The Watchers Below
Between two nameless towns, in the sea-caves that shoot like veins through the stony coast, a great desecration was uncovered. The crime, bloodless as it was, could not be described in terms the occupants of our annexed land understood – nonetheless, it roused such indignity and terror that an official response was deemed necessary. As the sole native detective in the employ of the Stowenbay precinct offices, the nation’s only police department, it was considered appropriate to assign me to the case, and I was sent away to dispel what my superiors called "aboriginal phantasms". This occurred in the year 1397, during the month of Distant Thunder, in the country of Zweng Du.
(That was thirty years ago. Now I am old, and Zweng Du is not as insular. Our art, once the exclusive fixture of local shrines – the finely wrought miniature palaces which dappled the countryside, cluttered our homes, and teetered at the crossroads of our few cities, every spare alcove opportunistically transformed into the delicate homestead of a doll – is well-known on the Continent, as are our customs. I think it will not be futile to tell this story.)
I departed from Stowenbay at midday and, traveling by carriage, reached the settlement as the sun sank under the long green blade of the sea. We had passed many shrines without stopping, as was necessary to arrive before dark, and because neither I nor my driver would admit to harboring any provincial superstitions. At the village only an old woman was awake to welcome me. She led me by firelight to my lodgings, which were in the sherpa's house. He was to be my close collaborator in the coming investigation, as he was the only man familiar with the local system of caverns.
The sherpa's home was small, and smaller in the dark. He was not awake, but my guide insisted I sneak upstairs, where a room had been prepared. So I coiled myself into the attic, and into fitful sleep on a straw futon whose scent reminded me of my childhood, in a damp boarding house not unlike this one, and all that had preceded my employment at the precinct. The warm rains of Distant Thunder woke me early the next morning.
Their freshness drove away the stale dreams. It is a comforting season to all who were raised by the coast: the gentle end of summer, before storms make landfall. The end of a sherpa's work-year, too; the caves would soon be impassable, either flooded or gated behind choppy whirlpools. When the waters receded in the spring, they would draw back pulverized stone to reveal new crevasses, cracks, and tunnels, and the sherpa's endless cartographing would begin anew. Now, though, was the time for harvest.
This reaping was manifest on the lower level of my host's ramshackle dwelling. Great spars of mineral, rent from the caves, cluttered every corner of the house, propped up against the walls like rows of soldiers. I was glad I had not noticed them looming the night before. They were adorned in ribbons of various colors, in what I learned was an illiterate system for designating price, client, and other details pertaining to the wares. Whenever anyone disturbed the stagnant air the ribbons would tremble as though caught in a gale. Terata, the sherpa, was in the process of affixing these labels to new spars when I descended.
He sat shirtless in front of an open screen door, handling the crystals with large padded gloves. When he saw me he nodded respectfully; he was a small man (a common trait among cave-crawling sherpas, but Terata was small even with reference to those peers) and I realized that the house, which to me seemed cramped, had simply been built to accommodate his stature. It was a little bit unsettling, that adjustment in proportion, as though we were standing in a dollhouse, a shrine, or an elf's-nest transposed from faerieland. He looked strong, as indeed he must have been, for the tallest harvested spars reached above his head to my shoulder, but he was so pale I thought he might be sick.
He indicated that we would descend to the scene of the crime, so to speak, after the rains had ceased, and that he would continue his harvest elsewhere in the caves while I examined the site. He, or perhaps his sons, who would be accompanying him, would collect me at the close of the day. I did not want to be alone for so long under that profane vault, but to refuse would be an embarrassment, in many ways. At the precinct, I had sought to exterminate all my lingering religiosity.
The morning passed wet and uneventful. I packed a small kit and paced around Terata's house, squinting at his rocks, which he tolerated admirably. Breakfast was prepared by an invisible domestic. Under the stairs I had climbed to the attic there was a simple shrine, whose resident doll was diminutive but beautiful. The stones of the Zweng Du caverns, from which all dolls are carved, are rightfully renowned for their splendor: pearlescent green and violet and gray, like milky, damaged skin, intersected by gulfs of limpid crystal, within which the mineral's deformities and bubbles resemble shrunken landscapes. The globe-enclosed dioramas created elsewhere by master glassblowers are not half as lifelike.
