The Fortress

I first caught sight of the fortress from the back of the pickup truck, the convoy’s engines growling behind me as the tarpaulin roof thundered in the wind. I leaned out over the side to get a better look and glimpsed the fort half-buried in a distant dune, like a child’s toy left out in a sandstorm. For a few moments I forgot the heat and the sweat and the God-awful way dust collected in every nook and cranny of my body and imagined the convoy as a row of little toy men in little toy cars, winding a path between mountainous dunes and swirling eddies of golden sand.

It took us another hour before we reached the fort, and several times it dipped out of sight only to reappear larger than before until, slowly, it lost all sense of miniature perspective. Individual windows became visible, and rising towers were revealed to be ramshackle things on the verge of collapse. By the time we could see the brickwork clearly, the truck started to slow and the guides called for us to ready our climbing gear.

“You ready for this?” Liz asked as I put my feet on the searing desert floor, already having to use my hat to fan the sweat from my brow.

“Probably not,” I replied. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“It’s not far,” she chuckled. The rocky outcropping the fortress was built on had been swallowed centuries ago by a roaming sand dune that was hundreds of metres high. Now the desert had finally seen fit to release the plateau, buildings and all, like an ocean wave travelling at glacial speeds. “The foundation can’t be more than ten metres from the ground. If you want, you can wait for the workers to build a ramp?”

Liz gave me a shit eating grin before walking off with a coil of rope under arm.

“It’s my find,” I cried after her. “And you know damn well I’m not giving up first dibs.”

“Maybe you should.”

I turned to see Hakim gathering more tools from the back of his truck.

“Why did the French come out here?” he said to no one in particular. “And why are we here now?”

“Finding out why they were here is why we’re here,” I told him.

“And if they have to come dig us up in a hundred years will they ask the same stupid questions?”

Something was clearly bothering our guide, so I silently went over to his side and began to pack my things while I waited for him to get to the point.

“I don’t like this place,” he said eventually, and I realised he was more nervous than angry. “I don’t like the soil, the rocks, the wind… I just don’t like it.”

I tried to disagree with him, but I looked at the fort and sensed a flicker of motion behind aching black windows. Deep down, I realised I didn’t like the place either, and so I said nothing while I helped him pack. To be fair to Hakim, despite his reservations he still scaled the short rock face with no complaints, stopping every few metres to hammer anchors into solid stone so our own ascent wouldn’t be so risky. Liz waited impatiently beside me, her feet pacing circles in the dust. We ascended together just a half hour later, Liz scaling the cliff using a few safety lines and her own power while I was hoisted up by three men who remained on the ground. It wasn’t an issue of weight or even athleticism, but I began to panic just a few feet off the floor and simply couldn’t be trusted to get myself up there on my own.

I treated it like a rollercoaster, shutting my eyes and doing my best to forget where I was and what was happening until, at last, Hakim cried out and I looked up to see him reaching over to hoist me up. Feet firmly on ground, I immediately stumbled away from the ledge and over to the fort. The dune had exposed a corner section and I faced the southern wall. Looking around I saw a narrow rocky ledge that led to an open doorway set some distance away into the East-facing wall. Sand was still pouring out of it like water from a bottle, presumably emptying the interior and doing part of our job for us. The effect was remarkable, since I could approach the nearest window and, leaning in, see the southern corridor standing empty as it must have done over a hundred years before. The fortress breathed a cold gust of tomb-like air that pulled at my hair, and I thought of ancient ruins and cursed pharaohs from the books I read as a child.

I caught movement in the corner of my eye and turned to peer into the shadows. For a moment I thought I’d seen nothing but then a gentle current in the darkness stirred and I felt a tantalising thrill of fear as a slither of black fabric flourished at the very edge of visibility. It looked like the hem of a dress, ragged and beautiful, like I’d just caught sight of a ghostly Cinderella fleeing the ball.

I jumped when Liz appeared at my side and shone her torch in that direction. We both saw nothing but a sand bank just a few metres away. No dress. No Cinderella. Not even a place for her to run to.

