Like every other day the young man sat upstairs in the double decker number 485 to get to and from his work in the City. His wintry mood fitted the cold interior of the bus and it's sleepy dour passengers.
He drew a sad face on the icy window. His breath was freezing.
It was nearly the end of March but still very cold, yet inevitably the mornings were beginning to lighten and as on every other day that month he stared out of the frosted window at the tower.
He could see it in the distance on the slope of a field as it rose from the horizon. The stone tower stood erect, a single column like a chimney, but with a conical roof and a door at the bottom and a window at the top.
It appeared every day just after passing Rawsons trailer yard on the opposite side, sometimes clear and sometimes darkened, depending on his mood he guessed. He felt as if he's been aware of its presence his entire life, tall and proud in some distant memory, like a brazen finger insulting the mind.
The young man had no idea how far away the tower was. He was hopeless with distances but guessed about a mile or two away across the farmland. There seemed to be no roads leading to it and it was a fair distance from a ruined farmhouse, as if constructed as far away from it as possible but still within view.
A copse of trees stood half way, still and brooding.
As to the tower's height, the young man had even less idea, but he surmised it was quite tall given how far away it was and how big it seemed.
In all his countless trips to the office where he clerked undisturbed he'd never seen a soul going in or out of the tower.
Not until today.
Walking towards its door was a small bright figure ambling along. Skipping in fact, before pausing and ...... entering!
It was over in a second. The bus had moved beyond the point of view. The young man had seen enough, however, to know that someone had actually gone inside the strange construction.
His senses told him it had been a girl. A young girl, who seemed vaguely familiar and he spent the rest of the bus journey musing as to who she could be and why she was there.
Concentration was difficult that day and not much work was done in the endless ledger. The young man's supervisor put it down to a hangover. At his age the supervisor had often gone out on the lash with his mates. Yet the dreamy face of the youngster did seem odd, as if in a world of his own.
"He's off with the fairies that one," thought the supervisor and left him to it; the ledgers were more or less complete for the day anyway. He turned down the heater as a sudden burst of late March sun poured down Starkey Street and through the office windows. It had been a tiresomely long winter and everyone in the world craved the sun.
When the working day was over the young man clocked out and grabbed his scarf and on leaving, turned and said goodnight to his supervisor and the staff who were just getting up to leave.
He couldn't wait to get on the 485 and pass the tower again and perhaps see the mysterious figure once more.
It was early evening and the rising sun was trying to chase away the dawdling armies of frost and sleet. As such, dusk had set in and when the field of the tower approached it was already twilight through the bus window.
The young man peered through the grubby glass and focused intently on the slope.
He could not believe his eyes.
The figure was there again, this time coming out of the tower's doorway and skipping along the horizon where the sun broke through. Suddenly, she stopped, stood still in a ray of light and began to wave.
The young man gawped and looked around the top deck to see if anyone was waving back but they weren't. He was convinced the figure was facing the bus and as it passed from sight he became even more convinced, rather frighteningly, it was waving at him.
At the very last second before the bus turned a corner towards Wragby, the young man gave a wave in return, a half-hearted effort but it was all he could muster through his confusion.
The figure couldn't possibly have seen him from that distance. He struggled to make out any features himself but he could clearly see a waving hand. He was also certain the figure was a young girl. A young girl who had gone in and out of the stone tower and waved to him on a bus a mile away!
Impossible but there it was.
He hardly slept that night and his dreams were fitful and wild. He woke early, grimaced at how chilly he was and made tea and toast, but his stomach was plagued with butterflies. He felt poorly. A bad cold no doubt and at 7am he called in sick.
Lying on the couch he watched the news. Late winter snow flurries at home, wars in Russia, tensions in America, bombing in Palestine, it was always the same. He couldn't concentrate and took some paracetamol.
He dozed for an hour and woke up in a cold sweat sneezing. He knew he would never be straight unless he went there. He just had to go to the tower and see the girl.
As if summoned, he got dressed up warm, made a flask of sweet tea, packed some digestives, took some more tablets and headed off for the 485 sniffling.
