Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Shan gathered what pegs he could find as they searched the chapels again. Ten minutes later Dawa called out excitedly from a chapel halfway between the east and south gates. As Shan arrived with Corbett, Liya and the girl were standing with their fingers in four holes, all on one wall, each a spot on the coat of a small snow lion, the four small lions arrayed around a larger image of a wrathful protector deity, the topmost lion cradling a tiny monk in his paw.

Shan inserted the long, heavy pegs he had gathered into the holes. They were evenly spread, diagonally left to right, the bottom left one eighteen inches off the floor, the top one, three feet to the right, a foot from the top of the wall.

“A stair!” Liya cried.

“But it leads nowhere,” Corbett pointed out.

Shan stepped onto the first peg, then the second, bending to fit under the ceiling. At first the rock above appeared to be solid but as he probed with his light, pushing at several spots, a piece of the ceiling lifted. “It’s wood,” he explained. “A door.” The hatchway had been carefully carved and painted to look like the stone roof, its edges irregular, matching a curving seam in the rock. Shan pushed the cover out of the way and illuminated a chamber above. Musty, incense-laden air drifted down as he stepped back off the makeshift ladder.

He turned, gesturing for Lokesh to have the honor of leading them into the ancient chambers above. But a slender figure burst into the room, hit the first rung with a leap and with a blur was up and into the shadows overhead. The only sign he had been there was a small bright object that fell from his pocket as he scrambled up the ladder.

Corbett picked the object up and examined it, an elegant silver figure of a god. “Your son,” the American said to Shan, “has very good taste.”

The small entry hall on the second level was lined with paintings of demon protectors. Beyond it, however, was not a curving tunnel as below but a sprawl of arches, entries to small chapels, each opening into at least two other chapels. It was a labyrinth.

“There still must be a ring shape to the design, a chain of chapels that circles the rest,” Lokesh said. “Just hidden in the chaos.” He gestured toward the largest of the paintings in the hall and the words beneath it.

Shan recognized Atisha, one of the greatest of Tibetan saints, framed by smaller images of lesser saints, each in a little square. Atisha wore the close-fitting contoured cap ending in a point that was associated with him. The smaller images were in the traditional formal style, but Atisha sat in a relaxed, asymmetrical pose, one foot extended beyond the edge of the large square that surrounded him, as if he were about to step out of the painting. The painting had a whimsical air. As he stepped closer to it his foot knocked another large peg. On the floor in front of him were four of the long wall pegs, as if someone had climbed up and pulled the pegs out behind them to conceal their passage.

“The greatest meditation,” Liya said. Shan looked up to see her reading a line of text below the painting. “The greatest wisdom.” That was all.

“It’s an abbreviation,” Lokesh observed in a contemplative voice, “a summary. The full verse goes ‘The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go, the greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.’”

Yao pulled out the rough map he had made of the lower ring, and turned it over, sketching the chamber they occupied.

“And here,” Lokesh continued, pointing toward more writing under a mendicant’s staff suspended on hooks over one of the doorways. “‘It is the only thing that is ours yet we look for it elsewhere,’” he read. “An old teaching. It means we carry the truth with us, just don’t recognize it.”

Shan took at step into the maze of chapels. “Rice,” he said, looking at Corbett, who carried the food supply.

The American looked at him quizzically, but silently opened the pack and handed Shan a small white cloth sack. Shan pulled open one corner. “We must stay together,” he said as he slid the cover over the hatch that led to the lower floor. “From here we will make a trail,” he explained, sprinkling a line of rice as he moved.

They had reached the fourth chamber when Yao called Shan’s name. Shan looked away from another of the rich paintings to see that the inspector’s light was aimed at a black cylinder on the floor, a metallic lamp matching the ones the soldiers had packed for them, its lens and bulb broken. It was the one Ko had carried.

Corbett studied the floor around the light. There was dust on the floor, from crumbling plaster overhead, showing patterns of bootprints in the dust. “He was running,” the American said. “He must have looked back and hit the wall.” Corbett gestured toward the pillar that separated the two doorways in front of them.

Shan stared into the blackness ahead. Without a light Ko could fall to his death, could wander aimlessly in the eerie labyrinth, could even stumble into the thieves, the killers, provoking a violent reaction.

He saw movement to his side, and watched as Dawa pulled Lokesh’s arm. “Aku, you are right!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper. “Some of the gods are still alive!” She bent and pointed, causing the old Tibetan, then Shan, to squat to make sense of her words. They saw nothing, but then Dawa took Shan’s light and held it low to the floor, creating a new pattern of shadows. At first Shan saw only smudges along the edge of the dust, but then he realized they were in a line. And at the end of two of the smudges were small ovals in an arc. The fresh prints of bare feet, extending into the darkness, lost as the dust disappeared and the floor became smooth bare rock again. Gendun never wore his boots inside a temple.

As Shan stared into the blackness ahead he became vaguely aware of a discussion behind him, of Corbett asking Liya where the clue was, insisting there had to be one, of Liya futilely asking Lokesh the same question. But as Shan turned toward his old friend he saw Lokesh was lost in one of the raptures that periodically seized him, staring at another painting of Atisha the gentle saint. His hands were together at his chest, the heels and fingertips of each hand touching, the fingers bowed outward as if clasping an invisible sphere. It was the treasure box mudra.

Yao began walking deeper into the network of chapels, busily sketching the layout.

“We should go now,” Shan said to Lokesh. The old Tibetan seemed not to hear. But when Dawa grabbed a fold in his shirt and gently pulled, Lokesh followed the others, walking like a blind man, the smile still on his face, his hands still acknowledging the treasure. Not the treasure the others hoped to find, Shan knew, but the treasure the ancient paintings had already deposited in Lokesh’s heart.

Shan gazed at the painting until, looking about, he saw that he was alone. But as he took a step someone behind him made a small murmuring sound. Corbett was there, with his light out, looking at the ancient saint with the same longing awe that Shan had often seen on the faces of old Tibetans.

“It doesn’t feel like we should be here,” the American said in a barely audible voice.

“This is where we will find them,” Shan said. “The criminals you seek.”

“I don’t mean it that way.”

Shan studied the American. “Not in an investigator’s way, you mean.”

Corbett nodded slowly and looked into the darkness. “Somehow I feel like this is the farthest from the world I have ever been, or ever will be. Lokesh was right. It’s more real than real. People sat here centuries ago and did things more important than we will ever do.”

Shan stayed silent a long time. Corbett’s words were like a prayer, offered to the deities. “Lokesh sometimes speaks of true places,” he said at last, “where you can glimpse the essence of the earth, or life as it was meant to be.”