Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Read online

  Even as I stood, one of the spikes started slowly to expand like a telescoping rod or a car jack. I moved out of the way before it pushed me into the hole, staring in wonder. Magical growing metal? It was not the weirdest thing I had seen today, but it was weird because it seemed so silent, so sinister, so unnatural.

  When I moved, another spike started to unfold very slowly behind me. I never heard any footsteps or voices behind the wall indicating a pikeman was shoving the pikes. Maybe the system was on automatic. If so, there was no resting inside this cage. Every few minutes, you’d have to move. So, no one could sleep here.

  There was no pattern to it. The darn things were completely silent. There was no clicking or ticking an honest machine would make to warn you. Sometimes they opened quickly, too quickly to dodge, and at other times, so slowly that you could not see them growing.

  The roof also had a round opening in it, directly above the hole in the floor. There was a tic-tac-toe grating of four rather thin bars that looked to me like they’d be easy to bend. The thinness of those bars almost taunted me with how easy it should be to climb out.

  In a circle around the edge of this upper hole was a ring of bright gold, twisted like a Moebius strip. A twilight gate? Above that was another chamber or area. I could only catch a glimpse of a patch of its ceiling directly above me, with an arched vault of black brick.

  All I had to do was wait until the random pattern of expanding spikes gave me enough of a grip to get to the top. I shook my head and snorted. Was it really going to be this easy?

  It wasn’t.

  There was a moment when more than four spikes at four different heights off the floor were telescoped out to their full length, and I saw my chance, and used the rods like an impromptu ladder, trying to make for that opening.

  Then a rod unfolding as fast as an arrow from a string jabbed into my abdomen, and blood and viscera poured out, and my arms and legs jerked, and another rod unfolded laterally, so that it caught me across the midriff as the first rod yanked back, slipping me as neatly off the spike as you might push a meatball off your fork with your knife. All the rods were retracted at once; there was no more makeshift ladder, nothing to grab, only a long fall underfoot.

  Down I plunged.

  3. The First Exit

  I was not too worried, insane as that might sound. I figured I would splatter somewhere in the landscape far away from the base of the tower, pull myself slowly together, rest, and walk on out of there. Maybe I would find an unwatched clothesline or a lonely farmer’s cottage where I could get some clothing. I remember I actually laughed at how easy it would be for an unkillable boy to escape an open cage, and I folded my arms behind my head, and crossed my legs, as I toppled end over end through the stratosphere.

  I spread my arms and legs, so that the world stopped spinning. There were clouds pushed across the walls of the Dark Tower, which looked like an icebreaker drifting through the sea. I saw the world, a patchwork quilt of green and brown, far underfoot.

  The wind caught me like a leaf, and blew me against the metal towerside, long before I hit the clouds so far below, or hit the world.

  There were nets strung up to catch me and break my fall, and men in Bronze-Age looking spacesuits or diving helmets with harpoons were waiting to close the net and beat me senseless. I woke up in the cell again.

  No one came to speak to me that day. No one gave me food or drink. The thirst started really getting to me. The very smallest hint of what it meant to be from the Order of Those Who Yearn in Vain for Death was beginning to nag and grow at the back of my mind.

  That night, I fell again. Some spear had poked and pushed me over the side into the abyss of air. I had no recollection of falling asleep: I was just too exhausted to stay awake. I woke from dreams of flying to the dizzy horror of an endless fall. I saw the stars above and the city lights below.

  I did not see the men waiting for me this time. In the distance, I saw lanterns on the top of tall brass helmets, which turned toward me like spectators at a tennis match as I zoomed past them. Perhaps I missed the net, or there was not one this time. Someone or something harpooned me as I flew past dark balconies and walls at terminal velocity, and the barbed heads sank into my flesh, and the long lines sang and went tight, and I slammed against the side of the Dark Tower and felt every bone in my body break.

  How had they known both times the exact spot where I would fall? Between the wind, and even little things like my orientation as I fell, or whether I extended my limbs or pulled them in, would have changed my point of impact by thousands of feet.

  And I woke in the cell again. No one was there.

  They did not put me in casts or splints: I lay there with both arms and both legs broken, compound fractures sticking out of my skin, and the only medicine was me trying to push broken bones back together with my unaided, naked fingers. I had to try to straighten a broken arm with my other broken arm to get the bone ends back in place, or push the joint back into the socket.

  There was no morphine, no aspirin, no nurses, no voices.

  And there was nothing else in the cell. No soap to whittle into the shape of a gun, and no guard to fool with it. No floor to dig under to dig my way out.

  Days passed, and nights, and I never slept longer than dazed naps, and lost track of time.

  And the spikes never stopped expanding, never formed a pattern, and so, even with both arms and legs broken, I had to keep moving, despite the blinding pain, or else get pushed out of the hole again.

  I was there for an eternity.

  4. Gazing Down the Dark Tower

  Yes, I had plenty of time to stare down that hole. From the distance between the cage and the Dark Tower wall, I figured the birdcage was suspended on some sort of really long yardarm, hanging out over an abyss of air.

  By day, I gazed and pondered.

  I counted the points of the bastions and made geometric calculations in my head, wishing I had something to write on. I stared at the ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps.

  The main tower itself, I eventually deduced, was an octakaidecagon with a triangular bastion at each vertex. What looked like complex outerworks were actually part of the shield wall, connected by bridges or built as one piece.

  This indicated that this world had some form of big guns, because there is no point in an architect calculating out so many zones of redundant overlapping fields of fire, if he expects the Tower to repel besiegers armed with nothing more than pikes and arrows. But it also suggested this world did not have the sophisticated weapons of our world. A hydrogen bomb would crack any tower like that in half; I don’t care what sort of metal it is made of.

  By night, I studied the lights.

  There were no lamps or spotlights on the Dark Tower. Hence the name, I guess. But from time to time, at dusk or dawn, I would see some sort of lines or channels or canals running straight up the sides. The same bluish light which had suddenly flamed inside the chamber where I had been caught was shining from these canals, but so dimly that they seemed like darkness made visible, illuminating nothing.

  What was that blue light? A defense against escaped clouds of Uncreation? Perhaps so, because I never felt the least stirring of the Oobleck I had once swallowed. I assume they cut it out of my stomach before I woke. That is what I would have done.

  At right angles to these channels, vast battlements or balconies like roadways circumvallated the diameter of the tower. Tiny patches of green and squares and threads of blue told me that there were gardens filling some of the balconies visible far below me. These were immense plots bigger than football fields, but so far away as to seem like the gardens and fountains of a dollhouse in a little girl’s room.

  The air must have been thicker down there, or perhaps the gardeners had a technology for sustaining greenery above thirty thousand feet. Vines o
f ivy and grapes and orchids growing along the coils of lianas hung over the side of these immense battlements, beards of green reaching down from each of these crenellated brinks.

  I saw petals cast by the thin, high ice-winds of the stratosphere drifting and dripping down, in a constant and intermittent confetti. The sense of desolation that comes to some men in autumn touched my soul.

  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.

  5. The Eternity

  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.

  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.
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  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.