Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule — Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry — having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defences against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.

“Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”

“Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.

Smithers was fair-haired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wide-shouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much taller men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specialising in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.

“Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”

“Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.

Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’ immediate task.

“Only a short way, sir. But what I learned — what I have heard—!”

Yule, who can be impatient and irritable, made a swift circular beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Aye, out with it, man!” But Smithers needed no encouragement. Already a story was tumbling from him: how in the desert city of Bikaner he had fallen in with an itinerant Portuguese merchant newly returned from a venture into the Great Indian Desert — the Thar, as the natives call it, that immense waterless void a hundred and fifty miles in breadth that stretches north-eastward for some four hundred miles from the swampy Rann of Cutch. Breathlessly Smithers retold the tale the Portuguese had told him: an unknown valley far out in the Thar, the sound of strange voices floating on the air, sometimes calling alluringly, sometimes wailing or sobbing, voices that could only be the voices of spirits or demons, for there was no one to be seen for miles around; the eerie music of invisible musicians, gongs and drums and bells, echoing against the sands; and above all a distinct sensation as of summoning , the awareness of some powerful force pulling one onward, deeper into that valley.

The Portuguese had resisted that force, said Smithers, for he was a hard-nosed trader and was able to keep his mind on business; but from villagers at an oasis town the man had picked up fragmentary anecdotes of an entire ancient city hidden away in that valley, a lost civilisation, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveller had vanished, never to return.

I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of scepticism in Yule’s eyes. He has never been a man to suffer foolishness gladly; and from the knotting of his bristling brows I interpreted his response to Smithers’ wild fable as annoyance. But I was wrong.

“Singing spirits, eh?” Yule said. “Gongs and drums and bells? Let me read you something, and see if it sounds familiar.”

He drew from his desk a sheaf of manuscript pages that were, we already knew, his translation of The Book of Ser Marco Polo — the earliest draft of it, rather, for Yule was destined to spend two decades on this magnum opus before giving the world the first edition in 1870, nor did he stop revising and expanding it even then. But even here in 1858 he had done a substantial amount of the work.

“Marco is in the Gobi,” said Yule, “in the vicinity of the desert town of Lop, and he writes, ‘The length of this desert is so great that ’tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other. Beasts there are none, for there is nought for them to eat. But there is a marvellous thing related of this desert, which is that when travellers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveller ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished.’”

“It is much like what the Portuguese told me,” said Smithers.

Yule nodded. “I will go on. ‘Sometimes the stray travellers will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put upon them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.’”

Smithers said, and his face grew even redder, “How I long to hear those drums!”

“Of course you do,” said Yule, and brought out the whisky and soda, and passed around the cigars, and I knew that look in Yule’s formidable glittering eyes had not been one of scepticism at all, but of complete and utter captivation.

He went on to tell us that such tales as Marco Polo’s were common in medieval travel literature, and, rummaging among his papers, he read us a citation from Pliny of phantoms that appear and vanish in the deserts of Africa, and one from a Chinese named Hiuen Tsang six centuries before Marco that spoke of troops with waving banners marching in the Gobi, vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again, and many another tale of goblins and ghouls and ghostly dancers and musicians in the parched places of the world. “Of course,” said Yule, “it is possible to explain some of this music and song merely as the noises made by shifting sands affected by desert winds and extreme heat, and the banners and armies as illusions that the minds of men travelling under such stressful conditions are likely to generate.” He stared for a moment into his glass; he took a reflective puff of his cigar. “And then, of course, there is always the possibility that these tales have a rational origin — that somewhere in one of these deserts there does indeed lurk a hidden land that would seem wondrously strange to us, if only we could find it. The great age of discovery, gentlemen, is not yet over.”