La Torre Que Se Come A La Gente

Introduction

This is for Belle's Challenge which you can read here:

The Peter Gabriel song from the album "Ovo" sprung to mind immediately, but this is MY story.

La Torre Que Se Come A La Gente

It had been there since the Middle Ages.

Tales were told that it held a great treasure, gold from Spanish Galleons brought over the seas from El Dorado, but the treasure was cursed.

No one knew who built the tower, but it was dark, but torches of fire always burned.

The rumours were that the torches were fuelled by those foolish enough to enter the tower. Whether the torches were there to light the way (to Hell?) or to lead the unwary astray to a ghastly fate.

Often bones had been found, dropped from the higher windows, stripped of flesh and the bones often looked as though they had been gnawed by some ravenous carnivorous beast.

Month on month some new fool decided to take a chance and find the treasure.

Those that looked in the burning door saw a stairway that wound up the tower, lit by torches that looked suspiciously like burning bodies and smelt of bacon.

It was said that sometimes the bodies disappeared into the tower's walls and then later the bones were found outside stripped of flesh and sometimes drained of marrow, cracked and broken.

People called it witchcraft and dark magic but it was more than that. There was a hellish power from the beginning of time that inhabited the tower.

Scholars and experts in the dark arts said it had a name that could never be uttered, and the only way to defeat it was to avoid and ignore it. But the rumours of treasure persisted and the Tower made sure that some would always be tempted to try where others had failed.

They only succeeded in being spat out by the tower when it had consumed their flesh.

Whether there was treasure there, no one could say. The only thing that was certain was that an ancient evil had come and settled here and would feed on anyone foolish enough to pass through its door.

The Tower That Eats People was given a Spanish name, and no-one knew what its dark secrets were, they only saw the bones that were left after the tower had fed