Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (2 page)

“This is no place for wonders,” he said quietly. “This country has its paradise, but it’s a distance from here. I can’t mention it until we’re closer.” And then he turned and started walking away.

“Scott!” I said. “Why did you ask me to come?”

“You’ll see,” he said, almost dismissively. He did not even turn to me when he spoke. “This is the cradle of civilization, you know. This place.” He waved his arm around and moved on.

I looked around at the plane, the pilots gesticulating at one of the steaming engine compartments, the joyful reunion over by the airport buildings. In the sky dark shapes rode the currents. They were too high to make out properly, and I frowned at the childish memories of vultures in old films, circling, waiting on a fresh death.

My luggage had been unceremoniously dumped on the ground beneath the open luggage compartment. I grabbed the holdall, snapped open the handle on the suitcase and followed Scott toward the potholed car park. The heat had hit me. I was melting.

“Thanks for the help with my luggage!” I called lightly, hoping for an abusive response, hoping for normality.

But Scott only raised his hand and waved back at me without turning around. “I’ll tell you when we get nearer,” he said. “I can’t tell you yet. Not yet. Not here.” The family watched me walk from the runway, but they ignored Scott. Perhaps they knew him. More likely, he looked like he belonged.

Scott had an old World War Two jeep, left over from that conflict and probably not serviced since. It screeched at us as he started it up, a high-pitched whine intermingled with the sound of something hard spinning around inside the engine, ricocheting, trying to find its way out. A cloud of smoke erupted from the vehicle’s back end.

“Shit,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Scott said, “I’ve cursed it. Wouldn’t, dare let me down.” He grinned madly, smashed the gearstick into first and slammed his foot on the gas.

My first instinct was to look for a seat belt, but if there had ever been one it was long since gone. Instead I grabbed on to my seat with one hand, the rusted window frame with the other, trying to ride out the jolts and bounces. The road was rough as a plowed field, not even bearing the ruts of frequent use.

“Fun, eh?” Scott shouted, laughing as the underside of the jeep crunched against the ground and sent a solid shudder through the whole chassis.

Perhaps we were in a town, but there was not much to see. The most salubrious building we passed was an old church, its tower tall and bell-less, walls rough-rendered and pocked here and there with what could have been bullet holes. Empty windows hid a dark interior, untouched by the strong sun. Contrasting this seemingly unused shell was the church’s garden, fenced in with a clean white picket fence. It held a profusion of bright shrubs, lush and thriving even through the dust that had settled on their leaves, gorgeous orchids nestling at the bases of thick green stems; green and purple, blue and red. They could have been artificial, such were the colors. An incredibly old man approached the church as we passed by, carrying a plastic water container on his shoulder, its contents spewing from a rent in its base. He looked our way but did not appear to see us.

“Where are we going?” I shouted.

“The desert!” Scott replied. “Hot as Hell, beautiful as Heaven! Hope you brought your sunblock.”

I nodded, though he was paying little attention. I had coated myself on the plane, drawing a single amused glance from one of my fellow passengers. Perhaps the sun was the least I had to worry about, and maybe he knew.

We soon passed out of the small settlement. The shacks and rubbish-strewn streets ended abruptly, as did any sign of cultivation. What few sad fruit trees and root crops I had seen had no place past the town’s outer boundary; now, there was only the wilds. The road suddenly seemed to smooth out and calm down, as if pleased to be leaving civilization behind, and before us lay the desert.

I had been aware of its presence for some minutes. It could be seen beyond the town, hunched down, spread as far as the eye could see. Its smell permeated the air; hot and dry, barren and cruel. I could even feel its weight, its distance, its vastness affecting my emotional tides like the sky at night, or the sea on a stormy day. But now for the first time I really
noticed
it. I saw its beauty and danger, its mystery and shapely curves. And I perceived the sharp edges that waited for those unacquainted with its harsh truth.

Now that the road had levelled to merely uncomfortable—and Scott had dropped his speed as if mourning the potholes left behind—I had a chance to talk.

“Scott, you have me confused.”