The polished face of this doll was carved sleeping, and it rested on a toylike bed, tiny fabric hands cushioning its cheek. The half of its face turned towards the ceiling was transparent, and were it a being possessed of organs, its brain would have been on display, floating above the swirls of the inner gem.
Because the dolls are often called "little watchers", foreigners have expressed confusion that many are carved in states of permanent repose. Temple-keepers have a simple answer: dreaming, too, is a way of watching.
The rains ceased, and we convened with Terata's sons outside their academy. A stone boarding house stood beside it, and it must have absorbed students, mostly the eldest sons of merchants, from all of the surrounding remoteness. Even so, I was surprised to find a school here, and more surprised that Terata could afford to enroll his sons. When the incident in the caves was first made known to the precinct, the reports, received by mail, were barely legible, and all were submitted under the surname Ma – baffling the secretaries, until I explained it was a rural custom for those without a last name to instead use the first syllable of their province. Even by the low standards of Zweng Du, this town was poor.
The boys, both adolescents, were called Tern and Tarth; foreign names, as was the fashion for sons. They were taller than their father, and darker, not sickly pale. As we proceeded towards the coasts we were joined, too, by a daughter, perhaps eight years of age, who unlike her brothers could have been Terata's twin, albeit even smaller and more ephemeral. It was she, apparently, who had cooked and served the breakfast, somehow escaping my notice. I was troubled suddenly by a vision of her lurking between the walls, as I could not imagine how else she had passed unseen. Her name was Pili.
We arrived, by way of a thin dusty path, at an opening into the caves. It was high up, and further from the shore than I expected, well back from the reach of the tide, where the foliage and soil had not yet crumbled into shale. A shrine was set above it, like an ornamental lintel, its doll balanced in a room so shallow it was practically an engravature. The creature, twice the height of Terata's little doll, stirred the rainwater inside a doll-sized iron cauldron. A common enough scene, though one rarely depicted in wilderness shrines. The men bowed, and then we entered. It was almost noon.
The shrines of Zweng Du followed an extensive tradition of composition, reconstructing eight-or-so scenes in perpetuity, albeit with great variety introduced by the whims of the creators and the different sizes of the dolls. In houses one found sleeping dolls and cooking dolls; by the roadsides and in the mountains there were wounded dolls, lying prone with arrows through their chests, and smiling dolls, surrounded by stone and paper animals; and in the deepest woods lucky wanderers could still find the old shrines of warrior dolls, which had become so rare since our occupation.
There were mirror-gazing dolls for merchants (the "mirror" was often a large polished coin) and scholar dolls, whose cells were heaped with scrolls, for teachers. In our temples cenobites worked to maintain vast and elaborate shrines; doll-palaces with hundreds of rooms, shrines stacked in geometric, dizzying grids; cooking dolls whose cauldrons were lit by real and ever-burning flames; aviaries for the smiling dolls; life-sized dolls posed on stages. Before it was dismantled, I saw a temple's rendition of a warrior, standing atop a mound of faceless jade bodies, its sword dripping with red wax which pooled around the victims and by some hidden mechanism was not allowed to harden.
My favorite scene, though, was that of the doll-carving doll, the little creature bent in its workshop over the unshaped face of a companion. I had kept one such shrine when I first moved to Stowenbay.
The tunnel into the caves was only gray for a moment. Sunlight dimmed behind us and the walls began to swirl green and mauve, as though we processed through the guts of a sorcerous cloud. The stone turned from smooth and molten to rugged, like it was shearing against itself. I hugged my cloak near to me, and still it tore; it was the maroon uniform of the precinct, which I had worn against Terata’s advice, as I cared less for it than for the fine clothes underneath. It caught frequently on spars, stalagmites, and various cave-growths I could not name. In the flickering of the lantern I was tricked by patches of crystal, which seemed to promise passage, and I collided with them like a bird flying into glass. It was obvious that I would not be able to retrace my steps without the aid of Terata or his family.
Tern carried the light and kept with me. Tarth ventured ahead, but not too far; his father seemed to know the way in the dark. Pili appeared and disappeared into cracks and crevices too small for the rest of us. Sometimes I heard her laughing far ahead, with Terata, but just as often she was by my side, like an unwelcome little white flame.
