Bible of the Dead

Chapter 39

She watched the blood run between her legs. A viscous and violet-red pool of sadness. Then she felt strong arms behind her, helping her to her feet. It was the killer, the Chemda lookalike, helping her.

Helping her?

Two monks ran over, and assisted Julia down the last steep and broken steps of the lamasery, to the broken street. Julia felt everything blur at the edges, like she was staring through a vaselined lens at the world. A car was waiting, an incongruously new car; Julia was gently lifted into the back seat. The killer drove.

The car raced the pot-holed roads. Julia was trying not to cry in pain, trying not to cry in despair. Someone had given her a large white rag of cloth, she clutched it between her thighs, sopping the blood. The pain surged, she gazed urgently out of the window, where Tibetan Yunnan was immortally unconcerned by her situation.

The barley dried in the sun, stretched across the tilted wooden frames. Tibetan women marched along carrying their wicker baskets of wood, singing and laughing as they worked. And Julia was bleeding from her loins in the rear of a car being driven by a murderer.

Back at the house. She was back at the house with the snaggle-toothed old woman and the pretty granddaughters and the piles of dung drying in the byres under the bedrooms.

Smiling and frowning, the women attended to her: cleaning and rinsing and bathing her, using hot water from the tin thermos, hot water from battered saucepans heated over the brazier. The pig faces stared down, their eyes batting little lashes of surprise. The women were well-meaning and ill-equipped and they tried to tell her, via sign language, what she already knew: she had miscarried. She had been pregnant. It all made sense now. The sickness, the throwing up: even the way the monkey reacted in Abkhazia – to her ‘unusual pheromones’.

Pregnant. Pregnant by Alex. But not pregnant any more. She had almost fulfilled her parents’ dearest desire; but she had failed them, again. Ghost children, smoke children: she had given birth to smoke children.

‘Dzo -’

The women were talking in Tibetan. Julia was cleaned and finally dressed and then they carefully sat her, like a large fragile doll, on the long wooden bench, so she could stare out of the window. But Julia was looking the other way: staring across the room. At the killer. All the time the killer had lurked there, in the shadows, between the thangkas and the picture of the Dalai Lama.

Julia didn’t care about anything any more. The killer wouldn’t have helped Julia if she meant Julia harm. Julia wanted to talk to this strange silent young woman. This brutal murderer.

The terror had gone – and grief was taking over the place. Grief and silence and emptiness. The old Tibetan house was empty, apart from Julia, and the murderer. Murderess. It.

‘Who are you?’

A soft breeze rippled the silken thangkas.

‘Soriya.’ The killer spoke, and walked closer. Her accent was quite clearly American. ‘You know you had a mis carriage? It’s not life threatening, the pregnancy was not advanced.’

‘Why did you help me?’

‘I know pain. I understand pain.’

Piercing curiosity filled Julia’s thoughts. Maybe the killer, Soriya – would explain. And Julia yearned for an explanation, for the truth, for something to fill the emptiness that now grew inside her, the horrible void; the tears came rising to her surface, but she fought them.

‘OK.’ Julia sat further along the bench. Inviting this woman – this woman? – Soriya – to sit beside her.

Soriya sat down. She was svelte. Young, athletic, wiry. She had Chemda’s beauty – but differently. Dark angry eyes.

The sun was slipping behind the sawtoothed horizon. A cold Siberian wind was chasing down from the Snow Mountains, reminding the black necked cranes of the winter they had escaped.

Gazing directly at Julia the Khmer woman took off her wig of long dark hair.

Underneath she was completely bald. She had a very faint scar on her forehead.

Julia gasped:

‘They cut you.’

‘Yes.’ Soriya paused, and continued: ‘Or so I have now calculated. Finally. Someone abandoned me. Chemda’s mother, Madame Tek. Chemda’s mother is my mother -’

‘You are her sister.’

‘Almost… Almost.’

The Khmer woman’s smile was shaded with an intensity of pain.

‘Growing up in America as a child, I was wild, unhappy, suicidal. I was moved from foster home to foster home. Unwanted. Because I was disturbed, and violent. Not comfortable in my skin. I tried to find out. Who my real parents were but the records were destroyed. I was just another orphan from Cambodia, another product of the chaos, after the Khmer Rouge fell. But my sense of dislocation was worse than that. And why was I scarred? What was wrong with my mind?’

‘How…?’

‘I am Chemda’s twin sister. And yet I am not. I cannot explain now. I don’t want to explain. I am strong and I am clever and athletic. I was recruited. Special forces. Then I left the army. But I still wanted to kill. I couldn’t control myself. Barely, I controlled myself.’

The light in the house was fading fast. Soriya’s speech was dark and unhurried and compelling and Julia forgot about her miscarriage and then she remembered and she listened to Soriya:

‘I went to Cambodia. Researching my past. Desperate. I found a guy called Ponlok. Begging, near Tuol Sleng.’

‘Ponlok. I have heard of him -’

‘I saw the scar on his head. We shared the very same scar. He told me what he knew, that he had heard a rumour. That the Khmer Rouge tried the surgical experiments on babies, on one baby in particular. He told me I looked like Chemda Tek. He told me it happened in Anlong Veng. I went to Anlong Veng. I found the doctor who did the trick. Madame Tek had twins. The doctors did a switch on the mother, told her the second girl was stillborn, a miscarriage, I was whisked away.’ Soriya’s eyes softened, for a second, in the twilight. ‘I am sorry for what happened to you today.’

