The Tower

by Simon Clark

  Fabian prodded at the key pad. It bleeped monotonously as he answered yet more questions. Hell, this was taking forever.

  Then, at last, a square of paper slid out from a slot. ‘Door code numbers,’ Fabian announced. He retrieved the credit card, then held up the slip so he could read the code. As he did so the second door gave a metallic thunk. Fisher pushed it open to admit them into a reception area with plastic benches in that same banana yellow. Artificial flowers in blond vases adorned the room. A shutter had been locked down across the reception counter with the words CLOSED UNTIL 8 A.M. printed across it.

  ‘Open sesame,’ Fisher declaimed as he keyed numbers from the slip into a numeric pad beside a third door. ‘You might want to freshen up while we wait for the police.’ He pulled open the door to a corridor lined with bright yellow doors. ‘We’ve got rooms one and two, so it looks as if we’re the only guests.’ He clicked his tongue to encourage Jak through into the corridor. ‘You’ll be able to make coffee, too.’ He reached the first door, tapped the number into the pad. After the lock clicked he pushed it open.

  ‘Yes!’ A note of triumph raised his voice. ‘At last we have a telephone.’ He stood back. ‘Guys, you use this one. Josanne take the next. I’ll make the call, then let you know what’s happening. Jak? Where do you want to go, Jak? Looks as if you’ve got company, Josanne.’

  Fisher stood back as Sterling, Marko and Adam filed into the room. Fabian went to the next door and tapped in the door code to unlock it, then he pushed open the door for her. She paused to let Jak in, then she called back in the most cheerful voice he’d heard in hours, ‘A motel room. A bed, a TV, a phone. Who could believe it’s heaven on earth?’

  Fisher nodded. Right now this place did seem like heaven. This wasn’t the kind of place to be haunted by chimes from an ancient clock. A clock buried in its lair in a medieval house within a house.

  Fabian walked back to room number one with a terse. ‘OK. I’ll phone.’

  Fisher followed Fabian into the room. Marko and Sterling sat on the king-size bed. Adam slumped into an armchair by the TV. Shock had left him in a detached state. He stared without being aware of the people with him or where he was. Fabian strode to where a telephone sat on the desk. Right now it was the key to their dilemma, their saviour angel, and their magic carpet out of here rolled into one.

  Fabian picked up the handset and began to dial.

  Cantley had watched the van leave The Tower. It had barrelled furiously down the driveway. Gravel spewed from its spinning tyres. The motor had roared. Its headlights had blazed against the trees. Then it had screeched through the gates onto the roadway before it hurtled away into the night. He’d seen everything. All six – five men and a woman – had gotten into the van. The black dog had gone with them.

  Whistling, with his fists pushed deep into the pockets of his jacket, Cantley walked up to the front doors that had been left open by the trespassers in their rush to escape. Now, he told himself, it’s time to wait.

  Fisher went to stand by the motel window as Fabian dialled. In moments, the crime would be reported to the police. Fisher imagined a line of police cars with their sirens whooping as they raced up the driveway to the Godforsaken mausoleum of a building that was The Tower. Now the early morning sun broke through the cloud on the horizon. Shafts of red light struck fields and bushes. A jet trail drew an orange line across the sky as the rising sun illuminated it. A passenger jet full of people being served coffee by the smiling cabin crew. Across the car-park a white Audi pulled up beside the filling station building. This must be the proprietor arriving to open before the rest of the staff arrived. On the road, a yellow school bus ambled by. No doubt it had to make an early start to collect the schoolchildren from whatever rural backwaters they inhabited. Adam still slumped in the armchair. Sterling and Marko sat on the edge of the bed. Their heads hung wearily. Now their escape from The Tower was over they began to relax. Fisher glanced at his wristwatch. Six o’clock.

  At the other side of the room Fabian spoke into the phone, his tone businesslike: ‘I need to report a crime …’

  A scream – a piercing one – a scream powered by anger, shock, with a searing undercurrent of disbelief.

  Fabian dropped the phone. ‘That’s Josanne!’

