Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

He counted a hundred and eight of the steep, nearly foot-high steps, before the passageway leveled into a dark corridor. It was a powerful, symbolic number, the number of beads in a Tibetan rosary. The smell of singed butter hung in the air, the acrid, sooty residue of butter lamps. He stood completely still. There were other smells. A faint, musty scent of incense that probably clung to the walls from centuries of smoldering braziers. A vague odor of tea. And something more recent, something alien. Tobacco. Twenty feet down the passage a dim flame burned. It was a butter lamp, tilted on its side, its contents flowing onto the rock floor in a small flickering stream. He pushed the small pot upright and with a chip of stone scooped the butter back inside. Raising the lamp he continued down the chill passage until, half a dozen steps later, two doorways opposite each other came into view. A few steps beyond, the corridor ended abruptly in a wall of solid rock.

The opening to the right led into a small, square room, five feet to the side, that may have been a meditation chamber or a storeroom. Inside it sat a large clay jar filled with water, beside a rough piece of burlap large enough to serve as a blanket or prayer rug. He lifted the burlap. It was a bag, supple, not dried out, with plastic thread in the bottom seam. Large Chinese ideograms stenciled onto the cloth declared its original contents to be rice, produced in Guangdong Province.

The second chamber was larger, its walls each over fifteen feet long, with another, smaller, doorway at the far end of the wall to his right. He took two steps inside and froze, staring at a black glistening patch on the floor of the smaller doorway. Shan closed his eyes, calming himself, then approached the dark patch and squatted, extending a fingertip into it. It was a pool of fresh blood.

He wiped his finger on the stone floor and stood, the light over his head, studying the room. He smelled the damp metallic scent of the blood now, combined with another scent he had come to recognize in the gulag. Not a scent as such, Lokesh would have said, just one of the sensations of the spirit, which perceived things that could not be explained by the physical senses. If you let it, Lokesh insisted, the spirit inside could feel the shadow of recent terror, like a lingering echo, or the disturbance left when another spirit wrestled free of a suddenly broken body. Shan would have been happy not to let his own spirit do so, but he did not know how to stop the sensation. Death had visited the little chamber.

Suddenly he felt empty and cold. Something inside shouted for him to run back to the surface, and he found himself pressed against the rock wall, pushing down, until he was crouching, his arm over his head, fist clenched as though to fend off an attack. What had Atso said about Zhoka? It was a place of strange and powerful things, a place dangerous to misunderstand. No, not exactly. He said it was dangerous not to understand what it did to people. Shan closed his eyes again and calmed himself. As he lowered his arm something frigid touched his hand and he slowly extended his fingers to grasp a long metal cylinder. It was a hand lamp, of sleek heavy metal, the kind the Public Security troops favored, because they could double as batons for crowd control. He pushed the button near the top. Nothing. His fingers were wet again. The light was covered in blood.

Dropping the broken light, Shan stepped along the perimeter of the room. The walls had been expertly plastered once, and covered with painted images. He paused at the pool of blood, holding the butter lamp high again. Above it was the image of a wrathful deity carrying a skull cup of blood, one of the mythical lokapalas, guardians of the law. The image had nine angry heads and over a dozen pairs of arms. All the eyes, every eye on every head, had been blinded, some precisely gouged out, others burnt away as though with the end of a cigarette. The powerful deity appeared sad and helpless, its cup tipped as if the blood on the floor had spilled out of the skull. Beneath the painting, in a line where they had rolled against the wall, were dark, worn beads. He lifted one, studying it forlornly. Surya had broken the ancient rosary he carried, passed down through generations of hermit monks, and left the beads as if they meant nothing to him.

A trail of moist crimson smudges led from the pool back to the first door, toward the stair passage. Surya’s forearms had been covered in blood, as had Dawa’s palms and the front of her dress. Even her shoes had shown smears of blood. He studied the stains on the floor. Dawa had slipped, falling into the grisly pool, pushing up against the floor. But the expensive metal light had not been hers, and she would not have entered the room without light. Surya must have been in the room, with the butter lamp. If she had ventured so far, had stepped in the blood, Surya must have been beyond, on the opposite side of the smaller doorway. Shan stepped over the blood into the shadows, seeing for the first time another trail, not of smudges but large drops of blood, where they had fallen from the one who must have died. The tunnel outside the room widened and sloped gradually downward. In the blackness was a vague rustle of sound, like distant wind. To the right was a small meditation chamber. As he turned to it his foot connected with something on the floor. He bent and recoiled. It was a bone, a human femur bone, dripping fresh blood.

He pressed against the wall again. Someone had died and been stripped of their flesh, a voice gasped from the place of his fear. Impossible, a second, uncertain voice said. Surya would not have had time for such grisly work, Surya was not a killer.

Shan forced himself to gaze at the bloody bone. The blood was fresh, but the bone was not. It was the kind of bone traditionally used by artisans to make kangling, the trumpets of Tibetan ceremony. There were three more bones, leaning against the wall. They must have been left there decades earlier, by one of the Zhoka craftsmen. But they had been rearranged. The center bone was vertical, the other two leaning against it, forming an arrow that pointed to a symbol drawn in blood a few inches above. A ten-inch oval had been drawn, its long axis parallel to the floor. In the center of the oval was a square, inside the square was a circle.

He stepped toward the meditation cell and discovered two four-inch-long rectangles cut into the floor, each nearly two inches deep, eighteen inches apart and eighteen inches from the wall. They could have held the legs of an altar or some sort of platform. On the floor of the cell was a pile of debris covered by coarse dust-encrusted sackcloth. Under the cloth, and scattered around it, were shards of pottery. Dried, shriveled kernels of barley, years, probably decades, old. A plank, dried and split, five inches wide and sixteen long. He looked back toward the pool of blood. Someone’s life had drained out onto the floor. But where was the body? There was no trail of blood except that left by Surya and Dawa, and if Surya had carried the body somewhere the front of his robe and underrobe would have been soaked with blood. The hysterical girl must have fled after falling into the blood. Surya himself must have dropped the lamp, far from the sunlight above, still burning, not bothering to retrieve it. Because he had been frightened by something he had seen? Or by something he had done? No, Shan told himself again, it was not possible that the gentle Surya, who often blessed Shan’s feet so they would not crush insects, could kill another human being.

Shan studied by the debris. The slab of wood was deeply cracked, but it had been carved with an intricate pattern of deer leaping through trees. It was the cover of a peche, he realized, one of the unbound books traditionally used in Tibet. He leaned the wooden cover against the wall and lifted the cloth, revealing more shards of pottery and a small unbroken clay image of the compassionate Buddha. Beyond it, lying against the wall, was a long piece of parchment, a leaf from a peche. He gently lifted the long narrow paper and read it, then looked up, staring into the darkness a moment. He read it again, turning it over, examining it with the lamp drawn closer. It was impossible, like so much else that had happened that day. The text was old, though not from a wood block, the traditional method of printing a peche. It was in blue ink, as if from a quill or pen, in a bold ornate hand that at first glance had the appearance of the elegant Tibetan script used for scriptures. But it was not in Tibetan, it was in English. Death is how deities are renewed, the parchment said. Know, then let go. Lift the brush a thousand thousand times then let it sink to the stone. Holy Mother, Holy Buddha, Holy Ghost. Death is how deities are renewed.