The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (42 page)

The unremembered man hovered there just beyond the glass, his yellow coat bat-winging around him in the air.

He floated like a drowned man, his greasy black hair haloing around his terrifying featureless face. He looked like something that had never been born and would never die. He was a half-assed facsimile of a man made by something that hated men. I wanted to scream just look

(forget that guy, listen to me kid)

ing at him. The Mariner turned up the stereo and

STOP WRITING. STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING. GET OUT

OF THE HOUSE OR

(keep pulling up the water)

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. .EID OT GNIOG ERA UOY

I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.

I put the pen’s nib to the paper and

I AM GOING TO RIP YOU IN HALF AND FUCK YOUR RAW GUTS.

tried to write. Judy Garland’s soulful, haunting voice was drilling “Over the Rainbow” into my head from the sides, and the yellow-coat man was drilling from the front, and this Hel guy was drilling from the back,

(left, right, left, left, no, left)

I AM GOING TO DRAG YOU INTO THE DEEP AND THE DEAD AND THE DARK

“Some
wheeeeerrrrre
over the rainbow....”

AND LICK YOUR WET RED BONES WHILE EVERYONE FORGETS

YOU EVER EXISTED.

“Where skies
are bluuue....”

_______

The tunnel begins to rotate, or perhaps it is gravity getting more comfortable, and the water pours across the bookshelves as Noreen finds herself running across the spines of water-fat tomes. The rushing cavewater threatens to sweep her feet out from under her.

The thing that is the true form of the unremembered man looms behind her, the Nameless Feaster, gazing down at her with that blazing-hot electric Sauron eye, that great swinging backburner sun.

The shelf, the books, the walls and all come to an abrupt end. Noreen is running straight at the precipice of a waterfall.

There is no time to hesitate.

She leaps without pausing from the edge, and a gargantuan maw slops shut where she had just been. Unspeakably foul ichor splatters across her back.

YOU CANNOT WIN.

She lands on her knees and then her stomach, on a steel catwalk brown with age, one leg dangling into space. Blood drips from a deep scrape, a thin flap of skin fileted from her left knee.

She scrambles to her feet and bolts forward again. The tears in her eyes—she is weeping with terror—stream out of their corners and trickle backwards across her temples.

Ahead is that citadel again, a misshapen spindle of refuse reaching into the beams of blue-green light that buzz down from holes in the void ceiling.

She redoubles her efforts even as the catwalk begins to twist in midair.

The Feaster is devouring it in her wake, the steel screaming, scraping, and spiraling into the nothing beyond the Eye. The railing and the grating come off in sections and whirl away like playing cards in the wind.

The vacuum of the thing pulls gently at her hair and clothes as she runs, it is so close. The constant trilling drone from the cave-sky is being drowned out now, by the sucking-roaring of the Feaster behind Noreen.

She is now mere seconds from entering the Spindle. The entrance gapes before her. She can hear her boots echoing inside.

And then—sorry Charlie, the door slams shut.

The Tower of Silence

L
UCKILY, NOREEN IS ON THE
inside of the door as it shuts.
At first, she didn’t make it, and I had to go back and edit her through it, but the words didn’t seem to want to be edited. Something was pulling the other end of the rope, and it was pulling hard.

Even as I crossed out words and wrote new ones, I found myself writing the same words again, and having to cross them out again. Several times I realized I was scribbling gibberish and had to mark that out as well.

I looked up at the ghoulish spectre outside the window and shouted, “Stop! Get the hell away from me!”

He laughed.

It was a terrible sound, a grating, grinding vibrato that reminded me of bad transmissions and subway trains.
EVERYTHING DIES
, he said.
YOU DIE WE DIE WE ALL DIE FOR ICE CREAM. AHAHAHAHA

His hideous face fell, and he said with a deadly seriousness,
YOU ARE SHIT. YOU ARE A SHIT WRITER AND A SHIT ARTIST. YOU ARE WASTING

YOUR TIME. THIS ISN’T

EVEN

REAL.

Unbidden, I got a mental image of myself lying curled into the fetal position, somewhere out in the desert all alone. He/I was shaking and drooling a thick foam, his/my sightless eyes gazing at the backs of his/my upper eyelids. The sun had risen in full, and was beginning to turn the hardpan sand into a griddle.

Even then, sitting there at the card table in the House of Water, I could feel the heat of it. Sweat sheeted down my face and back, funnelling into the crack of my ass and hanging from the tip of my nose.

FORGOTTEN AND ALONE.

you try so hard to be the strong one, boy. You always have.

you push the world away, neglecting your friends and loved ones, you self-serving, condescending piece of shit, and you break yourself trying to prove you’re better than what you think your family, your friends see in you.

you think you’re a “lone wolf”, but all you are is a scared little boy trying to tell himself that since his daddy didn’t need him, nobody needs him.

for what? Cry it out, bitch.

it all comes to naught in the end. Give up and walk away.

you don’t have to be strong anymore. You will be forgotten no matter how hard you work...no matter how hard you try.

(I am your father’s muse, Ross. Listen to me,)
said Hel Grammatica. The Silen’s raspy voice was as clear as a bell.
(Ignore him. I can’t keep this up for long, I’m really pushing)

BE GONE, WATER-CARRIER
, roared the other, the Unremembered Man, the Feaster. His voice was like a roach on a wedding cake.

