by steve higgs
In general, the Mill looked empty and I wondered if that was just because it was so big that you could employ ten thousand people and never see them. It appeared more likely though that the Mill could be doing better. Mrs. Barker had said that was what the new owner, Brett believed. I saw old plant equipment that looked like it needed to be replaced and it was idle when it ought to be busy doing something if the Mill was also busy.
I wandered through an open roller-shutter door into the main building. There were at least workers in here and there was activity. I got a few glances, but nothing more than that. I had been wandering for a good ten minutes and it was time I went back to reception and met with Ronald. I went via the car once more to dump my disguise in the boot.
The reception was plush, they had spent some money on it and it stood out as an oddity against all the dirty industrial landscape around it. The whole front was glass panels from the double-height roof to the floor. The doors opened automatically as I approached them with a swishing sound. Then closed behind me as I walked over an enormous mat emblazoned with the legend, "Welcome to Barker Mill. The Home of Steel". I continued onto a marble floor where my footsteps echoed across the room in the otherwise silent space. I could see the two young ladies on reception talking, but their voices did not carry at all.
I was greeted professionally by a pretty, blond lady. I was expected, and Mr. Drake would be back shortly. He had been waiting but had been called away to tend to something. Could I please fill in the visitors' book while I waited for him and take a seat on the right? I could help myself to tea or coffee from the machine in the waiting area should I wish to.
I waited only a minute or so before an older chap came into reception. He had thinning grey hair that was several weeks past needing a cut, large brushy eyebrows that had retained his original black hair colour and looked to be trying to join in the middle, and watery, steel-blue eyes that looked tired. He had on a poorly fitting pair of grey trousers with a belt cinched in to keep them up. The belt itself had lost the shiny black surface leather around the buckle from the many years of being done up and undone. On his feet were workers steel toe-capped boots which looked almost new, as did the luminous yellow jacket he wore. The jacket had Barker Steel written on the back. To finish off his outfit, he had a shirt and tie under the jacket. The tie had many stains, a couple of burn holes and my guess was that he wore the same one every day and the thought to buy a new one never occurred to him. He was perhaps seventy years old and walked with a spritely pace.
I watched as he neared the desk where the two ladies were sitting. The one I had spoken with nodded in my direction at which he looked up and headed over to meet me.
I stood up before he arrived and extended my hand as I moved towards him, ‘Ronald Drake?’
‘Yes sir, that be I.' He shook my hand with a firm grasp, which I liked.
‘Thank you for meeting with me at such short notice, Mr. Drake.'
‘That is not a problem at all, sir. Always happy to help. Besides Mrs. Barker asked in person and I likes to keep the Barkers happy.' He said all this with a smile, he seemed a jovial sort. ‘Shall we walk while we talk? I understand you wish to see some of the Phantom marks.'
‘Yes indeed. Can we start with the office in which Mr. Barker died?'
‘Of course. Right this way please, sir.’ Ronald pointed to a door leading out of the back of reception and led the way towards and then out of it. The door led outside again where it had started to drizzle lightly. The fine, mist-like rain would soak through one’s clothes if exposed for long enough but transitioning between buildings as we were it posed no concern. We followed a yellow safety walkway from the back of reception across a large yard and into another building. This building looked old, perhaps as old as the main Mill building and as we passed through the front door, I realised this would have been the original reception. The desk was still there with several other fittings.
We crossed through the room and went up a flight of stairs, which opened out onto a wide corridor with offices on both sides. Some of the offices had windows along one wall which allowed me to see in as we passed. I was following a pace behind Ronald and trying to take in as much as I could. It was late afternoon on a Thursday and there were plenty of people working on whatever it was they were doing. Was the Mill in trouble? Did it have a shaky future? I had too little information at this point to tell.
‘Here you are, sir. This was Mr. Barker's office. I suppose it still is actually, although it is a different Mr. Barker now.' Ronald opened the door, which was unlocked and stood to one side, so that I could go in first.
‘Where is the current Mr. Barker? Is he not in work today?' The office was empty. The computer screen had timed out and switched itself off and there was no coffee mug sitting empty on a coaster nor any smell of coffee. He could be a tea man, but my guess was that no one had been in the office today.
‘Mr. Barker comes and goes without my permission, sir.'
I nodded. Of course.
‘Is he away from the Mill often?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ I looked at Ronald. He was very clearly not saying what he wanted to say. I suspected this might be because we were stood in the firm’s main office building and perhaps he was diplomatically not saying anything negative about the owner. Very wise. I would ask again later when we had moved elsewhere.
I had no real interest in the office except for the door frame where I could now see the burnt handprint. I examined it closely. The door and the frame were oak if my knowledge of wood was enough to go by. On the left, as one entered, just lower than my eye height was a distinct four fingers, thumb and palm print burned into the wood of the frame. Staring at it now, running my fingers over it and giving it an experimental sniff, I was trying to work out how the effect had been achieved. My first thought was a viscous flammable gel could be moulded into the shape and set alight, it would burn briefly and leave the print. There was no smell of an accelerant that I believed would still be present though. I needed to give it further consideration. I took a few photographs.
