Springthorn and Weiss
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
The rumors spreading through the Ridge Islands hadn’t let up for months: a thing unknown to all, its like never seen before, was occupying the Singing Tower atop Bok Island’s Iron Mountain, the highest point of land on the drowned peninsula. It was said that the thing’s body and the tower had become one, that it had no eyes and lived in darkness. Those who had been there said that it played a strange, troubling music on the tower’s ancient carillon, and could see the future. We’d heard about the hundreds of pilgrims from all the islands, some from as far away as Jamaica, who came in boats to be touched by the being called Springthorn.
Where my wife Esa and I lived, up north on Big Scrub Island, with its dry climate and poor soil, there were more skeptics than believers, myself in the former camp, doubting it could be much more than a carnival sideshow with a costumed fortune teller hidden in the tower. But Esa kept pressing me to take her there, and it wasn’t hard to see why. For two years we’d tried to start a family, but so far had not succeeded, and she had recently turned thirty-seven. She needed to see a future that held something more than rising water and shrinking islands, and was desperate enough to seek it in what was almost certainly a fraud.
And it wasn’t just our failure to become parents that was driving us apart. It was hard for anyone to feel hopeful in these times, and I knew there was no denying her this probably futile pilgrimage. So I agreed to make the 120-mile trip south to Bok Island. We re-tarred and repainted our old twenty-eight foot sailboat and mended the sails. We provisioned for a longer trip, since one never knew the turns of the always unpredictable weather in this newest of North America’s island chains. Or its new-old chain; there had been other risings of the oceans in the past, at the end of ice ages. It had replaced the long-disappeared Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas.
We set out on a bright morning in April, a steady northwest wind behind us, sailing through the Mid-Florida Straits, where the waters of the Gulf of Mexico merge with the colder Atlantic. Not an easy run, with treacherous reefs of sunken ships, drowned condos and collapsed water towers along what had once been old Highway 27, which had traced the limestone spine of the former state of Florida. I steered for deeper water, taking the longer route, but the good weather held, and we got there on the evening of the third day. By the time we’d docked and secured the boat, registered with the Island Authority and obtained our two-day passes, it was dark.
“Here for Springthorn?” the official asked.
“Like everyone else, I suppose.”
“The Sanctuary closes at sundown. Sleep on your boat, then hightail it up to the Tower before first light, or you’ll wait in line half the day.”
“Is it real?” I asked.
“One way to find out,” he said, pulling down his window.
Sick of goat jerky and smoked gator-tail sandwiches, we found a restaurant on the dock and ate fresh-grilled shrimp and red snapper. We were very tired, and the evening was mild enough to sleep in hammocks on the deck. As the dock officer had advised, we were up and out before dawn on the bicycles we’d brought with us, finding it a steep climb up Iron Mountain, atop which soars the Singing Tower. Bok Island, the major remnant of the Lake Wales Ridge, has retained some of its lakes, but only a precious few are free of salt water intrusion, and these can always be identified by their large populations of alligators, marooned by the rising seas on all the islands.
There were already a few walkers, cyclists and horseback riders heading up to the Singing Tower and its still-lush gardens, planted centuries before when the peninsula had over fifty thousand square miles of dry land rich in lakes, rivers and fresh water springs. We arrived at a set of high, rusted gates and, after locking up our bikes, we bought our tickets and continued up the hill to the overgrown but still impressive gardens surrounding the Singing Tower. Its eroded pink marble was visible over the tops of some of the most ancient live oaks, palms and longleaf pines we’d ever seen. The sun was just rising on what promised to be a clear spring day.
This was our first trip to the Singing Tower, and as we reveled in its cool shade and birdsong, the deep note of a bell resonated through the gardens, a knell of shivering strangeness that struck the crowd into silence. It was followed moments later by another note, then, seconds later, another. It soon became clear that we were hearing a musical composition, or perhaps an improvisation, the rests between the notes so long that the ear had trouble linking them together. Harmony and atonality were indissolubly twined as the music gradually quickened, its shape forming and deforming into a controlled chaos of clashing bells. The rumors had not exaggerated: these sounds hovered on the very edge of what the human mind could define or understand as music.
The carillon is a grand but imperfect instrument, its sixty large, tuned bells incapable of forming a perfectly on-key note, so a certain dissonance mars even the sweetest melody but, apart from this, I had the profoundly disturbing impression that I wasn’t listening to a human performance. My unbelief in Springthorn was already shaken, and Esa’s faith confirmed. The music assaulted the peaceful morning in a thundering torrent of ideas, and I had to fight the urge to stop my ears, afraid that parts of my brain were being transformed by the otherworldly thoughts and emotions directing the massive bells. Esa seemed at once awed, frightened and deeply moved, her swimming eyes wide with an amazed recognition of feelings altogether foreign.
