Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

The unexpected exclamation from Lokesh caused the figure to spin about. As he did so the muffled light rose toward his head, illuminating his face in a hollow mask of jaw, cheeks, and forehead. It was Ko.

When Shan and Yao switched on their lights there was an instant of fear in the boy’s eyes. As he recognized them his body visibly tightened and he leaned against the wall, hiding the object in his hand, which glittered in the dim light. His lips curled over his teeth and he brandished his own light like a weapon.

“You should be careful,” Yao said to Ko in a quiet voice. “There are thieves in these ruins.” Shan glanced at Yao. The inspector had decided to refrain from the obvious, the thing that stuck like dry sand in Shan’s own throat. Ko was stealing from the chapels.

“Let’s see what evidence you have uncovered,” Yao said and stepped forward.

For a moment Ko’s face had the look of a cornered animal, a savage resentment, then it stiffened and seemed to collapse as the inspector pulled the object from his arm. It was a small gold Buddha, ten inches high, inlaid with precious stones around its base.

“Excellent,” Yao said, extending the statue for Shan to see. “Proof that we have discovered a place the thieves have not yet looted. It will allow us to focus our search.”

Ko’s pockets bulged with angular objects. A gilded trumpet hung on a braided cord from his shoulder. Ko stood in silence, looking at the floor as Shan lifted the trumpet and slipped the cord down his son’s arm. “This was made from a human thigh bone, Xiao Ko,” Shan said. “Probably from a holy man who lived centuries ago.”

Ko looked up with revulsion, and Shan somehow knew it had nothing to do with the bone. Without thinking about it Shan had addressed him as Little Ko, a traditional term of affection fathers and uncles might use. His son seemed to despise the words more than he hated Yao’s confiscation of his treasure.

“My name is Ko,” the youth snapped. “Tiger Ko,” he added, using the gang name in his criminal record. Abruptly he pushed Shan, shoving him against the wall, and bolted into the darkness.

“Children,” Yao said with an exaggerated sigh, handing Shan the little Buddha.

Shan looked into the darkness after Ko. His son couldn’t go far. The tunnel circled back.

Shan retraced their steps, looking into the chapels, and found an empty space in the third chapel he entered, a small clean place outlined in the dust that covered the rest of the altar. “Forgive him,” he whispered to the blue deity above the altar as he returned the statue to its place. “He was not raised well.” Noticing a heavy peg halfway up a side wall amid a row of painted skulls, he hung the jewel-encrusted trumpet on it, then paused. The peg was inserted into the eye of one of the skulls. He swept his light over the wall. There was another hole, incorporated into the eye of another skull. The holes were invisible to the casual glance. On the floor, by the altar, was a dust-encrusted peg, the same size as the first. He lifted it hesitantly, wary of disturbing anything in the ancient chapels. It fit perfectly into the eyehole. He searched the walls again and found four more holes, all the same size, all disguised as part of the painting. They formed no pattern. It could simply have been another clever way the builders had integrated the beauty of the wall with functionality, a way to hang robes, whisks, trumpets, and other ceremonial implements. But as he proceeded back toward the north gate, Shan found more holes in the corridor, in no regular spacing, only three or four every ten feet, all worked so perfectly into the overlaying paintings as to be effectively hidden to the casual observer. Zhoka’s heaven was intended only for those who earned it with both their wits and their faith.

As Yao and Shan followed the curve of the tunnel toward the south they seemed to pass through pockets of scents. Incense, Shan smelled, some recent, most older, musty, the complex scents made in the traditional ways with ten or twenty fragrant ingredients. Decay was sometimes in the air, interspersed with the fragrance of cedar. And, very faintly, something different, something alien to the temple.

“You smell it?” Yao asked.

“Tobacco,” Shan nodded. “Cigarette smoke.” He remembered the cigarette butts they had found above, near the excavation, and the cigar butts Corbett had found near the blood stains. They followed the tunnel as it curved to the south, passing more chapels, but found only ruin where the gate should have been, broken pieces of stone bearing the yellow paint of the southern king, huge slabs that had tumbled from the ceiling, blocking the passage, broken timbers, signs perhaps of a wooden stairway. There was no sign of Ko, though twice Shan heard sounds that may have been running feet. Each time he fought the urge to run and find his son. Ko, Shan sadly knew, was unlikely to stray far from the riches of the temple.

Yao caught Shan staring into the darkness. “It was a brave thing he did, jumping in to save Lokesh.”

Shan offered a nod, not because he agreed, but in gratitude for Yao’s tone. Shan knew his son had not gone into water to help anyone, only to escape them.

Ruin was in the east as well. The collapse of the eastern entrance had been more devastating than that of the opposite side, with great shards of rock on the floor of the approaching tunnel, the collapsed roof almost blocking their passage, obliterating any artwork or message at the entrance that might have yielded a clue.

They walked quickly back, silently, as if Yao, too, felt the sudden need to find the others. When they reached them in the chapel near the collapsed western gate, below the line of eyes, Lokesh had a serene glow on his face, a kind Shan had seen on his friend’s countenance only a few times in all the years they had known each other.

But they had found no answers to the riddles of the tunnels.

“There is no sign of the amban,” Yao said to Shan. There was a hint of accusation in his tone. “Not even any sign of the thieves except some smoke. Smoke,” he repeated pointedly.

“But this is the palace,” Lokesh said, as if not understanding Yao’s frustration.

Yao ignored the old Tibetan. “There is no other level. This is not the amban’s palace, and if this is not where the amban hid, the thieves would have reached the same conclusion. They could be miles away. We have wasted the day, and unless we are going back into that black water,” he said in a tone that told them he was loath to do so, “we have all but imprisoned ourselves in this place.”

“The snow lions are the message,” Shan suggested in a tentative voice. “The snow lion at the northern gate must mean something.” He took them back to the ruins of the western gate and showed them the small lions hovering near the shoulders of the deities.

“There’s more words!” Liya exclaimed, holding her light close to one of the lions to reveal a few tiny Tibetan letters. “And more, over each lion.”

“The true nature of things is void,” Lokesh read slowly. “The clear light of emptiness is the dawning of awareness.” They were words from the Bardo, the death rites.

“Emptiness.” Corbett aimed his light into the black tunnel. “We’ve got lots of emptiness.”

“But the words are incomplete,” Shan said, turning to Lokesh. “The actual words of the rites are different.”

Lokesh nodded. “One phrase is left out. ‘The clear light of emptiness, without a center or a circumference, is the dawning of the awareness.’ Those are the correct words to be spoken.”

“What is emptiness with a circumference?” Shan asked. “A hole,” he said a moment later, then quickly explained what he had found in the chapel, the oddly disguised holes and pegs.