Gregg Hurwitz - The Tower

As quickly as his rage had flared, it subsided. He sighed. "I do love games," he said softly to the empty room. "Let's see if Mr. Marlow can keep up."

Rising suddenly from the love seat, he began to pace about the room, chuckling softly and shaking his head. He stopped mid-step and whirled to face the television, which was rolling old publicity footage of Jade. His smile fled.

On the edge of sleep, in the fringes of the dappled orange-and-yellow light that flickered across the insides of Allander's eyelids, something waited, something terrible, like a dead body in a closet. Years had passed during which he had hardly slept at all, but as he had grown older and stronger, he had learned how to relax himself in the right ways. With all that had happened in the past two days, however, he found that relaxing was not easy.

Allander lay on the bed in the master bedroom and watched the fan make lazy circles above his head. Every time he began to drift off, he'd awaken with saliva flooding the sides of his tongue and a shallowness in his chest that restricted his breathing to short gasps. He knew that this time he couldn't push it down. After struggling himself awake a few more times, he surrendered to the terror. He knew that when it came this strong, it was going to have its way with him. He dozed off, and it seized him.

Allander had been taken when he was seven. The man was thick through the hips and buttocks and had a potbelly that hung over his belt. But worst of all was the gray stubble that peppered his puffy face.

They had tracked him for three days before they'd caught him. A checkout girl at the grocery store had recognized him from his sketch. They'd followed him to a filth-ridden motel behind a large freeway. When they'd broken in, he'd reached under his pillow for a gun and they had opened fire, making him dance, his body jiggling foolishly as the bullets entered it.

What they had found inside the motel room was unlike anything the veteran police staff had seen in their careers, and unlike anything they would see again.

Allander had been tied tightly to a chair, thick rope binding his wrists and ankles. He'd been naked, and a small shock of pubic hair had been painted, with a black permanent marker, above his prepubescent penis. He sat in his own defecation; it was later surmised that he had not been allowed movement except when molested or forced to perform acts.

The room had seemed the harrowing entrance to a world beyond reality, perhaps even the doorway to hell itself. It had been scattered with feces and blood, and illuminated only by a blinking television screen. Pornographic videos and magazines littered the floor, showing men with chains, women with animals, children with men. Sex tools of extreme perversion lay beside the more traditional handcuffs, whips, and blindfolds. Sets of masks were also discovered-leather masks with zippers crisscrossing the front, masks that merely covered around the eyes, masks of women's faces.

Most disturbing of all, however, had been the clown masks found beneath the stained sheets. Months later, some of the policemen still would awaken in a deep sweat, seeing the smiling faces and blank eyes of the clowns laughing at them through the darkness. And through the memory came the stench, and the realization of a horror that went beyond human comprehension.

Young Allander had been freed from his torture, and was returned home and to counseling. The thick red marks the ropes had left around his limbs soon cleared up. The whip scars on his back took a little bit longer, but eventually they, too, faded. He had seemed perfectly serene for his first three weeks home, his young mind brilliant in its repression.

Then the clowns had come to visit him.

He'd awakened screaming himself hoarse and his mother had rushed in and pressed his face to her bosom and made the clowns go away. His father had flicked on the light switch and stood in the doorway, his fists clenched in impotent anger and unfulfilled rage. Tears had traced a path down his face.

The clowns had come again and again in the night, and soon his momma couldn't make them go away anymore. Allander would cry hysterically at any prompting. He wouldn't watch TV because the cartoons sometimes had clowns, and he couldn't go near McDonald's because of the laughing white-faced clown that lived there, and even when his momma wore lipstick he would cry and try to smear it off with his child's fingers, sometimes digging his nails into her skin and leaving red welts.

The therapy had at first yielded no results, no reactions from the catatonic child. But once the clowns had begun to come in the night, the therapists' questions had probed like a flashlight shone into widened eyes.

An older man with long gray curls and a beard had tried to get him to play with dolls and make the dolls act things out. Then he'd tried to get him to draw, but Allander had taken the pencil and put it through the man's eye when the man's attention lapsed. He still remembered how the man's shattered spectacles had dangled from the end of the pencil as he'd screamed and clutched at his face.

Soon, the dolls had begun to look like clowns with accusing eyes, and so had his stuffed animals. One night, before the clowns could come, he had ripped the heads off all his stuffed animals and hidden them, with their placid, questioning eyes, in the bottom of his closet.

But still the clowns had come that night.

When his parents found him in the morning with his toys defaced, they had looked at him, eyes filled with concern and accusation, and had bestowed guilt upon him. He had screamed at them, "I have seen things, momma. I have done things." Things incomprehensible, things unimaginable. But of course they could not understand, and they couldn't make the hurt go away.

Allander had increasingly felt his difference, for he'd been avoided by his former playmates, and twice a week was sent to a special school where he would talk to adults about ink blots and about "The Period." There were so many faces that finally he could not tell them apart, or remember what they wanted. When he was nine, he had sodomized a younger boy in the school bathroom during recess. He had been taken away from regular school for good, and had had to spend more time at the special school.

One of the men who had come and talked to him was different. It was only to him that Allander could show the depth of his darkness. The new man was mostly interested in the monster, though, and not much in the child. He hadn't stayed long, but Allander remembered him and his gently slanted eyes.

When he was older, Allander had attacked his mother. He had come up behind her when she was putting on makeup, pursing her lips and winking first one eye, then the other. He had beaten her about the face and had shoved her down, but before he could reach resolution, he had heard the hard, punishing steps of his father on the porch.

He had fled out the back door into the darkness, traveling through what seemed one endless night of alcohol, prostitutes, sex, and drugs before he'd gotten caught with the five-year-old girl and his pockets stuffed full of her hair. He had been eighteen.

And still the clowns came.

Allander slept deeply, more deeply than he would have imagined possible. As he awakened, he had the distinct sensation of swimming upward, rising through levels of water as distinct and varied as the stripes of a rainbow. When he surfaced, he had a tremendous sense of focus.

He loaded the gray Mercedes he found in the garage with the supplies he needed. He slipped the roll of duct tape into his pocket, where it bulged conspicuously. It would come in handy, he knew.

He returned to the house and cut up food in little pieces to leave for the children. Gazing out the living room window, he could see teams of policemen with dogs prowling the beach in the distance, and he hoped that his clothes had sunk as he had planned. It was time to move to a less vulnerable position before they discovered a clue and started calling door to door.