He wanted to slip into that photograph with her. Slip under those covers with her and press his nose and lips into her underarm. To take her small round toes into his mouth and suck them one by one. She was watching him, watching him through time, waiting for him.
He looked up from the album spread upon his lap and listened. Back when he had spent many peaceful hours alone in his little house while his wife was working he would hear tiny furtive sounds of wood creaking, the shower faucet dripping, a branch stirring against a window like a ghost child’s nails, but in this solidly built old building there was not the slightest sound but for those he made himself. Aside from the graffiti and the musky human traces he thought he detected he felt certain that presently he was alone in the old mill or factory. So he opened his fly and freed himself and began working himself to release as he returned his attention to those three last photos in the album.
Having reentered the main corridor he came to a reception area and the front door to the building situated under the clock tower, the unseen but towering presence of which he could almost feel as an increased gravity pressing upon his body. Continuing past the reception area he arrived at the corridor’s end and a shadowy flight of stairs ascending to another level. He stood there gazing up into the murk of the stairwell and considered climbing but a glance back at the dimming light bleeding from the high windows along the corridor told him that the day was too far in decline. He had best get home, which was only across the street but seemed very far both in space and time, and continue his exploration of this structure on some other day.
He tried leaving through the front door but it was locked so he retraced his path down the central corridor and into the shipping area and out through that side door. Under one arm he carried the wedding album.
For several more days and through the weekend he refrained from revisiting the factory. He would merely glance over that way before mounting his driveway as if he hoped no one, maybe himself included, would notice he was looking, the way he stole glimpses of young women at work. Part of him was eager to resume his exploration of that place of solitude but after his first visit he had experienced a strange sensation upon returning home, like a mental version of a diver’s decompression sickness, as he readjusted to his usual environment.
One night as he sat absorbed in an old book he felt a hand materialize upon his left shoulder and slide down his chest, and seemingly disembodied lips brushed against his ear. He flinched in aversion. His wife’s voice too near spoke to him. Look what I just found in your bottom bureau drawer, under your dress shirts.
Her right hand appeared in front of him and she rested the wedding album from the factory atop the open book he had been reading. He stared at it in a kind of implosion of numb panic. He began to scrabble blindly for an explanation. His wife went on: I was wondering where this had disappeared to. I should have asked you.
I’m sorry, he mumbled.
She came around in front of him to sit on the arm of his chair and shifted the album onto her thighs to open its first page. Oh, weren’t we cute? Wasn’t that just the best day of your life?
He stared a long time at the first page, which was filled with a single enlargement of these strangers when they had been young, before the groom had grown a rounded belly and the bride had chopped and dyed her hair.
Yes, he mumbled.
His wife went through page after page, photograph by photograph pointing out faces and giving them names that came back to him now, and sighing again and again as she remembered this dead parent or grandparent or aunt as if the two of them moved from grave to grave in a cemetery.
He dreaded her arriving at the last page with its three final instant photos but she did and she leaned down against his shoulder and cooed, Do you remember that nightie?
Of course, he told her.
She closed the album and placed it on a small table and took the book from his lap and lay that on top of the album and lifted him from his chair by the hand. She smiled at him all the while that she pulled him toward their bed.
He eventually became hard and struggled valiantly atop her as if pushing a boulder up his steep driveway. He thrust with more and more force determinedly, wheezing and encapsulated in a membrane of sweat. Apparently repulsed by the sweat his wife didn’t put her hands on his back but she moaned when her orgasm came. He drove himself more forcibly yet and the bed squeaked and jounced and a terrible booming arose from within the wall like an awakened monstrous heartbeat.
He wanted to press his palms against his ears. He wanted to clamp his eyes shut as if to be alone in a small room taking comfort in its darkness and silence. He stopped thrusting and subsided heavily upon his wife and whispered, That bitch down there. I swear someday I’m going down there with a hammer to shut her up.
Silly! his wife said to him. That wasn’t her; it was our headboard hitting the wall. She hasn’t been home for a few days…haven’t you noticed her car hasn’t been here?
He hadn’t been conscious of it but now that he thought about it he realized his wife was right. Still, despite this reassurance he melted away inside her and thus was not able to achieve a climax. He rolled off her and lay panting and unfulfilled.
I’m sorry, he said again.
It’s okay, she reassured him. It’s late and we’re both tired.
During the night he got out of bed to empty his bladder, still tiptoeing despite his wife having reassured him their neighbor was away perhaps on some vacation. When finished in the bathroom he crept across the living room, poked his fingers through the blinds and looked out in the direction of the factory. There were no lights to indicate its presence, of course, and he saw nothing but a little bit of streetlamp glow reflected on the surface of the pond as though a viscous black void were slowly flooding in his direction.
It was a brighter day than it had been the last time, the sky still clear and crisply blue even after his interminable work day. Having parked his car opposite the apartment house crowning its little hill he descended the slope as before and once again came to the pond into which the Gosston Canal spent itself.
