by Tim Lebbon
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—
I dropped the bundle and watched it sink into the sand. The sudden change from vision to real life— darkness and wet, to dryness and blazing sun—startled me, but not as much as it should have. I squinted at Scott, and for the first time I saw a fleck of fear in his eyes, a dark, fiery look that floated there like the sun reflected in negative.
“Did you see?” he whispered.
I nodded.
“You saw what ties that person to this city,” he said. “Why they can’t let go.”
“Murder?”
“Unfinished business.”
I looked down at where the old skull had fallen and sunk. I felt observed.
“I’m going down,” Scott said,
“What?”
“I’m going down into the city. For every ghost with unfinished business, there’s someone accountable.”
“Matthew,” I said, but Scott chose not to answer. He was already walking away, across the boiling sand, past ruins that should not be, past the mysterious language carved into these stone walls, his footprints being swallowed by the desert behind him, eschewing the sun for darker depths. When he reached another pile of stone protruding from the ground he turned and looked back at me.
“I’d like you to come,” he said. Perhaps he feigned the fear. Maybe he was playing me even then, luring me to his own ends. But I was his friend, and the fear I thought I heard in his few words somehow enabled me to better my own. I followed him into the ground.
The way down should never have been there. After the storm, and after the eons that the desert had had to fill this place with its own, there should have been no clear route underground. The fluid sand should have seen to that. It was as if while the gale thundered above, so too had a storm raged down below, powerful enough to expel the sand like the cork from a shaken bottle of champagne. And Scott had found the way.
“Down there,” he said. “Down there we’ll find ghosts, Pete. Wraiths never given a chance to rest. Are you sure you want to come with me?”
“I’ve come all this way,” I said, failing to understand my own skewed logic.
“I knew I could count on you. Say goodbye to the sun!” He looked up and squinted at the sun, blazing and hot, even though it was dipping into the west.
I looked as well, but not for long. I did not want to imbue the moment with too much ceremony. That would be admitting that I may never see the sun again.
The hole was just wide enough for our entry. It opened beneath a wall, smashed through the buried foundations by some ancient cataclysm, leading in and down like an opened throat waiting to swallow us whole. Scott slipped quickly inside on his stomach, but I lay there for a while in the hot sand, looking at the perimeter of the hole and wondering just what was holding it up. It looked like compacted sand, little more. The wall passed above it and pressed down, but there was no lintel, no supporting stone. A trial of danger before entering the City of the Dead.
I squeezed through, scraped my back against the edge, felt sand crumble down the neck of my shirt, and then I was inside.
Scott was rummaging around at the base of a wall, cursing and shaking his head. Enough light filtered in for me to see him there, moving stuff aside with his foot, bending, grabbing something, dropping it again. He groaned and sighed, spat and whimpered.
“Scott!”
“We need a torch,” he said. “We need some light.” And I saw what he was doing. There were more segments of skeletons piled against the wall, as if blown there by some subterranean wind, and Scott was sorting them until he found a bone long enough to use as a torch. And every time he touched a bone…
“Here,” he said. “Not so bad. Love rejected. Hell of a reason to miss out on Heaven.” He held a long thigh bone, knotted a wad of material about its smashed joint, twisting and tying it hard so that the fire would take its time eating through. He slipped a lighter from his pocket and gave us light.
We were in a long corridor, its floor sloping down quite steeply, its far end lost in darkness.
“I guess we go down,” he said.
“No other way. Scott, do you really think—”
“Shhh!” he hissed. “Hear that? Do you hear that?”
I listened intently, breathing out slowly through my nose, and perhaps I heard the echoes of his voice. They seemed to go on for a long time, and they grew closer again before fading away into the stone walls.
“Let’s go,” he said. “They know we’re here.”
