Beautiful Ghosts (5 page)

The Tibetans followed Liya’s gaze, then looked back at Shan, wide-eyed, as if he had performed some sort of sorcery. One by one, they left the big herder’s side, several joining Gendun in a mantra. The scar-faced man sighed. “Lha gyal lo,” he offered in a tone of resignation, but kicked Shan’s hat as he walked away.

The chanting started again. The celebration began anew. As he retrieved his hat Shan heard snatches of prayers, then watched several of the Tibetans embrace each other. Several stepped forward and shook his hand, one gave him a small prayer scarf. Some of the children brought jars from the courtyard and began tossing flour into the air, laughing again. The sounds of joy grew louder, more heartfelt, than before, as if by eliminating both the soldiers and the spectre of a murderer in the hills Shan had confirmed that it was indeed a day of miracles. Gendun, who stayed on the fallen lintel, smiled. They would still have their festival, Gendun would still address the people of the hills. Lokesh began teaching some of the herders another pilgrim’s song.

As Shan began helping Liya distribute flour she cocked her head toward the courtyard. “Listen—”

“There’s nothing—” he began, then remembered the throat chant, which was supposed to continue without stopping until Gendun’s teaching.

As Shan turned in the direction of the central courtyard, a scream pierced the stillness. He ran.

The terrified, quivering howl kept repeating itself, the scream of an hysterical child. He was still in the foregate when Dawa emerged from the courtyard. The front of her shirt was soaked in blood. As she frantically waved her hands over her head, still screaming, Shan saw that her palms, too, were stained crimson, fresh blood trickling down her forearms.

The girl was inconsolable. Jara approached, reaching out for her, but the girl seemed not to notice, instead darting away, grabbing the nearest pot of flour, which she flung into the gorge, then another and another, the flour drifting out of the pots in long white plumes as they sank. She seemed to mindlessly reach for anything that lay on the ground and then pitch it into the chasm. Not mindlessly, Shan realized after a moment. The girl was destroying anything that hinted of Buddhism, any sign of the clandestine celebration. The photo of the Dalai Lama. The graceful bronze hand. Suddenly her hands were on Shan’s hermitage bag with the mani mantra. Too late Shan ran forward. The bag, with his supplies for the next month and his precious heirloom prayer sticks, tumbled over the edge, into the deep ravine.

There were more sounds now, frantic shouts as people began fleeing up the slope. Shan darted into the central courtyard. Lokesh stood by the chorten, staring in horror toward the stone where the throat chanters sat. Surya, whom they had not seen for an hour, sat clad only in the rough grey muslin garment worn under his robe. His robe lay on his lap, or what was left of it. With a glazed expression he was ripping the maroon cloth into shreds and feeding it to the fire in the brazier. Lokesh stepped forward, one hand raised as if to prevent Surya’s hand from reaching for the fire again. But Surya pushed him away. Lokesh resisted for a moment then froze, staring at the wet stain left from Surya’s touch. It was blood.

“I am a monk no more,” Surya moaned as the flames consumed the last of his robe. “I have killed a man,” he said in a wrenching, hollow voice. “No more a monk. No more a human.”

C
HAPTER
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Dawa ran into the courtyard, still screaming, beating her fists against her uncle’s chest as Jara caught up and wrapped his arms around the girl. Lokesh reached into the flames, futilely trying to retrieve the burning cloth, then looked up at Shan with a desolate gaze. Someone else had died. The hill people were fleeing in terror and Surya was abandoning his vows. They were falling down the well, eyes open.

Lokesh pulled something from his belt and urgently pressed it into Surya’s hand. It was his mala, his rosary. Surya stared numbly at the ashes of his robe as Lokesh lifted the monk’s fingers and entwined them around the beads.
“Om mani padme hum,”
Lokesh intoned in a plaintive, whispering voice, as if he had to remind Surya how to invoke the deity of compassion. The old monk’s eyes, empty as glass, drifted toward Lokesh, then dropped to gaze absently at the beads in his fingers. He opened his hand, letting the mala fall to the earth. Lokesh grabbed the beads and began a new mantra, an urgent invocation of Tara, protectress of the faithful.

No more flour flew in the air. No more cries of celebration were flung toward the sky. The few hill people remaining in the courtyard with Surya had retreated to the walls, staring at him in fearful confusion. The younger monk who had taken up the throat chant was silent, his eyes on the burning robe, torment clenching his face.

