The Darkest Tower (Unwithering Realm Book 2)

by John C. Wright

  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.

  6. Starving

  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.

  7. The Naked Skydiver

  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.

  8. I Still Miss Those Five Bars

  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.

  9. Crazytown, Population: Me

  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 on
e 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.

  I was too weak, and still had too many unhealed broken bones, to do a midair sit-up and somehow inch my pierced leg off the spike pole. The retraction of the spikes was arbitrary, so I did not know if this one would pull back after a minute or after a day.

  In this case, I hung there for hours, head downward, screaming at first, then crying, then praying, while drips and drops of blood and sweat flew out the hole below and into the world of floating clouds and carefree birds.

  Then the sun sank and the world turned dark, and my blood dripped toward a city made of horrible rectilinear squares I wanted to destroy and a river I wanted to drink.

  And a second spike decided at that precise moment to expand and thrust me through the side, into my lungs and heart. I recognized it (since I had given them all names) as Lee.

  That was when something in my mind snapped, and I started laughing.

  There I was pinned painfully through the calf with a second bar running through my sensitive, squishy, bloody internal organs, and I started laughing.

  And I sang a hymn. Sorry, I don’t remember the title or who wrote it. I don’t even recall all the lyrics. Never can recall the second stanza. I used to sing or hum it to myself while I was doing yardwork on hot days, pushing that darned push mower and wondering why, since our backyard was so huge, we could not afford a power mower.

  Ye holy Angels bright,

  Who wait at God’s right hand,

  Or thro’ the realms of light

  Fly at your Lord’s command,

  Assist our song,

  Or else the theme

  Too high doth seem

  For mortal tongue.

  Ye saints, who toil below,

  Adore your heav’nly King,

  And onward as ye go

  Some joyful anthem sing;

  Take what he gives

  And praise him still,

  Through good or ill,

  Who ever lives!

  My soul, bear thou thy part,

  Triumph in God above;

  And with a well-tuned heart

  Sing thou the songs of love!

  Let all thy days

  Till life shall end,

  Whate’er He send,

  Be fill’d with praise!

  You see, I sang it because otherwise I would start swearing and cursing like Alexei when it was his turn to mow.

  It reminded me to suck it up, be a man, and stop whining.

  Maybe you can see why I laughed, despite the impaling spike tearing my insides when my lungs moved, so that I coughed blood with each laugh. I was hanging upside-down in my own personal stratosphere-high hell of loneliness, starvation, insanity, self-mutilation, thirst and pain, and remembering how much I hated the push mower.

  Maybe you cannot see it. Maybe I had just permanently emigrated to Crazytown. But I felt more sane and more alert than I had ever since the eternity of pain began.

  Then and there, I started praying fervently to God and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and every saint I could recall, and some I made up.

  The spikes eventually retracted and dropped me on my head. I missed the hole, somehow, and scrambled to safety, taking that as a good sign.

  And still I prayed, every prayer I could think of, children’s prayers and men’s prayers, the Canticle of Mary, freeform prayer, praises, complaints, Bible stories, babbling, anything. I just kept going.

  No miracles happened that night. God did not send anyone.

  No answer.

  What did I have to lose? I did not stop. I was in hell. Why not pray?

  I know a lot of the cool kids at school look down their noses at praying and meditating, but I can tell you that when you have nothing else to do and nothing else you can do, praying is a lot better use of your time than slowly drowning in the mud of misery.

  10. The End of Eternity

  Eternity was still passing slowly, but something had changed.

  I said a lot of rosaries. It is a good way to pass the time, and if my Mom was watching, I’d want her to think her son had finally gotten serious about his religion.

  Of course, I had no beads, so I used the spike tips to keep track of which prayer I was on. And instead of saying the normal routine of five decades of Hail Mary and five Our Father for the Dolorous Mysteries, Joyous Mysteries and Glorious Mysteries, I said twenty-four, so that by the time I had recited all three Mysteries, I had counted three hundred sixty spike points. The remaining five spikes I assigned to the Sign of the Cross, the Apostle’s Creed, the Fatima Prayer, the Hail, Holy Queen. I was not sure if the part where you say we may both imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise is considered a separate prayer or part of the Hail, Holy Queen.

