The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (17 page)

‘What did they play, eh?’

‘Mum played the fiddle,’ Alan said, ‘and Dad played the accordion. I never learned to play anything until they were dead. Then I …’ He stopped. He remembered those early days in the Pyramid, the grief and the rage that never went away. ‘I wasn’t allowed, for a while. I wanted to learn the fiddle like my mum but they didn’t have instruments in the Pyramid. My friend, Eyes, he’s down there now, he smuggled a guitar to me. This one here: Snapper. I played it in secret. I found that I could remember some of their songs.’ He shook himself. ‘Sorry. Okay. Do you know “Baby Beetle”? I’ll do “Baby Beetle”.’ He picked the melody slowly and gently, and played for a long time before starting to sing. The sounds of his companions refuelling floated upwards, but they weren’t speaking. The sun was nearly down now and the stars were out and Corval and Satis were bright in the darkening sky. Mother Margo nodded slowly along to the music. The red of the sunset was visible between the planks of her hut. When he started singing, Mother Margo started crooning herself. He couldn’t tell for sure but he thought that behind her goggles her eyes were closed. By the time he’d finished, she was asleep. He went over to her, thinking he’d wake her up, but he saw that her cheeks were wet and he decided to leave her be.

He took a deep breath, put the lid back on the coffin and climbed quietly down the ladder.

The Oversight was abutted by a hillside of large, perfectly spherical cobbles, furry with thick bright moss, down which a wide road zigzagged. The stones were piled up in banks on either side of the road. With the morning came a warm fog that smelled of rust. Every now and again these weathers could descend, like a god dropping a cloying grey cloth over Gleam. Nora scraped a boulder clean of its green coat and squeezed the damp matter into the bottom of the dented metal flask that hung from her belt. The flask clinked against what she referred to as her ‘skinning knife’, the sound dead in the mist as she climbed back onto her bike. Periodically she would dismount and repeat the process. The sky had become something that pressed at their skins and at the ground beneath their spinning wheels. The sun was invisible, yet this was the hottest day of the journey yet. Hot and sticky. After two hours easing down the decline, Spider grew impatient and accelerated and the wheels
went out from beneath them. Spider’s trousers tore wide open and one side of his right leg was stripped of skin. He gazed in horror at the wound. ‘Three days’ work at least,’ he said, ‘taken in a moment.’

Churr was wearing leather and her tattoos survived intact. ‘Though,’ she said, ‘I’m as sweaty as a night in the Sleepless Pavilion.’

By the time they made camp, Alan was shaking with hunger, but he didn’t want to ask the others how they felt. Part of his sickness was guilt at dragging them all out here, but he was also beginning to feel burgeoning lust: he wanted to feel Churr’s sweat patter against his chest once more. He wanted to smell her. He badly wanted to fuck and to be fucked. This hunger was not as urgent as the hunger of his stomach, but it was as real.

He sat first watch at the base of a solid round tower of stones and tried not to imagine Churr naked. His hands moved restlessly across Snapper’s strings, drawing from the instrument a soft sequence that never repeated.

The tower, like the boulders, was mossy, and knobbly orange metal stubs protruded from it, presumably the remains of a ladder.

If this place was supposed to be a factory, then the designers must have been very stupid people
, Alan thought.
What were these damned balls for? What kind of factory has the space or the room for a mountain of giant marbles?

Once he was done he woke Spider to replace him and lay down in the lee of a tarp stretched from bike to
ground. The bag beneath his head felt lumpier than usual and he spent a good while shuffling around, trying to make at least a semi-decent pillow out of it.

‘Damn it,’ he whispered. ‘Damn it, fuck it all to hell, this is fucking shitty and I hate it.’

The fog was still masking the stars and the other worlds.

In the morning Alan ate a bitter stew Nora had made out of moss, moss water, toad bones and a handful of fat pink slugs she’d found inside an ancient broken goat skull, and he started to feel a little bit better.

