The line went dead again. Jonas placed the handset down. The phone stayed silent. He looked around the room, trying to find the telltale signs of a microphone or camera. He checked the lamps, lifting them up like spies did in movies. He checked under and behind the desk. When he found nothing, he looked at the phone again.
“They’re tapping my phone calls.” A rock formed in his stomach. “Who in the world did I sign on to work for?”
The room remained silent. He paced for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. He wanted a drink to calm his nerves, but had the feeling that if he started, he wouldn’t stop until he was in the same or worse condition the last time he drank in the hotel. And Lily was on the other side of the planet, too far away to save him from himself. He put his hands on his head as he paced.
“What do I do?”
His head started to hurt, so he took a shower to relax. He rested his forehead against the wall as the water cascaded over him. He wanted to know more. He wanted to hear Lily, to spend time with her. But he was being watched closely.
“No, I’m not being watched. I’m being spied on.”
He slammed his fist into the wall, making the glass door jump in its track. He hit the wall again and cracked one of the tiles. Water ran down his head and over his shoulders. He blew bubbles through the stream that fell from his face.
“Dammit.”
He got out of the shower and packed his bag. It hadn’t even been a full day. He called for the company van and set out for the dig site.
When he arrived, he was deeply disappointed. In the twenty hours or so since he had left, nothing had been completed. He spoke with his translators and asked why work hadn’t been completed. They responded with platitudes. Jonas looked at the absolute lack of progress and felt a dreadful certainty descend over him.
“This doesn’t make any sense! Last week you guys uncovered five more buildings while I was in town. This time, you haven’t uncovered anything new and the men are standing around idly.” He wiped a hand down his face in disappointment. “Get them back to work, now. If two days off per week isn’t good enough for you, then we’ll all go without. I won’t be going back to the city until we’re done, or I have faith in you to continue the work while I’m away.”
The men nodded and bowed, surprised by the reaction. He hadn’t been a pushover before, but the reaction was far stronger than they were expecting. They hurried off to give instructions and get the men back to work. Jonas sighed as he overlooked the sand-covered ruins. The men had acted like he had hire and fire authority, and for all he knew, he did. That had never been covered during his training or the documentation he had signed when he had taken control of the dig.
They were in for months of work at the rate they had shown. He hated the fact that power tools and trucks were out of the question. He needed the men to be vigilant for any small artifact. The ruins were so close pressed that using a backhoe would destroy buildings, let alone artifacts and evidence. Even if he never found the well, the city itself was a truly massive find.
“Have the diggers begin on the next building. I’ll be here if there’s any questions,” Jonas said as he sat down. The chair had an umbrella, saving him from the truly brutal night-time sun. With the number of work lights, he couldn’t even see the stars in the sky. It was a bizarre facsimile of daytime; one which held the silence of night and the glare of day.
Jonas sighed, knowing he had a lot of non-work ahead of him. The paperwork began to blur together. He started walking the city alone again. He wandered through the cleared buildings. His sleep was troubled by back aches. His cot was of the military style, yet with two extra blankets under him and a decent pillow it was better than what the other men had. They slept on either blankets or thin mats on the ground. After seven days, the nightmares began again.
Jonas lay on his cot on his side, back to the rest of the tent. He had been trying to sleep for two hours. Every time he started to drift off, a gust of wind would shake his tent, or one of the men would let rip a truly magnificent snore that echoed off the sand dunes. He thought back to the sleepless nights he had in the desert a month before.
“My child,” came the corpse-chilled voice from behind him. Papers rustled on his over-crowded desk though there was no breeze and his tent was shut tight in case of sandstorm. The tent remained unruffled, a detail that caused a shiver to descend Jonas’ spine. A heavy footfall crunched through sand on the tent floor. Then, another. The pace was agonizingly slow. He found himself anticipating and still surprised with each resounding step.
