Restless Soul - Alex Archer [85]
Farther in pursuit of the monkey, which seemed to have slowed to accommodate her lazy pace, she heard wind chimes. Clinky-clanky and almost tinny, not as pleasantly musical as the glass chimes that used to hang in the orphanage’s yard. The sound grew louder and she looked up.
Not wind chimes…dog tags, hanging from a dead branch and dripping blood. She floated out from underneath them and hurried after the monkey.
The mountains were easy to climb in her wraith-like state, and the vines that seemed to grab at her feet passed harmlessly through her. The scents were more intense as she rose, the flowers the strongest. They were mostly native Thai flowers: bunnak, phikun, lotus and chumhet-yai, some of which were edible and had medicinal purposes. But there were out-of-place blooms, too: tulips, daffodils and crocuses.
Annja loved the smell of flowers, and she was certain she picked up a trace of bougainvillea. The bright magenta and purple flowers were native to South America, and she remembered that they grew profusely outside Luartaro’s office window in Argentina.
The plant was discovered in the mid-1700s, Luartaro had told her, by a French botanist accompanying an explorer named Louis Antoine de Bougainville. She saw the beautiful thorny vine between a gap in the trees and she glided toward it, hovering and inhaling the fragrance. The bougainvillea’s thorns were normally tipped by a black, waxy material. But these were coated with dried blood.
Annja shuddered and looked closer. Bougainvillea thrived in moist soil. There’d been a few pink-flowered ones across the street from the orphanage in New Orleans. She’d also seen some in the gardens of the wat the cabdriver had taken her past in Chiang Mai. The flowers were all over the world now—in warm climes. The plant in her dream was especially vibrant…and disturbing.
She thought she saw something in the leaves. Peering closer still, a face stared back at her. It had been almost indistinguishable at first from the foliage. A young man’s face, smooth and unlined but covered with stripes of green and black paint that made the whites of his eyes stand out starkly. The mouth was set in a determined scowl. There were other faces, too, all painted, and all with sweat beads on their foreheads.
The monkey called to her, and she turned to see it hanging by its feet and holding something so she could see. A skull? No, just part of one. The monkey’s fingers traced designs on it, and dark symbols appeared as it filled with a black substance. The monkey pointed at the symbol for Papa Ghede.
It was her skull bowl, and it cracked into pieces when the monkey dropped it and scrambled farther up the mountain.
Annja followed it.
She crested a rise and teetered at the edge of a gaping maw yawning up from the ground. Light flickered from inside, revealing mounds of treasure. Luartaro and Zakkarat were there, stuffing their pockets. It was almost comical how their pockets bulged with coins and jewelry, their cheeks, too, just like chipmunks that had stuffed walnuts away for later.
Put it back, Annja tried to tell them, but with no voice.
Luartaro understood. His expression haunted and sad, he opened his pockets and spilled the contents on the stone floor. He grew thinner as the coins continued to spew, Zakkarat kneeling and scooping them up. Thinner and thinner until he was little more than a skeleton.
“Free me, Annja,” he implored as he melted into the stone, the broken skull bowl marking the place where he had stood.
“Free me,” Zakkarat said. A heartbeat later, he was gone, too.
She tried to wish them back; it was her dream and she could paint it the colors she wanted. But they didn’t return. And moments later the treasure vanished, too,