The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘He’s at a meeting in the old town, something to do with the screens for the atrium, and he has other appointments after that. I didn’t really expect to hear from him today, with the opening coming up.’ She looked out at the aquamarine sky, wondering how Hardy had got hold of her number. He had never rung it before. ‘Why? Is there a problem?’

  ‘I have to talk to him.’ A pause. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m—’ She thought for a moment. Something made her lie, even though she knew the lie could be found out. ‘I’m at the Mirdif Mall.’

  ‘I think you need to get back to the compound.’

  ‘I still have quite a bit of shopping to do.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay out by yourself.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, I come here by myself all the time.’

  ‘I’ll send someone for you.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I need to discuss this with your husband—’

  ‘I’ll go home as soon as I’ve finished.’

  ‘All right, but get Roy to call me as soon as you hear from him, ya?’

  She rang off and went back to the window, looking down at the concrete patterns below, wondering who to call for help.

  Behind the buildings, the dying day held the glowing contrails of arriving flights, sewn across the sky like golden threads. The first stars of the evening were starting to appear. The constellations seemed as ordered as the grounds below. A pair of workmen in green resort overalls walked across a connecting bridge, vanishing into a side entrance of the Persiana.

  Rachel had come to deliver the sweater to Ben and had looked out on this scene, the very heart of Dream World. Then she’d gone home and left the house early on Wednesday morning. Colette said she went to the desert whenever she needed to clear her mind. Rachel couldn’t decide who to talk to. Why not? Because she had no idea who to trust anymore. Lea felt her stomach shift as phantoms stepped from the shadows. What did you see, Rachel? she wondered. What did you realise when you looked out on all this?

  On an octagonal concrete building behind the flowerbeds, an exuberant mosaic pattern had been engraved in emerald green tiles. A row of sprinklers fussed into life, popping and fizzing as they doused the hibiscus bushes and acacias, splashing the main concourse between the landscaped gardens. The walls of the building darkened like poisonous night blooms.

  She checked Rachel’s map again. She had ringed the octagonal building. Next to the circle she had written something that looked like: 2,400 yards. No, not yards, years.

  Sealed behind glass in the air-conditioned tower, Lea rubbed her shivering shoulders. She headed downstairs. In the reception area of the hall that bordered the North tower, a guard sat behind a hectare of grained glass and stared blankly at his phone, like an electrical device waiting to be powered up. He barely took in what she had started to say.

  ‘My husband, Roy Brook, he might return here tonight. It’s important that you get him to call me straight away. I can’t get hold of him.’

  ‘It’s very busy,’ he told her. ‘Everyone is in meetings. For tomorrow. You can leave a message.’ He slid a pad toward her and indicated that she should write the message. She scrawled a hasty note, passed it back across the desk and headed outside, running across to the green-tiled building.

  Colette had told her that she and Rachel regularly came here and watched Ben pore over the plans for the resort. What was so special about this place?

  The building was little more than a concrete stump, probably an air vent of some kind. An unassuming iron door marked its entrance. As she got closer, she saw that its swipe-card box had been disconnected and the lock had been drilled out. In the last-minute rush to change all of the pass-protected doors, it had not yet been re-sealed. It opened easily, but with a metallic whine.

  Without thinking twice, she stepped inside the vault.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Conspiracy Of Men

  THE DARKNESS WAS so palpable that she hardly dared move for fear of falling. She turned on her cell phone and used it as a torch. The interior was disappointing, a bare space with some stacked gardening implements. A black square on the floor.

  The square turned out to be an unlit stairwell. There were wall-lamps, but she could not find a switch. She held out the cell phone but its feeble light illuminated nothing.

  There was nothing sinister here. A flight of clean stone steps, bare walls, no handrail, the smell of bleach. She descended slowly.

  A small low-ceilinged vault, blank, empty and dull. Some gritty sand on the floor. A square iron grating set in the floor. A couple of channels leading away from it. Flood drainage. Her torch followed the wall. Another staircase down, half as wide as the last. She listened and heard no-one, nothing. These steps were wooden and creaked. They led beneath the grating.

  This room was smaller still. There was nothing to see here either. Standing beneath the iron grille, she knelt and placed her hands flat on the floor. It was soothingly cold and wet. That was to be expected, she supposed—it was below sea level. Around the edges of the room was the sludge of drainage, just run-off. It was all very disappointing.

  Under her phone-light, she looked at her fingertips and saw that they were covered in blood.

  No, not blood—rust. Wet rust from the grating.

  She searched the floor again, using her phone. In one corner, caught down a narrow crevice, something shone dully. A short piece of chain. For no particular reason, she pocketed it.

  At the back of the room was a standard metal door with a fire exit bar. Pushing it, she found herself in an ordinary service corridor with an automatic lighting system that detected her presence and flickered on. The floor and ceiling were tiled cheaply and plainly. The pale blue illumination made her feel as if she was moving underwater.

  At the end of the long corridor was an extravagantly panelled hardwood door, an absurdity considering its location. Digging into her jeans, she removed the plastic wallet she had taken from Roy’s desk and tried the swipe card.

