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?”
“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 20 feet above the desert level. Only 20 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 which 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 only one high wall. It 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 was skirted around bases and against walls, 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 over 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 clod in the remains of a sandal, bones stripped of flesh and dangling with scraps of skin, snapped or broken at the ankle. The delusion 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 towards 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 were 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 towards 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. As well as the strange marki
ngs there were several more of the gruesome gargoyle-things 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.”
Further 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, coloured rocks inlaid in the stone so perfectly that their edges seemed to merge, offering no cracks for time to prise 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 their 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 rowing boat 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 the 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 his fear I thought I heard in those 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 which 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 up 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 fo
r 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 make-do 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 trap, trying to force his way through the deluge, pushing aside floating things, food, ropes, bodies, cursing at those that 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?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 Page 37