Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (6 page)

“Scott!” I yelled, but even though I felt no breeze, my voice was stolen away. He was next to me, spread-eagled in the air, and when he caught my eye he looked quickly away again. What that signified, I did not know.

The impact came closer, and then it was past. It did not hurt, and I had no memory at all of having landed. One second we were falling by tall buildings, flitting past windows that each seemed to hold a shadowy face observing our descent, and the next we were on the ground. Dust rose around us and floated in the still air, drifting up, up, as if eager to trace the paths of our recent descent. We lay there, watching the dust form ghostly shapes around us. Somehow, at the end of our fall, we had flipped over to land on our backs.

“We’re here,” Scott whispered. “Look.”

He did not point and I did not turn my head to see where he was looking. I did not need to. Because one of those ambiguous shapes suddenly became more real, emerging from the dust like a sunbeam bursting through cloud cover, carrying a bluish light and forming a very definite shape as it passed first over Scott’s body, and then my own. The shape of a woman in long, flowing robes, her hair short, her hands held out before her as if forever warding off some horrible fate. Her foot touched my arm—

She saw it coming at her, the dog, the animal, whatever it is, she saw it and she saw the faces of those behind it, and they could have been grimacing or laughing. She brought up her hands, as if that would do any good, and before the thing crashed into her in a rage of teeth and claws, she caught sight of the face of someone she had once loved in the gleeful crowd—

I scurried back, pushing with my feet until I was leaning against a stone wall, shaking my head to loosen the image. The wraith drifted away down the street and eventually faded into the uniform blue light that smothered this place. The wall at my back should have felt good, but it was merely more confirmation this was somewhere that should not be, as was the solid ground, the ground I had hit after minutes of falling. I glanced up, but the cliff wall was nowhere to be seen. Only that blue light.

“Are we alive?” I said, a sick fear suddenly making me cold.

“Of course,” Scott said. “Do you remember dying?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t. We fell!”

“Everyone here remembers dying,” he said. “That’s why they’re here.”

“But why—”

“No more questions, Pete,” he said. “Just open your eyes to it all.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

Scott reached down to help me up. His firm grip was comforting, and we held on to each other for a second or two as we stood there together, looking around. He was real to me and I was real to him, and right then that was very important. These buildings were real too. I kicked at the stone wall I had been leaning against. There was a dull
thud
and dust drifted from my tatty shoe. And I realized then, for the first time, how utterly silent it was.

Wherever we were, however deep below the ground or submerged in disbelief, there were no voices, no gusts of air, no sounds of a city, no movements, no breaths. My own heart started to sound excessively loud as it continued on its startled course, busy pumping oxygen through veins to dilute my fear and cool the heat of my distress. I was not used to existence without noise of some kind. At home, with a wife and two children sharing the house, there was always a raised voice or a mumbled dream, music or television adding a theme, toys being crashed or musical instruments adding their tone-deaf lilt to the air. Even at work, reading and editing, the voices in my mind were loud enough to be audible. Here, in this city larger than any I had ever seen or imagined, the complete silence was incongruous and unfair. And it made things so obviously false.

“We’re not really here,” I said. Scott ignored me. Perhaps in silence he was dealing with this in his own way.

There was an opening in the stone wall a few meters along, and I went to it and looked inside. I saw a room, large and high-ceilinged, bereft of anything—furniture, character, life. Four walls, a floor, a ceiling, nothing more. There were no signs of it ever having been used. There was a doorway in the far wall without a door, no glass in the window I looked through, no light fixture in the ceiling; the same uniform blue light lit every corner of the room, top and bottom, revealing nothing but slight drifts of dust. Shadows had no place here. I stood back slightly and looked up, realizing that the building was maybe fifteen stories tall, all of them identically holed with glassless windows, and I was certain that each room and floor was the same sterile, deserted emptiness.

Scott nudged against me as he walked by, and when I glanced down I realized that he had done so on purpose.

