Authors: Tom Knox
Then at last as the sun died behind the summits, Tashi pulled off the rubbly road into the forecourt of a huge, old, wooden Tibetan house, in an entirely electricityless village, where an old snaggle-toothed crone smiled at the door. This was where they would sleep. They climbed steps above a barn of stored barley and steaming livestock, into the house itself.
A pungent fire of fresh-chopped wood burned beneath a cauldron in the centre of the shadowy darkness. Pieces of flattened pigface and racks of yak trotter hung drying from the eaves. Jake saw a portrait of Mao on a poster on one wall. On the opposite wall was a large photo of the Dalai Lama.
Thangkas
– Buddhist paintings – hung behind protective screens of rippling silk curtains.
Mao stared at him. The Dalai Lama stared at him. The cured flat pig faces hanging from the eaves stared curiously at him with their squashed brown cheeks and lashy little eyes, like the face of someone run over in a cartoon. Jake struggled not to think, obscenely, and upsettingly, of his sister. Why were these thoughts bombarding him. It was surely the witch, the
krasue
, unnerving him. From afar. But if he was bewitched he was going to fight it. He had to fight, for Chemda.
Even as he sat here, she could be on the slab, her brain vivisected.
Tashi said:
‘You are hungry?’
‘Yes.’
‘The old woman, she is friend of my aunt. She will feed us.’
The request was passed to the woman who nodded and called in turn to some pony-tailed granddaughters, who emerged like petite and nubile genies from the intense darkness. Food was served. The house was filling with Tibetans. The whole family was eating walnuts and boiled broad beans and yak chops and oily cubes of rancid pork fat in sesame.
Tashi wiped his greasy hands on his leather jacket, then he said:
‘OK I ask about his place. Balagezong.’
He spoke with the woman, she nodded. Then she looked at Jake and Julia and she shook her head. An angry sadness lurked in her dark expression.
Tashi explained:
‘She says it is very bad place? She says do not go. Men with scars live there, I not know what this mean.’
‘What?’
‘She says death is there. Much death there. Scarred men, ghost there. They live in heaven village. She say do not go.’ He repeated her words. ‘
Do not go to heaven villages.
Because you will not come back.’
Jake was undeterred by this unnerving description: heaven villages. He wanted information.
‘How far is it? Balagezong?’
Tashi sighed:
‘A few more hours only. But a dangerous road. Now we sleep. Maybe tomorrow you feel different and go home. I hope so.’
‘I will not. I will not feel different. We have to leave early.’
The Tibetan man shrugged, and smiled a lopsided smile.
‘You are in trouble, I can see. I will help. As we agreed.’
Tashi stepped into the shadows, sitting on a bench – he was talking in Tibetan to one of the girls. Flirting. Her soft little giggles filled the silence of the house under the Snow Mountains.
Night fell, quite abruptly. Jake wondered if that suddenness had something to do with the heart-straining altitude, but he couldn’t work out the science. He got up and stood at the glassless window watching the stars over the snowy summits and he reached in his pocket: miraculously he had obtained a frail trace of signal on his phone – grabbing the chance he called Tyrone and he whispered his news, his whereabouts, he whispered across the miles and the skies: because he just needed the sound of the American’s sardonic voice. The distant presence of a friend.
Tyrone did his job. He offered to fly to Yunnan himself to help and Jake said No but in his heart he wanted to say Yes Please.
The call ended. Dogs barked in the bitter cold outside. Jake retreated from the window. He lay down on some straw bedding next to Julia and he whispered some reassurance to her and somehow they slept.
He woke at dawn, or just before dawn: the sky was aurora’d with pinkish green at the very edges of the endless darkened blue. A noise had disturbed him. Everyone was asleep but the noise was Julia being sick; she was being sick at the bottom of the wooden steps. He rose and went to help, but she waved him away.
‘I am OK. Go back to sleep.’
He obeyed; and for once he did not dream.