“God what were they doing out here?” Liz asked.

“Let’s find out,” I replied.

-

“Graham!”

Watson descended from the helicopter with wide arms and a cheery face. He grabbed me as soon as he could and pulled me in for a hug. “Jesus! What a thing you’ve found out here!”

I turned back to face the looming fortress. Wooden walkways zig-zagged up the cliff face and continued to sprawl across the exposed structure. Men had worked tirelessly each night for a week to clear as much as they could, but from where I stood on the ground it looked like we’d achieved remarkably little.

“Most of our luck has been in the bailey and some of the walls’ interiors,” I said. “The cliff has made clearing the sand easier than we could have hoped. Wherever there’s a break in the East facing wall, most of it starts to flow out over the sheer drop. Of course that only counts for so much of it. The real work will begin when we need to excavate the parts of the building still under the dune.”

“You’ve hardly been idle,” he scoffed, slapping me on the shoulder. “Come on! Show me what you’ve found.”

I took him up the walkway, trying my best not to look down through the creaky wooden slats. I told myself it was better than the alternative. I’d had to watch the workers inch their way across the narrow ledge with nothing to keep them safe and by the time they’d finally secured the first safety line, I’d sweated right through my shirt. At least I had a floor to stand on now, and in a few seconds both of us passed into the rear gatehouse where I called for Liz to come and meet our most generous sponsor.

“There she is,” I said, spotting her moving down one of the unlit corridors.

“Silly of her to be running around in the dark,” Watson grumbled as we both made our way down there. He wasn’t wrong, either. A little sunlight filtered in from somewhere so that the corridor wasn’t pitch black—I could clearly see her outline in the dark—but it was hardly safe. We’d already had one collapse on the western wall.

“Liz, are you okay?” I cried out, concerned she might be in some trouble. She turned to face me with a whip-sharp turn of the head, and the gesture caused the breath to catch in my throat. “A-are you hurt?” I stuttered.

I felt a terrible dread settle in my bones, and if Watson spoke at all I didn’t hear him. We both picked up our pace, my torchlight bobbing wildly over the crumbling stony walls.

“What are you doing!?”

I jumped at the sound of her voice coming from behind, her words crystal clear in the straight and narrow corridor. She was stood in the room we’d just come from, her confused face lit up by the blazing sun.

Watson burst out laughing.

“Poor Graham seems to be suffering in the heat,” he cried. “He thought you were wandering around in the dark.”

“Didn’t you see her too?” I cried.

“No no no,” he said, shaking his jowls like Churchill. Something that I was convinced was an affectation. “I was just following your lead. You looked concerned and ran off, so I ran with you. Good to know you take safety so seriously Graham.”

He clapped me on the shoulder once more and trotted off to meet Liz. I knew I should join them and smooth over any introductions, but a lingering curiosity had me take one last look towards the darkness. I saw a billowing wisp of black fabric with a cobweb white hem slink into the darkness. It could have been my imagination, or maybe even just the cries of workers distorted by the rocks, but I seemed to hear a peal of feminine laughter. The sound was grossly out of place in that dusty old building, and it disturbed me deeply.

“Come on.”

Liz was suddenly next to me, her hand pulling my sleeve as she looked at me oddly.

“There’s nothing down here, remember?”

“I hope so,” I mumbled, finally allowing myself to be led away.

-

“There’s something quite alarming about it, isn’t there?” Watson said, puffing away at his pipe. He loomed over me and for a moment I thought I saw the twinkling of cosmic dust in the darkness of his shadow. I wiped the sweat from my face and blinked the glare out of my eyes. When I reopened them the floor had reappeared, along with the six or seven yellowing bones we had uncovered during the dig. Just looking at them made my chest tighten and skin prickle with sweat.

That was nothing compared to how the machine made me feel.

“Could it have been a punishment?” Hakim asked. “Something like the stocks?”

“Usually military forces don’t want to… maim, kill… permanently disable their soldiers or workers,” I replied. “Humiliate and shame, maybe even hurt. But if you really couldn’t keep someone in line, you’d just shoot them.”

