Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (7 page)

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 more 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.

I plunged into the tunnel without a backward glance. If I turned I may have seen something impossible to ignore, a sight so mind-befuddling that it would petrify me, leaving me there to turn slowly to stone or a pillar of salt. I simply ducked away from that impossible place and entered the real world of darkness once again.

The blue light abandoned me immediately. I was in pitch blackness. I must have kicked through the shapes at my feet, though I could only visualize them.

I kept one hand held out, fingertips flitting across the stone wall to my right. Perhaps it was because I could imagine nothing worse than that place I was leaving behind—and the fate that must surely await Scott there, given time—but I walked forward without fear, and with a burning eagerness to see the sun once more.

I walked, and walked, and all the time I thought back to Scott running from me, wondering what had made him do so, why he had not turned to say goodbye.

He should never have left me like that. Never. Not on my own down there.

The tunnel seemed far longer than it had on the way down. The slope was steeper, perhaps, or maybe I had taken a branch in the darkness, a route leading somewhere else. I walked on because that was all I could do.

As light began to bleed in, its manifestation was so subtle that it took me a while to notice. I could not see and then I could see, and I did not discern the moment when that changed. My fear was dwindling, fading away with the darkness. We are all energy after all, I thought. There’s nothing to us but space and power. Our thoughts are an illusion, and the world around us even more so.

An illusion…

“Where is
that
coming from?” I whispered, and my voice was curiously light. Those ideas, those images and concepts, all so unlike me. Given time perhaps I could have thought them, but it had only been a while since I had left the city, only a while.

He should have never left me alone…

I heard Scott calling my name. His voice floated to me from afar, nebulous and ambiguous, and it could have been a breeze drifting through the tunnels from above. I made out carved symbols on the walls, recognized them from our journey down here. In the bluish light issuing from my skin, eyes and mouth, the ancient words were beginning to make some kind of sense.

I heard Scott again from up ahead, but his voice was fainter now, fading, retreating somewhere and some place lost to me forever.

Voices rose behind me to call me back, and sounds, and the noises of a city coming to life.

At last I could hear the dead.

W
E FOUND THE FIRST
body two days before Christmas.

Charley had been out gathering sticks to dry for tinder. She had worked her way through the wild garden and down toward the cliffs, scooping snow from beneath and around bushes and bagging whatever dead twigs she found there. There were no signs, she said. No disturbances in the virgin surface of the snow, no tracks, no warning. Nothing to prepare her for the scene of bloody devastation she stumbled across.

She had rounded a big boulder and seen the red splash in the snow, which was all that remained of a human being. The shock froze her comprehension. The reality of the scene struggled to imprint itself on her mind. Then, slowly, what she was looking at finally registered.

She ran back screaming. She’d only recognized her boyfriend by what was left of his shoes.

We were in the dining room trying to make sense of the last few weeks when Charley burst in. We spent a lot of time doing that: talking together in the big living rooms of the manor; in pairs, crying and sharing warmth; or alone, staring into darkening skies and struggling to discern a meaning in the infinite. I was one of those more usually alone. I’d been an only child and contrary to popular belief, my upbringing had been a nightmare. I always thought my parents blamed me for the fact that they could not have any more children, and instead of enjoying and revelling in my own childhood, I spent those years watching my mother and father mourn the ghosts of unborn offspring. It would have been funny if it were not so sad.

Charley opened the door by falling into it. She slumped to the floor, hair plastered across her forehead, her eyes two bright sparks peering between the knotted strands. Caked snow fell from her boots and speckled the timber floor, dirtied into slush. The first thing I noticed was its pinkish tinge.

The second thing I saw was the blood covering Charley’s hands.

“Charley!” Hayden jumped to his feet and almost caught the frantic woman before she hit the deck. He went down with her, sprawling in a sudden puddle of dirt and tears. He saw the blood then and backed away automatically. “Charley?”

“Get some towels,” Ellie said, always the pragmatist, “and a fucking gun.”

I’d seen people screaming—all my life I’d never forgotten Jayne’s final hours—but I had never seen someone actually
beyond
the point of screaming. Charley gasped and clawed at her throat, trying to open it up and let out the pain and the shock trapped within. It was not exertion that had stolen her breath; it was whatever she had seen. She told us what that was.

I went with Ellie and Brand. Ellie had a shotgun cradled in the crook of her arm, a bobble hat hiding her severely short hair, her face all hard. There was no room in her life for compliments, but right now she was the one person in the manor I’d choose to be with. She’d been all for trying to make it out alone on foot; I was so glad that she eventually decided to stay.

Brand muttered all the way. “Oh fuck, oh shit, what are we doing coming out here? Like those crazy girls in slasher movies, you know? Always chasing the bad guys instead of running from them? Asking to get their throats cut? Oh man…”

In many ways I agreed with him. According to Charley there was little left of Boris to recover, but she could have been wrong. We owed it to him to find out. However harsh the conditions, whatever the likelihood of his murderer—animal or human—still being out here, we could not leave Boris lying dead in the snow. Apply whatever levels of civilization, foolish custom or superiority complex you like, it just wasn’t done.

Ellie led the way across the manor’s front garden and out onto the coastal road. The whole landscape was hidden beneath snow, like old sheet-covered furniture awaiting the homecoming of long-gone owners.

I wondered who would ever make use of this land again—who would be left to bother when the snow finally did melt—but that train of thought led only to depression.

We crossed the flat area of the road, following Charley’s earlier footprints in the deep snow; even and distinct on the way out, chaotic on the return journey. As if she’d had something following her.

She had. We all saw what had been chasing her when we slid and clambered down toward the cliffs, veering behind the big rock that signified the beginning of the coastal path. The sight of Boris opened up and spread across the snow had pursued her all the way, and was probably still snapping at her heels now. The smell of his insides slowly cooling under an indifferent sky. The sound of his frozen blood crackling under foot.