The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  The yellow light stuttered over gravel and stone, and the tunnel soon dipped and began descending at a more rapid rate. I had to hunch to stop my head from banging on the low-hanging fangs of rock overhead, and I felt the cold, damp air spreading goosebumps across my skin. I imagined the dust-dressed men stomping in each morning, leaving the day behind as they wound down further under. I imagined men of few words losing even the slightest impulse to speak – after all, how could language compete with such darkness? I imagined their eyes drawing in for it, learning it, their ears alert to the sound of each stubbed toe, the thwack of each pick, the creek of each cart, each phlegmy cough, each grunt and each fart sounding out deep under the earth.

  No, that couldn’t be right. I’m not ashamed to admit that what I know about mining could be written on the back of a cigarette packet, but even I could see that something didn’t quite add up. There were no tracks for carts, no evidence of anything being dragged back up. So what the hell had they been doing down here?

  When I was a Red Guard, back in early ’67 our group had gone to the old temple behind the market. There were seven of us, each fizzing with energy, that tightly coiled fervour which springs your muscles into action and won’t let you keep still. Caps on heads, Little Red Books in jacket pockets, fire in our stomachs and on our tongues. Every inch of our bodies given over to that singular passion that comes when you know that you are right, possessed by a brightness that burns through you. By the time we got there we were about ready to tear the whole fucking feudal relic down. There’d been centuries of monks fleecing good honest people with their myths and rules, of binding noble workers in chains of fear and belief, and we had come to settle the score.

  At least that’s what we told each other as we tore the place up, pulling down shelves of scrolls and using them to feed the bonfire we started in the main courtyard. We smashed tables and altars, burnt rugs and wall hangings, pissed in begging bowls and wine cups, confiscated the last tiny golden buddhas, and ripped up pages of verses, scriptures, proverbs, histories, commentaries and all the rest of that crap. We even found a wrinkled old monk hiding out the back, near the bell tower. The others had fled weeks before, but I guess he had nowhere else to go. We tugged off his saffron robe to add to the fire, leaving him naked and shivering as we spat on him and cursed him and hit with one of the torn-down shelves, just for good measure. He shat himself in the end, and none of us could much be bothered to carry on after that.

  But I’m getting sidetracked. Memory has a way of doing that, setting you on paths you have no interest in heading back down. What I thought about standing in the mine was one of the tankas I saw there, in the temple. It was pretty much the last thing we tore down. It had been hanging in the cramped back room where the ugly old monk had been sleeping. It was one of those pictures of a thousand buddhas, like they have in those caves not far from here in Mogao. It was a ratty old thing, faded and a bit mouldy at the edges, run-of-the-mill, in fact – big fat boss Buddha floating on a giant lotus in the centre, doing that funny thing with his fingers pressed together, and all his half-naked helpers floating around him. Buzzing around his head were little angel buddhas, taking it easy in heaven, dancing on clouds or sitting by luscious green trees sprouting from stars. And then underneath big Buddha was the underworld: the demons with gnashing teeth and freaky grins, buried deep beneath the earth. They seemed so energetic, so raucous, so free – so much more alive than the ones lazing about on the clouds up in heaven.

  At the time I had just thought it was a stupid painting, a hangover from a world of superstition and slavery. Yet as I slowly wandered deeper under the earth, it all made a macabre kind of sense. Those above are complacent, lobotomised by calm and comfort. You do nothing too long and you forget who you are. There was something about this darkness, this depth, that sharpened my mind. It brought the shadows into focus.

  Time had thickened and slowed as I had descended, the way your limbs move slower when you wade through water. It was like being in a giant rabbit warren – every few metres the tunnel branched off in different directions, and I would follow one only to find that it suddenly stopped, and then I’d have to retrace my steps before exploring another turning. Whatever they were hunting for, they must have had trouble finding it. Occasionally I wandered over damp, rotting planks thrown across holes that stretched even deeper down. Nothingness. It’s denser than you imagine.

