Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (21 page)

I wondered idly if those blossoms, freezing once they left whatever zone of magic must have been protecting them near the tower, would turn to hailstones as they fell, reach terminal velocity, and whether they would burn up with re-entry heat, or if we were down low enough that they would only drift for miles on the winds before striking pets, livestock, and innocent bystanders with the speed and penetration of a rifle bullet.

I said battlements in the plural. I could see them one above the other, each one separated vertically by about the height of the Empire State Building. I counted fifteen before the distance blurred them into oneness.

At night, I could see the warm and friendly lights of a square supermetropolis gathered at the foot of the tower, surrounded on each side by four smaller squares of suburbs.

The city by day was a brown-gray blur too far away to make out any details. But whoever built it, and landscaped the lands around it, loved squares. All the farmlands were cut into squares. Bisecting the view was an immense canal running right through the center of the city, straight as a yardstick. There was a river to the west, and another to the east, connected by this canal. I assume the canal was busy with traffic that I was too high up to see. South was a haze of blue I took to be a sea or great lake. There was not much by way of hills or mountains down below.

I hated their urban planners. Who builds a city like an abstract problem in geometry, with no soft or curving contours for the flow of rivers, or the irregularities of coastlines?

The walls of the cage extended downward past the level of the wooden platform of the floor another ten feet or so, restricting my view of the world outside to a circle smaller than the horizon. I could not see the sky, the constellations, the phases of the moon, or measure the change in the location of sunrise, or do anything else clever prisoners like the Count of Monte Cristo could do to determine the month and season.

I tried to guess the seasons of the year by counting the hours of the daylight. Yes, I mean I started at dawn, “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…” and counted every second until dusk, and I did that every four days, trying to calculate the difference in the length of the day to get a sense of what time of year it was, whether it was before or after the solstice.

I kept expecting the landscape to change color as the season passed, whatever season it was, to get white if winter came, or brown in summer, or to see some difference in the texture or tint of all those endless quilts of plantations down there. It never happened.

I could use the shadow of the Dark Tower as an immense sundial, however. The dark strip fell across the landscape, running west at sunrise, east at sunset. Someone else must have had the same idea, because I began to pick out what must have been truly immense ziggurats or pyramids crouching outside the city across the endless plains of pasture and farmland and forest so far below. They were almost too tiny for me to see, but I assume from the way they were spaced that there were twelve of them. A simple way for everyone living in the city to tell the hours. I assume that this world, this timeline, separated its history from ours sometime after the twelve-hour day was established.

From time to time I saw below me condensation trails cutting through the thin blue air. At first I thought they were jet contrails, but no. This was the condensation of invasion machines spearing through the atmosphere at high speed. I saw no airplanes nor helicopters of any type.

But I saw blimps.

Low down on the tower, at the edge of my vision, I spied dockyards and mooring arms for airships, zeppelins like the Hindenburg.

And it is a sure sign that you are in a parallel world, and maybe a more peaceful one than our home Earth, if you see airships.

There is no sound technical reason why they were not developed in our history: it was the Second World War that interfered with their development. They are less useful than airplanes in war, because they are large and slow targets, but in commerce, they can haul more, for less fuel, at higher ceilings, than those early commercial planes. Who knows what modern materials and space-age engineering might have accomplished, had the war not grounded all the Zeppelins, or war tensions removed helium from the world market?

Did I mention Tillamook once boasted the largest airship factory in the world, before the war? So, to natives of my town, the question of airships has always been a little sensitive.

But I never saw any people moving on the Tower balconies itself. Maybe they were too far away. I never saw lights, not even when an airship was mooring or lofting.

No one came to question me. No jailer.

Nothing.

I was imprisoned in one little cell for a long, long time. I will not tell you how long, because the number would be misleading. It was long enough for broken bones to heal, be broken and heal again.

Yes, eventually I got out, so
technically
it was not an eternity. But I want you to imagine that I never got out, and that I was there forever, because that is what it felt like.

Every inch of the wall, every stud and clamp where the metal panels were hammered into place, every line of grain in the woodwork of the floor, the position of every needle on every bar of the cell, and, above all, that light, that hideous, unwinking, blue light that was shining on me day and night — all these things are carved into my memory the way drops of water, falling one after another, wear a hole in a stone. I won’t tell you how long it was, but it was long enough, that if you asked me to draw the pattern of grains on the third board counterclockwise from the one with a knothole in it, I could.

I tried to figure out the pattern of the spike thrusts, counting the seconds between when one spike telescoped out and the next, made bets with myself as to which of the spikes would open next.

There were exactly 365 spikes, I counted, organized in thirteen rows of different heights above the cell floor. And I spent a long time staring at that mocking hole in the roof, and the universe of freedom I could see and not reach, the lure of black brick ceiling ten feet above the upper hole.

I counted all the bricks in that upper universe, and, later, gave them names and personalities and made up stories about them. All the stories ended sadly, with them cemented into the ceiling of a chamber never seen in whose floor was a hole leading to a jail cell where a crazy boy who could not die was not quite locked up.

No one fed me, except once, and that was just a torture-psychology trick. There was a flash of rainbow light from the upper hole, and down fell a delicious package wrapped in leaves of white leather. I almost fell into the hole catching it, and I tore it open with frantic eagerness.

It was a severed human foot wrapped and garnished and cooked to crispy perfection, and I threw it down the hole the moment my mouth started watering, which it did at the smell of meat, I was that hungry.

Like I said, it was a psychological trick. It smelled like pork chops. I chewed on the white leather, but it tasted like pork, and I realized it was human skin leather. I threw it out the hole, screaming.

So, yes, I fasted. I am able to go without food and water indefinitely. But I am not immune from hunger pangs, lightheadedness, and hallucinations.

