The Burning Tower

The Burning Tower

Graham Swanson

 

Severe ulcers of regret channel tragic outcomes to the fortune teller under the distant tent. Her smoke is in the

air, but no one dares cross the creeks and old roads covered in thorny branches coveted by the badgers and

nighthawks. The prince of sorrow stood petrified with his lance still in hand, the chipped blade covered in moss

and spider webs. He sent a mean text message, then another, and another, completely vindicated,  because right

before sunset over the horizon of his earliest lovedreams, the ire of poisonous rats infected the brains of the once

wise wizards in the castles of victimhood, and bred the greed of the vaultkeeper to enlist his rioters to loot the

secret catacombs for the lost master manuals. The prince offered warnings to his witches after these rioters

appeared in the night to demand ransom for the safety of the manuals, and he paid with blood, his lust, and by

taking on a curse never to sleep again. The rioters didn’t know that the naive prince knew nothing of these

manuals. 

Other elites rode stallions up mountain slopes past the peasants hauling barrows of filth, called themselves warriors because they witnessed some battle or another and knew an armbar or two, or they stayed in their estates practicing harpsichord and studying the poetry of the elder warriors who conquered the world 10000 moon cycles ago. This prince maintained an unspoken romance with the young nuns of the old convent, and the ancient witches of the blackwood coven while practicing his honor of lighting all 10000 candles of the glass cathedral.  The nuns listened to him chop wood from the other side of wooden doors, and the witches summon demons to bow before him. Orphans hidden under black hoods followed him through the trees to witness his cruel betrayal. The insane wizards rewarded them with droplets from the essence of smoking elixers.

Despite the falling leaves and brief daylight, the clouds scattered and kiddie pools evaporated. Wasps built cities within the doors of broken-down trucks. Limping garbage rodents fled the gunfire of blind old men on the higher porches of ghetto homes. Neon vested and protected in heavy boots, the oppressed peasants of the land sipped hot coffee and battled to move their dying vehicles from the bare patch on the lawn. It's all gone, the good things, the young beautiful witches masquerading with fruit in their laps, and the saintly maidens soon heard the war horn blow, and they went off to battle in the desert. Yet the prince took his impunity when the forbidden tomes fell into his lap to take the crumbling pages to the moonlight, and he stayed there until the peasant vehicle erupted in the morning sunrise and finally left. Fugitives from the alleyways reeking of crystal meth and propane peeked into windows and looked under a neighbor’s boat. 

Once he learned all that he thought he knew belonged to the minds of good lords who died back when paper money earned enough people a house to call their own, and how they created races of carnivorous monstrosities to roam the world on the book, how they rendered the civilization of the elves to smoldering ruins, and how they grew mighty speaking forests, and how the drug addict and the alcoholic created a spectrum between a depressed doomer who gets stabbed to death in an alley and dies huddled in trash, promiscuous ladies who travel all over the world but always end up either going back to their vineyards or being strangled with telephone wire in a motel, power hungry, resentful men who understand psychology and the weaknesses of power, and the hermit living in solitude on a mountain sanctuary. All those faerie tales about true love and defeating the dragon fell mute because the peasants received the benefits of association in relation to their lords, but few maintained the charms and splendors illustrated by warrior sainthoods. 

Books existed to help the peasant, but the peasants used visual language not written to communicate, so without alcohol the information interested too few, and most came away believing that any talk of helping peasants overthrow their lords came from the mouths of assholes who just wanted to strip religion from the land and let foreigners invade. They gladly worked in their lord’s field but grumbled every springtime when they had to give the lord an egg for the fertility festival. When gold rained from the sky, the smart peasants left for the college while the others birthed more children and beat each other over the heads with clubs. 

This made them fun sport for the knighthoods with no battles to claim for their ancestors. On misty mornings they hurled lances through the chests of peasants armed with wooden forks and butter knives. Those peasants were no match for the full suits of armor and storm bridled horses. The peasants wondered why the knights didn’t chase after the giants who stole their pigs, but their foolish fathers just made things worse every single time they tried to get the knights to stop attacking them and maybe do something about the monsters. Peasants really just need to work harder, because this land belongs to the honored ancestors of the conquered legions unrivaled to all the malcontents created by war and neglect. 

