The Dark Tower Read online

  ‘Whose interest does it follow?’ asked MacPhee, but no one answered this because Ransom at the same moment said, ‘You mention people. What sort of people are they?’

  ‘No, no,’ said MacPhee. ‘Don’t let them start describing. We want our observations to be perfectly independent.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Orfieu.

  ‘You say it follows a man into the Dark Tower,’ said I. ‘You mean, do you, it follows him till he disappears inside?’

  ‘No,’ said Scudamour. ‘It sees through walls and things. I know that sounds rather startling, but you must remember this is an external or artificial memory and prevision—as the lens is an external eye. It behaves just like memory—moving from place to place and sometimes jumping, in obedience to laws we don’t yet know.’

  ‘But all roughly in the same place,’ added Orfieu. ‘We don’t often get more than ten miles away from the Dark Tower.’

  ‘That’s not very like memory,’ said I.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Orfieu; and silence fell. The wind seemed to be blowing up for a storm in the land we were looking at. The clouds followed one another in ever swifter succession across the face of the Moon, and on the right of the picture the waving of the trees became distinctly noticeable. Finally, heavy banks of cloud came up, the whole scene disappeared into a monochrome of dark grey, and Scudamour switched off the light and drew the curtains. We blinked in the sudden inrush of daylight and there was a general shifting of positions and intaking of breath, as among men whose attention has been strained.

  ‘Quarter to seven,’ said Orfieu. ‘We’d better think about getting ready for dinner. Everyone except old Knellie is down for the vac., so we ought to be able to get away fairly soon afterwards.’

  During the whole of our stay in College with Orfieu, his aged colleague Knellie (Cyril Knellie, the now almost forgotten author of Erotici Graeci Minimi, Table-Talk of a Famous Florentine Courtesan, and Lesbos: A Masque) was a great trial to us. It would not be fair to mention him in a story about Cambridge without adding that Oxford had produced Knellie and indeed nurtured him till his fortieth year. He was now a shrunk, pale man with a white moustache and a skin like satin that had been badly creased; very carefully dressed; nice in his eating; a little exotic in gesture; and very anxious to be regarded as a man of the world. He was the affectionate type of bore, and I was his selected victim. On the strength of having been at my old college—some time in the nineties—he addressed me as Lu-Lu, a sobriquet I particularly dislike. When dinner was over and Orfieu was just beginning to make his apologies to the old man for withdrawing us on the ground of urgent work, he held up his forefinger as prettily as if he had newly learned the trick.

  ‘No, Orfieu,’ he said. ‘No. I’ve promised poor Lu-Lu some of the real claret, and I’m not going to let you take him away now.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother about me,’ said I hastily.

  [Here folio 11 of the manuscript—about 475 words—is missing.]

  any words of mine could describe.

  Drunk with fatigue, and perhaps a little drunk with claret too, Ransom and I emerged into the open air. Orfieu’s rooms lay on the far side of the court. The starlight, and the sweet summer coolness, sobered our mood. We realised afresh that behind certain windows, not fifty yards away, humanity was opening a door that had been sealed from the beginning, and that a train of consequences incalculable for good or evil was on foot.

  ‘What do you think of it all?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Ransom. After a short pause he added, ‘But I can tell you one thing. I’ve seen that building—what Scudamour calls the Dark Tower—before.’

  ‘You don’t believe in reincarnation?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m a Christian.’

  I thought for a minute. ‘If it’s in the past,’ I said, ‘then, on Orfieu’s theory, there’s no reason why lots of people shouldn’t “remember” the Dark Tower.’

  By this time we had reached Orfieu’s staircase.

  I suppose that our experience at the moment of entering the room must have been rather like that of entering a cinema; there would have been the same general darkness, the lighted screen, and the groping for unoccupied seats. But it would have been unlike a cinema because of the ghostly silence in which the ‘picture’ proceeded. All this, however, I can only conjecture in the light of later experiences with the chronoscope; I remember nothing of our entry on this particular evening. What followed has effaced it, for destiny chose this night to pitchfork us brutally, and with no gentle gradations, into something so shocking that, if I had not had the business of recording it always before my mind, it would by now perhaps have been dropped out of my consciousness altogether.

