Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations (20 page)

But soon Skye realized that we weren’t the only ones laughing. He pushed himself up to a seated position and took a look around. That smile that I had fought so hard to keep stained on his face was washed away in an instant when he saw what was going on. His face twisted into a mask of utter disgust. Tears filled his eyes as he shook his head. My chest grew tight. This was it. He needed to know why he’s different.

Moving to him, I slipped my hands around his wrist and gently pulled him to his feet. Defeated, his head hung with his chin tucked into his chest. I guided him toward the nearest dinner table and motioned for him to follow my lead and lower to his knees. Once we were on the ground, I lifted the tablecloth and crawled under the table. Reluctantly, Skye followed.

For a few moments, I held him in my arms and ran my fingers through his hair. He was seven years old but still small enough to embrace in my lap. We rocked back and forth to a symphony of laughter echoing throughout the ballroom.

“Alright Skye. We don’t have much time. Ask me anything you’d like. I’ll try to tell you everything.”

Taking a moment to catch his breath, he eventually whispered, “What was our old home like?”

“Well, it looked a lot like this home, except we could go wherever we wanted—whenever we pleased. We weren’t called to different parts of the world every few minutes. We could orchestrate our nightmares for however long or short we wanted.”

“So you still made the nightmares in our old home?”

“Yes.”

Disappointed, Skye shook his head at me.

“It’s what we do, our people. It’s what we’ve always enjoyed doing, scaring others,” I continued.

“Not me. I don’t like doing that.”

I smiled and held his hand. “No Skye, not you. You’re different. You’re like the majorities. When you see people getting scared or nervous or disgusted, you don’t find humor in that.”

“Humor?”

“You don’t think it’s funny.”

“No. It makes me sad.”

“And that’s why you’re different.”

“Then why am I here? Why aren’t I with the other dreamers?”

“Because I didn’t want to leave you when I moved.”

He thought about that for a second. As soon as our conversation halted, the laughter seemed to echo louder, only occasionally broken by sounds of the dreamer screaming—high pitched shrieks of terror. Skye closed his eyes.

“Why did we move?”

“We agreed to move, all of the adults in this ballroom, because we thought it would be better for the majorities that way. When we all lived together, the majorities eventually became very scared of us. We were hurting them, they said. Mentally, not physically. They didn’t like to be scared. They didn’t like to watch us torture ourselves. But we liked to see them scared and nervous. That’s what made us happy. Do you see? We’re opposites, our people and the majorities.”

“But I’m like them. Like the majorities. I’m not like you.”

“Come on, Skye. We have fun together, don’t we?”

“I don’t like it here. I want to live with Jamie. I want to wake up.”

“I’m sorry, but you can’t. We can never leave these nightmares. That’s why I wanted to tell you all this, so you’d understand why things are the way they are, and hopefully someday you’ll come to accept it.”

“I won’t. I want out.”

“You can’t get out. You’ll be here forever with me, with us.”

Skye’s face fell. He quietly asked, “But why?”

“There once was a man, a very smart man, a scientist, who found a way to move us here. He thought it would help society, the majorities, if we only lived in their nightmares. You have to understand; he was only trying to help. He developed a way for us to enter the nightmares, but he . . . ummm, he died before he found a way to bring us back. He never intended to keep us here forever. He just hoped to make things better for the majorities for the time being.”

Skye’s eyes brightened.

“But what if, what if someone else, another scientist, found a way to bring me back?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. At least not any time soon. You see, Skye, I don’t think the majorities want us to come back. They don’t see a reason to release us from here because they think it’s safer for themselves to keep us in their nightmares.”

“But I’m different. I’m a majority. I’m not like you.”

“They don’t know that. They know what I am, and they know that you’re my son. So they think that you’re just like me, a piece of the nightmare orchestra. Your mom thought the same thing. That’s why she let me take you.”

As tears trickled down Skye’s cheeks, the ballroom began to tremble. Ripples formed in the tablecloth hanging around us. Laughter, shrieks from the dreamer, and the howling wind melded into one deafening roar of sound. The tablecloth swirled outwards, exposing our hiding place. Skye clamped his palms onto his ears and gritted his teeth. Above us, plates clinked against knives and forks. As a champagne flute tumbled to the ground and smashed beside Skye, I yelled, “The dreamer is waking up! Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay!” but I’m not sure if he heard me or not.

=[]=

Chelsea Armstrong
received her BA in English from the University of Alberta. She currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta in an old house which sits atop of a collapsing foundation. When she’s not slowly sinking into the earth, Chelsea works full time, reads any novel she can get her hands on, writes short, twisted stories, and plays Scrabble. She is a large fan of words.

Jay R. Thurston

=[]=

One of the rewards for editing this book is that I was able to read so many brilliant stories that offered explanations and discovery for a multitude of lost lands and peoples. There is no end to ideas of what “could have been” or “may have actually happened.” Some stories are entirely imagined in the civilizations that are discussed, while others are mired in historic fact. These latter tend to be the most intriguing to me. You read them and think, “yeah, I know what this legend is all about,” only to be thrown for a loop, as the author takes you down a path you did not expect, but realize you were heading toward the entire time. Such is the case with
The Funeral Procession
, in which an archaeology team uncovers more than they expected while excavating for the burial ground of the last of a feared tribe.

=[]=

Along the fringe of the northern Gobi Desert, a lone jeep’s dust cloud rose over the rural expanse. Ahead, a single stream of smoke could be seen climbing from a cluster of tents. Rises of excavated earth contrasted against the desert’s edge and beyond that, a crescent-shaped lake separated the settlement from distant mountains. The jeep’s driver checked the clock on his cell phone; over an hour had passed since he had last seen any other trace of civilization.

