Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

As she saw Shan's clothing a sharp hiss of air escaped her lips. "We will need identification, Comrade."

Shan kept studying the books. "They said to leave it at the front desk. We have much work here." He gestured to a chair. "Perhaps you would like to help."

The woman spun about and disappeared down the hall. Tamdin, the book said, Code 4989. Set One from Shigatse gompa, 1959. Set Two from Saskya gompa, dated only fourteen months earlier. He walked quickly to the corridor and began checking the doors again. The third one opened onto descending stairs.

The basement shelves rose from the dirt floor to the ceiling, crammed with boxes of wood, wicker, and cardboard. They were arranged by inventory number as the girl had explained. He darted down the rows, desperately scanning the numbers at the end of each shelf. Suddenly there was a new sound, the unmistakable sound of running feet on the floor above.

He found the 3000 series, and kept running. Then the 4000. Shan pulled a box from the shelves. It held an incense burner. He began to run, and stumbled onto his knees. There were shouts upstairs. He found a shelf marked 4900. A set of golden horns extended from a box. The mask of Yama. Frantically he checked the boxes. They were on the stairs now, shouting. Another row of lights was illuminated, much brighter. Then he had it. Tamdin, the box said. Tamdin, demon costume, Saskya gompa. It was empty.

Someone yelled nearby. There was a white index card taped to the top of the box. He tore it off and ran away from the sounds of the searchers. There was a door up a shorter flight of stairs, showing daylight at the bottom.

It was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder and old wood splintered. He fell outward onto the ground. As he lay blinking in the painful sunlight someone jammed a boot into his back, then reached down and placed handcuffs on his wrists.

The first syllable of weak protest was still on his lips when a truncheon slammed into his forehead, spattering blood. "Hooligan shit," his captor spat before he spoke into a hand radio.

The blood that trickled into his eyes prevented him from seeing how many there were. They were Public Security, he had no doubt, but they seemed confused. From behind him, as he was pushed into a gray van, there were arguments about whose prisoner he was, about his destination. The first two didn't use place names. "The long bed," one of them said. "Wires," argued another. But a third man joined them. "Drabchi," he said, in the tone of an order, referring to the notorious political prison northeast of Lhasa. Prison Number One, it was formally called, where the high-ranking officials of the Tibetan government had once been held.

It was over. Sungpo would die. Shan would have new wardens. Eventually, if Tan did not abandon him, he might be returned to the 404th, with five or ten years added, but only after a Public Security interrogation and the stay in the infirmary that would follow. Who, he wondered in some remote corner of his mind, would be recruited to express the people's disappointment in his socialist development? I'm a hero, Shan would tell his captors. I lasted twelve days on the outside.

The blood was in his mouth now, and the pain of the wound began to surge through his stupor. The van was moving. A siren erupted, painfully loud. They were on a fast road, accelerating. He blacked out. Suddenly there was a shout, and he heard the sound of breaking wood and chickens squawking in terror. He felt the van slam on its brakes and heard the men in front leap out.

There were furious shouts from the front of the van. Then someone climbed into the driver's seat and the van was moving in a Uturn. The siren was cut and the vehicle made a series of a rapid turns, then it pulled to an abrupt stop. The rear doors were flung open and four hands reached in for him. He was half carried, half dragged into the back seat of a car, which instantly pulled away.

Slowly, with dreamlike motions, he wiped the blood from his eyes and pulled himself up. It was a large car, an older American sedan. The driver wore a wool cap over his head. When they pulled into the broad thoroughfare that led out of town the man dangled a small key over his shoulder. As Shan unlocked the handcuffs the man removed the cap to reveal a head of thick blond hair.

"I didn't know-" Shan began, paralyzed by confusion. He pulled out his shirttail to wipe away the blood. "Thank you," he offered in English. "Are you Jansen?"

The man shook his head and muttered to himself in a Scandinavian tongue as he drove slowly through the traffic, careful not to attract attention. "No names," he replied in the same language. "Please. No names." On the floor beside him Shan recognized the bag he had carried to Lhasa. The skull from the cave shrine.

"How could you know?" Shan asked after five minutes.

Jansen had sunk into a depressed silence. "I'm just taking you to the highway somewhere. Your friends will be on the highway, they said."

"Why?"

"Why?" Jansen pounded the steering wheel in anger. "You think I would have done it if I had known? With the knobs as thick as flies? Nobody said anything about knobs. They said for me to be there, that's all. Need to help the gentleman who brought all the information from Lhadrung." He shook his head. "Nothing like this has happened before. Help with the records, no problem. Give an old man a ride from Shigatse, no problem. But this-" He threw up a hand in frustration.

"The purbas," Shan realized. Somehow it had been the purbas. The little man he had seen on the street had not been alone. He had been a purba, Shan now understood. "But how could they know?"

"How do they know anything? Like telepathy."

The knobs had somehow known. The purbas had somehow known. Everyone seemed to know everything. Except him.

"Like telepathy," Shan repeated in a hollow voice. He looked out the window for a fleeting glance of the Potala as it faded into the distance. The precipice of existence.

"Worst they do, they deport me," Jansen muttered to himself.

Shan lay back on the seat. He found a paper towel and held it to his forehead. "There was an obstruction pushed onto the highway," Shan said, as though to himself. "A farmer's cart, I think. The knobs got out to clear the path."

"They told me you need a ride. To wait with my car. Okay, I thought. A ride. I could ask you about the skull shrine. Suddenly one of them runs by. Tosses me a key. For you, he says. Then this Public Security van races down the alley and they throw you inside. Who are you? Why does everyone want you?"

"For me, he said. Did he use my name?"

"No. Not exactly. He said for the pilgrim."

"The pilgrim?"

"The name the purbas are using for you. Tan's pilgrim."

No, Shan was tempted to say. A pilgrim moves toward enlightenment. All I move toward is darkness and confusion. But suddenly a tiny flicker of light appeared. "You said you drove an old man from Shigatse? To Lhadrung?"

Jansen nodded distractedly. He was nervously watching the rearview mirror. "His wife had just died. He sang me some of the old mourning songs."

Rebecca Fowler and Tyler Kincaid were waiting fifteen miles out of the city, parked at a flat stretch of highway along the Lhasa River where truckers gathered to sleep. Jansen pulled in behind a decrepit Jiefang truck, from which four young men instantly emerged and escorted Shan to the Americans. Shan turned to thank Jansen, but the Finn just nodded nervously and sped back down the road.

The Jiefang pulled out in front of Kincaid and the driver motioned for the Americans to follow.

Fowler was silent in the front seat. At first he thought she was sleeping but then he saw her hands. They were twisting the road map, their knuckles white.

"It's like free-falling," Kincaid said, with unexpected excitement in his voice. "A hundred feet a second. Your heart's in your throat. The world's flying by." He glanced back at Shan. "It's them, right?" he asked with a huge grin.