The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

MARK SAMUELS The Tower

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 The solidity of the past, the idea of permanence, was over, and it had been replaced by a new ethos of disposability and change for its own sake, under the guise of so called “progress”.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 lingers 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.

In design the Tower was fantastically lofty, a dizzying physical projection capable of being conceived only in the mind of an individual given over wholly to dream. It radiated an aura of antiquity, and the surface of its brickwork was thick with the grey dust of untold centuries. The titanic spire that formed its pinnacle was bewildering to the imagination, for its height surpassed any of the skyscrapers of the “triumphant” modern era. It was as if the Tower was the spectre of a structure that had been destroyed, but which had forced its way back into existence, or back into human consciousness, which — nevertheless — amounts to the same thing.

The appearance, overnight, of a structural invader amidst the architectural vista to which one has become accustomed, seen from one’s own window, provokes terror.

Doubtless some puerile Freudian analyst would have had the temerity to designate the appearance of the Tower as evidence of a phallic symbol erupting into my consciousness from the depths of repression, but, in opposition to such a notion, one that cannot be disproved since its basis is ideological, I can do little more save express my scorn and contempt. The anthropodeist perspective is so ingrained into modern man that to the absolutely convinced any attempt at denial contains the seeds of its own defeat. Unable to acquiesce, I felt to protest the thesis was to confirm it.

By the time I had rapidly dressed and was ready to venture out into the mist, it had lifted and when next I looked out of the window, the Tower had vanished utterly.

I cursed myself for a fool and a victim of my own imaginings, for I have always been a dreamer, and such a one is often prone to delusion.

I could not help but conclude that the Tower could be seen only when the mist was present, and was not merely the by-product of my own mind having become disordered. This I realised over the course of many weeks observation, seeking in vain for the elusive structure. It was not a phantom edifice conjured by a mental fugue. Its first appearance occurred moments after I had awoken for the day, had lit a cigarette and sat absent-mindedly in my easy chair looking out the window, with a completely clear frame of reference. Since my rooms (which I had occupied for just over a month) are on the third floor a quarter of the way up the steep rise of this district’s hill, the view is extensive and I can see over huddled rooftops all the way to the summit.

If only it were not the case that the noise of tolling bells in the Tower had been so ghostly, more like the shadow of a sound than a sound itself, then I could have hoped others might notice, but it could be heard only late at night, at those moments when the world is at its quietest, when conversations die, when broadcasts and recordings are turned off, when dreams replace thoughts. And then there was the anti-light therein, not darkness, but of a negative intensity that, though glimpsed only through the Tower’s narrow, gaunt apertures, formed streaming shafts of an unknown colour, and penetrated the gloom of the mist that lay without like mystical searchlights.

Though I tried not to allow this vision to dominate my day-today life, I could not resist its allure. Only when a mist descended was the Tower visible. I became a devotee of its capricious nature and longed, like a spurned lover, to further what opportunities were available for me to glimpse again the half-ruined edifice from which strange, distant chants seemed eventually to mingle with the tolling bells and whose warped architecture told a tale of madness beyond the apprehension of those who went about their commonplace lives.

I alone knew that some ultimate mystery was to be found within, and only inside the immense confines of the apparition would I discover the symbol for which the Tower stood. I was prepared always for the advent of mist, whether in the early morning or during the midnight hours, and went abroad in pursuit of the titanic structure, wandering the streets in a desperate attempt to get closer and closer. Yet, despite my best endeavours, I found it impossible to draw near, for the Tower seemed to maintain a fixed distance, one unrelated to my own conceptions of proximity.

It was, of course, not a physical, but rather a spiritual, phenomenon. The matter of my approach depended less on my physical route and the speed with which I acted, than upon my own state of mind. The Tower was not a structure visible to all, for it appeared only to those who had been initiated into its mysteries. I dared not speak of it to anyone else, lest the spell be broken by my own faithlessness, and the mystery be snatched away from me.

I wondered then whether the fog, too, existed in my own mind, and formed as much a part of the initiatory sequence as any other component of the process of transformation.