A breathy rasp tore the air. Cold breath washed over his neck, and he felt his stomach rise in revolt. The exhalation stank of strange herbs and rotten meat. The single barked laugh left him feeling filthy. Then the hollow voice spoke again.
“You will never succeed. I will have my time again.”
A bony hand, just outside of his vision, wrapped around his shoulder. It squeezed like a vice, sending chills into his bones. A soul-deep pain blossomed. Jonas wanted to scream with every fiber of his being. Panic gripped him in his helpless state. The hand removed itself, giving him a brief respite, then a heavy step told him the encounter was not over. A second followed, and he knew the creature would step into sight, lord over him, smiling from inside a rotten face covered in ancient linens. He could smell the dust and decay. His chest was seized with fear.
Jonas woke drenched in sweat. He lay quietly for some time, unwilling to be conscious, equally unwilling to chance another nightmare. Finally, he sat up and checked his shoulder. The phantom pain and cold still lingered long after his dream had faded away. Work that night was hellish. He was slow, couldn’t think well, and his shoulder hurt. That night, the apparition returned. It said the same words to him, though the laughter was longer than the first time. When he woke, he could hear sounds from the tents nearby. Men cried out in their sleep. Terror knew no language, and he didn’t need to speak Arabic to understand what they said in their sleep. They were all being haunted.
The first man left after the third night of terrors. Three more disappeared the next day. Men would wake during the heat of mid-day and walk into the desert. Some were found. Most weren’t. Jonas fought through, refusing to give in to the horror that crept through his dreams. He talked more often with Lily in his tent. The men were no longer social anyway. Most snapped at the others. He fought with the supply line and had beer brought in for the men.
A week after the nightmares had begun, word of a sandstorm came through the radio. It was a big one, far worse than any they had dealt with up to that point. He heard the men whispering a word- ‘haboob’. He asked what it meant. The translators told him it simply meant sandstorm, but the diggers appeared to be attaching extra significance to the word. He nodded tiredly and ordered the men to prepare for the storm. He returned to his own tent.
Dim sunlight entered the tent through the unfastened entrance. Sand blew in with each gust, signaling an approaching haboob. Jonas walked to his desk, then heard the diesel generator die. His lamps were low on oil, and if he wanted to work through the storm, he would need to refill them before it took full force. Even as he contemplated the best way to tackle the job, the wind gained strength and volume. Just minutes after entering, he could no longer hear the other men in the camp. He hurriedly walked the outside of his tent to ensure the anchors were set, then retreated inside. He fastened the storm flap, then the inner flap. Even so, some sand filtered through on exceptional gusts.
A short time later, he sat at his desk. He had an hour of oil left in one lantern and two in the other. He kept the other unlit, hoping he wouldn’t need to use it. He grew to understand the difference between ‘storm’ and ‘haboob’. A storm would thunder, or rattle, or rain. The haboob filled the air with what sounded like the screams of the damned. Jonas listened to the howl of the wind. He hooked his coffee maker up to the car battery powered transformer he kept in the corner for just such an emergency. Soon, the scent of dark roast coffee fil
led the tent, drowning out the dry-mold redolent air.
The last vestiges of the night terror haunted the edges of his mind as he continued filling out paperwork for the buildings and carvings they had found so far. More than one of the dwellings had a petroglyph of stickmen fighting creatures; though faded, they looked like jackals reared onto their hind legs. Most were too far eroded by sand and time to reveal any details. He longed for a bracelet, a tablet, a glass or pot. Anything that wasn’t a carving he couldn’t remove from the wall.
Jonas looked up from the paperwork with bleary eyes. He couldn’t remember the date. He couldn’t remember if he had been at the site for two weeks or three. The night terrors were depriving him of sleep. His diggers were doing little better. Their cries were louder each day. More men walked into the desert each time the sun rose or set. Those left shambled to work like the living dead every night. They all needed a break, but they couldn’t stop. Not without a security force, and he had asked for it the day before. Or the week before. He could no longer remember. Either way, the answer had arrived. It lay on a sheet of paper to his right, sitting on its own. The Department wanted work to continue.