He headed off into the corridor and I could only follow. The light from his makeshift torch was very weak, but it bled back far enough to touch the ground around my feet, casting sad reflections from the bones Scott had rooted through. They were mixed, but I was sure they would not match. A dozen remains here, two dozen, and I accidentally kicked one aside with my sandaled foot—
The ship was going, sinking quickly, and this person was trapped inside, searching for an air pocket, trying to force his way through the deluge, pushing aside floating things, food, ropes, bodies, cursing at those who had shut them down here, cursing until his mouth opened and emitted a final bubbling gasp that no one would ever hear—
Scott would have felt every one of those remains. Every death, each betrayal or sin or deceit, telling its story as he shuffled the remains.
“It’s all so unfair.” I had no idea what I was seeing, and no idea why.
“It’s life,” he said. “Or death.”
Scott went on, and the slope began to dip down even steeper than before. I glanced back frequently, just to reassure myself that the glow of sunlight was still behind us. That small entrance grew smaller and fainter, from a false sun into little more than a smudge in the dark. And then, as I knew had to happen, we turned a bend in the corridor and the daylight vanished.
I stopped and called out to Scott. “We’re alone.”
He paused and looked back over my shoulder. The torch he carried was growing fainter as the fire consumed the ancient material. I reached out to take it from him, but there was nothing there. No bone to touch, no friction, no heat when I held my hand in the guttering flames. Nothing.
“Scott,” I said. “Just where the hell are you taking us?”
“There’ll be light,” he said. “Every place I’ve read of this, there’s the light of the dead. We just have to get there. This is the route to the city, not the city proper. We should find it soon, Pete. Soon! And then perhaps I can lay Matthew to rest.”
“This is madness,” I said. Our voices were peculiarly dead in that subterranean place, consumed by the rock walls and the weird hieroglyphs. The etchings writhed in the weak light from Scott’s insubstantial torch, given a life of their own.
“Stay with me, Pete,” he said. He turned away and continued along the tunnel, heading down and away from the vanished light, perhaps lead
ing us into places and dangers neither of us could truthfully imagine. “You’re my best friend.”
I followed because it was the only thing I could do. I like to think I stayed on his tail because of my devotion to my friend, my burgeoning sense of adventure, my excitement at what we might have discovered around the next curve in the corridor, or the next. But in reality I think I was simply scared. I could not face the walk back out on my own. Uphill. Past those strange markings on the wall, those bones that had no weight or touch.
I had no choice but to follow. We walked for what felt like hours. Scott’s torch had guttered down to little more than a blue smudge in the utter darkness. The new light that manifested came so slowly, so gradually, that for a while I could not understand how that failing torch was throwing out so much illumination. But this new light was growing and expanding, dusty and blue, originating from no single source. The walls of the passage began to glow, as if touched by the early morning sun, and the shapes and tales carved there told differing stories as the shadows writhed and shifted. None of them was clear to me.
“Scott,” I said, afraid, more afraid than I had been since those first blasts of the storm had assaulted the tent walls.
“The light of the dead,” he said. “They need it to see. I guess they don’t like the dark. We’re almost there, Pete.”
Ahead of us the passage narrowed, walls closing in and ceiling dipping until we had to stoop to pass by. The ceiling touched my head once, and I didn’t like the sensation; the rock was smooth and as warm as living flesh. I could not shake the idea that we were walking willingly into the belly of a beast, and now here we were at the base of its esophagus, deep deep down, about to enter its stomach and submit ourselves to digestion.
There were more remains around our feet here, scattered across the ground, offering no resistance as we waded through. The bones tumbled aside, clanking silently together, some falling into dust as soon as they were disturbed and others rolling together as if coveting their former cozy togetherness. I could not feel them. It was like kicking aside wafts of smoke. I wondered if they could feel me.
Scott was ahead of me. When I heard him gasp, and I walked into him, and his gasp came again as a groan, I knew that things were about to change. The claustrophobic passage opened out onto a small ledge strewn with skeletal parts that seemed to dance away as we both came to a stunned standstill, looking out at the place we had come down here to find.