  The door swung back in silence, its automatic lighting revealing a blandly decorated foyer partitioned off by a floor-to-ceiling red curtain. She pulled the curtain aside, feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, expecting the worst.

  Instead she found herself looking at some sparse white leather Italian furniture, two tall steel lamps, a fan of design magazines on a marble table, several plush rugs in teal and stone, a panoramic glass wall of the city and the sea which proved to be fake dioramas discreetly illuminated by LEDs. It could have been the room from the photographs in Milo’s bin.

  At the back of the main living room was a large bedroom furnished with photographic blow-ups of Bedouin women in traditional head-dresses. The bathroom had empty cabinets and freshly folded towels. There was nothing more to see.

  She left the same way she entered, from the octagonal vault, and skirted the deepening shadows that had dropped across the resort grounds like chasms.

  The rust beneath her fingernails still looked like blood.

  Driving away from the coast, she caught the heavy homegoing traffic and sat creeping forward, anxiously waiting for lights to change. Her head was filled with lies and betrayals.

  The lights changed and she edged the Renault ahead. Move, she wanted to yell at the Porsche in front. The traffic filtered to a single lane, where a pair of mirror-shaded cops bent to see through car windshields before waving them on. It was impossible to tell what they might be looking for. They barely glanced at her, a woman no longer young, before moving to the next vehicle.

  Fears looped themselves through her mind. Rachel had figured something out. She had gone to the desert, planning to return that day because she had taken no spare clothes with her. Couldn’t she have talked to the authorities? No, she was worried that she wouldn’t be believed. The crazy grandmother who gets drunk with Milo at parties.

  A
s the road widened again she stepped on the accelerator, opening the window as she overtook, feeling the hot sea air on her sweating face. The book with the faded green cover was still lying on the passenger seat.

  The book.

  She pulled the Renault over so suddenly that the Mercedes behind her gave a long, angry blast on his horn. As she tipped to a stop, a cloud of dust settled over the car, then drifted across the road to the sands.

  She threw the hardback open and flicked through the pages. Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion. The Wonderful Wizard.

  Look behind the curtain, Rachel had written. What had she been trying to tell her? Had she seen the story as some kind of parable? Oz, the distant land into which they had all been blown, including the wizard himself, a carnival trickster who set himself up as its all-powerful ruler.

  If you wanted to become all-powerful, what would you do?

  The Renault rocked violently as a truck roared past.

  She looked down at the illustration once more.

  The Emerald City. The people of Oz. The visitors.

  Reaching for her phone, she typed an address into it. An instant later the shimmering DWG website unfolded. She flicked beyond the home page to a display of the company’s corporate structure, represented in a scrolling, spidery graph.

  At its head was the cabal of directors, existing only as a company logo, a neat little gravatar, a hotlink revealing no more than a basic paragraph about the founders, Oxford and Harvard educations, corporate fellowships and societies, the kind of undetailed information James Davenport was paid to invent on a daily basis. There were no other names or images. None at all.

  As she glanced back at the book and studied the drawing again, it became clear that she had made a mistake.

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not blow in from a far-off place and reinvent himself. He was created to control Oz.

  There was no such man as the Wonderful Wizard. There were only the company’s directors. The conspiracy of men, an exclusive group with unlimited power. They could enter the room via the vault whenever it pleased them. They could do whatever they wanted, and take whoever they liked there.

  Abuse, destroy, conceal. The way of all those who controlled worlds.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Secret History

  LEA PULLED INTO the car park of the Dubai National Geographical Institute and turned off her engine. Like the rest of the city’s municipal buildings it was monumental yet somehow understated, as if the architects sought to misdirect people away from it.

  A woman at the front desk issued her with a visitor’s pass and allowed her into the public archive, a pristine area which looked as if it had not been visited by anyone since it opened. Illuminated glass displays explained the history of the city and its region, but there was no-one to read their story.

  Finding maps on the coastal region was easy enough, but the electronic files only referenced the present. To follow the timeline back she had to go into the print archives, a series of tall blue steel cabinets on tracks that traversed the lower ground floor, sharing the space with a library.

  The strange thing was, it wasn’t at all hard to find. It featured on every map and diagram, in every sketch and fanciful painting, a circular stone dwelling that had once stood at the edge of the ocean, with a cart-track leading from it to the only tall rock in the area. An aerial photograph taken two years before the work on Dream World began showed the blurred outline of a circle submerged beneath a veil of sand. It was captioned: Ancient meeting-place of the Ka’al. She found a young attendant and asked him.

  ‘It is probably a tribal reference,’ he told her solemnly. ‘Please follow me.’ He led the way to a glass temperature-controlled room and unlocked the door. ‘You must wear gloves for these books.’ He brought her a pair of white cotton gloves tied with a blue cardboard band, then set out a large album covered in grey linen. It was published in 1892 but she supposed that in a city like this, which had only existed for a handful of years, it must have seemed like an ancient artefact. She read.

