The Story Of The Stone by Barry Hughart Read Free Book Online

mixed with the trivia, but none had been found.
    “Until Brother Squint-Eyes found a curiosity,” Master Li muttered.
    “His body lay there, and no one else was in the room,” the abbot said. “One glance told us how intruders had entered, but the entry was impossible.”
    A side window that ran almost down to the floor opened upon a small garden. The bars in it were iron as thick as my wrist, but four of them — two on each side — had been squeezed together like soft warm candles to form entrances.
    Master Li raised an eyebrow, and I walked over and spat on my hands. I could feel muscles strain all over my body as I tried to straighten the bars, but I might as well have tried to straighten crooked pine trees. I stepped back, panting.
    “So,” Master Li said, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes. “You heard a scream. You ran to the library. The doors were bolted from inside. You got a log and broke the door down. You entered and saw nobody. Behind the desk was the body of the librarian, with an expression of extreme terror on his face. The bars of the window had been squeezed together by some incredible force, making an entrance to the room. Then what happened?”
    The abbot was trembling again. “Venerable Sir, that's when we heard the sound. Or some of us did, since others couldn't hear it at all. It was the most beautiful sound in the world, but heartbreaking at the same time. It hurt us, and we wept, and then we started running after it. We had to. It was calling us.” He led the way out through the window to the garden, and Master Li grunted at the mass of sandal prints that covered any possible clue. We went out through a gate, and I realized we were on Princes' Path. It was very beautiful, and mixed with trees and flowers I had known all my life were strange ones I couldn't identify. Master Li pointed out one flower as being a golden begonia, and said there couldn't be more than three others in all
    
    
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    . The path was really a vast garden, and I began to get the feel of it when we reached a ridge and I could look across the valley and see the green line winding up the opposite hills. Master Li confirmed my thoughts.
    “The heirs of the Laughing Prince were appalled when they saw the destruction,” he said. They vowed to set things right if it took a thousand years, and Princes' Path was planted to conceal the scars from the acid works, in fact, the only reason the peasants of the Valley of Sorrows aren't spoiled rotten is that the Liu family is land-rich but cash-poor, and most of the cash goes toward maintaining Princes' Path and countless charities."
    The abbot stopped at the crest of a low hill. “We ran to this point,” he said. “Did I mention that the moon was very bright? We could not be mistaken in what we saw. Down below, down where the sound seemed to be coming from, we saw monks, but their robes were of clown's motley, and they were laughing and dancing beneath the stars. Normally we would have run for our lives, but the sound was summoning us and we had no choice but to obey. We ran on, and we came close enough to clearly see the clown robes although we could not see the faces because of the cowls. Then the monks danced into heavy brush and disappeared. Shortly afterward the wonderful-terrible sound stopped, and when we got through the brush, the dancing monks had vanished. In their place was something else.”
    We walked down and made our way through the brush, and we stopped in our tracks and stared. “I'll be the Stone Monkey,” Master Li said softly.
    Death had laid an icy finger across Princes' Path. In an area approximately thirty feet wide and five times as long, not one living thing could be seen. Trees were bare and dead and without even a trace of sap, as I discovered when I broke off a branch. Flowers were withered. Bushes might as well have been sprayed with engraving acid. Not even the grass had survived, and brown clumps broke off beneath our feet. It