Morning came harsh and stark and blue and cold and it was like waking up asthmatic, the air was so thin. He drank some black tea, his hands nursing the hot metal cup, and he looked at Julia’s pale face. The altitude was exhausting him, he wondered what it was doing to her.
‘Julia,’ he said, ‘You really have gotta stay here. Let me reconnoitre. You stay here, please?’
For the first time the Canadian woman seemed to succumb to some inner weakness. She nodded.
‘I don’t feel so good. At all. Maybe . . . OK maybe I rest just for today, then you will come and get me?’
‘Yes.’ said Jake. ‘I will check it out. Then come and get you.’
There was no mention of what Jake was going to do. He had no
idea
what he was going to do. He just had to keep moving and he hoped it would sort itself. He could see Chemda, lying on the table, her hair shaved, her scalp peeled back, an arc of skullbone removed.
They walked down the steps to the car. The view beyond the farmhouse yard, up the valley, was stupendous.
‘Now,’ said Tashi. ‘We go now. If we must go.’
Jake turned and hugged Julia. She was still pale and she was shivering. He said:
‘You should go back to Zhongdian. We can get you a lift.’
‘No. I’ll wait.
Find Chemda.’
She kissed him on the cheek and he got in the car with Tashi and waved goodbye and then they drove on down the winding high mountain road in silence. The plateaux and ranges stretched ahead of them. Jake took photos. He saw a bleached yak skull sitting in a brown meadow by a brown and frothing burn. The teardrop sky ached in its blueness. He felt like he was driving finally to heaven. A cold unwelcoming heaven.
‘OK,’ said Tashi, ‘this the dirt road the lady tell me about. This is where it get very dangerous. First down, then up, into the holy mountains. She say we take secret route, to this mountain, is mountain of the snow goddess. Heaven villages there, with the men. We go behind the mountain.’
He pointed at one vertiginous and beautiful peak: a slender pyramid of grey and ice against blue, immense and intractable, maybe 20,000 foot, streaked with white snow.
And yet they were heading
down
an awesome gorge. The drop was precipitous. It grew humid as they dropped, richer with oxygen, the jungle encroached, replete with mighty ferns and palm trees. A monkey hooted. Parrots alarmed the air with crimson feathers. The chasm was gut-numbingly deep, three kilometres, or more.
Then they bottomed out and they were ascending again. Switchbacking right and left and right and for an hour they did a dizzying ascent, back up to a plateau
.
They passed three humble villages, implausibly remote. Tibetan women in bare feet and embroidered turbans were sitting in a field digging turnips, the holy mountains rose behind.
‘These the heaven villages,’ said Tashi.
‘Why are they called that?’
‘Is the fog. Thick fog, so thick it go into houses. You wake up you are on a cloud, in heaven. And because when you reach this far, you never come back. Like you have died and you are in heaven.’
They left the heaven villages behind. Ahead of them the road forked. Tashi stopped for a moment and climbed from the car and surveyed the mountains, sniffing the air; he got back in and they took the smaller and humbler road. This lesser road was barely passable: it had once been paved, but the winds and rain had reduced it to a glorified goat path.
Yet they drove. The car protested and rumbled. A stubborn pair of yaks barred the road and they shooed them away with hoots and curses. The car span on, taking the switchbacks in tight sweeps. The track disappeared under a cataract; it seemed they were lost; but then Tashi pointed. Beyond the water, and a grove of trees, the road recommenced.
They drove, left and right, left and right. Climbing even higher into the sacred cirque of mountains, scraping gravel. Nearly spinning off the road. The anxiety rose with their ascent.
They were close now.
‘We have come around the mountain, from the back,’ said Tashi. He was not smiling. His face was twitching with nerves. He pressed the throttle. The final turn brought them out onto a flat yard of gravel space and a couple of dirty concrete shacks. Like very big urinals.