  So at first, I tried to use that last spike for the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I kept getting stuck at one spot: Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Ark of the covenant, Gate of heaven, Morning star…

  What title comes after Morning star?

  It’s Comfort of something, then Refuge of something else. Help of Christians. I could sure use some help, you know. Then a bunch of Queens. Queen of Angels, Queen of Patriarchs, Queen of Prophets, I could not remember it all. I wondered if she were queen in this somewhither world, or if this world was ruled by parallel evil Virgin Mary who dressed in black and showed a lot of cleavage. Would the rules of physics be the same in all worlds? What about the rules of morality? What if this was the version of Earth where there were only Nine Commandments, and everyone worked on Sunday?

  And why, exactly, is the Virgin Mary the Morning star? Or a Tower of ivory?

  So I finally decided to use the last spike for saying the Memorare of Saint Bernard (yes, he was a real saint and not just a dog).

  You see, I had a lot of time to ponder these things in my heart. A whole lot of time.

  Slowly, I noticed that my healing rate seemed to speed up as I prayed. I assume the cells in my body were responding to my thoughts, my frame of mind, just like the Oobleck between worlds. Breaks that should have taken weeks or months to heal were gone in a day.

  This cheered me immensely. I decided that if I were trapped here for eternity, I would spend the rest of my existence just praising God and praying and practicing reaching a clear and unattached zen state of mind.

  What else should I have done? Climbed out? Jumped to my death? Been there, done that. Didn’t work.

  I had the plan, since I was apparently able to regenerate flesh and bone, of seeing if I could flay myself alive, sew together my own cured flesh as a kind of parachute, and use bones ripped out of my arms and legs to act as a yard-arm to stiffen the parachute, and then fly to safety. Nothing much came of that plan. You try and flay your skin off yourself just using your fingernails and teeth without fainting from the pain. That plan was soon abandoned.

  I eventually found a way to get a good night’s sleep, although the solution was a hideous one. I would lie down with my feet facing the hole and my arms stretched overhead, and jam my hands, palm first, onto two adjacent spikes in the bottom rank. If those two spikes decided to expand as I slept, all I had to do was close my fingers and hang on to save myself from a drop. If their immediate neighbors decided to expand, sometimes the spike pole would slide by me to my left or right without piercing my skin or pushing me out the hole to wake me. So I only had to worry about a small group of seven spikes out of three hundred or so. My odds of an undisturbed sleep were about one in fifty. And it made me look in the morning a bit like Saint Francis.

  I found I could slake my thirst in the morning by drinking my own blood from my hands. Gross, I know, but I did it. I lived. I survived through eternity.

  Eventually eternity ended. Something happened.


  11. Water

  The blue light stopped. The floor went out.

  There was a flare of multicolored peacock light right over my head, and a lettuce, nice and fresh and eatable, fell through the bars of the ceiling and hit the floor. The head of lettuce began to roll toward the big round hole in the floor.

  I scrambled after it.

  There were two heads of lettuce the second day, and, on the third, a loaf of crispy golden bread as long as my forearm, like a French baguette. The fourth day included a cluster of dates and a wedge of soft cheese, maybe goat cheese or Brie.

  Each time, the process was the same. The lampwood floorboards would stop shining, and the multicolored fire of a Moebius coil would burn around the upper opening. Someone or something on the other side would drop food.

  On the fifth day, there was a new twist. A dimple of metal forming a spout poked over the golden rim of the upper opening, and a trickle of water started running in some place in the space above the cell where I could not see, and I was tormented with the sound of it for a time, but then a silver thread appeared, hanging between the upper and the lower openings, and I scrambled so eagerly toward it, that I nearly toppled headlong into the air once again.

  The Lord of Magicians

  1. The Interrogation

  So I was not surprised in the least when, on the seventh day, an old man appeared in the chamber above mine.

  I say I was not surprised, because the only reason my unseen jailors had for feeding me was to get me in good enough shape to be questioned, or tortured. Tortured more. They wanted me to be coherent enough to answer questions.

  When I say he appeared, I mean he appeared out of the twilight. All the lampwood under my feet went dark, and the Moebius coil set into the upper hatchway lit up. The bars forming the upper grating retracted silently. It was now open, and me with no way to get up there to get out.