The Old Keepers

The warmth of stored body heat between a thumb and ring finger. The weight of metal sliding around the base of a middle digit. A nervous habit transmuted by determined practice into a cue to stop and ask a single, disarmingly simple question:

Is any of this real?

Focus. Disengage the autopilot of everyday life. Take a breath and look around. Where am I? Why am I here? How did I get here?

Answer carefully, and, most importantly, accept the conclusion. Don’t be drawn back in.

Turn around, and take a step.

***

Moonlit Holmstowe had changed since the last time Zoe had briefly walked its roads. Even from the moment she had turned away from the hazy, joyful dream of endless holidays hiking through the Kentish woods with her mother, the familiar streets that had emerged beyond the trees had led her to unexpected ends.

Having not seen the lighthouse from afar before now, Zoe took a moment to silently apologise to her brother for criticising his description. It really was more of a tower than it was a lighthouse. Sure, a light may well have burned near its apex, but the ship-warding glow seemed almost an afterthought in the building’s strange, Gothic construction.

It wouldn’t have seemed out of place attached to a church or cathedral, but, perhaps more strikingly, as Zoe approached across the tidal bridge, she saw that the entrance at the tower’s base looked precisely the same as it had at her last visit. Unlike the ever-shifting town behind her, not a single stone block felt out of place.

The rest of the dream seemed subject to the wandering currents and eddies of her subconscious mind, but the tower, by contrast, felt fixed. Bathed in pale moonlight, and as real as anything in the waking world, the building was a solid, static point that Zoe could neither change nor displace.

If Eirene was right that this was just a desperate trick of her mind, then she could only congratulate herself on being wilful enough to create such a stubborn aberration amidst the surrounding sea of roiling change.

She checked behind her as she pulled against the door, wary of whatever had stopped her last time she had stepped inside this place. Although she knew the hand on her shoulder and the words in her ear had been her friend’s, something in the back of her mind just couldn’t shake the idea that the voice itself had belonged to someone else.

That familiar dread pooled at the base of Zoe’s stomach as she once more found herself confronted with the spiral of stone steps leading down into the darkness below the tower. Wary of being grabbed again, she fought past the instinctual fear rising in her chest and pulled the doors closed behind her, shrouding the tower’s interior in darkness.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she realised there was still just enough light by which to see. A quick glance up revealed that the tower’s interior terminated abruptly only a few feet above her head. However, the very bottommost of the square, glassless windows she’d seen dotted along its exterior were visible inside too, allowing both moonlight and an ocean-stained breeze to filter down to where she was standing by the door.

The muffled sounds of waves crashing against the base of the island outside were drowned out by the tuneless howling of the wind echoing through the inverted tower’s hollow interior.

Zoe swallowed and set her eyes firmly on the stairs, reaching a hand into her coat pocket and pulling out the torch from within that she had just decided had been in there all along. Increasingly afraid as she was becoming, she was at least glad for the reassurance that she still retained some control, even in this place.

She pressed the button on the side of the torch and frowned when nothing happened. A few more attempts later, and a weak, flickering beam of light finally shone out from the LED bulb and cast harsh shadows against the wall behind the top of the stairs.

Zoe gritted her teeth. There was a part of her that wondered if her torch’s ability to illuminate was somehow tied to her own resolve, and it was thereby a little disquieting to see such a fragile and trembling projection against the opposing wall.

It didn’t matter, she decided. She wasn’t here for her own enjoyment.

Taking a deep breath, Zoe crept across the base of the tower and took her first step down onto the stony spiral staircase. She hated how loudly even her most careful footsteps echoed through the interior of the hollow tower, but she could only hope that the groaning of the wind would mask her approach from… well… anything that might be lurking at the bottom.

She kept her pace steady, moving perhaps a little faster down the dizzying spiral of stone than she would have liked for fear that morning might come before she reached her goal. She must have more time now than during her last attempt, right? Sleeping in her own bed at night, rather than on a school desk in an empty classroom over lunch break…

Still, there was no way to keep track of time in here that she knew of, so, much as her steadily rising heart rate was trying to convince her otherwise, she had no real choice but to keep moving forward.

When an end to the circular descent hadn’t made itself apparent by her third circuit around the tower’s inner wall, Zoe stopped for a moment to lean over the steps and cast her flickering light down into the abyss. There was no handrail, so she kept her centre of mass away from the edge as she peered down.

Nothing.

