The Princess In The Tower
by Derrick Martin-Campbell
In the time between times, a young white family lives in a tower of newly-built condominiums along the waterfront downtown. Remily and David with their daughter Baby Kass bought their ground-floor unit— with its walkable shops, controlled access parking, earthquake retrofitting, and floor-to-ceiling river views — in the innocent foreshadow of the 2008 financial crisis using a downpayment gifted them by Remily’s noble father. Six months later, with the real estate market tanked and half the country underwater, every other unit in the building remains unsold. They are the only ones who live in the tower.
While David sleeps furrow-browed beside her, dreaming struggles of his own, Remily lies awake nights listening to the drips and groans of their semi-abandoned tower before falling finally asleep at 4 AM into what has become her recurring dream. In it, she runs down a long corridor, Kass crying in her arms with dark figures in pursuit. She runs toward David where he sits in their idling car at the corridor’s far end. Remily’s high heels echo as she goes, steps quickening with her impressions: David calling for them, Kass’s crying, the nearing shadows, screams, darkness… and then she is awake, gray light new upon the Willamette, ospreys fishing in the dawn.
The high-heel sound persists a little longer, following her into the world — hard, panicked steps reverberating somewhere nearby within the tower, growing faint and climbing higher.
“They didn’t even finish building it up there,” she tells her father on the phone, Kass strapped to her chest, their faces squinting up toward the tower’s distant top. “I can see it from here: the top floor is just a cement shell, no glass or walls or anything. It’s like they just quit one day,” she says. “I know that’s where the water gets in, the drip drip drippies that keep us up all night.”
Now the head pastor of the New Fire Community megachurch an hour up the freeway, Remily’s father made his first career as an attorney specializing in mergers and corporate acquisitions. Remily called him today seeking guidance and connections. She has that morning, decided to finally commence legal action against their realty company over the tower’s neglect and subsequent insult to their investment. The company’s voicemail has been full for months, she tells him, emails bouncing back undeliverable. The sanitation company has stopped service to the building, leaving David and Remily’s small white kitchen bags to accumulate in the huge parking garage dumpster, untouched until their discovery by the winter’s coyotes . She tells him how the HVAC smells strange sometimes, like a car with engine trouble, how the lights dim and surge, how a dark liquid backed up into their tub one night, odorless and slow-bubbling, discovered just as Remily was about to set Kass into the bath.
“…dark…liquid…” repeats her father, jotting notes. “Yeah that definitely sounds like something we are not paying for.”
“And I almost put her in it, Daddy!”
“Don’t you worry, Princess,” her father says, “we are not putting that little girl in anything but normal water.”
He promises what all good kings promise their daughters: order will be restored, things will get straightened out. “We’re gonna find you somebody good,” he tells her, “the best. This is not the life a princess deserves.”
A grinning, hard-muscled man, her father is sixty years old, short and tan with a thick head of cropped, white hair. He stands in wiry, stick-straight contrast to Remily’s husband David, who slouches a deep and wide six feet tall, bearded and barrel-chested, a sleepy-eyed viking. David worked private security in Afghanistan until he and Remily married, at which point he transitioned to sales. “For his mental health,” Remily still tells their friends, taking credit for his improving social skills, the softening in his eyes and the increasing coherence of his small talk. Even yet, when her husband and father arm-wrestle at family functions, she cannot say for certain who is letting who win.
“How’s that grandbaby of mine, by the way?” asks her father. “She eating good? Putting on weight?”
Remily looks down to meet her child’s eyes already gazing up at her and kisses Kass’s forehead.
“She’s good, Daddy. For now. But pray for us. Pray a hunk of condo doesn’t come blowing off the top of this thing to crack open our pretty little skulls.”
She calls her father the morning David’s company sends the lay-off emails, two-word subject-line, “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY,” with half the sales team cc’d. Remily watches from the kitchen as he reads it, sitting eerily unmoving before his laptop until the screen dims going to sleep. Then, like a machine completing a cycle, he stands, showers, dresses, and volunteers to take Kass to her wellness visit later that morning.
“So you can catch up on your freelance stuff,” he says.
And Remily smiles, kissing her husband’s bearded cheek. “Of course,” recalling his face from her dream, teeth uncanny in his yelling mouth, glow of burning buildings in his eyes, “You two have fun.”
