Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (4 page)

Still the sands scoured the tent, driven by the horrendous gales. I shouted at Scott several times to ask whether the canvas could withstand such a battering, but he did not answer. He knew I was asking something, but he merely smiled, eyes sparkling, bringing the bottle to his lips once more. He existed in his own little space.

There was no point in trying to sleep. I checked my watch regularly, but day and night had become confused, and when the time began to make no sense I stopped checking. Perhaps night fell, because the dark storm became that much darker, but lightning gave us brief moments of illumination here and there. Scott lit some electric lanterns around the tent, solar batteries charged during the day to keep the day with us through the long, dark desert nights. And it grew perceptibly cooler. I opened my luggage and rummaged around for a shirt and a pair of combat trousers, standing to change with my head only inches from the convex canvas ceiling. For some reason it seemed so much louder than when I was sitting down.

Eventually, after hours that felt like days, the storm began to abate. We only realized how much it had lessened when we found that we could converse comfortably by raising our voices only slightly.

“How long do these usually last?” I asked.

Scott shrugged. “As I said, never seen one like this before. But I think that was short.”

I looked at my watch, but still it made no sense.

“Hours,” he said. “Maybe six.” He glanced at the empty beer bottles strewn around the floor of his tent. “Maybe more.”

I suddenly realized how much I needed to urinate. I looked around the tent, but there was no sign of a bucket or a partitioned toilet area.

“Two tents along,” Scott said. “If it’s still there.” He pointed the way without standing. He suddenly looked very drunk, even though minutes before he had been alert and observant.

I stared at him. I was scared, terrified of the desert and the prospect of leaving the tent on my own, but I could not articulate that idea.

He knew. “Come on,” he said, standing and swaying slowly toward me. “Shit, listen to that. Like it never was.”

The storm had all but died down. There was a continuous, low hissing of sand slipping slowly from the dome tent. But even that faded away after only a few more seconds, and we were left with our own heavy breathing.

The silence was shocking. My stomach rumbled, and I was ridiculously embarrassed.

“Like it never was,” Scott said again. “Let’s go and see what it’s left us.”

We exited the tent into a bloodred dusk.

And we saw what the storm had left behind.

The landscape had changed beyond recognition.

Where the watering hole had been, a sand dune now lay. Where the neighboring tents had been pitched, there was now a wind-patterned expanse of loose sand. And the horizon that had once been apparent, viewed across packed sand and low, gentle mounds, was now hidden behind something new.

Rising out of the desert, a city.

I fell to my knees. I could not take in the immensity of what we were viewing. My mind would not permit it. It did not fit within the confines of my imagination, the limits of my understanding.

Scott was amazed, but not surprised. That was something that terrified me even more. He was not surprised.

“There it is,” he said. “There it is, at last.” He walked across the altered landscape, ignoring the fact that ours was the only tent left standing. There was no sign of the others. They could have been anywhere.

“Scott?” I whispered at last. He turned and looked, smiling, but not at me. “Scott, what’s going on?”

“The City of the Dead,” he said. “The storm gave it to us. Pete, you have to come and see it with me. Don’t just stay here.”

“I’m afraid. It shouldn’t be there, it’s too… big.”

“Out of the desert, that’s all.
Please
, Pete. You’ll always regret it if you don’t come. You’ll think about it forever. It’ll haunt you…
believe
me, I know. Live a little.”

Live a little
. Yes, that was what I wanted to do. Scott had lived a lot, and I only wanted to live a little. But still, I was terrified. I could conceive of no way that this could be happening. I looked past him at the ruins revealed by the storm. They seemed to begin just over a wide, low dune created at the western extremes of the old camp, and if they were as close as I believed they probably rose about twenty feet above the desert level. Only twenty feet.

But before the storm, there had been nothing there at all.

“They shouldn’t be there…” I said.

Scott shrugged. “The desert is deceiving. Messes with perspective. Come on.”

He was lying. But somehow I stood and followed.

