D: L&L - Part 29 | Dot: The The Straw Remains

I woke up face down in mud, coughing river water and blood into a patch of black grass. My head was pounding. Something sticky ran down my temple—probably from the rock that tried to kiss me on the way down. Dead trees in all directions, and me caked in mud. All around me, silence. No more screaming, no more rot-covered hands grabbing at my ankles. Just a low mist creeping over the water and a stillness that made my skin crawl.

If this was Oz, it wasn’t the one with singing flowers and happy little Munchkins. This was something else. Something cold. Something forgotten. Something my grandmother didn’t know. How could she? And yet, she was always so sweet and innocent, so cheery, like a person in living color in a bland world of black and white and gray. I envied her that sometimes. She’d never seen a bombed-out village in Herat.

I pulled myself up, boots squelching in the soft earth. The river had carried me farther than I thought—there was no sign of the old wooden bridge I dove from, and the trees here were taller, wrong, like they'd grown in twisting agony. Their bark looked burned. Their branches hung low like gallows.

I sucked down handfuls of water, feeling my stomach grumble. My alice pack was great for carry stuff, but not for tumbling upside down in a river for…miles? Empty, like my belly. And night coming on. In a world that wasn’t my own, full of things I hadn’t seen yet. What to do, Marine?

I followed the riverbank as the sun set off to my left -- blues into gray and oranges and reds. Was it always like this? I didn’t dwell on it. It was light, and light is what I needed. Dangerous move to be out near water at dusk -- if there were any creatures nearby, this would be the time to come down to the river to drink. This would be the time to find something, kill and eat it. If it didn’t kill me first. 

But there was nothing and more nothing and still more nothing, until the last light of day dwindled away into nothing, and the forest opened up to grass. And there, blacker than the black sky -- a tower.

Fuck. Do I go in? Do I sit out here all night exposed? Stupid question, Marine. And so, I pulled out my maglite and Toto, and took my first steps into the open. I swept the maglite, listening, my hearing more important than my site now. If something was coming out of the grass, I wouldn’t see it until it was on me. 

Tall it was, blotting out part of a sky twinkling with distant lights. Leaning slightly like it regretted being built. A tower wrapped in gloom, black iron ribs interspersed with brick and mortar, veined with vines that looked more like veins than plants, as if the whole tower could bleed. It rose out of the grass like it had been stabbed into the land. And yet—there was a kind of elegance to it, in the way old things sometimes still carry themselves with a whisper of dignity, even as they rot from the inside out. The whole structure gave off a low groan in the wind, as if each breath hurt.

And rotting this place was. The closer I got, the more the dank musk filled my nose. And something else beneath it—wet rot, the metallic tang of mildew, and something faintly sweet. Like overripe fruit left in a closed room. Something was decomposing. Not just wood or fabric. Something deeper.

The door was cracked open. Because of course it was.

I should’ve kept walking. Found shelter elsewhere, gotten dry, maybe looked for a town. But something about the place tugged at me. Like a voice saying you’ve been here before, even though I damn well hadn’t. And not a word from grandma about this place. It couldn’t be the Wicked Witch’s castle, with its ramparts and battlements. This was something else entirely.

Inside, the air was thick with mildew and something sharper—old paper and rusted metal. The entryway was wide, once grand. A sweeping staircase curved up into darkness, its banister broken in several places like someone had come through swinging an axe. Paintings hung tilted on the walls—most had been defaced or melted by moisture. One was of a man with no face, just a sack where his head should be, stitched at the mouth, crowned in gold.

Okay.

Sure.

There were statues, too, encircling the grand room here on the ground floor -- like a museum or a gallery. Dozens of them, all headless, their necks snapped clean. They stood in alcoves like guards still waiting for orders that would never come. I passed one and noticed straw spilling from the split in its neck. Not a statue. Not marble. Mannequins? Soldiers? Effigies?

