I am the interloper.
This is my tower.
I am Adam.
This is not my tower.
I belong here.
I do not belong here.
Silence like a cancer grows.
I have always been here.
We have always been here.
For Ivy.
In her infinite rapture.
Turn around.
“Turn around.”
Adam turned around. There was nothing. No form. No mass.
No light.
There was nothing.
Yet below.
So far below.
He couldn't hear it. He was so used to hearing it. There was such sorrow in it's abscence. No machinery grinding in the darkness.
Not yet.
His hands were tied and the phone was shrilly ringing, demanding him. He heard it above, he heard it below. Behind.
He tried to turn, yet was unable to move as his arms were secured to the railing in front of him, the ivy twisted across his fingers and woven around his wrists, up his bare arms in spirals. It dug into his skin, welts of blood where each tiny spine broke through. He peered closer as he wriggled his arm, disconcerted to see that the ivy in places seemed to break through his skin, whole tendrils disappearing within.
Beneath.
He could feel it. Inside him. It constricted around his bones with every move he tried.
Glancing up, he could see the familiar green infused skylight, the sunlight diffusing down through, casting mote ridden arcs of daylight across the iron and ivy. Somewhere above he heard a door slamming open and closed, although erratically, as though caught by a wind that only blew up there, with everything around him still. Almost too still. It was as though he inhabited a photograph. Nothing moved.
Yet the phone still rang. He had to get it. He knew it was for him.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself away from the railing. His legs and feet weren’t secured to or by anything, so brought up first one knee into the bare balustrade, then the other. He pushed out with his legs, transferring all the power through them that he could muster. At first there was nothing. No give, no movement. No pain.
Only on the fourth attempt, his fury increasing, the rage fuelling his muscles, did something start to give. A wet tearing sound, the small spines from the ivy tendrils detaching from his skin, spots of blood falling freely through the static air. He was empowered by that give, and pushed firmer. Harder.
A couple more times.
Then. The agony.
The tendrils that had pushed themselves beneath his skin started to get pulled out as he pushed against it. He was freely hanging now, only his fingertips snagged around the side of the balustrade under the railing. He pushed still, his jaw aching with the grit in his teeth. Blood flew around him. His own blood. It arced past him in a crimson loop, and he fell to the bare wooden floor.
He screamed in pain.
The phone answered him, and he stood, turning to answer it. Ivy hanging from his skin, that in turn hung in damp strips where it had been readily detached. Yet now, he didn’t feel it, as a numbness spread through his body. On unsure legs at first. Yet a few steps towards the telephone and he felt stronger. He could stand.
“Hello?” He lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” A child’s voice. A girl. He knew it. He knew her.
Violet.
She had spoken to him before. Yet she was different now. As though this was an adult speaking with his daughter’s voice.
“Hi…did you mean to call me?” It was all he could think of to say.
“Yes,” the voice said. “I heard you scream.” There was no emotion in those words. No infection. Somewhere beyond the voice he heard the ocean.
“Just now? I’m sorry. There was some pain. It was sore. Was it loud?”
“Not really. But it wasn’t just then, although I did hear it.”
What else is that I can hear, it sounds like
“An engine. You can hear it to. It’s with me just now but it will be with you soon.”
“What do you -”
“Don’t interrupt. It’s rude.” Again, no emotion. This was a simple fact. Adam had interrupted, and it was rude. “But I heard you scream earlier. You scream all the time. You scram when you’re asleep. You scream when you’re awake. You screamed when you saw what she did to her children. What she was still doing to her children. It’s why you’re here again.”
“I don’t follow.” There was a sound now, not just in the phone. Somewhere below.
“Silly, you know where you are.”
He really didn’t.
A sigh, the exasperated sound of a child trying to explain something to an adult, mimicking the reverse. “It’s only when you’re sleeping but you don’t go to sleep just when you go to bed.”
A deeper rumble far below.
“She’s going to be coming up again for you. It’s your fault and she’s really mad with you. I should be too, but I’m not.”
“Why is that?” Just play along Adam. I’m sure it’ll be time for your meds soon and someone will wake you up and help you along to your nice cell with no hard edges and the nice ambient music.
“I wasn’t born like her I think. And other things. Mainly though it’s -”
The line cut out dead. Silence.
He was about to put the receiver down when something spluttered from the earpiece. The sound of someone struggling to speak through a mouthful of water. Someone struggling to breathe.
“Hello? Hello!?” Adam gasped into the mouthpiece. “Are you okay?”
More choking and spluttering and then a different voice to the one that had been before.
“Turn around.”
No.
