Part 3 (1/2)

”Scott,” 1 said. ”Just where the h.e.l.l are you taking us?”

”There'll be light,” he said. ”Every place I've read of this, there's the light of the dead. We just have to get there. This is the route to the city, not the city proper. We should find it soon, Pete. Soon! And then perhaps I can lay Matthew to rest.”

”This is madness,” I said. Our voices were peculiarly dead in that subterranean place, consumed by the rock walls and the weird hieroglyphs. The etchings writhed in the weak light from Scott's insubstantial torch, given a life of their own.

”Stay with me, Pete,” he said. He turned away and continued along the tunnel, heading down and away from the vanished light, perhaps leading us into places and dangers neither of us could truthfully imagine. ”You're my best friend.”

I followed because it was the only thing I could do. I like to think I stayed on his tail because of my devotion to my 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 1 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+fted. 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 a.s.saulted 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 pa.s.sage narrowed, walls closing in and ceiling dipping until we had to stoop to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.s 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 1 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 1 saw in this place way below the desert was larger, older and far less explicable.

The City of the Dead lay spread out before us. It was flat and utterly without limit, stretching way out farther than I could see, and it was sheer distance rather than anything else that faded it into the horizon. No hazy atmosphere, no darkening of the air-the light of the dead was rich and pure and all-encompa.s.sing, much more revealing and honest than mere sunlight-but pure, unbelievable distance. The city went on forever, and I could see only at the speed of light. It spread out left and right and ahead, the only visibly defined border being the high cliff from which we had emerged. The wall fell down to the city and rose higher than I could see, and it faded similarly as I looked left and right. It did not seem to curve around, perhaps enclosing the city, but stood in a straight line, and here and there I spied other ledges and darker smudges that may have been the mouths of other tunnels. In the distance I thought I saw another shocked individual standing on one of these ledges, but I blinked and the image was taken away.

I looked down, trying to judge how far below the ground lay. Too far to climb but close enough to fall Too far to climb but close enough to fall, I thought, and though I had no idea where the idea came from I looked at Scott, caught his eye, knew that he was thinking the same awful thing.

Together we stepped forward and tipped slowly over the lip of the ledge, leaning into s.p.a.ce, somehow welcoming the plunge that would immerse us in this city.

The fall lasted long enough for me to make out plenty more detail. I did not dwell upon the strangeness of what was happening-right then, it did not seem important-and though I knew that things had changed irrevocably as Scott and I had set foot on that ledge, I took the opportunity to view this place. Here was the supposed City of the Dead. The buildings were hugely diverse, ranging from small shacks made of corrugated tin spread across branch uprights, to golden-domed offerings of love; steel and gla.s.s towers, to complex timber-clad settlements; frosty ice-sculptured homes, to hollows in the ground, caves, deep holes heated by the boiling insides of the hot earth itself. There was no order, no design to the city, no blocks or arrangement, merely buildings and the s.p.a.ces in between. Here and there I saw wider areas that may have been parks, though there was no greenery to be seen. The things in these parks may have been dead trees, or simply much taller skeletons than any I had seen before. Some buildings had windows and some did not, and only some of those with windows retained their glazing. It was only as we fell closer to the city- and that fall, that plunge, was still accepted by both of us-that my attention was drawn more to the s.p.a.ces in between the buildings.

In those s.p.a.ces, things moved.

Until now I had seen this as the City of the Dead, and I was falling toward it, and that did not matter.

Now, seeing this movement in the streets and roads and alleys and parks-seeing also the flittering movements behind the windows of the taller buildings, shadows denying the strange, level light that this place possessed-I came to dwell upon exactly what was happening to us. We fell, though there was no sensation of movement; no wind in my ears, no sickness in my stomach, no velocity. And soon, looking down, I knew that there was an impact to come. Directly below us was a collection of smaller, humped buildings, rising from the ground like insect hills, surrounded by taller constructions that even now we began to fall past.

”Scott!” 1 yelled, but even though I felt no breeze, my voice was stolen away. He was next to me, spread-eagled in the air, and when he caught my eye he looked quickly away again. What that signified, I did not know.

The impact came closer, and then it was past. It did not hurt, and I had no memory at all of having landed. One second we were falling by tall buildings, flitting past windows that each seemed to hold a shadowy face observing our descent, and the next we were on the ground. Dust rose around us and floated in the still air, drifting up, up, as if eager to trace the paths of our recent descent. We lay there, watching the dust form ghostly shapes around us. Somehow, at the end of our fall, we had flipped over to land on our backs.

”We're here,” Scott whispered. ”Look.”

He did not point and I did not turn my head to see where he was looking. I did not need to. Because one of those ambiguous shapes suddenly became more real, emerging from the dust like a sunbeam bursting through cloud cover, carrying a bluish light and forming a very definite shape as it pa.s.sed first over Scott's body, and then my own. The shape of a woman in long, flowing robes, her hair short, her hands held out before her as if forever warding off some horrible fate. Her foot touched my arm- She saw it coming at her, the dog, the animal, whatever it is, she saw it and she saw the faces of those behind it, and they could have been grimacing or laughing. She brought up her hands, as if that would do any good, and before the thing crashed into her in a rage of teeth and claws, she caught sight of the face of someone she had once loved in the gleeful crowd- I scurried back, pus.h.i.+ng with my feet until I was leaning against a stone wall, shaking my head to loosen the image. The wraith drifted away down the street and eventually faded into the uniform blue light that smothered this place. The wall at my back should have felt good, but it was merely more confirmation this was somewhere that should not be, as was the solid ground, the ground I had hit after minutes of falling. I glanced up, but the cliff wall was nowhere to be seen. Only that blue light.

