The Sacred Towers

By Intoxcy8me

When the night wind come howling down from the north, frozen, unflagging, and insatiable: when the snow drives down, a horde of The Shadow wandering senseless, hurrying and scurrying through the night: the shadows do their work. They make no sound: they fashion terror, and ultimate terror, and more terror....Or-is it indeed only terror that they fashion?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intoxcy8me
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311455581

Intoxcy8me

I'm happily married to my wonderful partner of eight years who’s been my rock since I had to give up full time work due to an illness. She’s supported me all the way in my venture as an author, and even though I may not be the most talented writer in the world, she always gives my books an A+. I've had many jobs in my life but nothing comes close to letting my sordid imagination flow through my fingertips and into my eBooks – I love it and hope I can continue with it for as long as possible. Aside from writing, I love to watch movies and if I'm not at my keyboard I can normally be found in the den, or out in the countryside walking our two gorgeous dogs. I feel blessed to be able to ‘work’ while enjoying myself and I hope you will enjoy reading what I write. I intend to keep on publishing books for as long as I possibly can and I hope you will continue to read and enjoy them!

Book preview

As the light is against the darkness, so are you and I against The Shadow. HERE is one of the most extraordinary stories that we have read in a long while. It is sure to arouse your wonder and excitement. Such an attainment would overshadow all else in the realms of book world.

The northern winter is altogether harsh and brutal; there is no friendliness to man to be found in it. There, the snow has its proper habitation; there, in the gaunt valleys of the mountain, in the terrible, lonely desolation, The Shadow abide.

They go about their work silently in the gray darkness; heaven knows what dreams may be haunting them. Those dreams that no mind could imagine, unless death had already frozen its brain.

When the night wind come howling down from the north, frozen, unflagging, and insatiable: when the snow drives down, a horde of The Shadow wandering senseless, hurrying and scurrying through the night: the shadows do their work. They make no sound: they fashion terror, and ultimate terror, and more terror....Or-is it indeed only terror that they fashion?...

You're wrong, said Beard. He's simply not a man. He's a shadow. That's what he is. When I see a wolf, I think of him. This dark shadow —I get chills simply looking at him because he reminds me of death.

Well, she said, Indians have taboos. Things they mustn't touch, mustn't do. Then again, there are a lot of ceremonials they submit to. Ceremonial dances, I mean, before they go to war, magic the medicine men preside over. In a way, the Indian's hands are tied almost as badly as a white man's, but there's nothing to tie Mohamed Atta. He doesn't believe in anything. He's an absolutely free soul.

It's true! cried Beard, thumping his fist on his knee. He believes in nothing. That's why he's strong. He has the strength of the evil one because he is a demon. He's free, just as Satan is free. That's your idea, isn't it, Sylvia? It's mine, too.

Except for the place where they died, Bill Feehan and Mohamed Atta would seem to have had absolutely nothing in common. Feehan rescued people; Atta killed them. As a lifelong firefighter who rose to become first deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, Feehan was directly or indirectly responsible for saving thousands of lives. As a suicidal terrorist who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Atta murdered thousands, including Bill Feehan, who was helping a woman at the base of the North Tower when the building collapsed on him. Any suggestion of moral equivalence between the two men is repugnant. And yet, it must be said, both believed in the rightness of their causes with absolute certainty. It might be more comforting to think that Atta was stark raving mad, but true madmen, who are usually dysfunctional, don't work with Atta's calm purpose. No one wants to think that even a seminormal human being--indeed, nearly a score of them--could do what the terrorists did on September 11. In a world of moral relativism, we prefer psychological explanations; no one wishes to stare directly into the face of evil.

Virginia DiChiara did have a premonition that something wicked was on the way. DiChiara, whose office was on the 101st floor of the North Tower, had worried that the terrorists might come back to finish off the World Trade Center. She had been a block away, working at Bankers Trust at 130 Liberty Street, when terrorists bombed the WTC in 1993. But in 2000, when she got a big job as director of audit for Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm at the top of the North Tower, she tried to put her fears out of her mind. Her corner office looked out on the Statue of Liberty far below, at the brilliant sunsets and, in the distance, to the Jersey shore, where she liked to go boating in the summer. Once a carefree sun worshiper, DiChiara will never soak up the rays in the same way again; on September 11 she sustained third-degree burns on much of her body. She had gone to hell and then, slowly, painfully, come back.

Denial is an ordinary and understandable response to calculated mass murder. Americans, like most people, don't want to see what they don't wish to know. Warning about grand terrorism--terror with weapons of mass destruction--and calling for homeland defense has been an academic subspecialty for years. Foundation and government reports warned that it was only a matter of time before the terrorists struck America in a way that could claim thousands of lives. Yet at the White House, homeland defense was not the first job Vice President Dick Cheney got when the new administration took office last January. Cheney spent several months running a task force to solve an energy crisis that, it turns out, was probably exaggerated. His staff was just formally turning to the subject of homeland defense on September 11, when the terrorists hit.

To be sure, few could have guessed at the brazenness and resourcefulness of Atta or Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that backed him and the 18