Dark Tower-Part 3
When we succeeded in descending these steep slopes, the primitives had long since dispersed and disappeared into the darkness; but judging by the corpses lying on the ground, with their arms and legs cut off or their internal organs ripped out by dismembering, they hadn't neglected to take some snacks with them to satisfy their hunger.
There was no longer anyone left to save here, for the knives and sharp teeth of the savages had worked perfectly.
"There's nothing we can do," said Shahset, "even if we bury them, the primitives will find and open the tombs. We have no time to lose. We have to be as fast as we can and get the chest up the hill.”
After we went up again, we pulled out the rocks on the road that were obstructing the progress of the car with wooden levers and continued climbing the slope.
By daylight, the rain had completely stopped. The unseen sun made the thinner parts of the dark clouds shine like silver, and from time to time their dazzling rays pierced them with arrows; but despite all this, the clouds continued to harbor evil within them.
The demons circled in the sky, stretching their wings above the rising air currents, starting from their necks to their serpentine tails. Their large drooping noses sniffed the air, their triangular ears listened to the silence, and their keen eyes scanned the land where the tower rose.
When they spotted something noteworthy, they dived straight over their target, catching it with their appendages, and rising again. In contrast to their jelly-like bodies, the rows of spines surrounding the fangs and the tips of their appendages were rather hard and sharp.
Their faces, like ugly people, were undulating and changing shape just like their bodies; but it was not possible to find human expressions on these faces. These faces bore the dreadful and merciless gaze of a devastating evil.
As the two demons came circling in the air and hovering above the tower, we hid under the vegetation that had enveloped the tower walls and waited. I saw this obligatory break from our journey as an opportunity to rest my weary body and took a break from the crowd. I put my horse's reins in my hands and sat on a stone by a black pond and leaned my back against the cold, damp wall of the tower.
The hooked spines at the ends of the moving tongues that covered the undersides of the broad leaves above my head were undulating gently in harmony, like the surface of the pond beside me, and the permanence of the movements of these hideous things weighed down my eyelids like nuggets.
The conversations of my friends just ahead, the neighing of horses, the hum of a cloud of flies flying over the animal carcass standing in front of me, and the strange sounds of unseen frogs or other creatures around the pond began to sound like lullabies to me after a while.
Finally, my tired body responded to the sweet calls of sleep and surrendered. I have no idea how long I slept like that, but what woke me from my sleep was the sound of a sword, and soon afterwards I heard a hollow sound made by something heavy falling to the ground. I felt a numbness in my left leg and an abnormal fatigue in my body.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Brendon standing in front of me with his sword in his hand, and I noticed a huge object that was fidgeting on the ground right next to me, out of the corner of my eye. When I turned my head, I saw that it was a dirty yellow, slippery-skinned, snake-like creature.
There were seven rows of eyes on either side of his body, and he writhed on the ground like a giant worm by the pain of his limb severed by the sword, but these writhing did not last long; because soon after, when Brendon swung his kick at him, he jumped out of the way he was struggling and ended up at the bottom of the black pond.
"Silly!" Brendon scolded me, in a harsh tone that he tried not to get high, "Don't you know you shouldn't go near ponds?"
While I was staring blankly at his angry face, he pointed at my left leg with the tip of his sword and said, “Look at you!” said.
That's when I noticed that thing stuck to my leg. It was the mouth of the creature that Brendon had cut with his sword and kicked into the pond, and what I saw when Brendon ripped it off my leg was the most disgusting thing I had ever encountered; resembling a huge suction cup, it was a sticky mouth detached from the body it belonged to, and it was filled with tiny, pointed teeth in a spiral row.
Those disgusting teeth made me take another look at my leg and notice the blood running down my leg.
“These creatures that live in ponds are bloodsuckers.” Brendon explained, raising the piece of meat he was holding in the air, “They approach their stupid victims silently like you, and thanks to the narcotic they secrete from their mouths, you don't even feel that these sharp teeth enter your body. These things are so dangerous that they can put you to sleep and drink your blood to the last drop. Pray that…”
While Brendon was telling these things, the suction cup's mouth suddenly moved away from his hand and jumped forward, causing him to interrupt his words. The mouth was next to me now, bouncing off and on the ground, beating itself against the ground, and if I had the strength to get up I would have jumped up and down in fear like a confused cat with a snake at its feet.
It was only a few leaps before your mouth threw itself into the pond when Brendon leaned forward and took two or three steps, thrusting his sword into the middle of his mouth and shouting, "You damn stubborn bastard." said to the creature.
The creature, whose movements were now lifeless, seemed to be on the verge of complete death now.
“You have to be careful, apprentice!” said Brendon, wiping the sword he had drawn from the creature onto the ground, "evil springs from every inch of this tower, you must be careful wherever you step."
Brendon straightened from where he was leaning, sheathed his sword and raised his head. Then, hearing Shahset calling out to him, he turned his face to the left, toward a leaf that had descended from the hill and hung on the side of his head; but as soon as he turned his face, he found the wiggling tongues on his face, which had covered the lower part of the broadleaf plant.
As soon as these tongues, writhing to feed on meat, felt Brendon's face, they started to move by contracting part by part, and stabbed Brendon's face like arrows with the thorns on their ends. When the leaf stuck to his face, Brendon first groaned and then stood still.
His body was in a fit of tremors, and the one eye on the side where the leaf had not covered his face was open as if it were going to pop out of its socket. Those who heard his cry of pain rushed to help, and after cutting the leaf on his face with a sword from the stem, they laid him on the ground and tried to separate the leaf from his face.
But the hooked spines on the leaf's tongues were so stubborn that they didn't let go of what they had grabbed, that when the men managed to tear the leaf out in haste, they were met with a human face, one side of which had been stripped of its flesh and bones.
Thank you for reading :)
You can find the other parts here.-
https://read.cash/@Nidos/dark-tower-part-1-5425182c - PART-1