CHAPTER SIXTY ONE


    The door opened to darkness. A box of light fell through the doorway onto the ground, but the light stopped dead. The surface inside the tower didn’t reflect the light in any direction. The light from the doorway fell on a paved floor of irregularly cut stones, and a sill of red bricks. Tom heard the whir of birds'' wings and he looked up. A conspiracy of ravens flew overhead, flying into an upper window of the tower.


    Although the idea of stepping in and letting the door shut behind him was troubling, Tom knew that this was the only way forward. He could feel the door trying to shut, being weighed in some way. He gave the door a shove, hoping it would catch in some way and remain wide open, only the door immediately came back to his pushing hand. There was a large handle on the inside of the door which Tom tested. It worked in the same way as the key from the other side: releasing the locking mechanism from the floor. Tom took careful note of where the handle was in relation to the door, in case it was too dark to see it.


    At the edge of the box of light was the bottom step of a stone staircase that rose into the inky darkness. This must be the way forward. Tom felt that he could slowly work his way up the stairs, even if there was darkness.


    He stepped into the tower and let the door swing shut behind.


    Everything went black.


    Tom waited for his eyes to adjust. He waited. He waited some more. Only even when his eyes widened into night mode, he still couldn’t see. There was no light.


    He noticed that everything had become muted. No sound entered this dark chamber from outside, and nothing inside made a noise.


    The darkness wasn’t just dark - it was dark in an existential way, like it had taken everything that was alive or could be alive and completely obliterated it. It was the blackness of absence. Although Tom could feel his heart beating, he couldn’t hear his heart beating. The sound wasn’t transferring. He shuffled a foot forward in the direction of where he remembered the stairs were before the door had shut behind him. He paused. He took another step. Paused again. He called out, wondering if the others were near, but his voice fell dead. It was as though the sound didn’t get past his lips.


    Stay calm, Tom told himself.


    The air was thick and waxy and it was incredibly difficult to breathe.


    Carefully moving forward his feet found the stone steps. He put a hand out to feel the wall.


    For the next few minutes, as Tom slowly, carefully, climbed the stairs, he found himself in a world of hysterical madness. He experienced such overwhelming claustrophobia that he began to scream with fright and abandonment. Although he felt his throat straining with the force of his screams, and although he felt the screams vibrating across his tongue, and although the screams sounded inside his own head, the screams became soundless as soon as they exited his mouth.


    Even his thoughts seemed to be suffocating, as though his thoughts were being smothered by a blanket. Was this what it felt like to die? Was this how it felt to cease to exist?A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Pushing into the dense fog of his brain, came a vision.


    Tom recognised, almost immediately, that this vision was of a time from before he was born, when he was this great man Elion who ruled the world of Paris from a chair inside a machine. In this vision he was in a bright and holy place, with birds flying around, and noises of steam hissing and gears clunking. Then he heard screams and he saw the world outside. He was compelled to look up, and he saw strange objects flying at speed up into the cloudy daylight. The objects were blazing with light, and were round and spiky like little suns.


    Suddenly Tom understood what he was seeing, as the knowledge and memory of that once great Elion flooded back.


    The spiky balls of light were the souls of those people and creatures that had died in Paris. These souls flew as though to heaven - only it couldn’t be heaven because Tom knew that these souls were trapped under a dome in a tiny world. The only place for these souls to fly was to the top of the dome that sat inside a machine, inside a mountain, in a town named Blackheath in the northern part of England.


    The vision faded, and once again Tom became aware of the immense darkness that pressed into his brain, a hot blanket of darkness that squeezed as though trying to strangle the life from his brain.


    Still he climbed the stairs, one slow leg raise at a time, moving like a slug, until he took a final step and got flooded by light.


    The light hit his eyes like the first breath after nearly drowning.


    He had landed in a room filled with the most interesting gadgets and devices. In the centre of the room was a large machine that was nothing like anything Tom had seen in Paris. It was similar (in some non-similar way) to the machine that Tom had gone through in the cave known as Miller’s Crypt. It had the same tubing and dials and flasks and copper and iron. The machine had iron gears and silver springs and pulleys with greasy chains, and cast levers, and glass vials filled with liquid, and a huge copper tub that seemed to shimmer with impossibly fast vibrations. The copper tub was the shape of a large egg.


    The gears moved and the levers travelled up and down. Keys of metal moved in and out and up and down and light struck the machine from a weird angle, the light coming from the ceiling where mirrors were angled to distribute the flickering of a dozen lamps.  The light found the metallic gears, found the copper and the gold and the silver and brass.


    The room was noisy with clunking and hissing and a rat-a-tat-tatting. Steam spurted from a pipe making a hiss and a whistle, and the steam rose in a small cloud that quietly dissipated as it rose to the ceiling.


    Tom was meant to take a seat inside this machine, and yet there didn’t appear to be a seat. The egg that was sealed shut had a small crease that ran around its middle, as though the egg would separate. Perhaps the seat was inside the egg.


    Looking down the egg Tom saw a control panel with arn area that held a lock where a key could slip inside. Perhaps the key that Tom still had attached to a leather strap at his neck.


    Tom heard another, familiar sound, which turned out to be Trinket, cursing loudly as she emerged from a far staircase at a triangular angle from where Tom stood. Trinket looked as though she was in a rage. Whatever had happened to her in that dark ascent had been far more disturbing than what had happened to Tom.


    The Emperor stepped out from the final staircase. Tom could see the Emperor through the grinding edges of steel and brass and gold. The Emperor straightened and looked across the machine to Tom. He had a haunted look in his eye, as though a vision had taken him somewhere sinister.


    The Emperor immediately headed toward a rectangular box, similar to the telephone booth that Tom had seen when he took a trip to London with his school. Inside the booth there was a metal plate, and in the centre of the metal plate there was a spot to put a key. It looked identical to the lock in the control panel at the base of the egg.


    Trinket headed toward another booth on the far side of the machine room. Both she and the Emperor moved with confidence, as though they had been taught exactly what to do in this situation. And they were enthusiastic, like both of them had been dreaming of this moment, like both of them had been plotting for this moment.


    They placed their keys in the locks of their respective booths, and turned to look at Tom.


    Tom stepped toward the egg.