Liya appeared, surveying the chaos with a wild, frightened expression. She leaned on the chorten with one hand, then two, closing her eyes a moment, then she straightened, calmer now, and retrieved a clay pot of water from behind the chorten. As Jara held the sobbing Dawa, Liya silently began washing the blood from the girl’s hands.

Helplessness surged through Shan as he approached the once joyful, gentle monk. “Surya,” he whispered near the monk’s ear. “It’s Shan. Tell me what it was, what happened.”

Surya gave no sign of hearing. A new sound came from his lips. Not a throat chant, not a mantra, but a low, terrible creaking, the sound of a dying animal. He stared at the ground, his eyes like fading embers.

Shan shuddered, and moved to Dawa. As Liya glanced at Shan he pointed toward the fleeing Tibetans. “Those soldiers could still be in the mountains,” he observed in a grim tone. Liya bit her lip, gazing forlornly at Dawa for a moment, then handed the clay pot to him and darted toward the slope.

“What was it, Dawa?” he asked as he knelt at the girl’s side. She pressed her head into her uncle’s chest. “What did you see when you followed Surya?” Neither the girl nor her uncle seemed to hear. Then with a pang of guilt he recalled she had spoken before, with question in her voice, and he had not responded. I saw the way to the hidden land, she had said. He rose and studied the ruins, trying to recall Surya’s movements after his first cycle of chanting.

Between their turns of chanting Surya and the other chanters usually sat in meditation. If Surya was coming to live in the ruins, he no doubt had studied them more closely than the others, had perhaps found his own special place for meditation. Shan followed the path Dawa had taken into the shadows and soon found himself facing two pillars of natural rock that had supported one of the ruined structures.

Shan stepped between the two pillars. To his surprise he found no floor in front of him, only a dimly lit flight of stairs hewn out of the rock, cupped by centuries of use, the top steps overtaken by lichen. He had not previously seen the eight-foot-wide stairway that sank into the earth, perhaps because the walls that hid it on either side were leaning so treacherously they had seemed too dangerous to approach. He studied the walls a moment. If either collapsed, he would be trapped in the darkness below. Surely Dawa would not have ventured into such a place, surely Surya would not have considered it a place for mediation. He was about to turn back when he noticed a few moist red drops in a line coming from the shadows below. Shan descended into the darkness.

He counted a hundred and eight of the steep, nearly foot-high steps, before the passageway leveled into a dark corridor. It was a powerful, symbolic number, the number of beads in a Tibetan rosary. The smell of singed butter hung in the air, the acrid, sooty residue of butter lamps. He stood completely still. There were other smells. A faint, musty scent of incense that probably clung to the walls from centuries of smoldering braziers. A vague odor of tea. And something more recent, something alien. Tobacco. Twenty feet down the passage a dim flame burned. It was a butter lamp, tilted on its side, its contents flowing onto the rock floor in a small flickering stream. He pushed the small pot upright and with a chip of stone scooped the butter back inside. Raising the lamp he continued down the chill passage until, half a dozen steps later, two doorways opposite each other came into view. A few steps beyond, the corridor ended abruptly in a wall of solid rock.

The opening to the right led into a small, square room, five feet to the side, that may have been a meditation chamber or a storeroom. Inside it sat a large clay jar filled with water, beside a rough piece of burlap large enough to serve as a blanket or prayer rug. He lifted the burlap. It was a bag, supple, not dried out, with plastic thread in the bottom seam. Large Chinese ideograms stenciled onto the cloth declared its original contents to be rice, produced in Guangdong Province.

The second chamber was larger, its walls each over fifteen feet long, with another, smaller, doorway at the far end of the wall to his right. He took two steps inside and froze, staring at a black glistening patch on the floor of the smaller doorway. Shan closed his eyes, calming himself, then approached the dark patch and squatted, extending a fingertip into it. It was a pool of fresh blood.

He wiped his finger on the stone floor and stood, the light over his head, studying the room. He smelled the damp metallic scent of the blood now, combined with another scent he had come to recognize in the gulag. Not a scent as such, Lokesh would have said, just one of the sensations of the spirit, which perceived things that could not be explained by the physical senses. If you let it, Lokesh insisted, the spirit inside could feel the shadow of recent terror, like a lingering echo, or the disturbance left when another spirit wrestled free of a suddenly broken body. Shan would have been happy not to let his own spirit do so, but he did not know how to stop the sensation. Death had visited the little chamber.

