A Stark And Wormy Knight by Tad Williams

that she’d changed in ways that no illness could explain. But when I got in to see the child she was asleep, and although she looked surprisingly healthy compared to my general experience with possession cases, I couldn’t get any kind of feeling from her one way or another. When I tried to contact the family a few days later they’d moved and no one could find them.
    “There were others, too – too many to be coincidence, most of them unknown to the general public. The greatest hindrance in these situations is the gutter press, of course — any real study, let alone any chance to help the victims and their families, is destroyed by the sort of circus they create. These days, with television and the internet, it’s even worse. If I don’t strenuously keep my comings and goings a secret, I wind up with cameras in my face and following me everywhere and looking over my shoulder.”
    “They are vermin,” said Edward Arvedson with feeling.
    “In any case, when I talked to you I had just learned of an accident victim in Minnesota who had recovered from a coma and, like the girl in Southern California, seemed to have undergone a complete personality shift. He had been a mild and soft-spoken churchgoer, but now he was a violent, alcoholic bully. His wife of twenty-four years had divorced him, his children no longer saw him. The front yard of his house in Bloomington was a wreck, and when he opened the door the stink of rot and filth just rolled out. I only saw him for a few seconds through the chain on his front door, but what I witnessed was definitely madness, a sort of…emotionless focus that I’ve only seen in the criminally insane. That doesn’t prove anything, of course. Brain damage can do that, and he’d certainly been badly injured. But he recognized me.”
    “You told me when you called,” said Davidson. “I could tell it upset you.”
    “Because it wasn’t like he’d seen my picture in The Enquirer, but like he knew me. Knew me and hated me. I didn’t stay there long, but it wasn’t just seeing the Minnesota victim that threw me. I’d never heard of possessions happening at this rate, or to people so close to death. It didn’t make sense!”
    “It has my attention, too,” Edward said. “But what I want to hear now is what happened with your Buddhist gentleman.”
    Nightingale let out a breath. He swallowed the last of his sherry. “Right. Well, Geshe was a very interesting man, an artist and a teacher. I wish I could have met him at a different time, but even in our short acquaintance he impressed me and I liked him. That’s why what happened was so disturbing.
    “He had checked out of the hospital to die at home. He’d lost his wife a few years earlier and they’d had no children, so although some of his students and colleagues came by to sit with him from time to time, at the end there was only his friend Joseph, an American Buddhist, and the hospice nurse who checked in on him once a day. And me, of course. Geshe and I didn’t speak much – he had to work too hard to manage the pain – but as I said, he impressed me. During the long days in his apartment I spent a great deal of time looking at his books and other possessions, which is as good a way to get to know someone as talking with them. Also, I saw many of his own works of art, which may be an even better way to learn about another human being – he made beautiful Buddhist Thangkas, meditation paintings.
    “As Geshe began to slip away Joseph read the Bardo Thodol to him. I’ve never spent much time studying it, myself – I think that hippie-ish, “Tibetan Book of the Dead” reputation put me off when I was younger, and these days I don’t really need to know the nuts and bolts of any particular religious dogma to work with the universal truths behind them all – but I have to say that hearing it and living with it, even as Geshe was dying with it, opened my eyes.”
    “There is great truth at the heart of all the great