I once stood on the viewing platform at the top of the Empire State Building in New York, looking down at the city surrounding me, the myriad streets and blocks crawling with people and cars, the mechanical streams spotted yellow with frequent taxis, sirens singing up out of the city like wailing souls long-lost, other high buildings near and far speckled with interior lights, the city rising in three dimensions, not just spread out like the carpet of humanity I had imagined. I could look east toward the river and see a hotdog vendor’s stand at a road junction, and then south toward Greenwich Village, where through one of the telescopes I could just make out someone hurrying across a street with a dog tugging them along, and I knew that these two people may never meet. In a city of that size, there was a good chance that they would pass their lives without ever exchanging glances. And I, at the top of this huge tower, could see it all. I could see a fire to the east of Central Park, follow the course of fire engines screeching intermittently through the traffic, but wherever the owners of the burning building were I could not tell them. I had a strange feeling of being lifted way above the city, an observer rather than a player, and as I descended in the express elevator and exited once more onto the streets, I experienced a dislocation that lasted for the rest of the day. I glanced back up at the tower, and wondered just who was looking down at me right then.
What I saw in this place way below the desert was larger, older and far less explicable.
The City of the Dead lay spread out before us. It was flat and utterly without limit, stretching way out farther than I could see, and it was sheer distance rather than anything else that faded it into the horizon. No hazy atmosphere, no darkening of the air—the light of the dead was rich and pure and all-encompassing, much more revealing and honest than mere sunlight—but pure, unbelievable distance. The city went on forever, and I could see only at the speed of light. It spread out left and right and ahead, the only visibly defined border being the high cliff from which we had emerged. The wall fell down to the city and rose higher than I could see, and it faded similarly as I looked left and right. It did not seem to curve around, perhaps enclosing the city, but stood in a straight line, and here and there I spied other ledges and darker smudges that may have been the mouths of other tunnels. In the distance I thought I saw another shocked individual standing on one of these ledges, but I blinked and the image was taken away.
I looked down, trying to judge how far below the ground lay. Too far to climb but close enough to fall, I thought, and though I had no idea where the idea came from I looked at Scott, caught his eye, knew that he was thinking the same awful thing.
Together we stepped forward and tipped slowly over the lip of the ledge, leaning into space, somehow welcoming the plunge that would immerse us in this city.
The fall lasted long enough for me to make out plenty more detail. I did not dwell upon the strangeness of what was happening—right then, it did not seem important—and though I knew that things had changed irrevocably as Scott and I had set foot on that ledge, I took the opportunity to view this place. Here was the supposed City of the Dead. The buildings were hugely diverse, ranging from small shacks made of corrugated tin spread across branch uprights, to golden-domed offerings of love; steel and glass towers, to complex timber-clad settlements; frosty ice-sculptured homes, to hollows in the ground, caves, deep holes heated by the boiling insides of the hot earth itself. There was no order, no design to the city, no blocks or arrangement, merely buildings and the spaces in between. Here and there I saw wider areas that may have been parks, though there was no greenery to be seen. The things in these parks may have been dead trees, or simply much taller skeletons than any I had seen before. Some buildings had windows and some did not, and only some of those with windows retained their glazing. It was only as we fell closer to the city— and that fall, that plunge, was still accepted by both of us—that my attention was drawn more to the spaces in between the buildings.
In those spaces, things moved.
Until now I had seen this as the City of the Dead, and I was falling toward it, and that did not matter.
Now, seeing this movement in the streets and roads and alleys and parks—seeing also the flittering movements behind the windows of the taller buildings, shadows denying the strange, level light that this place possessed—I came to dwell upon exactly what was happening to us. We fell, though there was no sensation of movement; no wind in my ears, no sickness in my stomach, no velocity. And soon, looking down, I knew that there was an impact to come. Directly below us was a collection of smaller, humped buildings, rising from the ground like insect hills, surrounded by taller constructions that even now we began to fall past.
“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 t
hose 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.