I didn’t know what the hell I was walking through, but there was little there save the stone floor and the headless guards. I looked around, gave the chamber a once-over sweep with the mag, and then holstered Toto. Nothing here, but it was too exposed. The main door was barely standing, but what was above me in the darkness? I looked up, left the strap off my holster and listened.

Nothing but the whistling wind. So, I took the first step and began to climb.

Further up, a room opened into what must have been a lounge or study once. A fireplace took up most of one wall, cold and cracked, with a pile of charred books half-buried in the ash. Someone had drawn on the bricks above it in black chalk: a complex set of equations, diagrams, arrows pointing in every direction.

One word repeated over and over again:

"THINK."

Think what? Think how? Think who?

I wiped soot from one of the books and cracked it open. The ink had run, but I could still make out notes in the margins. Paranoia scrawled in every line. Someone had been trying to map something—cities, perhaps. Armies? Memories?

The whole second floor, like the first, was just one vast room. But the silence was different here. Denser. Like the tower didn’t just keep sound out—it absorbed it, swallowed it like a dying man choking on his own breath. I wandered up again, through the next few floors, boots echoing in the vast, emptiness of the tower. Everywhere I turned, I saw glimpses of a mind unraveling—and a body, maybe, too. The walls seemed to sag in places, wood bowed and sweating with damp, like the building itself was giving up. Projector reels stacked in corners, canisters rusted and spooling out their guts onto the floor. Broken chalkboards with half-solved problems and frantic, looping scribbles. Pinned to one wall was a ripped piece of parchment with what looked like a royal seal—a wax imprint of a crown split in half.

Whoever had lived here wasn’t just rich. They were important. Respected. Then, somewhere along the line, abandoned.

And that’s when it hit me.

This place wasn’t a fortress. It wasn’t built for war.

This was a retreat.

A vacation home.

High ceilings, grand balconies jutting from rounded walls, the one spiral staircase leading to nowhere—just up up up. This place had once been beautiful. Serene, even. A place for someone who wanted to be alone with their thoughts. Someone who’d been trusted to rule... and failed. There were hints of the occupant in everything—the obsession with logic, the absence of sentimentality, the fear, maybe, of what feeling too much could do.

And then the straw. Always the straw. Stuffed in cushions, spilled from cracks in chairs, bundled in corners where the wind hadn’t reached. Like the tower had once been full of it, bursting at the seams, and now it was slowly leaking out. Not just leaking—bleeding. The straw in the cracks was soaked with time, discolored, some of it matted with mildew or tiny fungus that pulsed faintly in the dark, like it had taken root and fed on what was left.

A name stirred in the back of my head. A story my grandmother used to tell. The Scarecrow. Not a joke, not a punchline—not here. Here, he was something else. Something darker. Or maybe just more real. As real as it could be. A man murdered and enchanted. Returned to life as a scarecrow and cursed with everlasting life now. How was that possible? And yet, here I was. I’d loved the stories as a kid, scoffed at them as a teenager -- as all good teens do. And as an adult, I’d forgotten, moved on, grown up. I was in Herat when I got the message -- Grandma Dorothy, my namesake, had passed. And then the stories had slipped away.

I found a map room at the top of the stairs, my legs trembling now, stomach rumbling. Dust blanketed the floor like snow. A globe of Oz sat in the center, cracked down the middle. Cities had been scratched out. Labels removed. There were symbols carved into the wood—places blacked out entirely. At the far end of the room, a bench, and on it, a straw hat, warped and collapsed with age. I didn’t touch it. Not because I was scared. (Okay, maybe a little.) But because it felt like the only honest thing left in this place. Like whoever left it there had done so knowing they wouldn't come back.

I stayed the night in a room with a broken window and sheets that smelled like mold and smoke. I didn’t sleep well. The wind howled like voices outside. My stomach growled, and I longed for the river again and its cool, crisp water. I kept hearing footsteps, laughter, a moan—but that had to be the wind playing through the crevices and cracks, the open windows and broken doors of the balconies, all the sores of a dying creature breathing its last. Once or twice, I could swear I heard a breath catch in the walls. A wet cough. But I told myself it was the wind. Just the wind.