The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  Lea looked at them in wonder. To hear this small group of dust-caked teenagers speaking as if they had the power of an international peacekeeping force was oddly touching.

  The Subaru coasted down into the town of Nizwa, their last stop before Muscat. As always, there were few women in the streets, mostly men drinking coffee outside their shops or playing checkers. They turned into the main street and found the pavement lined with immaculately dressed Omani boy scouts holding tall red banners.

  ‘What the fuck, man?’ Dean looked about. Another troop of scouts was heading toward them. Arendt picked one of the smallest and had a word with him.

  ‘The King of Sweden is visiting the country,’ he reported back. ‘Apparently he’s the head of the World Scouting Federation.’

  Arendt laughed, and the tension between them broke. They parked under a fig tree, and bought fresh supplies from a kiosk at the edge of the town’s souk.

  ‘That was fast thinking back there,’ Dean told Lea. ‘Where did you get the tray of chicks?’

  ‘I bought them from one of the farmers,’ Lea replied. ‘I didn’t understand what he was saying so I just stuck a pile of notes in his hand.’

  ‘He probably got most of them back,’ Dean said. For a moment it looked as if he might smile.

  Even Cara seemed less grudging. She leaned against the side of the van, fanning herself in the shade. ‘We need to find an empty café where we can check what happened last night on the laptops,’ she said, pointing across the road. At the shadowed entrance to the souk, the proprietor of a small coffee shop sat dozing in the sun. Above his head was a red plastic sign that read Kahwa – Halwa – Wi-Fi. ‘Over there.’

  Heading across the road, they awoke the owner and ordered bitter coffee flavoured with cardamom and dates. Lea ate lokhemat, deep-fried dough-balls served with sweet limes, while the boys tapped into their connections and solemnly viewed the news reports.

  It felt unreal, the sunlight dappling over the little sepia-painted coffee shop, the smell of roasting Kahwa in the kitchen, the fat little café owner dozing on a fraying wicker chair, the scent of sticky sweet halwa in rosewater, the Muezzin call in the distance and four intense young people furiously typing, muttering to each other, operating as a single organism.

  Beside a thorny, ancient myrrh bush stood a kohl-eyed old man, older than anyone she had ever seen before, leaning on his cane, dressed in a traditional tribal cloak, his withered brown arms bare to the shoulders. His left forearm bore the diagonal scar of a terrible burn, long-since healed. The mark of the Ka’al.

  And there, just behind him, were two policemen.

  ‘Look,’ whispered Lea.

  Dean glanced up, annoyed at being interrupted. ‘Shit, the fucking scouts. The king of Sweden. He’s probably being escorted by someone from the royal family. Heightened security.’ They closed their laptops as one and rose, pulling her up, but the police had seen them.

  ‘They’ve got machine guns on their backs,’ said Cara. ‘File out slowly.’

  Lea placed money on the table for the coffees and led the group out, but as they left the officers began calling to them.

  The group broke into a run, heading into the deeply shadowed souk. Sunlight filtered through the wood slats overhead, casting matchstick stripes across the confluence of narrow alleyways. In front of each store sat a boy with nothing to do, too many vendors selling the same things, shoes and bags and lamps, shopkeepers peering out of the gloom to collar passing trade.

  The police called out to shopkeepers to stop the infidels, but on Dean’s command they broke apart, and Lea found herself running hard to keep up with Cara. Arendt and Dean darted off into one of the many winding alleys filled with carpenters and metalworkers.

  Lea glanced back and saw Arendt sprawling across an angled spice display, the great wooden trays of cardamom, marjoram, caraway and sumac tipping and bursting clouds of eye-stinging spice into the air, ochre and crimson, ginger and jade.

  A young man popped up in an opened panel among the spices, so that he appeared to be buried to his shoulders. Rubbing his saffron-covered face, he started yelling and grabbing at the boy. Arendt was seized by one of the officers and fought hard, kicking and twisting until strong arms came around his chest and held him still.

