Spire in the Woods/8

I had no thoughts of Rob. Out there, on that island, I never considered for a moment that the bells had played a role, a large role, a huge, monstrous role in his suicide. He’d heard them. He’d found them. In the end, he’d put a homemade shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I’d like to think that if I had, I might not have pressed on. But when I’m being honest with myself, I know I would have. What’s death compared to knowing? What was so great about my life that it’d be better than hearing the bells at their source?

When I stood up, I realized I wasn’t at the shore of the island. I couldn’t even see the shore. I looked around, trying to figure out how I’d gotten so deep into the woods and noticed there weren’t any footsteps behind me. But there was a deep track. It looked like when I fell to my knees, my body had been dragged through the snow.

I should have stopped, but I didn’t stop. I pressed on.

The colonial houses, the broad, dirt road I’d seen when the bells rang— I felt like I could still perceive where they’d been. Some of the trees, the ones nearest me, were wrong. They were too young. They didn’t belong here. The road was real, even if I couldn’t see it. The houses loomed on all sides, even if I couldn’t see them, even if decades earlier they’d all been moved or destroyed. It was like the present had been superimposed on the past. Everything I saw felt less substantial than what I knew had been there before.

I'd seen the island's true face. I was on a road and the road would lead me to the Spire, the Spire housed the bells, and no new-growth forest could hide that from me.

It was slow going. My feet were numb. Each time I tripped in the dark, I had to pull my hands from my warm pockets to catch myself before I hit the frozen ground. Some snow had made it into my shoes and was melting. But like the hike where I befriended Kerry, I kept going. Even if I’d wanted to complain, who would I complain to?

I trudged my way deeper and deeper into the woods. I might have been the first person to walk there since Rob had made his way to the Spire back in late August. It’s a weird feeling to be that alone. It’s not privacy. It’s isolation.

When I stumbled into the clearing, I almost didn’t see it.

The Spire.

Everything else around me was frosted in snow, but not the Spire. It was pristine. It stood twice my height, its whitewashed facade nearly invisible against the snow. The Spire had a clean design: four large, flat faces tapering up to a sharp point, the sort of wooden spire you’d expect to see topped with a cross on a Protestant Church. I don’t think I’d have seen it all if it weren’t surrounded by a half-circle of withered, long-dead trees that looked as though they’d been rotting for ages.

All my hair stood on end. This was the source. The Spire in the Woods housed the bells. I approached it with reverence, like I used to approach the tabernacle after receiving communion. There was an energy in the air, an electricity. I could sense it. The Spire was invisibly warping the space around it. It was like when you were a kid, and your teacher had you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet.

Tonight there’d be no deer crossing signs, no air conditioners, no dates that didn’t line up on a family’s tombstones. But soon there would be the bells. Right here. Right in front of me.

My hand trembled as I reached out towards it. My cold fingers traced their way across the Spire’s wooden surface as lovingly as they had Alina’s skin. And it was even more luxurious.

I circled around the Spire, trailing my hand along its seamless joints, across its flawless paint. I found the window with its panes kicked out and wished I had the skill to fix it. Then a better thought occurred to me. I could go in. I could be in the room with the bells when they sounded.

I pushed my duffel bag through the window. Then, cautiously, gently, I poked my head in. I didn’t meet any resistance, not exactly, but the energy the Spire radiated built in intensity. My scalp tingled, my face felt flush, and my brain sang with excitement, as if all my neurons were firing all at once. Eagerly, I pressed my shoulders through the gap in the window. It was a tight fit, but I wriggled and squeezed my way into the darkness until I managed to get my hips through.

I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, but it was no use. Outside, I could see by the moonlight; the trees and their shadows stood out starkly against the white snow. But inside, there was nothing. I struggled to open my duffel bag. Ice had formed between the teeth of the zipper, and my fingers, still numb from the cold, had trouble gripping the slider, but eventually it opened enough for me to get my fingers in and force it the rest of the way.