  I am going to tell you what we saw in the order which will make it clearest, not in the order which my attention actually followed. At first I had no eyes except for the Man; but here, the room in which he sat will be described first.

  We were looking at a chamber of greyish-brown stone which seemed to be lit by morning daylight from windows that were not in our field of vision. The room was about the width of the screen so that we could see the walls on each side as well as the wall that faced us, and each of these three walls was covered down to the floor with decorations in low relief. There was not so much plain surface as you could lay the point of a penknife on. I think it was this intense crowding of ornament that chiefly produced the disagreeable effect of the place, for I do not recall anything specially grotesque or obscene in any single figure. But no figure was single. You would get a floral pattern, but the individual flowers were repeated till the mind reeled. Above that there might be a battle-piece, and the soldiers were as numerous as those of a real army; and above that a fleet, whose sails could not be counted, riding on a sea in which wave rose behind wave for ever and each wave was done in the same relentless detail, up to where at last a regiment of beetles appeared to be marching down to the coast, every beetle distinct, the very joints in their armour traced with an entomologist’s accuracy. Whatever one looked at one was aware of more, and still more, to the left of it and the right of it, above it and below it, all equally laborious, reiterative, microscopic, and all equally clamorous for an attention which one could not hope to give and yet had difficulty in withholding. As a result, the whole place seemed to be bursting, I cannot say with life (the word is too sweet), but with some obscure kind of fertility. It was extraordinarily disquieting.

  About four feet from the front a high step ran right across the room so that the further part of it formed a kind of dais, and in the side walls at each end of the dais there were doors. One half of this dais—that on our left—was protected by a kind of half-wall or balustrade, which rose about four feet from the surface of the dais and five feet from the lower, and nearer, part of the floor. It came out to the middle of the room and there stopped, leaving the rest of the dais visible. The chair in which the Man was seated was placed on the lower floor in front of the balustrade. He was therefore invisible to anyone who should walk into the room along the dais from the door on the left.

  Against the right-hand wall, well forward and opposite the Man, there was a squat pillar surmounted by a curious idol. At first I could hardly make out what it was, but I know it well enough now. It is an image in which a number of small human bodies culminate in a single large head. The bodies are nude, some male and some female. They are very nasty. I do not think they are meant wantonly, unless the taste of the Othertime in such matters differs remarkably from our own. They seem rather to express a savagely satiric vision, as if the sculptor hated and despised what he was making. At any rate, for whatever reason, shrivelled or bloated forms predominate, and there is a free treatment both of morbid anatomy and of senile sexual characteristics.

  Then on top there is a huge head—the communal head of all those figures. After full discussion with my colleagues I have decided not to attempt a description of the face. If it were not recognisable (and it is difficult to convey the ef
fect of a face in words), it would be useless; on the other hand, if many readers, especially of the less balanced sort, recognised the face, the results might be disastrous. For at this point I must make a certain statement although the reader will not be able to understand it till he has read further into the book. It is this: that the many-bodied idol is still there in that room. The word still is in some ways misleading, but I cannot help it. The point I want to make is that the things I am describing are not over and done with.

  All this description of the room I believe to be necessary. MacPhee, who is beside me as I write, says that I am lengthening it out simply in order to postpone the moment of describing the Man. And he may be right. I freely admit that the memory from which I write is an extremely disagreeable one and that it struggles in the most obstinate manner not to be set down in words.

