Story
Jack Flanders, a hitchhiker and drifter, is invited to the estate of his aunt, Lady Sara Jowls. As Jack approaches the estate, he sees an outline of the mansion silhouetted against the night sky, with four distinct towers reaching up to the sky, though his aunt and everyone else who lives there insists there are only three.
Jack slowly becomes familiar with the strange inhabitants of Inverness, including the mansion's caretaker, Old Far-seeing Art, who can listen to the aum sound emanating from the center of the Universe, and tends to the estate's hedge maze, a place that only he can enter without going insane. Others include Dr. Mazoola, an alchemist of the first order, Jives the Butler, who is an old quick-change artist with a dry sense of humor, the Madonna Vampyra, an energy vampire who lives in the mansion's hollow walls, Wham Bam Shazam, a young man with a penchant for the 1950s who is learning to fly from Chief Wampum, and Little Frieda, a Venusian who is a "million and a half" years old, but looks like a small girl with no pupils in her eyes, large pigtails, and a penchant for smoking huge Havana cigars.
The group teach Jack what he needs to know in order to successfully enter, and more importantly, return from, the Fourth Tower, ranging from an explanation of the Tibeten Wheel of Life to a past-life regression and a lesson on how to draw energy from trees.
Lady Jowls' husband, Lord Henry Jowls, vanished into the mysterious Fourth Tower without a trace some years ago. Lady Jowls is disturbed by the recent happenings at the mansion, in particular an old jukebox somewhere in one of the mansion's three tall towers, that plays the song "Angel Baby" whenever an accident is about to occur. Accidents have been on the rise in Inverness recently, and range from simple misunderstandings involving an aroused kundalini to a fire-breathing dragon.
Jack realizes that the mysterious jukebox must be playing in the invisible Fourth Tower, and is determined to find its source. It is said that in the past, eight people have seen and entered the fourth tower of Inverness, and none have returned alive. Jack Flanders is the ninth.
Read more about this topic: The Fourth Tower Of Inverness
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