Lowell shook his head.
“What, then?”
“I cannot take the picture,” he repeated. “I’m sorry.”
“You owe me an explanation.”
Lowell looked from the camera to the seated couple. He exhaled. “Yes,” he conceded. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“Well?”
He pointed to the area above his own right eye and nodded toward Mrs Whateley. “It’s her make-up. It’s playing havoc with this light. Could we try one without?”
Whateley’s face turned crimson. He sprang up from the chair and grabbed hold of his wife’s arm. Without a word, he dragged her to her feet and spirited her toward the doorway.
In the entryway, he retrieved his cane and spun on his heel to address Lowell.
“You have wasted my afternoon, sir,” he declared coldly. “And you will not see me again. Nor will you see my friends again, either. I will certainly warn them to stay far away from an amateur such as yourself.”
He stepped through the doorway, pulling his wife after him. She tripped on the stoop and looked back at Lowell, her expression at once pleading and resigned, as though craving a deliverance she no longer expected. Her despair bit deep, instilling in Lowell a terrible, inescapable guilt.
He ran after them into the alleyway. Dusk was descending. A heavy snow filled the air. “You swine!” he shouted after Whateley. “I will tell the world what you are!”
Whateley halted and turned around. He released his grip on his wife’s arm and advanced on Lowell with a menacing sneer, brandishing his cane like a common thug, the weighted end tapping against his open palm.
“Run!” Lowell shouted to Mrs Whateley. “He will kill you – don’t you see that?”
She did not move. She merely looked on without expression, watching as her husband approached her would-be rescuer. Two yards away, Whateley lifted the cane high above his head and brought it down across his chest, a pendulum descending.
Lowell dodged to his right and managed to escape the blow. The cane impacted the frozen ground with a hollow report. Whateley cursed. Lowell saw his opening and took the offensive, dashing toward Whateley with fists raised.
The other man was ready for him.
Whateley stepped to one side and caught Lowell with an outstretched boot, scooping his legs out from under him. The photographer dropped to the ground, his weight landing on his elbow. His arm went numb.
Lowell attempted to regain his feet, but Whateley was too quick for him. The younger man kicked the photographer in the side and stomped down on his exposed gut. Lowell screamed. He rolled over and attempted to crawl away, dragging himself through the snow with his good arm.
Whateley followed him. Wielding the cane like a riding crop, he delivered a series of rapid blows across Lowell’s back, dropping the photographer onto his stomach. Lowell tried to speak – to apologise, to plead for mercy – but found he had not the breath for it.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Whateley raise the cane and take aim at his left temple. The blow connected with a startling crack. The world flashed white before him and the vision in his left eye flickered and dimmed. A warm trickle poured from the torn scalp, staining his shirt and collar. He collapsed onto his stomach and closed his eyes.
Snow settled above his brow and melted. Cold fluid streamed down his forehead and into his damaged eye. Patrick’s face returned to him in that moment, surfacing from the crimson cloud that obscured his vision.
“Forgive me,” he murmured. “Please.”
“Scum.”
Whateley wiped his stick on Lowell’s shirt and spit on him as he would a beggar or criminal. Then he turned away. His footsteps retreated, muffled by fresh snow.
“Come,” Lowell heard him say. “We’re due at the Grand.”
He opened his eyes.
Night had fallen. Hours might have passed or mere minutes – he could not be sure – but the agony he experienced on waking was indescribable. His chest ached. His temples pounded, and he had lost the sight in his left eye. Nauseous, he rotated his head and threw up into the fresh snow. His vomit was yellow and dark, the colour of old bruises.
He crawled to the nearest wall and propped himself against it. Slowly he counted down from five, whispering the words to himself as he did before a picture. When he reached the end, he vaulted himself into a standing position. He wobbled dangerously, nearly fell, but caught himself against the wall. He cast his gaze back in the direction of his studio. The door was open, but he could not bring himself to return there, not now.
