Death Trance Read Free

more than paper and wood and gilded paint, it exuded extraordinary evil. It looked as if it were ready to snap into sudden life and devour them both.
    Michael said, 'If Barong Keket does not protect me, the spirit of my father will.’
    The pedanda took the embroidered cloth and covered the mask again, although he left it where it was, resting between them.
    'You are ready,’ he said dryly. 'We shall close our eyes and meditate, and then we shall begin.’
    The pedanda sat opposite Michael and bowed his head. The fragrant incense billowed between them, sometimes obscuring the priest altogether so that Michael could not be certain that he was still there. The incense evoked in Michael's consciousness the singing at funerals, the trance dances, and all the secret rituals the pedanda had taught him since he was twelve years old. There was another aroma in the incense, however: bitter and pungent, like burning coriander leaves.
    'You must think of the dead,’ the pedanda told him. 'You must think of the spirits who walk through the city.
    You must think of the presence of all those who have gone before you: the temple priests who once tended this courtyard, the merchants who cried in the streets outside, the rajas and the perbekels, the children and the proud young women. They are still with us, and now, when you wish to, you may see them. The crowds of the dead!’
    Michael looked around. He was in the first stages of trance, breathing evenly as if he were cautiously entering a clear, cold pool of water. There, lining the walls of the inner courtyard, stood carved stone shrines to the deities of life and death, a shrine to Gunung Alung, the volcano, and another to the spirits of Mount Batur. It was in these shrines that the gods were supposed to sit when they visited the Pura Dalem. Michael had occasionally wondered if the gods ever came here anymore - 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