He looked at his hand, lost in thought, remembering the pain of the ethereal fire on his skin. The shock of finding the first trees. He spent more of each night lost in the past. Both his past, and the long-forgotten history of the city they excavated more of each day. The tent shook under a furious gust of wind. Sand sprayed through the small holes in the tent flap. He wanted rest. He wanted a real bed. He wanted away from the sand.
If he left, the men wouldn’t work. The more he thought about that possibility, he realized that not only did he need a long weekend, the men did too. If they weren’t given time off, they would likely all walk away from the dig, no matter how much money they were given. Dying on the job was not worth anybody’s time.
He looked around the tent as it flexed and moved in the storm, then down at the growing pile of sand at the door. He decided that as soon as the storm broke, he would head back to Cairo. Give the men time off. Make it known he would be gone for three days, and the only important thing that needed to happen on the site was security. A thought hit him, and he pulled a sheet out of a manila folder. It was a requisitions form. He filled it out, then looked it over. He nodded in satisfaction and stood from the desk.
Without really thinking about it, he opened the tent flap and the storm flap. The wind instantly pelted him with sand, yanking the fabric out of his hand. It felt like he was being sandblasted to the bone. He struggled to shut the storm flap, one hand on the frame of the tent and the other reaching for the flap as it waved about in the wind. He ducked back inside and fastened the door shut, leaving just enough room for his torso to squeeze out. He leaned out, again reaching for the storm flap with his left hand on the frame of the tent.
It juked him twice, three times, then the edge of the fabric caught in his hand. A shape formed in the swirling dust so briefly that he wasn’t sure he had even seen it. He yanked the flap into place. A moment later it was secured, and the wind no longer battered him. The thought wouldn’t leave his head though. He peeled one edge of the storm flap back and looked into the storm. Nothing was there. He shrugged, then retracted from the small pocket of space between the two flaps. Just as he let go of the frame with his left hand, something clamped it back in place. The pressure was excruciating.
“HEY! LET GO!”
The pressure increased and it felt like his hand was going to break.
“Nggh, let go, you’re going to break it!”
“I am coming,” said a dead voice.
Jonas yanked his hand back and fell on his ass. He scurried backward through the drifts of sand. The tent rocked and shook, but it was just the wind. The howling was as loud as ever. He thought back and wasn’t even sure he’d heard the words. He shook his head, then looked around the tent. Papers had been scattered everywhere, and sand coated absolutely everything. It would take him hours just to clean up.
“I really need some rest,” he sighed. He stood and brushed himself off, then started to gather the papers. By the time the sun rose and the storm abated, he had the sand gathered in a pile at the door and the paperwork returned to the former state of organized chaos. He hesitantly opened the tent, blinking his eyes in the weak light. Sand and dust still hung in the air, but it was still. The effect was like fog, bordering on magical. He blinked again, and a shape appeared in the dust. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away, yet he couldn’t make it out. His pulse began to race and he felt fear start to edge into his consciousness.
“Hello?” He called out.
“Yes, Mister Quartermain!”
Jonas sighed, letting out a gust of breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The shape drew closer and finally started to gain detail. It was one of the translators.
“Oh good, it’s you, Ahmed. Have the van readied for when the weather clears. I’m going back to Cairo. I want you to make sure you keep the men on site, but they have the next few days off. You just have to make sure the site stays secure.”
“Oh, good, sir. I was going to tell you the men are upset. They want time off.”
“I figured. I’ve been pushing us too hard. Oh, one other thing,” Jonas said as he ducked back inside his tent. He returned a moment later with a piece of crumpled paper. “This needs to go up the chain. I think the men will appreciate it.”
Ahmed took the paper and looked it over. He read it a second time. Then he looked back at Jonas with questions in his eyes.
“Yes, I’m serious. The men deserve it. I’ll find a way to get it approved if it comes back. But I’m calling in a favor as soon as I get back to Cairo.”