Breathing heavily, he hauled himself hand over hand down the alleyway and emerged into the gas-lit sheen of the street. Only this morning he had walked this same block, but tonight, everything had changed. Providence itself now swam in the lens of Patrick’s camera. Even the newest buildings bore the signs of decay, marked by smoke stains and fallen roofs, brown curls of dying ivy on every wall.
It was late – too late – but the city hummed with activity. An endless stream of carriages clattered over the cobbles. Lowell stumbled into the path of a police officer, but the man simply ignored him, turning up his collar to hurry past.
No one else seemed to notice him. He passed among the midnight crowds – anonymous, unseen – cursed by solitude as in the year that Patrick left him. A dogcart flew past, missing him by less than a yard. Reeling, he took two steps backward, lost his footing, and tumbled into the gutter.
He lay there for a time, quite collapsed, while men and women passed him by. At one point he spotted the two sisters from the morning and observed that their faces had grown heavy with the accumulation of years, all vestiges of their former beauty spoiled. On a chain between them, they carried a purse that bulged with miserly excess.
Behind them, shackled to the purse by a pair of manacles, walked a young woman of waxy countenance who wore nothing but a cotton shift. Lowell could see that she alone understood his plight, but she only lifted her shackled wrists, as though to indicate her own helplessness, and then shuffled past, dragged on like a dog by the women she served.
No one would help him – that much was clear – and he called on reserves of strength he did not know he possessed in order to regain his feet. Once he had steadied himself, he began to walk, continuing down the pavement toward Saint Andrew’s. He thought he must be dying. He shivered in his shirtsleeves, occasionally spitting blood into the slush at his feet.
On the corner, he passed the paperboy. The lad grinned wickedly through his front teeth and shoved the evening circular into his face.
“No,” Lowell gasped. “I don’t need it.”
“Yessir,” the boy drawled. “But ye do want it, don’t ye?”
Lowell tore the paper from the boy’s grasp and threw it into the street. He pressed past him to the church of Saint Andrew’s, where he mounted the stone stairs. He took them slowly, his legs weakening with each step. At last he reached the high doors. He rattled the handles but to no effect. Locked fast: even the Church had closed its doors to him.
In despair he cast his gaze heavenward, seeking out that point in space where the cross-topped spire disappeared into endless snowfall. Then he saw it: the cross had become a crucifix. A living figure writhed in agony on that bronze tree, naked and abandoned with only the dark for comfort. Lowell recognised him at once, even at that great distance.
He fell to his knees, trembling as before the altar. He heard a cry – a boy’s voice, he fancied, though he could not make out the words. The world was falling from him, a garment shed. His head tipped back and he tumbled into nothingness.
He woke up swathed in snow. His clothes had frozen in conformance to the shape of his body, and the blood had thickened in his beard. He wiped the snowmelt from his face, relieved to find he could see through his left eye, and levered himself into a crouch. The pain was excruciating, but perhaps not as intolerable as before.
He was in the alleyway behind his studio. His nightmare, then, had been a nightmare in truth, a visi
on brought on by the blow to his skull. It made no difference. He was a man haunted, damned beyond atonement. He understood this now. Though years might pass, nothing could erase from his mind the image of that crucified figure.
He struggled to his feet and limped back into the studio. A fire smouldered in the grate and the room was still warm. From this he concluded that his unconsciousness could not have lasted more than an hour. He went to the side cabinet and extracted the brandy bottle. He took three quick slugs before replacing it.
He crossed the room to the corner where the shipping crate lay discarded, left behind in his excitement over Patrick’s camera. He turned it upside down. A brown envelope slipped free and drifted to the floor. No name was indicated, but he knew it was meant for him.
Inside was a photograph. Lowell recognised it as one that he himself had taken many years before. In the picture, a young child regarded the camera without smiling. Patrick. The child’s features were fair, his nose turned slightly to the right where it had once been broken. His eyes were blue: wide with terror, blank with suffering.