“Sometimes cruelty is both the means and the end,” he replied.

We had unearthed a contraption quite unlike any other I’d seen, something the original occupants must have adapted from one of their wagons. However it was constructed, the end result was a pair of large wheels about 6 feet apart with rusted iron manacles that would have clamped firmly around a person’s wrists and ankles. The engineering was complicated, most of the metal and gears and teeth mangled beyond recognition, but out of curiosity I applied weight to the largest winch and found that the two wheels rotated slowly in opposite directions.

Watson sucked air through his teeth but didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. It was obvious how the machine would work. Put someone in the centre, suspended over the ground, legs and arms pulled as far apart as you could, and then turn the winch to wring their whole body like a wet towel.

“How many do you think there are down here?”

It was Liz who spoke. She was knelt beside me pawing at the ground having just unearthed another jagged femur. I had a feeling we would find a lot more over the next few days. Something about the rust-red gears and richly stained wood made me think the machine had been put to long and agonising use. I couldn’t help but picture someone strained between the two wheels, sobbing in the desert sun as some twisted bastard turned the winch at a snail’s pace, grinding bones and popping sockets while tendons snapped like guitar strings.

“Well something happened to the people who came here,” I said. “We knew it wouldn’t be a tea party. I guess this is our first bit of insight into what actually happened.”

“You can’t seriously be suggesting they were all put through that, that… thing?” Watson chuffed.

“No but, I mean… at least a few of them were, right Liz?”

“I won’t know for sure, but this has to be the seventh victim so far,” she answered, holding up yet another rib.

“Some kind of mutiny?” Hakim asked.

“It was out in the sun,” I said. “Left out and tied up in the heat like that, one crank a day, a sixth of a rotation each time… day after day. You could have kept someone out here for weeks if you knew what you were doing. Right where everyone would see ‘em as they went about their business. Maybe it was about sending a message? And if there was a fight, it makes you wonder who ended up winning?”

-

“Where do you think she went?”

I was looking out over the edge of the tower, my stomach churning at such a height. Behind me Liz unfurled the dress, the sight of which made me deeply uncomfortable. “Bit plain,” she added, dusting it off with her hand. “White hem… black cotton, wool, maybe. I can see why she ditched it. It would have been a bad mix with the weather.”

“Looks like a mourning dress,” I said.

“That explains the veil then, doesn’t it?” she replied. “Not much else though. Don’t understand why she was up here.”

“She burned her only way down for warmth,” I said, gesturing to a small spot of stone that was charred in a circular pattern. Beside it were a few broken lengths of wood that I guessed were the rungs of a ladder. “No food. No water. Just about the only thing she had to stay warm at night. If I had to guess, she was escaping from whatever was going on down in the bailey with all those torture machines.”

“Still no personnel logs? No idea who she might be?” Liz asked, and I shook my head.

“Isn’t too much of a stretch to think she was the only woman here,” I said. “Wife of an officer, maybe. He probably died early on in the journey, maybe before they even reached this place. Either way, that would explain the dress. Not to mention why she had to go to such drastic lengths to stay safe. Whoever started killing who first, it wouldn’t have been safe for her alone.”

“So,” Liz said, “once again… where is she?”

The tower, like all the others, was hollow with the top floor accessible only via a long climb. Either via rope, like Liz and I used, or ladder like the old soldiers did. Either way, we had found just about every clue as to this woman’s final moments except for her bones.

“Maybe she jumped,” I said, returning to the nearby ledge. Such heights made me nauseous, but it was preferable to the sight of that all-too-familiar black dress with a white cobweb hem. “Desperate beyond measure… starving, dying of thirst… and everything going on in that courtyard, do you think she could see it? Could hear it, even? Day in, day out, no stopping, just… just screams. Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore and took the only escape she had.”

“In that case,” Liz replied, “her body is lost forever. Jesus… imagine what she went through in her final few days? Awful… just awful. It’s like this place is fucking cursed.” She laughed, perhaps not aware of how seriously she should consider that final statement.

