Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed Read Online Free PDF Page B

there that 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 one high wall. There 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 were skirted around bases and against walls, had 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 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 clad in the remains of a sandal, bones stripped of flesh and dangling with scraps of skin, snapped or broken at the ankle. The illusion 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 toward 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’s 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 toward 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