Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

friend, my burgeoning sense of adventure, my excitement at what we might have discovered around the next curve in the corridor, or the next. But in reality I think I was simply scared. I could not face the walk back out on my own. Uphill. Past those strange markings on the wall, those bones that had no weight or touch.
    I had no choice but to follow. We walked for what felt like hours. Scott’s torch had guttered down to little more than a blue smudge in the utter darkness. The new light that manifested came so slowly, so gradually, that for a while I could not understand how that failing torch was throwing out so much illumination. But this new light was growing and expanding, dusty and blue, originating from no single source. The walls of the passage began to glow, as if touched by the early morning sun, and the shapes and tales carved there told differing stories as the shadows writhed and shifted. None of them was clear to me.
    “Scott,” I said, afraid, more afraid than I had been since those first blasts of the storm had assaulted the tent walls.
    “The light of the dead,” he said. “They need it to see. I guess they don’t like the dark. We’re almost there, Pete.”
    Ahead of us the passage narrowed, walls closing in and ceiling dipping until we had to stoop to pass by. The ceiling touched my head once, and I didn’t like the sensation; the rock was smooth and as warm as living flesh. I could not shake the idea that we were walking willingly into the belly of a beast, and now here we were at the base of its esophagus, deep deep down, about to enter its stomach and submit ourselves to digestion.
    There were more remains around our feet here, scattered across the ground, offering no resistance as we waded through. The bones tumbled aside, clanking silently together, some falling into dust as soon as they were disturbed and others rolling together as if coveting their former cozy togetherness. I could not feel them. It was like kicking aside wafts of smoke. I wondered if they could feel me.
    Scott was ahead of me. When I heard him gasp, and I walked into him, and his gasp came again as a groan, I knew that things were about to change. The claustrophobic passage opened out onto a small ledge strewn with skeletal parts that seemed to dance away as we both came to a stunned standstill, looking out at the place we had come down here to find.
    I once stood on the viewing platform at the top of the Empire State Building in New York, looking down at the city surrounding me, the myriad streets and blocks crawling with people and cars, the mechanical streams spotted yellow with frequent taxis, sirens singing up out of the city like wailing souls long-lost, other high buildings near and far speckled with interior lights, the city rising in three dimensions, not just spread out like the carpet of humanity I had imagined. I could look east toward the river and see a hotdog vendor’s stand at a road junction, and then south toward Greenwich Village, where through one of the telescopes I could just make out someone hurrying across a street with a dog tugging them along, and I knew that these two people may never meet. In a city of that size, there was a good chance that they would pass their lives without ever exchanging glances. And I, at the top of this huge tower, could see it all. I could see a fire to the east of Central Park, follow the course of fire engines screeching intermittently through the traffic, but wherever the owners of the burning building were I could not tell them. I had a strange feeling of being lifted way above the city, an observer rather than a player, and as I descended in the express elevator and exited once more onto the streets, I experienced a dislocation that lasted for the rest of the day. I glanced back up at the tower, and wondered just who was looking down at me right then.
    What I saw in this place way below the desert was larger, older and far less explicable.
    The City of the Dead lay