Lowell blinked. His vision blurred. The room swam before him and the blood rushed to his ears. He thrust the photograph into the fire. He watched it light – the child’s face blackening, falling through – and then lunged for Patrick’s camera.
He toppled the tripod, dashing the instrument onto the floor. Dropping to his knees, he ripped free the hood and shattered the slide loader, punching through the mahogany frame, his knuckles splitting where they connected with brass. He plucked out the lens from the viewfinder and carried it into the darkroom, the glass slipping between his injured fingers. In the darkroom, he held up the lens to the mirror and glimpsed himself in its depths.
What did he hope to see there? Lowell could not say. Some hidden truth, perhaps – some veiled hope of which he was only half-aware. But his appearance had not altered. In the lens, he saw only the same broken man as in the mirror, a bloodied beast stalked by the same demons, the same ghosts. With a roar of agony, more animal than human, he hurled the lens against the far wall and heard it shatter.
He returned to the studio and shot the deadbolt, the better to escape down the neck of a brandy bottle. And so the night passed. He drank – he did not pray – and the darkness drew near as with the rustle of fabric, a starless hood that stretched to cover the city, to gather all creation in its sweep. At dawn, the wind turned southerly. The snow became a bitter rain that drummed like pebbles on the walls of the studio.
He was awakened by the doorbell. It was midday, the sun’s glare doubled by slush and snowmelt. He went to the door and cracked it open, withdrawing the chain when he recognised the clerk from the post office.
“Yes?” he croaked. “What do you want?”
The clerk started, shocked by the change in Lowell’s appearance.
“You didn’t stop by, sir. Yesterday, sir. Before we locked up.”
“No,” he said. “I was – delayed.”
“I have this for you,” said the clerk. “I’m sorry, sir.”
The tersely-worded missive contained the news of Patrick’s death.
On 29 November, the young man had sold off his apartment and settled his debts before returning to the studio. After he failed to emerge, his friends had summoned the officers, who found him in the darkroom, a suicide.
It was later reported that Patrick had boxed up all of his possessions prior to his death: his books, his papers, his prints. Only his camera was found to be missing.
Lowell’s story ended there. For a time neither of us spoke. Crickets sang in the nearby underbrush. The moon emerged from a bank of clouds, recasting the landscape from shades of silver. Lowell stubbed out his cigar and disappeared inside.
Five years have passed since our brief meeting, and yet I find his story has not left me. Lowell spoke eloquently of light and darkness – and of the dark that cannot be illumined – and within his tale itself there is another kind of darkness, a history hidden from the light of narrative: shadowed, secret, and thus ineradicable.
I woke the next morning to find that he had gone. He had departed the resort at first light and returned to Providence. I do not know what has become of him. Sometimes I like to think that he has found some measure of peace, whatever the nature of his past sins. In any event, I doubt that I shall see him again.
MARK SAMUELS
The Tower
MARK SAMUELS LIVES ALONE in a garret in London, England. He is the author of four acclaimed short story collections: The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press, 2003), Black Altars (Rainfall Books, 2003), Glyphotech & Other Macabre Processes (PS Publishing, 2008) and The Man Who Collected Machen (Ex Occidente, 2010; reprinted by Chômu Press, 2011), as well as the short novel The Face of Twilight (PS Publishing, 2006).
“The Tower” is the seventh of his tales to appear in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. New fiction from his pen is forthcoming in issues of the journal Sacrum Regnum, published by Hieroglyph Press.
About the following story, Samuels reveals: “Actually, this is more of an autobiographical piece than a work of fiction. In psychological and spiritual terms, every word of it is the truth.”
MY CUSTOM, for many weeks, just after awaking at dawn, was to walk the streets in the region around King’s Cross. They are a bewildering mixture of decay and modern renovation. A number of the buildings seem in danger of being pulled down, because they do not appear to fit the image of the brand new and commercially successful ideal the redevelopers have in mind.
