Bible of the Dead

Chapter 37

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.