He stopped halfway across the scabrous metal bridge that spanned the canal to peer down into the water, being able to see into it more easily today. He thought he might be able to see fish. Perhaps, remembering his theory about a meteor creating this hollow, mutant or unknown breeds of fish. Past the epidermis of reflected sky he could just make out a multitude of shadowy tendrils all reaching toward the pond like a migration of eels but he figured them for aquatic plants squirming in the dreamy current. He turned to look off the opposite side of the bridge and what he discovered there surprised him. A large form crouched below the water’s surface: the body of a black automobile, the canal just deep enough to have submerged it entirely, its roof humped like the back of a small whale basking in the penetrating sunlight. Had the car been driven or pushed down the wooded slope in the past by some of those teens who rutted inside the abandoned factory?
He continued across the bridge and toward the elongated red brick building with its faceless clock tower and went again to that unlocked side door that let him into the shipping area. He stole in quietly, listening for any indications of others. Though he had seen no cars in the parking lot teenagers from the area would likely come here on foot. Yet only that previous silence as solidly rooted as the brick walls greeted him. It was as though even sound had been stripped from this place of unknown industry along with its machinery and all the rest.
Leaving the former shipping area he tested a closed metal door at the start of the central corridor and confirmed his suspicion that it opened onto a stairwell identical to the one at the other end of the building. He was grateful that in order to explore the second level he would not have to pass the door he had closed last time to shut up that massive ball of spider silk suspended from the ceiling, in case it had burst in the interim and its cargo was crawling free, slipping out around the door’s edges.
The door screeched as
he opened it further, the noise amplified by the stairwell. If anyone else were here they would now certainly know he was here too. Not that he expected anyone who came here would physically harm him though one could never fully rule out such a threat, but he wanted the place all to himself.
He entered the stairwell and eased the door shut again behind him on its pneumatic cylinder to minimize a repeat of the metallic shriek as best he could.
The stairwell was lit feebly by one narrow window up near the landing, which he soon reached. He stepped through a threshold from which the door had been removed and entered one end of a corridor that ran the length of the building as did the one on the ground level. The floor of this corridor was wood with bolted down metal plates presumably for hand trucks or carts to move more smoothly across and to prevent further wear of the warped old boards beneath.
The floor just ahead appeared to be strewn with dozens of severed human feet gone brown and petrified with age, with more of the same heaped up innumerably in bins to either side of the walkway. He smiled with recognition. They were wooden lasts for shoes or boots to be formed around. He’d been correct when he thought he’d smelled leather and tanning chemicals the first time he entered the place. He didn’t know why the lasts would have been left behind unless it was because they were an obsolete make, scuffed and gouged old wood, whereas nowadays he assumed it was more likely they were fashioned from plastic. He knelt to pick one up. Yes – the last, hinged through the instep, was much like those he had seen every day in the old boot factory he’d begun working in at the age of nineteen, his first fulltime job, except those lasts hadn’t had a grooved suggestion of toes like these scattered and piled specimens did. He figured the kids who came in here were responsible for the ones knocked all over the floor. He placed the wooden foot he had been examining into one of the bins, after first conscientiously making sure the number stenciled on the bin corresponded to the last’s size.
He supposed by now every shoe or boot that had been manufactured in this place had gone the way of the cows that had died to make them, and maybe every one of the people who had worn them besides.
As he proceeded further along the corridor, passing through slants of late afternoon sunlight entering through windows that were larger than those downstairs but still fogged white with dust, he took note of something odd about the ceiling. The ceiling here on the second floor was much lower than the one below and its bare wooden timbers were bedewed with a profusion of yellow droplets. He stopped again to tilt his face toward them. Were these dirty drops of rainwater that had soaked down through the building’s flat roof? It hadn’t rained for a number of days but it seemed the best explanation. He speculated that the tar covering the roof must be in very bad shape for so much water to have leaked through, since the whole of the ceiling as far forward as he could see was jeweled with these hanging drops. He noticed, however, that nowhere did the floor seemed puddled or even wetted by the water having dripped down. The drops simply hung suspended like millions of beads of glistening honey.
Past the bins of lasts piled in cairns he came to an open area with empty bolt holes in the floorboards. His guess was that there had been rows of benches here supporting sewing machines, where canvas linings had been joined to leather vamps and all the leather panels had been assembled into shoes or boots.
Beyond this, he knew from its wide work bench and slotted racks like roomier letter holders was the leather room, where tanned and finished skins would have been grouped by their dyed pigments and rolled up into tubes to be inserted into the rack for the leather cutters to pick their next job from.