There were several more wraiths moving along the street. Two of them walked, strutting purposefully together, their expressions and facial features similar. They wore bathing shorts and nothing else, their torsos and limbs dark with suntan, faces young and strong and long, long dead. They did not touch each other as they strode by, and they exuded contempt, staring straight ahead and doing nothing to acknowledge the other’s closeness. Another shape seemed to float and spin through the air, but as she passed by I realized that she was falling horizontally, clothes ripped from her body by the invisible wind that whipped her hair around her head, face and shoulders. She may have been beautiful, but the forces crushing her this way and that were too cruel to tell. She passed over the heads of the striding brothers and cornered at the end of the street, her fall unimpeded. Two more shapes came by separately, neither of them appearing to notice us. One shouted silently and waved fists at the sky, and the other struggled on footless legs, stumping his way along and swinging his arms for balance, as if pushing through mud. One of his hands brushed mine, I saw it but did not feel it—

He was in the sea, trapped by a giant clam that had closed around both feet, his muscles burning acid into his bones as he struggled to keep his nose high enough to snort in a desperate breath between waves, and even though the salt water was doing its best to blind him, he could see the boat bobbing a few feet away, the faces peering over the edge, laughing so much as their tears of mirth fell to quicken his fate—

I gasped and pressed myself back against the wall, watching the dead man hobble away.

Scott had remained in the center of the narrow street, staring about him as the new shapes breezed by. Perhaps they touched him, but he seemed not to have noticed. With the taste of brine still on my lips I went to him, desperate to feel someone real again. I clapped my hand to his shoulder, held on hard, followed his gaze. High buildings, that blue light, no sign of where we had come from… and high up, sometimes, darker blue shapes sweeping by.

“What are they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But Pete, Matthew is here. He has to be! I have to find him, and however long it takes…” He left the sentence unfinished, ominous with possibilities.

“These aren’t just ghosts,” I said.

“Not ghosts, no!” He shook his head as if frustrated at my naivete. “Dead people, Pete.”

“There’s nothing to them!”

“Do you have to feel something for it to be real or mean anything? Can you touch your dreams, taste your imagination? They’re as real as we are, just not in quite the same place, the same way. And they’re here because they were wronged.”

“How could you know all this?”

“You think I haven’t been looking for this place?” he said. “Poring over every scrap of ancient script I’ve discovered, or uncovered in some godforsaken old library somewhere? Tearing apart whole digs by hand to find a fragment of writing about it, a shred of evidence? Ever since I first got wind of this place the year Matthew died, it’s been my only reason to keep on living.”

“Matthew? Why… ?”

He looked at me then, a quick glance, as if he was unwillingly to relinquish the sight of our unbelievable surroundings. “I wasn’t there when he died.”

“He died of leukemia, Scott,” I said.

“I should have been there.”

“You couldn’t have done anything! He died of leukemia. Just tell me what you could have done?”

He stared at me, but not for effect. He really could not understand why I was even asking. “I could have held his hand,” he said.

“You think your young son could hold that against you?”

“No, but I could. And that’s enough to keep him here.”

“You can’t know any of this!” I said, shaking my head, looking around at the impossible buildings with the occasional impossible shape floating, striding or crawling by. “You might think you do, but you’ve been—”

“Misled?” He said it mockingly, as if anyone could draw a sane idea from this place.

“No,” I said. “Not misled. Maybe just a little mad.”

“Do you see all this?” he asked.

“I don’t know
what
I see. It’s madness. My eyes are playing tricks, I’m drunk, I’m dreaming, I’m drugged. All this is madness and—”

“
You see the City of the Dead
!” He grabbed my lapels and propelled me back against a wall, dust puffing out around me in an uneven halo. His shout tried to echo between the buildings, but it was soon swallowed or absorbed, and it did not return. He did not shout again.

