“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?”
“I certainly do.”
“That was one of them, hitchhiking a ride in a living body. Nearly ripped my head off before I got away. I still have the scars…”
The night-time city waited now between waves of the storm. For a moment it was quiet enough in the room for Nightingale to hear the fan of his godfather’s ventilator.
“In any case, that smoky yellow light terrified me. The bardo says it’s temptation itself, that light, but maybe it didn’t tempt me because I wasn’t dying — instead it just made me feel frightened and sick, if you can be sick without a body. I could barely sense Geshe but I knew he was there and experiencing something very different. Instead of continuing toward the brilliant white light of compassion, as the bardo instructed, this very compassionate man seemed to hesitate. The yellow light was spreading around us like something toxic diffusing through water. Geshe seemed confused, stuck, as though he fought against a call much stronger than anything I could sense. I could feel something else, too, something alien to both of us, cold and strong and…yes, and hungry. God, I’ve never sensed hunger like that, a bottomless need like the empty chill of space sucking away all living warmth…”
Nightingale sat quietly for a long moment before he spoke again. “But then, just when I was fighting hardest to hang onto my connection to Geshe, it dissolved and he was gone. I’d lost touch with him. The yellow light was all around me, strange and greasy…repulsive, but also overwhelming…
“I fell out. No, it was more like I was shoved. I tumbled back into the real world, back into my body. I couldn’t feel Geshe any more. Joseph had stopped reading the Chakkhai Bardo and was staring in alarm. Geshe’s body, which hadn’t moved or showed any signs of life in some time, was suddenly in full-on Cheyne-Stokes respiration, chest hitching, body jerking — he almost looked like he was convulsing. But Joseph swore to me later on that Geshe had stopped breathing half an hour earlier and I believe him.
“A moment later Geshe’s eyes popped open. I’ve seen stranger things, but it still startled me. He had been dead, Uncle Edward, really dead, I swear he had. Now he was looking at me — but it wasn’t Geshe any more. I couldn’t prove it of course, but I had touched this man’s soul, traveled with him as he passed over, the most intimate thing imaginable, and this just wasn’t him.
“ No, I will not die yet,” he said. The voice sounded like his, but strong, far too strong for someone who had been in periodic breathing only a minute earlier. “There are still things for me to do on this earth.” It was the eyes, though. That same cold, flat stare that I’d seen through the doorway in Minnesota, the one I’ve seen before in other possession cases, but there was none of the struggle I’d seen in classic possession, no sense of the soul and body fighting against an interloper. One moment it was Geshe, a spiritual man, an artist, the next moment it was…someone else. Someone as cold and detached as a textbook sociopath.
“He closed his eyes then and slept, or pretended to, but already he looked healthier than he had since I met him. I couldn’t tell Joseph that I thought his friend was possessed — what a horrible thing to say to someone already dealing with several kinds of trauma! — and I didn’t know what else to do, what to think. I sat there for most of an hour, unable to think of anything to do. At last, when the nurse came and began dealing with this incredible turn of medical events, I went out to get a drink. All right, I had a few, then went home and slept like a dead man myself.
“I should never have left them, Edward. When I went back the next day, the apartment was empty. A few weeks later I received an email from Joseph — or at least from Joseph’s address — saying that after his miraculous recovery Geshe wanted to travel to Tibet, the place of his heritage. I’ve never heard from either of them since…”
The lightning, absent for almost a quarter of an hour, suddenly flared, turning the room into a flat tableau of black and white shapes; the thunder that followed seemed to rock the entire building. The light on Edward Arvedson’s desk flickered once, then went out, as did the lights on his ventilator. Through the windows Nightingale could see the houses across the street had gone black as well. He jumped up, suddenly cold all over. His father’s oldest friend and his own most trusted advisor was about to die of asphyxiation while he watched helplessly.
“Good God, Edward, the electricity…!”
“Don’t…worry…” Arvedson wheezed. “I have a…standby…generator.”
A moment later Nightingale felt rather than heard something begin to rumble somewhere in the house below and the desk light flickered back on, although the houses across the street remained dark. “There,” said his godfather. “You see, young Natan? Not such an old-fashioned fool after all, eh? I am prepared for things like this. Power for the street will be back on soon — it happens a lot in this ancient neighborhood. Now, tell me what you think is happening.”
Nightingale sat back, trying to regain his train of thought. If only the old man wasn’t so stubborn about living on his own with only Jenkins — no spring lamb himself — for company.
“Right,” he said at last. “Well, I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing as me, Uncle Edward. Somehow these predatory souls or spirits have found a way to possess the bodies of the dying. Which would be bad enough, but it’s the incredible frequency with which it seems to be happening. I can’t possibly investigate them all, of course, but if even half the reports that reach me are real it’s happening all over the world, several times a day.”
The rain was back now, lashing the windows and tattooing the roof of Edward’s Victorian house. When the old man spoke, there was an unfamiliar tone in his voice. “You are…frightened, my dear Natan.”
“Yes, Uncle Edward, I am. I’ve never been this frightened, and I’ve seen a lot. It’s as if something fundamental has broken down, some wall between us and the other side, and now the living are under attack. What did the cab driver say to me on the way over, babbling about the weather — ‘the storm door is open’…? And I’m afraid the storms are just going to keep coming thicker and faster until all our houses arre blown down.”
“But why? And why now?”
“Why? Because they’ve always been there — the hungry ones, the envious things that hate us because we can still breathe and sing and love. Do they want that back, or do they just want to keep us from having it? I don’t know. And why now? I don’t know that either. Perhaps some universal safeguard has stopped working, or these entities have learned something they didn’t know before.”