And there, toward the end of the corridor, a row of leather cutter’s clicker machines lined either wall making for a total of a dozen. He recognized the clickers because for several years at two companies he himself had stood up all day at such a machine, swinging it into position on its arm, depressing the two buttons that caused it to press heavily down upon bladed metal dies, the outlines of which represented the various panels that would compose a boot, driving these dies through spread cow skins like cookie cutters pushed into sheets of dough. He was surprised to see the clickers remained whereas the sewing machines and other machinery downstairs had been removed but he supposed the clickers might have been harder to transport or too dated for future use.
Yet there was another thing toward the end of the corridor that commanded his attention more so than the clicker machines and he stood poised like a deer that had emerged from the forest to confront its first human being at the opposite end of a clearing.
Was this other figure contemplating him as he contemplated it? For a human form stood on the raised little platform that supported the last of the clicker machines along the left row. This figure was, at once, both darkly silhouetted against the window behind it and yet luminous from within.
He watched this human outline for long seconds in a silence thorough as deafness, as if he expected the figure to swing the arm of the clicker machine, simultaneously push the buttons set into its two handles, and stamp a die through a cow’s flayed skin. The figure did not move, though, nor produce the slightest sound.
He stole forward again in the manner of a person afraid to awaken one who is sleeping.
Though he mostly kept his eyes on the human form standing at that machine in the corner he was peripherally aware that the drops on the ceiling dangled progressively lower here, some of the strands a foot or more in length, making them appear more solid than liquid, like strings of rubber cement. Was there an attic space in which glue for shoe soles might have been stored, ruptured over time or overturned by vandals? Or were these seemingly gummy extrusions related to the roof’s deterioration, some sealant gone liquid during the hotter months only to solidify again when the weather grew cold?
He walked between the rows of clickers and approached the last machine on his left. Still the figure mounted there on its little pedestal did not shift or emit a sound. As he began to study it more clearly he no longer expected it to move. Nevertheless he spotted a small weighted cobbler’s hatchet stuck in one of the clicker machines’ heavily scarred plastic tables and he pulled it free if only to give himself some physical sense of security. A familiar weight in his hand. These hatchets were used to chop away the web of leather remaining after the dies had punched out their panels and the cow hide was advanced across the cutting block. He had once accidentally chopped his thumb with a similar hatchet while hacking away such scrap and still bore the depressed white scar today.
Here at the terminus of the corridor, the back wall bearing pegs that once would have supported the variously sized and shaped dies, some of the strands depending from the ceiling had dripped so low they were like thin icicles glowing yellow with sunlight, and at last there were even a few thickly mounded pools on the floor where the gunk had collected in overlapping folds. A couple of the ceiling’s delicate stalactites were connected to the top of the largest of these heaps. He tapped this pile with the toe of his shoe expecting from its translucent golden appearance that it would be gelatinous and resilient but in fact the mound clicked solidly like hardened resin.
At last he turned his full attention to the human-shaped thing standing on its wooden platform with its hands wrapped around the clicker’s double handles, though if there had been a cow hide spread across the cutting block it was now absent, leaving only the table’s badly chewed up plastic surface.
It was the form of a man as rendered in the same golden-brown translucent material that was seeping down everywhere through the old wooden ceiling. This statue was anything but crude in execution. Rather than merely being roughly anthropomorphic it was beautifully sculpted, or molded perhaps when the resin had been softer and pliable, detailed to such an extent that the strands of its hair and the folds of its clothing were convincingly suggested. The figure was that of a slender young man though of course the matter’s uniformly honey-like color prevented one from telling the model’s hair or eye color, the effigy’s eyes just
blank golden orbs in a glassy golden head that seemed to glow inside with the mellow light that angled in through the window behind.
All alone now, huh? he said aloud to the statue. He waited a beat as if an answer might come. Working overtime? Good luck with that. I worked a lot of overtime, too. Still lost my house, though. He cocked his head a little. Who left you here?
It was far too artful a creation to have been fashioned by the teens who had sprayed graffiti on the walls of the ground floor. It was in fact too masterful an artwork to imagine anyone having abandoned it here. Which made him wonder then if this posed mannequin of glassy resin was a piece of artwork at all.
Was it possible that some freak mishap or grave calamity had occurred here, and that was the cause of this factory having been abandoned and stripped down? Could some dangerous chemical have poured down from an attic upon a poor unsuspecting worker at his station, encasing him alive? Then, the tissues and bones of his body having burned away or rotted over time leaving only this fossil-like shape of him in his place? A physical echo, a solid shadow?
Or might it be that this golden matter – this perhaps celestial matter – was or had been organic, even sentient, a protoplasmic mass of communal cells that had found the loneliness of the dead factory so troubling that it had shaped itself into the form of one of the beings that had once populated it, raising up this monument in tribute, like the skeleton of an extinct creature erected in a museum? Or, had it been an ill-conceived shortcut in evolution…a noble but failed attempt to aspire to something greater than was within this primitive life form’s capacity to attain?
If so, apparently those living cells themselves had died off and become a fossilized residue of their former existence.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 6
