The black gold Tower stood there, looming erect and impending against the backdrop of a darkening steel sky, mean and deceitful like a giant switchblade mugging the sky. Its intentions unclear, obscure, nevertheless a threat to the very existence of its populations, mere reflections on a pitch black wall of subjugation and abuse.
Once erected, the city had quickly fallen into a status of utter disrepair. No one seemed to know why the Tower had been built in the first place, whose mastermind it served nor to what purpose it cut the sun in two and cast long malicious shadows over the terminally ill urban sprawl that had in some remote point in time housed and fed a vibrant community of free people. Its dark tail extended itself like a deformed serpent in all directions, unnatural, ungodly, like no other man-made artifact would do. What it held inside no one could tell and no one would even venture asking. The tower glistened, indifferent to the squalor all around that spread infectiously from the concrete and burnt plastics units to the flesh and souls of its godforsaken dwellers.
People soon forgot it ever being built and time became immemorial: a paralyzed parasitic limp gushing out of an open wound, the awful obelisk acted surreptitiously like a congenital disfigurement or menomation that cannot be amputated, to the unacceptable price of the entire living system slowly dying away. But there was no life flowing through its vertical spire like arteries, nothing grew from the soil, nothing that could sustain any type of living. All the species had become extinct, only to leave the sad spectacle of human and rats and cockroaches fight over what little was left to loot.
Those who were rich enough fled early, leaving behind everything they had: the poor vestiges of past routines lying everywhere in the killing fields, corroding memories once would better not recall: broken homes, junkyard garments, burnt photographs of moments deemed worth remembering and now nothing more than waste, the rusting carcasses of cars rotting into twisted shoebox sized caricatures of what future laid ahead for those who stayed. It was not a matter of choice... The Tower drew you towards itself, it intoxicated the casual wanderer, called you by your childhood name during night dreams that felt vivid and somehow altered, like a newborn’s fever and the scars it leaves unhealed. People stared at it and fetishized its gold and black sleek commandment of the disintegrating cityscape. A phallic monastery of an evil chaste of vampiric clergy, their nightly litanies of blood incoherent and nightmarish resonated for miles and miles ahead, as far as the territory went, while the sane lands receded, giving away anything not to be infected by its lurid chants. But it was a war not worth fighting for, for the outcome was clear and crystalline to all: a total defeat and unconditional surrender of land and things and people alike, nothing could quench the thirst of the Tower, nothing would satisfy its monstrous greed. It was the pure embodiment of power in its most imponderable and toxic form. Nothing could even scratch it, let alone the early infantile attempts to fight it committed by doomed sacks of terrorists who had tried to start a resistance and were quickly never heard of again. No one fought anymore, a humiliating sense of total defeat and vacuous desolation gradually overtook them . All had let go.
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Bruce Russell of The Dead C comes to Bandcamp, bringing with him an archive of rare & unreleased material, with more in the coming months. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 22, 2021
