CHAPTER 15
The Dead Sea, Jordan
Tallis was desiccating. The heat had arrived all at once, the salt in the air was sharp, and now they were striking the tent in sunglasses, even though it wasn’t much past seven in the morning.
Sally had attached his phone to his car speakers, so they were working to some nineties music that she suspected he thought was retro.
Every so often the sound crackled, and Sally looked over, somewhere between confused and annoyed. It was a new car.
“Have you got signal?” he asked her. “Mine was fine yesterday, but . . .”
“I got a scary message about roaming last night, so I turned my phone off,” Tallis admitted, looking at her bag, where the phone was crouched in a side pocket like a very expensive bomb.
“I thought it would kick in automatically, but then I had to buy some at the airport, and now it’s angry with me and yelling about allowances and—that was a long way of saying no, sorry. I could try—”
From the direction of the sinkhole, there was an odd noise. It was something like the sound of a skip being emptied; slow and quiet at first, and then a crash of—something. Brick, debris.
“Did something collapse?” Sally said, straightening too.
“We’d better go and look, to make sure we can tell them it wasn’t our fault,” said Tallis, having visions of being blamed by the archaeologists for ruining something of historic importance. All her colleagues would believe them too, and talk about The Time with the Jar of Caesium.
It was much easier to navigate over the uneven ground by daylight, but it didn’t make the site any less disquieting.
Lit stark, the metal spikes were worse than before.
At least in the dark they were lost reassuringly in the gloom after a few yards.
Now, they cast razor shadows, deep black against the white of the salt, so that the whole site looked as though it had been shot somehow in monochrome, under the light of a star too bright and cold to be theirs.
“Oh, God. The door in the gate,” she said.
The door hadn’t just collapsed. It had been pulverized. There was just—no more wood in the gateway. The noise they had heard must have been those bizarre silver tacks tumbling inward into the tower, tonnes of them. Beyond was darkness.
“Exposure to the air?” Sally said, pulling out his phone to take a picture. He was right. Nobody would believe it wasn’t them, but they did need to document it. “It was protected all that time, and now—well, it was probably just dust.”
Tallis stared into the gateway. If their tests could be trusted, then in that darkness was a kind of light that neither of them could see, so powerful that it shone through wood and aluminium onto film, and coming from .
. . from something that had certainly looked as though it could be alive.
It was unnerving to see nothing now, with her own eyes.
Sally’s phone made a hissing noise. The screen fuzzed.
Something in it cracked, something blasted out of the electronics inside, brushing his hand, and he dropped it.
When it landed on the ground, it split open, and for a terrible fraction of a second Tallis thought something alive was mangling its way out.
For the next fraction, she thought she was hallucinating in a way far more sinister than usual, but then, aeons later, she realized that Sally could see it all too.
Spikes of salt had blasted out of the phone’s sockets and through the screen. The salt formed loops, following the arcs of electromagnetism. They both stood looking at it, waiting for it to do anything else, but it seemed not to want to. The arcs broke when, gingerly, Sally picked it up.
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
The silence seethed. Down in the pit, the darkness beyond the gate was inky.
Tallis stared into it. A primordial part of her mind stirred.
With as much certainty as she knew that Sally was beside her, she knew that something in that darkness was watching them.
Right on the edge of perception, she could hear singing. Or, not hear: it was more like the memory of having heard. She had never hallucinated a sound before. She turned her head one way, then the other, waiting for it to fade, but it was constant, so quiet it almost wasn’t there; but only almost.
But then she supposed she had never stood on the edge of a pit in the desert and wondered if there was something alive in an unclassified type of radiation, either. Perhaps epilepsy liked to move along with events.
“I feel like insurance . . . might not cover this,” Sally said, turning over the mess of crystals and bits of wiring that had been his phone.
An alarming thought cracked open. “Jesus, the cars.”
He was paralysed too for a second, and then they were scrambling up and hurrying as quickly as they could without breaking ankles.
Salt dust puffed around them, so dry it floated in the air.
