The Tower of Moab by L A Lewis

Abel Grimmer (1570-1619)
Building of the Tower of Babel

A salesman is traveling in an industrial region dominated by a strange yellow tower. The tower is not the well-preserved ruin that at first he takes it for. After buying some drinks in a bar he learns that it's less than a century old, begun by a religious cult who presumably intended, like the builders of The Tower of Babel, building their way into heaven. Their project was finally abandoned when the money ran out. When the salesman’s next client proves a disappointment, the years of drudgery and disillusion at last seem to come to a head. He takes a rented room where he can drink without interruption and writes a letter of resignation before rising into a ‘Nirvana of concentrated, objective thought.’ He’s quite comfortably pickled by the time he notices the Tower of Moab rising distantly beyond the houses opposite.

The description of the Tower inevitably places this story in a literary landscape vaguely similar to those by Lovecraft, Robert W Chambers or Machen, though Lewis is as original as any of those writers.

Leaving the room to examine the tower at close quarters, the man discovers that its walls are decorated with carvings depicting Biblical scenes executed on a huge scale. ‘One gets something of [the] feeling from the prints of an old family Bible in which the air is full of the most substantial-looking winged angels and there is a pit full of demons in the foreground. I think that young children, being shown such things, go about thereafter expecting to meet them.’

Successful story telling often relies greatly on anticipation, and – given the passage quoted above and the intoxicated narrator’s almost-constant view of the tower from his window – it is hardly surprising that he soon begins to have visions of unearthly creatures.

The builders of The Tower of Moab might not have succeeded in their goal of building a tower to reach heaven. But there are those dwelling beyond the skies who now find the Tower provides them with a convenient means of egress to lower regions.

Editor Hugh Lamb writes that this is ‘…probably the strangest story you’ll read for a very long time.’ He adds ‘I certainly regard it as one of the unrecognized classics of English macabre fiction.’ I agree.

From Tales Of The Grotesque (1934)