“Scott, please…” I felt a little madness closing in myself. Some vague insulating layer of disbelief still hung around me, blurring the sharp edges and dangerous points of what I saw and what I could not believe. But beyond that layer lay something far more dangerous. I wondered if Scott was there already.

“Don’t ‘please’ me!” he said. “Matthew is here,
trapped
here, because of
me
! He could be there!” He pointed along the street at a large domed building, ran there, peered in through one of several triangular openings. I followed after him and looked inside. There were shadows moving about, writhing across the floor like the dark echoes of snakes, passing through the blue light and somehow negating it with themselves.

“There’s only—”

“He could be there!” Scott said, running away from me again, dodging around a gray shape that stood wringing its hands. He passed by a row of squat-fronted buildings and ducked into a gap in the block, disappearing from view. I followed quickly and found him leaning over a low wall, looking down into the huge basement rooms that it skirted. “Down there, see?” Scott said. “He could so easily be down there!” I saw several shapes sitting on rough circular seats, each of them gesticulating and issuing silent shouts and pleas.

“Is he?” I asked.

“No,” Scott said, “not there. But there! He could be there!” Yet again he ran, heading between two buildings. The lonely pad of his footsteps sounded like a riot in that silent place.

I ran after him, terrified that he would lose me in a maze of alleys and streets, parks and squares. “Matthew!” he called, still running, calling again. His voice came back to me and guided me on.

I did not want to be lost. I’d spent my whole life being lost and found, lost and found again, sometimes the same day, emotionally tumbled and torn down by the doubt and fear that time was running away from me. My mind could not cope with the complexity of life, I had often thought, and while others found their escape in imagination and wonder, I wallowed, lost in a miserable self-pity. Now, in this place, lost was the last place I wanted to be.

I spun around a corner and straight into the figure of a lady of the night standing against a wall, smiling at me, making some silent offer as I ducked by. Her fingers snagged my sleeves and brushed against my skin, and in that brief instant I saw abuse more terrible than I could have imagined. I gasped, fell to my knees and crawled forward, desperate to escape this dead woman’s cursed touch. I turned and glanced back at her. She was laughing, pointing at me as if that could touch and show me again. I stood and ran, wondering just how mad a dead person could become.

Scott’s shouts drew me on. I was darting around corners blindly, not knowing what would be revealed beyond. A long alley once, the blue light of the dead faded here as if swallowed by the walls. Then a square courtyard, filled with so many wandering shapes that I could not help touching several of them as I ran by, sensing them stroke my skin but unaware of any weight, any substance to their presence. At each touch, I saw something of their reason for being here. This place was an unbalanced concentration of pain and suffering, I knew, but before long I began to despair that there was any good left anywhere in the world.

I wondered what these dead things saw or felt when I touched
them
.

“In here!” Scott called. “Or over there!” His voice angled in from several directions at once now, the city juggling it to confuse me. I passed from the courtyard into another narrow alley, this one turning and bearing downward, no square angles, only curved walls to enclose its sloping floor. There were shapes sitting in doorways like black-garbed Greek women, but they all looked up at me with pale, dead faces. Some reached out to show me their stories; most did not. One of them turned at my approach and passed through a doorway into the building behind it, and I could not help stopping and looking inside. There were things apparently growing in there, strange dark fungi breaking from the floor and reaching for the ceiling, but when one of them moved and cast its dead gaze upon me, I turned and fled.

Some dead people walked, and some ran. Some stood still or sat down, forgetting to move at all.

Scott’s voice rang in again, and for the first time I realized that it was only his voice. Footsteps no longer accompanied his cries. He had either stopped running, or he was too far away for me to hear them. Yet still he was crying out for Matthew, and somewhere he looked upon ghosts and did not see his dead son’s face, because his call came again and again. I ran on, but with every step, and whichever direction I took, his voice grew fainter.

I came across a district of timber buildings, most of them squared and severe looking with their ancient saw marks, a few seemingly made from the natural shapes of cut trees; curved roofs, irregular walls, windows of bare branches where leaves may have grown once.