Tallis had the car keys in her hand long before they reached the cars.
God, what did they charge you if you wrecked a hire car?
A portion of your liver and rights to your firstborn, at least.
Clack-click: the lights flashed on as she unlocked the car, quick and untroubled.
Relief bashed her over the head. She picked her bag up from the ground by the tent, quite hoping that her phone had turned to salt too, but of course it bloody hadn’t.
It was probably broadcasting a signal that would let the company charge her a thousand pounds just for the privilege of turning it back on again. She decided not to try.
“Mashallah,” Sally said, laughing. His keys had worked too. “I really thought we might be stuck here just then.”
“Not that I would have minded the company,” Tallis said, laughing too.
She heard how inappropriate that was, but she was too giddy to mind.
Or, she would have a good full-body cringe about it at two o’clock in the morning in the privacy of her hotel, but for now, it didn’t matter.
“Would you mind if I followed you back into Amman? I had the satnav on my phone on the way here, I don’t think I can get back by myself . . .”
“Oh, of course. I can take you to the hotel. I know where it is.”
“But—that must be well out of your way?” Tallis said, taken aback.
The district her hotel was in, on the edge of the city and quite close to the airport, didn’t seem to be a residential place.
People who lived in Amman lived much nearer to the centre, in those fabulous crowded terraces and blocks painted all different colours, with their gardens full of date trees and fairy lights.
“I know you come from a weird broken country, but we do hospitality properly here,” Sally told her firmly. He smiled. “But if you’re going to tie yourself in knots about it, you can take me inside and buy me a drink to say thank you.”
He didn’t mean that in the way he might have if he had been speaking to someone younger, but it didn’t matter.
There was nothing she wanted to do more than buy him a cocktail in the pretty hotel bar in the foyer by the fountain, among its neon lights that shone on the silk ties of businessmen and the white veils of the women who worked at the army base, the ones who, when Tallis had arrived, had been comparing the virtues of different fighter jet engines over expensive baklava while the concierge looked worried about the dust on their combat boots.
It was a hollow wanting. Her grandfather had once said that it had made him sad to see the moon landing, because it was so magical, but he would never go. She knew what he meant.
“Yes please,” she said, and saw a tree right in front of her. Deliberately, she stepped forward into it, and it vanished obediently. She touched the side of her own head, as if that would soothe all the misfiring electricity there.
Still, on the border of everything, singing.
As Sally started his engine, Tallis remembered to pick up their empty Coca-Cola bottles where she’d left them on the ground. As soon as she did, though, the sun hit them wrongly.
The bottles had been clear when they’d finished the drinks. Now . . . they were a deep, brilliant violet.
“Oh, wait,” Sally said through his open window, sounding puzzled, at exactly the same time that she said, “Um, Sally,” with a building strain deep under her lungs.
The thrum of Sally’s engine sputtered, then cut.
Something exploded, and she hit the ground faster than she had ever imagined she could react to anything, because it sounded like gunshots—only it wasn’t.
It was the headlights shattering, salt smashing outward, and then a crackling roar that was salt blasting out of the engine.
There was no fire, but the bonnet shrieked and tore.
Sally tumbled out and staggered away from the car.
Tallis caught his arm and pulled him back further, half expecting it to explode.
No; nothing. No flames. The broken steel groaned, quieter and quieter. There was an insectile clicking that was salt building insane arcs above the car’s smashed engine. It looked hideously alive.
“Sally,” she managed, and came back to common sense enough to move around in front of him. “Jesus Christ, are you hurt?”
He was grazed, but he was shaking his head. “No. No, I’m . . . what . . .”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, but whatever it is, it turned the Coke bottles purple.”
He finally turned his head to look at her properly. “The windscreen and the windows too.”
He was right. They were dark, too dark, and so were hers. She hadn’t noticed: she’d thought they were just tinted.
“Up,” she said tightly, slinging her backpack on. She was the kind of person, it turned out, who remembered her passport even whilst being catastrophically irradiated. “Up, right now. Run. Run.”