A Stark And Wormy Knight by Tad Williams Page B

the first light, which the bardos call the soft light of the gods and which they counsel the dead soul to avoid. It was very attractive, like a warm fire to someone lost in the night, and I was feeling very cold, very far from comfort and familiar things – and remember, I had a body to go back to! I can only imagine what it seemed like to Geshe, who was on a one-way journey, but he resisted it. The same with what the bardo calls the “soft light of the hell-beings.” I could feel him yearning toward it, and even to me it seemed soothing, alluring. In the oldest Tibetan tradition the hot hells are full of terrors – forest of razor-leaved trees, swamps bobbing with decomposing corpses – but these aspects are never seen until it’s too late, until the attractions of one’s own greed and anger have pulled the dying soul off the path.
    “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