Suddenly he felt empty and cold. Something inside shouted for him to run back to the surface, and he found himself pressed against the rock wall, pushing down, until he was crouching, his arm over his head, fist clenched as though to fend off an attack. What had Atso said about Zhoka? It was a place of strange and powerful things, a place dangerous to misunderstand. No, not exactly. He said it was dangerous not to understand what it did to people. Shan closed his eyes again and calmed himself. As he lowered his arm something frigid touched his hand and he slowly extended his fingers to grasp a long metal cylinder. It was a hand lamp, of sleek heavy metal, the kind the Public Security troops favored, because they could double as batons for crowd control. He pushed the button near the top. Nothing. His fingers were wet again. The light was covered in blood.

Dropping the broken light, Shan stepped along the perimeter of the room. The walls had been expertly plastered once, and covered with painted images. He paused at the pool of blood, holding the butter lamp high again. Above it was the image of a wrathful deity carrying a skull cup of blood, one of the mythical
lokapalas,
guardians of the law. The image had nine angry heads and over a dozen pairs of arms. All the eyes, every eye on every head, had been blinded, some precisely gouged out, others burnt away as though with the end of a cigarette. The powerful deity appeared sad and helpless, its cup tipped as if the blood on the floor had spilled out of the skull. Beneath the painting, in a line where they had rolled against the wall, were dark, worn beads. He lifted one, studying it forlornly. Surya had broken the ancient rosary he carried, passed down through generations of hermit monks, and left the beads as if they meant nothing to him.

A trail of moist crimson smudges led from the pool back to the first door, toward the stair passage. Surya’s forearms had been covered in blood, as had Dawa’s palms and the front of her dress. Even her shoes had shown smears of blood. He studied the stains on the floor. Dawa had slipped, falling into the grisly pool, pushing up against the floor. But the expensive metal light had not been hers, and she would not have entered the room without light. Surya must have been in the room, with the butter lamp. If she had ventured so far, had stepped in the blood, Surya must have been beyond, on the opposite side of the smaller doorway. Shan stepped over the blood into the shadows, seeing for the first time another trail, not of smudges but large drops of blood, where they had fallen from the one who must have died. The tunnel outside the room widened and sloped gradually downward. In the blackness was a vague rustle of sound, like distant wind. To the right was a small meditation chamber. As he turned to it his foot connected with something on the floor. He bent and recoiled. It was a bone, a human femur bone, dripping fresh blood.

He pressed against the wall again. Someone had died and been stripped of their flesh, a voice gasped from the place of his fear. Impossible, a second, uncertain voice said. Surya would not have had time for such grisly work, Surya was not a killer.

Shan forced himself to gaze at the bloody bone. The blood was fresh, but the bone was not. It was the kind of bone traditionally used by artisans to make
kangling,
the trumpets of Tibetan ceremony. There were three more bones, leaning against the wall. They must have been left there decades earlier, by one of the Zhoka craftsmen. But they had been rearranged. The center bone was vertical, the other two leaning against it, forming an arrow that pointed to a symbol drawn in blood a few inches above. A ten-inch oval had been drawn, its long axis parallel to the floor. In the center of the oval was a square, inside the square was a circle.

He stepped toward the meditation cell and discovered two four-inch-long rectangles cut into the floor, each nearly two inches deep, eighteen inches apart and eighteen inches from the wall. They could have held the legs of an altar or some sort of platform. On the floor of the cell was a pile of debris covered by coarse dust-encrusted sackcloth. Under the cloth, and scattered around it, were shards of pottery. Dried, shriveled kernels of barley, years, probably decades, old. A plank, dried and split, five inches wide and sixteen long. He looked back toward the pool of blood. Someone’s life had drained out onto the floor. But where was the body? There was no trail of blood except that left by Surya and Dawa, and if Surya had carried the body somewhere the front of his robe and underrobe would have been soaked with blood. The hysterical girl must have fled after falling into the blood. Surya himself must have dropped the lamp, far from the sunlight above, still burning, not bothering to retrieve it. Because he had been frightened by something he had seen? Or by something he had done? No, Shan told himself again, it was not possible that the gentle Surya, who often blessed Shan’s feet so they would not crush insects, could kill another human being.