The shaft of the wheel had been made from the thigh bone of the first head of the Avalokiteshvara Order. The wheel itself was cleverly carved from sections of that same holy man’s skull. Both had been overlaid with fine layers of hammered gold leaf, but there was no mistaking what they had once been. Next to the prayer wheel was a drinking cup, also made from the trepanned top of a monk’s skull. And next to that was a scroll composed of human skin, counting beads made from finger bones, a necklace fashioned of yellowed teeth…
The shelves surrounding him were full of such mementos mori, dozens of them, all neatly dusted and arranged.
Brrr. Jay shivered again, but this time the involuntary reflex was not caused entirely by the cold. He was alone physically, but not spiritually. The dead swirled around him unseen, traces of their essences clinging to that which had once been part of them.
Of course, before he met Saji, his western, rational, scientific mind would have been amused at such things, would have laughed at the idea of ghosts and revenants. But here in the depths of the monastery, science ran into its limits. Here, in this charnel dug deep into the raw stone heart of Mount Changjunga, here, in the bottom levels of these labyrinthine tunnels and chambers, here, in the Place of the Dead, Jay had more than once thought he heard the spirits call to him when, on rare occasions, he had managed to still his thoughts long enough to slip into meditation.
Spooky.
To sit alone in the Place of the Dead was definitely that.
Some of those who had left parts of themselves here had not been quite so holy as their contemporaries had thought them to be. Some of them had not advanced so far along the path as they had pretended. Their essences were strong and sinister, it was whispered, still full of unfinished business, of lusts and hatreds and fears, and woe to the initiate who sat among them unprepared. Legend had it that they would beat upon the walls of a student’s mind, clamoring to be let in, to experience once more the red pulse of life, to leach warmth from his spirit as the floor did from his body.
Saji had spoken to him of the fear Jay had felt on such occasions, especially when he had been recovering from his stroke.
“But of course you will be afraid,” she had said. “Fear is natural. Confront it often enough and it will lose its power over you. There will come a day when you will embrace fear as you would a woman, and it will serve you as well as the warmest love.”
Uh-huh. Right.
Jay realized that his breathing had become more rapid and shallow. He could feel fear rising in him like the mercury in a thermometer. He concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, focusing his awareness on his breath.
It seemed to him that the light had grown even more wan and pallid, that the darkness was pressing in hungrily around him. He noticed the skull of some ancient monk sitting on a nearby shelf at eye level. An unnamed artisan — perhaps existing at the same time as the monk, perhaps centuries later, there was no way of knowing — had outlined the skull’s eye sockets with filigreed silver and placed within them a pair of faceted rubies, each worth a king’s ransom. The gems glittered in the weak light, seeming somehow to focus on Jay with malign intensity…
Jeez, how good were you at creating a scenario when you could scare yourself with something you had made?
Jay turned his gaze from the skull, trying to still his mind, to concentrate on following the breath as it entered and left his body.
He sighed. There was no denying it — the monkey mind was in full control now. His thoughts scampered from one subject to another like primates leaping from tree to tree. Before his mental eye arose the image of his own infected computer, and of the anger he had felt at that. He wanted to hurt somebody. Oh, boy, did he.
He also wanted very much to be able to be calm, and to not let his emotions run away with him, and so he kept trying to get there. And if that had to include sitting on a frigid stone floor among human body parts, meditating and fighting off the attacks of restless spirits, then so be it. Saji could do it. He could learn how to do it, too.
Jay closed his eyes again. He blew his breath out through his left nostril, inhaled slowly through his right nostril. Once more he blanked his mind as best he could and sought the “om,” the sound of all sounds, the drone of the entire universe as it spoke with a single voice.
In the embrace of the “om,” it was said, all things were possible.
Even tracking down the lowly little hacker who’d created that virus—
He shook his head. There he went again. He was never going to get this. Never. Maybe he should—
His priority alarm chimed, kicking him abruptly out of the meditation scenario—
“What?”
“WE HAVE FOUND THE EVIL ONE,” his tracker imp said.
Jay grinned. He could get his head together later. Right now, he had a criminal to catch and a very personal score to settle.
21
“Smokey Jay” Gridley leaned against the cool blue tuck-and-roll Naugahyde cushion in a back booth in the disco, doing his best to appear relaxed as he watched the drug dealer and his buddies in a booth a dozen feet away. Thick smoke drifted through the air, with much of the bluish haze coming from low-grade marijuana, to judge from the smell.
The dealer was a pig. Jay guessed he weighed three, three hundred fifty pounds at least. His bald, bullet-shaped head gleamed in the flashing lights from the dance floor. Three sets of heavy gold chains glittered on his chest in the large gap of the lime-green polyester shirt he wore unbuttoned down to his navel. He moved his hands in the air, tracing a Coke-bottle shape, and laughed.
His two friends, who looked as if they could have been cast in a Superfly movie, laughed uproariously at his apparently obscene comments. One man wore a black hat with big peacock feathers in the band, a poster boy for “pimp of the week,” and the other sported black leather pants and a jacket, both studded with chrome buttons. A few safety pins through his cheek and a mohawk and he’d be a punk rocker. Thankfully, they weren’t quite to that era yet.
A few people moved on the dance floor, fairly graceful considering the platform shoes they all wore. The chukkita-chukkita-chukkita of the disco beat was underscored by a lot of percussion, particularly cymbals, and a nasally male singer.
What awful music.
Jay glanced around the room and caught a view of himself in one of the mirrored pillars that framed the dance floor. He wore amber-tinted horn-rimmed glasses and a brown leather jacket. A thick gold medallion with an up-raised fist lay on his chest, framed in a gap that was nearly the equal of the fat man’s, and his dark blue bell-bottomed jeans almost completely hid the snakeskin boots he was wearing.
He’d combed his hair into a huge pompadour, the front of the ridge extending a good inch out from his forehead, and held in place by the strongest hair spray you could find in 1973—which was almost shellac. You could bounce quarters off his hair, he was sure.
Jay Gridley, human chameleon.
A burst of static echoed in his right ear. He wore an earpiece there that was 1973’s version of a high-tech receiver.
Jay pushed the fist in the middle of the medallion — the microphone — and spoke: “Yeah?”
“Hey, hey, Smokey Jay, looks like the connection has done arrived.”
It was the undercover cop outside. Jay knew that he needed help on a major bust like this — not because he couldn’t handle a simple pickup like this one. No, it was more political than that. Whenever possible, Net Force tried to bring in the locals, share some of the credit as it were, especially on the big busts.