Panzi drew his hand across his own throat. "He"s already been sent to report to the G.o.d of Death."
The old man"s face looked empty, and then he slapped his thigh. "He deserved to die. I never wanted any part of this business but Young Lu said if I didn"t help him, then he"d do me in. All of you, please understand, I really was tricked into this. Please let me go."
"Save your old breath," Uncle Three said. "Where do you live? Why are you getting water here?"
"I live just over there." The old man pointed to a cave on the edge. "Look at me, I am an old man. I have no land, my son died young, and I don"t even have a house to live in. I am just waiting to die. Oh, have pity on me!"
"So you must be very familiar with the area. Perfect! If you want to stay alive, you"ll have to take us where we want to go." Uncle Three pointed to the forest.
The old man"s face suddenly took on an expression of distress and concern. "My Great Master, I did not know that you have come to rob the grave. You must not rob that tomb-there are monsters inside!"
Once I heard this, I knew immediately it was some kind of trick. This old man knew a thing or two for sure. Uncle Three asked him, "How do you know? Have you seen them?"
"Aiya! A few years back I brought a group of people in there. They said they were archaeologists but I knew right away they came to rob the tomb. They were different from other people. The small-time thieves that I"d seen before usually began looting as soon as they saw the graves. But these guys paid no attention to any of the graves on the sides, and demanded to be taken to the valley right away. At that time, I was the only person who had been there, and these people were lavish with their money. They gave me ten large bills without hesitation and I couldn"t resist that. I brought them to the woods and took them as far as I had ever been before but they insisted that I take them farther. I refused, and said their ten large bills could not buy my life. They said they would give me ten more, and I said I would not do it for another hundred more. They shook their heads, their expressions changed. One of them took out a gun and pointed it at my head. So I had no choice."
He scratched his head and continued, "Later they stopped and said they were at the right spot. They were so overjoyed, and started pounding the soil with a pestle, saying there was something right below. We found a place to set up our tents and I drank a bit too much that night. Once I fell asleep I was completely unconscious. But guess what? When I woke up, everyone was gone. All their stuff was still there, and the fire had not been put out. I panicked and began to scream but n.o.body answered. I knew something dreadful must have happened. I thought, since they were no longer around, I could just slip away. So even though I was badly hungover, I ran."
The old man narrowed his eyes as if he was recalling some hideous memory, and said, "I had only run a few steps when I heard someone calling me. I saw a woman from the expedition waving at me and I began to curse and complain about everyone running away so early in the morning. Then suddenly I saw the tree behind her opening its mouth and waving its branches like claws. I looked up into the tree, and h.e.l.l, dead bodies were hanging all over it. My eyeb.a.l.l.s almost bulged out of their sockets and I was so scared I peed my pants. I ran all day and all night before I got back to the village. You see, that was definitely a demon tree. If I hadn"t grown up eating human carrion, my soul would have been pulled out of my body by those monsters."
Uncle Three sighed. "You were indeed nourished by corpses!" He waved his hand and in response, Panzi tied the old man up. We could save ourselves a lot of grief in figuring out the lay of the land with this old scoundrel leading the way, and now he couldn"t refuse if he wanted to.
According to what the old geezer told us, it would take a day to get to the place where the expedition had disappeared. Big Kui began to clear a pathway, and we marched on. As we walked, we consulted our map, hoping that by using this, along with the old man"s guidance, we would reach our destination before nightfall.
We walked for half a day. At first we chatted as we went, but later the vibrant green of the forest created waves of visual restlessness. Things began to look vague and unclear and we yawned without stopping as if we wanted to fall asleep. All of a sudden, the old man stopped.
Panzi cursed and asked, "What game are you playing at now?"
The old man looked at the bushes on the side of the path, his voice shaking, "What...what...is that?"
We turned around and looked. Something was flashing in the thicket of leaves and branches and as we came closer, we saw it was a cell phone.
Chapter Nine.
THE ANCIENT TOMB.
That cell phone had obviously been dropped only a short time before, since it was still flashing a signal. When I picked it up, I saw bloodstains on its keyboard and felt less than delighted by my discovery. "This cell phone definitely did not fall from the sky. It appears we"re not the only group of people here. And it looks as if someone has been injured."
I opened the cell phone"s list of contacts, and saw that the phone numbers were all foreign ones. There were no names with any of the numbers and when I tried to call one of them, there was no reception. Uncle Three said, "Well, we certainly can"t go off to find them now, wherever they might be. It"s more important to hurry forward."
