Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison Read Free Book Online Page A

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