‘Where to next please, Mr. Drake?' I asked, smiling at my guide.
‘This way, young sir.' He replied amiably, then turned and made his way back along the corridor to the stairs.
Once outside, I decided to press him for some more information. ‘Ronald, I can tell that you are not a fan of the new owner. I am curious to hear why.' He did not speak but instead looked around as if checking to see if there were persons within earshot.
‘Not here.' he said and quickened his pace as we headed for the foundry building.
We crossed between buildings and turned a corner to find ourselves at the opposite end of the foundry to the one I had gone in. Still following the yellow safety path, we entered via a small door in the side of the building. It was warmer at this end of the building and I was assailed with the smell of tortured metal as soon as we went inside. It was not a smell I knew, yet it was somehow still familiar as if I had encountered it before. I wracked my brain, insisting it deliver the information to me but all I could come up with was being in the machine shop at my school where we had heated metal up and whacked it with a hammer or drilled holes in it etcetera.
There were lots of shadows from the machinery as the overhead lighting failed to create enough illumination to penetrate in some areas. We were walking along a corridor formed between some of this machinery now. Above us were walkways where the floor was a mesh panel of some kind. The mesh allowed light to come down, but from my perspective it allowed me to see up into the pipework above. I had no idea what any of the machinery was for or what it did or how long it might have been standing in its current position. From its aged appearance, I suspected that much of what I was seeing would have been the original installation. Ronald reached a staircase, also made of steel mesh, and began to climb. At roughly three metres above the shop floor, we stepped off the staircase and onto a walkway that took us across the expanse of the foundry. From my van
tage point, I could see workers performing numerous activities, their little white hardhats moving around below me.
I paused to watch the molten steel being poured. I was transfixed by the beauty and horror of it. I knew very little about steel, but I did know that it was one of the most recyclable substances on the planet, even when rusty it could be melted down, turned back into steel once more and used for whatever purpose one chose. The soft orange glow emanating from the furnace closest to me, cast gloriously playful shadows against the walls and would kill anyone who got too close.
‘Nearly there, sir.' said Ronald, who had noticed my motion had stalled and had come back for me. I nodded and followed him once more. We got to the end of the walkway and stepped into the darkness at the other side of the building. Ronald turned a corner, descended a short flight of concrete steps in a brick corridor and fetched up to a door set into the wall.
He pointed to the wall next to the door. A blackened but faded handprint, just like the one in the frame of the owner’s office door could be seen. There was some graffiti near to it which I tried to read but could make no sense of. However, I could read where someone had written the year 1954 just below the handprint.
‘Old Sam was here when this happened, Mr. Michaels.' Ronald told me.
I took a picture of the handprint. ‘Old Sam?’
‘I’ll take you to see him now. Three lads were badly injured when a walkway came loose and fell to the ground.’ A horrifying thought. ‘The mesh panels had been tampered with. As they walked across the void the floor just came away beneath them. Old Sam was a young man at that time and was working right down by Furnace A that you were just looking at. He saw the whole thing.’
Ronald led me around more corridors, down some more stairs and I was as thoroughly lost as I could have been by the time we arrived at a small door in what I thought was an outer wall. Ronald opened the door and I expected daylight from outside to stream in. Instead, we were met with the gloom of a small room.
‘Now we can talk, Mr. Michaels. Here, in Old Sam's boiler room we will not be disturbed.' We were clearly not in a boiler room, but I already had enough questions without adding to them with trivial ones. The room was a box about six metres square in which there was various junk stacked and a wall of lockers facing us about halfway across the room from where we stood. Ronald was already crossing the room. As he reached the lockers he vanished from view, a pace later I saw where he had gone.
The lockers overlapped in the middle to create a small gap through which a person could go if they turned sideways. I slipped through and found myself in a den of sorts. There were comfy chairs arranged around a coffee table, another table against one wall on which a kettle and mugs sat and either side of it was a non-matching pair of free-standing lamps casting light and creating shadows. None of the chairs matched either. I guessed that all the furniture had been brought in by people who were throwing them out and that this was a worker's escape that the bosses didn't know about.
Asleep on a brown, corduroy armchair was an elderly gentleman that I was certain would introduce himself as Old Sam. There were a few wisps of white hair left on his head and liver spots adorning his pate and hands. If I had to guess his age, it would be over eighty. He was wearing a pair of Barker Steel overalls.
‘Old Sam!' yelled Ronald from right next to me, making me jump. Old Sam didn't twitch. ‘He's getting on now.' Ronald said. ‘He should probably retire but Mr. Barker, the previous Mr. Barker that is, never once suggested that he should, so Old Sam just kept on turning up for work each day. He was my shift supervisor when I started in 1965. I was fifteen then, we started younger in those days and he had been here a decade already.' Ronald crossed the room and gave Old Sam's arm a shake which brought the chap out of his slumber and back to blearily blinking consciousness.