  Following the scream, came a volley of furious barks from Jak. Fabian ran to the door. In a split second he’d wrenched it open and disappeared into the motel corridor.

  Cantley! The madman must have followed us here; the thought sped through Fisher’s head as he followed Fabian through the yellow door into the corridor with its corporate carpeting and branded decor that led directly into …

  … into the cellar of The Tower. Fisher stopped so hard his feet skittered across the slime covered brick floor. The old Hoovers, furniture and mouldy blankets lay scattered in heaps where the receding floodwaters had left them. He stared about him in that cold gloomy vault.

  When he hissed the words, ‘No … you can’t do this to us,’ his breath peeled from his lips in clouds of white vapour. For a moment all sound was sucked from the air. There was a silence that went beyond mere silence. A profound absence of noise. The silence of a tomb that lay undisturbed for a thousand years.

  Then it broke. In shimmering notes, as ice-cold metal struck ice-cold metal, the chimes ghosted down through the walls – but not only through the fabric of the building, but through the fabric of time itself – as if an ancient voice vented its cold fury on him. The instant the chimes began their toll, he heard the arched vaults above him groan.

  CHAPTER 35

  Fabian heard the single chime as he exited the motel room. There was no resonance. The vibration was abruptly cut so it sounded as if what started a clock chime ended as a Clunk! He registered the sound in the back of his mind but his priority was Josanne. He, too, had thought one name when he heard the scream: Cantley.

  In seconds he raced from the room, where he’d flung aside the telephone, the one where he had left Josanne just moments before, and from where he heard her scream and the dog’s barks. Her room was empty. There were no signs of commotion. A depression showed on the bed where she must have lain for a moment.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he shouted back to the others. ‘The dog, too.’

  When there was no reply he looked back. Marko, Fisher and Sterling had been following from the motel room. He was sure of it. Only the corridor was deserted. A rush of cold flooded him as he returned to the room he’d exited just seconds ago.

  ‘Fisher? Adam?’

  The bright yellow door yawned wide open. Beyond it, room number one held no human occupants. The four men had gone.

  The volume of the chimes made Fisher grimace. Not only were they loud, the metallic notes vibrated his eardrums with such an intensity they itched. Fisher craved to drive his fingers into his ears to scratch at the sensitive skin. In the light falling through the doorway at the top of the cellar steps he saw pools of stagnant water on the floor. The walls bore streaks of black silt from the flood that had nearly claimed Josanne’s life. Pond weed hung in vivid green strands from where it had snagged on shelves. It even clung to upended Hoovers in shaggy pelts that still dripped water. Even though the sound disorientated Fisher he found himself asking: A minute ago I was in the motel. I heard Josanne scream. I ran out of the room into the motel corridor. So how come I’m back here in The Tower? How on earth can it have brought me back?

  Above the chimes, Fisher heard the bricks groan as they chafed against one another in the ceiling vaults. Pieces of mortar crumbled away to fall with a pitter-patter sound on the floor. The movement of the bricks became more pronounced. Now they appeared more like the scales of a monstrous reptile that shrugged its body to produce ripples in its skin. The brickwork bulged. The walls deformed as a colossal force pressed inward from the other side. Now the nightmare came back to him with a power that was nothing less than caustic. He flinched as he recalled lying in his room as its walls and ceiling bulged in at him.

&n
bsp; You’ve had the dream – the Death Dream – now the chimes, Fisher told himself. This is when the vision becomes reality. Images of him lying crushed beneath the masonry struck him with a force that made him gasp. The image of his mutilated head; how the eyeballs had been pressed back into the skull to be replaced by twin pools of glistening crimson. A brick worked itself from the ceiling to fall so close it brushed his arm. The movement required him to raise his arm to shield his head; instantly it brought a jag of pain to his injured hand. Pain skewered through it like a jet of flame. It hurt enough to shock Fisher out of standing there like a slab of wood. As the bricks worked loose from the bucking ceiling he ran for the stairs. Bricks slipped from their mortared joints with a grating sound. All around him they crashed down to shatter in a splash of red dust. One struck his shoulder hard enough to make him curse. Busted fingers or not, he held both hands above his head to protect his skull from the tumbling blocks.