  I felt like I had been walking for hours; yet without my slow, cautious hunt for the tiniest of clues, and without all the wrong turns and doubling back, the miners could probably have covered the same stretch in only a few minutes.

  Finally the tunnel opened out, the narrowing walls and low-dipping ceiling spreading into a wide cavern. It was a mess. And it stank. Large rocks strewn across the uneven ground, a dirty jacket soaking up a puddle, and the furthest wall half demolished amid a pile of rubble. I could see moonlight pouring in fits and starts through the great broken crag above. So this is where the ceiling had fallen in. I ran the torch along the ground by my feet, and could make out tracks where large rocks (or bodies?) had been dragged through the muck. Whoever had got down here after the landslide had done a pretty good job of cleaning everything up. It must have taken twenty, thirty men to move all the debris and unearth whatever – or whoever – was buried below. And they wouldn’t have been able to do anything without diggers, pulleys and all the rest of that crap. That must have been some operation.

  However they’d managed it, they’d done a pretty impressive job. There was nothing left but great stacks of rocks and rubble pushed against the furthest walls. And that awful stink. I hated to think about what it might be. I felt my pockets, hoping I’d remembered my smokes. I hadn’t. No bottle either. Shit.

  I spotted something glinting and made my way over to one of the piles of rubble near the closest wall. Amid all the rocks and earth I spotted the shiny remains of picks and hammers and a few smashed hard-hats. It was only when I started making my way over the wreckage towards the far end of the cavern that I realised what the smell wafting off the fallen rocks was. That thick, charred smell that gunpowder leaves. So they had been blowing something up. Why bother with safe, careful hand-grafted labour when you can knock down whole walls in seconds with a cheap mix of saltpetre and cracker paper?

  I could picture it. One charge too many, then a sudden aftershock, a rumbling of rocks and the hissing of water, and before they knew it they were running for their lives. Some might have been able to make a dash back up the tunnel, only to find the supports collapsing and earth and water pounding towards them. But Wei Shan wouldn’t have come this far. He’d only come to talk to the manager. They’d probably been near the entrance, jabbering away about all kinds of crap when the ground they were standing on was suddenly snatched away from beneath their feet.

  But even though I knew – knew in the very pit of my gut – that I wouldn’t find him here, I kept going. I couldn’t stop myself: I called out. Just once. ‘Wei Shan?’ My voice rolled off the rocks and returned to me. ‘Wei Shan? Wei Shan?’ With each echo I felt more ridiculous. If Wei Shan’s ghost was loitering anywhere nearby, then right now it was probably laughing at me.

  Or else it would be asking what the hell I thought I was doing, poking about deep beneath the ground when I could have been downing a glass of shudders back at the Golden Dragon. Truth be told, I wasn’t really sure anymore. I should have turned back ages ago, but the further I ventured, the more I felt the tug of something unknown pulling me deeper into the darkness.

  I swept my torch between the rubble. There had to be something. Anything. The acrid stink of gunpowder was making me gag. Why use dynamite? I doubted cutting costs had anything to do with it. Whoever Hong Youchen was, he obviously had enough to bribe police and local officials to keep this whole pile of shit hushed up. No, this was about speed. I could see it all clearly. Someone was in a hurry. The mad rush to get the new mine up and running. Bribing officials for permits and paying off the inspecto
rs. Roping in that old college professor with the dodgy tattoo. Probably recruiting the first men to turn up in the morning without worrying about prior experience or skills. Hacking the earth away to dead ends in every direction until they found what they were looking for. Erecting the clumsiest of feeble supports without thinking of the potential for disaster. Then blowing away whole chunks of the hill as quickly as they could. It was a miracle that something hadn’t gone wrong sooner.

