Another Experiment, Part 5 – The Tower

There was one vote to stay in the woods, and one vote to take the ruined north road. But it’s Spooky Season, so…

It’s lucky that the moon and stars are bright above you, because the old road is old, and treacherous beyond belief. It was paved, once – every so often a patch of intact stone slabs gives you a glimpse at the broad highway that must have once stretched down all the way to the river. But years of wind, rain and presumably theft of what looks like a solid building material have left this once-grand road in tatters. You trip and stumble across shattered stone, over holes in the earth beneath, across heaps of loose, broken stone.

This is not just the toll of years, you realise. This road was deliberately broken. Below the fisher’s dell, there is no trace of it at all.

But you forge on. You pause for a while to sit atop an old milestone, its inscription long since worn away, and eat more of the food the fisher gave you. Somehow, despite all your day’s travelling, despite the lateness of the hour, you feel invigorated. Perhaps it is the food, or perhaps it is that, for the first time in several days, you are travelling without feeling actively chased. No torchlight follows your path, no wolves howl in the night… yet. Nobody is on this road but you.

It is cold, though. You are not quite in the mountains themselves, but the slope you walk on cannot really be called a foothill anymore; it is rocky and growing steeper by the yard. But the ruined road continues on, and, for lack of anything better to do, you follow it. It must lead somewhere, you think. To something.

And it does. It looms from the dark, but subtly: the stone is the same hue as the shadows that surround it, and even in the moonlight you only see it when you are right outside its doorway: a tower, in surprisingly good condition, save for the half-collapse of the topmost floor and a few gaps in the lower wall. It is three floors tall, slender and well-built. Its door has long since crumbled away, leaving a few long, splintered bits of old wood on the floor, the only barrier against the darkness within.

Well, you think, I’ve come this far.

Photo by Félix Besombes (Unsplash)

With the flint and steel from your pack, some of your ragged shirt and one of the bits of wood you improvise a crude torch. Guttering firelight reveals little more than dust and echoes in the atrium, save for the remnants of what might have been furniture, and webs that must have belonged to some truly gargantuan spiders. The immediate ceiling has collapsed, leaving more scraps of wood across the floor. But it is, at least, inside.

There are stairs. They lead up, curving against the outer wall, all the way to the stone ceiling at the top of the tower. You would have a good vantage-point to look down the mountainside from there, but any fire you lit – and you will need one for the night, this high above the world – will be clearly visible. To who, you do not know, but the thought of it makes you uneasy. You could, instead, just settle down here for the night. There is enough scrap wood to keep you warm. But you would be vulnerable, with the yawning door before you and no real view to the outside. Maybe you could build a barricade, but the thought of that exposure still does not strike you as pleasant.

Something howls in the night, far away… for now.

But the stairs go down, too. Down, into the earth below. There is a trapdoor, still intact. Gingerly lifting it, you see that there is a strong bolt on the inside, that would hold it firmly closed. Nothing would be able to get in.

But was something not meant to get out?

The top of the tower, the atrium, or whatever lies below. Where will you go?

Let’s have some votes, then.