I glanced around and saw no other trace of people. I had no choice but to continue on the road, but finding such a modern object in this wilderness disturbed me. I asked the old man if anyone besides us had recently entered the forest.
The old man laughed. "There was a group of people here two weeks ago, about a dozen of them, but they still have not come back out yet. This place is really dangerous. It"s not too late to turn back now."
"Who cares if we find monsters-let alone whatever devils and demons might be here," Big Kui said. "Tell you what, our young master here made a thousand-year-old zombie kowtow to him. Am I right?" he asked Poker-face, who ignored him as though he were empty air. Rejected, Big Kui fell into a bad mood, but there was nothing he could do about it.
We walked steadily and quietly, reaching our destination by late afternoon, just as the sky began to darken.
There were nearly a dozen military tents, all still intact; although they were covered with rotting leaves, inside they were still very dry and clean, with a lot of useful supplies. We found equipment scattered about, even an electric generator and a few gallons of gasoline. The motor had been wrapped in oilcloth but most of the parts were in bad shape. Big Kui tried to start it up with no success, but at least no water had gotten into the cans of gasoline, so that was still useful.
As I looked at the equipment I saw that all of the labels had been removed-even the trademarks on the tents and backpacks had been torn off. I thought, how strange is this? It looks like these people did not want anybody to know where they had come from.
We made a fire at the campsite and cooked a simple supper. As we ate, the old man looked around warily as though he was afraid that monsters would rush out at any moment and string him up to die on a tree.
Poker-face looked at the map as he ate. He pointed to the spot where there was the drawing of the strange fox face and said, "We"re definitely here now."
We all crowded around him as he explained, "This is the place of worship. There ought to be a worship platform beneath the ground where we sit. The items that were buried along with the deceased might be right below us."
Uncle Three squatted, grabbed a handful of soil, put it under his nose, and sniffed. He shook his head, walked a few steps, and grabbed another handful. He said, "If it"s here, it"s buried too deep for me to be able to detect its presence. We"ll have to dig a bit to find out."
We screwed the steel pipes together, connecting them to the shovel heads. Uncle Three stamped a few footprints on the ground to indicate where we should swing our shovels. Big Kui poised the head of his shovel and tapped it into the soil with a short-handled hammer to begin his excavation. As he tapped, Uncle Three touched the metal pipes connected to the shovel head with his hand to get a feel of activity in the place underground. After a total of thirteen taps, Uncle Three suddenly said, "That"s it!"
We pulled the shovel up section by section. Big Kui detached the shovel head that had brought a batch of soil to the surface. He came to the edge of the fire so we could all take a look. Uncle Three and I stared, and our faces turned white at the same time. Even Poker-face cried out. The soil looked as though it had been soaked in blood, and a bloodlike liquid dripped onto the ground.
Uncle Three sniffed the dirt and frowned. Both he and I had seen doc.u.mentaries on zombies, but our knowledge of them was general with no specific details. We could not accurately a.s.sess this situation, even with the help of my grandfather"s journal. We only knew one thing for sure-since there was wet blood in the soil, the grave beneath us was certainly no small bag of potatoes.
I glanced over at Uncle Three and tried to guess what his decision would be. He gave it some thought, lit a cigarette and said, "We"ll talk about this after we dig some more."
Big Kui and Panzi had not stopped digging. Big Kui struck the shovel into the ground a few more times, and then brought it back up to show Uncle Three. Uncle Three smelled every shovel head, and began to connect the excavated holes with lines that he drew with a trowel. In a short time, an approximate outline of the cave was drawn on the ground.
Identifying the position of burial caves was a basic skill of grave-robbing masters. In general, the underground location of the grave was sure to look like the outline drawn above ground. Very few masters of the soil will make a mistake when doing this. But when I saw the contours that outlined the cavern we sought, I didn"t feel they were correct. Most of the graves from the Warring States Period had no chambers. This one looked as though there would be one. Moreover, our outline indicated that the roof was built with bricks, which was extremely unusual.
Uncle Three took measurements with his fingers and finally determined the approximate location of the coffin. He said, "There is a tile roof underground. My shovel cannot penetrate its surface. I can only mark the approximate location by rule of thumb. This underground palace is too bizarre. I don"t know how thick the bricks are, and we can only break in from the back wall according to my experience. If this doesn"t work, we"ll have to strike again. Move quickly now!"
