divine Mother of Infinite Space be my rearguard. May I be led safely across the fearful ambush of the Bardo."
It's just a routine - to pray before crossing the border. Although it just seems, those who guard it are real enough, and for getting over the third wall, I must kill them all.
Notes:
1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Bardo Thadol.
2. The mental state between death and rebirth in the Buddhism of Mahayana.
3. "The games of vetala with man."
4. "The games of vetala with man."
5. The stoics considered the thinking as the activity that forms ghosts: "a subject of the thinking is a mental ghost; this is neither a creature not a feature but kind of a feature and a creature."