Chapter 6: The Forever Tower – Part 6 (Conclusion)

I didn’t bother looking back. I ran to the nearest door and tried it. It was locked. Locked, but there was no time to unlock it, no strength in me to break it open. I tried the next door, and it was locked too. And the next, and the next, and the next… All the time I refused to look back. The closer the sound grew, the darker the shadows crowded, the more the air picked up, first to but a breath then a steady breeze that pulled at my hair.

Tap, tap, tap.

When I looked up, I saw light. The end of the corridor, and beyond it ― the Tower. My eyes widening, I ran forwards. It was not the escape through the locked doors that the woman had urged, but it was an escape of some sort. An escape back to a world that at least made sense. And yet, as I ran, it seemed to me that something was growing from the edges of the tunnel. Not shadow, not wall, but something clear and hard. Like glass. I put my head down and ran faster, reaching down to undo the clasps that held my rucksack on. I would have to jump through before it closed. As my rucksack fell from my shoulders, I stumbled over my own feet for a moment, but picked myself back up and kept going. Faster.

But not fast enough. I collided with what was now a solid, thick wall of glass and stumbled backwards, one hand clutching my head, where pain now flared. In front of me stood my world, the line shuffling past as it always did, unaware or uncaring. Turning around, all I could do was stare back down this tunnel of walls and doors that was closed around me.

Tap, tap, tap.

I couldn’t see much of what was coming for me; merely the uncertain outline of a thin figure veiled in shadow, walking slowly, deliberately, surely. My ears told me there were more of them, but I couldn’t see where. And then the wall between two doors halfway down the corridor seemed to turn liquid and fold in on itself, leaving in its wake an opening and the echoing harmony of dozens of shoes, all tap, tap, tap-ing.

I stepped left and slammed my shoulder into the locked door there, knowing it would do no good. It jumped underneath my weight, but didn’t budge. I supposed that was a little how they had felt, when I was blocking the door. But they could not have been so desperate. I kicked at the door, but the action simply put me off balance and I stepped back.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a crack.

Tap, tap, tap.

The crack ran like thin lightning through the glass where my head had struck it. I kicked at it, and it grew, just a little.

Tap, tap, tap.

I glanced back down the corridor. I had room to back up, so I walked slowly backwards then charged again, my shoulder forwards, screwing my eyes shut moments before collision…

The glass did not shatter exactly, but it broke. A piece of it near the centre seemed to fall out into the Tower, except where it had fallen there was only blackness in its place. When I kicked again, more pieces fell away, and then more ― the glass was crumbling, and now I could see the pieces fly into the darkness as though it were pulling at them. And maybe it was; the wind had picked up, but now it was blowing the other way, towards the window where the world I knew was collapsing before my very eyes.

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Behind me, the noise had changed.

TapTAP, tapTAP, tapTAP.

They were running; an uneven, limping charge. There was space enough in the glass now, but it was dark. It was void. An abyss. How could I throw myself into that?

‘It’ll be dark,’ the memory of the woman’s voice reminded me, ‘but you have to do it or you’ll end up like me.’

Her command. ‘Gow now!’

The memory of two insignificant, forever lost, nameless souls lived in me. They mattered not to the world or the figures charging at me, they were nothing to time or death, or the endless stagnant decay of this reality, and if they were peeled from my head and discarded as I flickered away like a dying flame in these corridors then no one would notice. But I would remember that I could not remember. Maybe I would meet someone like me and tell them to find a locked door or a window to jump through, but I wouldn’t remember why. I would only know that I no longer knew so many things that I should still know. And that was more terrible than anything oblivion could offer.

As I jumped, I felt a swipe of air at my neck as one of their hands missed me by centimetres. I crashed through what was left of the window and found myself falling... falling towards shadow, an abyss enclosed by concrete walls of endless height interrupted by an infinite chaotic array of glass windows and inset balconies and... as a hurtling downwards wind flipped me, I saw the open door from which I had fallen, out into nothing.

The first thing I knew after that was… sound. I could hear wind. Not like the breath of the corridors, but true wind, over an open space. I felt it tug at my hair and my clothes, and it was cool ― even refreshing. The next thing I felt was pain. It was not bad, but it was there. There was a dull ache through every part of me, cut through here and there by sharp stinging in my arms and legs, doubtless the parting kiss of a slowly shattering window. And beneath me, I realised, was stone and dust. My face was pressed against gravel. I opened my eyes.

My vision blurry at first, it swam into view, and that view was endless. Gravel, dust and sand stretched away, hills of it, rising and falling all the way to the…

I slowly pushed myself up to a kneeling position and looked to the horizon. Who knew where I was, but as I slowly raised my eyes until I was craning back, looking directly up, I did not see a vague light, something to grasp for but never reach, something pale and uncertain. Instead, there was something vast, open and blue above me…

I saw the sky.