Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed Read Online Free Page A

sense.
    “Scott?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why no one has found those scraps of things before, or seen the ruin, or pieced together the evidence that’s just lying around for me to find. And for a while, this made me doubt the truth of what I’d discovered. It couldn’t be so easy, I thought. I couldn’t have just stumbled across it. The evidence was so
real
, and the existence of the city here is so
right
, that others must have come to the same conclusions. A hundred others, a thousand.”
    “Are you quite sure no one has?”
    “No,” he said. “Not positive. Perhaps others have found the place, but never had a chance to reveal any of their findings.”
    I drank my beer and glanced around the tent. The closer I looked, the more I saw Scott’s identity and personality stamped on the interior. A pile of books stood in one corner, all of them reference, no fiction.
What’s the point of reading something that isn’t true
? he’d once said to me, and I’d hated myself for not being able to come up with a good reason. Me, someone who worked in publishing, incapable of defending the purpose of my life. A belt lay carelessly thrown down on the rugs, various brushes, chisels and other implements of his trade tied to it. And the rugs themselves, far from being locally made, seemed to speak a variety of styles and cultures. Some told stories within their weaves, others held only patterns, and one or two seemed to perform both tasks with deceptive simplicity. The realization that this man, my friend, did not actually have a home hit me then, strong and hard. He carried his home with him. After all these years, all this time, I guessed that I had assumed Scott would “come home” one day, not realizing that he lived there every day of his life.
    I missed my wife and kids then, sharply and brightly. But the feeling, though intense, was brief, and it soon faded into a background fog as Scott opened another bottle for each of us.
    “I think I found this place for a reason,” he said at last. “I can’t say I was led here—I led myself if anything, looking, delving, searching into old histories and older tales—but I think it was meant to be.”
    “Don’t tell me you’ve started to believe in fate.”
    “Only if it’s self-made,” he said, grinning. “I was fated to find this place, and you were fated to join me here, to search more fully. But only because that’s what both of us wanted. Me to find Matthew, and you to give your life an injection of
life
.”
    I felt slighted, but I knew that he was right. In what he said about me, at least. As to Matthew, I could not begin to imagine.
    “Where better for the city of the dead than nestling in the cradle of humanity?” he said. “Ethiopia is where the first people walked, where Homo sapiens came into being. What better place?”
    Something slammed against the side of the tent, sending the canvas stretching and snapping against the poles. I jumped to my feet and Scott glanced up, bottle poised at his mouth. “Sounds like we’re in for a bit of a blow,” he said.
    “What the hell was that?”
    “Wind. Storm coming in. You’d best get your things inside. We’ll share this tent. Sand storms can be a bit disconcerting the first time you’re caught in one, especially in a tent. Magnifies sound.”
    “You never said anything about sand storms.” I felt the familiar fear rising inside, the one that hit me keen and hard when I was removed from my normal place, the company of my normal people. The fear that said I was lost.
    “Didn’t say much at all,” he said. “If I had, would you have come?”
    “Of course!” I said. “Of course I would.”
    “Even though you think I’ve lost the plot?”
    I considered lying to my friend then, but he would have known. He already knew the truth. “That was the main reason.”
    He smiled. “You’re a good mate. I’m a lucky man. I may only have a few possessions to my name, but I’m