Beautiful Ghosts (39 page)

“A stair!” Liya cried.

“But it leads nowhere,” Corbett pointed out.

Shan stepped onto the first peg, then the second, bending to fit under the ceiling. At first the rock above appeared to be solid but as he probed with his light, pushing at several spots, a piece of the ceiling lifted. “It’s wood,” he explained. “A door.” The hatchway had been carefully carved and painted to look like the stone roof, its edges irregular, matching a curving seam in the rock. Shan pushed the cover out of the way and illuminated a chamber above. Musty, incense-laden air drifted down as he stepped back off the makeshift ladder.

He turned, gesturing for Lokesh to have the honor of leading them into the ancient chambers above. But a slender figure burst into the room, hit the first rung with a leap and with a blur was up and into the shadows overhead. The only sign he had been there was a small bright object that fell from his pocket as he scrambled up the ladder.

Corbett picked the object up and examined it, an elegant silver figure of a god. “Your son,” the American said to Shan, “has very good taste.”

The small entry hall on the second level was lined with paintings of demon protectors. Beyond it, however, was not a curving tunnel as below but a sprawl of arches, entries to small chapels, each opening into at least two other chapels. It was a labyrinth.

“There still must be a ring shape to the design, a chain of chapels that circles the rest,” Lokesh said. “Just hidden in the chaos.” He gestured toward the largest of the paintings in the hall and the words beneath it.

Shan recognized Atisha, one of the greatest of Tibetan saints, framed by smaller images of lesser saints, each in a little square. Atisha wore the close-fitting contoured cap ending in a point that was associated with him. The smaller images were in the traditional formal style, but Atisha sat in a relaxed, asymmetrical pose, one foot extended beyond the edge of the large square that surrounded him, as if he were about to step out of the painting. The painting had a whimsical air. As he stepped closer to it his foot knocked another large peg. On the floor in front of him were four of the long wall pegs, as if someone had climbed up and pulled the pegs out behind them to conceal their passage.

“The greatest meditation,” Liya said. Shan looked up to see her reading a line of text below the painting. “The greatest wisdom.” That was all.

“It’s an abbreviation,” Lokesh observed in a contemplative voice, “a summary. The full verse goes ‘The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go, the greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.’”

Yao pulled out the rough map he had made of the lower ring, and turned it over, sketching the chamber they occupied.

“And here,” Lokesh continued, pointing toward more writing under a mendicant’s staff suspended on hooks over one of the doorways. “‘It is the only thing that is ours yet we look for it elsewhere,’” he read. “An old teaching. It means we carry the truth with us, just don’t recognize it.”

Shan took at step into the maze of chapels. “Rice,” he said, looking at Corbett, who carried the food supply.

The American looked at him quizzically, but silently opened the pack and handed Shan a small white cloth sack. Shan pulled open one corner. “We must stay together,” he said as he slid the cover over the hatch that led to the lower floor. “From here we will make a trail,” he explained, sprinkling a line of rice as he moved.

They had reached the fourth chamber when Yao called Shan’s name. Shan looked away from another of the rich paintings to see that the inspector’s light was aimed at a black cylinder on the floor, a metallic lamp matching the ones the soldiers had packed for them, its lens and bulb broken. It was the one Ko had carried.

Corbett studied the floor around the light. There was dust on the floor, from crumbling plaster overhead, showing patterns of bootprints in the dust. “He was running,” the American said. “He must have looked back and hit the wall.” Corbett gestured toward the pillar that separated the two doorways in front of them.

Shan stared into the blackness ahead. Without a light Ko could fall to his death, could wander aimlessly in the eerie labyrinth, could even stumble into the thieves, the killers, provoking a violent reaction.

He saw movement to his side, and watched as Dawa pulled Lokesh’s arm. “Aku, you are right!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper. “Some of the gods are still alive!” She bent and pointed, causing the old Tibetan, then Shan, to squat to make sense of her words. They saw nothing, but then Dawa took Shan’s light and held it low to the floor, creating a new pattern of shadows. At first Shan saw only smudges along the edge of the dust, but then he realized they were in a line. And at the end of two of the smudges were small ovals in an arc. The fresh prints of bare feet, extending into the darkness, lost as the dust disappeared and the floor became smooth bare rock again. Gendun never wore his boots inside a temple.

As Shan stared into the blackness ahead he became vaguely aware of a discussion behind him, of Corbett asking Liya where the clue was, insisting there had to be one, of Liya futilely asking Lokesh the same question. But as Shan turned toward his old friend he saw Lokesh was lost in one of the raptures that periodically seized him, staring at another painting of Atisha the gentle saint. His hands were together at his chest, the heels and fingertips of each hand touching, the fingers bowed outward as if clasping an invisible sphere. It was the treasure box mudra.

Yao began walking deeper into the network of chapels, busily sketching the layout.

“We should go now,” Shan said to Lokesh. The old Tibetan seemed not to hear. But when Dawa grabbed a fold in his shirt and gently pulled, Lokesh followed the others, walking like a blind man, the smile still on his face, his hands still acknowledging the treasure. Not the treasure the others hoped to find, Shan knew, but the treasure the ancient paintings had already deposited in Lokesh’s heart.

Shan gazed at the painting until, looking about, he saw that he was alone. But as he took a step someone behind him made a small murmuring sound. Corbett was there, with his light out, looking at the ancient saint with the same longing awe that Shan had often seen on the faces of old Tibetans.

“It doesn’t feel like we should be here,” the American said in a barely audible voice.

“This is where we will find them,” Shan said. “The criminals you seek.”

“I don’t mean it that way.”

Shan studied the American. “Not in an investigator’s way, you mean.”

Corbett nodded slowly and looked into the darkness. “Somehow I feel like this is the farthest from the world I have ever been, or ever will be. Lokesh was right. It’s more real than real. People sat here centuries ago and did things more important than we will ever do.”

Shan stayed silent a long time. Corbett’s words were like a prayer, offered to the deities. “Lokesh sometimes speaks of true places,” he said at last, “where you can glimpse the essence of the earth, or life as it was meant to be.”

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.