”Are we alive?” I said, a sick fear suddenly making me cold.

”Of course,” Scott said. ”Do you remember dying?”

”No. But that doesn't mean we didn't. We fell!”

”Everyone here remembers dying,” he said. ”That's why they're here.”

”But why-”

”No more questions, Pete,” he said. ”Just open your eyes to it all.”

”I'm not sure I want to.”

Scott reached down to help me up. His firm grip was comforting, and we held on to each other for a second or two as we stood there together, looking around. He was real to me and I was real to him, and right then that was very important. These buildings were real too. I kicked at the stone wall I had been leaning against. There was a dull thud thud and dust drifted from my tatty shoe. And I realized then, for the first time, how utterly silent it was. and dust drifted from my tatty shoe. And I realized then, for the first time, how utterly silent it was.

Wherever we were, however deep below the ground or submerged in disbelief, there were no voices, no gusts of air, no sounds of a city, no movements, no breaths. My own heart started to sound excessively loud as it continued on its startled course, busy pumping oxygen through veins to dilute my fear and cool the heat of my distress. 1 was not used to existence without noise of some kind. At home, with a wife and two children sharing the house, there was always a raised voice or a mumbled dream, music or television adding a theme, toys being crashed or musical instruments adding their tone-deaf lilt to the air. Even at work, reading and editing, the voices in my mind were loud enough to be audible. Here, in this city larger than any I had ever seen or imagined, the complete silence was incongruous and unfair. And it made things so obviously false.

”We're not really here,” 1 said. Scott ignored me. Perhaps in silence he was dealing with this in his own way.

There was an opening in the stone wall a few meters along, and I went to it and looked inside. I saw a room, large and high-ceilinged, bereft of anything-furniture, character, life. Four walls, a floor, a ceiling, nothing more. There were no signs of it ever having been used. There was a doorway in the far wall without a door, no gla.s.s in the window I looked through, no light fixture in the ceiling; the same uniform blue light lit every corner of the room, top and bottom, revealing nothing but slight drifts of dust. Shadows had no place here. I stood back slightly and looked up, realizing that the building was maybe fifteen stories tall, all of them identically holed with gla.s.sless windows, and I was certain that each room and floor was the same sterile, deserted emptiness.

Scott nudged against me as he walked by, and when 1 glanced down I realized that he had done so on purpose.

There were several more wraiths moving along the street. Two of them walked, strutting purposefully together, their expressions and facial features similar. They wore bathing shorts and nothing else, their torsos and limbs dark with suntan, faces young and strong and long, long dead. They did not touch each other as they strode by, and they exuded contempt, staring straight ahead and doing nothing to acknowledge the other's closeness. Another shape seemed to float and spin through the air, but as she pa.s.sed by I realized that she was falling horizontally, clothes ripped from her body by the invisible wind that whipped her hair around her head, face and shoulders. She may have been beautiful, but the forces crus.h.i.+ng her this way and that were too cruel to tell. She pa.s.sed over the heads of the striding brothers and cornered at the end of the street, her fall unimpeded. Two more shapes came by separately, neither of them appearing to notice us. One shouted silently and waved fists at the sky, and the other struggled on footless legs, stumping his way along and swinging his arms for balance, as if pus.h.i.+ng through mud. One of his hands brushed mine, I saw it but did not feel it- He was in the sea, trapped by a giant clam that had closed around both feet, his muscles burning acid into his bones as he struggled to keep his nose high enough to snort in a desperate breath between waves, and even though the salt water was doing its best to blind him, he could see the boat bobbing a few feet away, the faces peering over the edge, laughing so much as their tears of mirth fell to quicken his fate- I gasped and pressed myself back against the wall, watching the dead man hobble away.

Scott had remained in the center of the narrow street, staring about him as the new shapes breezed by. Perhaps they touched him, but he seemed not to have noticed. With the taste of brine still on my lips I went to him, desperate to feel someone real again. I clapped my hand to his shoulder, held on hard, followed his gaze. High buildings, that blue light, no sign of where we had come from... and high up, sometimes, darker blue shapes sweeping by.

”What are they?” I asked.

”I don't know. But Pete, Matthew is here. He has to be! I have to find him, and however long it takes...” He left the sentence unfinished, ominous with possibilities.

”These aren't just ghosts,” I said.

”Not ghosts, no!” He shook his head as if frustrated at my naivete. ”Dead people, Pete.”

”There's nothing to them!”

”Do you have to feel something for it to be real or mean anything? Can you touch your dreams, taste your imagination? They're as real as we are, just not in quite the same place, the same way. And they're here because they were wronged.”

”How could you know all this?”

”You think I haven't been looking for this place?” he said. ”Poring over every sc.r.a.p of ancient script I've discovered, or uncovered in some G.o.dforsaken old library somewhere? Tearing apart whole digs by hand to find a fragment of writing about it, a shred of evidence? Ever since I first got wind of this place the year Matthew died, it's been my only reason to keep on living.”

”Matthew? Why...?”

He looked at me then, a quick glance, as if he was unwillingly to relinquish the sight of our unbelievable surroundings. ”I wasn't there when he died.”

”He died of leukemia, Scott,” I said.

”I should have been there.”

”You couldn't have done anything! He died of leukemia. Just tell me what you could have done?”