abbot. “No trace of poison,” he said. “No sign of violence. No exotic disease from a place he couldn't possibly have visited. In short, no proof of murder. Brother Squint-Eyes died from a heart attack.”
The old man gazed thoughtfully down at what was left of the corpse. “It could be murder if he was intentionally frightened to death, but it would be hell to prove. Abbot, when we catch the fellows who stole the manuscript, you might consider suing for damages rather than insisting upon a murder trial. We'd have to be able to demonstrate the precise method, and an out-of-court settlement might make more sense. How about settling for having your roof fixed? There has never been a monastery that isn't selling subscriptions for a new roof, and never will be.”
The abbot seemed cheered at the thought. Master Li washed his gory hands and we began walking back up the stairs while the abbot explained that in ages past the monastery had been used as a fortress against bandit armies, which was why the lower stories were fashioned from huge blocks of solid stone, and why thick iron bars were set in the windows.
“It was just after the third watch,” he said. “I was awake, listening to see if Brother Pang had finally got the bell rings right, and I heard a terrible scream. Other monks joined me as I ran toward the library. The doors are always open, but now they were closed and bolted from the inside. I sent monks out to get a log.”
The doors had been bashed apart, and the log lay in the corridor. We walked inside to a large square room. Three of the walls were lined with tables, and the fourth was lined with scroll racks. The books were kept in side rooms. In the center of the floor was a large circular desk for the librarian, and the abbot showed the careful chalk marks where the body had been found behind the desk. The scrolls, he said, were very old but totally without value, being feudal records involving every payment to the various lords of the valley. Several times within living memory the imperial clerks had searched to see if any treasures were mixed with the trivia, but none had been found.
“Until Brother Squint-Eyes found a curiosity,” Master Li muttered.
“His body lay there, and no one else was in the room,” the abbot said. “One glance told us how intruders had entered, but the entry was impossible.”
A side window that ran almost down to the floor opened upon a small garden. The bars in it were iron as thick as my wrist, but four of them—two on each side—had been squeezed together like soft warm candles to form entrances.
Master Li raised an eyebrow, and I walked over and spat on my hands. I could feel muscles strain all over my body as I tried to straighten the bars, but I might as well have tried to straighten crooked pine trees. I stepped back, panting.
“So,” Master Li said, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes. “You heard a scream. You ran to the library. The doors were bolted from inside. You got a log and broke the door down. You entered and saw nobody. Behind the desk was the body of the librarian, with an expression of extreme terror on his face. The bars of the window had been squeezed together by some incredible force, making an entrance to the room. Then what happened?”
The abbot was trembling again. “Venerable Sir, that's when we heard the sound. Or some of us did, since others couldn't hear it at all. It was the most beautiful sound in the world, but heartbreaking at the same time. It hurt us, and we wept, and then we started running after it. We had to. It was calling us.” He led the way out through the window to the garden, and Master Li grunted at the mass of sandal prints that covered any possible clue. We went out through a gate, and I realized we were on Princes’ Path. It was very beautiful, and mixed with trees and flowers I had known all my life were strange ones I couldn't identify. Master Li pointed out one flower as being a golden begonia, and said there couldn't be more than three others in all China. The path was really a vast garden, and I began to get the feel of it when we reached a ridge and I could look across the valley and see the green line winding up the opposite hills. Master Li confirmed my thoughts.
“The heirs of the Laughing Prince were appalled when they saw the destruction,” he said. They vowed to set things right if it took a thousand years, and Princes’ Path was planted to conceal the scars from the acid works, in fact, the only reason the peasants of the Valley of Sorrows aren't spoiled rotten is that the Liu family is land-rich but cash-poor, and most of the cash goes toward maintaining Princes’ Path and countless charities.”
The abbot stopped at the crest of a low hill. “We ran to this point,” he said. “Did I mention that the moon was very bright? We could not be mistaken in what we saw. Down below, down where the sound seemed to be coming from, we saw monks, but their robes were of clown's motley, and they were laughing and dancing beneath the stars. Normally we would have run for our lives, but the sound was summoning us and we had no choice but to obey. We ran on, and we came close enough to clearly see the clown robes although we could not see the faces because of the cowls. Then the monks danced into heavy brush and disappeared. Shortly afterward the wonderful- terrible sound stopped, and when we got through the brush, the dancing monks had vanished. In their place was something else.”
We walked down and made our way through the brush, and we stopped in our tracks and stared. “I'll be the Stone Monkey,” Master Li said softly.
Death had laid an icy finger across Princes’ Path. In an area approximately thirty feet wide and five times as long, not one living thing could be seen. Trees were bare and dead and without even a trace of sap, as I discovered when I broke off a branch. Flowers were withered. Bushes might as well have been sprayed with engraving acid. Not even the grass had survived, and brown clumps broke off beneath our feet. It looked like a cemetery one might see in a nightmare, and the line between life and death was so sharp it could have been cut with a knife. An inch from a dead flower was a blooming one, and lush greenery rubbed against bare brownness, and birds sang less than a foot from a place where not even an insect moved.
Master Li threw back his head and laughed, but without humor. “Incredible,” he said. “Abbot, Ox and I will have to take plant and soil samples to Ch'ang-an for analysis, and I doubt that it's worth speculating until we get a report on what caused the damage. Don't worry. Most of this affair seems clear enough, and quite simple, and I expect to wrap it up in one or two weeks.”
His confidence cheered the abbot, who pointed up toward a roofline high on the opposite hill.
“Prince Liu Pao has returned, and is eager to see you,” he said. “Could you possibly stop there first? The peasants…”
His voice trailed off.
“Want the prince and the visitor from the big city to search the Laughing Prince's tomb and make sure that the bastard is still in his coffin?” Master Li said.
The abbot nodded.
“We will be honored to visit the living prince and the dead one,” Master Li said. “I assume you have a great many things to do, so if you'll point out the way, we'll stroll up there and then on to Ch'ang-an.”
The abbot was obviously relieved at not being asked to enter the tomb of the Laughing Prince, and he gave directions and bowed and trotted away, muttering something that sounded like “forty-two kettles of fish.” I gathered plant and soil samples, and then we set forth to visit an aristocrat whose nerves, I hoped, were made from good material. Superstition is easily dismissed in daylight, but when the owls hoot, it's a different story. The wind sighs like ghosts whispering, and moonlight and leaves form patterns of mad monks dancing on the grass, and the house makes creaking sounds rather like the footsteps of a long-dead lunatic lord creeping up the stairs, and Prince Liu Pao's bedchamber was sitting practically on top of the maniac's tomb.
4
The estate was as large as one would expect for the ancestral seat of the former lords of the valley, but very little of it was still used. Weeds covered the formal gardens, and everywhere I looked I saw crumbling ruins. I suppose I was expecting a classic setting for a horror story, but that idea was dispelled the moment we walked through the gate to the wing of the mansion that was still kept up. The courtyard was rock and gravel and natural planting, and the spirit screen was simply a beautiful slab of red stone placed upon a sandalwood pedestal. We walked around the screen to the inner court, and instantly we were surrounded by a blaze of cheerful colors. Bright flowers were everywhere, and gaudy parrots and cockatoos greeted us raucously. A long vine-covered veranda led to the house, and a stack of broad-brimmed peasant hats had been provided for visitors who were allergic to bird droppings.