Tashi braked, the car stopped. What now? Jake peered through the dirty windscreen. The lunacy of everything he was doing began to hit home; as soon as he stopped moving – the stupidity kicked in. He wasn’t even armed. He didn’t even have a weapon. What did he expect to do? Walk into this place and rescue Chemda, like some superhero? Maybe he should have waited for Tyrone. Or something. Maybe he should have cooked up a plan. He squinted again. Through the dust.
What?
A group of men had emerged from the shack. Faces pointing towards Jake. They were running to the car.
They had scars on their foreheads.
‘Go!’ said Jake. Unnecessarily. ‘
Go!’
Tashi was already squealing the tyres, hurriedly backing away, an emergency turn. But the scarred men were at the car, one of them was yanking at Jake’s door, pulling the door open; Jake had the absurd sensation they were being attacked by apes, by a troop of primates; he felt himself tugged out of the seat by several hands – he shouted at Tashi, who was still swinging the wheel.
Jake was pulled clean away and he watched the wildly swinging car door clash against rock; the door was snapped clean off its hinges – the car swerved; the men were shouting; Jake was trapped by the hands, the men were holding him, but Tashi was thrashing a second reverse and then roaring away.
A cloud of descending dust.
Tashi had escaped, but Jake was captive. The men with the scars looked at Jake and they nodded and one of them said something in Chinese.
The others agreed.
‘Hui!’
Jake was briskly dragged into the shack. He writhed in the clutches of the men, he fought and he bit and he felt them punching him, wrenching his bones, brutally slapping him; despite his struggles, they were young, and many, and they beat him easily into submission.
Inside the shack it was dark. And big. The building extended into other grubby corridors. He glimpsed an iron bedstead in a far room. A rusty iron bedstead with a small machine sat next to it. A grimy machine, like a food processor, with tubes emanating. The clear plastic tubes were smeared red on the inside. For the last time he struggled and wrestled. Pointlessly.
The men hoisted him like a sack into this furthest room, then dropped him with a painful crack onto the iron bedstead. He felt the pain clang through his body. Now he was being strapped to the bed, with tight leather restraints. Tight on his wrists. He stared at the stained ceiling. He fought the reality. But the bedstead was like the bedstead in Tuol Sleng. Where they used to . . . where they used to . . .
Jake shunted away the idea, but the fear was loosening his grip on his bowels.
He felt the brief sharp pain of a steel needle in the crook of his arm. A second jab of pain told him the other arm was also being brusquely pricked. Tubes were now attached to the inserted needles. Jake watched the men intubating him. The tubes recalled his dreams, the nightmares: the tongue of the
krasue
, the many tongues of the
krasue
, probing inside – seeking his innards.
The machine was switched on, with a casual flick. It was now buzzing and humming. It was of course a pump. An electric pump.
The men looked at each other and a shrug passed between them. Job Done.
The machine suctioned and pumped, and rocked very slightly from side to side, a small but effective electric pump just doing its humble task.
Jake twisted against his leather restraints and gazed down at his feet, strapped to the iron frame of the bed. Now he could see bulky glass canisters, beyond the end of the bed. The vessels were slowly and imperceptibly filling up with bright scarlet blood, the blood was dripping down the inside of the glass vessels. Making fat carafes of blood. Flagons of crimson rich blood.
Jake’s blood.
The electric pump ticked over.
Jake began to gasp, to croak, to stridulate. He was dryly croaking as the machine vacuumed and sucked the lifeforce from his flesh. The minutes passed, then an hour. His rich red precious blood filled one carafe then another, and then another. The pump ticked over. He was croaking and the ceiling was dirty and he felt like he was being abraded from the inside out.
All the blood was being sucked from his body, ounce by fluid ounce, draining into the bottles. They were taking all his blood, like the Khmer Rouge in Tuol Sleng, on the hill of the poison tree, draining the blood of their prisoners.
He rasped, in his agony, like a dying insect.
