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.