Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed

by Tim Lebbon

  “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.

  “I haven’t found him yet, but he’s here.”

  I shook my head, frowned.

  “I just need to look farther… deeper…”

  “Scott, has the sun—?”

  “No, it hasn’t. The sun hasn’t touched me!” He almost became angry, but then he calmed, relaxed. “Pete, Matthew is here somewhere, because every dead person who has ever been wronged is here.”

  “Somewhere. Under our feet, under this desert. I’ve found the City of the Dead.”

  He turned and walked into one of the larger tents, leaving me alone in the jeep. The City of the Dead. “A real city?” I said, but Scott seemed not to hear. I may have been alone. Tent flaps wavered for a few seconds in a sudden breeze, snapping angrily at the heat. I looked around and felt the immensity of the place bearing down, crushing me into the small, insignificant speck of sand that I was. I was lost here, just as lost as I was at home, and though it was a feeling I had never grown used to, at least here I could find justification. Here, I was lost because the desert made light of so many aspects of life I took to be important. Here there was only water, or no water. Here too there was life, or death… and perhaps, if Scott’s weird story held any trace of truth, something connecting the two.

  But I could not believe. I did not have the facility to believe.

  The sun must have driven him mad.

  I jumped from the jeep and followed him into his tent. Its interior was more well-appointed than it had any right to be, being compartmented into four by hanging swirls of fine material, and carpeted with an outlandish collection of rugs and throw cushions. In one quarter there was even some rudimentary furniture: a cot, a couple of low-slung chairs and the solar fridge. He was pulling out two bottles of beer, their labels beaded with moisture.

  He popped the caps and offered me a bottle. “To us!” he said. “Nice fuckin’ life!”

  “Absolutely,” I said. We clinked bottles and drank.

  Only he could use that phrase and sound like he actually meant it.

  “So tell me,” I said. “This city? A real city? Why have you dragged me a million miles from home? Other than to sit and drink beer and see if you’re still a pansy when it comes to booze.”

  “Three bottles and I’m done,” he said, slurping noisily, wiping his chin, sighing in satisfaction. “I wonder if the dead spend their time mourning their senses?”

  “The dead.”

  “Wouldn’t you? If you died and could still think, reason, wouldn’t you miss the sound of a full orchestra or a child’s laugh? Miss the taste of a good steak or a woman’s pussy? Miss the smell of fresh bread or a rose garden?”

  I shrugged, nodded, not knowing quite how to respond.

  “I would,” he said. “Life is so lucky, you just have to wonder at it, don’t you? Even thinking about it makes everything sound, taste and smell so much better.” He looked at me. “Apart from you. Didn’t you shower before you left home? Stinking bastard.”

  “And I suppose the showers are out of action,” I said.

  “Yes, but the Jacuzzi is in the next tent, and the Jacuzzi maids have been told to treat you special.”

  We shared a laugh then, for the first time this visit, and we sank wearily into the low chairs.

  “The city,” I said again. For someone so keen to drag me out here, he was being infuriatingly reticent about revealing his discovery.

  “The city.” He nodded. “I don’t know if it’s a real city, Pete. It’s really here, really under our feet, and later I’ll show you how I know that. The relic I handed you in the car is one of a few I’ve found, all of them… the same. Distant.”

  “It didn’t feel all there.”

  “I think it was a ghost,” he said, frowning, concentrating. “I think it was a part of someone who died a long time ago, but a piece that was buried or lost to the ages. The other things I’ve found point to that too.”

  “But have you actually found this place? Or are you surmising?”

  “I’ve found enough to tell me that it’s really here. For sure.”

  “These bits of ghosts?” I felt slightly foolish verbalizing what Scott had said. It was patently wrong, there was some other explanation, but he could state these outlandish ideas comfortably. They did not sound so real coming from my skeptical self.

  “Them, and more. I saw a part of the city revealed by a sinkhole. Haven’t been able to get close yet—the sand is too fluid. But there’s nothing else it can be other than a buried ruin. Blocks, joints. I’ll show you soon.” He stared at me, challenging me to doubt.

  “But why hasn’t anyone else ever come here, found this stuff?”