  The first human settlement in Dubai was in approximately 3000 BC, when the area was inhabited by nomadic cattle herders. In the 1st century AD the Ka’al (lit: ‘Men of the Sand’) became the first known tribe to stay in the coastal area. Their elders met in a small circular building (Site A attached to Site B), the High Rock, where sacrifices were made to the sun. In the 3rd century AD, the area came under the control of the Sassinid Empire which lasted until the 7th century, when the Umayyad Caliphate took control and introduced Islam to the area.

  Ka’al Tribe: Secretive tribal settlement whose members were periodically wiped out due to public disapproval of their sacrificial practices. The Ka’al believed that prosperity could be assured by virgin slaughter. Ka’al elders held positions of high tribal status. The cult returned in considerable numbers in 430, 1200, 1560 and at other times later still before being finally eradicated. The last known adherents of Ka’al rituals died in 1908. Members of the Ka’al could be recognized by a ceremonial burn-mark made on the left arm. Their status may be derived from a more mythological meaning of ‘Ka’al’, suggesting ‘doom’ or ‘doomsayer’, one who grows strong by dooming others of lesser, more innocent status.

  In his book Corruption of The Gods Dr Omar Shamon explains how the Ka’al sought to infiltrate the ranks of local property owners in order to buy land and establish permanent bases, therefore providing sites for commerce.

  Modern-day re-interpretation of the Ka’al: Rumours continued to persist throughout the 20th century that the Ka’al would return in a new, more commercial guise, and that the souls of the young would once again generate wealth for the old.

  How could people not have noticed what was hidden in plain sight? The Ka’al had returned. Perhaps they had never been away. They took the girls to their ancient sacrificial site. They dumped their bodies afterwards. They got rid of anyone who suspected.

  She scrolled down the DWG page on her phone. The directors’ list had been expanded to include its latest pair of inductees: Ben Larvin and Roy Brook.

  If we could see inside men’s minds, the truth would appal us.

  Were the directors of the Dream World Group knowingly following in the footsteps of the Ka’al, or had the tribe simply reappeared like spring water bubbling up through the rocks, impossible to eradicate because it was part of the landscape, part of its history, part of its existence? A secret enclave within a private company, the lines of responsibility and guilt blurred like charcoal on parchment, until it was impossible to tell whose hands were stained.

  AS SHE PULLED out and inched the vehicle forward through the sea of hot engines, she understood everything. What horrified her most was its sheer inevitability. The worst fears were always true, even though they were clothed in kindness and rendered acceptable. Power was like water or stars or the arid soil, something that was simply there.

  A truck horn blared at her, snapping her attention back to the outside traffic; she had missed her turn at the lights. The few people on the streets were walking faster than normal, as if they had all been energized by the thought of the world’s gaze once more turning to this desert land.

  The journey home took forever. She pulled in to the compound entrance and a new young guard shambled out to check under her car with his mirror, moving as slowly if he was underwater. Suddenly everything was normal again, and her fears seemed as absurd as the plot of a multiplex movie.

  Just ahead, across the white demarcation line on the tarmac, were the rows of perfect villas with neat green turf and white garages, every bush and flower in place, down to the last leaf, bud and petal. Somewhere a dog yapped. Sprinklers hissed. Droplets shivered on acacia leaves.

  As she waited for the guards to finish, she recognised one of the men standing behind the booth, Rashad Karmeel, the construction workers’ supervisor. She rolled down her window.

  ‘Mr Karmeel,’ she called, ‘could I have a word with you?’
/>
  Rashad broke off his conversation and came over. He looked overheated and uneasy. Dark patches showed beneath the armpits of his white workshirt. ‘Hello, Mrs Brook, is everything all right?’

  ‘Have you seen my daughter or any of her classmates?’

  ‘Not today. Quite a few of the kids are helping to decorate the nursery for your dinner party tomorrow, aren’t they?’

  She had forgotten that Mrs Garfield had persuaded them to volunteer their services. ‘Thanks, I’ll check there,’ she said. ‘How long are you staying on?’

  ‘I’ll be here for a few weeks yet. My men are looking forward to seeing their wives and families again.’

  ‘I hope they’re being properly paid.’

  ‘Our contracts were extended by a month, without any extra pay. There are some people who do not like to see black men making money, Mrs Brook.’

  She closed the window and drove off. The streets were silent and empty. She parked the car at the kerb and went into the house. Lastri had returned to her own home at five, and the rooms were in darkness. Roy was presumably stuck in his meeting with his mobile turned off. She had to talk to someone, but had no idea whom to trust.

  She remembered the young woman who acted as an off-site assistant to the senior architects. She existed as a voice, a conduit without an identity of her own, which made her easy to talk to. What was her name?

  ‘Irina, it’s Lea Brook. Do you know when my husband is likely to get out of his meeting?’

  ‘There are sessions running right through the evening, Mrs Brook. I have not heard from him in a while.’

  ‘Roy told me one particular appointment was arranged late downtown. Something to do with curtains or blinds.’ She was amazed by the calmness of her voice. She held out her left hand and found it was shaking.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ Irina replied. ‘He might not have had time to add it to the central diary.’