Black Box: Book Three

50 ~ The Spire in the Woods (Part Three)

Rob had reached the first island. He'd been searching fruitlessly for nearly 40 minutes when he heard them. The bells. Being so much closer now, they were even clearer. He fell to his knees, letting their sensation, their warmth, wash over him. For a moment, he knew bliss.

The bells rolled back, like the ocean at low tide. Rob found himself shivering on the ground. He could hear nothing but frogs and crickets.

He rose on unsteady legs, sure of only one thing. In an hour he'd be there, he'd be standing before the Spire. He'd hear the bells, feel them, up close. He ran to the shore and dove into the waters.

Rob emerged from the reservoir onto the rocky bank of the second, and far larger, island. He stumbled barefoot through the woods, increasingly aware of how dark it was beneath the trees. As the bells' siren call faded in his mind, he began to doubt himself. The Island was nearly two miles long and a half mile across, he could search it all night and never find a damn thing.

The bells chimed once more. He turned to face them. There it was. In the center of a grove of dead trees, the Spire jutted out from the ground like a pike set to receive a charge. Its white paint was oddly untouched by age. Small windows adorned each of its sides. Framed by the dead trees and bathed in moonlight, it called.

Unable to resist their song, yet too overwhelmed by their warmth to walk, Rob crawled to the Spire like an infant to its mother. He pushed against the slats of the window. They gave way and he squirmed his way inside.

Rob landed on the top of a staircase. As the bells continued to chime, he pulled his shuddering body down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the enveloping darkness within, until he lost himself once more in the ethereal sounds and their radiating warmth.

Once the silence returned, Rob strained in vain to see. The air was humid, and black as ink. He could feel wood, dank and rotting, pressed against his bare calves. It gave him the impression he was sitting Indian-style inside of a living thing, like Jonah in the whale.

Slowly, Rob rose to his feet. He held his hands out in front of him and groped blindly. He hoped he'd find a wall or a banister to the stairs, anything that would give him a clue about his surroundings. Instead he found nothing, forcing him to shuffle deeper into the impermeable darkness.

His outstretched fingers recoiled from the soft surface they encountered. What was it? He shook as he reached out, letting his hands land once more on the chest-high object in front of him.

It was wrapped in cloth. It only extended out to about the width of his shoulders. The cloth hung loose over something hard that his hands couldn't identify. Rods? Dowels? His probing fingers traced up the object's outer edge until he felt something he could identify. He froze. His fingers were in the eye socket of a skull. His thumb rested on its teeth.

The bells rang again, if only inside Rob, as his mind's eye showed him the endless dance. He'd sat there in the dark, his unseeing eyes transfixed by the clockmaker's wife as she was dragged on her post through the twirling gauntlet of Union automatons. He saw her, alive and dead, the blush of youth, the maggots of decay, twitch and scream and moan as her body was pierced by countless bayonets. He saw her face as she ran the endless race.

Rob shrank and shriveled, collapsing to the floor. Like a wounded animal, he crawled and clawed his way back. Back, back, back. Until he hit the wall, and even then he didn't stop but pushed against it with all his strength, hoping to retreat further.

His flailing limbs struck a step, the first of many. With what little control he had over his frenzied mind, bolted for the surface, and an escape from the moist pit. And the clockmaker's wife.