Found Stories: The Red Tower

While going through my phone for my pictures of the white peacock, I found this old picture.  I’d have made a post out of it much sooner, but I’m not very tech-savvy.  When I first took it, I honestly didn’t know how to get it out of my phone, and after a while I half-forgot about it.

Anyway, the real story of this picture is that it was Valentine’s Day and the Empire State Building was lit up red in celebration of it.  The clouds were very low and heavy, and they covered the peak of the building and diffused the light into this creepy-as-hell aura.

But you know what?  That’s not a very interesting story.  I think I can think of a better one.

I think that what we’re seeing is the culmination of an unholy ritual that has taken generations, though whether the celebrants of that ritual are actually generations of a family or cult that have devoted themselves to it, or the original celebrants who have simply outlived generations of lesser mortals.  Either way, over a century of New York history has been devoted to the task.  The Empire State Building itself was built of girders made of materials that don’t appear on the Periodic Table, with mystic symbols engraved into key points.  “Accidents” were arranged for workers who fit certain highly-specific criteria of age, heritage, physical and mental traits, social status, and personal habits so that their blood would sanctify the foundations and the supports.  As the city grew, streets and subways were laid out in occult configurations, their excavations specifically targeted to awake dark things sleeping in the Earth.  Sigils and runes were hidden in common graffiti.  Certain high-profile crimes – the Son of Sam murders, perhaps? – served as sacrifices, and to keep the populace in the right “mood”.  The whole city was shaped to the purpose of focusing mystic energies, and the Empire State Building was the antenna.  All of it was held together by rituals and sacrifices performed in the secret sub-basements (interestingly enough, virgins were not the sacrifice of choice.  Instead, people whose bloodline would go on to “sink its roots deep in the City” were preferred).

(Did 9/11 accelerate the timetable by filling the city with fear, anger and grief?  Or delay it by blowing a hole in the City’s occult geometry?)

Now the ritual is complete.  The gates in the sky are opening, and something terrible is coming through into our world.  The Change has already begun: that tall building you see before you is no longer the Empire State Building.

It is the Red Tower.  And in the age to come, when a dying Sun shines red on a dim, blasted Earth, it shall be the new axis of the world.