-

I could see the tower from the window in my tent. Even if I pulled the flap shut and zipped it tight, I felt its presence there like a burning candle on my skin. Sleep didn’t come easy to me in that place, and without realising it I’d find myself rolling up that window and looking out towards the tower over and over. With no noise pollution, the night sky was so beautiful and there that thing was jutting up into it like a thumbtack in the roof of your mouth. It made me think of shadow puppets, all black with no detail. Looking at it was uncomfortable but I didn’t stop myself because it was a little like tonguing a loose tooth. Even if it hurt, I just couldn’t leave it alone.

Didn’t help I could see someone moving about up there. I tried not to focus on them but the mind doesn’t really work that way. First time I saw them I zipped the window shut and went back to bed, pulling the covers up and over my head like a scared child. Wasn’t even forty minutes before I was back there, squinting to see if I’d just imagined it all. Sure enough, there they were again bustling back and forth. Sometimes they’d stop whatever it was they were doing and I’d drop down out of sight, scared somehow that they could see me in the dark. No way they’d be able to, of course. I had no lights on inside my tent, but the hiding wasn’t done out of reason. It was done because something about that place scared me shitless and my imagination already told me who was up there.

It’s that woman, I thought, she’s upset we moved her things.

I would’ve left it, I think, if I hadn’t seen a light on the outer wall and realised one of the workers was making a beeline to it. They might have seen what I saw, some person up top, and decided to do something about it. Or maybe something else made them go towards it. Either way I remembered that we’d left our own little rope ladder hanging down and I had panicked thoughts of some idiot trying to go up there on his own and falling to his death. Part of me wanted to just pretend I’d seen nothing but even as I watched, I saw their light enter the tower and suddenly disappear. The feeling that someone’s life was in danger became too powerful to ignore.

I had to stop whoever it was from going up there, so I geared up, taking a torch, a knife, and a good length of rope. I kept thinking about that woman stuck up there, all that time… The last thing I wanted was to spend the night up there if anything went wrong so I made sure I had enough to get back down if all went wrong.

By the time I reached the tower any sign of the worker was gone. There was no light either above or below, and when I held my breath to listen I heard the aquatic sound of footsteps on the floorboards above.

“Hello?” I cried, and immediately whoever was walking around up there stopped for a moment before picking up once again, this time faster and more desperate. It almost sounded like a struggle. “Who’s up there!?” I cried, this time even louder. Now the footsteps died down for good, and I was left stood in the dark with my torch pointed upwards—where it didn’t even reach the ceiling—in the hope that somehow, this might all turn out okay.

Something whipped past my head and struck the floor with a terrible crash. Terrified, I turned my torch on it and saw the broken bulb of an electric lantern. This was the irrefutable proof I’d been dreading. Someone was up there, someone from our team, and they were in trouble, stuck way up high and without any light.

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I moaned, hoping the sound of my own voice would make me feel less terrified. I grabbed the first rung, lifted myself up a foot, felt the cloying fingers of panic start to pull at my consciousness, and immediately stepped back down.

“No no no no no,” I muttered over and over. It was time to turn around and go get Hakim, I decided. He could go up there, but not me.

I looked just in time to see the door slam shut and it was like the whole world disappeared. No distant wind or rustling tents. Even my footsteps lost their echo but the sound of my breathing just kept getting louder. Panicked, I flicked my light from side-to-side but all I saw was the odd lump of rock or broken wood. Somehow I knew I wasn’t alone. Something was in there, just out of sight. Above or below me, or maybe all around me, but it was in there and it was waiting.

I heard a creaking, the sound of hinges that hadn’t seen fresh air in over two centuries, and bringing the torch up I saw that the door had been pushed open by a few inches. A deliberate act if I’d ever seen one. Something designed to unnerve… to toy.

I watched as four gnarled fingers curled their way around the door, waiting like the legs of a funnel web spider. Before I had time to think of who or what it was, I found that I had already climbed the first three rungs of the rope ladder.

