Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“For what?” Yao asked.

“Maybe there was other artwork here,” the American suggested. “Something with silver and jewels that had to be pried loose perhaps.” He lowered the flake, picked up another that had a small kernel shape. “This one is different. I spent a few years in a forensics lab. A silver filling from a tooth.”

“The Tibetans that live in these hills,” Shan observed quietly, “do not have teeth filled with silver. If a tooth goes bad it gets pulled.”

“The blood drops start there,” Corbett said, aiming his beam at the cell where Shan had found the manuscript leaf. “Where the first attack was made, where the wound was opened. He was bleeding severely by the time he got inside the door. Stepped in his own blood, I think.” The American held the light on a point in the gruesome trail Shan had missed, where the toes of a boot had stepped over the blood. The sole of the boot made a waffle pattern, similar to those he and Yao had seen in the chamber below. Corbett continued to trace the trail with his light. “He fell, after trying to hold on a moment.” Corbett lit the stone wall on the side of the doorway. There was a print, a red smear that showed part of a palm and fingertips. The spot of light followed the tracks on the other side of the pool Shan had seen before, the smudged prints of sandals. “Someone else was there while this one lay dying. Or just after.”

“Surya,” Shan whispered.

“This is not the crime we are investigating,” Yao said with warning in his voice.

A strange stillness fell over the chamber as Corbett kept the light on the prints, showing how Surya had gone to the corner, then to stand in front of the nine-headed deity, below which the beads had collected in the crack in the floor. Corbett, Shan sensed, understood Surya had retreated to the corner in horror, then stood in front of the deity and broken the cord of his prayer beads.

“There is no partial truth,” Shan heard himself say in a voice that was somehow sad. “There is only the whole truth.” He looked up to see both men staring at him.

“What do you mean?” Yao demanded.

“I mean,” Shan said with a certainty that seemed to well up from some unknown place within him, “you will never understand what happened in Seattle and Beijing without understanding what happened here, in this room, without seeing what that deity witnessed.” He looked up at the powerful image on the wall above the pool of blood.

He expected anger, or at least ridicule from his companions. But they said nothing, only stared at the deity with the nine heads. Had it been blinded because it had seen what had happened?

“There’s another thing,” Corbett said, and aimed his light on the lower wall just outside the chamber. “He tried to leave a message.” The American pointed to the oval with the circle and square inside. “Someone drew that and wrote a word.” He pointed to what Shan had thought was another smear of blood above the drawing, perhaps where the dying man had supported himself as he drew. But in Corbett’s light figures glowed through the smear.

“What glows is blood,” Corbett said. “Over it is pigment, nearly the color of fresh blood.” He switched off the purple light and the letters disappeared. “Someone wrote in blood, someone else covered it with paint, the same color that was used up at the tower to cover the writing.” He switched back on his light. “What does it say?”

“Nyen Puk. It means Cave of the Mountain God,” Shan said. “It must not be complete. Sometimes the dying will write one last prayer.” Surya had desperately wanted to obliterate any reference to the Mountain God, but the dead man used his last breath, his last blood, to tell about it.

“You mean the dead man was Tibetan,” Corbett said.

Shan’s hands closed around the chip in his pocket. “I don’t know,” he said and pulled the chip out. “This was in the pool of blood. Maybe it was his.” It was as if the dead man were Tibetan, but not Tibetan.

Corbett’s eyes lit with excitement. “Not the dead man’s!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you-” He didn’t finish the question, just snatched the chip and studied it. “He was here, this proves it.” He tossed the chip to Yao, who frowned at it without examining it further. “The bastard killed again,” he said in a tone that was almost hopeful. “He tossed it at the dying man, like a taunt, an act of contempt.”

The American looked up at Shan. “We searched Lodi’s recent travel history. Before Seattle he had flown in from London but spent three days in Nevada. Reno.”

Corbett may as well have said he had proof the man came from a bayal, one of the mythical hidden lands. It seemed impossible, as if somehow life in two alternate universes had briefly overlapped in the dim chamber, leaving a dead man, the nine-headed deity, and a plastic gambling chip inside a forgotten earth taming temple of ancient Tibet.

“Surya came to the surface saying he killed here,” Shan said. “I was here minutes later. He could not have carried out the body without being covered in blood, couldn’t have dragged him away without leaving a trail of blood. When I came down minutes later, the body was gone.”

“Because Lodi was still here,” Corbett said. “Hiding, waiting to destroy the evidence of what he did.”

“The thieves store supplies here,” Yao reminded Shan, and explained to Corbett what they had found. “Your old monk must have seen him, could have been frightened and confused about what he saw. He ran to the surface.”

“But why would Lodi steal a fresco already in Tibet?” Shan asked.

The American sighed, staring into the darkness again. “What the hell is this place?” he asked in a voice that was suddenly weary. It seemed he was speaking to something in the shadows.

They stepped into the corridor that led to the stairs, studying its walls this time. The space somehow felt incomplete to Shan. There was no gonkang chapel, only a place to prepare for the gonkang, a place to pray and compose one’s self for meeting the fierce protector deities. He slowly walked twelve feet to the end of the corridor. The rock wall that formed the end of the passage, consisting of a solid slab with smaller stones along its edges, was canted slightly inward at the top. The mani mantra was painted on the smooth stone, in big red letters. Shan played the beam of light slowly over the mantra, studying the letters. In places the paint was flaking away. He touched the edge of the paint and another piece fell away. It had been applied with a wide brush, in thick, bold strokes, less refined than the other writing he had seen. He played the beam along the corners of the back wall, running his fingers along the cracks in the loose stone rubble that had fallen in the corner. There was an odd sense of motion. Air. He aligned his fingertips along one of the cracks. The flow was almost imperceptible, but air was moving out of the crack. He aimed the light beam slowly upward, following as it covered the stone above his reach, settling on a smudge of color over ten feet above the floor, where the ceiling met the rear and left walls.

“What is it?” a voice snapped behind him. Yao shined his own light into the corner.

“Nothing,” Shan said uncertainly. “Something on the rock. Probably lichen.”

“Lichen doesn’t grow where there is no light,” a deep voice said behind them. Corbett approached, shining his own lamp toward the ceiling before stepping closer to the rear wall. He bent with his light over the writing. “This paint is different from all the rest. Not the old stuff. It’s like cheap house paint.” He picked up one of the chips of paint and pulled on both ends. It stretched.

Shan gazed back at the smudge of color at the edge of the ceiling.