  I’d just about clambered over the last ridge of fallen rock to complete my circuit around the cavern when I spotted the passageway. A small hole at the foot of the wall, opposite the tunnel that led back out. I walked over, bent down and stuck my head in. Even with the torch, I couldn’t make out how far it stretched. Was this the last place they’d been digging? Could be. I might as well check it out. I was about to start down the craggy passageway when something pulled me back. I was stuck in the dark, somewhere in the rotten bowels of the Jawbone Hills, while my wife and daughter bitched about me at home, while Li Yang was probably giggling at another man’s jokes, and all for what? Fishlips and Xiang had both warned me off, each in their different ways, but I had still bothered to waste my evening in this cold and damp tomb of a place. And the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it all seemed. I had somehow convinced myself that if I understood what the hell was going on down here, then I’d have found a little slither of justice for Wei Shan, not to mention Jing Ren, Fatty, Spotty, Horseface, and all the others whose bodies had been carted off. But that’s not how things work. You can’t bring justice to the dead. They don’t care. They’re dead. It doesn’t matter to their rotting corpses if the truth comes out, or if it stays hidden forever. Justice only matters when you’ve either got something to prove or something to lose. Wei Shan probably didn’t have either anymore. Why do we think we need to understand everything, to make sense of the things that touch our lives? I don’t know how my car works, I don’t give a shit, in fact, but I’m still happy to get in the old heap of junk every day. Why should this be any different? But somehow it was.

  There was nothing left to do but crawl in. After all, my suit was already a mess. And all the restaurants would be shut by now anyway. My knees scratched against the rocks, and I pushed forward on one hand, the other aiming the torch into the distance. They must have been working at it one at a time from here, with picks and trowels. My palm scraped and cut on something sharp. I didn’t need to shine the torch on it to know that it was bleeding. Part of my trousers snagged and ripped. The now-torn plastic bags over my shoes rustled and hissed as I dragged myself forward. This is the kind of stupid thing that happens when I don’t have enough to drink, I thought. Perhaps there was still a half-empty bottle rolling under the passenger seat. Or buried under the useless business cards in the glove compartment.

  I kept crawling. And the darkness kept going, squeezing tighter into black. I kept going because it was better than torturing myself about whether or not I had a bottle left somewhere in the car. My wife was wrong when she said that I drank because I hated that I’d turned into someone I didn’t want to be. I didn’t drink because I was pissed off, nor because the world had screwed me. I drank because there was nothing else to do. And anyway, only a little. Not half as much as most of the people I know. Or used to know. My father used to drink till he’d be shouting at the walls. Lips spitting, fists flailing. I wasn’t like that. I just wanted something to blur the edges, that’s all.

  The tunnel corkscrewed in, closing around me. I sunk down onto my elbows, shuffling awkwardly through the shifting ridges of dirt and flint. The whole mountain heaved above me. Each breath more dust than air. My tongue must have been as black as a nightmare. My nose was thick with grime, and my senses were slowly dropping away: smell, taste, sight. My hands were starting to go numb from the cold and the scrapes. A dull ache rang through my body, and my ears were on overload, turning every tiny scuffle and echo into the portent of a landslide.

  I stopped to catch my breath. Out here in the villages, some of the families still bury their dead in the earth, despite official regulations. What if you woke up and found yourself lying deep beneath the ground, with nothing but the worms and your last thoughts for company? It’s not the idea of being buried alive that’s scary, it’s more the thought of surviving. Of lying there, unable to move, and waiting for a death that doesn’t come. I pushed up onto my elbows and started again.

  Then I saw it. My eyes were so messed up and fuzzy from the darkness that I wasn’t sure at first. I shone the torch up and down, left and right, round and round, back and forth. Then just to check I shuffled forward, the last few metres. This was it. I even reached out my frozen hand to touch it. I’d reached another dead end. A wall of rock. As far as they’d bothered to dig. And I’d found nothing. I set down the torch and rested my head on my outstretched arms. Where were they trying to get to? Between the sound of my panting breaths, I could hear something dripping, some stretch of ice water trickling down. It was then that I realised I couldn’t turn around. The only way out was to crawl backwards.