True, I had been drinking a great deal. True also, that the small capital upon which I had been drawing in order to keep me from ruin, was close to exhaustion. My attempts to connect with the so-called “real world” had been unsuccessful. My rent was several weeks in arrears. What food I could afford to purchase was of the cheapest and least nutritious kind: instant noodles, bread on the last day of its expiry date, vegetables close to mouldering, and the contents of tins with peeling labels that, for the most part, lay dusty on shelves; the type viewed only as insurance by the majority of people against some long period of unexpected war or other disaster.

What few job interviews I obtained were useless, for when I was questioned upon business aptitude and commercial considerations, my answers were of a kind that revealed at once the gulf between an autocratic dreamer and a man of this world, sharing in its values. I did not tell anyone directly of the Tower, but dropped hints that I hoped might prove to be the equivalent of a password, or a secret sign, admitting me into that otherworldly realm where I hoped to find at least one other individual who knew of its cryptic existence and who was prepared to acknowledge its awful, and infinitely essential, character.

But always I encountered only those with television eyes whose own imaginative vision had dimmed, those whose values were formed by the irresistible tsunami of gossip and infotainment. Those whose gazes were fixed on bright plasma and LED screens, those addicted to shows where the value of a person was determined by his ability to entertain, to financially enrich or to sexually arouse, an agenda driven in turn by those who were drained of their own thought-processes by the media’s mental vampires. Pity those who, through the process of electronic devolution, had allowed themselves to be turned into a pack of obedient dogs, eagerly lapping up the anti-individualistic, collectivist poison provided by their supremely powerful masters, lapping up the noxious gruel, the sewage diet of self-destruction, and being told that this wave of conformist propaganda is freedom. Pity those who thought they had the solution, and who paid lip-service to an alternate system of totalitarianism, which they called freedom, but in which the mass of men were only components; oppressed economic units rather than individuals.

For a time I wallowed in the icy consolations of pessimism, that anti-gospel which provides solace in the creed that the universe is so ordered as to be inimical to humanity itself. Relieved from the onus of developing a measure of stoic acceptance of life’s vicissitudes, I found respite in a grand conspiracy theory in which the cosmos was intrinsically malignant to men. Intrinsically, but not consciously, malignant, you will note; rather like a natural poison-zone, in which sentience was an aberration of such jarring uniqueness that it could be nothing other than doomed to final destruction when confronted with the revelation of an ultimate, dead, and bleak reality.

And yet this scheme, like all the others, I found unsatisfying. It answered all questions, allayed all doubts, provided one acquiesced in its inhuman principles, and so I concluded it was a hoax. For if the advocates of pessimism were correct, they would surely have destroyed themselves, negating all that their continued existence represented. Instead, they lingered on within life, filling time in the fruitless quest to persuade others, the bulk of mankind, that all men are nothing more than mindless puppets, and, thereby, themselves playing at being the puppet-master.

Their excuses were hollow — especially when they retorted that their deaths would cause unwarranted distress to those they left behind — or why should they care at all for the temporary and negligible reactions of others whom, their logic dictated, were as doomed and ensnared by human illusions as were they? Suicide, instead of causing pain (though doubtless they would) should have been viewed, by the true pessimist, as being an authentic act, an example to follow, not as an occasion for mourning.

A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.

For, in truth, is not all human philosophy simply the piling up of one word after another in a self-absorbed train of thought and justification? To pull the strings of mental association, to prompt the idea, to suggest the conclusion, to lead, to guide, to steal back into the shadows and work one’s “magic” from afar?

What then, of experience as opposed to reason? Can the experience of any one man be of significance to all others? And if experience be incommunicable, what then of a better example one man might set? Alas, even had I endeavoured to turn myself into a saint, such a course was beyond my powers. Fallen too far into the morass of materialism, my soul had begun to rot, my imagination had dried up, and I had reached the stage of dreading any contact with my fellow human beings.

I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever.

As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are.

One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages.

Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it.

