Bible of the Dead

Chapter 36

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.