I think of the “Lighthouse” (which has no light) atop a dilapidated building on the corner of the Gray’s Inn Road, just opposite the station.
I think of the old Eastern Goods Yard just north of the station, its sidings abandoned, the vast wooden structure now scarcely covered by the paint that has turned grey and peeled off, its bulk surrounded by a field of weeds that have broken through the pavement. It, along with Granary Square, will soon be remade, and turned into something as grotesque in appearance as an elderly woman who has become the casualty of too much plastic surgery.
I think also of the wharves, where cargoes were offloaded from narrowboats on Regent’s Canal, the buildings now lost to chic design companies who produce nothing of lasting value.
It is still possible to wander in this area and discover corpse structures: closed-down and boarded-up pubs left abandoned, the silent remains of a record shop that sold vinyl, an empty sex shop with dust-obscured windows, fast food restaurants where now only hordes of vermin feed. I remember passing by all of these places when they were still active. Now they are gutted, with only decaying outward shells as reminders of their having been there at all. In a few more years even these remnants will have vanished completely – “regenerated” into yet another useless tentacle of corporate nonsense.
As I wandered in the early morning sunlight, golden and dazzling, it seemed to me that the remains of the past were more beautiful than what was to come. The future offered no prospect but a soulless death, all the more terrifying for its not being acknowledged. The solidity of the past, the idea of permanence, was over, and it had been replaced by a new ethos of disposability and change for its own sake, under the guise of so called “progress”. But progress towards what destination?
For no destination seemed to be in mind, only “progress” for its own sake, only an end that could not be reached, only the doing away with all that shows any sign of having reached old age. The human race now lives solely in order to try and prolong its own youth indefinitely. And that was progress?
Those ruined and decayed remains of buildings that have been abandoned due to their commercial worthlessness have more mystery about them than any number of new glass and steel developments. They are testaments to the truth that the city is not solely the business centre its rulers would have us take pride in, but that it is an organic entity with an occult life and history of its own. For there are still ghosts in those shells, and, just as long as memory li
ngers and imagination is not stamped out by the profit motive, the ghosts will live on.
And so, when morning was over, once the sun had risen higher in the sky, once the traffic had begun to swarm, and the commuters had streamed out of St Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston, to tramp the streets and take possession of the buildings like an army of occupation, once commercial activities reigned, I retreated to my garret in a squalid, horrible edifice further north, and I pursued my campaign of resistance in occupied territory: my enemies being the fearful foes who would reduce all spirit, wonder and beauty to mere semantics, madness and insignificance. I continued, against all obstacles, to resist the vengeful by refusing to recognise their dominion.
After a while I ceased to visit the region around King’s Cross, having reached the point where I could no longer bear its transformation, and I made the district wherein I dwelt the limit of my universe. With this act of psychogeographical withdrawal, and perhaps as a consequence of it, the Tower appeared for the first time.
On that morning the entire city was shrouded with a deep mist, rendering existence within its confines ghostly. All other edifices became nebulous, but this one structure seemed to draw its own clarity from the degree to which others were obscured. It stood out in stark relief against the grey murky atmosphere that had descended like a pall. Naturally, I thought myself to be, at first, the victim of my own imagination. I was acutely aware of the degree to which I had become isolated from other people, and aware of the pitfalls that follow an intense degree of self-absorption. I had suffered periods of paranoia, of depression and of loneliness, but I regarded myself as nevertheless psychologically intact, since my capacity to make critical judgements with regards to my own state of mind remained clear.
I had, of course, seen the same view innumerable times before, and it was quite familiar to me. But this time, from the profusion of the mist, there appeared this fantastic new structure, as if risen up from inconceivable depths; with one lone Tower breaking the waves and the tolling of immense bells heralding the return of an Atlantean cathedral wreathed in sea-fog.
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