The Lost Goddess

37

The heaven villages: unnerving images floated into Jake’s head. He resisted them; sourcing his resolve. Focusing on Chemda. 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 and sat down on a bench — 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 into his pocket for his cell phone.

But there was, of course, no signal. And who could he call, anyway? Who could really help? Tyrone? The police? He was hunted by police.

They were on their own.

Dogs barked in the bitter cold outside. Jake pocketed his phone and retreated from the window. He lay down on some straw bedding next to Julia and whispered some reassurance to her, and somehow they slept.

He woke at dawn, or just before dawn: the sky had an aurora of pinkish green at the very edges of the endless darkened blue. A noise had disturbed him. Everyone else 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 reconnoiter. You stay here, please?”

For the first time the American woman seemed to succumb to some inner weakness. She nodded.

“I don’t feel so good. At all. Maybe… OK, maybe I will 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 out. He could see Chemda, lying on the table, her hair shaved, her scalp peeled back, an arc of skull 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.”

Then she kissed him on the cheek. 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 creek. The teardrop sky ached in its blueness. He felt like he was driving finally to heaven. The heaven of another god, another time.

“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 gray and ice against blue, immense and intractable, maybe 20,000 feet, 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 kilometers or more.

Then they bottomed out and they were ascending again, switchbacking right and left and right, and for an hour they made 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 rising behind them.

“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 spun 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 windshield. The lunacy of everything he was doing began to hit home; as soon as he stopped moving, the stupidity kicked in. He wasn’t 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 one of the shacks. Faces pointing toward Jake. They were moving hesitantly. Staring. Shuffling. Uncertain. Bizarre.

And then they started running — toward the car.

Jake saw the scars on their foreheads.

“Go!” said Jake, unnecessarily. “Go!”

Tashi was already squealing the tires, hurriedly backing away, an emergency turn. But the scarred men were at the car, and one of them was yanking at Jake’s door, pulling it open; Jake had the absurd sensation that they were being attacked by apes, by a troop of primates; he felt himself tugged out of the seat by several hands. He shouted to Tashi, who was still swinging the wheel.

Jake was pulled clean away, and he watched the wildly swinging car door clash against rock and snap from 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 down the road.

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 a shack. He writhed in the clutches of the men, he fought and he bit and he struggled as they entered the darkness, the shadows of the building; but then he saw one taller man step over, contemptuously tutting, barging between the others. The man carried a large metal wrench. He raised it over Jake’s head. The crack of pain was intense; Jake ceased his struggling, barely conscious now.

He watched, head throbbing, with a kind of detachment, as they carried him into a further room and chained him to a rusty iron bedstead with a small machine sitting next to it. A small machine? It was a grimy machine, like a food processor, with tubes emanating from it. The clear plastic tubes were smeared red on the inside.

Smeared with blood?

The uncertain implications of this made him struggle, fitfully, just one last time: he rattled at his straps and yelled for help — but again the taller man came across and lifted the metal wrench. Yet again he clattered Jake, brutally. And this time he did it so hard that Jake blacked out at once.

He awoke — moments later, maybe minutes later — to a strange sensation. A sharp prickle. In his arm. He looked down. There. They were sliding a steel needle into the crook of his arm. A second jab of pain, on the other arm, followed the first. It was another long needle, sliding in.

Tubes were now attached to the inserted needles. Numb with horror, Jake watched the men intubating him. He felt the coarseness of the leather restraints, saw the spray of old blood on the ceiling. It was all from his dreams, from 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 one another and shrugged. Job done.

The machine suctioned and pumped, rocking very slightly from side to side, a small but effective electric pump just doing its hum ble task.

Jake twisted against his straps and gazed down at his feet, tethered to the iron bed frame. 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, dripping down the inside of the glass vessels. Making fat carafes of blood. Flagons of rich crimson 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. As the pump ticked over.

He rasped, in his agony, like a dying insect.