  Cara hurtled into an alley festooned with wheels of electrical cable, charging through reeking puddles between ducks and flea-riddled cats, around a cart stacked with hundreds of bubble-packed purple plastic dinosaurs. She knew the officers would be calling for more help to seal off the other end of the alley.

  ‘Here,’ she shouted, catching up and pulling Cara into the musty interior of a carpet shop. They climbed between the folded towers of rugs woven in burnt oranges and reds that rose from floor to ceiling all around the narrow shop, and ran for the stairs at the rear, pushing past a confused shopkeeper.

  Every inch of space was filled with silks, tapestries, scarves, tablecloths, runners, and cloths graded by shade and shape, endlessly refolded and arranged. On the second floor was a small wrought-iron balcony. Here, the sides of the streets were so close that the opposite balcony was not much more than a metre away. Pushing Cara ahead of her, she clambered onto the railing and jumped across, praying that the ironwork would hold.

  Somewhere below they could hear the two policemen shouting to one another as they tried to track the dispersing Europeans. Lea was still dressed in her burkha, and Cara could have been mistaken for any black-nailed youth toiling in the dense, dust-filled air of a workshop, except that she had lost her hat and now her sun-bleached hair tumbled about her face. Lea grabbed a brown woollen cap from a pile and jabbed it onto her head.

  ‘Tuck your hair in,’ she instructed as they made their way downstairs, through a dingy room where cross-legged boys sat carding twine on wooden frames. They headed into a quieter part of the souk where few might notice their flight.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Cara asked when it was safe to stop running. ‘Arendt had the keys to the van.’

  ‘We have to keep going,’ said Lea.

  ‘We can’t get caught.’ Cara was bent over with her hands on her thighs, breathing hard. ‘There’s a lot more to do yet.’

  ‘I don’t care about your plans. I just want to keep you safe.’

  ‘You never worried before.’

  She grabbed at Cara’s face and pulled it around to hers. ‘Of course I worried! I always cared. We caught a kind of blindness, you and I. The one thing I can’t do is lose you now. There’s nothing else, don’t you see? If we throw this away, there’s nothing else left for us.’ They cautiously emerged into sunlight, keeping to the shadowed edges of the buildings. ‘At the moment it’s only worth thinking about the things we can control. We need to stay out of sight. We have to get a ride to Muscat. I have our passports and some money, we could get a passage to Karachi, head into India, make our way home from there.’

  ‘What home are you talking about?’ said Cara. ‘What’s home anyway? Dad’s not coming back. If what you say is true, he left us a long time ago. The time for families is over. This is all the home we need now.’ She led the way, checking the road ahead, and for once it was her mother who followed without question.

  Ahead, a colourful boy scout parade was spread across the road out of Nizwa. Carmine banners had been hung across the sidewalks, offering some shade from the punishing sunlight. As the King of Sweden’s motor cavalcade passed, they turned to watch. Marching in front was a local band, an odd mix of trumpets and ouds playing the maqamat that gave songs their distinctive Arabic temperament. The procession of vehicles was followed by a small squad of soldiers and military officers, with a mix of security guards and regular police bringing up the rear. All of the men had ceremonial rifles strapped across their backs.

  Cara and Lea stood beneath the oleander bushes on the far side of the road, separated from their destination.

  ‘We’ll have to wait here until they’ve passed,’ said Lea. ‘There are plenty of trucks going to Mu
scat. We should be able to get a lift in one of them.’

  Cara turned to her and smiled. She looked happy again. ‘You understand, don’t you? That if everything you’ve told me is true, it all has to go?’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  Cara swung down her rucksack and opened it, showing Lea. Inside was a gun. ‘Leo Hardy gave it to Norah’s dad. He found at in the workers’ barracks,’ she explained. ‘It works okay. The scouts will be going to Dream World.’ Still smiling, she took a step forward into the street.

  ‘Come back,’ Lea warned, ‘don’t draw attention to yourself.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum.’ Cara raised a placating hand. ‘I have to go.’