My uncle and his men had many years of grave-robbing experience. With fleet movements, their three shovels whipped up and down like small cyclones. In only a minute, they had dug down about twenty-six feet. Because we were in the wilderness, there was no need to be careful about where we put the soil, so we threw it onto the ground as though we were creating a dust storm. Soon, Big Kui shouted from below, "Done!"
He had dug a hole beneath our entry point and had exposed a huge amount of brick wall. We turned on our miner"s lamps and pointed them into the hole. Poker-face noticed that Big Kui was preparing to knock on the wall and stopped him by snapping, "Don"t touch anything."
Stretching out his two unnaturally long fingers, Poker-face gently touched the surface of the wall, and traced the seams of the bricks for what seemed like a very long time. "There"s an ant.i.theft device here," he said. "All the bricks must be shifted outward. We must not push inward, and we must not break any of them!"
Panzi touched the wall and said, "How is it possible to not crack one of these bricks as we work? And how are we going to pull these out?"
Poker-face was busy with a project all his own. Gently he touched one of the bricks and suddenly with an explosive force, he pulled it out from the wall.
I gaped at him. Knowing how st.u.r.dy those bricks were, I could not imagine the power it would take to pull one out with just two fingers. This guy was definitely a well-trained and extremely experienced grave robber.
Carefully placing the brick on the ground, he pointed at its back which was covered in a layer of dark red wax. He said, "The inside of this wall is covered with vitriol, an acid used to make pills of immortality. Once broken, this acid would immediately cover our bodies and burn off our skin in an instant."
I gulped, my stomach jolted, and I suddenly thought of the skinless monster my grandfather had seen. Was it possible that it had not been a blood zombie, but perhaps his great-grandfather after a bath in vitriol? Were the shots that grandfather fired aimed at his own father?
Poker-face waited while Big Kui dug a well; then he took a needle and a plastic tube from his bag. Connecting the tube to the needle, he put the other end of the tube into the pit. Panzi lit a match and burned the needle until it was red-hot. Poker-face then carefully poked the needle into the wax wall. Instantly the red acid flowed through the tube into the well.
The dark red color of the wax on the brick wall soon turned white, which indicated that the acid had drained completely from the bricks. Poker-face nodded, said, "All right!" and we began to move the bricks. Soon there was a hole in the wall big enough for a person to go through. Uncle Three threw a match inside, and by its light, we were able to see inside.
We were now on the north side of the tomb. The floor was made of a solid piece of flagstone engraved with ancient writing and laid out very much like the arrangement of the Eight Diagrams in Chinese mythology. The farther out it went, the bigger its area; the farther in it went, the smaller it became. Surrounding the tomb were eight oil lamps to represent longevity. They of course had gone out since they were in a tomb. In the middle of the tomb stood a mammoth four-legged square vessel with the heavenly bodies engraved on it. On the south side of the tomb, which was directly opposite where we were standing, was a stone coffin and a corridor behind it which looked as though it led down to another place.
Uncle Three popped his head into the tomb to get a whiff. Then he beckoned for us to follow, and we made our way through one by one.
Uncle Three looked at the writing on the flagstone beneath our feet and asked Poker-face, "Take a look at this writing. Can you tell who is buried here?"
The straight-faced chap shook his head and said nothing.
We lit a few more matches, tossed them onto the oil lamps, and the entire tomb blazed into light. For no reason at all, I suddenly remembered the monster Grandfather wrote about in his journal, and seemed to hear the eerie rattling he mentioned repeatedly. My heart froze. Panzi climbed up to look inside the vessel and shouted, "Master Three, there are treasures here!"
We all joined him and saw a desiccated, headless corpse inside the vessel. Its clothing had all rotted away but its body was adorned with jade bracelets. Panzi reached down, took them off the body, and put them on his own wrists.
"This must be the body left behind after the human sacrifice was completed. They decapitated him, offered his head to the heavens, then put the body in here and offered it to the deceased. He was probably a prisoner of war. There would never be any jewelry on a slave"s wrists."
With that, Panzi jumped into the vessel to see what else there was to find before Poker-face could stop him. Uncle Three cursed loudly, "You stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d! This vessel holds offerings to the deceased. Do you want to be one of the offerings yourself?"
Panzi laughed. "Master Three, I"m not Big Kui. Don"t think you can frighten me that way." He stroked a huge jade vase. "Look! There is so much good stuff down in here. Why don"t we turn this vessel over and see if there"s more?"