Let me describe the symptoms. Sensations of hunger slowly get worse for two or three days, and slowly disappear. There is a gnawing pain in the abdomen. I could relieve that pain a little bit by clutching my midriff as tightly as possible, but the muscles of my hands would tire after an hour or three, and the pain returned.

One day that pain, and the sensation of hunger, just disappeared, and next came extreme weakness, spreading from my stomach and reaching throughout the body.

Hunger was my friend, because after a while it went away. Thirst is not my friend. The sensation of thirst persisted until death, insanity, or unconscious. All three happened to me at one point or another. I got better. I simply woke up again, and the pain started again.

During starvation, the body grows emaciated. Muscles get soft and reduced in size by more than one half. I measured it with my fingers. The skin becomes loose and pale and turns the color of clay. My feet and ankles were swollen.

I could describe more. Never mind. If God is kind, it will never happen to you, so you don’t really need to know more. But keep in mind, this was my existence. I got to notice all the changes to my excretion, the blood mingled in my stools. I got to experience the sensation of my thinking becoming loose and disconnected. I got to watch my cruel, cruel dreams of food and plenty like so many little horror films in my head, whether I was asleep or awake.

You are probably wondering, since I was one of the Undying Ones, why I did not simply jump out the hole and take my chances. Maybe this time I could avoid or fight the men in pressure suits. Maybe I would hit some projecting balcony, or maybe there was a way to cling to the bottom of the birdcage and shimmy to one side or the other?

Well, I did jump, at least fourteen times. Maybe sixteen. After I lost count of how often I had done it, I decided not to do it any more.

Sometimes I remember the impact. Sometimes not. I studied the sides of the Dark Tower very carefully, watched the clouds, guessed the prevailing wind, and sometimes I tried to angle my body and surf toward the tower and hit it, and sometimes I tried to angle-surf away and miss it and hit the world.

Don’t ask me why, but I never was able to hit the ground. I never even reached the ten-thousand-foot level. Perhaps their large-scale Moebius gates in the upper atmosphere could change the prevailing winds, or maybe there was a magnetic attraction, or a charm, or just plain bad luck that always blew my body back into one part of the tower or another. Each time I just hit the wall in one spot or another where there were nets strung up, or else there were men in Bronze Age-looking spacesuits or diving helmets with harpoons.

Once or twice I jumped just in the hope that maybe I would smash my legs and not my head, and get a chance to talk to the men in the diving suits.

I mentioned the psychological trick with the meat. The thinness of the bars on the round hole piercing the cell roof was another psychological trick. I would climb from wall-spike to wall-spike up to the ceiling, and wait, sometimes for hours, for one of the upper spikes to telescope open, giving me a chance to swing or balance on it, and jump and grab the thin bars of the upper grate.

There I would hang, with the lower opening very open below my toes, and either clouds or cityscape below, or, at night, elfin city lights. And I was strong enough, at least before I lost muscle mass, to begin to bend the bars. I could start to work them out of their sockets. They did not seem very firmly fixed in.

And whenever one was about to come loose, another bar would grow out of the rim of the opening and take its place, or near enough. Like the spikes coming from the walls, it made no noise, and it did not move particularly fast. Sometimes, it was downright slow, almost lingering, so you would think you might get one more bar free in time before the escape closed up again.

But like the men waiting when I jumped, the bar always slid sardonically across the opening I’d made at or before the right time.

And the number of times my hands slipped and I fell out the bottom of the birdcage away through the cold, high air and toward another few weeks or months of brokenbonedom, accounts for roughly half my plunges.

I knew there were people around, somewhere. I was never conscious when they dragged me back into the cell. I tried to keep a bar I had pulled with so much pain and effort over such a long time out of the overhead hatch, but there was no place to hide them, and someone always took them while I was out falling or being carried unconscious back up. I hated that more than anything. I deserved those bars. They were mine. I had collected five of them. Five! And one I had sharpened into a passable shiv by scraping it for hours against the metal walls. I loved my five broken bars. I swore to myself I’d find them again.

I did not spend as much time crying as you might think. No water means no tears after a while. I am not sure if I mentioned one reason why I kept jumping out. I was trying to get to that river.

So I was not thinking straight, not for eternity.

The pain of living with broken bones and no casts, no splits, no morphine helped with my little excursions into the fringes of Crazytown: I would lie there with all my limbs broken, delirious with pain. Sometimes the bones grew back crooked, sometimes straight. The only other medicine was to try to shove my head into a spike so that it would pierce my brain and bring a blissful darkness of dreamless sleep.

It seemed like I could heal back from anything, but I also did not, not at first, heal back any faster than a normal mortal. Often I pondered why my chest wound on that first day healed almost instantly. I did not know, but I assumed it was the Oobleck helping.

Once, an expanding spike telescoped out too quickly for me in my exhausted state to dodge, but it did not impale me firmly enough to keep me on the tip. With my feet dangling above the hungry hole, I struggled a moment, and pulled the painful shaft into my midriff, so that I felt the cold metal in my guts. Still I pulled, eager to be safely higher on the shaft, farther from the drop. The flesh of my back was slowly puckered out of shape into a tent as I drove the spike harder, and then the skin of my back tore, and the spike was all the way through me…

The cell had succeeded in getting me to torture myself. And kill myself, over and over. The cell was conditioning me, shaping me to the will of the Dark Tower.

The spike retracted so suddenly that I was slammed against the spikes of the wall, and cut in a dozen places.

Shouting in rage, next I tried to throw myself out of the hole, and, perhaps as a joke, one of the spikes (the one I named Spike Jones) snapped open suddenly enough to impale me painfully through the calf of my lower right leg, passing neatly between my tibia and fibula, so that my weight did not simply rip the spike through my leg and let me drop. Instead, the impaling spike caught me neatly and prevented my fall.