Thirty-Three Teeth

Blind Panic

The creature that Seua had become sat on the riverbank watching the moon rise. He scratched at the blood-caked fur that covered him in patches and dipped his face into the muddy water to quench his thirst.

It would soon be over for another month. The nurse would be the last. With the moon at its zenith, he would make his fourth sacrifice on the steps of the Black Stupa. He would dedicate it to Nyut Vaj. It couldn’t be long, with all this love he showed, all this dedication, before his God would accept him into the eternal Kingdom. Then he would be at peace and cease to walk the earth in animal form.

He looked up again. It was time. Bent almost double, he prowled to the spot where the roots of the sadness tree tangled down the bank. He parted the thick reeds and crawled deep between the roots and into the earth.

Siri was in such a state when he arrived at the old pl headquarters compound that he almost drove into a pole out front. He skidded to avoid it and only righted himself at the last second. He killed the engine and ran to the gate. It was chained shut, and even with all the extra adrenaline pumping through his veins, too high to climb over.

He reached inside and felt around the chain for a padlock. There was none. The chain had been draped around the bars and tied like a rope. He wrestled it loose, opened the gate wide enough to get inside, and barged through. His heart was already beating fast when he started to run down the side of the main building and around to the back.

There he found himself on a grid of large rectangular concrete slabs. The moon was high and bright, and it didn’t take him long to find the secret entrance to the tunnel. He didn’t even need to use a tool to raise it; someone had been there before him and left the slab lying beside a gaping hole in the ground.

He hurried to it and looked down into a pit. A ladder of steep wooden steps led down into inky blackness. He had no hesitation: He lowered himself into the hole and, with his feet, felt his way down the rungs. The thought of sinking down into the earth reminded him of his being dragged below the stupa by the Phibob and without thinking, he stopped, undid the top buttons of his shirt, and re-hung the white talisman so that it was on the outside.

When the top of his snowy head was at the level of the ground, he reached into his shoulder bag for the flashlight. It was always there, so he hadn’t bothered to check before he left home. He never took it out, except on days when he got his teeth counted. His heart dropped. He’d forgotten to return the damned thing. It was missing.

It was a terrible moment. He was about to go down into the earth to find Dtui. He instinctively knew that every second could be vital, but he had no light. What help would he be if that thing were down there? At least the beam of a flashlight might have made it wary of him. How could he help if he couldn’t see? Suddenly a difficult project had entered the realm of the impossible. But there was no time and no choice.

After two more steps, his feet landed on packed earth and he glanced upward at the moon one more time before turning away from the ladder. It was hopeless. Only a yard from where he stood, there was nothing to be made out with the naked eye. There were no shadows or shapes. The channel of moonlight ended at a wall of black.

Again he fumbled in the bag, this time to retrieve the motorcycle tire iron he’d brought to lift up the concrete. It was a small weapon that could have little effect against the power he’d seen evidenced on his morgue slab. But it was something to hold on to, like a stick to a blind person: a cattle prod between himself and the unseen.

He walked forward. The walls curved over and above him to become a ceiling just above his head. A man of average height would have had to stoop through this narrow passage, but Siri could stand to his full height. He dragged his left hand along one wall and could tap the opposite wall with the iron: such was the width.

After ten slow, cautious paces, the tunnel curved to the left and any evidence of light from the outside was erased. Behind him now lay the same tarry blackness as ahead. He was blind. It was at this point that an anxiety of sorts began to infect him. It arose from his foolishness in abandoning logic and safety. He could make neither head nor tail of what he was doing. In the jungle, he wouldn’t have survived if he had showed such flagrant disregard for common sense.

He walked on. His dragging hand picked up a load of passengers that bit him and crawled up into his sleeve: probably red ants defending a nest. He slapped them off quietly against his side but didn’t slow his pace. The air was becoming staler. The dry earth and musty root smells mixed with other less natural, less healthy scents. He had no doubt that something had died down there in those tunnels, and he hoped beyond hope it was an animal.

