Dust: (Part I: Sandstorms) (5 page)

Leaving Town

She came back to me white as a sheet. A crumpled sheet. It was obvious we had to leave. I chose not to ask questions. It was not important in any case. I feel for this little slip of a girl. What she went through to get those answers. What she must be carrying inside her. She will help us, I am sure, but at what cost? Before we encountered her she was simply a blip, a co-ordinate that we had to track. A stepping stone. Now what has she become? We are bound on her course. Much as we might pretend that we are holding her for our own benefit it is her that is leading this crazy chase.

She is so slight but she has the power, we all know that. She has met Abel, knows Abel, the distant prize. The men have their suspicions I am sure. We all have our suspicions but the trick is not letting them get to you.    Her connection is deep and for that she is charged a heavy price. She has blood on her hands, is steeped in it. I do not blame her, there is no other way that it could be. What does she think of Abel? Does she think of him?

In any case this is our life. I know that not one of my men would hesitate to die in the pursuit of our orders. We are professional. It may seem impossible that word can have any meaning any more but for us it still retains significance. We have a job to do, a reason to be out here, slogging through this endless terrain, rather than somewhere more comfortable, waiting for others to bring answers. We have been tasked with delivering certain results and there is no doubt we shall.

None of us, except for her, know what Abel is, what he stands  for but whatever we discover when we reach him, whatever he is, it is danger. That much is clear. It is written in her eyes. Written all over her face. She never says anything to me or the men but it is us that are helping her. We are the ones along for the ride, transporting her back to him.

I asked her when the last time she saw him was.

‘I’ve not seen him in ten years,’ she said.

‘Ten years? That’s a long time,’ I could sense she wanted to say more. ‘Do you miss him?’

‘Miss him?’ she said dismissively. ‘He’s my brother.’

I wasn’t sure what she meant by this. I sensed it was a lie but could not be clear what truth it covered.  It was hard to imagine that this fragile, vicious little girl was related to the big game we hunted. Our orders gave no hint as to their relationship but I had formulated various theories.

‘You know why we have been sent?’

‘Yes,’ she looked at me steadily, those dark eyes hard in her fragile face. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘And then why do you help us?’

‘You won’t succeed.’ She said firmly, confidently. I tried not to let any reaction show, like we had been trained. No doubt she had also been trained, trained to spot just such repression, the lack of reaction.

‘Why do you think that?’ I asked, sure that she was only bluffing.

‘I know him,’ she replied, a frightened look on her face. ‘You won’t succeed.’

‘Perhaps what we need to do is not as difficult as you think.’

She was not interested. She shook her head dumbly, like a child or a doll. She could appear so juvenile with certain movements, not innocent but young, like children often are, aware but not conscious, not conscious like the rest of us.

‘I know you plan to kill him,’ She spoke slowly, admiringly. ‘I know you are trained and well-armed. I know you have enough explosives packed in your trucks to level a small town.’

Her eyes shimmered antagonistically. I don’t know how she knew those facts. I can only presume that she was good at guessing. Had sized us up the moment we captured her. It was not an impossible leap of imagination.

I am not too proud to admit that I grabbed her by the hair. I wanted to feel my strength over her, crush her. Her eyes widened slightly, only slightly, but she did not cry out. I was impressed by her firmness, impressed and engorged. There was a look of fear in her eyes but it was not fear of me.

The more I thrashed at her the softer she became, supplicant, a victim. She cowed to me, spoke softly, bent before me. I was fighting against myself but I could not let go. I became possessed, possessed by the idea that I had to possess her. She did nothing to prevent me, she had become a victim, the victim.

The sandcastle

Time passed, I had been surprised when John came to me in my cabin. He was alight, pulsating. I suppose he must have seen something new, some change in me after Bonmont, something that appealed. I tasted sulphur.

Was I the one that let go? Or did he? I ran a finger over the soft sheets of the bed. He would return I was sure. I felt a long forgotten tide. The moon was long banished but the night carried its own luminance.

Now suddenly this search for Abel felt real, close. I felt sure that we were closing in on him. What would happen then I had no idea but that it would be explosive I could not doubt. A termulent expectation engulfed me. I imagined touching Abel’s face.

The truck slowed. Was John returning? I waited but the break in our journey was clearly due to some external factor, some obstacle in our path. Had they encountered other travellers? Mercenaries? Abel’s men? Minutes passed away and I tensed with anticipation at who should open the door. Of all the options I did not know who I hoped for most.

Finally John appeared, a cloud on his brow.

‘You might want to see this,’ he said, dutifully, as if showing me some evidence of his own wrongdoing.

The sand flooded in the door around him and firmly offering his arm as if to help me down. I dressed hurriedly and climbed down from the truck on my own. I wore a helmet that completely covered my head and for a moment I imagined myself a diver, descending to the bottom of the deep, blue sea, swimming through the soft currents of some tropical beach.

John led me a few metres away from the vehicle and I quickly lost sight of our convoy. All was swirling grey, ashen, alive and buzzing around us. The helmet Jon had left me in the cabin was snug, a short range earpiece was embedded and I heard Jon’s voice, crisp in my ear.