It was no easy feat getting up, but any fear of falling had been overridden by the sight of that hand waiting for me. One. Two. Three. I barrelled up each new rung, ignoring the way the rope bucked and swayed beneath my feet. I was ready to climb all the way to the top of Everest if it meant putting as much distance between me and that thing.

I was about half-way when the ladder started moving independently. I never looked down, but God, I knew that something was coming and my imagination kept painting pictures of who or what that might be. By the time something brushed my ankle it turned my mind to paste. I think I’d been operating on a kind of childlike logic up until that point, and so on some deep level I kept expecting the dream to burst. I don’t know… it was like the feel of that hand cupping my shoe, it switched my brain from child-mode to monkey-mode, and something else took over the climb upwards. My arms were steady, my feet were certain. I was sobbing and begging for help, but it was like my body was doing its own thing to keep me alive and it was doing the job a hell of a lot better than I had on my own. Within moments my head was through the trap door and my arms were pulling me up and over edge so that I was safe, up on the roof.

I looked over and saw the worker, wide-eyed with a small plank of wood held in a tight grip, like he’d been only seconds away from smashing my brains in. Without waiting another second I rolled over onto my hands and knees and grabbed a knife from my belt. Even as my mind told me it was insane, I began to cut the rope ladder.

“Help me!” I cried, gesturing to the trapdoor. Whether he spoke English or not, he understood. He grabbed a piece of broken glass, gripped it so hard it drew blood from his palm, and began to clumsily saw through his side of the ladder. Together, we severed the rope and sent it tumbling away into the dark. I would have given anything to hear the thud of flesh against stone, to know that we’d hurt our pursuer in some way, but the rope ladder disappeared down into that abyss without a single noise.

Exhausted, I tried to catch my breath, but the man beside me wouldn’t relent. He was crying out in French and pointing to a corner of the tower. There was the same black dress that Liz and I had found, somehow having escaped its crate to return home. Already I could tell what the man was trying to say, even if the specific words were lost on me.

We’re not safe here. She can come back.

Thankfully his mind, less frayed than my own, picked up on the spools of rope and climbing gear I had stowed on my back. Moving with tremendous urgency he snatched them away and anchored two lines to the parapet, sturdy lumps of immovable stone that would easily hold our weight. It took him only a few minutes to get them ready and just like that, I was stood with my back to an enormous vertical drop while be spoke words to me that I had no hope of understanding. Liz had talked me through some of the mechanisms on the rope and its latch before, I just had to hope it would carry me through.

Going over the parapet was absolutely dizzying, and more than once I felt my hands and legs panic and begin to flail of their own accord. To be fair to the worker, he actually stopped to help me get started, if only for a minute or two. I probably should have waited for him to join me, but as soon as his head disappeared back over the ledge I assumed he would be coming down beside me any second.

In a sense, he did just that.

I was about fifteen feet off the ground when he passed me. The force of him falling, the air that he displaced and the eerily silent passage of his body hurtling past at terminal speed, it felt like a punch to my gut. I never saw him hit the ground but I heard it. A sad and pathetic whump as a soft body hit soft sand with enough force to send a plume of dust up into the air. I might have taken the time to stop and look down, to satisfy that morbid curiosity we all know we have, only I couldn’t take my eyes off the face glaring down at me.

She was old. Older than I would have thought it possible for any one person to be. She looked like the kind of thing you’d see in a medieval wood cutting, like some medieval peasant would stumble across her tearing at a coffin lid with crazed hunger. I wouldn’t have even recognised her as a woman if it wasn’t for the white sailors collar around her neck. It was stupid, but I couldn’t quite get rid of the thought that she looked exactly like someone who had spent two centuries drying out under a sand dune, impossible as that might be.

She disappeared out of sight just a few seconds later and it was then my rope was seized by something from above, and slowly I could feel my body being hauled back upwards. Wasting no time, and paying no attention to the God-awful chorus of whispered fears that filled my mind, I took out my knife and severed the rope, falling the final bit of distance freely. The last thing I could remember was thinking to myself,

I must run as soon as I hit the ground, no matter what is broken or what is hurt, I must move!