The sand underfoot was loose and treacherous; more than once we both slipped and slid several steps down the side of the new dune. I could not take my eyes from the ruin rising before me. I tried to convince myself that I had been misled by Scott’s certainty; that the structure was naturally formed, carved from solid stone by millennia of scouring wind. But it could only be artificial. There were the joints between blocks, the blocks themselves huge and probably each weighing several tons. And the windows, squared at the base, curved inward at their head, like traditional church windows back home. Around the windows, still visible here and there, ornamentation. Scrolls. Patterned carvings that may have been some sort of writing. And in one place, staring out at us as we approached, guarding the ancient ruin it formed a part of, the face of a gargoyle.

I tried not to look, but my gaze was drawn there. It had three eyes, two mouths, and though its edges had been worn by eons of erosion, still its teeth looked sharp.

“Scott,” I whispered.

“I know!” he said, excitement to my fear. “Come on! I think this is just a part of it.”

We walked slowly up the low slope of the new dune. I glanced back once or twice at the remains of the camp we left behind. Only the single large tent was visible now, with a few sand-covered mounds here and there that may have been scattered equipment. Ahead of us, the old ruin revealed itself more and more with each step.

I was afraid to reach the top. Afraid to see whether this was just a part of it, or if there was so much more beyond. I so wanted this to be a single tall wall.

When we crested the hill, the world became a different place. Everything I had held true shifted, much of it drastically. My beliefs, my faith took a gut-punch and reeled against the assault. Scott touched my shoulder and then held on; he knew what I was feeling. I looked at him, and his eyes were ablaze with the thrill of discovery.

The ruins lay in a wide hollow in the desert. There was not one high wall. There was not even a single building. Spread across the floor of the depression in the land, seemingly growing from the ground, lay the remains of several large and dozens of smaller buildings. Sand and grit were skirted around bases and against walls, had drifted up and through openings that may have been windows, may have been wounds. Some of the ruins rose above the level of the desert floor, but many more had been revealed below, shown the sunlight for the first time in eons when the terrible sand storm had opened them up to view. The hollow must have been a mile across.

“Let’s go down,” Scott said.

“Why?”

“I want to see. I want to know where the dead live. Look, over there!” He pointed to our left, and before the dark stone of the first tumbled building there was something in the sand, something dark, moving.

At first I thought it was a scorpion or small lizard. But as we moved closer I saw the reality. It was a foot, still clad in the remains of a sandal, bones stripped of flesh and dangling with scraps of skin, snapped or broken at the ankle. The illusion of movement stopped as we came closer, but I blinked several times and wiped sand from my eyes, waiting for it to move again.

Scott hesitated momentarily before picking it up. “Here,” he said, offering me the relic. “Touch something timeless.”

Before I could refuse he grabbed my hand and placed the skeletal foot there. It had no weight. Lighter than a feather, little more than a memory, it lay across my palm and fingers, yet seemed not to touch them. It felt warm, though that may have been the sun beating through its nothingness—

And the sun struck down as this person walked, endlessly, herded with a thousand more, driven from one old land and taken toward another. Soldiers and settlers accompanied them on their way, using guns and boots if any of the ragged tribe lagged behind. This person was old by now, crying, leaving a trail of tears as she was torn away from her own lands for the first time ever, and she died from thirst and sorrow on strange soil—

I dropped the thing back into the sand and it landed with a thud. It sat there motionless, and at any second I expected it to strike out.

“There’s more,” he said. “Signs of habitation.”

I shook my head, trying to dispel whatever it was I had imagined.
Hallucination? Vision
? “You really believe this place is what you said it is?”

“Of course!” he said. “And there’s more, much more. This is just the surface. I want to go down inside. Matthew is inside!”

“If that’s true—if everything you’re saying, all this madness, has an ounce of truth—do you know what this would do to the world? To religion, belief, faith?”

“I don’t care,” Scott said.

“Why?”

“Because caring can’t change the truth.”

I stared over Scott’s shoulder at the ruined city risen from the sands.

“I want to go
deeper
,” Scott said, and he turned and walked down toward the ruins.