(my voice to you right now, but if you can get her to the top of the tower of silence, everything will be okay. I’m down here waiting. I’ve got the others with me, Sawyer and Walter, they’re okay. You can’t save everybody but if you can get us out of the Void, we can work on finding the T—)

The house around me shimmered, and I could see through the walls into a bright and rainless expanse. The Formica of the table under my forearms began to disintegrate and grow gritty with sand, and also hot. I could hear the rustling of wind-blown desert brush over the Sea of Dreams.

The rope in my hands slipped, and I panicked, reaching for it.

A terrifying, ripping screech startled me. A blotch appeared on the paper.

I hadn’t even realized the Mariner had changed the vinyl on the turntable—the strains of The Beatles’ “Come Together” thumped out of the headphones now. The sweat-drop on my nose fell on the bottom end of the paper like a signature, blurring the ink-spot (set the world on fire!).

The desert reeled away from me like a drop of dish-soap in a bowl of pepper and water, leaving me sitting at the table with my feet (in wet sand / on floorboards).

I used the song’s rotary-phone backbeat as a handle to anchor myself and put the pen to the paper again.

_______

The inside of the spindle is a depthless black, only pierced by a shimmering shaft of light, the blue-green of the ocean, that comes down through a hole in a low ceiling. It’s so dark in here that the column is almost a solid thing, a rotating obelisk of ice confined to the space in the center of the round room.

The pulsating thrum is unbearable here. It emanates from the light, a wheedling, harrowing drumbeat that reverberates in the massive room, rolling around the hollow walls like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.

It is nothing compared to the stench permeating the air, a filthy, raunchy smell that reminds Noreen of both french fries and roadkill.

It is nothing compared to the constant metallic creaking and snapping thundering from the walls as they groan in the agony of stress.

The entire tower sounds as if it is being slowly twisted to pieces.

She feels instinctively for a light switch, and she’s touched the wall before it occurs to her what an exercise in futility that is. She finds the unmistakable smooth surface of polished metal, and for some reason, it is
greasy,
as if coated in lard
.

The floor is a catwalk of steel grating, as slimy as the wall but the texture of the grill provides grip.

She feels her way around the room, keeping her eyes on the light for perspective. It spills through a deep funnel in the center of the floor, and grows stronger as Noreen circumnavigates the wall.

When she returns to the side where she came in, she freezes in terror and confusion.

The door is gone.

That’s when she sees that the floor has become the same smooth steel as the walls. Her second epiphany is that the tower is rotating, very slowly, like a gigantic auger drilling into the floor of the void, and she is walking up the thread of the auger’s screw.

She is climbing the inside of a huge screw-conveyor, and it is moving in reverse, drilling into the rock like an oil-platform.

Bones lay in haphazard sorts across the floor here. Some of them are locked into restraining cuffs mounted on the wall like tools on a pegboard. As she watches, a human skull buzzes across the steel, carried by the vibrations of the tower, and topples clattering into the hole in the middle of the room.

Another bone follows it—a long, knobby femur—and then another, a curving rib-bone. A skirl of terror whips through Noreen as she understands, setting her scalp on edge.

The walls are greasy because they are dripping with adipocere.

Corpse-fat.

A pelvis falls from the hole in the ceiling and strikes the side of the pit, shattering like a ceramic gravy-boat. The shards flash white and then they’re gone into the deep and the dark.

She follows the curve of the climb with her eyes, and she’s able to make out human skeletons locked into cuffs. They are queued endlessly around the interior wall into the darkness at the apex of the curve, gradually shaken apart at the joints as they make their way downward into the depths of the abyss.

They swing free on bands of rotten ligament and tumble like pickup sticks into the pit.

“Oh Jesus God,” says Noreen, wiping her hands on her clothes.

She keeps talking to herself, mumbling ecclesiastical names as she ventures onward and upward into the upper reaches of the Tower of Silence.

As she goes, the bones lining the walls become less and less defined.

Blow-flies crawl across ragged strips of leathery fiber. Grinning skulls gradually turn into the gaping, gore-eyed Edvard Munch screams of train-station mummies, their taut skin shrink-wrapped by death and thirst.

Each corpse is less deteriorated than the last, but only just.

The longer Noreen walks, the brighter the light gets, until the room is the frigid blue of sunlight filtering through the non-Euclidean frozen shapes of Arctic waters. It’s as if she is walking around and around the inside of a Zoroastrian dakhma hermetically sealed under the North Atlantic ice.

An hour into the climb, the parade of shackled bones encircling her become shriveled and hoary bags of bulbous angles. Their desiccated brown eyeballs dangle in sockets like olives in knot-holes; their arms are drawn to their chests, some as if they died begging, some in protective affect.

She keeps her face averted. Tears have begun to stream down her face in earnest.

She can hear groans from somewhere up above. Most of them are in a language Noreen doesn’t speak: gutteral, exhausted, nonsensical rambling, barely audible over the beating-fluttering pulsation of the spindle.

The sounds of life stir her out of her anguish, propel her up the fat-slimed metal spiral, past the motionless scarecrows...until she sees the first of them. A man hangs from the wall-shackles, bristling with long locks of grimy, gray-gone hair.