Kypo, noticing Shan’s gaze, sprang into action, turning out the desk light, taking a step toward the old blue truck that waited for them, suggesting they leave. Shan gestured for him to lead and stood as if to follow, then flung off the cloth.
The bronze statue of Yama, the Lord of Death, was perhaps eight inches tall, atop a heavy base set with a ring of turquoise stones.
“Is this the secret of Tsipon’s success, a god in every car?”
Kypo muttered a curse and trotted to the bench, lifting the cloth to cover the figure again. “It’s nothing, just an old thing that nobody cares about.”
“It’s one of the stolen statues.”
“Not stolen. They’re wandering back now.” Kypo, like many Tibetans Shan knew, tended to speak of their deities as if they were members of their households.
“You’re saying the thief is bringing them back?”
“More or less. The first one that went missing was found on the doorstep of an old weaver at the edge of the village, a couple days ago. Half a dozen were taken from the village, and most have been brought back now. Found on a doorstep, in a hay manger, one inside a butter churn, one down at the flour mill.”
“Sort of a Yama scavenger hunt,” Shan mused. “But surely this one wasn’t returned here.”
“No. But I need to fix it before my mother sees it. She would call it an omen, that this happened to one of deities from the altar behind her house.”
“One?”
Kypo nodded. “There was a much older, more valuable statue of Tara, the goddess, beside the Yama. But only the Yama was taken. Then last night he came back, left on the wall behind my house. He was changed like the others,” Kypo added in a voice full of worry. “Her altar is special, people come there from all over the village. She might tell the villagers something through her dice that-” Kypo stopped, glancing uneasily at Shan. What was he saying about his mother’s use of her astrological powers?
“What do you mean the statues were changed?”
“When an old man down the road had his statue returned, he told her something inside had been released, said no one should insult Uncle Shinje this way,” Kypo said. “She was upset when he showed her. I found her in her house crying,” he added, confusion entering his voice. “She is the strongest woman I know, and she was crying over someone’s little god.”
Shan lifted the statue, testing the weight. As with most such figures, the base was hollow, for the small slips of prayers and charms that were traditionally sealed inside when the statue was consecrated. He turned it over. In the center of the bronze plate on the bottom was a neat half-inch hole, recently drilled.
“They all come back like this,” Kypo whispered in a haunted tone. “I thought I could repair it before my mother saw. Like the others, the sacred papers are left inside but the same hole is made in each. People say something inside has been incubating, waiting all these years to hatch. People say Yama is sending out worms of death.”
The two-legged demon of Shogo town was communing with his gods, sitting on the altar he had built against the wall of an old shed that overlooked the trash pit. Gyalo was so drunk he did not seem to notice Shan as he lowered himself to sit before him. The former lama, perched on his altar beside a candle, swayed back and forth, gazing without focus into the darkness of the gully below, into which the remains of the old town gompa, once the largest in the county, had been bulldozed decades earlier.
At first Shan thought the low murmur arising from his lips might be a mantra, but then Gyalo belched and he recognized it as a bawdy drinking song favored by herdsmen.
Shan had returned to his stable home and searched in his second, hidden workshop to find another Yama statue, which he now placed in the circle of light cast by the candle by the altar. “Where is the home of the Lord of Death, grandfather?”
Gyalo started, then grew very still as he gazed at the pool of light. He had, Shan suspected, thought the deity that had materialized before him was speaking. With an oddly solemn air he filled one of his little altar bowls from a white porcelain jug and tossed it in the little god’s face. Gyalo had hung an old chart in his tavern the month before, doubtlessly from some long-extinct monastery school, with images, in descending order, of the hierarchy of existence, with bodhisattvas, living saints, at the top and something resembling a worm at the bottom. He had written his name under the worm. Devout monks strived to leap from human form to sainthood in one lifetime. Gyalo’s sacred goal, he had solemnly declared that night during a drinking bout, was to leap to the bottom of the chart in one lifetime.
Shan leaned into the light and repeated his question. Gyalo looked up, carefully poured some more of his baijui, the foul-smelling sorghum whiskey that was the staple hard liquor of China, drank half, then tossed the rest into Shan’s face. Shan, accustomed to such baptisms, wiped his cheeks and spoke in a level voice. “Nowhere in Tibet have I seen so many statues of Yama as here. There must have been a temple devoted to him.”
“The army has a missile base up the road. They say it can destroy all of India in half an hour. That’s our temple of death.”
“A temple of Yama, Gyalo. Uncle Shinje’s retreat.”
“I once dug out twenty fresh skulls after an explosion on Tumkot mountain. I have learned to eat flesh three times a week. I saw a cat eating a butterfly today. Everything in the shadow of the mother mountain is dedicated to the Lord of Death.” Gyalo turned the jug upside down, draining its last few drops into his bowl. “To the glorious chairman of the glorious republic,” he toasted with the raised cup. “You Chinese have taught us what life is really about.”
“When the Yama statues started disappearing, people started dying.”
“What kind of people?”
“A Chinese, an American, a Nepali.”
Gyalo shrugged, as if it were to be expected.
“A Tibetan was murdered too, near Tumkot village.”
Gyalo’s head slowly shifted upward, from the jug to Shan.
“Perhaps you knew Ama Apte’s uncle.” Shan did not miss the way Gyalo shuddered at the mention of the astrologer. “He took a bullet between the eyes.”
Gyalo suddenly grew very sober. “Two legs or four?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Four.”
The news disturbed the tavern keeper, as if he had known, and feared, the mule. “It’s something of a habit in that family,” he said dismissively. But Shan saw the worried glance he shot over his shoulder, into the night, toward Tumkot. “No one should worry about that one. He knows how to throw off a face.” But Gyalo was worried. Of all the people who had died, of all the hardships that had come to the town, and his life, the only thing Shan had ever seen worry him was a dead mule.
“No,” Shan said quietly, “Ama Apte and I burned juniper and spoke to him. He is a hungry ghost. He will be in pain, unable to move on, until he reconciles his death, which means understanding the other deaths.”
Shan recalled Jomo’s report that Gyalo wanted to know about the murders.
Gyalo leaned forward, exposing a steel incisor, so close Shan could smell his rancid breath. “What do you know of dead people?”
“Most of my friends,” Shan explained, “and all my family but one are dead people.”
Gyalo’s laughter came so abruptly it seemed he had exploded. Bits of rice and sputum shot onto Shan’s shirt. But as quickly as it came it was gone, replaced by more worry, as Gyalo searched the shadows, his gaze lingering for a moment on the door to the shed behind him. Shan had seen inside that door only once, had glimpsed stacks of old tools and rusted artifacts.
“Why would the town’s living demon be scared of a dead mule’s ghost?” Shan asked.
“You don’t know ghosts like I do,” Gyalo said in a near whisper. “Make light of him and you make light of Yama.”
“I am going to stop him,” Shan declared.