“It’ll all become clear,” he said. “Or… clearer. More obvious.” He shook his head, trying to rattle loose whatever he was trying to say. “Just wait and let me show you, Pete.”

I nodded, tried to return his smile, but the sun must have stretched my skin. I uncapped the lid of my sunblock and coated my face and arms once more, taking off my cap and rubbing it into my scalp. It grated and scratched. Glancing at the mess on my hand, I saw that a thousand grains of sand had become mixed in, turning the cream into an effective exfoliant.

“Ha!” Scott laughed. “Just like being at the beach. You get used to the sand eventually, just like you get used to being thirsty, sweaty, tired. You can get used to anything, really. Remember going to the beach as a kid? That time when our families went together, you wanted to go canoeing, but I dragged you over to explore the rock pools and caves?”

“You got me into so much trouble.”

“I was a kid, what was I supposed to know about tides?” He laughed again, wild, uninhibited, untempered by normal worries like mortgages and jobs and love. I loved him and hated him, and for the thousandth time I wondered how that could be.

“We could have died.”

“We should have gone farther into the caves. But you were scared.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t know what was there. We could have died.”

“You never find out unless you look.” If I didn’t know him better, I may have imagined mockery in his smile.

“You said you’d found a city,” I said. “A city of ghosts?” He glanced across at me, handed over a bottle of water, looked ahead again.

The road had effectively ended as we left town, cross-country evidently being a more comfortable ride. This desert was not as I had always imagined it to be—the high, sharp-ridged dunes of
Lawrence of Arabia
—but rather flat, hard-packed, supporting sparse oases of vegetation that seemed to sprout from the bases of rocky mounds or in shallows in the ground. Leaves were dark green and thin, their ends sharp, threatening and unwelcoming. If these plants did flower, now was not their season. The sun was high, the heat intense, and mirage lakes danced across the horizon. Ghost water, I thought, and the idea made Scott’s silence even more frustrating.

“What city could be hidden out here?” I asked. “It’s the desert, but it’s hardly wilderness.”

“Hardly?” he repeated, raising his eyebrows. “What’s wilderness?”

“Well… the wilds. Somewhere away from civilization.”

Scott lifted a hand from the wheel and swept it ahead of him, as if offering me everything I could see. “This is as wild as it gets,” he said. “Civilization? Where? Out here there are scorpions and snakes and spiders and flies, and other things to do you mischief. It’s easy to die in the desert.”

“And?” I asked. There had been no feeling to his words, no sense that he meant it. Spiders and snakes did not frighten him, or turn his desert into a wilderness. There was something else here for him.

“And history,” he said. The jeep began to protest as we started up a shallow, long rise. Scott frowned down at the bonnet, cursing under his breath, and then with a cough the engine settled into its old rumble once more.

I looked around, searching for ruins or some other evidence of humanity, of history. But I saw only compacted sand and plants, and a shimmering mirage that made me ever more thirsty.

“The sands of time,” Scott said. “Blown around the world for the last million years. Parts of every civilization that has ever existed on Earth are here. Shards of the pyramids. Flecks of stone from the hanging gardens of Babylon. Dust from unknown obelisks. Traces of societies and peoples we’ve never known or imagined. All here.”

I looked across the desert, trying to perceive anything other than what my eyes told me were there. Yet again I envied Scott his sense of wonder. He could take a deep breath and know that a million people before him had inhaled part of that lungful. I could see or feel nothing of the sort.

“Time has ghosts,” he said. “That’s what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come. And sometimes, the ghosts gather.”

“The city of ghosts?”

Scott drew to a halt atop a low ridge. Ahead of us lay a staggering expanse of nothing: desert forever, the horizon merging with the light blue sky where distance blurred them together. Heat shimmered everything into falseness.

“Farther in,” he said quietly. “A couple of hours’ travel. I have plenty of water, and there’s a spring at my camp. But here. I found this. Take a look. Gather your thoughts, and when you’re ready, tell me what you think.”

He dug down under his seat and handed me something. For a couple of seconds I drew back and kept my hands to myself, afraid that it would be deadly. Not an insect, nothing poisonous, nothing so banal; something
dangerous
. Something that, were I to accept it from Scott, would have consequences.