The flashlights were, of course, gone. The incense was completely destroyed and my mother’s Bible only fared a little better. Half of its pages had gotten wet when I’d used the bag to pull Kerry out of the water and were now frozen together in a block. I found my grandfather’s lighter beneath the raft I’d borrowed from Kristy.

Lighter fluid’s freezing point is absurdly low, something like -240 degrees Fahrenheit, so despite having been left outdoors on a frozen lake covered in snow for a month, it actually lit on the third try. The meager orange flame seemed so bright.

I was on a small landing at the top of a flight of stairs. The landing was no bigger than a coffee table, and made of plain, unfinished wood that, unlike the beautiful exterior, had been badly warped by years of trapped moisture freezing and thawing inside of it. There was a hand railing in a similar condition; I was hesitant to lean against it as I held the lighter out over the abyss and peered down. The stairs wrapped around the outer wall of the Spire and disappeared into the darkness. In the flickering light, I could just barely make out a heavy beam stretched across the gap between the winding stairs, two floors below me. That had to be where the bells hung.

It never entered into my mind that I’d find anything down there but the bells. It never occurred to me to wonder how Amy Lowell Putnam would feel about me descending into her home; into the room where her husband had threaded metal rods into her flesh while she was still very much alive. Into the bowels of the clockwork that hourly displayed her to the townspeople, so her friends and neighbors could be entertained as her corpse zipped along on its track.

I wish I had, but my every thought was occupied by the goddamn bells.

My first few steps down the weathered stairs were slow and cautious. I’d test each step with my foot before fully shifting my weight, ready to pull myself back at the first sign of danger. They were slick, their surface covered in a fine layer of frost, and they bowed and creaked beneath me. But they held, and with each step I grew bolder, my pace quickening.

By the time I’d reached the next landing, I was coming down the stairs like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt like one, too, eager to unwrap the presents waiting for me below. I started taking the stairs two at a time. The lighter's orange flame sputtered as I gained speed, threatening to blow out.

A laugh, a mirthful, childish giggle bubbled up from deep within me. I could just make out, faintly, the shape of the bells. They were right there! From the next landing they’d be so close, I’d be able to reach out and touch the nearer of the two!

I leapt down the last three steps. The lighter went out and the landing collapsed beneath me.

I fell through two pitch-black stories. My body flailed, desperate to find purchase on anything it could, but the only thing I managed to connect with was the floor. My feet hit first and I had the queasy feeling of the wood shattering beneath me. This time, though, only one or two floorboards gave out and I came to a stop with a sickening crack as my chest slammed into the ground.

The wood floor, though bowed and weathered, didn’t afford my hands any purchase, and I could feel the weight of my legs and stomach dragging the rest of me towards another fall through God only knows how much more inky blackness.

I kicked with all my strength, but couldn’t get my legs up high enough to climb out of the hole I’d created. In that moment, I can’t even truly say that I felt panic. I was a cornered rat, all claws and gnashing teeth. A primal thing incapable of thought or feeling, governed by adrenaline and that basest of instincts, survival. I curled my fingers into hooks and thrashed with everything I was worth, clawing my way to safety.

The pain of it all crept into my mind slowly as the adrenaline wore away. The fall had knocked the wind out of me, and, as I’d later find out, broken two of my ribs. I can’t say how long I lay there on my back, struggling to pull air back into my lungs, but I can say that every breath I took felt like it was going to rip me open from the inside.

I gritted my teeth and attempted to sit up. My chest felt like it was on fire. I put my hands back behind me, to push myself into a seated position, and felt the sharpest pain of my life. I’d lost three fingernails, those of my left index and middle fingers and my right ring finger, while pulling myself out of the hole in the floor, but what really hurt, what felt even worse than my ribs, was the four-inch splinter that had stabbed beneath the nail of my right index finger and slid out the other side just above the first joint.

I collapsed back to the ground. My hand trembled as I brought my finger to my mouth. I hesitated for a moment, trying to think if there was any way to avoid what I was about to do, but there wasn’t. I was four, maybe five stories below ground, in the woods, on an island, in the middle of a frozen reservoir, surrounded by more woods, miles away from the nearest soul. No one was coming to help me.

