Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“It could be another false lead,” Corbett said, then rested against the adjacent wall and gasped as he began slipping. The wall behind him was shifting, opening on a central pivot. As the wall stopped, Corbett fell into the darkness.

Shan quickly followed, aiming his light at the American, who lay on the floor of a wooden landing below a steep, eighteen-inch-wide stairway, leading up.

“Christ they were good,” Corbett said, as he stood and aimed his own light at the back of the moving wall. It was constructed of heavy wood, joined so tightly and painted so cleverly that from the outside it looked like another stone wall.

As they climbed to the third level they reached a chamber unlike any of those below. Punji groaned as she topped the stairs, Lokesh gave a cry of delight.

The walls were lined with the heads of demons. Not those of the paintings below, but three-dimensional heads, the intricate, horrible masks of Tibetan ritual dancing, the heads that according to tradition could be inhabited by the demons themselves when the right words were spoken.

They stood for a moment, in the center of the room, their moving hand lights giving motion to the wrathful faces.

Shan’s light settled on a piece of paper framed in wood, hanging by one of the chamber’s two doors. It was not Tibetan, not part of the rituals, but a greeting of sorts.

As he lifted the dusty frame from the wall and handed it to McDowell, Shan heard her breath catch. “Dear Uncle Bertram.” She smiled and quietly read the text out loud:

How you made it this far I am curious

Since the chapels make pilgrims so furious

Was it our monkish crew

Or the deities who

Told you the maze was just spurious?

The door from the mask chamber led into a curving tunnel, matching that of the bottom floor, though with a smaller, tighter radius. The outer wall of the tunnel was broken at regular intervals by doorways leading to a series of chapels, each separated from the next by a meditation cell. They walked quickly, not pausing to study the images of the chapels. The inner wall was plastered, as intricately painted as the chapel walls, but with a simple wooden door every thirty feet, each constructed of heavy planks and held shut with an iron latch, each with a segment of rainbow painted between the top of the doorframe and the ceiling. They passed a painting of a deity on a lion throne, the wall behind painted yellow. It was the symbolic southern gate. Shan paused at the wooden door opposite the yellow wall and opened it.

It was an apartment, a living quarters for one of the gompa’s senior lamas-a spare, simple chamber, with a single thangka on the wall opposite the door, a low platform bed against the right wall, a wooden trunk against the left wall, and a simple altar under the thangka, all constructed of fragrant wood. The bed had a pallet and a single felt blanket, crumpled, pushed against the wall. As Corbett opened the trunk, Shan looked over his shoulder, seeing that it was divided with a slender plank. On one side there were two robes, two grey underrobes, sticks of incense, and several jars of herbs. On the other were four peche, the manuscript leaves neatly tied between elegantly carved end-boards. As Shan ran his finger over the delicate birds carved into the topmost end-board, he noticed Punji staring toward the center of the room. He followed her gaze to see Lokesh, gazing with sudden anguish toward the bed. Under it was a pair of worn sandals.

“What’s wrong?” Corbett asked as he noticed the old Tibetan. Then he muttered a low curse and stepped silently to Lokesh’s side.

“He ran out, sprang up from his bed,” Punji said in a pained voice.

The blanket, left in disarray in the otherwise pristine room, and the sandals forgotten under the bed, spoke eloquently of the day forty years before. “They came at dawn,” Shan whispered.

The blanket had not been touched, left where the lama had cast it off as the alarm was sounded, perhaps as the first bombs fell, as he sprang out the door without his sandals.

They silently stepped out of the room and ventured behind the next wooden door. The chamber appeared nearly identical to the first, except that its blanket was neatly folded on the bed. But an easel rested on the floor by a cushion and a wooden tray with paints and brushes. The piece of stretched cotton on the easel held the shapes of a complex thangka outlined in charcoal. In one corner the artist had started applying pigment.

The next chamber held another blanket thrown off in haste, and a clay jar upturned by the door. Suddenly Shan realized Lokesh was no longer with them. They retraced their steps and found him in a nearby chapel, staring at the murals, his lamp close to the wall.

“They aren’t the same as the others,” Lokesh observed, as Shan stepped to his side.

Shan’s lamp, quickly followed by the others, rose to illuminate the walls. The colors and the patina of age in the panels were like those of the other chapels. But instead of being surrounded by smaller images of the reincarnate lineage or panels of sacred emblems there were rocks and trees and clouds in the background. Mountains were behind the saint, with small birds flying over an open landscape.

“It’s not Tibetan,” Corbett said.

But Lokesh pointed to the saint in the center, with his hand to his ear. It was without a doubt Milarepa, the famed ascetic, flanked by other Tibetan saints.

“Tibetan but not Tibetan,” Shan said. “The background is in the Chinese style.” He pointed to a small group of five curving marks in the lower right corner, like commas, all rising from the top of a small arc. “This I don’t know.”

Corbett confirmed that the marks were in the corners of the other two paintings in the chamber. “It’s like a painter’s mark, a signature. But you said Tibetans don’t sign their paintings.”

“Almost never, except sometimes a handprint or word on the back of the painting.”

“Who is at the side?” Yao asked, pointing to the two robed figures who stood behind another Tibetan saint, one robed figure at each shoulder, their faces drawn in painstaking detail. He pointed to one of the men. “His face is not Tibetan,” the inspector said. “He looks somehow familiar.”

Shan and Lokesh lingered behind the others, still gazing at the strange paintings. Though they departed from the traditional form of Tibetan art, the artist had been skillful, had created a different form with its own simple, stirring beauty. When Shan finally stepped into the corridor he saw the others standing in front of the next wooden door, gazing at its frame. Several pegs hung from the frame, and from them hung at least twenty khatas, ceremonial offering scarves. At the base of the door were several dust-encrusted bronze figures, rolled prayer papers tied in vines, and shriveled brown shapes that may once have been butter offerings.

“It’s some kind of altar,” Punji said. “These were put here a long time ago, before the bombing.”

At first, in the beams of their lights, the interior seemed like the others, with a spare plank bed, a small, low writing table with a chair, a shelf with peche manuscripts, a wooden trunk, and an altar under a thangka. But the pallet was tied with a length of silk, and on top of the trunk was a small stone statue of a dragon.

No one seemed willing to step over the offerings in the entryway. Finally Yao sighed and stepped inside. As the others waited he walked to the bed, rested his hand on the rolled pallet a moment. He paused, gazing at the dragon, then he turned to sweep his light along the other walls. Suddenly, with a sharp intake of breath, he dropped his light. He did not bend to retrieve it, but stared at the wall around the door, the wall that could not be seen by the others. After a moment he recovered and took a tiny step, then seemed to stumble, dropping to one knee but not recovering, just staring at the wall, forgetting his light, supporting himself on one knee.