The prince closed the books, and called the witches to tell them what he read, but despite ancient wisdom of the zodiac, the information changed nothing to them, because they lived in the woods, and so what if they lived under the spell of relief from a turbulent home, they remained in their swamp covens. And since he read forbidden words, on the day the zodiac restarted all the knights died in the armor, and their castles crumbled. Prisoners trapped in the dungeons went free because rats carried keys to them from under the cages. The prince slowly, painfully turned to wood, then stone, and the saints still visited him to give the idol whiskey and kisses for good luck in the coming harvest.

Night Echo

 Night Echo

by Graham Swanson

Kale enjoyed the quiet hours of midnight in the village between time zones. She worked at the gas station between two village hotels and the abandoned theatre. She scrolled on her phone and made nasty remarks on social media until the censors banned her accounts. During the usual night, a few young cops might come in to use the bathroom, unless a bus stopped. Then she faced the nightwalkers, midnight drifters, and mystical gypsies as she rang up blue Gatorade and cigarettes coming in from smoking borders behind the darkened rails.

The magical woman asked Kale if she wanted to see the love of her future, the outcome of a journey, the wealth of gold. Astrology. Tarot cards. Crystal balls. Magic amulets. Kale watched them all shuffle back onto the bus and turn to steam under the currents of freezing rain and speeding bursts of light. On their way fast to nowhere. Sleeping like angels. 

  Overall Kale enjoyed her job but the way some of the hooded men lurked in the parking lot looking into the windows without coming in made her wish that she had a co-worker there with her. She kept her cell phone at hand, leaving it on the charger, looking out at the sifting wind dragging strangers with the red wheat. Sometimes they waited in their cars outside the building, sometimes they walked out of the wheat fields and grouped together around burning barrels in the alley. Sometimes they turned up beaten and stabbed in a turned over boxcar not far from the gas station. Most soared away into the speeding oblivion of highway traffic and joined the blank faces on the wall. 

     Kale just turned 28. She hoped to resume classes at one of the small local schools along the riverfront for outcasts. She quit school the first time. Every single day she woke up and thought about finding a shotgun and shooting him in the face or smacking his skull with a baseball bat. He married a stripper from the dance club down the road. She didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t like to call it that. She just scrolled on her phone, tightened her mask around her ears, and looked out for tramps getting gas. 

At the flickering of lights, a stranger pressed against the fogged glass walls. This hooded figure didn’t wander off into the ether, he breathed into the glass and left bloody handprints on the condensation. He burst through the doors gasping, one arm missing, blood jetting onto the linoleum tiles and smearing across the glass, leaking down his jacket, pant legs. Buckets of blood splattered onto his boots as he hobbled over to Kale, blue faced, his eyes reddened and his pink mouth balking, soundless moaning for her to call for help. Kale reached for the store phone and pressed the emergency key but no tone rang on the other end. She dialed 911 on her cell phone just as the power went out and the man fell to the floor. 

Only his twitching boots made noise scraping on the floor, blood gushing out of his socks. A stick of bone still grinded on the tiles. Kale bowed over the counter to examine it under her flashlight. Little bite marks gnarled the wet joint bone. A heavy shadow fell over the gas station and even the lights outside the pumps went off, and then the cash computer went off, and the beer cooler shut off and melted under the door. 

Kale kept telling herself that a car is coming. A car will come and help will arrive. Something scraped at the ceiling over his head. It started with small scratching but then it turned into long deep raking sounds. The heater stopped working as the air conditioner and vents fell from the ceiling and crashed down on the coffee station she just finished restocking. Heavy breaks of thunder fluttered overhead, and the shadow lifted from the store. The ceiling pressed down as a tornado of cold air cycloned the building, shattered the glass and hurled the dumpster into the gas pumps. On the other end of her phone call, 911 emitted a tornado siren.  She kicked the lottery machine. Outside a fire started over the gas pumps.

Late January snowfall built up around the ditches. Kale stole a bunch of food and stuffed it in her jacket. She hurried out the door to find her car flipped upside down on top of one of the hotels. The clouds dropped lower and lower as horrendously warm winds thawed the frozen moisture on her cheeks. She hurried to reach the lobby of the hotel before whatever lurked above the clouds found her there. Once inside she began to eat the snacks she pulled from the shelf. Instead of a cool, lit up lobby with the night clerk she has a crush on waiting at the desk, she found wind blowing against curtains, and shattered fountains. No one around. A lamp lay broken on the floor. The paintings lay face down. Only one room light burned under the door. Kale finished her snack and left the garbage in a broken pot. She knocked. “It's an emergency. Let me in. Let me in.”

