CHAPTER ONE
Hammering machines sounded as a warmarch. A man sat an iron desk at the center of the ancient, riveted facility’s ground floor, manipulating a brandless typewriter with steady violence to match the labyrinthine machines, that whirred and jutted at odd angles from cracked concrete floor to dusty tarpstrewn windows. He appeared more of the building and its darkness than flesh and blood. The smouldering site of labor, lit by a single, dim rafterborn lantern of frosted glass, affixed with an aged length of rope.
At length, the typist stopped and sat straight. Luminous eyes gleamed like polished stone. Dark-gloved hands caressed the workworn apparatus as if it were a sacred relic.
He reappraised the final lines of his work, his face a penumberal mask that concealed a vague smile.
Upon the last, fresh-inked page were the words:
“From sin’s darkling stream, there was no escape. For it trammeled the whole of the world, whose depths were as the end of it.”
CHAPTER TWO
The man with the golden mask stood the threshold of a fathomless abyss. Two women beside him, one dark of complexion, similarly guised, the other pale, bound and struggling. The masked man caressed the captive’s face, without tenderness, as a practiced dealer of antiquities seeking an imperfection in a replica, and finding it, tossed her to the yawning chasm. He stood the aperture triumphant as its murk went thick with a cry of primal terror. For several seconds that stretched into eternity she fell, a mass of regret and fear, until her frail body was swallowed by the hungry void.
The masks were discarded, revealing eyeless, disfigured faces. The man kissed the woman, tore her shirt and felt the supple weight of her breasts. He sunk teeth to neck, extracting a shudder of delight, then pain and blood, and in the red pool that formed, he invaded her. At the edge of the carnivorous rift, the chimera shimmered, like twin stars in the dark.
Liot Ravel woke with a shudder. Nightmares were commonplace for him, but never had any dream held the vivid potency of that from which he had egressed. He ran a pale hand through unkempt hair and shook himself, as if the gesture could dispel slumber’s black imaginings. He stripped, showered, hastened into his clothes and out the door.
Without his creaking saltbox twostory, gloaming sky. A stygian stormwall approached that appeared as a titanic centipede, set to swallow the world. Bony boughs rattled and feathered regents spun from wooden thrones, cawing, as if roused by the breath of the great spectre above. Ravel, disturbed, shook himself once more, and walked on to the old factory at the high northern outskirts of town. The place was a refuge in times of mental distress, for it afforded a stolid quietude absent the clocklike rhythm of the township.
Feeling watched, he paused in the sodden path and looked again to the massing clouds, discerning no familiar shape. With the forms dispensation, the gale ceased. Only roiling charcoal and cracks of light remained.
He worked his jaw and paced sparse, muted wood, and a patchy, rain glossed footpath until he came to his destination.
The factory perimeter, distinguished by an eight foot high gate of spined black iron, beyond which stretched an immense mechanical necropolis, strewn with husks of earthmovers, tractors, processing bins and oddments whose applications were long forgot, in tangled heaps or skewed stacks. Little vegetation grew about the industrial monument, or the fence which girded it, and that which did was yellowed and thin. Beyond the remnants, the factory itself shot skyward with ruthless, chimeric prominence. It was an exceedingly unusual building. Originally a coal plant, it had thereafter been reconstituted as a steel forge, then, a lumber yard, and other incarnations never scribed. No part of the structure had ever been torn down. Each new portion had been melded with the old, or built atop it, such that it no longer resembled a commercial facility, but rather, an immense, alien fortress. The ornateless metallic exterior and lancing smokestacks cast a long shadow over the mechanical midden and no birds nested upon it.
Liot strolled to the arched front gate and found Waltyr Clemons, clad in checkered coat and flat sporting cap, fixing a chain through the bars.
“My way is shut.”
The gatekeeper jumped and laughed, spying the entrant. “Snuck up on me.”
“What’s this?”
Clemons secured the lock with a sigh as the sky glowed blue with lighting, and a great clangor let out from heaven. “Rains coming thick. Best get to the summer house. Tell you there.” Liot nodded and together they took the path from the gate a short distance, turned into the woods, and cut to a clearing where sat a small pavilion, near old as the factory, greening with lichen, moss and vine. Inside the derelict, a heavy calcimine table, two blanketed wicker chairs, two cups, and a portable burner topped by a squat, stained samovar. Clemons sat as the air thickened with cloudblood and filled the vessels with black tea from the simmering kettle.
“Someone’s bought it.”
“Bought it?”
“Fraid so.”
“Why should anyone buy it?”
Clemons shrugged. “The owner could just as well ask why you like coming round.” The man brushed his formless hat off sunkissed brow with a callous thumb. “Why do you like coming round?”
“Helps my process. Its peaceful.”
Clemons took a sip, swallowed, and looked to the tangled, rain-curtained woods and the vanishing construct beyond.
“That it is. I think the machines scare the coyotes off. Or maybe its ancestral memory. Never seen one around here. Same with the deer. So the hunters don’t come round. Its like its own little country.”
“Population, two.”
“Ha. Mayor Ravel has a ring to it, eh?”
“No, no. I’d abdicate. Certainly, that’d be your honor.”
They laughed and drank, enjoying the warmth of the aromatic brew and the thrum of the firmament.
“Sometimes,” Clemons started. “When I’m out here alone, clearing the path to town, I try to image what it was like to live back when there was nothing but that factory and a couple of shacks.”
Liot followed his friend’s gaze to the pall beyond the pavilion and nodded.
“Must have been a hard life.”
“Might be they’d have the same opinion of us.”
“Might be.”
“People like to think the past was always sorrier than the present. There’s comfort in it. However far a man’s down, he can always say, ‘It’d have been worse back then, I’m just lucky I was born when I was.’ As if it were something to be elected.”
“Walt.”
“Hm?”
“You haven’t told me who bought it.”
“Oh. Sorry. Dunno.”
Ravel sighed and fiddled with his cup, eyes on the table.
“Don’t look so glum. You lost your haunt, but you got the festival to look forward too. Tess still going?” Ravel brightened at the utterance of the name and the thought of fall’s festivities.
“Yes. I should take her out here sometime. This quaint little pavilion. It’d be a nice place for a picknick.”
“Speaking of,” Clemons bent to a compartment in the desk and drew a thermos and a paperbag. “Soup and sandwiches?”
“That’d be lovely, thanks.”
As they ate in silence, Ravel glanced through the path leading to the factory. By a lull in the downpour he could make out a disntinctly human shape framed in the grime guised top floor window. The figure did not move and appeared to be looking at him. As he refocused his eyes, the torrential curtains resumed their veilments.
Was it the new owner or a manikin? Or perhaps it was merely a deceptively donned coatrack?
He turned back to Clemons. The groundskeeper maintained a number of eccentricities. Aversion to striding neath ladders for fear of incuring bad luck. Signing himself before graveyards to allay restless spirits. His superstitious turn of mind, Ravel thought, must have rubbed off.
/////Logos Literature 