She works happily the two hours they are gone, seated without music in their windowless office, a room so square and quiet she sometimes hallucinates the sound of her own heartbeat. She completes and files two projects, sends invoices, and has just finished logging her hours when she hears David’s key ding in the front door. Just from the sound of it, from the ding to the way the handle turns, she already knows he is angry.
“Doctor says Kass is behind on her vaccinations,” he says. “Like months behind. On a bunch of ‘em. Here.”
He raises the list between them, Kass wriggling in his arm.
Remily closes her laptop.
“You knew,” he says. “You lied to me.”
“First off, you never asked—”
“I assumed—”
“David, you never asked because you know how I feel about this and — let’s be honest — you were happy to let it go. But now that’s changed. Now you’re interested all of a sudden, excited even, after going off and losing your job–”
“Christ, Rem-”
“-excited to pick a fight with me, to tell your beautiful, young wife she’s wrong, again, that I’m wrong to-”
What ears hear their argument as it echoes through the tower? David, so confident upon his return, so certain of his grievance and the justice due, watches shaken as his wife slips through his accusations like the salmon through the river as it migrates by their home.She describes for him infected monkey organs razor-sieved into metal vats, praises God for the bodies briefly leased them here upon His Earth, pontificates on nanobots, until Kass really starts to fuss.
“Microscopic robots, David!” she says. “These doctors are trained to make you feel crazy — and you’ve been talking to them all afternoon!”
Then the lights go out. There is a period of silent, timeless darkness. From that dark eventually comes Kass’s voice —“Mama?” — and, at her call, the world returns: lights, the printer, air purifier. Remily sees her husband before her, a frustrated, impotent man, their daughter straining in his arms; my daughter, she thinks, even as the eyes with which Kass regards her glow the same pale blue as those of the man holding her.
Kass calls, reaching for her mother again.
“Baby bird,” Remily says, taking their daughter in her arms. She looks the room up and down. “This G-D place,” she says. “I reached out to my father about it this morning. He’s gonna make some calls. Find someone who can help us.”
She feels David’s eyes light upon her strong and graceful ex-dancer’s legs as she turns for their kitchen. Kass propped on her hip, she performs the dinner ritual: two boxes of macaroni and cheese, sliced hotdogs with ketchup squirted directly into it, a meal meant for children. One they all enjoy. They call it bloody mac and cheese.
“Did you think to get the oil changed while you were out this morning?” she asks. “It’s okay if not. I know today has been a lot for you.”
Waking cold-sweat drenched once more to the sound of her dream-self’s sprint reverberating between worlds, Remily lies listening in bed, waiting for her pulse to slow. She decides the sound is closer than it’s ever been, maybe no more than a wall or two away. She looks to David asleep beside her and wonders why, in her dream, he never gets out of the car to help them. She sees the coming day before her: playing with Kass on the floor as David’s hulking shape shuffles room to room, taking down and auditing random storage boxes, silently cleaning things that don’t need to be cleaned.
She rises, dons a robe and slippers, checks on Kass (asleep, and dreaming of what?), takes her keycard and phone and sets out in pursuit of the still-audible high heel sound.
She walks the tower’s empty halls and foyers, silk robe trailing in her wake, fearless in her dominion over all she saw, so that any voyeur might indeed have known her for the royalty she was. She pursues her quarry doggedly, with predator’s senses, pausing to listen, triangulate and reorient before seeking ever onward. Sometimes the sound seems to sprint at her approach, a rush of hard reports, while others wait as she catches up. She follows the clatter deeper and higher into the tower. Mounting a rough stairwell, she climbs the building’s windowless interior, steps helixing up and up and up, passing landing after landing until, arriving finally at a door stenciled ROOF ACCESS, she finds waiting there before her the object of her hunt: a deer, a doe in fact, muscled body tensed in perfect stillness, unknowable brown eyes locked upon her.
Mirroring the doe, Remily similarly stills herself, slippered foot poised mid-step above the final stair. Silence. The doe’s ear flickers. There is a third presence.
NO ENTRY, warns the door. ALARM WILL SOUND.
Remily’s foot touches the landing. The doe kicks the door open, leaps through into the light and whatever fate awaits her there. A growl, an awful whimper, then quiet.
Chill air stirs the hem of Remily’s robe as the door slowly resets, the smell of the world upon it. She stares at it, waiting for something to happen, until she realizes that whatever is on the other side likely lies in wait for her. She is the one who hesitates. She steeles herself and, with a deep breath, places her hands upon the bar.