Julia did now know what to say. She struggled towards a reply.

‘It does not compare to… what happened to you.’

Soriya shrugged.

‘No. It does not. The doctor told me, in Anlong Veng, that I was carried off. Like a prize. The prize was me. They took me away and tried the experiment on me, they wanted to see how I would fare compared to my twin sister. She was the control. It was science. But it went wrong. I was a disturbed baby, feral, epileptic. A failure. They gave me away. Someone adopted me from America. That’s how I ended up in America, age two, just thrown away like a spoiled chicken steak. In America I got worse. The fighting. Disturbances. Fits and seizures.’ Soriya paused. ‘When the doctor in Anlong Veng told me all of this I was… even angrier. I threatened him. I was brutal. He told me that one man could explain more, about the experiments, the theory that had mutilated me. Hector Trewin. So I went to England and I tortured some of the truth out of him. And he gave me the list of names and he told me about the western mission. The Marxists. He didn’t tell me why they did what they did, but he told me that they helped, helped the communists do their experiments. And so I resolved. To kill everyone. If I had to kill I was going to kill all the people that did this to me -’ She gestured at the scar on her head. ‘They made me this way. So I have been slowly killing them. One by one. I have many passports. One of them says Chemda Tek.’

‘You travel as Chemda?’

‘It is easy. When I am dressed like her I am identical – unless you look very close.’

Julia could see this was true. Only close up, sitting two feet away, could she properly see a difference in Soriya’s face. A faint haze of facial hair maybe. A stronger jaw perhaps. The mind affecting the brain? But how?

And yet the face was beautiful, just like Chemda’s. Beautiful and dark, and murderous, and scarred.

‘What about… what happened in Paris?’

‘I do not like killing anyone I do not have to kill. The archivist, at the museum? That was wrong. I am ashamed of that. My temper still surges, I still have… many cognitive problems. Violent urges. I can’t help it. But I am sorry I had to do that, and sorry I frightened you. I have been aware of you and the English guy, for a while. And Chemda. Of course. Following you. Watching you. I followed Barnier to his apartment block.’

A puzzle presented itself to Julia. She ignored the pain in her lower stomach and asked: ‘How did you find me here? Why did you find me here?’

‘Two westerners in Zhongdian? Not hard. A few days ago I tracked down a young Tibetan. Tashi. Rumours said he had taken two gwailos, two white people, to Balagezong. Neither came back. He told me Jake was taken by men in the mountains, he said you were here in this house. He was very very frightened. I decided to come and find you.’

‘Why?’

An evening breeze kicked at Soriya’s fake black hair.

‘I know who you are. An archaeologist. You have the truth.’

‘What?’

‘All along, all through this, I have been trying to find out why they did this to me – what was the point in cutting me open. Trewin refused to say, even at the expense of his life. No one would tell me. I tried to find out more. At the museum, in Paris. I failed. But Barnier, when it happened, he tried to bargain for his life, and he told me you and he had worked it all out. But the doorman disturbed me. I had to act quickly. I killed him. Had to. But that meant he couldn’t explain. That leaves you. Only you can tell me what happened. Tell me, please. Why did they do this to me?’

Julia hesitated, for a long time. Then she explained. Softly, firmly, lucidly, she elaborated the theory. Outside in the cold evening air the yaks walked along the valley in quiet processional.

At the conclusion, Soriya nodded.

‘Guilt. Conscience. Of course.’

And then she said nothing, gazing out at the brooding turquoise sky. Julia broke the silence:

‘Soriya, what are you doing here?’

‘It’s the only road to Balagezong.’

‘But how do you know all of this? You’ve been here, to these places, before?’

‘Yes.’ The killer’s voice was quite calm, but her eyes burned, staring at the very first stars. ‘I have been preparing for several years. I got an army pension. Battlefield wounds. Bought me the time, to do this.’

‘Preparing how? How did you prepare?’

No answer.

‘Preparing how,’ Julia repeated. ‘Learning to kill?’

Her question was brutal; Soriya shrugged, and said:

‘I didn’t have to learn that. The army taught me that. No. I tried to learn some languages. And then, as I said, I traced and tracked the different… communists. I also honed my skills over time. Faked suicides. Learned to sedate: by disabling, then injecting. Methohexital. Carefully. Intravenously. You can’t just inject in the buttocks.’

‘And here?’

‘I have been here several times before. I came to Zhongdian, and then to Balagezong. Disguised. Preparing for today. OK. Today. You need to decide.’

‘Decide what?’

‘Tomorrow I am going to Balagezong. The last chapter of the story.’

Julia tried to speak; Soriya raised a small, strong, dark-skinned hand.

‘I am leaving tomorrow morning at dawn and it is unlikely I’ll be coming back this way. So I’ll be gone and no one will see me again. But I can’t just let you go back to Zhongdian. And call the police. So my friends here will make sure you stay put.’

‘Imprison me?’

‘Yes. You won’t be harmed. But you won’t be able to leave. Not for a week. By which point my task will be done. Finished. Either way.’

‘So…’

‘The alternative. There is an alternative. If you want, you can come with me. And you can maybe find a way to save your friends.’

Julia protested:

‘But how? How can I save them?’ ‘I have no idea. But I give you the choice because you gave me the truth. You don’t have to trust me, I am a killer, after all.’

The wind carried scents of pine and ice through the glassless window. The darkness was fanged with frost.