  Yet in the general appearance of the Man there was nothing to shock one. The worst you can say of his face is that it was, by our standards, singularly unattractive. He had a yellowish complexion, but not more so than many Asiatics, and he had lips at once thick and flat like those of a carved Assyrian king. The face looked out from a mass of black hair and beard. But the word black is inadequate. The stiff, heavy masses—again reminiscent of carving—could not have been attained in our race without the use of oil, and hair so black would, among us, be lustrous. But this hair showed neither natural lustre nor the gleam of oil. It was dead black, like the darkness in a coal-cellar, a mere negation of colour; and so were the heavy robes in which the Man was swathed down to the feet.

  He sat perfectly still. After seeing him, I think I shall never describe anyone in our own time as ‘perfectly still’ again. His stillness was not like that of a man asleep, nor like that of an artist’s model: it was the stillness of a corpse. And oddly enough, it had the curious effect of making one think that it must have begun suddenly—as if something had come down like the blade of a guillotine and cut short the Man’s whole history at a moment. But for what followed, we should have thought that he was dead or that he was a waxwork. His eyes were open, but the face had no expression, or none that we could interpret.

  MacPhee says that I am again drawing out my description needlessly; going round and round while the most important thing about the Man remains to be described. And he’s right. The anatomical absurdity—the incredible thing—how can I write it down in cold blood? Perhaps you, reader, will laugh. We did not, neither then, nor since, in our dreams.

  The Man had a sting.

  It was in his forehead, like a unicorn’s horn. The flesh of the forehead was humped and puckered in the middle, just below the hair, and out of it stuck the sting. It was not very big. It was broad at the base and narrowed quickly to its point, so that its total shape was rather that of a thorn on a rose-branch, or a little pyramid, or a ‘man’ in the game of halma. It was hard and horny, but not like bone. It was red, like most of the things in a man, and apparently lubricated by some kind of saliva. That is how MacPhee tells me I ought to describe it. But none of us would have dreamed of saying ‘lubricated’ or ‘salivation’ at the time: we all thought what Ransom thought—and said:

  ‘Dripping with poison. The brute—the dirty, dirty brute.’

  ‘Has this appeared before?’ I asked Orfieu.

  ‘Over and over again,’ he answered in a low voice.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Inside the Dark Tower.’

  ‘Hush!’ said MacPhee suddenly.

  Unless you had sat with us in the dark room and seen the Stingingman, you could hardly imagine with what relief, with what shiftings in our chairs and releases of breath, we saw that the door on the left of the Othertime room had opened and that a young man had entered on the dais. Nor will you understand how we loved that young man. More than one of us confessed afterwards that we had felt an irrational impulse to warn him of the horror sitting silent in the chair—to call out as if our voices could have reached him across whatever unknown centuries lay between us and the Dark Tower.

  The young man was concealed from the waist downwards by the balustrade; what was visible of him was naked. He was a fine muscular fellow, bronzed from the open air, and he walked slowly, looking straight before him. His face was not very intelligent, but it had an open and agreeable expression, sobered, apparently, by something like religious awe. So he appears, at least, when I try to analyse my memory: at that moment he appeared to me like an angel.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said MacPhee to Orfieu, who had suddenly risen.

  ‘I’ve seen this done before,’ he replied curtly. ‘I’m going out to take a turn in the open air.’

  ‘I think I’ll come with you,’ said Scudamour, and both of them left the room. We did not understand this at the time.

  While these words were being spoken, the young man had already advanced to the open part of the dais and stepped down on to the lower floor. We now saw that he was barefoot and dressed only in a sort of kilt. He was obviously engaged in some ritual act. Never looking behind him, he stood motionless for a moment with his gaze fixed on the idol. Then he bowed to it. Then, when he had straightened himself, he took three paces backwards. This brought him to a position in which his calves almost touched the knees of the Stingingman. The latter sat still as ever and his expression did not change; indeed neither of them gave any sign that he was aware of the other’s presence. We saw the young man’s lips moving as if he were repeating a prayer.

  Then, with a movement as much too swift, as his previous immobility had been too still, for humanity—with a movement like the dart of a dragonfly—the Stingingman had shot out his hands and gripped the other by the elbows; and at the same time he put down his head. I suppose it was the sting which made this movement seem so grotesquely animal; the creature was so obviously not letting his head sink in thought as a man might; he was putting it into position like a goat that means to butt.