‘It blocked our reader,’ he said, a tight pitch in his voice. “That’s how we knew there was something here.’

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did?’

There was more than enough obscurity out here without extra guessing games.

‘A cathedral,’ he said. ‘We’ve come across them before but never seen one this big before.’

After the initial wave of destruction strange structures started to appear. It is unclear where they come from but as those first sand drifts encroached on the suburbs, heaping new drumlins in unused cul-de-sacs and high streets, people started to report peculiar sightings.

The first formations were little more than mounds of sand. People paid them little attention, after all the city was covered in sand. Overnight a sandbank might shift its distribution, take on a different shape, a new pile appearing at random.

‘It’s the wind,’ we would say, ‘naturally it shifts the sand around.’ We did our best to convince ourselves of this, even when we knew there had been next to no wind.

Doubtlessly there were plenty of hoaxes, kids no doubt with nothing better to do, would shift the sand around to spook out their parents. We laughed at the paranoia.

It was only when more complex structures started to appear that things got uncomfortable. At first they were distinguished by small tunnels, around the width of a clenched fist, that peppered certain mounds, like an animal’s burrow.

Despite the precarious nature of the sand, these tunnels somehow managed to retain their structure, and when attempts were made to excavate some of the tunnels it was found that they extended for several miles in a complex warren system. In different cities around the world there were reports of these tunnelled sandbanks. Explanations abounded.

‘It must be rodents and other small mammals,’ we said, ‘forced out of their homes and forced to seek shelter in the city amongst the sand.’ It sounded plausible, even though there were next to no sightings of rodents in any of the streets.

As the sand become common in streets, piled up banks of sand with tunnels disappearing into them at odd angles were accepted as normal. They searched for the animals that produced such burrows but it was obvious there were none.

As the restaurants and estate agent offices became disused, the sand would collect in doorways and side streets. We got used to everything, those sandbanks, the tunnels. It became normal to see pavements sporadically covered with these “rat dunes” as we called them. Everyone had time to get used to them. They did no harm. 

The irony of course was that we all knew that whatever might live in those holes it certainly wasn’t rats. We citydewllers had long held a belief that city rats were stubborn survivors. Everyone who lived in the city thought of them as indestructible, on a par with cockroaches, natures enduring vermin. Yet they were one of the first to go, almost overnight. Something about the dust damaged them.

For a period of about four weeks, right at the start, there were rats everywhere, sick wheezing creatures, driven out into the light to gasp a final breath. Thousands of them, congregated next to drains and sewer hatches, they died peacefully, silent, piled body upon body in heaps around the streets. We tried to clean them away. We forgot about so quickly but when it first happened there was outrage that the streets should be blocked with dead animals. It all happened in a space of no more than four weeks. We never saw a rat after that.

And then reports appeared of more advanced ‘buildings’ built in the sand. There were photos, in those days when we could still communicate, everyone was amazed by them. People embraced the idea at first. A sign of hope. A sign of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. People claimed they were man-made, some form of graffiti or ‘street art’ movement but it was not clear how they could be formed.

At first, some chancers tried to take credit for certain examples, claiming they were sand sculptures or situational art. As far as we could tell, they appeared in several locations around the world and resembled sandcastles, about two feet high.

Slowly there came reports of more advanced ‘buildings’. Disturbed looking edifices, about the height of your average twelve year old. Some of them were covered in intricate patterning, like Gothic stone work. Others had tiny entrance ways, arches, spires and columns.

‘Like miniature cathedrals,’ we said, as something of a joke.

The first examples were crude, somehow wrong, they looked alien, like facsimiles of human structures, constructed without any idea as to the original purpose. Slowly however, the designs progressed and grew in size.

At first kids would play with them. Take turns smashing them up. I remember standing at my kitchen window watching a group of teenagers out in the street. They took it in turns smashing lumps out of one of these miniature cathedrals. It had appeared in the night. Perfectly formed. It looked like a sick version of Cologne cathedral.

I don’t know when the superstition first arose, where the connection with bad luck first materialised. People were dying left and right in any case. Just about anything could be seen as a sign of bad luck in those days. Everyone was pushed, stressed beyond breaking point by that point. It didn’t take much for silly notions to pop into people’s heads. Towns were buried every day, the rate of the sand’s ingress increased. There was nothing to suggest this increase was linked to the destruction of the miniature cathedrals but slowly the rumour spread that demolishing these miniature cathedrals was a curse.

People would cross the road to avoid them. If a cathedral appeared on a street, slowly people would start moving away. In time ‘professionals’ appeared to destroy unwanted edifices. For a fee they could remove all trace of a cathedral from a street, for a time at least.

In most cases, once it was destroyed there would be no further aggravation but occasionally, normally within a matter of days, a replica would spring up. This new version would typically bear some resemblance to the original but with the addition of some ‘wound’ or ‘injury’.

As with their very existence, no one had any explanation for this phenomenon. It was suggested they might be the manifestation of some force, a force experiencing, struggling with, trying to express pain.

It shows how far things shifted in the space of a few months that people started to have any kind of sympathy for sand. Sand, after all, was the last thing that we had believed could hold any type of awareness.

To be continued….

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