  Scott took another long drink from his bottle, emptying it, and then tilted his chair back and stared up at the tent ceiling. The sun cast weird shapes across the canvas, emphasizing irregularities in its surface and casting shadows where sand had blown and been trapped, gathered in folds and creases. Scott looked as though he was trying to make sense.

  “Scott?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why no one has found those scraps of things before, or seen the ruin, or pieced together the evidence that’s just lying around for me to find. And for a while, this made me doubt the truth of what I’d discovered. It couldn’t be so easy, I thought. I couldn’t have just stumbled across it. The evidence was so real, and the existence of the city here is so right, that others must have come to the same conclusions. A hundred others, a thousand.”

  “Are you quite sure no one has?”

  “No,” he said. “Not positive. Perhaps others have found the place, but never had a chance to reveal any of their findings.”

  I drank my beer and glanced around the tent. The closer I looked, the more I saw Scott’s identity and personality stamped on the interior. A pile of books stood in one corner, all of them reference, no fiction. What’s the point of reading something that isn’t true? he’d once said to me, and I’d hated myself for not being able to come up with a good reason. Me, someone who worked in publishing, incapable of defending the purpose of my life. A belt lay carelessly thrown down on the rugs, various brushes, chisels and other implements of his trade tied to it. And the rugs themselves, far from being locally made, seemed to speak a variety of styles and cultures. Some told stories within their weaves, others held only patterns, and one or two seemed to perform both tasks with deceptive simplicity. The realization that this man, my friend, did not actually have a home hit me then, strong and hard. He carried his home with him. After all these years, all this time, I guessed that I had assumed Scott would “come home” one day, not realizing that he lived there every day of his life.

  I missed my wife and kids then, sharply and brightly. But the feeling, though intense, was brief, and it soon faded into a background fog as Scott opened another bottle for each of us.

  “I think I found this place for a reason,” he said at last. “I can’t say I was led here—I led myself if anything, looking, delving, searching into old histories and older tales—but I think it was meant to be.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve started to believe in fate.”

  “Only if it’s self-made,” he said, grinning. “I was fated to find this place, and you were fated to join me here, to search more fully. But only because that’s what both of us wanted. Me to find Matthew, and you to give your life an injection of life.”

  I felt slighted, but I knew that he was right. In what he said about me, at least. As to Matthew, I could not begin to imagine.

  “Where better for the city of the dead th
an nestling in the cradle of humanity?” he said. “Ethiopia is where the first people walked, where Homo sapiens came into being. What better place?”

  Something slammed against the side of the tent, sending the canvas stretching and snapping against the poles. I jumped to my feet and Scott glanced up, bottle poised at his mouth. “Sounds like we’re in for a bit of a blow,” he said.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Wind. Storm coming in. You’d best get your things inside. We’ll share this tent. Sand storms can be a bit disconcerting the first time you’re caught in one, especially in a tent. Magnifies sound.”

  “You never said anything about sand storms.” I felt the familiar fear rising inside, the one that hit me keen and hard when I was removed from my normal place, the company of my normal people. The fear that said I was lost.

  “Didn’t say much at all,” he said. “If I had, would you have come?”

  “Of course!” I said. “Of course I would.”

  “Even though you think I’ve lost the plot?”

  I considered lying to my friend then, but he would have known. He already knew the truth. “That was the main reason.”

  He smiled. “You’re a good mate. I’m a lucky man. I may only have a few possessions to my name, but I’m rich in friends.”

  I was unfeasibly flattered by his comment, and I went on to say something trite in response—thanks, or so am I—when another gust of wind hit the tent. It seemed to suck the air from inside, drawing in the tent walls, pulling down the ceiling, shrinking the canopy as if to allow the desert sand and air to move closer. The whole structure leaned and strained for a few seconds that seemed like minutes, and then the gale lessened, the tent relaxed and I glared down at Scott.

  “Are we likely to be left homeless by this?” I said.

  “Nope. Tent’s meant to move and shift with the wind.” His eyes were wide, seeing something far more distant than I knew, and I saw the familiar excitement there, the knowledge that there was more going on than we could ever hope to understand. That kind of ignorance never offended Scott. It merely gave him more cause to wonder.