Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Along the bottom of the leaf were painted more deer in the traditional Tibetan style, as well as small intricate figures of yak. He read it, stared at the bloody bone, and shivered. The peche leaf spoke of death like a poem, or a eulogy. It was decades old, perhaps a century or more. It had been dropped exactly where somebody, this day, had died. A coincidence, he would have said years earlier. But if Lokesh were with him the old Tibetan would have solemnly clapped his hands together and exclaimed how fortunate they were to be present when the movement of two wheels of destiny, however briefly, meshed together.
    Shan raised his lamp again. There were no more pages, nothing but more shards of pottery, shreds of sackcloth, and what may have been a shriveled apple. He examined the parchment once more, read its strange, haunting English words again, then rolled the leaf and placed it in his pocket. As he straightened he spied one last object, something small and dark in the corner of the little alcove. He pressed the lamp close to it. A cigar, the end of a narrow cigar. He picked it up with his fingertips and held it under his nostrils. The tobacco had a cloying, sweet odor, unlike any tobacco he had ever known. It was not a Tibetan thing, not even a Chinese thing. He wrapped it in one of the shreds of cloth. As he did so, something cold seemed to breath down his back. He turned and turned again, then quickly stepped back over the pool of blood into the chamber, noticing for the first time a subtle contour in the center of the pool, a small round shape, the relief of a disc perhaps an inch and a half wide, not much thicker than a coin. Using a chip of plaster he pushed it out of the blood, wrapped it in the corner of his handkerchief, and placed it in his pocket.
    Suddenly he was trembling. The strange events, and perhaps even stranger words, of the day swirled through his mind. Once—had it been only an hour ago?—Gendun had said the day was one of the most joyful of his long life. Today everything was going to end, Surya had said. Godkillers were in the mountains. This was a day when the world was changed. Zhoka held secrets that were dangerous to misunderstand.
    A low hollow moan abruptly rose from the darkness behind him, from the descending tunnel past the blood pool. He told himself it was the wind playing on some rock formation or a hole in the debris, but he found himself against the wall again, his skin crawling. Whoever, or whatever, had taken the body had done so in the last twenty or thirty minutes, and could still be lingering nearby. Shan extended the light toward the sound, but as he did so the lamp began to sputter, its fuel nearly exhausted. He darted through the doorway. By the time he reached the stair passage the flame was out.