The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

could be nothing other than doomed to final destruction when confronted with the revelation of an ultimate, dead, and bleak reality.

And yet this scheme, like all the others, I found unsatisfying. It answered all questions, allayed all doubts, provided one acquiesced in its inhuman principles, and so I concluded it was a hoax. For if the advocates of pessimism were correct, they would surely have destroyed themselves, negating all that their continued existence represented. Instead, they lingered on within life, filling time in the fruitless quest to persuade others, the bulk of mankind, that all men are nothing more than mindless puppets, and, thereby, themselves playing at being the puppet-master.

Their excuses were hollow — especially when they retorted that their deaths would cause unwarranted distress to those they left behind — or why should they care at all for the temporary and negligible reactions of others whom, their logic dictated, were as doomed and ensnared by human illusions as were they? Suicide, instead of causing pain (though doubtless they would) should have been viewed, by the true pessimist, as being an authentic act, an example to follow, not as an occasion for mourning.

A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.

For, in truth, is not all human philosophy simply the piling up of one word after another in a self-absorbed train of thought and justification? To pull the strings of mental association, to prompt the idea, to suggest the conclusion, to lead, to guide, to steal back into the shadows and work one’s “magic” from afar?

What then, of experience as opposed to reason? Can the experience of any one man be of significance to all others? And if experience be incommunicable, what then of a better example one man might set? Alas, even had I endeavoured to turn myself into a saint, such a course was beyond my powers. Fallen too far into the morass of materialism, my soul had begun to rot, my imagination had dried up, and I had reached the stage of dreading any contact with my fellow human beings.

I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever.

As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are.

One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages.

Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it.

Still, even if one is not rich, there is freedom in the imagination. I recall, in particular, a certain night on the dreary stretch of the busy Archway Road. The rain was falling quite heavily, and beneath the stellar street-lamps the droplets beat down like a majestic mystery upon the sodden and wet pavements, creating a world of splendour and of intense fascination. Reality was transformed; a deeper glimpse into the realm of possibilities was made apparent, one that suggested much more than a single moment, but which revealed itself as a shard from a greater eternity.

When I realised this, I began to see the vision of the Tower outside of those times when the mist seemed to bring it into existence, for it appeared my imagination had sufficient power to carry me more frequently into that other realm of spirit. And with each mental voyage, the next became less arduous.

Eventually, the Tower appeared omnipresent. I saw it, whenever I looked for it, at all hours of the day and night. Believing its appearance as a constant to be an indication of the mysterious structure that was now gaining a firmer foothold in reality — or what I took to be reality, or even some new reality imposed by my imagination — I naturally attempted to gain entrance to its immediate grounds, and perhaps even to its interior confines.

But when I tramped the maze of streets that I thought would draw me closer to the Tower, I found that, despite the ease with which I conjured it into being, still I got no nearer to my destination, and it remained as distant as when I first glimpsed it. Several times I made the attempt, but each one ended in exhaustion, and with a resultant bodily collapse dozens of miles from my home. Naturally, when asked about the object of my quest I dared not tell the truth lest I was regarded as being of completely unsound mind, and thereby unable to care for myself; a prospective candidate for the close attention and palliative care of the state (that is, of a society whose, albeit unconscious, aim is to crush any form of deviation from its own standards).

What was contained inside the Tower? Was it not the case that it was less important in and of itself than the secret within? Increasingly, I thought so.

Physical distance was not the barrier to the attainment of close proximity; rather was it a question of spiritual distance.

I felt myself to be subject to a form of discipline, a form almost totally alien to that of the world in which I felt myself stranded, and something beyond even the increased power of my imagination. And this discipline was being imposed from without; from a force that was entirely transcendent of the self-absorbed and self-consuming world in which I dwelt. Without the discipline one could not advance. Moreover one did not seek the discipline, rather was one called to it by its source. But I knew nothing of the nature of that source or of its meaning (if it was possessed of either).

The discipline required was precisely that form of introspection into which I had fallen, or to which I had succumbed. It was an ordered withdrawal from all the demands of the everyday. Not, I must add, as an escape. The process, I suppose, was most closely akin to meditation; an immersion into the essence of one’s very consciousness, and the Tower stood as a signpost, one not representing some external object but the nucleus of my own mind, and not the nebulous dreams that surrounded it.

One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one’s innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.

Although the discipline was imposed from outside, I knew that my withdrawal was not ordered by any force other than my own self, in its own intrinsic desire to find its true purpose — the absorption into a greater meaning, one that I might finally attain by entry into the Tower.

When one has given up all the petty jealousies of ambition, all the siren-calls of satiety, when one instead recognises that the loss of all one holds dear in this materialistic paradigm is not an escape but a liberation, a moving on, a step into the next stage of being, that this is the only form of authentic revelation that there is, then one approaches true freedom.

Within the Tower was the mystery of untold ages, and without there was only certainty. For every man there exists an individual Tower, but all the Towers are One.

And I know now, gazing upon the reflection that stares back at me from the mirror in the apartment wherein I dwell, that to see the Tower is to pass from this world to the next. My body is that of a white-haired ancient, one whose flesh is honeycombed with innumerable lipomas, one whose skeletal structure has become strangely distorted, one whose face is a maze of crisscrossed lines harbouring rheumy, cataract-clouded blue eyes, one whose yellow skin, dry as parchment, is stretched tightly over a death’s-head skull.

Time becomes fluid and non-linear as the liberty of disintegration takes hold. Time torments those who immerse themselves in its infinite progressions and regressions. Time, experienced in its entirety, is incomprehensible.

And indeed, since my discovery of the Tower, decades have passed in days and seconds have become