  It must have been close to a quarter of an hour later than I emerged, arse first, from the tunnel. What remained of my suit was clinging and soggy, and scrapes and scratches crisscrossed my arms and legs. I spat. Once, twice. Mouthfuls of thick, sooty phlegm. I’d have had a better night if I’d just thrown myself off the bridge.

  The pursuit of knowledge is supposed, in some way, to be quantifiable. You ought to be able to know you’re getting somewhere. But with every step I took I understood everything a little bit less. How was I going to find out what happened now? Locate Hong Youchen and turn up on his doorstep demanding to know what was going on down there? Somehow it didn’t seem very likely.

  I wiped the grit out of my eyes. Something was sticking to my knee. I shone the torch over it. Half a piece of crumpled paper had attached itself to my trouser leg, probably while I’d been crawling through that stupid tunnel. I reached down and tore it off.

  The faded grey print was all but illegible. Smudged beyond recognition and torn right where the words began. All I could make out was a mess of intersecting lines. Some kind of map? Well, maybe. Perhaps if it hadn’t been soaked right through and turned into a sodden blur, I could have made a more educated guess. But what else are you going do with a funny-looking squiggle of interlinking lines? If I squinted, it looked like the kind of thing my daughter used to draw when she was small. I flipped it over. Either the ink had run in a really peculiar way to create the biggest coincidence I’d ever come across, or I was holding a scrap of paper with a picture of a little black bird. Just the same as the one I’d seen tattooed on Jing Ren.

  A crow. Damn. Maybe I should have let Xiang do some research into the tattoo after all. But at least I had a clue now. Some solid bit of evidence. And I was pretty sure that somehow it bound this whole mess together. But how?

  This was getting too complicated. All I’d got in return for the last few hours of risking my life in this grubby little hell-hole was a cryptic image and a shitload of extra questions to answer. ‘Wei Shan,’ I called out once again. ‘Wei Shan, if you’re not already dead, I’m going to kill you.’

  Then I shoved the paper into my pocket and started to make my way back up.

  When I finally got back to my car some forty minutes later, I searched under the seat, in the glove compartment, in the back, and even cranked open the boot for the first time in about a year to hunt down any unfinished bottles. I struck gold beneath a mouldy raincoat next to the spare tyre. Just a couple of sips left. Sour, past its best. But still good. A shiver in a bottle. A tingle sent down to the tips of my fingers.

  Disappointment? You get used to it. I was amazed at how light it was outside, despite the thick blanket of grey cloud, despite the hard rind of dull moon, and I couldn’t stop blinking as I drove. The lights on the highway were unbearable, heavy stars scalding my retina, and it wasn’t long before the burning pain of it forced me to take the first turn off and wind
home slowly through the villages. Places of power-cuts and bonfires, of five-to-a-bed and cooking on home-stoked fires, of myths and rumours. Places of darkness – and right now that was all I could cope with. What must it have been like for the workers, down there all day and emerging to the painful unfamiliarity of sight each evening? I squeezed my eyes shut, then forced them open again.

  The car juddered down shoddy dirt roads. My eyes slowly got used to the lights spilling from paper-covered windows, the bare bulbs in village stores where muddy carrots and potatoes were strewn across the floor, waiting to be bartered for. I slowed down when I spotted a crowd outside a grotty dumpling café beside the track. Village people are always up to something. I strained my neck to see – they were crowded around a small black and white TV. Thirty, forty people huddled together in front of the tiny screen. An old extension cord snaking through the mud. I pulled up and got out. The café was still open, so I bought a little bottle of the cheap stuff and a snack. When the greasy-haired woman running the place spotted my car over at the edge of the track she upped the price. I guess that’s economics for you.

  I stood next to a tall man with a face that appeared to have been whittled from oak.