  Lea’s stomach tipped. ‘We’re going together, we agreed—’

  ‘No, you agreed. As usual, you decided what you wanted to hear. We can’t, we’re western females among all these men, they’ll stop us sooner or later.’ She took another step into the road. ‘Do this one thing, okay? Don’t follow me. I’ll find a way back and I’ll stay in touch somehow.’

  ‘You can’t do it alone,’ Lea implored.

  ‘I won’t be alone. There’s one phrase I learned in Arabic.أناالصالحين. It means I am righteous. There are plenty of people who’ll help me.’

  Her smile was filled with the light of the day.

  Cara touched her face and held the sight of her, then walked away, into the glare of the sun, through the thicket of beige uniforms.

  Lea’s instinct was to run after her, but for the first time she held herself in check.

  The tribal elder was still leaning on his cane, watching with a half-smile on his lined face. He had been joined by several other men of his age. The gathering of the Ka’al had occurred as if by some form of spontaneous magic. The Sand Men watched and smiled and waited, and did nothing.

  Lighting the last of her cigarettes, Lea remained beneath the bushes, pushing back into the dusty hot leaves, hardly bearing to watch. Cara carried on walking. She did not look back. Soon she had passed through the crowd and was lost in among the buildings.

  My daughter, she thought, my own daughter.

  The scout troops were being followed by a great mass of mothers and children. In her burkha, Lea look no different to any other Omani woman. She allowed herself to be absorbed by the crowd.

  She looked back one more time to see if she could find Cara, but the girl was lost in the dust of the people following the parade.

  The sun shone and the band played on, and the procession of scouts followed the gleaming black cars along the road with small children running behind them, all filled with an absurd, irrational hope for the future.

  About The Author

  BORN IN LONDON, Christopher Fowler has written for film, television, radio, graphic novels, and for newpapers including The Times, for more than thirty years. He is a regular columnist for The Independent on Sunday. Fowler is the multi-award-winning author of more than thirty novels, including the lauded Bryant & May mystery novels. He is the winner of the 2015 CWA Dagger In The Library award.

  For more information visit www.christopherfowler.co.uk

  With a Foreword by Joanne Harris

  June Cryer is a shopaholic suburban housewife trapped in a lousy marriage. After discovering her husband’s infidelity with the flight attendant next door, she loses her home, her husband and her credit rating. But there’s a solution: a friend needs a caretaker for a spectacular London high-rise apartment. It’s just for the weekend, and there’ll be money to spend in a city with every temptation on offer.

  Seizing the opportunity to escape, June moves in only to find that there’s no electricity and no phone. She must flat-sit until the security system comes back on. When a terrified girl breaks into the flat and June makes the mistake of asking the neighbours for help, she finds herself embroiled in an escalating nightmare, trying to prove that a murderer exists. For the next 24 hours she must survive on the streets without friends or money and solve an impossible crime.

  ‘Christopher Fowler is a truly original writer. I’ve loved everything of his I’ve ever read, and with Plastic he’s raised his game even higher.’

  Peter James

  ‘The dark reverse of a personal growth novel, a hoot of a crime thriller.’

  The Independent

  www.solarisbooks.com

  “It’s a strange thing, nyctophobia. You’re not born with it. It can start at any time. It comes and goes, and it’s one of the only phobias you can transmit to other people.”

  Newly-married architect Callie and her wealthy husband Mateo move to Hyperion House, a grand old home in southern Spain. It’s an eccentric place built in front of a cliff: serene and beautiful, but eerily symmetrical, and cunningly styled so that half the house is flooded with light, and half – locked up and neglected – is shrouded in darkness. Unemployed and feeling isolated in a foreign country, Callie determines to research the history of the curious building.

  But the past is sometimes best left alone. Uncovering the folklore of the house’s strange history, Callie is drawn into darkness and delusion. As a teenager Callie was afraid of the dark, and now with her adolescent nyctophobia returning she becomes convinced there’s someone in the darkened rooms.

  Somewhere in the darkness lies the truth about Hyperion House. But some doors should never be opened.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors...

  Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out:

  What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?

  Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.

  www.solarisbooks.com