On he went, slowly, nervously.

The tip of the iron struck only air. Siri stopped and felt the far wall with his hand. A second tunnel. It cut to the right. How far had he already veered left? Which route would take him in the direction of the river? He waited for a sign. Surely with all the bodies he’d put in the ground, one grateful spirit could come along and prod him in the right direction. But there was just him, and the blackness, and silence. Nothing more.

He went right, increasing his pace as his instincts warned him about time. He knew he had to get to the river. He was no longer careful about what his hand might touch or what might lie under his feet. He visualized a long, well-lit passage and marched along it, barely tapping with his iron.

When it hit him, it was so sudden and overwhelming that he panicked. It had quickly wrapped itself around him, covered his face. He flailed around, hit out with the iron bar, and fell back against the wall, kicking into space.

He clawed at the cold, thick accumulation around his mouth and neck and cleared space enough for an unrestricted breath. Still he swung his iron back and forth like a child in an imaginary sword fight, but he hit nothing, heard nothing, and soon understood that he was expending all his energy against himself.

He held up a hand and stepped forward. He had come to a thick barrier of spiderwebs that blocked the tunnel ahead.

If this was a test, it was a failed one. He waited for his breath and his heartbeat to cease their rantings, and de-webbed himself. He wondered whether he’d made too much noise fighting off his fictitious attacker-whether he’d been heard. He couldn’t be sure.

He quickly retraced his path to the main tunnel, turned right and proceeded somewhat more cautiously into it. Time hadn’t allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, so he knew there was absolutely no light filtering into the tunnels. He had completely lost his sense of direction. In a straight line, a brisk walk from the compound to the river would take no more than five minutes. To an old man in a pitch-black tunnel, a minute can stretch to a significant portion of the remainder of your life. The tunnel seemed endless.

Suddenly, the ground wasn’t there anymore. Siri stepped into empty space, and only his guiding left hand against the wall prevented him falling arse over apex. He pulled himself back, got to his knees and reached down into the void with his iron. It was no bottomless chasm, just a deep step. The metal clunked against something solid but not heavy, then once more. The smells around him were overly familiar, but he had no choice but to step down into whatever was there.

He waded ankle-deep through a well of what he was sure were bones. They crunched beneath his feet, so they were small and not all fresh. Yet with every step he dreaded treading on a larger corpse. Because of this threat, he trod respectfully, with his breath held.

When he finally arrived at something solid, it proved to be no more than the step on the far side. He remembered the geography of the Viet Cong cave networks and wondered whether this was a pivot room. If it were, there would be tunnels leading off in each direction. Matters would become even more confusing if he had too many alternatives, so he didn’t bother to find out. He continued going straight. He climbed the far step and set off again into the tunnel. But things soon went horribly wrong.

Late the previous year, after rescuing his neighbors from their ruined house, Siri had been hospitalized until the masonry dust could be cleared from his lungs. Although the dust was eventually flushed out, the air didn’t ever return with the same enthusiasm. Consequently, the doctor started to find himself short of breath at the worst possible times. But none of those times had been as inopportune as now.

The further he moved from the only obvious source of oxygen, the deeper he had to trawl for air. He knew he had to concentrate on his breathing. The attack of the spiderweb had taken a lot out of him and he was now in danger of blacking out. If he lost consciousness, this whole horrible ordeal would have been a waste of time.

He stopped, lay down on the ground where the richer air would still be, and gently meditated himself into a more relaxed state. He ignored the slithering and crawling around his head, and concentrated on replenishing his energy.

This was when he began to hear, or believed he could hear, sounds. They were muffled, far off, and could, for all he knew, have been coming from above the tunnels rather than within them. But this was late at night in Vientiane. There wouldn’t be much activity in the streets. He listened intently.

At first he didn’t recognize it. The noise was sporadic and muted like a bee in a tin can. He wasn’t able to identify it as either natural or man-made. But the longer he listened, the more obvious it became to him that the sound was getting louder. If it was in the tunnels, it could mean only one thing. It was coming toward him.

