Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Corbett nodded again. “He also told me of the bayal, the hidden lands. Maybe it’s the same thing. The true places are all hidden from the damned world we’ve created. When I swam through that black pool it didn’t feel like water. It was like shadow so thick it was almost solid, like a pit where darkness became concentrated.” He covered his face with a hand for a moment and breathed deeply. “How could there be criminals here?” Shan thought the investigator was speaking again, until Corbett asked another question, addressing the saint. “How could they stay criminals?”

The American reached for his water bottle and drank deeply, almost desperately, as if doing so would break the spell that held him. “Sorry,” he said with a small gasp when he lowered the bottle. “I’m short on sleep I guess.” He pushed past with an awkward glance and Shan began dropping rice again.

A quarter hour later they stood in the twentieth chamber since leaving the entry room, making no progress in finding a pattern in the maze of rooms or a clue among the paintings. Yao’s map had become a meaningless tangle of lines. Every room had a curve built into at least one wall, there were no straight paths, at no place could they stand and see more than twenty feet away. The walls continued to be painted with scenes of the Buddhist pantheon, each room a little exquisite palace unto itself. Lokesh had returned to awareness, but strangely, the dreamlike state seemed to have shifted to Dawa. The fear that had been on the girl’s face when they entered the underground complex had not stayed with her, or grown as Shan had expected, but had disappeared entirely. She had begun to smile, had even shown something that seemed close to serenity.

Suddenly Shan heard his name urgently called from the next chamber. Corbett gestured for him to hurry.

The room had no art, or at least no colorful images of deities or saints. The surface of the walls were covered with faded words. Liya quickly paced along the perimeter then pointed to the upper corner of one wall. “It begins here,” she said, and slowly read. “I create a wisdom palace,” she began. “It will not be small.” She grew silent, scanning the text, looking at the next wall before speaking again. “It is a very old prayer,” she explained. “A song really, called the Prayer for the God of the Plain.” She looked at Corbett and Yao. “I think when the old artists began, this is where they started. When the Buddhists first tried to build temples in Tibet they were always torn apart by the gods in the earth, by earthquakes. This is one of the original prayers used to placate the main land gods, to calm the land so temples could be built.” She looked at Shan with a small knowing smile. They stood in a place where the earth taming began, a thousand years before.

Half a dozen more rooms with only writing adjoined the first. Lokesh and Liya studied each wall, calling out excitedly as they identified the sutra or other teaching from which it was extracted. Yao, looking exhausted, sat on the floor with a water bottle and laid his map between his legs, asking if anyone could make sense of the rooms, could find anything like a passage that might lead to another gate. Shan stepped into the shadow of the next chamber. He held his hand over his light to muffle it, watching in near darkness, fighting the urge to call out for his son. At last he turned off the light and sat in the black stillness, listening.

The silence of the temple had a texture all its own. He had been in many caves, but this did not feel like a cave. There was a strange lightness to the air, an invisible energy. After several minutes he sensed a low sound, an animal-like moaning, rising and falling. He rose, still in darkness, and walked, no longer dropping rice, one hand in front of him, touching walls at first, then, inexplicably, finding he could sense where the openings lay, walking from chapel to chapel without colliding with the walls until, suddenly, a frightened groan rose a few feet in front of him. Shan froze, still not switching on the light.

“It is a very old place,” he said. “If you let it, it will give you strength.” He heard a sharp intake of breath.

“I was tired,” Ko snapped. “I was sleeping and now you woke me.”

Shan began to take a step toward the voice, stopped, turned back into the adjacent chamber long enough to silently lower his unlit lamp to the floor before advancing toward his son.

“I have food,” he said. “Some walnuts.” He extended the small sack he had kept in his pocket.

When Ko did not respond Shan frantically thought he had fled. Then he heard a rustling of clothing, and a hand, sweeping through the air, touched the sack. Fingers closed around it and pulled it away.

“You have no light?” Ko asked in a tight voice.

“No.”

“How did you find your way here?”

“I don’t know,” Shan said truthfully.

He heard a nut crunch in Ko’s mouth. “I need a drink,” Ko demanded.

“I have none.”

A snort, a sound of dismissal, came through the blackness.

Shan remained still, facing the sound, trying to push back the pain in his heart. He was in one of the most beautiful places he had ever known, and his son was stealing from it, his son was feeling nothing but anger and greed.

“No one can stop me.” Ko’s voice in the darkness was like the growl of some cave creature.

“No one will stop you. We are here for something else. But afterwards, if you get out alive, they will send troops to find you. The soldiers in this county are bored. You heard Yao. They will make sport of it, the way they hunt leopards sometimes.”

“I’m not scared of any damned soldier.”

Shan sighed, wondered what deity was looking down from the walls. “I do not know how to be a father,” he said very slowly. “But I could try to be a friend.” He could only have said it in the darkness, without seeing the eyes of his son, or of the deities.

He heard the snorting sound again. “I’m sorry. I’ll go,” Shan said, and he took a step away from Ko. The darkness somehow seemed different, as if closing in about him. For a moment he felt a desperate need to be on the surface, in the light and air, away from everything.

Then an uncertain voice called to his back. “Your gang,” Ko said. “What happened to your gang?”

The ten years Shan had waited to have a real conversation with his son had seemed like a century. And now, when Ko seemed ready to talk, he wanted to know about Shan’s gang. Shan turned. “I told you, there was no gang. I was sent to prison by some powerful people to stop me from sending them to prison.”

“I thought you lied, that you were saying that to impress that damned inspector.”

Shan took a step back toward his son. “My job, it was like what Inspector Yao does today.”

“If you were so important, you could have gotten me out of that prison.”

“I told you. I was in prison myself.” He heard his son eating the walnuts again. “If we stood back to back, walking slowly,” he offered after a moment, “we could watch for lights and find the others.”

“They won’t want me.”

“They need you. You’ll just have to remove the things you put in your pocket.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a trusty. Because if he learns he can rely on you there’s a chance Inspector Yao may have you made a trusty when you return to your prison.” Because, Shan wanted to add, you must stop offending the deities who live here.

“Right,” Ko said slowly.

Shan heard the rustle of fabric, a metallic sound, of small objects clinking together. After a moment he sensed Ko rising, and felt his hand touch Shan’s arm. Shan turned and they stood back to back.

“They’re hard places, the coal mines,” Shan observed after watching the darkness for another minute.