I bit down on the splinter and pulled it back out the way it’d come in. My mind screamed the profanities my lungs couldn’t bear to push out. And it was just four slender inches. Nothing compared to what Amy Lowell Putnam had endured.

Though they were raw and bloody, my fingers probed the floor around where I lay, searching for the lighter. The only thing I found was one of my fingernails embedded between two floorboards. I thought about prying it out, but couldn’t imagine what good it’d do me. It’s not as though I could slide it back into place.

Once I was sure the lighter wasn’t within arm’s reach, I found myself wondering if I even wanted to find it. A part of me knew I’d eventually have to if I didn’t want to starve or freeze to death beneath the Spire, but it hurt so much to move, and hadn’t I come here to surrender myself to the bells one more time? Wasn’t that what I really wanted?

It was.

So I sat alone in the cold and the dark waiting for the Widower’s Clock to strike eleven.

The clapper of the bells struck their surface with the force of a cannon ball. In that instant, suddenly there was light.

It was a soft light, but after the total darkness at the bottom of the clock tower, I found the way it glinted off the innumerable gears and tracks and coils filling the room blinding, like glare of the winter sun bouncing off the snow.

A man spoke, his voice small and distant. “So, you’ve heard my bells?”

Adolf Reifler stood, a bent old man, before his workbench. His face was wrinkled and he leaned heavily on a cane, but his eyes burned with an intensity that belied his frail voice.

When he spoke again, I noticed his lips didn’t move, “You’re missing what you’ve come so far to see.”

I stood almost automatically and was surprised to find that although I could still feel my injured ribs and see the blood trickling from my mangled fingers, I could move with relative ease.

Adolf turned back to his bench. “The stairs behind you will lead you out.”

I marched across the wood floor where the hole I’d just created should have been. I was dimly aware of the same dreamy feeling I’d had outside of Alina’s house when I had felt compelled to watch her screw Ryan Dorset. I’m not sure if I listened to Adolf because I wanted to— although, make no mistake, I did want desperately to see the Widower’s Clock— or because I had no choice. It felt almost as though I was watching myself as I headed toward the stairs.

“Be sure to try the marmorkuchen,” Adolf said. “It’s really quite good.”

The stairs dumped me out into the middle of a well appointed room. An oriental rug ran down the center. Ornately framed paintings hung on the walls between each of the windows. It looked like quite a grand foyer, the perfect entrance to any courthouse or place of business out to impress the public.

The carpet led to a huge pair of double doors and I went to them without a second thought. They opened with ease, despite their size, onto a summer night and what appeared to be a party.

There were maybe two dozen or so men and a half-dozen women, all sporting old-fashioned suits and dresses, the sort of things they likely only wore to weddings and special occasions. They all stared up over my head, expressions of awe plastered dumbly over their frozen faces. I thought for a moment, just a moment, that they were staring at me, but quickly realized they were watching what I’d come to see, the dance of Reifler’s automatons, and unbeknownst to them, his wife and her lover.

I made my way through the crowd. The bells chimed for only the second time. Time seemed to have become loose, more elastic. My feet were moving at the proper speed but each tick of the great clock dragged out for several seconds. Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. It was nauseating. Toooooooooooooooock.

I took a spot beside a table full of refreshments. A man in a smart-looking uniform stood behind it, but, like all the other’s, he had eyes only for the clock.

Helping myself to a plate of marble cake and a heavy silver fork, I turned to finally get my first glimpse of the Widower’s Clock in all its glory. The clock tower was illuminated by electric lights, which surprised me as I wouldn’t have thought Enfield had been electrified in the early 1930s. It was easily five, maybe six stories in height. Its base was almost as broad as the width of the Reiflers’ house, and it tapered slowly until it reached the Spire. Its white wood paneling gleamed in the electric light; as grand and audacious as the Tower of Babel, it blasphemously penetrated the starlit sky.