  A frightful convulsion had passed through the victim’s body when he first felt himself seized; and as the point of the sting entered his back we saw him writhe in torture, and the sweat gleamed on his suddenly whitened face. The Man had stung him apparently in the spine, pressing in the needle-point of the sting, neither quickly nor slowly, with a surgeon’s accuracy. The struggles of his victim did not last long; his limbs relaxed and he hung limp in the grip of the operator. I thought he had been stung to death. But little by little, as we watched, life came back to him—but a different life. He was standing on his own legs again now, no longer hanging, but his stance was stiff. His eyes were staringly open and his face wore a fixed grin. The Stingingman released him. Without once looking behind him, he hopped back on to the dais. Strutting with sharp, jerky movements, lifting his feet unnecessarily high and swinging his arms as if in time to the blaring swagger of some abominable march, he continued his walk along the dais and finally left the room by the door upon our right.

  Almost at the same moment the door on the left opened and another young man came in.

  In order to avoid telling over and over again what I hope, when once this book is finished, to efface for ever from my memory, I may as well say here and now that I saw this process carried out about two hundred times during our experiments with the chronoscope. The effect on the victims was always the same. They entered the room as men, or (more rarely) women; they left it automata. In recompense—if you call it a recompense—they entered it in awe, and left it all with the same clockwork swagger. The Stingingman displayed neither cruelty nor pity. He sat still, seized, stung, and sat still again with the passionless precision of an insect or a machine.

  At this session we saw only four men poisoned: after that we saw another thing which I am afraid must be told. About twenty minutes after his last patient had left the room, the Stingingman rose from his chair and came forward—came to what we could not help regarding as the front of the stage. We now saw him full-face for the first time; and there he stood and stared.

  ‘Great Scot,’ said Ransom suddenly. �
��Does he see us?’

  ‘It can’t be, it can’t be,’ said MacPhee. ‘He must be looking into the other part of that room—the part we can’t see.’

  And yet the Stingingman slowly moved his eyes, exactly as if he were taking stock of the three of us one by one.

  ‘Why the hell doesn’t Orfieu come back?’ said I, and realised that I was shouting. My nerves were badly jangled.

  And still the Stingingman went on looking at us, as it seemed, or looking at people in his own world who for some reason occupied just the same places in relation to him as we did. It lasted, I suppose, ten minutes or so. What followed must be described briefly and vaguely. He—or it—began to perform a series of acts and gestures so obscene that, even after the experiences we had already had, I could hardly believe my eyes. If you had seen a mentally deficient street-urchin doing the same things at the back of a warehouse in Liverpool docks, with a grin on his face, you would have shuddered. But the peculiar horror of the Stingingman was that he did them with perfect gravity and ritual solemnity and all the time he looked, or seemed to look, unblinkingly at us.

  Suddenly the whole scene vanished and we saw once more the exterior of the Dark Tower, the blue sky behind it, and white clouds.

  III

  Next day, as we sat in the fellows’ garden, we arranged our programme. We were languid from insufficient sleep and from the sweetness of late summer all about us. Bees murmured in the foxgloves and a kitten, which had placed itself unasked on Ransom’s knees, stretched out its paws in a vain effort to catch, or touch, the smoke of his cigarette. We drew up a time-table according to which we were to take our turns as observers at the chronoscope. I forget the details, for those of us who were off duty so frequently dropped in to share the watch, or else were called up to see some specially interesting phenomenon, that the whole of that fortnight is confused in my mind. College was so empty that Orfieu had been able to find bedrooms for us all on his own staircase. The whole thing, except the scenes on the chronoscope itself, comes back to me as a vague chaos of midnight calls and noonday breakfasts, of sandwiches in the small hours, baths and shaves at unaccustomed times, and always, as a background, that garden which, whether by starlight or sunlight, so often seemed our only link with sanity.