‘What?' Old Sam wiped some drool from his mouth. ‘What do you want, Ron?'
‘This fella is here to investigate the Phantom, Sam. Mrs. Barker sent him.' Old Sam stared at me, taking me in. Sizing me up perhaps.
‘Another one?' asked Old Sam. ‘We only just had an investigation.'
‘The last investigation was in the seventies, Sam.' replied Ronald with some exasperation in his voice. ‘Look, never mind that. Tell Mr. Michaels about the Phantom.'
Ronald sat himself down in the chair adjacent to Old Sam, so I took this as a cue and took a seat myself. Old Sam levered himself up so that he was sitting straight in his chair, wiped his chops again, scratched his head and said, ‘Okay, Ron. Okay.'
For the next thirty minutes, I listened patiently while the two gentlemen regaled me with various tales about the Phantom. Both had joined the Mill because that was what everyone in the local area did. They both had family members or friends that already worked there, so had second-hand stories to tell that they had heard from the previous generation. In Old Sam's case, his grandfather had also worked at the Mill and had been one of those employed when it first opened. The Phantom was deemed to be responsible for dozens of acts over the last hundred years. Some events were mere pranks where light bulbs would be taken from an area causing the night shift to have to shut down, but in most cases, the Phantom attack was more serious, often leading to machinery damage, injuries and in two different instances the death of a worker or workers. The Phantom had been seen on several occasions. I remembered the photograph I had found during my initial internet search earlier this afternoon. On each occasion, the Phantom was described as a cloaked figure that moved silently, had glowing eyes and vanished at will whenever anyone tried to follow it.
‘I saw it myself.' Old Sam confided at one point, leaning right in to make and hold eye contact so that I knew he meant it. ‘It was in the rafters above A furnace.' As I watched, his eyes went up and right indicating he was engaging the memory portion of his brain. Had they gone up and left he would have been engaging his imagination which would have told me he was making it up. ‘It was July 5th, 1954. It was Friday afternoon and we were close to the end of the shift. The crew was making the last steel of the shift and I could almost taste the beer at the working men's club. Barry and me. That's Barry Dunford I mean, well we were hoping to court these two girls, Margaret Miller, that's the shift supervisor's daughter and Susie Watts. Susie, well she had a small mole on her left hip…'
‘Sam.’ Interrupted Ronald ‘The Phantom?’
‘Oh yeah. Where was I? Well, I was a new lad at the time and still learning, so I was being taught about the degassing rig at the time. Suddenly everyone was running, and I thought they were playing some kind of trick on me. I was left at the degassing rig because someone had to stay and everyone else ran off because there were injured people, although I did not know that at the time.'
As I listened, I could feel myself being pulled into the story. If he was making it up he was doing a convincing job. I interrupted him a couple of times to ask a question. I have learned that people making things up cannot suddenly add tiny details and it exposes the lie. Old Sam though was recalling the story from memory, including seeing the Phantom and following it. He explained how he had left the degassing rig and climbed up into the rafters and how he had burned his fingers on the handprint the Phantom left.
‘That was a scary moment I can tell you.’ he concluded, then slumped back into his chair as if retelling the story had exhausted him.
I had been making notes throughout and had already formed several theories. I was certain of course that there was no Phantom, but it also seemed likely that Old Sam had seen something. I also had a feeling that he was holding something back, that there was a vital element of the story he had not shared with me.
‘What do you think caused the walkway to fall, Sam?’
‘It was the Phantom.’ He looked at me with worried eyes when he said it.
‘Is that what everyone thought at the time? That it was the Phantom and not some unfortunate industrial accident?’ I asked.
‘Oh no, Mr. Michaels. The fixings had been sawn right thr
ough. It was the handy work of the Phantom and no mistake. The handprint on the wall told us clearly enough but they wasted their time on a full investigation anyway.' He trailed off again.
‘Tell me then, please. What do you think the Phantom is?’ I was thoroughly curious to hear his answer.
‘Well, I don’t rightly know what to believe, sir. Some say it is a restless spirit of a worker killed when the Mill was being built. He is trapped here because he fell into the concrete foundations and is still there to this day.’
Ronald chipped in then, ‘I heard it was the original Mr. Barker's business partner and that Mr. Barker murdered him rather than share the Mill. Now he haunts us all.'
I noted their theories then swung the conversation in a new direction and back to a question I had already asked. ‘Ronald, I asked you earlier about the new Mr. Barker. You declined to answer at the time, but I feel you have an opinion you would like to share.' I left him to answer. Mrs. Barker had basically accused the man of murder. I felt it entirely possible she would be right, but I wanted to build up a picture and reach a conclusion based on facts.
The two men glanced at each other for a moment before Ronald spoke. ‘I'll say this, Mr. Michaels, the new owner wants rid of us older chaps. I don't think we have long left here with him in charge.'
‘Why is that?’
‘He wants to sell the Mill, Mr. Michaels. That's what I hear anyway.'