She checked back above her, and noted that her suspicion that this place was somehow more stable than anywhere else in the dream appeared to be proving true. Having been keeping track of her rotations, she counted just as many stairs above her as she expected.

Without warning, her light died again, casting her back into sudden darkness. The failing torch kept going out of its own accord, but, so far at least, she had managed to get it to come back to life with a few more presses of its switch.

Coaxing her only light source back into service once more, she set her jaw and continued on down, hoping as she went that the monotonous descent wouldn’t be enough to lull her back into the state of unaware dreaming from which she’d worked so hard to escape in the first place.

***

When the warm, flickering light from below had first emerged into view, it had taken Zoe more than a few steps to register that it wasn’t just her mind playing tricks.

She’d lost track of how long she’d been descending the stairs now, and she could only hope that she still had a good amount of time left before the morning.

Frowning as the subtle changes in the surrounding illumination slowly became more apparent, Zoe turned her torch off and squinted over the side of the stairs.

There was what looked like a wooden floor far below, strewn with objects that she couldn’t make out, and cast in a wavering light emerging from one side of the tower’s wall. The tower itself seemed to have been slowly getting wider as she descended, so it would still be a few minutes yet until she reached the floor below.

The temptation to call Kit’s name died before the breath even made it to her lips. There was something sinister about this place that, although she’d yet to encounter anything… well, alive… kept her from wanting to draw any unnecessary attention. If Kit really was down there, then something very insistent in the back of her mind told her that it would be much safer to keep on creeping down the steps and find out for herself.

It may have only been a dream, but something about the potential danger still felt uncomfortably real.

Hurrying down the last few rotations of the staircase as quietly as she was able, Zoe kept her torch in her pocket and her silhouette close to the wall.

The howling of the wind above finally started to die back, and she couldn’t help but pause as the retreating noise was replaced by not only the crackling of a fire burning below her, but by a muffled, lilting melody.

Frowning, she pushed herself to round the final circuit of the staircase, finally feeling her shoe touch down on comparatively soft, pliable wooden floorboards.

With one cautious foot still on the last of the stone steps, Zoe took a moment to absorb the scene before her, quickly noting that, although the staircase terminated here, it continued on down again on the other side of the room.

The space must have been around forty metres across, and was lit solely by a grand fireplace built into the wall to her left. Decorated with dusty, antique furniture, almost like an enormous living room, the chamber looked like everything inside it had been scaled up so that, had the space been shrunk down to the diameter of the tower above, everything would have been the expected size.

Monstrous armchairs partly blocked the firelight from reaching the far wall, where towering bookshelves flanked a set of mouldering, oversized bunk beds. Atop the dining-table-sized coffee table by the fire, a gramophone warbled out muffled and crackling ballroom music through a tarnished old acoustic trumpet large enough for Zoe to crawl inside and hide.

Most unsettling, though, were the statues. Three great, hulking gargoyles, wingless and matched to the proportions of the oversized room, stood frozen in a grim pastiche of what everyday life might have looked like for people living in a place such as this.

One hunched over a lit gas stove by the far stairs, as if tending to the contents of the bubbling pot from which Zoe could see steam curling up and past the statue’s snarling, canine visage. Another by the bookshelves clutched an enlarged tome between its jagged claws, standing motionless atop the toes of its bestial hind legs as it seemed intent on replacing the book on a higher shelf.

The third, largest by far, remained largely obscured, collapsed in front of the fire into an armchair that, even with its distended size, was still too small for the figure that it bore. Facing away from Zoe as it was, head tilted unnaturally far back over the top of its seat, the only detail she could make out was the yawning emptiness of the statue's deep, shadowy eye sockets.

Swallowing her unease, Zoe crept away from the stairs and slowly traced the edge of the chamber along the opposite wall to the fireplace, until she came to the bookshelves and had to contend with the statue replacing books. Keeping a firm eye on the thing, and noting that, up close, its body appeared draped in old, tattered clothin—

Bang.

Her foot collided with something solid, and her heart hammered in her chest as she glanced down and saw a long, serpentine tail on the ground, leading away from the statue’s back.

She spent an uncomfortably long few minutes staring into the statue’s cavernous eye sockets as she waited for the other shoe to drop, expecting that it would spring to life at any moment and pounce on her for disturbing it.

But as nothing seemed to come of her transgression, she allowed herself an uneasy glance back at the other two statues in the room. Noting that neither of them had moved, she spared the one closest to her one last look before carefully stepping over its tail and making a silent, crouching dash the rest of the way to the far stairs to continue her descent.