Babel Tower Read Online Free

dear, or something inane, and he rings off. I’ve no idea if he’s upset, or malicious, or what. Down here, I suppose, we are likely to over-react, to suspect someone who merely wants to
rile
you, of being desperate, even if he isn’t. We see the underside of the world, I suppose.”
    Her needles tap. Her voice is comfortable, like honey and toast. She is in her fifties, and unmarried. She does not invite questions about her private life. She once managed a corset shop, Daniel knows, and now lives perhaps off a small private income and a pension. She is a devout Christian and finds Steelwire harder to take than masturbators in phone-booths.
    Canon Holly comes down the stairs as Ginnie Greenhill answers another call.
    “No, we’re here to help,
whatever
the problem, you
might
shock me of course, but I do doubt it—”
    Canon Holly takes the third chair and watches Daniel write in the log.
    4.15–4.45. Steelwire. There is no God, as usual. Daniel.
    “Any idea what he’s up to?” The Canon inserts a cigarette into a cracked amber holder and puffs smoke towards Daniel. He moves around in a cloud of smoke-scent, like a bloater.
    “No,” says Daniel. “Same message, same style. He set out to irritate, and did. It’s possible he’s really upset because there’s no God, or God is dead.”
    “Theological despair as a motive for suicide.”
    “It’s been known.”
    “Indeed.”
    “But I think he’s too gabby to be suicidal. I wonder what he does all day and night. He rings at all times.”
    “Time will reveal,” says the Canon.
    “It doesn’t always,” says Daniel, who has had one or two nasty experiences, hearing desperate voices subside into meaningless babbleand the burring of an empty telephone, or rise more and more shrilly before the sudden severing of the link across the air.
    Or it might begin with the beginning of the book that was to cause so much trouble, but was then only scribbled heaps of notes, and a swarm of scenes, imagined and re-imagined.
    Chapter I    
Of the Foundation of Babbletower
    When the blissful dawn of the Revolution had darkened to the red light of Terror, when the paving-stones of the city shifted on flesh and oozed blood in their interstices, when the streaming blade rose and fell busily all day and the thick sweet smell of butchery flared in all men’s nostrils, a small band of free spirits left the City separately, at night, in haste and secrecy. They wore various well-studied disguises, and had made their preparations well in advance, sending supplies secretly and ordering horses and carriages to be made ready at lonely farms, by those they could trust—for there was trust in some, even in those dark days. When they were gathered in the farmyard they seemed a ramshackle crew of rusty surgeons and filthy beggars, stolid peasants and milkmaids. In the farmyard those who seemed to be the leaders, or at least in charge of the plan of action, described the coming journey, across plains and through forests, always skirting large towns and villages, as far as the border of the land, where they would cross into a neighbouring mountainous country and make their way to the hidden valley, beyond the white-capped fangs of the mountains, where one of their number, Culvert, had a sequestered property, La Tour Bruyarde, which could be reached only across a narrow wooden bridge between two lines of peaks, across a dark and lifeless chasm.
    They must travel fast, and circumspectly, never trusting anyone they met on the road, save certain helpers at posting stages, and in certain lonely inns and hamlets, who could be recognised by certain secret signs, a blue flower at a certain angle in the hatband, an eagle feather in a tuft of cock feathers. If they all came safely to their destination—as it was most vigorously to be hoped they would—they would be able to set up their own small society in true freedom, far from rhetoric, fanaticism and Terror.
    So they travelled, through a press