About Tower Curator
Stories
6
Chapters
1,003
Words
3.6 M
Comments
5,236
Reading
12 d, 8 h
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Erika peered out the motel window, eyeing the cars as they moved up and down the street. This motel was a dump. The door next to hers looked like it had been in a fight with a battering ram and had only survived thanks to someone bolting a metal plate over a gaping hole. Mold clung to the air, thick and sour, around the entire block, while her room smelled of smoke. There were burn marks in the small table next to the bed—too big for cigarettes, more like the calling card of a heroin junkie. The…-
268.4 K • Ongoing
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Erika sat in her truck, eating a sub sandwich at a parking lot just outside Chicago’s downtown. Heavy metal music blasted from the speakers, vibrating the windows and drowning out the noises of the city. It didn’t seem to matter how much she turned it up; the music still wasn’t loud enough to quash her own thoughts. Rick had sent her a text earlier—Anna was awake, though not quite ready to leave just yet. Erika couldn’t decide if she should visit. Showing up with a ‘Sorry you died, get well…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Varn’s felt different without anybody around. Erika spent all of a Tuesday morning tidying up around the old arcade, cleaning a few of the neglected cabinets, organizing the stock of tokens that would replace quarters, and setting out the prizes. The boarded-up windows had been replaced with proper glass, though they were shuttered at the moment; between the light coming in through the windows and the new lights throughout the arcade, more dust than ever was visible on nearly every surface. The King…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere on this one,” Daniel said, snapping a book on ancient death cults closed. It joined the stack of dead-end books, leaving him with only one last book to skim through. But he knew that if he didn’t find something relevant, their search would go nowhere, and he hated feeling helpless. Bethany, leaning back on the rear two legs of her chair, absently balanced herself as she scrolled down her phone. “Maybe you should figure out what you’re looking…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Erika woke with a sudden gasp, confused and disoriented. She sat on her side, just as she had been ten seconds ago. The room around her was no longer The Castle’s operating theater. The last thing she saw was The Orderly, warning her that she would feel a burning sensation in her arm as she added some anesthetic to Erika’s IV line. Erika distinctly recalled feeling a heat in her wrist. She opened her mouth to comment on it, then… The recovery room didn’t look much different from the room Erika…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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The Butler towered over Erika as she guided the way through the long, empty corridors of The Castle’s asylum. Erika couldn’t be certain, but it felt like The Butler was even taller than the last time she ran into the woman. “I am sorry for not contacting you,” The Butler said, breaking a silence that had lasted since leaving the operating theater. “It wasn’t that I deliberately ignored you, just that The Director doesn’t typically bring in outsiders.” “That’s… fine? I guess?”…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Erika rolled over and puked straight onto the floor for her first conscious action. The motion of rolling made her head swim and warble, intensifying the welling nausea in her stomach. She vomited again. The second time seemed to help a little, as if her nausea splattered over the old-fashioned tiles on the floor just as much as everything else in her stomach did. Slowly, Erika sat upright, trying to keep from jostling her poor, sick mind. That proved to be a mistake. Spikes of pain coursed…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Erika winced and grimaced every time she heard the bone saw whir. Holding a meeting over an operating table was… an experience to be sure, one that Erika didn’t feel like she ever needed. Leah had wanted her to be a doctor once upon a time, and Erika actually considered it before getting her GED, but watching The Doctor hack into Anna killed any lingering interest in the idea. It took effort to hold back her nausea. Erika forced her focus on The Director. “I trust I have you to thank for…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Delilah staggered through the door to her apartment quarters, following after her mother. The air around them was a noxious cloud that smelled of acrid incense with a metallic aftertaste, clinging to them like a sticky, slimy film. Her shoes left burgundy stains with every step, and she couldn’t bring herself to care. “I’m taking a shower,” Delilah said. “We’re not supposed to use hot water after ten.” Delilah trudged past her mother, grinding the heels of her shoes into the frayed…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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Erika checked her watch, mentally counting how long each second took to pass. Normally, time moved at a fairly regular pace of one second per second, but her watch accelerated after she broke things. Starting four hours behind real time, she had until the watch caught up to the current hour before the ripples of her power would propagate, thus becoming detectable to The Mummy. The tests with the cubes had gone on for an hour, breaking all five of the cubes during that time. She had also performed a few…
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268.4 K • Ongoing
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