Dark Tower

• Joshua Hong, Grade 6, North Rocks Public School
• Short Story
• 2019

Excellence Award in the 'Just Keep Writing 2019' competition

Thunder crackled across the ominous sky, a bolt of plasma shot down from the heavens. As if answering a cue, other streaks of jagged lightning sparkled down to the earth from the void.
A mammoth tower loomed forlornly, dark bricks gleaming in the night. A cone like tile-cracked roof penetrated murky, stormy clouds, pulsing with mystifying purple light. A forest surrounded me like an impenetrable wall of wood, raising its wind-stripped branches to the sinister sky.
Specks of rain hailed me, obscuring light and bringing gloom and sadness. The shower became a downpour, as if the heavens was throwing buckets of water to the earth. The ground soon became unpleasant, giving the unattractive sound of squelching, gritty mud.
I approached the inauspicious metal doors of the castle, a delicate but sturdy three foot tall door of wrought black iron. The handle complemented the door, curling into a swirly pattern of black. I knocked once. Then twice. And the door slowly creaked open...
The floor was cloaked with dust and grime, as if swept with an extremely granular and dusty bristle. Glasses were cracked, rowdily boarded up with uneven planks, nails protruding from it like needles on a pincushion. Cobwebs swung up around the corners of the large room, swathing the walls like an extremely unpleasant bunting.
A chandelier swung perilously from the centre of the room, a majestic masterpiece, robbed of its former grandeur. Golden paint remained on the branching curves of the colossal lantern, an artefact of the days of glory, abandonment and rejection turning it over to disrepair.
As I swept my eyes across this most peculiar room, my eyes transfixed on a component that I had not noticed until this moment.
An iridescent light shone from a shimmering hourglass, gleaming as if it had just been crafted, completely juxtaposing the ancient room. The glass was as clear as crystal and the sands of time trickling down the funnel, like a trickle of water, irreversible and unstoppable. I felt as excited as a fervent child on his birthday. I reached out my hands to admire it, my face perfectly reflecting off the unblemished face of the hourglass when the most bizarre event occurred. The moment I put my hands on the glimmering hourglass, the whole world erupted in an outburst of blazing light. My head felt light and I blacked out.
I groggily opened my eyes, adjusting to the darkness. I felt the cool but clammy fall of rain on my arm. I stepped up. Then a whole river, no, flood of thoughts erupted in my head. The tower. The Hourglass. The light. I was on muddy ground, a forest enveloping me. But no sign of the tower. Only the rain and mud. Just me.