All through the tunnels were yellow ribbons, placed by Terata and by his forefathers, marking certain spars as cursed: never to be harvested. This was the tell-tale sign of a cave explored; a warning that any native of Zweng Du, sherpa or otherwise, would understand. In some stretches of cave they were sparse, bright and lonely pinpricks of malevolence. Elsewhere entire outcroppings were condemned. These areas, I confess, made my heart race. We would come upon them suddenly, sprawls of crystals ribboned in yellow like loose teeth a surgeon had prepared to be yanked. When they were jagged they reminded me of frolicking demons; when they stood parallel they reminded me of funeral processions, which the dead in their golden robes are said to join.
When a ribbon faded, its yellow no longer vibrant against the surrounding mildewy nebula, a new one was tied over it. Some spars had as many as four. The oldest were turning to white dust. This was a well-mapped cave, which had been traveled for generations. Despite my disorientation, we made good time, and our passage was easy. We never crawled, and only once did I have to bow my head, while walking through a channel that was low but still wide. There were parts of this network that would have been impassable to me, I am sure; caverns that could only be reached by climbing up chutes, squeezing and worming, or diving into pools of cold water. Secret places known only to Terata and his kin.
By the time we reached our destination Pili's elbows and knees were as black as a goblin's, and she must have traversed twice the distance we had, due to her constant doubling-back and creeping away. Yet she remained energetic, and in fact was the only one unaffected by the stifling, ghoulish aura of the cavern into which we emerged.
It was vast and very beautiful. No lantern would be necessary here; we were near the sea, and great shafts of sunlight shone through gaps in the western wall. We stood on a high and wide plateau which jutted out over the water. There must have been an opening into the cavern at sea-level; far below us I saw a little rowboat full of people, made minuscule by that space. I waved to them, perhaps seeming a strange figure in my red and newly-tattered uniform. We were too far to communicate.
The spars in this room were enormous. The largest could never be harvested, not without the generosity of a temple to pay for the laborers it would take to haul them away. They stood there like pillars, as tall and as thick as old trees; but they did not dominate the expanse. We were all, instead, drawn against our will towards the copse of spars that had been defaced – or rather, enfaced.
It was a group of a few dozen, standing between knee and collarbone height. All were marked with faded yellow ribbons. And yet, in a defiant act of ruin, they had been carved. Evil pealed from them, almost audible.
Tern was visibly pained, and only Tarth accompanied me up to the makeshift dolls. He offered a promise that they would return before sundown, and retreated. Terata stayed at the other end of the chamber, holding his daughter back by her forearm. Then they all scurried away through an elevated crack, scaling twenty feet up the wall in barely a minute. It was the harvest, after all, and they would live off the income of selling spars all winter.
As soon as I was alone there came a ruckus from below. The villagers on the boat had begun waving and shouting, but the cliff face that separated us seemed to repel their voices. I bellowed a question back, and my words must have been just as indistinct to them, because they went quiet. One of them extracted a mirror from his pocket, and began to flash it arhythmically, in what I assume was a code. I took out my notebook and recorded the tempo of the message, though I could not decipher it – it was likely one of the signal-dialects of sailors. Eventually they stopped trying to communicate; however, they remained in the basin, floating watchfully.
I began my investigation of the carvings. There were twenty-three spars total, seven of which had been carved. I measured them, and tried to preserve some impression of the faces with a charcoal rubbing. My plan had initially been to compare them to the styles of known local carvers; but few carvers ever ventured into the caves, for to learn the ways of the caverns would take time away from their art. There had been a time when all sherpas were carvers, but it was long passed. The skills were so different that specialization naturally occurred, first within families (often a husband walked the caves and a wife carved), and finally without. While the sherpas were only informally organized, knowledge and territories kept secret by kin, the carvers had a guild, issued licenses, and held exams. I had consulted their members list seeking likely culprits, to no avail. These dolls, anyways, were very crude – not the work of an experienced practitioner.
(It was theorized that further specialization was possible, and perhaps inevitable. We knew, of course, of the factories and assembly lines that were becoming common across the Continent, but our guilds had held firm in their rejection of them. So I thought instead of Terata’s children; Pili was by far the most skilled at navigating the caves, maybe even a prodigy, but she obviously lacked the ability, which even I manifested somewhat, to determine which stones were cursed. Innocence, or sociopathy, some broken internal tool – Tern, by contrast, winced at every yellow ribbon, while being the largest and clumsiest of the three.)