He didn't sit on the top deck. He wanted the stop for the field and sat downstairs so he could alight quickly.
He set off walking along Dark Lane and eventually found a gate into the field. He entered and immediately felt a chill, as if a cold familiar hand had brushed down his spine. There was frost and the grass was hoary. He reached a wood at the foot of the slope, which prevented him from seeing further up but he knew that the tower lay beyond it about half a mile to a mile away.
Passing through the trees he daydreamed. He fancied that the March wind was humming a sad farewell to him among the still-bare branches. He stopped at a small beck and squinted through the twisted canopy at the sun desperately trying to break through. He began to feel ill again.
A crow cawed above him and the young man trudged out of the woodland into a clearing where masses of cut timber was stacked high, far too high to see over. Next to him an ichneumon probed deep into a hole in a log, then flew away towards the barren sky. He felt an increasing sense of loss, which he simply couldn't explain.
The young man was tired and sat heavily on a trunk. He drank a cup of hot tea and ate two biscuits before carrying on. After a few minutes he was clear of the stacks and could see the top of the hill.
There it was. The tower. It seemed altogether more massive now, teetering on the brink of the field, a colossal column of ancient cut stone reaching to the heavens or so it seemed to the young man. It was at once frightening and welcoming.
He craned his neck to take in the magnitude of the structure. The huge timber door was clearly visible as was the window near its peak.
He felt queasy as he lumbered up the slope, his progress hampered by fetid tussocks of grey grass. An occasional starving crow would land nearby and peck at his splitting shoes. The air seemed thick, as if used up and the sky wavered like a dark ocean breaking on the lea,.
He loosened his shirt buttons and dropped his rucksack. The flask of hot tea smashed as it landed. He was sweating more with each arduous step toward the infernal tower, a gargantuan stone spike piercing the ground as if nailing the very Earth to its core.
He crawled the final length, retching and gagging; his hands and trousers thick with cloying mud from the dank pasture no animal could ever tolerate. His icy nose began to bleed, the crimson fluid mixing with the dormant soil in a palette of dreadful colours he wished he'd never seen. He was sick and lilting snowdrops thickened with his blood. He felt as if he was dying.
With one last terrible push he reached the top and knelt before the tower, wholly insignificant beneath it's dizzying sun-tipped heights.
"What do you want from me! For God's sake! Please!" he screamed at the stones, a sense of Deja-Vu making his head spin.
He sobbed and wiped his bloody face on his sleeve before attempting to stand.
He was assisted in getting up by a young woman of inestimable beauty. Holding his hand and elbow she gently raised him and stood before him smiling.
She was the very essence of light itself, shining like a walking flare, hopping, skipping and burning up the oxygen around her like a rocket. Beyond her, huge hares leapt over each other and celandines raced towards her bare feet in a yellow surf.
"Come", she said softly in a sickly-sweet voice, "you must be exhausted after your journey. Come and lie down for a while".
The young girl carefully guided the young man through the tower door and up a spiral staircase made of stone to the very top. Here she opened a wooden door leading into a small bedroom where the window at the tower's peak looked out onto the land below.
"Here" she whispered, "rest your tired body".
The young man was helped into a large four poster bed. His body had shrunk to half its normal size and he was racked with an indescribable pain, as if his very self was being squeezed into a bottle, his bones crunching and melting like a glacier hitting the sea.
The young woman tucked the bedclothes up below his chin and lightly kissed his face, now entirely withered and thawed, his eyes closed.
She turned and licked her frosted lips and was filled with ambition, a gamboling desire to handle the wet business of birth in all its bloody glory.
As she locked the tower door she looked up at the window one final time, already uncertain who was up there.
Barrelling down the slope she forgot about the tower completely and danced all the way to the waiting fields, where she ripped the year's first born lamb from its Mother's womb and smeared her grinning face. With a sunny bloodied smile she waved at the passing 485.
And so the Winter was imprisoned in the tower once again and the Spring released for yet another year.
