by Knox, Tom
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 was tucked hard against a mountainside, tiered and bleached and dazzling in the sun, like a terrace of snow mountains, like the very mountains that it faced across the sloping 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, heralding the heavens.
Julia ascended to the temple yards, where some old men spun 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 lotused statues of the Buddha, beside 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 center of her chest, her stomach.
What now?
An intricately carved red-and-yellow wooden platform was standing in front of the largest hall, and it was filled with sand—and the sand had been planted with a hundred vermilion 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 toward her. The young Asian woman. It was her. At last. Confronting her as she had done in Paris. And this time there was no hiding, and no escape.
In the bright mountain light Julia could see the woman so much better. It was Chemda and yet it wasn’t. The white face had gone. Yet it was Chemda, almost.
“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 swiveled—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, 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 toward her, but all Julia could see was the astonishing liters of blood.
Running and pooling between her legs.
39
Death was near. Jake could sense his presence in the grimy room, Death the Bureaucrat with his infinite checklist, ticking the boxes, auditing names, eyes unsmiling behind his rimless spectacles as he went down his list. Baby smashed. Tick. Sister killed. Tick. Mother dead. Tick.
He could hear the gurgling noises of his own blood, the last of his blood, filling the glass bottles.
Yet even as he heard this he was staring at his mother. His dead sister and his dead mother floating under the Butcher’s Lake. Their white arms waving, beckoning him down, and down. He yearned to join them, at last, in the nothingness; to commingle his ashes with their ashes, to meld his nonexistence with theirs, to sing the song, to be standing in church as a small boy once again, still loved, still mothered, still holding his mother’s hand as she stared at the stained-glass window, gazing up in adoration: at the robes of blue, Saint Lucy blue, the blue of the Virgin.
The beloved mother. The forgiving mother. Who left him, who left him alone in this life. Until the only thing he could do was run away, so he had fled to the very ends of the earth—and yet here he had found her again, the mother he hated, he loved, he hated, and his sister, frail and floating, two floating female heads, disembodied, kinarees with wings on the sandstone of Angkor.
The blood siphoned and guttered, the last fluid ounces were draining into the bottles: like pilfered gasoline on the streets of Phnom Penh, on the road to Skuon, where the spider witch had cursed him.
The krasue sucked. She was inside him. The demon. Sucking out his blood. Like Chemda sucking him in bed with her seven black tongues.
He rasped. Choked. Shuddered. The last blood was nearly taken. He was inside. He was outside. He was blind now. He couldn’t see. His sight had gone. But he could hear voices. Was he hallucinating? One of the voices was Tyrone.
Tyrone? He realized he was purely dreaming now.
He blacked out.
40
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, as if she were staring through a smeared lens at the world. A car was waiting, an incongruously new car; Julia was gently lifted into the backseat. The killer drove.
The car raced over the potholed road. Julia was trying not to cry in pain, trying not to cry in despair. Someone had given her a large white rag of cloth, and she clutched it between her thighs, sopping the blood. The pain surged; she gazed urgently out 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 byre 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. All these years after the abortion she had thought she was infertile, that something had been damaged, internally, by the termination. So she never took precautions. Because she didn’t have to. And yet she was still fertile.
And yet again the baby had died. It all made bitter sense now. The sickness, the throwing up: even the way the ape reacted in Abkhazia—to her “unusual pheromones.”
Pregnant. Pregnant by Alex. But not pregnant anymore, and probably not pregnant ever again. She had almost fulfilled her parents’ dearest desire; but she had failed them, again. Ghost children, smoke children. All she did was produce 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 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.
Jul
ia didn’t care about anything anymore. 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.
“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 miscarriage? It’s not life-threatening, the pregnancy was not advanced.”
“Why did you help me? You tried to kill me before.”
“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 the surface, but she fought them.
“OK.” Julia sat farther 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 coming 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 had been 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. I was strong, and 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 as she listened to Soriya.
“I went to Cambodia. Researching my past. Desperate. I found a guy named 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 rumor. 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 not know what to say. She struggled toward 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 with my twin. 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 there, 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 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. And I am sorry for what I did. To you, too. 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 shadowing 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 belly 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. Rumors 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 was desperate. That’s why I went back into the museum, after I did it. After I killed the guy at the door. I wanted that box. Prunières de Marvejols. But you must have moved it. So I was still seeking the truth. And 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.
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 it 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 madwoman and a murderer, after all.”
The wind carried scents of pine and ice through the glassless window. The darkness was fanged with frost.
41
“Dude.”
The swamp mist cleared from the Butcher’s Lake of his mind. He was still alive.
“You had us worried. Big time.”