But it was all moot. Whatever happened, I hit my head hard enough to lose consciousness, and by the time I opened my eyes the sun was beginning to rise and I could hear the panicked voices of people crying out for a missing friend. Looking beside me, I could see that the worker’s body was gone.

-

Hakim was dealing with his crew, some of whom sat solemnly in the shade of one wall, some of whom raged as he tried to instil some sense of order. It was one of those odd moments where I felt the need to call the police, or an ambulance, or just some authority figure who could come and make it all go away. It was a stark reminder that we were on our own out there in the desert. No one could come, even if they wanted to.

“I thought Hakim vouched for these fellows?” Watson asked, leaning in so as to not be heard. Liz, who saw us speaking, stepped over to listen.

“He did,” I replied.

“Not well enough!” Watson hissed. “One of these men is clearly a killer, and a twisted one at that!”

Watson had chosen a poor choice of words given the scene before us. That machine—the first of many we’d unearthed—had been put to use in the middle of the night and no longer did we have to use our imaginations to picture what that meant for bones and tendon and muscle. Nor did I have to wonder what the fate of the missing worker was…

The man in front of us had been twisted in half and broken apart like tissue, with only some straining ligaments and bits of vertebrae still connecting the two halves of his body. The rest of his abdominal cavity had broken free, and now lay in the baking sun, covered in sand and already attracting the first of many flies.

“They’re his people, aren’t they?” Watson grumbled. “How in the hell did he let a monster into this place with us?”

“He was born in Bristol,” I snapped. “He speaks the language and has a few friends and family in the area. He’s hardly the fucking president of Algeria.”

“Security was his responsibility!”

“To look for thieves or potential leakers,” I replied. “Not… not Hannibal Lecter!”

When Liz finally spoke it was quietly.

“Why didn’t we hear him?” she asked, and I could see the question troubled Watson as much as it troubled me. “Why didn’t we hear him scream? He was injured but alive when they put him here. He must have been, the blood is still fresh.”

“Maybe he didn’t scream,” I said, stepping closer to get a good look at the man’s face. It was a far cry from the terrified man I’d known briefly the night before. Now he looked at peace, as if he had endured his torture the same way he might have endured a good massage.

To my relief, the three of us were given an excuse to leave the broken body when we heard the first of many cries from the gatehouse. This time it was no longer anger at poor Hakim we heard, but terror and desperation as the men glimpsed something on the horizon.

“Oh no,” Hakim said as he stepped up and saw what was coming. One by one, Watson, Liz, and I joined him and echoed that same sentiment.

In the distance, a monstrous sandstorm approached, a roiling inferno of sand that choked the sky and uprooted the earth. I had never glimpsed anything so large in my entire life. It stretched from one end of the horizon to the other like a curtain pulled across creation. The sight of it was enough to feel like the rules of perspective had broken, like the dizzying laws of gravity were on the verge of collapsing and we would find ourselves falling into it to be torn apart by elemental forces.

“Hakim,” I said, “We need to get everything out of the camp and up here.”

The expression on his face could only be described as desperate. For a moment, I thought he might protest as he glanced back at the broken body that lay suspended and dripping over the floor, and then back at the approaching storm.

“The workers… they won’t stay here. Not with… not with that,” he stuttered.

“This isn’t a multiple choice exam,” I told him. “There’s no other way. We have to bunker down here.”

-

It was night and the storm was finally upon us. Outside, the sky was little more than a sickly haze and visibility was reduced to less than a metre, even with a strong torch. Without one, it was absolutely haunting. Alone, in the small supply store I’d claimed for my room, I waited as it felt like the sky collapsed all around us. Watson wasn’t happy, neither was Liz, but Hakim and I had called in a chopper to get us out of there the second the weather allowed. They saw that as bailing. Not that it mattered. The workers had already fled, setting out in the convoy in desperate hopes of outrunning the storm. I would have gone with but they left without warning, ignoring my cries to wait as I ran after them.

I wouldn’t have looked back either.