You are a daughter of Christ, counsels her mother’s voice, clothed in dignity and strength, but you are my daughter as well, words recalled from a letter to Remily when she was a girl at summer camp, a letter read idle on her bunk, its script lavender and tilting ever right. Many daughters do noble things. But you surpass them all.
She bites her cheeks. Pushes.
Predawn lids the world, cold and gray, Venus untwinkling in the corner. She locates herself atop the tower, its utmost floor. High winds snap at tarps in the dim, the city glowing below. The doe lies splayed out just before her, a dark, raw cavity opened in her loin from which a huge cat — a cougar, she sees, come down from the hills — now feeds in purring, lustful bites. The doe still moves, brown eyes rolling as she is consumed. She thrashes at Remily’s approach and the cougar braces the doe’s flank with its paw. Jaws stringy with blood, the cougar raises its head to greet her.
“Hello, Remily,” says the cougar. “I am a friend of your father’s.”
The cement’s cold penetrates through Remily’s slippers. She tries to remember what to do for a cougar. The great cat flexes its foreclaws and the doe strains. Remily turns dizzily away, seeks for a moment something within herself, something she has always hoped was there but has yet to truly need. Turning back, she steadies her voice, looks the cougar in the eyes.
“Prove it,” she says.
Through the blood, she thinks she sees the cougar smile.
“Alright,” says the cougar. “When you were a girl, your parents taught you a phrase by which to know someone sent for you, to pick you up from school, say, or church, in the event of an emergency. Hearing it meant you could trust them.”
“Okay,” says Remily, waiting. “And…”
Now his smile is unmistakable.
“You had another baby, before Kass: a son. He died three days old. You grieved his death with rage and threatened to kill your husband if he ever got you pregnant again.”
Tearful heat behind her eyes, she speaks through set teeth: “Who are you?”
“Your father and I once worked together, on…projects. Key deliverables were nearly lost but for his intervention, and I am honored now to have the opportunity to—”
“Tell me—” she interrupts him, voice trembling, “tell me how you’re going to help me. You’re not a lawyer. You’re not even a person.”
“No,” says the cougar, still smiling at the paling sky. Remily sees around them now the illuminated ruin of the tower’s unfinished top floor, its cracked walls and rebar bare, each intention of corridors and rooms left abandoned, incomplete. Amidst these now the other deer are visible, one for every night, their rotting legion carcasses littering the ground, some newly decomposing, others little more than bones –
“I am not,” he says.
The doe’s breathing grows labored, eyes still watching Remily. A V of geese pass overhead and the cougar’s purr revs watching them. Remily’s foot lifts from her slipper.
“Mmmm, a goose…” muses the cougar hungrily, before a crunch of bone refocuses its attention on the doe as she shudders beneath its claws then stills. The cougar turns to see Remily’s bare, muscled leg planted heel-down through the doe’s head, skull crushed beneath her step, stain slowly spreading on the cement. Remily raises her soiled foot to her hand, wipes the blood with the hem of her robe, and steps delicately back into her slipper, eyes on the cougar the whole time. And the cougar is not unimpressed.
“This business, with your apartment, or whatever,” says the cougar, “it is frankly out of scope for me, and soon to pass regardless. The forces I represent pursue longer timelines. Recent events are but a preview, etc. etc….” he says.
“A preview…”
Again the cougar smiles. “Would you like to see?”
And Remily searches herself once more. Slow-breathing through her nose, the smells are overwhelming. She nods.
The cougar indicates the city — skyline, streets, bridges and overpasses, the green hills to the west with their blinking radio towers, the river that carves the valley, flowing on to other rivers and the sea, the sky above all this: “Look,” the cougar says.
And Remily looks.
What did she expect? The sun rises over the world, falls, rises and falls once more, many times. She sees the city grow and change as in a dream of its own, a dream of life and prosperity, growing and ever-changing, and like a dream soon turning strange. She sees the green hills singe to burning and the sky fill with smoke, turning the daylight red, sees the ground open, the streets crack and buildings break, fleeing cars clogging the tunnels, spilling over with panicked families and solitary drivers. She sees earthquake set the bridges trembling as floods rush the valley, drain and flood and drain again, hears gunfire and riven glass, explosions, screaming, lamentations between alarms, sees and hears it all wax-waning many times until finally all is still, quiet, like her home office, no sirens or explosions, no human voices, only a grand, penultimate silence within a longer deeper night. Clouds part to show the stars and, below, what perseveres? A glow where the sun may soon rise, another beginning, but something else as well.