The creatures had faces that were angular and unsanded. Their mouths were great gashes with hideous lips, and their eyes were holes, large and gaping and far apart. Any goblin charm they may have possessed was negated by the unease with which I beheld them. They faced various directions, polluting almost the entire chamber with their gaze; the little boat had approached the cliffs so as not to be “visible” by them. To my embarrassment, I, too, found that hiding behind one of the massive columns, where their eyes couldn't reach, calmed my nerves.
The dolls were in several cases carved into the middle of the spars, at about chest height. A kind of dread was gnawing at me. I went over to the cliffs that dropped into the basin to look for the marks of crampons, or nails in the rock. Other than via the cave network, scaling that surface was the only way of reaching the plateau; the cracks that let in sunlight were all above the water. The dolls' sight prickled as I searched.
Foreigners often mistakenly believe that carving releases spirits residing in the stone. (Or rather, that is what they believe we believe.) Yet this is not the case – the dolls are not nature spirits, and the carving creates a being, rather than releasing one. Selecting a spar to carve is an act of divination, then, into what kinds of person its many futures hold.
I have heard tell, elsewhere on the Continent, of machines called “golems” that are animate but not agentful: husks which exist only to labor, endowed with minds that take in orders but produce nothing. The dolls of Zweng Du are in many ways the opposite; they cannot move, except insofar as we pose them, but they certainly think, decide, and act. They change the world by watching it.
How? Come the end of the universe, they tell the story of all that they have seen, and their telling flows backwards in time and becomes the world. The choices of the sherpa, deep in the caves where no dolls can see, exist in the interstices of that mythopoesis – the story chooses its own narrator, and so in harmonious simultaneity the cosmos and its apocalypse weave each other.
From these premises one can derive the criticality of creating sympathetic watchers, and of avoiding the knots of evil whose testimony would only write bad fortune. Perhaps I have now rambled too long about these mysteries; despite its metaphysics, my country was poor, and in the salons it was popular to blame these superstitions for our deprivation. Those who remained faithful resorted to arguing that if we lagged behind the Continent it was because their accelerant was poison.
Regardless, like other such beliefs, to anyone raised with them they rang with truth when it counted: in privacy and in the dark. No matter the attitude adopted among salonnieres. I could not find a way up, or down, the cliffs.
The rowboat and its occupants still bobbed in the waters below, and I was glad for it. It struck me, then, that the anomaly had been reported by a fisherman visiting this cavern, instead of by the sherpas. I had assumed that their territory was simply too large to patrol in full, but the well-tread path to this cavern had left me with the impression it was central to the network. I returned quickly to my refuge behind the pillar. There was much to contemplate.
In retrospect, the delirious stupidity of coming here seemed obvious – had, in fact, been obvious to my anonymous watchers on the boat. Terata and his family were the only ones known to have access to the cavern, but a smothered religiosity had blinded me to the possibility that a sherpa, of all people, could commit this crime. It was self-immolating lunacy, to step into the gaze of an angry fate, and I had not believed any motivation could outweigh that doom. The evidence, finally, had crashed through my naivety. Yet they had not bludgeoned me to death on the walk here, so I clung to hope.
I might have concluded it was some rogue, mad cave explorer, had it not been for the height of the carvings. Pili, I was certain, was the one to have made them; her father had to have known, and was either protecting her, or compelling her. Perhaps the brothers were innocent. Their nervousness around this blasphemed place had seemed genuine.
I wondered what to do. I spent quite some time wondering, as the sun sank lower, and the air turned to gold in its beams. Eventually, as the last grayness of the day slipped away, I realized they were not coming to retrieve me. The little boat had left, no doubt to avoid the perils of darkness and the morning storms. I had no lantern. I considered jumping into the water and swimming back. The light had passed before I thought of writing an account of my investigation, and I cursed myself. My notes were comprehensive, but disorganized, and it embarrassed me to imagine them being retrieved – a dramatic consideration, but I was truly uneasy, and in the dark my panic was turning to fantasy.