There was nothing to be done, not really, except wait. Something I would have found a hell of a lot easier if I could sleep for longer than a few minutes at a time. The storm raged relentlessly and I could hear a dozen boarded windows straining under the assault and at least one shutter banging furiously in the wind. Just above my head my own barricade rattled with each dreadful gust, and I finally gave up on sleeping when something broke and a thin trickle of sand started to pour down onto my head.

I figured it was best to maybe wait this night out with the others. Torch in hand, I left and walked the corridor. I knew it was no more than a few hundred metres in length but at night those walls seemed to stretch elastically so that you couldn’t be sure of where you stood or how far you had to go. You had only the fetid gloom of a few feet in front of you to let you know you were moving anywhere at all. I tried not to let it bother me as I kept walking until at last I came to a turn in the wall’s interior. Around the corner, the wind was suddenly louder and I soon discovered why. One of the doors had been opened, the wooden bar nailed across the frame pried loose and tossed aside. Hakim was stood leaning against the jamb with a glazed look in his eyes. Already sand was beginning to pile around his feet and ankles.

“You need to shut that thing now!” I cried, but my voice faltered when he turned to look at me. His eyes were wide and his skin paler than the stone he leant against. He stuttered something, a half-whispered croak of pure terror, and pointed at the darkness. My eyes followed, taking in the scene outside. It was like something from another world, like a glimpse at the surface of Venus or Mars. I could see no sign of any of the interior buildings or walls, only a haze so thick it obscured even the floor.

I reached out to pull the door shut and even in just a few short seconds the wind burned my skin raw.

“Jesus Christ, help me!” I cried, giving Hakim a little shove. I felt like I was fighting a hurricane one-on-one and my loss was only inevitable. Instead of helping though, he reached past me, shoved the door open even wider and pointed at the storm.

“It took them!” he cried. “Liz and Watson! We have to hurry!”

Before I could stop him he ran out into the courtyard and was gone without a trace after just a few steps. It was like the storm had eaten him alive. God, I might have gone right back to my room if it wasn’t for the sight of a black dress when I turned to look down that corridor. Just a fleeting glimpse, but that was all it took to remind me that staying alone wasn’t an option.

A few steps out into the storm and I had to cover my face with my sleeve and squint through the wind. I made the mistake of opening my mouth to cry for help only to get it filled with sand before I could utter a sound. After spitting it back out I kept my lips firmly closed and began to stumble through those dreadful winds. I don’t know how long I wandered for, but it seemed to take impossibly long before I finally stumbled across the west-facing wall. It offered a mild reprieve from the wind, and conditions were slightly clearer. Already I could see the tarpaulin-wrapped body of the man we’d found torn apart at the midsection, the man I’d helped in the tower. Something about the way it flapped in the wind unsettled me, and I crawled over to get a better look.

The pegs binding it to the rocky ground were still there, but the rope had been cut loose. It was hard not to draw conclusions about the sticky red handprints and slug-like trail of rusty blood smeared across the sand. I decided it was time to turn back but one glance the way I came and I saw the outline of someone standing just on the edge of visibility. The bell-shaped outline of their clothes made my stomach drop like a stone and without much further thought, I continued to fumble through the wind. Without even paying it much attention, I found that my feet followed the trail of gore. There were simply no other landmarks, nothing but a swirling featureless void of white sand that seemed to smother the very torch in my hand.

Somewhere along the line, I realised with some certainty that I was being led and corralled. That something about this place, from the very beginning, had been pulling me along by the nose and this was just another part some strange clockwork mechanism I’d woken that very first day when I poked my head through the window. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t surprised when the trail led to one of those strange machines, the blood coming to a stop at the base of what looked like an old wrack.

Like a curtain pulled aside, the storm simply stopped. For a few brief seconds the silence was overridden by the sound of thousands of tonnes of sand falling to the ground for miles and miles in every direction. It felt unreal, like a glimpse of another world, like an entire layer of the desert had been lifted and dropped back down by some childish god. It was every bit as frightening as the stifled cries of Hakim. He had been fastened to a plinth of wood with a central hinge. Slowly, levers were being worked to snap him backwards at the waist. The hinge had barely moved further than ten or fifteen degrees but already his ribs bulged outwards and the muscles on his legs strained to the point of snapping.

