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...To the Dark Tower Come

Jonathan Goedeke

Screams of anguish and pleas for death echoed through air
smelling of decay and sweat in the fathomless darkness of the
tower’s corridors. They bounced off dank, moist walls of unfin-
ished stone that gave even the regular inhabitants the impression
they were trapped in a cave deep underground, never to see
freedom and light again.
The sounds of the damned continued to echo through the
labyrinth, unto the very door of the laboratory. “Laboratory” it
was called by Arius, though others had dubbed it less flattering
things: a sorcerer’s lair, a torture chamber, Hell. All were accu-
rate, still, laboratory it remained.
As for what they called the man in robes of red and black
who now toyed with a series of glass vials on his wide, rough-
hewn desk, such names cannot be mentioned. Arius called
himself “a lover of all that is forbidden and blasphemous.” Few
would gainsay him that right.
Setting down one vial, his gaunt, long fingered hand crept
spiderlike over the remains of a human skull and a jar of eyes to
rest on the stained and yellowed pages of an arcane tomb enti-
tled The Interchangment of Love and Lust through Magiks most
Foul. As his eyes, flinty and as yellow as the book, began to scan
the page, an interrupting whimper came from the doorway.
Turning with the slow grace of an uncoiling python, Arius

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