The second floor was dominated by the tracks where the automatons hourly performed. Adolf Reifler, for all his faults, was truly a masterful engineer. His creations zipped along with such grace and fluidity, it was almost impossible to believe they weren’t alive. Except for two: a sluggish Southern belle and a stiff-limbed Confederate soldier, ironically the two most wooden figures on stage were the only two made of actual flesh and blood.

Behind Amy Lowell and her lover a backdrop, which must have been nearly a story in height, of a grand plantation house on fire rotated slowly into view. The Union automatons, each equipped with small electric lights designed to look like torches, charged towards the plantation house. They touched their torches to cutouts painted up like cotton fields as they went, and everywhere the torches touched, a red light turned on beneath the cutouts, illuminating the cotton flowers, revealing they were made of glass and sparkling as though they were actually on fire.

As the troops reached the plantation house, another group of automatons rose to greet them. Slaves. I cringed when I saw the slave automatons, they were such racist caricatures. The slaves set about beating their former owners, much to the delight of the New England audience who hooted and cheered as the Rebs received their comeuppance.

The Southern belle and Confederate automatons crumpled beneath the attack, their bodies folding in on themselves in a way that was only possible if their spines had been broken in multiple locations. The slaves grabbed Amy Lowell’s corpse and dragged it offstage. Two of the slave automatons turned as they departed, flashing toothy grins at the spectators.

Adolf Reifler was not a subtle man.

The bells rang once more, just as the Union soldiers shot the prone Confederate automaton. The onlookers burst into applause, well, most of it did. I noticed a man just off to my right side hadn’t celebrated. He looked bored, as though he’d seen this all before. Something else was off about him, too. He wasn’t dressed like the others. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

I wasn’t the only one who’d heard the bells. I wasn’t the only one who’d found the tower. And I wasn’t the only one watching the automatons’ endless dance. My eyes scanned the crowd. There was an emaciated man in a park ranger’s uniform, the bones of his face plainly visible beneath his skin, leaning against the end of the refreshments table. There was a boy in a tie-dyed shirt who looked to be about thirteen, his slashed wrists covered his corduroys in blood, but he gave his injuries no notice.

Were they dead? Was I? Had the fall killed me?

Then I noticed another figure sitting alone near the woodline. A young man with a slender build, about my height. His skin, burnt to a crisp, was the color of charcoal and most of his jaw was missing.

Robert Edward Kennan.

What was left of his skin flaked off his neck as he turned his head and fixed me with his gaze. Beneath his blackened eyelids, his watery eyes were as blue as a clear sky. Rob patted the ground next to him.

The bells chimed once more and Rob and I shuddered in bliss.

I took a seat next to him. He tried to speak but his injuries made it impossible to understand him. I think he was trying to apologize for killing himself, or maybe he was just sorry to see I’d followed him to the bells. I don’t know.

We sat together in silence, watching as another glass backdrop rotated into view: a glasswork of Atlanta. The lights made it flicker as though it was on fire. Time seemed to return to full speed, and the bells finished calling out the hour.

My body shivered and my ribs screamed. It was pitch black once more and I was sitting with my back against something, a wall maybe, and my ribs let me know in no uncertain terms that they did not appreciate this position. Slowly, I slid down until I was lying on my back.

I couldn’t fully process what I had seen. In his note to Fletch, Rob had said, “I will soon join them. Staring at her face as she runs the endless race.” Had he known he’d be stuck there when he died? Stuck watching the Widower’s Clock, stuck watching Amy Lowell Putnam endlessly running round and round in the automaton her husband had concealed her in? Was I going to be stuck too? All I could say for sure was that the spell was broken. I never wanted to hear the bells again.

The cold had numbed my fingers to the point where I could feel little more from my missing nails than a dull ache, and while I was thankful for that small blessing, it also meant that hypothermia and frostbite couldn’t be far behind. I needed to find the lighter. I needed to find a way out of there or my questions about the afterlife would be answered all too soon.

I tried pulling myself along the ground with my arms, but the stress on my ribs was too great. I had to push myself across the ground using my legs. It was painful, but bearable.