Beside him were several other machines, all of them turning and grinding with the kind of creaky mechanisms you’d expect to lower a portcullis on a medieval castle. Chains as thick as my arm clunked through gears, wooden beams as wide as my torso strained and turned…

None of them were empty. Watson lay on one, partly bisected, but only partly. Liz lay on another, resembling a doll caught in a bear trap. She looked at me with broken eyes while my brain tried to understand how her feet could be pressed against her ears and pointed in the same direction as her nose. Neither were dead, but they didn’t appear completely alive. They merely shook, like frightened dogs in a kennel.

A scream began to rise in my throat, but it was caught when I finally saw the torturers step out in front of their work. It was that her, that creature in the black dress whose mere presence radiated a special kind of malignant hatred and pitch-black despair. The way she looked at me made me feel like the very flesh around my head would bubble and melt away. More than anything, it was the fact her face was alive. Warped, wrinkled, weathered and discoloured… but alive. Not faked. Not rubber. Not prosthetic. A lifetime of horror movies hadn’t come close to preparing me for what it was like to see something so warped and alien. The way her features twitched as she appraised me kneeling on the floor left my mind a writhing hiss of white noise and terror.

It would only be later that I remembered the other torturer. How he stood, I do not know, but his face was every bit as slack and lifeless as it had been when I’d seen him splayed across that first machine. Somehow, his broken and twisted spine supported a torso that balanced upon it precariously like a spinning top. Dislocated shoulders popped and clicked as they tugged at levers, but his eyes never moved. With no wind to whip the sand into a frenzy I saw him all too clearly, standing there like a badly controlled puppet. It was the worker, the one from the tower. And behind came others. Soldiers and officers and labourers and ancient travellers, their clothes speaking of dusty old centuries long-forgotten in the modern world. They were such grotesquely mutilated things, snapped and bent and twisted and cracked open and spun inside out. The variety of it all was daunting…

The woman stepped forward, her hand stretched out towards me, and without waiting another moment, I ran. I pulled myself up and sprinted in the opposite direction with only hysterical terror to occupy my mind. In those few moments my vision narrowed to a tunnel and my mind turned to jackrabbit fear and it didn’t stop until I barrelled through an open door and everything went black. It wouldn’t be until someone else found me, twenty-two hours later, hiding in a wardrobe that any semblance of lucidity would return.

-

The fort, according to satellite photos, simply no longer exists. The sandstorm has reburied it and I suspect it won’t re-emerge for some time. At least, that’s my hope anyway. Watson was too wealthy a man to simply go missing, and I spent a considerable amount of time after my rescue being hounded by his lawyers and family. At the very least, the fact that Watson and I hadn’t exactly gone after the fort legally meant no one went to the papers. Money like that can stop these sorts of things getting out and Watson’s family treasures their reputation highly, so that is at least one silver lining.

It hasn’t stopped me digging, however. I’m not sure I’ll ever get any real answers. The closest I’ve gotten is a letter from a wealthy member of the Third Republic around the time of the original colonial expedition might. After the loss of the Rosetta stone to the British, this man implored the French government to act on rumours and myths from West Africa that spoke of a civilisation even older than the Egyptians. He mentioned an ancient fort that was founded not so much on any principle of strategic value, but instead on protecting a site of supposedly buried treasure. He argued if the government would not act on it, then it might come down to a few wealthy men having to sponsor a military regiment.

Given the fort’s location—and the complete lack of anything nearby to guard—I can’t help but think it fits the man’s letter. There were civilisations in the Sahara, once upon a time. Old ones too, older than we could possibly imagine.

They say that, in the right places, even death can die. Perhaps that’s what I saw? The lingering echo of that place’s most recent trauma. No. Not an echo at all… All those people being tortured, all of them still breathed. And that woman… she was not a spectre. Not when I saw her. She was as real as you or I, only old and withered beyond all human experience.

And she’s still down there.