"Quit your nonsense. Come out quickly!" Uncle Three shouted. He saw Poker-face turn white with his eyes fixed on the stone coffin, and my uncle knew at once that something was going terribly wrong.
It was then that I heard the rattling sound that I had imagined just a few minutes before. I turned around and my blood turned to little bits of ice. The sound did not come from the coffin. It was coming from Poker-face.
Chapter Ten.
THE SHADOW.
At first I thought Poker-face was deliberately trying to scare us, but judging by what we had seen of his character so far, he didn"t seem like a practical joker. The rattling sound came from him without a pause, but none of us could see his lips move. We all looked at him and shivered. Was it possible that Poker-face was an undercover zombie?
When Uncle Three saw Poker-face"s ghostly visage, he pulled Panzi out of the vessel at once. At that point, Poker-face grew quiet and there was a weird silence. Then the top of the coffin flew upward like the top of a jack-in-the-box and shook violently as a ghastly, chilling sound came from inside it. It was a noise much like the one my grandfather had described in his journal-it was like the sound of a frog.
Big Kui was so terror-stricken that he fell flat on his b.u.t.t. My own legs turned numb and I was ready to plop onto the ground as well. Uncle Three, who had been around and seen a lot, didn"t fall although his legs were shaking.
Poker-face turned even more ashen when he heard this sound. Falling to his knees, he kowtowed deeply toward the coffin. As soon as we saw this, we all immediately followed his example, knelt down, and kowtowed as well. He then looked up and began to chant a series of strange words, as if he were casting some sort of spell. Cold sweat rolled down Uncle Three"s forehead, and he whispered, "He"s not talking to it, is he?"
Finally, the stone coffin stopped shaking. Poker-face kowtowed once more, stood up, and said, "We must leave here before dawn."
Uncle Three wiped his sweat and asked, "Menyouping, were you bargaining with the zombie just now?"
Poker-face made a gesture as if to say, Don"t ask. "Do not touch anything in here again. The owner of this coffin is immensely powerful. If he were unleashed from his burial spot, not even G.o.d could get us out of here alive."
Panzi still did not understand what Poker-face meant and asked him, smiling, "Ah, come on. What kind of foreign language were you just speaking a moment ago?"
Poker-face ignored him, as usual, and pointed to the tunnel behind the coffin. He said, "Tiptoe past here and whatever you do, do not touch that coffin!"
With Uncle Three leading the way and Poker-face at the end of the line, we turned on our lamps and entered the tunnel behind the coffin. When Big Kui pa.s.sed the coffin, he pressed his back firmly against the wall to keep as far away from it as possible. It looked very funny, but I wasn"t in the mood to laugh.
The tunnel of the gravesite curved downward. Both sides of it were carved with inscriptions on the rocks. I looked at them and could not make out what they meant. But since I was in the antique book business, and had studied these things quite a bit, I could still understand a few words here and there.
Uncle Three walked very cautiously as he led us forward; each step took a long time. The light from our lamps wasn"t very strong and the s.p.a.ce before us looked as dark as what we left behind. It was quite a bit like being back in the water cave, and I felt terribly uncomfortable. After half an hour of walking, the tunnel began to curve upward so we knew we had probably gone halfway.
And then we saw a robbers" tunnel and Uncle Three was taken aback. His biggest fear was that some early bird had already caught the worm and he promptly went over to investigate.
As far as we could tell, this robbers" tunnel had been dug recently. Even the soil still had a fresh, newly excavated smell to it. I asked Uncle Three, "The old man said that a group of people came down to the valley two weeks ago. Could they have dug this tunnel?"
"I can"t tell. But it was done hastily and carelessly. It"s plain that it wasn"t dug to enter this place, but rather to get out of it in a hurry! I"m afraid someone else has beaten us to the treasures."
"Don"t be discouraged, Master Three. If they really were proficient robbers, they would have exited from the same route they used to enter. It looks to me as though something bad happened. I"m sure the treasures are still untouched," Panzi a.s.sured him.
Uncle Three nodded and we walked on. Since someone had already crossed the perimeter before us, we didn"t need to be so cautious anymore.
We increased our pace and walked for another fifteen minutes, when we reached a wider corridor. This section was double the width of the first, the decorations more exquisite. It seemed as though we had arrived at the main area of the grave. At the end of the corridor lay a vast jade door. We were sure it had been opened, probably from the other side. Next to the door were two carved statues of hungry ghosts, one of which held an imperial seal. Both of their bodies were entirely black.