The darkness was so absolute, I had no idea which way I was facing or where the hole was in the floor. I moved slowly, dancing my fingers over the wood, like an insect’s antennae, hoping to find that little metal lighter that could mean the difference between life and death.

I was beginning to panic. I’d searched an area maybe twice the length of my body and found nothing. Not even the far wall. The room had to be huge. I could barely move. What if the lighter had fallen through the hole I’d made when I hit the floor? I was never going to find it...

I began mumbling prayers to myself, just to keep my growing sense of despair at bay.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

The Virgin Mary. The most exalted woman in all of Christianity. What could be more comforting than praying to her, the mother of God? Wasn’t I a child in despair? Don’t all despairing children cry out for their mothers?

So why did it feel so empty to pray to her now?

I didn’t know, but elected to continue my work in the oppressive silence.

My fingers were so cold and numb, the lighter didn’t even register when they sent it sliding deeper into the darkness. I only knew I'd found it because of the sound it made sliding over across the warped planks.

I flicked the flint once, and nothing. Twice and it sparked. Three times and it lit.

To suddenly see the flame was like staring at the sun. It took my eyes several seconds to adjust. That’s when I noticed I wasn’t alone.

Figures stood all around me, casting long shadows along the floor that disappeared into the edges of black beyond the lighter’s reach.

I panicked. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t fight, but I scrunched up my face and braced for an impact that never came. Slowly, I reopened my eyes, and, much to my relief, realized that the figures were automatons.

After 60-some-odd years of neglect they were all in a state of disrepair. Their plaster faces were spiderwebbed with cracks; pieces, sometimes full limbs, laid in heaps around their bases.

I was surprised I hadn’t encountered any of the tracks which lay everywhere on the floor, but I suppose I hadn’t covered very much area lying around on my back, nor would I be able to leave by doing so. I gritted my teeth and, despite the pain, forced myself up onto my feet.

The plaster bodies of the automatons seemed small, scarcely five feet in height, as I picked my way slowly between them. It made Amy Lowell and her lover having been hidden inside one of these things seem all the more grotesque. There was no way Adolf could have done it without chopping off their hands and feet.

One by one I climbed the stairs, taking frequent breaks when the pain in my ribs grew too intense for me. Eventually I drew even with the bells, which appeared to be rusted fast to the thick iron rings from which they hung. I don’t know why this surprised me so much; I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I thought they’d be made of polished silver and sparkle like starlight.

In time I reached the collapsed landing. Or rather, reached where it should have been. Now there was nothing but a gap, five feet across, with the staircase continuing its upward climb on the far side. It would have been easy enough to jump if my ribs weren’t broken and I trusted the wood on the other side to hold my weight. But they were broken and I was terrified of taking another fall.

I sat down on the steps and cried, utterly convinced that I would die there and join Rob and Adolf and Amy Lowell, in front of the Widower’s Clock every hour, on the hour, for all eternity.

It wasn’t fair. Yes, I had chosen to investigate the Spire in the Woods, but I didn’t choose to crave the bells. I didn’t choose for them to warm me when I was cold, or comfort me when I was scared. I didn’t choose to black out at the sight of Alina melting around Ryan Dorset’s member. And I certainly wouldn't claim to have been in my right mind when, just an hour earlier, I chose hearing the bells one more time over searching for a way out.

The lighter closed with a snap that echoed in the darkness. I had been a Catholic my whole life, but as I sat there on the edge of the broken stairs, straining to see even the faintest sliver of moonlight from the window that laid beyond my reach, I knew that my faith was gone.

I had set out to find evidence that there was more to creation than could be explained by science, and though I’d certainly found that, I felt more alone in the universe than ever. What kind of a God would create a world so cruel that it contained the bells? How could I pretend there was a design and a moral underpinning governing the universe when something as innocuous as a beautiful sound could rob you of your free will, and, by all indications, damn you for it?

Eventually I got tired of staring at nothing. It was too cold to keep sitting there. I lit the Zippo and headed back down the stairs. I needed to find a way to warm up.