She turns before it’s too late.
“None of this helps me,” she says. “It doesn’t scare me either. You owe my father a favor? Help me for real–” raising her cell phone shaking in her hand, “—or would you like me to call him now?”
“Hey, hey, relax,” says the cougar, “How about this: I will give you a dream — a new dream. Show gratitude. A dream is a gift.”
And the cat’s gaze turns to indicate the killing floor around them, blood-dark, the doe’s crushed head, bones and carcasses, an abattoir atop the empty tower: “See what fruits your last dream has wrought?”
Remily considers this, phone still raised. The early morning trucks flow the freeway, sounding like the river.
The door dings as she enters their condo and finds it crowded with people, worried faces she soon recognizes as thirty-to-forty of her closest friends and family. All gasp at her arrival, stunned to silence, before crashing seconds later into a wave of shrieking cheers. David lifts her spinning through the air, white robe swirling about them, repeats her name between prayers of manly gratitude, the room blurring as his muscles flex around her.
“A miracle,” declares her father, tears streaking his cheeks. “Praise God — an honest truth miracle!”
She has been gone for three days.
Many hands reach to touch her, pull her close and pet her hair. From the center of their crush, Remily sees her mother knelt quietly at the window across the room where she plays with Baby Kass; her mother’s expression is flat, inscrutable, perhaps even idiotic. Amidst the chaos of her homecoming, she is struck by the possibility of her mother’s senility, and, inevitably, her death.
“Mom,” she calls. Then, “Kass—”
Kass looks up smiling at her mother’s voice, untroubled. What time has passed for her?
“What are these stains on your robe?” asks David, genuinely concerned. And Remily looks to where he points, as does everyone, to the deer’s blood scabbing brown upon her silk hem, around her slippered heel. Voices mutter. She looks up at him, eyes aflame.
“What?” he says. His smile fades. “What?”
She has just realized she hates him.
When they divorce two years later, she lets him keep the condo, David buying her out with money from his new business: consulting on real estate opportunities in conflict zones. In fact, with their bankrupt realty company’s assets finally up for auction and the rest of the tower still unoccupied, David seizes the opportunity, throws together some charts and slides and following a handful of meetings, secures enough investor-funding to leverage the shifting market and purchase the tower outright. Despite it all, Remily is proud of him. It’s something the old David could never have managed. The recovery is underway.
Remily’s father dies that winter. A brain aneurysm sitting in his car in the church parking lot early one morning. Her mother finds the body and calls Remily first, before even the paramedics. She asks her what she plans to do. Remily pauses, phone to her ear, considering her answer. She bites her cheeks. Bites until a coppery taste.
Strapping Kass’ carseat illegally into the front of a U-Haul, she leaves the city and the tower behind and returns to her father’s compound, there to care for her mother, raise her daughter, and eventually, with only a little push-back from the younger deacons, assume the leadership of her father’s church. The congregation quickly embraces her and the church prospers under her leadership and vision.
She appears on a podcast about people who have experienced episodes of lost time. Remily distinguishes herself from the other guests in her confident assertion that each of their respective experiences can be best explained by brain malfunction due to formaldehyde poisoning. From unnecessary vaccinations, she says.
“A lot of people are asleep out there,” she tells the hosts, smiling not unlike the cougar, “but, one by one, we are starting to wake up.”
She asks the producers to include a link to her church’s website when they post the episode. And they agree to do so, at first, until one of them clicks the link. But this omission changes little. In the grand scheme of things.
In Remily’s new dream, a teenaged Kass lounges with her friends in the green summer ravine behind the church. The girls laugh, gossip, bite whole apples and braid each other’s hair, savoring their idyll, until a twig-snap alerts them to a predator nearby. The girls freeze, lock eyes, then leap wings-flapping for the sky, theirs the newly-evolved power of flight.
Remily watches their departure from the ground as they shrink into the yonder, eyes stinging tears as her love rears wild within her. It is a dream in which she herself figures little. Not until the end when, stepping gingerly from the bush on dancer’s strong and muscled legs, she sees that she is the predator.
Derrick is a writer from Portland, OR. His stories have recently appeared in Joyland, The Evergreen Review, Apocalypse Confidential, and Necessary Fiction, among other places.
COLD SIGNAL 