The door floated open and inside sat a pretty redhead at a table with a glass orb and desert crystals all around her bed. The magical woman from not long before. Kale saw her sometimes with a backpack asking for rides in the parking lot. The strange woman recognized Kale too but she never learned the face that went with the name.

 “I am the mistress Night Echo of Silverchair ,” she told Kale, and offered her a glass of bitter elixer next to the table amid a ring of candles. 

Kale shook her head. A shattered mirror lay on the table. A dagger buried in the hardwood sparkled in the candlelight. She thought she heard whispers from the tiny purple flames. The strange woman looked younger than her, yet tattoos covered her shoulders, fingers, and bare feet. A deep resentment fell over her face when she looked away from the light, like she was waiting for someone to die. 

“No, no." Kale said. "We need to get out of here. Something just wrecked the gas station. Someone is dead.”

“Yes, I know. You can leave if you want, but it won't go away. Yes, Kale. I've seen you around. Slip out of those terrible work clothes. You don't need them anymore. I have some nice comfortable robes in the drawer. You’re welcome to them.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I've been waiting for you to come. That thing outside. I saw it. It won't be coming back for a long time.'' She touched the largest crystal with love and care. Inside, a heartbeat. “You see, I summoned him. I summoned him here, Kale.”

“That's not possible.”

“Not at first, but here, where the time zones never change, I find that there are many stars that don't shine in the rest of the world, there are places that don't appear on any map, and there are lost men and women who come and go like a bus stop.”

‘Why, why did you do that?”

“Sit down. It's 60 degrees outside. Soon tornados of ice will fall, and you’ll freeze to death before you can reach your… little home. That's right. That must really bother you. I see it in the crystal, Kale. Sit down, it's warm in here, there are two nice beds, and there’s me, the arms of Night Echo, the sorceress of doom.”

Kale looked into the crystal beyond on the center of the table, and she felt the dark rings around her eyes pull her under. The door slammed shut. The chair felt comfortable. She’d been standing all day. Warm too. Despite the frost growing on the window, the power lines down sparking in the parking lot, the fields of snow melting under the small fires, warm clouds blowing fog from empty field to empty field.

“Now, let me read you.”

art: The Sorceress, Jan Van De Velde II, engraving, 1626

Beyond the Web

Beyond the Web

Graham Swanson

 The knife killed the monsters that followed him to his home, killed the puppets with human faces 

waiting in his basement, and killed the things watching him in the attic. He still heard them mounting 

in the dark, slurping the cells from dead flesh, prying up floorboards, and seeking the smell of 

blood. They remained barging against the locked door. His daughter screamed and screamed as they bit 

off one of his fingers and broke his nose. The witch warned him this would happen but he didn’t listen 

to her wisdom, he just drank the elixir from her pot and brought her wood to burn.

Buford came far from his home. The witch somewhere out there laughed at him, her youthful skin swollen with moisture and vitamins, disintegrating to malnourished green cracks and pale red sagging flesh. She told him to find it there over the fencing where the wolves protect the forest.

Buford carried his knife to the well cover in a heaving hurry that pounded wind and pus against his eardrums. The hallow wind blew fog around blackened trees and covered animus tracks with fallen leaves. Creatures of the dark scampered in the thick trenches of garbage water, old men smiled from veils on unlit porches and clouds of smoke. He heard her screaming at him from the other room. The wall muffled her strained clamor of violent ponder, yet he still heard it from the moon and stars.

The cover lifted for him when the clouds circled the moon and the branches formed a lens through which the pale light beamed. It shined on Buford, colored the blood on his arms and cheeks a bright silver, and invoked a salt smoke to lift from the bottom of the well. He looked down to see if any faces of water awaited him, then he took one last look at the knife. The blade forged from the green blood of the last albino spider cut through the webs sealing the well. Strips fell down to the bottom of the well as spiders crawled up Burford’s arm.

The voices from the well mumbled as the opened became clearer with each strike of the knife. The temperature around the well dropped. Everywhere else the leaves dripped and fog rose from pools of sinking rainwater, but as the well opened more and more Burford felt his warm blood steam as it leaked from his ears and eyes. The mist froze around him like soft snow and turned the trees overhead white. His wrist ached and back locked up, enduring the grinding bones and muscles, and kept chopping at the webbing. Spiders crawled into his jacket for warmth. His knife cut through the thick blankets of web-like ropes.