He told himself not to panic, reminded himself he had the element of surprise. But surprise on whom or on what? Some surprise it would be, with him flat out in the middle of a narrow passage. And what if there were no connection between this noisemaker and Dtui’s disappearance? Was he really considering laying into some stranger with an iron bar just because he was scared out of his wits?

Yes.

“Don’t panic,” he told himself. He breathed. He lay still. He thought calm thoughts, and the sounds got louder-not a buzz now, but a growl. Now and again the growl would rise to a howl, a human-animal high-pitched roar, and it came to him:

This was the sound from his dream in Luang Prabang. This was the unseen danger that approached through the jungle, the sound that he was to listen for in the future, to avoid, to flee with every iota of strength he possessed. He shuddered, and his nerve endings tingled the length of his body.

Still he focused. Still he breathed. No sort of attack or defense would be possible if he were unconscious. He devised a plan. When he had enough breath to carry it through, he would return to the room through which he’d just passed. There were corners there, perhaps other tunnels. These could give him a chance.

Because of the natural deadening effect of the earthen walls, it wasn’t possible to tell just how far off the creature was. But from the steady increase in volume, it was evident that it was traveling at a rapid pace.

Siri breathed. He concentrated. He heard other sounds. He heard footsteps, heavy shuffling steps, and, between the howls and grunts, a heavy wheezing breath like that of an old man with a hole in his windpipe. He heard a low steady dragging sound and a sniff. The tunnel was now carrying noise with a frightening clarity.

It was time. Siri got to his feet and walked slowly back toward the last room. Since he’d entered the tunnel, he’d counted the distances in paces. It was forty back to the deep well. At thirty-eight, he’d stop and proceed carefully until he found the drop. But as he walked, the sounds grew even louder behind him. He was tempted to run, but he knew the limitations of his lungs.

Then, one new sound made him stop completely. It was brief but unmistakable: it was the sob of a woman. He listened for a repeat of it, but heard nothing but the snarls and ever-loud howling. Could it have been …?

He reached the end of his count and began to tread carefully, bent over using his iron as a walking stick. The step was further than he’d calculated: annoyingly further. By the time he finally reached it, his breathing was strained again, but there was no chance to rest. He stepped carelessly down into the pit and crunched some of the debris under his foot.

The sounds behind him immediately stopped, and he froze in position. There was the standoff: Siri fighting for breath, half up, half down, not daring to make another sound. And there was the dilemma: was the creature also frozen, listening for other sounds, or was it already running silently in his direction? If the latter were true, it could be on him at any second.

He looked back over his shoulder, fearing the worst.

“Breathe, Siri.”

The view there should have been the same black tar he’d stared into since he arrived. He shouldn’t have been able to see a thing, but for some reason, deep, deep at the end of his tunnel, there was a gray speck. It hadn’t been there when he’d walked in that direction a while earlier.

It hadn’t occurred to him for a second that the creature might need artificial light. Something had always made him believe it could find its way through the maze in darkness, using its instincts. But if it were part human, part Mr. Seua, perhaps it needed to use a lamp to see its way. Perhaps the distant grayness was the reflection from that light source. And perhaps that could be his one chance.

There came an almighty howl that echoed along the walls and passed Siri in a gust. The creature was on the move again, and Siri could indeed see that the gray shadow shimmered in time with the footsteps. He sighed with temporary relief.

Once again he waded through the matter in the pit, skating his shoes so as not to make undue sound. He skirted the perimeter of the room on one side, tapping the wall with his iron. He passed two corners. He found no other exit. He arrived at the opposite tunnel with time running out and inspected the other side of the room with new urgency. His premise was mistaken. The room had one entrance and one exit and no alternatives. His only hope was the pit.

Light, like a very distant sunrise, was beginning to filter down the tunnel. With a lamp, Seua would see him soon enough if he stayed in the room. But the creature might not think to look down below the lip of the step. Siri carefully cleared a space by the aperture through which the creature would arrive. He was a little off to the right, so he wouldn’t be trodden on when it stepped down. He would have very little time to act.