He dropped the receiver. There were footsteps on the stairs. Perhaps two floors below. Or less. A sound like the growling of something animalistic, but that could have been the machinery that had increased in volume far down below. He walked to the railing again. Nothing he hadn’t done before. What he saw when he looked over the edge wasn’t unexpected, yet it chilled him regardless.
There. The flash of her face. Again. He saw her hand below on the railing of the floor directly under his. It moved with incredible speed. Towards the ascending stairs.
She was coming for him.
He moved towards the stairs furthest. The ones that took him up. He climbed, taking two at a time. The door slammed with increasing ferocity far above. The further he climbed, the hotter and more humid the air around him became. He was increasing his speed, hauling himself up via the railing. Pulling himself. Willing himself up. She was gaining on him and he heard her directly behind. The machinery increased in volume. A great rhythmic howl.
It was important he reached the door. He knew little of what was beyond. He remembered the arm on the floor, the one that twitched and threatened to move towards him, a hand like a fleshy crab pulling it’s swollen grey load behind it to the interloper who had dared to enter the room.
“Turn around!” She cried. It cried. It wanted him to look at her. He wouldn’t give it the satisfaction.
I can make it, he cried inside his head, yet he didn’t believe that.
A hand took firm grip of his ankle and pulled. He lost balance and fell forwards, hitting his head on the iron stairs. The bridge of his nose burst. More blood. Yet he was still numb, and felt nothing.
She pulled him with unnatural strength and he fell down three steps. He had been so close to the top. He was in sight of the door. It opened and closed. Slamming and banging. Beyond was sunlight so bright. He saw it there. Behind the door way. It was sitting up in a chair in the centre of the room. It twitched and shook almost spasmodically, with a speed and erraticism that was supernatural. It stood and shuddered towards the door. Pulling it closed one final time.
“I need you to turn around and look. I need you to see.” The voice gurgled. He couldn’t place it. It was a girls voice. It was a woman’s voice. It was mingled with something darker and much older.
He clawed forwards with his hands and gripped the stair, pulling himself up.
“No,” he gasped. “I need to get up there.”
“He doesn’t want you like this. I need you. I need you to see.”
“No,” he said again, but could follow it with nothing. He had nothing left to say.
If you have nothing, the voice, now inside his head, demanded, then the least you can do is scream.
“Wake up,” he said instead. “Dammit Adam, wake up.”
“That will do you no good here. This is mine.”
This is
MINE
“Wake up for fuck sake WAKE UP”
MINE
NOW TURN
AROUND
A hand on his jaw, such strength, pulling his head around sharply in a near one hundred and eighty. He saw just for moments. A face, so beautiful and yet as one one with something else. Something mechanical. A fusion of flesh and machinery. He knew in that instant that he had made it. He had produced this.
She was at once his and not his.
He was reminded of a story he had once read. The final section he had been given intruding upon him as time slowed down, near to the point of stopping completely. It shouldn’t have followed him in here, yet he supposed it belonged here more than it belonged anywhere else. It could well have been birthed here after all. It was time. Hours wrapped in seconds and held in ransom to an impossible value.
THE TOWER
Her mother had sought it, and she didn’t know why, but now she, Ivy, sought it.
And she was here.
Yet the tower wasn’t important, and she thought no more of it. It was merely one of it’s shapes, and now she was inside, it ceased to matter.
She was standing on the first landing. The stairs she had climbed behind her, and she at once knew that was where they would stay. Each stair she climbed would be forever behind and below her. For to be here was to go up. Only up could she wrap her fingers around that which she sought. She knew it would delude her until that moment. Yet she knew that when she took hold of it, she would never let it go. She would pull it towards her and she would force it to look at her.
There was a great distance between her and that moment, and she had only just begun her journey, although she had felt also that she had lived it enough for two lifetimes. Perhaps that was what she was doing, for she wasn’t just doing this for herself…
…but for her sister.
Violet had been her twin, and as babes they had been impossible to tell apart. Their mother loved them both equally but through poverty and an instability she had been afflicted with, she had not seen fit to keep Violet. The ocean had adopted her, of this Ivy knew, and had taken her to it’s bosom. She saw her sister at night when she slept, and her sister spoke to her, much as she was doing now.
“Go upwards to our mother, and ignore what you may pass. Below as you ascend starts up time itself, irrevocably winding towards inevitability.”
She was doing as she was asked. Only after climbing did she hear the machine, deep in the bowels of the tower. Her hand went to her face, feeling a slight hardness within her cheek. She ignored it and climbed, occasionally looking out over the banister.
Then, once she did that one time over all others, and she saw him looking down at her. She knew she had to go faster. He wouldn’t wait.
But she would catch him.
And so she did. Adam saw her and she was beautiful. In her infinite rapture. Just as she broke his neck and he awoke.
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