Uncle Three inspected the jade door and found that its trap had already been dismantled. We went through the portal. The s.p.a.ce was far-reaching inside, and it was exceedingly dark. The glow of the miner"s lamps was inadequate for such blackness and could only dimly pierce it, but still we could make out the broad outline of the chamber.
This we knew ought to be the main tomb. Panzi swept his miner"s lamp across the room and cried out, "Why are there so many coffins?"
In the absence of a strong light, it was very difficult to see clearly what was inside this tomb. I swept my eyes across the room, and saw many coffins lying in the middle of the tomb. At first glance, I could tell that they were arranged in some sort of order other than the customary formal, neat alignment. The ceiling was covered with magnificent murals surrounded by square blocks of stone panels that were thickly covered with words. I put my lamp on the ground, and Panzi put his more or less on the same spot directly across me. As our outline had shown us, there were two small rooms on either side of the main tomb, looking like little ears.
Uncle Three and I walked to the first stone coffin. We lit a match, and discovered that this coffin was completely different from the one we saw when we first entered the cave. It was carved with inscriptions and when I took a look, I could actually read some of them.
The text chronicled the life of the deceased in this coffin, identifying him as a marquis who had served under the emperor of the State of Lu. This person was born with a ghost seal which he could use to borrow soldiers from the world of the dead, and so he had never lost a war. He was hailed by the State of Lu as the Ruler of Dead Soldiers.
One day, he asked to see the emperor of the State of Lu, and explained that there was a rebellion in the world of the dead. Since he had borrowed soldiers from this realm, he had to go back to the king of the dead to return the favor and help that sovereign. He needed permission from the emperor of the State of Lu to go back and perform this duty. The emperor of the State of Lu granted his wish and the Ruler of Dead Soldiers knelt down, placed his two hands on the ground in thanks, and died sitting down like a monk.
The emperor of the State of Lu thought he would return and set up an underground palace for him. He kept the body safe, hoping that the Ruler would continue to fight for him when he came back. The inscription went on and on with elaborate descriptions of the Ruler"s many battles. Once he showed his ghost seal, the soldiers from the world of the dead would plunder all the souls of their enemies.
Panzi listened as I translated and sighed, "What power. It was too bad that the Ruler of Dead Soldiers died young. Otherwise the State of Lu would have been the one to unify the six Warring States."
I laughed. "That isn"t necessarily true. Our ancestors were really good at exaggerating. If the State of Lu"s Ruler of Dead Soldiers could borrow soldiers from the dead of the underworld, then what"s-his-name from the State of Qi could rely on heaven"s army. I recall there was also a general who could fly. You must have read the Roll of the Mountain and the Sea, right?"
"In any case, now we know whose grave we are robbing. But there are so many coffins here. Which one would be his?" Panzi asked.
I read the inscriptions on a few other coffins which all said more or less the same thing. We counted a total of seven coffins, the same number as the stars in the Big Dipper. None of the coffins contained any clue as to who might be in them. As I was studying some inscription that I didn"t understand, Big Kui shouted, "Look guys! This stone coffin has been opened!"
I walked over to have a look. Sure enough, the cover of the coffin was not completely sealed and there were many fresh shaft marks that showed it had recently been pried open. Uncle Three took our crowbar out of the backpack and removed the coffin"s cover bit by bit. Then he put the lamp inside to look. Panzi made a strange noise, and glanced at us with a look of confusion. "How come there"s a foreigner inside?"
We looked, and not only was there a foreigner in the coffin, but the body was very fresh, looking as though it had been dead for no more than a week. Panzi was about to reach in and dig around for clues but Poker-face grabbed his shoulder, evidently with great force because Panzi screamed.
"Don"t move," Poker-face told him, "the owner of the tomb is right under him!"
We looked. There was another corpse beneath the foreigner"s body but we couldn"t see what it looked like. Uncle Three took out his black donkey"s hoof and said, "It"s probably something terrible-perhaps a mummy or a zombie. He who strikes first gains the advantage."
At this moment, Big Kui pulled at the back of my shirt and took me aside. Since he was usually quite frank and straightforward, I was worried and asked him what was going on. He pointed at the shadows on the wall opposite the spot where we had placed our miner"s lamps and whispered, "Look. This is your shadow, right?"