The jeep halted beside the only other vehicle at the tents, a pick-up-truck turned makeshift-bus. Around him, faces poked out from freshly dug holes in the earth, no discretion made in trying to catch a glimpse of the light-skinned newcomer.

“Oy, mate,” Standing by the truck, a sharp-featured man in safari-styled attire offered a bombastic greeting. “Pleasure to have you on board. Name’s Duncan. You’re American, I see.”

“Yes, how’d you know? I’m Aaron,” said the younger man as he got out of the jeep. Duncan met his welcome with a firm grasp and sustained the handshake several seconds after Aaron felt comfortable.

“I don’t know of any other Kansas City.” Duncan examined the small print of Aaron’s cap, above the much larger
Royals
in
handwritten embroidery. He smiled, accentuating sun-dried cheeks. “What brings you out this way?”

“I’m doing a thesis on the whereabouts of Genghis Khan. I thought some first-hand time with a research team would help me get started on the project.”

“Ah, you go to university. Well you came to the right place then, mate. Spending holiday out here? Or you chucking a sickie?”

Huh? Chucking a what?
“Summer break just began, so I’ll be able to spend some time before next semester,” Aaron explained.

“Good-on-yer-mate.”

“Cool accent. You British?”

“Nah, Aussie.” He gestured for Aaron to follow. “I’ll introduce you around.”

“What brings an Aussie to Mongolia, Duncan?”

“Same as you. Intrigue.”

Mongolian laborers in the low ground sprung into startled motion with the command from a gaunt man with a goatee. Aaron and Duncan were the only foreigners in sight. Duncan pointed to the leader, scolding a pudgy worker for discarding soil in another’s dig space. “See that bloke? He’s Qachi, the son of the chief researcher. He’s in charge of the labor force.”

“Seems a bit strict.”

“Bit of an ocker, that one. Got all wobbly on me when I first got here. Racked off after I knocked him one.”

Aaron nodded with a blank expression.

Duncan’s gesture encompassed the settlement. “There’s a lot of expeditions just like this all around Mongolia. Seems everyone’s got a different theory about the Khan’s hidden tomb. Course, most of it is raw prawn.”

“Raw prawn? I’m not following.”

“Most of their theories are bullshit. This is the only expedition open to foreign assistance. And the chief researcher allows it because he’s closer than any of them other blokes.”

“So he wants all the help he can get. But is he really closer to finding the grave of Genghis than the next guy?”

Duncan rolled back the entry to the largest tent. A wrinkled native man hunched over books in Mongol script, grey strands of a long Fu Manchu mustache grazing the pages. To the right, a Caucasian woman with an auburn bun clicked away on a laptop, surrounded by spotlights, cameras, tripods, generators, portable batteries, satellite dish, and other electrical equipment. Neither looked up from their toil.

“You must have found us by our website,” Duncan said.

“I did.”

“She’s our web designer and photographer, Stefania Milanowski. Stef also handles much of the translating.”

Aaron asked, “Aussie too?”

Stef’s soft lips curled to a halfhearted smirk, but her eyes did not break from the glow of the laptop. “I am Polish.”

“You’re a photographer?”

“Yes.”

Aaron found her accent as attractive as the face speaking it. “I think you’re on the wrong side of the camera.”

“Easy, mate,” Duncan said between laughs. “There’s a waiting list for that sheila.”

She shot Duncan a cold scowl before returning to work. Duncan rolled his arm toward the elder gentleman shaking his head.

“This is our leader of the operation, chief archaeologist Haguyu. He’s dedicated his life to the search for the great Genghis Khan.”

“Does he understand English?” Aaron asked in a low tone.

“He understands enough.”

Aaron stepped up and offered a handshake. The elder bowed his head and returned to the book.

“Come on, mate, let him be. He’s brainstorming, does a lot of brainstorming.”

Aaron left the tent on Duncan’s queue. At a safe distance, Aaron asked, “So what makes Haguyu think he’s closer than anyone else?”

“Fair question. Are you familiar with the tales of Genghis Khan’s death?”

“Of course. He got as far as Poland before he was stopped.”

Duncan nodded.

“Isn’t it a bit ironic that Stef’s working here?”

“It was almost eight hundred years ago, mate. The Mongols are over it. Plus she’s quite valuable to the group.”

“She seems nice.”

“Nice to look at is about all.” Duncan steered the conversation back on track. “What about
after
Genghis died?”

“His body was returned to Mongolia and placed in an unmarked grave near his place of birth.”

“Right, another theory,” Duncan said. “Search parties have torn apart the Khentii Mountains based on that rumor. Others say he was taken hundreds of miles away, or that he’s under a river bed, or he’s covered in permafrost. Raw prawn. What all these stories have in common is what Haguyu stakes his research upon.”

“There’s a commonality?”

“A handful of slaves and soldiers carried out the transport of the Khan’s corpse. Any human or animal that crossed their path was slaughtered. After the slaves dug the grave, they too were slaughtered. The soldiers then killed off one another. The final resting place had to remain a secret at all costs.”

“Wow, but, if they all died…”

“The final soldier standing was one of the Khan’s most loyal lieutenants, a man named Chagatai. He arrived in Mongolia at a young age from an unknown clan to the west, and earned loyalty from Genghis when he carried out the order to decimate the village he came from. Chagatai massacred his mentors, friends, and even family.”

“Wow, brutal.”

“He buried the soldiers and slaves of the funeral procession himself. After the burial, rumor was he returned to the nearest settlement and never spoke again for the rest of his days. Others say he wandered hopelessly without guidance from Genghis or presence of his fellow soldiers. Haguyu believes he released his horse to the wild, possibly the Khan’s personal horse as well, and sacrificed himself shortly after the burial.”