There were two possibilities. If the creature’s destination lay beyond this room, he would stay hidden and let it go. If its goal were the room itself, he wouldn’t know until it had stepped down to where he was. He would eventually be discovered. But there might just be a few seconds in which to attack the creature, to spring at it from behind and hit it with the iron bar.

He knew he wouldn’t be allowed more than one thwack, so he would have to be deadly accurate. It would need every last gram of Siri’s strength. So he lay down against the step, practiced his meditation, and slowed his heartbeat to gather his resources for that one attack. And as more light filtered into the room, he could make out the carcasses of small creatures in varying stages of decay a foot deep all around him.

“Breathe, Siri.”

Events that until that moment had been happening so fast, suddenly slowed as if time were stalling. The tunnel must have been longer than Siri had anticipated. The approaching sounds continued but the doctor felt as if he’d been lying there for an age. He had the opportunity to think about Yeh Ming and wondered why the old sage had failed to send warnings of this danger.

If ever his temple-he, Siri-were under threat, it was now. A terrible feeling of guilt came over Siri. Despite all the careful planning that had gone into his choice as host to the grand old shaman, he’d let him down. He’d knowingly put himself into a life-threatening sit-

Suddenly the creature was there. The beam of a flashlight dazzled directly into the room from just behind the step. From where he lay squashed tight against the dirt wall, Siri couldn’t see who was holding it, but the sound of snarling was almost directly above him. Only a wedge of black shadow kept the doctor from sight.

His heart beat so loudly, he felt sure it could be heard. He breathed silently to a rhythm he’d set himself and gripped the iron bar tightly in his fist.

What happened next wouldn’t be fully explained for a very long time. There were two halves to the mystery-one to baffle his hearing, one his sight-that wouldn’t ever completely fit together. The sounds came first.

They began with footsteps shifting away from the step and the continued sound of dragging. There was one final howl. Then, from a point way beyond, came three incongruous sounds one after the other. First was the clucking of a chicken. Unlike all the other sounds, it didn’t resonate around the room.

There followed two heavy thumps and a loud crack.

Finally came the scream of a woman.

Then there was silence.

When he heard the scream, Siri abandoned all caution and clambered noisily to his hands and knees. But before he could hoist himself into a position to see over the step, the light from the flashlight went out.

It was a darkness more profound and a silence more total than he’d ever encountered in his life, because it followed directly on the heels of chaos. He had no idea what he’d just heard or what to expect. He couldn’t get the eerie scream from his mind.

“Dtui?” he shouted.

His voice exploded in the new silence like thunder.

“Dtui? Is that you? … It’s Siri.”

There was no reply.

If the creature were there in that blackness, Siri was now exposed. But there was no calling back his voice. There was no turning around. Something awful had just happened, and he needed to know what it was.

He climbed the step and shuffled forward, expecting his feet to find evidence of some horrific scene. His left foot kicked against something that rolled away. He knew it had to be the flashlight. He took a step forward and fumbled around in front of him on the packed earth. But his hand came to rest in something warm and wet and sticky like molasses.

He pulled away and took as deep a breath as he could. He knew what he’d found. But this was no time to become squeamish. He continued to sweep his palms back and forth until he made contact with the flashlight. He grabbed it, located the switch and, with his heart in his mouth, clicked it on.

Nothing happened.

“Please, Buddha, don’t say the bulb’s gone.”

He tapped the flashlight and shook it and tried the switch again.

Still nothing.

From a little way ahead of him, no more than a yard, there came a breath. He rattled the battery frantically, shook the flashlight again, smacked it harder against his palm.

Another breath came from the dark.

He took one breath of his own, concentrated, screwed the head of the flashlight tight, and tried the switch one more time.

The tunnel lit up like a theater and, looking around him upon its stage, he saw the most impossible, the most extraordinary scene.