I followed, sliding once or twice, starting a small avalanche that preceded us both down the slope. There were several more dark shapes in the sand, shapes with glimpses of white within, old bones, ready to crumble in the heat. I wondered if they were light and insubstantial like the foot. Light, but filled with memories waiting to be relived. I had no wish to touch them.

Scott reached the first ruin. He stood very close, hand held up in front of him, palm out, almost touching the wall. The stone sported some elaborate designs, letters or images, numbers or figures.

“Old,” Scott said. “These are so old.”

“What language is that? Is that hieroglyphics?”

“An earlier form, perhaps. Though initiated separately. I’ve seen variations of this before, many times all across the world. I’ve been searching for so long, it’s almost my second tongue.”

“What does it say?”

Scott turned to me and smiled, and his hand touched the rock for the first time. He sighed and blinked heavily, as if suddenly tired or drunk. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Come on.”

Scott and I circled the stone ruin. It was built from huge flat blocks, far too large to possibly be moved by hand, and old though it was, burial in the sands must have protected it from erosion by the winds of time. In addition to the strange markings there were several more of the gruesome gargoyles at various points on its upper surface, not corresponding at all with any opening or any particular spacing. I glanced back, and our footprints seemed to have disappeared into the desert. The sand was so smooth, so fine that it had flowed back in to fill the depressions, leaving little more than dents in the surface. It was as though the buried city were swallowing our presence. Or wiping it away.

“I think this may be a temple,” he said.

“May
have
been,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head, frowning and smiling at me at the same time. “This may be the City of the Dead, but it can never be deserted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” he said. “Deeper.”

Farther down in the depression stood the remains of more buildings. They looked ruined to me, ancient and ruined, but what Scott had said stuck with me, forced me to view them in a different light. So there was no roof on these four tumbled-down walls, but what need of a roof buried in the sands? The doorway was blocked with the tumbled stone arch that had once held it open, but do the dead need true doorways? I looked around at our feet and saw more of the scattered remains, some of them still wrapped in old cloth, some of the bones white in the glaring sun, bleached and seemingly brittle as if they had been exposed for eons, not hours. The wind must have danced and spun between these barely standing walls, because the stone floor was revealed in places, sand swept aside. It held patterns, colored rocks inlaid in the stone so perfectly that their edges seemed to merge, offering no cracks for time to pry apart. Scott tried to brush away more sand, reveal a larger pattern, but the more that was on display the less sense it made.

He revelled in the mystery, while it made me more nervous.

“Is that a language?” I asked. “Same as the wall markings?”

Scott shook his head. “Not a language as we know it,” he said. “I think it’s meant to inspire feelings. True art. We could carry on, uncover it all. Find out
which
feelings.”

I shook my head. “Let’s move on.”

“Good man!” Scott said, slapping my shoulder and hurrying on ahead.

There was a maze of long, low walls at the base of the depression, spreading maybe three hundred feet from side to side. Scott paused at its perimeter for a few moments, looking around, kicking at the sand. He stooped and picked up a badly eroded bone. It may have been a skull, but it was full of unnatural holes. He closed his eyes.

The air around us seemed to shimmer, as if stirred by an invisible breeze. I felt no breath against my sweating skin, but the ruined walls and the high ridge of sand around us flickered as if through a heat haze. And though I felt no breath, I seemed to hear a whisper.

Scott dropped the relic, glancing back at me. “Murder,” he said.

I looked at the tangled mess of cloth and bone. And then I surprised myself. I must have shocked Scott as well, because he raised his eyebrows and took a step back.

I reached out and picked up the skull—

And it was dark by the sea, windy and wet, stinking of rotting sea life as beaches always do. This person stood with his back to the cliffs, staring out, watching the bursts of effervescence as waves broke and captured the moonlight. In one hand there was a gun, in the other a torch, and when the small rowboat came ashore both would be pointed outward this night, and both used. But that chance did not arrive. The waves hid the sound of the shape creeping up behind him, out of the cave where it must have been waiting all day. When the knife curled around his throat and slid through his skin, the moon caught the spurting blood, bright as breaking waves, and the betrayal tasted of salt—