Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed

by Tim Lebbon

  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.

  There was no greenery, only dead wood.

  I wondered who had built this place.

  The ground was scattered with fine sawdust, ankle deep in places, and I saw no footprints of any kind. My own were the first, and I imagined them as prints on the moon, no air movement to take them away, destined to remain for as long as time held them. Yet the dead were here too, though leaving no trace. Remains were scattered against the timber walls, just as they had been in the caves and tunnel leading down from the surface, and as I accidentally kicked a skull out of my way, I had a brief inkling of its owner’s fate—

  Standing in the woods as strange sounds came in, weird visions lighting their way between the trees as the hunt drew closer, the air grew warmer, and the fear became an all-encompassing thing as the first of the arrows twanged into trees and parted the air by his head. The voices called in a language he could not know, though he recognized the universal sound of laughter, vicious laughter, and that made him turn to run. The knowledge of his own death was there already, as if he had seen what I was seeing many times over—

  I kicked the holed skull away just as I heard the sound of an arrow parting the air.

  The place was utterly silent once more as I looked down into the sightless sockets. Where was his ghost? I wondered. Is this it? Do even ghosts fade away in the end? And as I mused on this, wondering where I was and why and just how I would ever escape, I realized that Scott’s voice had bled away to nothing, and that I was alone and lost.

  I despaired. My breath came heavy and fast, and the air tasted of the blue light, cool and devoid of life. I could not be here, or anywhere like this, because cities like this did not exist. I saw and smelled this place, but I was lying to myself. In fleeing, Scott had taken his open mind with him, leaving me with my own weak, insipid perception of things.

  I found a small courtyard, the fossilized remains of plants clinging solidly to the walls. The well at the center was dry as my mouth. There were no dead here and no remains on the ground, so for a time I could pretend that I was alone. I sat beneath an overhanging balcony. There was no shade from the unvarying bluish light, but the balcony gave me the psychological impression of being hidden away from prying eyes. So I sat there, held my head in my hands and looked down at my feet, striving to forget that the dust around them was in a place that could not be.

  There were dead people all around me. And the blue light, the light of the dead, giving me no day or night, brightness or darkness, cold or heat …..

  I believed none of it, because I could not. I was more willing to accept that I was mad, or dead myself.

  My breathing became slower, gentler and more calmed, and eventually I fell asleep.

  Upon waking there was no telling how much time had passed. I was still not hungry or thirsty. I had not dreamed. I was in the same position in which I had dropped off. Time eluded me.

  “Scott!” I shouted once, loud, but the sound terrified me more than being alone. It felt so wrong. Even though my voice sailed away, I had the distinct sense that it was ricocheting from walls and angles I could not see, not from these buildings that stood around me. The resonance sounded wrong.

  My old friend did not answer. Perhaps he’d been as dead as this place all along.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, and a sudden breeze blew a handful of dust across my face, a hundred images screaming and destroying the relative peace of the moment, assaulting my senses with smells and sounds and views from too many different places and times to take in. Each scrap of dust stung, and each sting was a past life striving to make itself and its suffering known. I opened my mouth to cry out and felt grit on my tongue and between my teeth. Held there by my saliva, these old ghosts had time to make themselves and their reasons for being here known—

  She ran along the dock, the animals chasing her, jeering and laughing and tripping as they tried to drag their trousers down, readying themselves—

  Where had that breeze come from?—

  A man stood against a wall and stared down the barrel of a dozen guns, hating them, hating what they were doing, hating their uncaring eyes as they saw a rat in front of them, not a man, not a human being—

  Something must have caused it!—

  She should never have left him, never, not when he could do this, not when he could stroke his wrists this way and open the skin, the flesh, the veins, she should never have left him, never—

  There had been no movement before, nothing, and now a wind to blow the dust over me?—

  The rattle of machine-gun fire tore the air above him, just as his stomach had been torn asunder, and the sand was soaking up his life as he cried out for help that would not come—

  There were more, more, so many images crowding in and flooding my mind that for some time, seconds or days, I forgot just who I was. I stood and ran and raged, shaking my head, running blind, and each impact with a wall only gave me m
ore painful deaths to see, more wronged lives ripped away by unfairness at best, evil at worst. I remember faces watching me, and for a time these faces seemed even more alive than I felt, true observers rather than mere echoes of who and what they had once been.

  For a while, I was just like them.

  Perhaps that was their way of trying to chase me away.

  I walked. Through the city, past the barren buildings, dodging fleeting shapes of dead people where I could. Some of them glanced at me, and one even smiled. I always tried to look the other way.

  Eventually, after hours spent walking, I found myself at the base of a cliff, and without thinking I began to climb. Up must be good, I reasoned. If we had come down here then up must be good. Hand over hand, feet seeking purchase, fingers knotting with cramps, muscles twisting and burning as I heaved myself higher, higher. I refused to look back down, because I knew that silent city was below me, watching, and that somewhere Scott still pursued his own wronged ghost. I could not bear to see him.

  I had no thoughts of trying to find him in a place so endless.

  Time lost its meaning. The blue light of the dead lit my way. I went up and up, and though I once thought of sleep, there was nowhere to rest. I moved on, never pausing for more than a few seconds to locate the next handhold or footrest, weightless. I did not tire. My heavy breathing fled into the massive space behind me, swallowed away without echo. I wondered how far the sound would travel before fading away. Perhaps forever.

  I was hardly surprised when I tumbled onto the same ledge Scott and I had fallen from. I had no idea how long had passed since then. I was not hungry or thirsty and did not need to urinate, but I was certain that I had been in the city for days. Its grime seemed to cling to my skin, giving glimpses of the multifarious fates its inhabitants had suffered. And much as I thought of my wife and children right then, they seemed like memories from ages ago, the past lives of someone else entirely. It was the city that had taken the bulk of my life.