Still, even if one is not rich, there is freedom in the imagination. I recall, in particular, a certain night on the dreary stretch of the busy Archway Road. The rain was falling quite heavily, and beneath the stellar street-lamps the droplets beat down like a majestic mystery upon the sodden and wet pavements, creating a world of splendour and of intense fascination. Reality was transformed; a deeper glimpse into the realm of possibilities was made apparent, one that suggested much more than a single moment, but which revealed itself as a shard from a greater eternity.

When I realised this, I began to see the vision of the Tower outside of those times when the mist seemed to bring it into existence, for it appeared my imagination had sufficient power to carry me more frequently into that other realm of spirit. And with each mental voyage, the next became less arduous.

Eventually, the Tower appeared omnipresent. I saw it, whenever I looked for it, at all hours of the day and night. Believing its appearance as a constant to be an indication of the mysterious structure that was now gaining a firmer foothold in reality — or what I took to be reality, or even some new reality imposed by my imagination — I naturally attempted to gain entrance to its immediate grounds, and perhaps even to its interior confines.

But when I tramped the maze of streets that I thought would draw me closer to the Tower, I found that, despite the ease with which I conjured it into being, still I got no nearer to my destination, and it remained as distant as when I first glimpsed it. Several times I made the attempt, but each one ended in exhaustion, and with a resultant bodily collapse dozens of miles from my home. Naturally, when asked about the object of my quest I dared not tell the truth lest I was regarded as being of completely unsound mind, and thereby unable to care for myself; a prospective candidate for the close attention and palliative care of the state (that is, of a society whose, albeit unconscious, aim is to crush any form of deviation from its own standards).

What was contained inside the Tower? Was it not the case that it was less important in and of itself than the secret within? Increasingly, I thought so.

Physical distance was not the barrier to the attainment of close proximity; rather was it a question of spiritual distance.

I felt myself to be subject to a form of discipline, a form almost totally alien to that of the world in which I felt myself stranded, and something beyond even the increased power of my imagination. And this discipline was being imposed from without; from a force that was entirely transcendent of the self-absorbed and self-consuming world in which I dwelt. Without the discipline one could not advance. Moreover one did not seek the discipline, rather was one called to it by its source. But I knew nothing of the nature of that source or of its meaning (if it was possessed of either).

The discipline required was precisely that form of introspection into which I had fallen, or to which I had succumbed. It was an ordered withdrawal from all the demands of the everyday. Not, I must add, as an escape. The process, I suppose, was most closely akin to meditation; an immersion into the essence of one’s very consciousness, and the Tower stood as a signpost, one not representing some external object but the nucleus of my own mind, and not the nebulous dreams that surrounded it.

One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one’s innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.

Although the discipline was imposed from outside, I knew that my withdrawal was not ordered by any force other than my own self, in its own intrinsic desire to find its true purpose — the absorption into a greater meaning, one that I might finally attain by entry into the Tower.

When one has given up all the petty jealousies of ambition, all the siren-calls of satiety, when one instead recognises that the loss of all one holds dear in this materialistic paradigm is not an escape but a liberation, a moving on, a step into the next stage of being, that this is the only form of authentic revelation that there is, then one approaches true freedom.

Within the Tower was the mystery of untold ages, and without there was only certainty. For every man there exists an individual Tower, but all the Towers are One.

And I know now, gazing upon the reflection that stares back at me from the mirror in the apartment wherein I dwell, that to see the Tower is to pass from this world to the next. My body is that of a white-haired ancient, one whose flesh is honeycombed with innumerable lipomas, one whose skeletal structure has become strangely distorted, one whose face is a maze of crisscrossed lines harbouring rheumy, cataract-clouded blue eyes, one whose yellow skin, dry as parchment, is stretched tightly over a death’s-head skull.

Time becomes fluid and non-linear as the liberty of disintegration takes hold. Time torments those who immerse themselves in its infinite progressions and regressions. Time, experienced in its entirety, is incomprehensible.

And indeed, since my discovery of the Tower, decades have passed in days and seconds have become aeons.

Across the whitewashed walls inside this overground tomb, there are scrawled indecipherable words and equations, each either haunted with antiquity or else pregnant with futurity.

Their meaning is lost, but their significance is not.