My anxieties led me to remember strange tales, superstitions built on superstitions, which even the most devout considered fanciful; tales of witches who lived in the mountains and sold evil dolls, which were hidden in victims' homes to sour their fortune or end their lives. Campfire stories of dolls that moved in the night, hungry and vengeful. Of shrine dolls that had grown old and bored and begun whispering for blood in the minds of passers-by. These, and other ridiculous ideas, chilled my blood. Since the carved spars had not been severed from the rock, was the entire cavern now the inverted body of a doll, a creature trapped (with me) inside of its own stomach?
I lived, of course, but the night was long. Like a child I wrapped my cloak around me and pretended that was shield enough; I squeezed my eyes shut when, through the holes torn in it by stalagmites, I glimpsed things moving about in the star-glimmering murk. All through my vigil I heard groaning and muttering, though whether the sounds were of this world or another I could not say.
Rain brought the morning, and ended my cowering. The droplets sang like a choir in that great space, and the basin was turned to green foam by their turbulence. When I emerged from behind my pillar I was buffeted by the hatred, which seemed magnified, in those twisted faces. Their glowering eyes never left me.
When the little boat returned, this time with another, I was elated. As soon as they were near I signaled that I wanted to drop something to them, a gesture they fortunately understood. Nearing the cliff, they exited their boats and waded – I was glad I had not tried to jump – until they were positioned to catch the papers I let fall to them wrapped in my red cloak. "TERATA IS GUILTY," the first page stated. "HE MAY RETURN TO HARM ME." I think even from my distance I could see their sad looks.
Retrieving me from the plateau required quite the feat of engineering, and I remain indebted to the villagers who worked for several days on the rescue. By the time a rope was successfully launched up to me, I was half-crazed both from hunger and from the stress of surviving several nights with the dolls. Frankly, I do not remember much from that time, only that when my descent was accomplished, I asked first whether they had arrested Terata.
They had not; he, and his entire family, had lept to their deaths from a nearby promontory. A fisherman had found three of their bodies, floating near the shore, and a suicide note, in which he confessed, had been left at the threshold of their home.
After that revelation I was rushed back to Stowenbay, where I was put up first in a hospital, and then, to my annoyance, a sanitarium, for the rest of the summer. Happily this recovery period was not totally unproductive, as my colleagues at the precinct had become suddenly interested in the case, no doubt because of my attempted murder and the suicides. They had not believed our myths could stir real violence; so while I waited for my health to return I was interviewed not only by my superiors, but by agents who introduced themselves as members of the Department of Folkloric Affairs, an organization under the occupying military supposedly dedicated to minimizing cultural conflict. To my surprise, I was welcomed back at the precinct after my release, and I have done well for myself there in the thirty years since.
Much has been written about what followed my investigation, back in the caves. Foreign author Lupario Forth witnessed the ceremonial destruction of those dolls, and his account of that event, and many other magnificent occurrences, was published in his collection Tales of Unearthly Zweng Du: how they were wrapped in shining mantles, served fruit and water, and then shattered by a hammer-wielding mechanical doll the temples reserve for this purpose. (I have always enjoyed reading foreign articles about my country. Whether they see us as quaint or savage, a certain magic of this land is best captured by aliens.) Their fragments now repose in a doll cemetery, among countless benevolent kin.
The cavern itself, suffused by the malice of those beings, was entirely condemned by the sherpas who harvested the spars for destruction. Every crystal in that theatre was marked with a yellow ribbon, and as the decades pass they have been reapplied, such that the chamber is now aglow with them. A great miasma of stars; a locus of ethereal beauty, for those who can withstand the ambient malaise. It is now a popular tourist attraction.
Yet despite this apparently satisfying conclusion, I think back to that case more than any other; to the uncanny senselessness of it, to the contrast of the rickety house and the rich school, and to the suicide note of an illiterate man. I think about the Department of Folkloric Affairs, and how its activities are entirely classified. Zweng Du is as poor as ever, suffering in the long shadow of its neighbors, and I think, too, about how its veins, the caves which are its definitive feature, may be infested with evil watchers, writing sorrow into its history from their perch at the end of time. And I begin to wonder who might have put them there.
Recently, though, I think most of all about new rumors from the West: of a tiny, feral woman discovered living in a previously unmapped cave system, and of how, without exception, she had carved every single spar in the tunnels – of how each face was more sublime than the last, until the whole network sung with intelligence and eerie calculation – and of my many questions only she can answer.