The screams drowned by the wall vibrated as the ground froze to crystals. Buford's waders snapped the blades of grass. He tore out knots of web and tossed it down on the ground. The spiders bit his chest and neck. In the darkness, he barely saw them but felt them tingle the sores on his flesh, the tender scars, and the pus-filled blemishes and rip off pieces of his skin to devour. Tiny hairy legs trembled upwards into his nose and eyes. He smashed the spiders against his face but more climbed from the webbing strewn across his arms and hands back onto his clothes and balding head.

The way almost became clear enough for him to dip his head down, but in the freezing enchantment over the ancient stones, he saw only snow falling in and a whirling lash of dry fog. Buford heard the screaming wall grinding against the ground at wicked speeds. The naked bodies receded back into darkness. When the knife quite cutting the webbing he looked at it again, feeling its handle with frozen numb fingers, he found the blade bent and dulled by layers of oozing web. He screamed into the night under cyclones of blood drops and curtains of fog.

The pommel tassel blew over his wrist. The eye looking after him winked and he felt the witch’s hair against his knuckles and between his fingers. He opened his palm to let the knife drop and a fountain of spiders flowed from the holes in his glove to the ground. The naked faces burst into flame around the well, arranged in a circle, all went quiet as the mist front the well changed to bright green. Buford leaned against the well and breathed it in.

The fog turned to smoke, but it didn’t hurt his lungs like cigarettes. It smelled like warm soot and charred birch sap. He tore off his clothes and watched them crawl away under a million spider legs. The frozen air chipped off the blood on his body. He lowered one foot into the well, then the other. The heat of a radiator warm his bare feet. He lowered himself down then let go of the bricks. The well went down for miles underground, to a tunnel that he crawled under long enough to cover his body in dust. On the other side, he heard the stretching metal of a huge cover larger than a cloud overhead and a warm wooden floor that stretched for miles. He scampered through the dark leaving a trail of filth behind him towards the far light hanging high over the ceiling. He climbed over bails of dust and webs, heard spring rattle above him. He peeked from the high cover to see the light, see where he managed to get to, and it looked like a bedroom, but not his own. He lived in a crack hotel on the outskirts of the factory where he worked as a welder. Wooden panels covered everything, the stitches hanging from the giant bedside look handcrafted, and no power cords divided the room. Oil burned in the lamps and a fireplace on the other side heated the room.

He stepped out to see who slept on the massive bed but he heard an earthshaking scream. “daddy! There’s something scary in my room”

Buford watched a giant spider leap from its covers as a larger, louder spider burst into the room. He dove under a sock but they all saw him skid on the smooth open floor. He felt a million eyes on his back. He knew his only chance was to escape back under the bed but to his horror the tunnel he came in through no longer existed.

“Kill it, daddy! Kill it!”

Across town, Buford’s daughter pretended to sleep comfortably in a big bed surrounded by pillows and stuffed animals. She was too afraid to sleep because she thought she had a dream of her biological father living in the woods dragging her by the hair screaming at her to throw away the clutter of bathing soaps she left in the shower into an ancient well. She almost fell asleep, then awoke screaming into the peace of night and the troubled dream leaked from her memory, but she still heard his screams. It came from under the bed. She looked down and met a spider on the floor. She called on her stepdad to come in. He burst into the door soaking wet only wearing a golden bath towel.

The witch, youthful again with silky black hair and red lips came to the door behind him wearing a fur bathrobe. “Did you have another nightmare?”

“No,” their step daughter whimpered. “I saw a spider. It was big and scary.”

“This old house.” the step dad looked out the window. It began to snow. “It must be the weather. The bugs are getting inside.”

the witch took the stepdad by the shoulder. “It’s gone now, wherever it was.”

“Try to get some rest, sweetheart.” the stepdad told his stepdaughter “Do you need some water or another blanket?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay.” He tried to hold back tears and terror. Her stepdad noticed the tense muscles in her face, but decided not to say anything.

“Good night. We’ll have oranges and bacon in the morning.”

“My favorite!”

“that’s right.” The witch smiled, and she brought the stepdad out of the room. “Sweet dreams. We love you.”

The stepdaughter looked out the window cuddling her stuffed animals and watched the snow build up outside. Somewhere out there her real father still looked for her. The scars on her arms and fingers from where his hunting knife slashed her muscles never healed right and still hurt on the night of the attack. Before she fell asleep she thought she saw a shadow at the window of a large spider. A dozen long legs, a hundred eyes, and a shape set of pinchers gleaming in the moonlight like a blade of hot steel.

art: "The Crying Spider" by Odilon Redon, 1881