In a sense, the music demanded more of us than we had to give, and to divert enough attention away from it just to keep walking was an act of will. Many pilgrims had frozen in place, some with ecstatic expressions, others clearly suffering, and a few had sunk to the ground and lay as they fell, mouths open, eyes sightless with visions, their writhing fingers struggling as if to express in some alien sign language what tongue could not. Esa and I had to force each other to move forward.
The grounds were alive with birds, squirrels and darting lizards, seemingly unaffected by the sounds scissoring through our brains. Unfamiliar species of tropical and subtropical flowers, their nectar on which numerous swallowtail, heliconian and skipper butterflies, honeybees and bumblebees eagerly fed, and big fleshy-leaved plants native to rain forests hung over shallow pools crowded with creamy white water lilies, the turbid green water home to sluggish gold, albino and multi-colored carp.
A long marble reflecting pool held the half-ruined splendor of the Singing Tower. Its top was crowned with the marble statues of native pelicans, storks and raptors with folded wings, some broken but most intact, and all defaced by centuries of accumulated moss and mildew. Spiky bromeliads, vines and bushes had taken root in the crown, like unruly hair.
At the base of the tower, up a low flight of marble steps, a great brass door with a gothic arch, much tarnished and set deeply into an alcove, stood unopened, guarded from the curious by a broad moat of shallow water. The door’s front panels depicted bas-relief scenes, a weathered sign informed us, from the Book of Genesis. The extensive, shaded grounds, enriched by the cool splash of fountains and tiny spillways, invited the visitor to stroll over winding gravel trails through what had been, no doubt, a pleasant destination in less urgent times.
But Nature’s quiet invitation to serenity was being roughly challenged by the being occupying the tower; it seemed, at least to me, to be struggling, through its music and the mighty instrument on which it performed, to force an awareness of deeper realities on our simian brains and some of the inconceivable vastness and violence of the galaxies and the loneliness of the spaces between stars and galaxies, and the musician’s exile from that grander life.
Then the music stopped. By this time Esa and I stood directly in front of a bridge across the moat guarded by a wrought-iron gate, and as we dazedly tried to make sense of what had just happened to us, the brass door opened and a tall, stocky, black-robed man with a deep chest, a quite large head, long, brushed-back gray hair and a full beard, descended the steps and out onto a marble portico, spread his arms wide, and spoke in a deep, commanding voice that needed no amplification:
“Welcome, everyone, to the Singing Tower! My name is Albert Weiss. You’ve come great distances to commune with what lives inside the tower, and I promise that each one of you will receive its gifts. You bring doubts, questions, and fears, too, and I will try to prepare you for the touch of Springthorn. But first, let me relate how I came to know the Being that has no name. Names, for the best of reasons, are unnecessary for its kind. I gave it the name Springthorn after my first encounter with it, on that memorable night four years ago, while walking alone on the western shore of Bok Island.
“A driftwood trunk from a grandfather cypress, a thousand years old if a day, had washed up on the beach. I approached it, preparing to paste my Right of Salvage sticker on it and rejoicing in my good fortune, when I glimpsed something dark and formless entwined in its leafless branches. It had no face, no eyes, mouth, or ears, and I at first mistook it for a large mat of clinging moss or algae.
“I was near enough to touch it — and be reminded that it was a very dark night — when I felt a soft, gentle touch on my hand. Thinking it was a mosquito, I slapped at it, then felt a tiny, painless prick. Something flowed into me then, something that I still struggle to define. It wasn’t an attack or a defense, but instead a gentle, curious, somehow innocent contact.
“Without the slightest fear, I knew that the thing on the tree was inside of me, and I in it, and that we knew each other, had always known each other. There were no secrets between us, just this pure flow of understanding and sharing. Without words, with its touch alone, it showed me its wanderings, its instinctive kindness and curiosity, its need to explore other worlds, and its space vessel’s collision with an old earth satellite and disastrous fall from the sky, to crash land in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I saw that it came from a planet many light-years from Earth, its star larger and hotter than ours, where life flourished only underground. Full sunlight would have killed it but, fortunately, its ship went down at night, not far from Bok Island. Its kind can adapt to many conditions, including our air and gravity, but the salt water would have killed it, had it not found its life raft in that old floating cypress log that providentially bumped against the slowly sinking wreckage of its ship, carrying it to Bok Island, and to me.
“I was the appointed guardian of the Singing Tower, and played the carillon on festive occasions. Knowing this, as it knew everything about me instantly, it made me understand that the tower could be its home, safe from the sunlight, so I went back for my horse and carriage, and in the darkness transported it to the tower, where it has since grown and adapted to our climate.
“As you’ve heard, it expresses many thoughts and emotions through its music, much of it strange to us. I have learned a great deal about it since then, how it senses the world through its skin and its ability to extrude tendrils that can shape into any appendage it needs. I should also tell you that it does not subsist on food, as we do, but instead draws harmless amounts of pure life energy from those it touches. Don’t be alarmed, please. It gives much and takes little, and you will feel no more than a slight weariness after your communion. Think of it as the coin the ancient Greeks paid the Oracle for her prophecies.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