  And all the while clock chimes beat through the air and through his skull into the centre of his brain where they echoed with a savage power. When he reached the stairs a brick ejected from the wall to strike him on the forehead. He stumbled. The next second he was on his hands and knees. More bricks struck his back. The chimes rose in pitch. A note of triumph. The house celebrated his fall into the filth. It exulted at his pain. More bricks cascaded. One landed an inch from his broken finger.

  Fisher! If you don’t damn well move you’re going to be buried under a pile of the things.

  Gritting his teeth he let out a yell of fury. Then he used that rage to fuel his scramble up the stairs. The moment he crashed the cellar door shut behind him the chimes stopped.

  The chimes. Adam didn’t know whether they were in his head or came from outside the motel. An ice-cream truck out here? In the middle of nowhere? He’d looked up from where he sat in the armchair when he heard the scream. Fabian and the others had rushed to the motel-room door. Thoughts of Belle dominated. Grief at her murder overwhelmed him. All he could see in his mind’s eye was her bloody body lying in that monstrous house. Josanne’s scream, however, roused him. Adam ran after the others from the room into … into … into … onto …

  Onto the concrete runway. Mist swirled about him. Turning round and around he saw acres of swamp. The pools of viscous mud that looked like molten tar in the dawn light. Adam heard the chimes from the house. He turned to gaze at it. The huge bleak building, with the central tower that was like a fist raised to shake its fury at the world of man. Its windows had the dull quality of dead eyes. While at its base was the bristling barrier of hawthorn. The botanical version of razor wire. Keeping people out? Keeping people in? That depended on the circumstances … whatever the house wanted.

  Come to that, whatever The Tower wants, The Tower gets. That’s why a minute ago I was in a motel miles away – and now I’m here. The chimes came tolling down the meadow with all the measured gravity of a funeral bell. Fog rolled in from the swamp. The pools of stagnant water began to vanish into murky grey.

  ‘Find the others,’ Adam murmured to himself. ‘They’re back, too.’ He was sure of it. He wouldn’t be the only one. As he walked along the centre of the concrete runway he looked for the dry land that would take him back to the house. The chimes continued. They shape-shifted on the cold dawn air. One moment a thin, brittle sound, the same as ice cracking beneath your feet on a frozen lake; then they would descend into deep shimmering bass notes that appeared to roll from the ground. The measured pounding of dead hands from behind the tomb door. Adam didn’t know whether the sound was in his head or some weird distorting effect of the topography of the landscape. Maybe his mind was being torn loose of its moorings as he wrestled with the concepts of Belle’s slaughter, the panicky dash from the house, and finding he’d been flung by supernatural forces back here to the runway that lay beneath the brooding presence of The Tower.

  ‘It scared you, didn’t it?’

  The voice had a cracking quality to it as it floated through the mist. Adam’s eyes roved over the marsh as he searched for the speaker of the words. He saw hundreds of square yards of water, liquid mud, tussocks of grass …

  ‘It’s the house. It did that.’ The voice sounded pleased. ‘The house makes it seem the chimes are coming out of your head.’ The voice changed into cracked laughter. ‘It scared you, didn’t it? You should’ve seen your face!’

  Now the chimes had returned to their steady brassy rhythm, Adam figured the voice came from his left – out in the swamp itself. He walked to the edge of the runway that formed the linear man-made island.

  ‘The house can do anything. It can make you fly back here. You didn’t know that, but you do now! From anywhere in the world, it can just pull you back. You can never escape it!’

  Adam sang out, ‘The house wants, the house gets?’

  ‘You understand how it works now, eh? Better late than never.’

  As Adam moved slowly toward the edge of the runway he saw a figure out in the swamp. It stood so still that for a moment he began to question whether it was a man or simply a post poking upright from the grassy tussocks. The chimes changed. They’d quickened. They sounded like breaking glass. He could only take one more step closer. The edge of the runway was in line with the toes of his shoes. Just a couple of inches away was one of the stagnant pools of water streaked with bright green veins of weed. For some reason it reminded him of a vast discoloured eyeball without a pupil or iris. Perhaps the eye of a man who’d lain dead for a dozen years. A ruin of moss and decay.