Julia waited wearily and headachingly in the house on the road to Balagezong. For two days she stood cold and frightened at the window, like a fisherman’s wife, waiting for a boat that would not return, gazing out to sea after a fearful storm. She watched the herdsmen patrolling the mountain paths, she saw a man carrying a huge creamy red-and-yellow yak skeleton on his back.
She counted the stones on the roofs of the houses, she watched the black necked cranes glide against a blank white sky.
Where was Jake? She retreated to her bed of straw, as her fever worsened: she was half convulsed with cramps, listening semi-consciously to the creaks and moans and smells of the Tibetan farmhouse. Her cold limbs shivered. The woman with the teeth came across and medicated her with cups of warm barley wine poured from a tin thermos.
She lost track of time. The only indications of daytime were the spears of light, through holes in the timbered ceiling, shining on the flattened pig faces – plus the noise of occasional laughter and singing outside. And then even these dim sounds melted into a white noise of pain and fever.
The smell of yak dung rose from the livestock below. The fever climbed inside her bones. The cups of yak butter tea tasted like her own bile. She lay back in pain. The loneliness was intense. No one spoke English, she had no one to talk to. The old woman and her granddaughters came and went in her dreams, her half dreams, her day dreams.
Men came and went. A Frenchman. A Canadian. An Englishman. But through her perspiration she realized she was hallucinating – it was the Tibetan men, stomping into the house in the evening to eat their chicken feet and spit the bones in the fire, brutal daggers tucked under the
chubas
. Some of them gazed in curiosity at the white woman, the woman dying in their house; they stared at her stomach.
Amidst her dreams she wondered if they could see through her – see the faint skeleton of the child she never had, inside her red uterus, like a fossilized bird with its Jurassic feathers preserved in soft red sandstone. Like a ghost baby, a smoke baby. The grandchild she never gave her parents.
The ghost of her guilt.
The men spoke quietly and a young man sang a wistful song, and she tried to understand the snatches of Tibetan.
‘
Cho
.’
‘Kara.’
‘Chinghai . . .’
Her dreams melded. Dreams of Alex, making love to her by a lake, with frightening flocks of storks and cranes. She was trembling all the time now. Once she woke in a swinish perspiration and she saw the old woman eating blue plums. The plum juice drooled down the woman’s face. Where was Jake? Where was Tashi? They had gone, gone for ever, everyone was gone, smoked, ghosted. The kippered pig face stared across the room.
Then it rained. The winter storm came charging down the valley like a phantom cavalry, a regiment of ghostly winds and sabres of rain, slashing at the barley frames like Mongol hordes, agitating the vertical prayer flags into a frenzy. The village men stood at the doorway picking their teeth with their daggers, staring at the sheets of rain.
Was she going to die?
She almost didn’t care – until she cared. At some virtually unnoticed moment – five or six days in, maybe seven, she summited, she topped the mist-shrouded mountain of her illness without even realizing.
The fever abated.
After that Julia slept properly, undreamingly, and when she woke she felt a firmness in her bones, an energy returning. She sat up. She stood. For a second. Then she slumped into the wooden seat by the fire where she rubbed her stiff legs and eased her aching neck; before sorting through her bag.
There. Julia examined her phone. And sighed. The battery had died long ago. She dropped the useless phone.
What was she going to do? Wrapped in an embroidered blanket, she shuffled to the window.
Her hopes had finally gone, likewise the rains. Jake was not coming back. Maybe he was dead. Surely he was dead. But she
had
to help him, just in case. She wasn’t going to stop now. She’d come this far, the idea of turning back seemed perverse. She had to help him, and help Chemda. It was her duty.
Julia gazed.
The corn was laid on the top of the houses to dry in the new winter sunshine. Two Tibetan men were singing a song as they worked in the yard, sawing logs. A strange eerie dancing song. She followed the tune with her mind, gazing along the valley, sensing an idea. What she needed was electricity, therefore what she needed was a big building, somewhere that might have a generator, and a socket, so she could recharge her cellphone.
