Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed Read Free Page B

headed down the slope, out into the great desert.
    I dropped the cloth bundle and kicked it away from my feet, watching, waiting for it to vanish or change. It did neither. But by the time we reached Scott’s encampment, I thought perhaps it had faded a little more.
    There were six tents scattered around a boggy depression in the ground. This was Scott’s “spring.” As we pulled up in the jeep a flock of birds took off from the watering hole, darting quickly between the tents, moving sharply like bats. There was movement on the ground too; lizards shimmied beneath rocks, and a larger creature on four legs—too fast to see, too blurred for me to make out—flickered out of sight over the lip of the depression and into the desert.
    “Quite a busy place,” I said.
    “It’s the only spring for miles in any direction. I don’t mind sharing it.”
    “You have others on the dig?” I asked. The tents looked deserted, unkempt, unused, but there was no other reason for them to be there.
    “I used to,” he said. “The last one left three weeks ago.”
    “You been skimping on their wages again?” I was trying to be jolly, but it could not reach my voice, let alone my smile.
    “Frightened off,” he said casually. He jumped from the jeep, slammed the door and made for one of the tents.
    I sat there for a while, trying to make out just what was different about this place compared to the other camps I had visited over the past two decades. The sun scorched down, trying to beat sense out of me. I closed my eyes, but still it found its way through, burning my vision red.
    There were no people here, but that was not the main difference. There were fewer tents than at most digs. Those that were here looked older, more bedraggled, as if they had been here for a lot longer than usual.
    Scott stood staring back at me, hands on his hips. “I have a solar fridge,” he said. “I have beer. We need to wash up, catch up and then talk some about what I’ve found out here. You ready for some wonder, Pete?”
    You ready for some wonder, Pete
? He could have been reading my mind. And yet again, only my closeness to Scott prevented me from taking his comment as ridicule.
    “Where’s the dig?” I asked. “Where’s the equipment? The washers, the boxed artifacts, the tools?”
    “Ah,” Scott said, throwing up his hands as if he’d been caught cheating at cards. “Well… Pete, please mate, I’m not trying to deceive you or catch you out. I just wanted you here to
share
something with me. Come on, into my tent. We’ll crack a few, and then I’ll tell you everything. The time needs to be right.”
    “Matthew,” I said. It was the first time I had mentioned Scott’s most baffling e-mail since my arrival.
    His face dropped and he looked down at his feet. We stayed that way for some time—me sitting in the jeep, slowly frying in the sun; Scott standing a few steps away examining the desert floor—and then he looked up.
    “I haven’t found him yet, but he’s here.”
    I shook my head, frowned.
    “I just need to look farther… deeper…”
    “Scott, has the sun—?”
    “No, it hasn’t. The sun hasn’t touched me!” He almost became angry, but then he calmed, relaxed. “Pete, Matthew is here somewhere, because every dead person who has ever been wronged is here.”
    “Somewhere. Under our feet, under this desert. I’ve found the City of the Dead.”
    He turned and walked into one of the larger tents, leaving me alone in the jeep.
The City of the Dead
. “A real city?” I said, but Scott seemed not to hear. I may have been alone. Tent flaps wavered for a few seconds in a sudden breeze, snapping angrily at the heat. I looked around and felt the immensity of the place bearing down, crushing me into the small, insignificant speck of sand that I was. I was lost here, just as lost as I was at home, and though it was a feeling I had never grown used to, at least here I could find justification. Here, I was lost because