“Yes, sir! Let me go tell the men now.”
“Wait, Ahmed. Let that be a surprise. If you have to tell them anything, tell them the weekend is theirs but they have to stay here. Those that do will get a nice surprise. You understand now.”
The small man nodded his turban-clad head, a smile visible even through his beard. He hurried off toward the garage. In truth, it was a hastily constructed sheet metal shack, but it did its job well enough.
He sniffed himself and gagged. The stench of sweat was thick, but the sand and dirt had its own strange scent. He smelled like a compost heap, which meant he was beyond ripe. The trip back would be miserable. He packed his clothes, all dirty, into his duffle. They were stiff from sweat and grime. By the time he looked out of the tent again, the air had cleared. The van rattled to a stop right outside.
An hour and a half later, they stopped outside of the Hilton. He stepped out of the van, trailing sand. He carried his bag over one shoulder and stopped at the entrance to stomp as much sand off as he could. When he passed the front counter, the receptionists goggled at him. He paused and looked at himself in a mirror behind them. He was gray-brown from the sand. His hair stood straight up like it had been glued. He shrugged, mouthed ‘sorry’ and kept walking. The two behind the counter blanched further as they took in the long trail of sand.
Jonas climbed the stairs until he arrived at his floor. He was exhausted and wanted nothing more than a good day’s sleep, but the shower called to him. When his duffel bag hit the floor, it sounded heavier than normal. The clothes inside practically held themselves up with sand and sweat. He started the shower and stepped under the spray, uncaring of the temperature. Eventually the room steamed, but the water running off his body remained brown for a very long time. When he stepped out of the shower, the mirror was completely opaque. He stared at the vague shadow that was his reflection in the large mirror.
Then the shape stepped toward him, looming and menacing. Jonas whirled in place, but nothing was there. He shook his head, wrapped a towel around his waist and walked out of the bathroom. He sat on the couch and lifted the handset for the phone.
“Operator, connect me with Davion Jenkins.”
“One moment, sir.”
“Jenkins,” answered the familiar voice a mome
nt later.
“Davion, it’s Jonas.”
“Good to hear from you Jonas. What can I do for you?”
“I put in a request earlier today.”
“I’m aware.”
Jonas shook his head. Somehow the paperwork had beat him back to the city. He had no idea how. Maybe they kept a courier on hand for just such an event.
“I’m assuming you were serious and want this request fulfilled.”
He nodded, then remembering that Davion probably couldn’t see him, he answered. “Yes. The men deserve it. If they’re going to be stuck there, the least we can do is provide actual decent food.”
Davion sighed. “Alright. To be honest, I’m surprised you’ve waited this long. I’ll have two- no, I’ll have three shawarma stands set up out there. The competition will be good. And the beer, you’re sure?”
“Give the distributor instructions to only allow it in the last hour before sunrise, no earlier. But yes, I want that there too. If we reward the men, they will stay around for us. We’ve lost more than a dozen as it is.”
“I see. Very well, I’ll have that done today. Do you know how much this is going to cost?”
“Does that matter to you? Does it matter to me?”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t. You’re dangerously close to going over your budget, Jonas.”
“Let me know when that happens, and we’ll work something out. Now, I need sleep. Badly.”
“Very well, Jonas. Sleep well.” The line went dead. Jonas thought about dressing as he shucked the towel. Before he had gathered the energy to dress, he lay down. He was out before his head hit the cover of the bed.
41
Lights and images whirled past his eyes, sounds roared and fell away. Fierce, astonishingly hot and bright sunlight bathed him in its glory. He raised a hand to block its radiance, allowing him to look at the construction near the horizon. A large wound in the ground was shored by stone and wood. The building was already massive, over two hundred cubits on each side and barely started. It would be a project on a grand scale. A pyramid that would be spoken of by his people and their descendants for centuries.
Rakitaki: A Jonas Quartermain Adventure Page 30
