Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed Read Free Page A

desert.”
    “And?” I asked. There had been no feeling to his words, no sense that he meant it. Spiders and snakes did not frighten him, or turn his desert into a wilderness. There was something else here for him.
    “And history,” he said. The jeep began to protest as we started up a shallow, long rise. Scott frowned down at the bonnet, cursing under his breath, and then with a cough the engine settled into its old rumble once more.
    I looked around, searching for ruins or some other evidence of humanity, of history. But I saw only compacted sand and plants, and a shimmering mirage that made me ever more thirsty.
    “The sands of time,” Scott said. “Blown around the world for the last million years. Parts of every civilization that has ever existed on Earth are here. Shards of the pyramids. Flecks of stone from the hanging gardens of Babylon. Dust from unknown obelisks. Traces of societies and peoples we’ve never known or imagined. All here.”
    I looked across the desert, trying to perceive anything other than what my eyes told me were there. Yet again I envied Scott his sense of wonder. He could take a deep breath and know that a million people before him had inhaled part of that lungful. I could see or feel nothing of the sort.
    “Time has ghosts,” he said. “That’s what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come. And sometimes, the ghosts gather.”
    “The city of ghosts?”
    Scott drew to a halt atop a low ridge. Ahead of us lay a staggering expanse of nothing: desert forever, the horizon merging with the light blue sky where distance blurred them together. Heat shimmered everything into falseness.
    “Farther in,” he said quietly. “A couple of hours’ travel. I have plenty of water, and there’s a spring at my camp. But here. I found this. Take a look. Gather your thoughts, and when you’re ready, tell me what you think.”
    He dug down under his seat and handed me something. For a couple of seconds I drew back and kept my hands to myself, afraid that it would be deadly. Not an insect, nothing poisonous, nothing so banal; something
dangerous
. Something that, were I to accept it from Scott, would have consequences.
    “Here,” he said, urging me. “It won’t hurt you. That’s the last thing it’ll do.”
    I took in a deep breath and held out my hand.
    The bundle of cloth was small, and it had no weight whatsoever. I was holding a handful of air. It was old, crumbled, dried by the intense heat until all flexibility and movement had been boiled away. It lay there in my hand, a relic, and as I turned it this way and that I saw what was inside.
    Bones. Short and thin, knotted, disjointed. Finger bones. One of them had a shred of mummified flesh still hanging on for dear, long-departed life.
    I gasped, froze in my seat, conscious of Scott’s gaze upon me. I hefted the bundle, still amazed at how light it seemed, wondering if the climate had done something to my muscles or sense of touch. And for a moment so brief I may have imagined it in a blink, I saw this person’s death.
    Cold. Wet. Alone. And a long, long way from here.
    “It’s old,” Scott said. “Very old. Before Christ. Before the Minoans, the Egyptians, Mesopotamia.”
    “How do you know?” I whispered.
    “It’s hardly there,” he said. “Touch it.”
    I pointed a finger and reached out, aiming between the folds of ancient cloth at the dull gray bone wrapped inside. Closer, closer, until my finger felt as though it had been immersed in water of the exact same temperature as our surroundings. But that was all.
    I pushed farther, but there was no sense of the bone being there. It was not solid.
    “Mirage?” I said. But I knew that was wrong. “What is this?” I hefted the package again, squeezed it, watched as it kept its shape and did not touch my skin. “What the bloody hell… ?”
    “Sometimes I guess even ghosts fade away,” Scott said. He started the jeep again and