“Here,” he said, urging me. “It won’t hurt you. That’s the last thing it’ll do.”

I took in a deep breath and held out my hand.

The bundle of cloth was small, and it had no weight whatsoever. I was holding a handful of air. It was old, crumbled, dried by the intense heat until all flexibility and movement had been boiled away. It lay there in my hand, a relic, and as I turned it this way and that I saw what was inside.

Bones. Short and thin, knotted, disjointed. Finger bones. One of them had a shred of mummified flesh still hanging on for dear, long-departed life.

I gasped, froze in my seat, conscious of Scott’s gaze upon me. I hefted the bundle, still amazed at how light it seemed, wondering if the climate had done something to my muscles or sense of touch. And for a moment so brief I may have imagined it in a blink, I saw this person’s death.

Cold. Wet. Alone. And a long, long way from here.

“It’s old,” Scott said. “Very old. Before Christ. Before the Minoans, the Egyptians, Mesopotamia.”

“How do you know?” I whispered.

“It’s hardly there,” he said. “Touch it.”

I pointed a finger and reached out, aiming between the folds of ancient cloth at the dull gray bone wrapped inside. Closer, closer, until my finger felt as though it had been immersed in water of the exact same temperature as our surroundings. But that was all.

I pushed farther, but there was no sense of the bone being there. It was not solid.

“Mirage?” I said. But I knew that was wrong. “What is this?” I hefted the package again, squeezed it, watched as it kept its shape and did not touch my skin. “What the bloody hell… ?”

“Sometimes I guess even ghosts fade away,” Scott said. He started the jeep again and headed down the slope, out into the great desert.

I dropped the cloth bundle and kicked it away from my feet, watching, waiting for it to vanish or change. It did neither. But by the time we reached Scott’s encampment, I thought perhaps it had faded a little more.

There were six tents scattered around a boggy depression in the ground. This was Scott’s “spring.” As we pulled up in the jeep a flock of birds took off from the watering hole, darting quickly between the tents, moving sharply like bats. There was movement on the ground too; lizards shimmied beneath rocks, and a larger creature on four legs—too fast to see, too blurred for me to make out—flickered out of sight over the lip of the depression and into the desert.

“Quite a busy place,” I said.

“It’s the only spring for miles in any direction. I don’t mind sharing it.”

“You have others on the dig?” I asked. The tents looked deserted, unkempt, unused, but there was no other reason for them to be there.

“I used to,” he said. “The last one left three weeks ago.”

“You been skimping on their wages again?” I was trying to be jolly, but it could not reach my voice, let alone my smile.

“Frightened off,” he said casually. He jumped from the jeep, slammed the door and made for one of the tents.

I sat there for a while, trying to make out just what was different about this place compared to the other camps I had visited over the past two decades. The sun scorched down, trying to beat sense out of me. I closed my eyes, but still it found its way through, burning my vision red.

There were no people here, but that was not the main difference. There were fewer tents than at most digs. Those that were here looked older, more bedraggled, as if they had been here for a lot longer than usual.

Scott stood staring back at me, hands on his hips. “I have a solar fridge,” he said. “I have beer. We need to wash up, catch up and then talk some about what I’ve found out here. You ready for some wonder, Pete?”

You ready for some wonder, Pete
? He could have been reading my mind. And yet again, only my closeness to Scott prevented me from taking his comment as ridicule.

“Where’s the dig?” I asked. “Where’s the equipment? The washers, the boxed artifacts, the tools?”

“Ah,” Scott said, throwing up his hands as if he’d been caught cheating at cards. “Well… Pete, please mate, I’m not trying to deceive you or catch you out. I just wanted you here to
share
something with me. Come on, into my tent. We’ll crack a few, and then I’ll tell you everything. The time needs to be right.”

“Matthew,” I said. It was the first time I had mentioned Scott’s most baffling e-mail since my arrival.

His face dropped and he looked down at his feet. We stayed that way for some time—me sitting in the jeep, slowly frying in the sun; Scott standing a few steps away examining the desert floor—and then he looked up.