  The figure took two steps forward. ‘You can see me now, can’t you?’

  Adam recognized him now. ‘Cantley.’ The man was perhaps a hundred feet from him. He stood on grassy mounds that poked just inches above the slick surface of the noxious silt. The mist thinned enough for Adam to take in the scruffy mass of hair. Above the coldly gleaming eyes that stared back at him was the distinctive crescent of scar tissue. Cantley wore a dull green jacket that had frayed into wisps of loose fibre. The jeans weren’t in better shape. Holes at the knees revealed grimed skin.

  ‘You should have listened to The Tower talk. You’d have understood it would give you what you wanted.’

  ‘Cantley? Did you kill Belle? The woman with blonde hair?’

  ‘You have to give something in return. You don’t get something for nothing, do you?’

  Adam’s eyes took in the malnourished form. He might have been armed with a handgun or a knife. But if he was, why didn’t he show them? Maybe he’d caught the guy without a weapon. A plan began to form in Adam’s mind.

  ‘And there was another girl.’ Adam followed the line of grass tussocks that formed something like a raised spine through the marsh. ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘I was born with pain in my body.’ Cantley’s voice cracked. ‘When I came here the house sometimes made the pain stop.’

  ‘Did you kill Kym?’

  ‘I only had to pay the price.’

  ‘Listen to me. Did you kill Kym?’

  ‘Of course I did. What do you think I gave to the house? Cow shit?’

  The line of grass tussocks formed tiny islands. They ranged in size from a dinner plate to a table top. The sight of Cantley gloating at him was too much. Cantley had killed both Kym and Belle. That knowledge was a big sweet candy bar to the madman. He sucked on it with pleasure.

  He knows that I know, that he knows … That’s how it goes, isn’t it?

  Adam took a step forward on to a clump of grass. It squelched under his feet but was firm enough. The chimes continued. Six o’clock was long gone. They were faster now. An urgency drove them.

  Cantley raised both hands with the fingers splayed outwards. As if to say: Look at these hands. These hands held the knife that stabbed the woman until she bled to death. Take a look at these hands … a good, long, hard look. These hands killed two women …

  With a bellow of fury Adam ran along the line of grassy islets. His feet made the earth yield a little but the matted vegetation held h
is weight. The clock chimes beat louder. The sound worked deep into his ears to irritate the sensitive skin. But he wasn’t about to stop now. Cantley was just fifty feet away. He didn’t appear to have anywhere to run. He wasn’t armed. Adam bunched his fists. He’d pound the guy until the bones of his face snapped beneath his knuckles.

  The mist thickened. It didn’t matter. Adam was only paces away from the murderer. A scrawniness and the pinched sick-looking face told Adam that Cantley lacked the muscle for a fist fight. Adam’s eyes flicked down to make sure he didn’t stray off those tiny islands of marsh grass. Cantley was ten paces away when he took three steps to the right. Trying to get away, huh?

  Adam turned right to stop his escape. Immediately his foot splashed down into a substance that offered no resistance to his weight. Momentum carried him forward until both feet were in the liquid. He tried to step forward. The liquid was mud, a loose silt that had the consistency of something like yoghurt. It couldn’t hold him; he sank down into its cold grip that stank of wet leaves, which had spent the winter rotting beneath a tree.

  From a half a dozen paces away Cantley looked down at him. ‘Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t safe? Or did it slip my mind?’ He nodded with satisfaction then put his hand to one ear as he fixed the staring eyes on Adam. ‘What do you hear?’

  ‘Damn you!’

  Adam wasn’t going to give the madman the satisfaction of knowing what he heard. It was the raucous chiming of the clock. It sounded like someone abandoning themselves to peals of deranged laughter. The ice-cold liquid had reached his chest by the time he struck out for the nearest tussock of grass. It formed a grassy dome that rose about four inches out of the liquid mud at its highest. If only …