Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison Read Free Book Online

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.
    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