Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“It’s what he would do!” the old woman gasped in sudden realization.

“He wrote a mantra a thousand times for protection, then wrapped his boots in jute for better traction and climbed the cliff,” Shan said. “But he fell, breaking his legs, ripping his ear, breaking the bones on one side of his face where he hit the rocks. There is no murderer,” Shan declared in a loud, slow voice. “There are no monks who kill.”

As he spoke Liya pointed excitedly toward the old tower. “The soldiers are gone!”

The Tibetans followed Liya’s gaze, then looked back at Shan, wide-eyed, as if he had performed some sort of sorcery. One by one, they left the big herder’s side, several joining Gendun in a mantra. The scar-faced man sighed. “Lha gyal lo,” he offered in a tone of resignation, but kicked Shan’s hat as he walked away.

The chanting started again. The celebration began anew. As he retrieved his hat Shan heard snatches of prayers, then watched several of the Tibetans embrace each other. Several stepped forward and shook his hand, one gave him a small prayer scarf. Some of the children brought jars from the courtyard and began tossing flour into the air, laughing again. The sounds of joy grew louder, more heartfelt, than before, as if by eliminating both the soldiers and the spectre of a murderer in the hills Shan had confirmed that it was indeed a day of miracles. Gendun, who stayed on the fallen lintel, smiled. They would still have their festival, Gendun would still address the people of the hills. Lokesh began teaching some of the herders another pilgrim’s song.

As Shan began helping Liya distribute flour she cocked her head toward the courtyard. “Listen-”

“There’s nothing-” he began, then remembered the throat chant, which was supposed to continue without stopping until Gendun’s teaching.

As Shan turned in the direction of the central courtyard, a scream pierced the stillness. He ran.

The terrified, quivering howl kept repeating itself, the scream of an hysterical child. He was still in the foregate when Dawa emerged from the courtyard. The front of her shirt was soaked in blood. As she frantically waved her hands over her head, still screaming, Shan saw that her palms, too, were stained crimson, fresh blood trickling down her forearms.

The girl was inconsolable. Jara approached, reaching out for her, but the girl seemed not to notice, instead darting away, grabbing the nearest pot of flour, which she flung into the gorge, then another and another, the flour drifting out of the pots in long white plumes as they sank. She seemed to mindlessly reach for anything that lay on the ground and then pitch it into the chasm. Not mindlessly, Shan realized after a moment. The girl was destroying anything that hinted of Buddhism, any sign of the clandestine celebration. The photo of the Dalai Lama. The graceful bronze hand. Suddenly her hands were on Shan’s hermitage bag with the mani mantra. Too late Shan ran forward. The bag, with his supplies for the next month and his precious heirloom prayer sticks, tumbled over the edge, into the deep ravine.

There were more sounds now, frantic shouts as people began fleeing up the slope. Shan darted into the central courtyard. Lokesh stood by the chorten, staring in horror toward the stone where the throat chanters sat. Surya, whom they had not seen for an hour, sat clad only in the rough grey muslin garment worn under his robe. His robe lay on his lap, or what was left of it. With a glazed expression he was ripping the maroon cloth into shreds and feeding it to the fire in the brazier. Lokesh stepped forward, one hand raised as if to prevent Surya’s hand from reaching for the fire again. But Surya pushed him away. Lokesh resisted for a moment then froze, staring at the wet stain left from Surya’s touch. It was blood.

“I am a monk no more,” Surya moaned as the flames consumed the last of his robe. “I have killed a man,” he said in a wrenching, hollow voice. “No more a monk. No more a human.”

Dawa ran into the courtyard, still screaming, beating her fists against her uncle’s chest as Jara caught up and wrapped his arms around the girl. Lokesh reached into the flames, futilely trying to retrieve the burning cloth, then looked up at Shan with a desolate gaze. Someone else had died. The hill people were fleeing in terror and Surya was abandoning his vows. They were falling down the well, eyes open.

Lokesh pulled something from his belt and urgently pressed it into Surya’s hand. It was his mala, his rosary. Surya stared numbly at the ashes of his robe as Lokesh lifted the monk’s fingers and entwined them around the beads. “Om mani padme hum,” Lokesh intoned in a plaintive, whispering voice, as if he had to remind Surya how to invoke the deity of compassion. The old monk’s eyes, empty as glass, drifted toward Lokesh, then dropped to gaze absently at the beads in his fingers. He opened his hand, letting the mala fall to the earth. Lokesh grabbed the beads and began a new mantra, an urgent invocation of Tara, protectress of the faithful.

No more flour flew in the air. No more cries of celebration were flung toward the sky. The few hill people remaining in the courtyard with Surya had retreated to the walls, staring at him in fearful confusion. The younger monk who had taken up the throat chant was silent, his eyes on the burning robe, torment clenching his face.

Liya appeared, surveying the chaos with a wild, frightened expression. She leaned on the chorten with one hand, then two, closing her eyes a moment, then she straightened, calmer now, and retrieved a clay pot of water from behind the chorten. As Jara held the sobbing Dawa, Liya silently began washing the blood from the girl’s hands.

Helplessness surged through Shan as he approached the once joyful, gentle monk. “Surya,” he whispered near the monk’s ear. “It’s Shan. Tell me what it was, what happened.”

Surya gave no sign of hearing. A new sound came from his lips. Not a throat chant, not a mantra, but a low, terrible creaking, the sound of a dying animal. He stared at the ground, his eyes like fading embers.

Shan shuddered, and moved to Dawa. As Liya glanced at Shan he pointed toward the fleeing Tibetans. “Those soldiers could still be in the mountains,” he observed in a grim tone. Liya bit her lip, gazing forlornly at Dawa for a moment, then handed the clay pot to him and darted toward the slope.

“What was it, Dawa?” he asked as he knelt at the girl’s side. She pressed her head into her uncle’s chest. “What did you see when you followed Surya?” Neither the girl nor her uncle seemed to hear. Then with a pang of guilt he recalled she had spoken before, with question in her voice, and he had not responded. I saw the way to the hidden land, she had said. He rose and studied the ruins, trying to recall Surya’s movements after his first cycle of chanting.

Between their turns of chanting Surya and the other chanters usually sat in meditation. If Surya was coming to live in the ruins, he no doubt had studied them more closely than the others, had perhaps found his own special place for meditation. Shan followed the path Dawa had taken into the shadows and soon found himself facing two pillars of natural rock that had supported one of the ruined structures.

Shan stepped between the two pillars. To his surprise he found no floor in front of him, only a dimly lit flight of stairs hewn out of the rock, cupped by centuries of use, the top steps overtaken by lichen. He had not previously seen the eight-foot-wide stairway that sank into the earth, perhaps because the walls that hid it on either side were leaning so treacherously they had seemed too dangerous to approach. He studied the walls a moment. If either collapsed, he would be trapped in the darkness below. Surely Dawa would not have ventured into such a place, surely Surya would not have considered it a place for mediation. He was about to turn back when he noticed a few moist red drops in a line coming from the shadows below. Shan descended into the darkness.