My duffel bag was sitting a few feet from the hole I had created in the fall. I pulled out the raft and briefly considered inflating it. It would have been nice not to have to lie directly on the cold, hard floor, but ultimately I decided it’d be best to use it as a blanket.

It occurred to me that there might be something useful in the floor below. I crept as close to the edge of the hole as I dared, held the lighter over the chasm and peered down. It looked like most of the room below had been claimed by groundwater that had frozen solid. If the planks that broke my ribs hadn’t held, I doubt I would have survived slamming into that ice.

Lying back down hurt like hell. The raft didn’t seem like it was going to do much for me, but any insulation was better than none. Reluctantly, I closed the lighter. It didn’t have an unlimited supply of fuel. I’d have to be careful with it.

Waiting for midnight, shivering in the dark, my mind’s eye kept conjuring images of Rob Kennan’s burnt face, his one good eye watering. I really didn’t want to join him, but at the same time, I couldn’t wait to be warm again.

With a deafening clang, the bells tolled. It was midnight, and I once again found myself lying on the floor of Adolf Reifler’s workroom.

“You’re back?” He never looked at me, just continued to scan the rows of wrenches that hung from the wall. “People don’t usually come back quite so soon.”

“I can’t get out. The stairs broke.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” His voice was filled with pity but his unmoving lips retained their scowl.

He took a wrench from the wall and began picking his way back through the tangled mess of gears that seemed to only exist when the bells were ringing. I followed him to a hidden corner of the room where the Southern belle and Confederate soldier automatons stood. Adolf’s deft fingers pushed the dress down over the Southern belle’s shoulder exposing a bolt on her back. He slipped the wrench over it and set to work.

From beneath the lacquered wood Amy Lowell’s bones splintered and popped. My stomach revolted at the sound and I looked for a place to retch. Adolf continued to smile as he gave the bolt another half turn.

“You mustn't judge me too harshly,” came his sad little voice. “You can’t fathom the regret...the burden...I carried with me for the rest of my life.”

He pulled her dress down further, pausing only briefly to admire his handiwork as he exposed the majority the automaton's body, before continuing on to the next bolt.

“I loved my wife. Despite her faults— her vanity, her frivolity— I loved her. She was mine.” His hands slid up her body, pulling her dress back into place. “But there was no pleasing her.”

He lifted her arm up by the wrist and let go. Her hand herked and jerked as it fell back into place.

“Scheisse! Scheisse! Scheisse!” He yelled, his lips moving with each curse.

He grabbed the automaton by her head and twisted it violently in a way no neck could bend. It sounded like cracking knuckles.

The automaton’s blank eyes seemed to stare right at me. They were such a lovely shade of brown. I was lost in those eyes and thoughts of Alina until Adolf’s wrench returned to work and the sounds of bones crunching shook me from my revelry.

“You mustn’t doubt my love for her,” Adolf whispered through his closed lips. “What you’re seeing...I was simply angry then. It was a malady of spirit, and I admit that I have a temper, but, like squalls on the open sea, my foul moods disappear almost as quickly as they come. Taken against the rest of our marriage, not to mention the courtship, this was a moment. A fleeting moment.

“And it wasn’t as though she was blameless,” he continued. “You can’t possible know...can’t possibly understand the humiliation of seeing another man take what is rightfully yours.”

I felt compelled to speak. I’ve always hated it when someone challenged my experiences, it makes me feel so small, but it was more than that. My mouth moved, and it was like I was outside of my body, listening to myself tell Adolf all about Alina. And what I’d done to Ryan Dorset.

“So you do understand.” He sounded relieved, as if I’d just given him absolution for his sins.

The bells tolled.

Adolf gave the bolt on the automaton’s elbow a full turn, splintering Amy Lowell’s bones. It was loud, like a branch snapping off a tree in a storm. He again lifted her arm and let it fall. He must have been pleased with the results because he set down his wrench and headed towards the stairs.

I followed him without thinking.