The biggest building in the valley was large and tiered and far away and painted white. A monastery? It looked, from this great distance, like a monastery from a picture of Tibet. The palace in Lhasa.
She crossed the room and asked the old woman, who was busy shelling walnuts. What was the place at the end of the valley? The woman shrugged, toothlessly, and smiled, blankly. Of course she did not understand. Julia signalled, and pointed and gestured:
big building. Up there?
Miraculously the woman nodded and smiled properly and said:
‘Songzanlin!’ And then the old lady did a praying motion with her head, like a Buddhist monk, chanting.
It was a monastery, a lamasery. Julia hurried downstairs and out into the dry dry sun, her head still faintly swimming with the altitude, and she cadged a lift from a youth on a motorbike: riding pillion along the dun hard valley. She barely knew what she was doing, or why: maybe a non existent God the Father would speak to her at the lamasery. Guide her movements. Certainly she needed a socket for her phone and the only likely place in the entire valley was the most significant building of all.
The drive took a frustrating twenty minutes. Past a trail of Tibetan tribeswomen carrying enormous wicker baskets of grasses on their backs. Bent over by the burden.
Songzanlin monastery was tucked hard against a mountain side and it was tiered and bleached and dazzling in the sun, like a terrace of snow mountains, like the very mountains which it faced across the sloped brown fields. The ancient steps up to the white monastic buildings were steep and knackered. A few stray pilgrims were climbing the steep archaic steps on their knees. A yellow-robed monk was playing a trumpet made from a human thighbone, Jerichoing the heavens.
Julia ascended to the temple yards, where some old men span the prayer wheels, the fat brass cylinders that shone in the sun as they revolved, squeaking on their ancient axles. Prayer flags of red and faded yellow and a washed-out blue fluttered and rippled in the stiff cool breeze, by the ancient white stupa.
She entered one of the chambers: the temple halls of Songzanlin. It was wooden, old and enormous. She felt stupid and angry now. There was no electricity here. The lamasery was as ancient and isolated and powerless as the village down the vale. Monks were kneeling on rugs and praying with palmed joss sticks, chanting their nodded incantations, whispering in sacred Pali beneath the lotussed statues of the Buddha, besides the gilded frescoes. Smoking butter lamps scented the darkness, men in maroon robes came and went, wearing tall yellow hats.
Julia coughed the smoke and stepped outside, desperate and defeated. She had been defeated. Jake was maybe dead. Chemda cut open. It was all her fault. The guilt was a pain in her mind, an actual headache, in her frontal cortex, in the centre of her chest, her stomach.
What now?
An intricately carved red and yellow wooden platform was standing in front of the largest hall, it was filled with sand – and the sand had been planted with a hundred vermillion shoots of incense. The perfumed smoke trailed in wisps into the blue and sunny haze.
She turned.
A face.
A recognized face.
It was the killer.
Coming towards her. The young Asian woman. It was her. At last.
It was Chemda and yet it wasn’t. The white face had gone. Now it
was
Chemda.
‘But . . .’ said Julia. ‘But . . .’
Was this it then? Was this where she was going to die? Here in Songzanlin monastery?
‘Julia Kerrigan?’
Yes, the voice was American. It was definitely
her.
Chemda and not Chemda. So nearly identical. Long hair, deep eyes, only a strangeness in the bones spoke of a difference. The killer was a few yards away, approaching, across the terrace of the monastery. How did she know Julia’s name?
Julia swivelled – and she ran. She ran to give Jake and Chemda a final slender chance; but as she ran she tripped on the steps at the top of the great processional stairway of Songzanlin and she fell. A monk shouted, she was falling, the sun was bright, she kicked and smashed against the steps and she cracked her head with a blinding pain and the agonies shot through her back.
Get up.
She had to
get up.
But she couldn’t move. Something was wrong, something had snapped. The killer was running down the many steps towards her, but all Julia could see was the astonishing litres of blood.
Running and pooling between her legs.