*

The road forked and Nora led them to the left. The new road became a spiral tunnel, burrowing on down into the superstructure. The bike lamps lit up each vehicle, but did little to illuminate what lay ahead. The travellers were strung out, islands of light and gleaming metal growling through the darkness. Though the descending spiral felt endless, it had to end somewhere, and nobody wanted to encounter that end at speed, so they moved slowly, the motorcycles muttering instead of roaring, the cavernous tube rumbled with echoes. Every now and again one would leapfrog another. When he was at the rear, Alan hung back and watched first Nora and Eyes, then Churr and Spider disappear around a long curve, leaving him alone in the ocean of darkness. The sound of his own vehicle was all he could hear, and before long it had become, to him, the sound of the dark itself: its
breath, or the rushing of blood through its veins. It was shot through with something else, though: something thin and desolate. Something like the crying of a baby.

He sped up again.

At one point he veered to the right and came upon the side of the wide passage. His lamp revealed a row of uniform doorways alternating with windows. There were the remains of wooden doors in the doorways. Gleaming yellow in the glow of the headlights, the bits of wood looked like rotten teeth at the tops and bottoms of stretched black mouths. The windows had similarly worm-eaten shutters, some with glass reflecting the light.

Alan shuddered and swerved away, immediately besieged by visions of people –
people?
– watching him from within those pitch-black rooms, drawn to their ruined windows by the sound. Almost as disturbing was the realisation that even if these strange compartments were empty of life – which they probably were – they had once been lived in. They reminded him of Pyramid quarters. The thought that these subterranean boxes had once been homes caused something like panic to blossom in him. Who could live in a place like this? Had they had a choice? Though back then –
when?
– it would surely have been lit. But still.
But still …
Underground, light can never truly banish the dark.

And then, revealed from around the curve like a ribbon extending horizontally, there was a long, thin rectangle of orange. At first he couldn’t work out what he was looking
at, then he saw that the rectangle was an opening out into space. Across that space was a red brick wall, glowing.

At the window they turned off their engines and looked up into the sky. The sky was on the other side of a red glass dome. From the window where they were standing they could see a jumble of red-brick shapes and blue-slate roofs. The buildings were similar to each other in only one respect: their size. Together, they formed a gargantuan, three-dimensional labyrinth of towers, blocks, teetering high-rises, bridges, archways, ramps, tiers, courtyards and turrets. Metal pipes shining orange in the tinted light ran crazily across and between everything, emerging from windows, wrapping around buildings, leaping bottomless gaps and plunging directly into the brickwork of another structure. Wooden walkways spiralled around, branching off from spindly black metal ladders and staircases.

Spider pointed wordlessly to a nearby rooftop, on which a bent old man shuffled about in some straw. On his back was a cage at least four times his size, full of tiny white birds. The man found something in the straw and held it up to his face. He examined it using a small brass magnifying glass: an egg. The man grinned, satisfied, and placed it into a wooden box strapped to his front. As he turned around he stared at Alan and company, but he ignored them and continued his search. The birds in the cage hopped between perches but remained eerily quiet. The man was perhaps twenty feet away from them.

‘This is Glasstown,’ Nora said. ‘Some Mapmakers
think that the red light affects people’s brains. I don’t know about that. But from here is the easiest way down. This is where we begin our descent.’

‘Eh?’ Eyes said, after a moment. ‘I – I – you’re all looking at something, I can tell that. Whatever it is, though, I can’t see it, not a damn thing. I can see red light, like, but that’s it.’ The skin around his eyes was crusty with pus and blood. The whites of his eyes were clearly shot through with nasty thick streaks of something. ‘Can’t see a damn thing,’ he repeated.

*

In Glasstown the people apparently ate a lot of lichen. They just scrabbled at the brick and then sucked the spoils from beneath their long fingernails. They all wore dirty pale robes, and they shared their ruined brick palaces with flocks of the tiny white birds. Many of the walls had fallen away. At Nora’s insistence, Alan and the others stripped the bikes for all they could carry, ditched the vehicles on a rooftop, and dropped through a skylight into a dusty room with a black-and-white chequered floor. An ornate fireplace sat squat and cold in the middle of one wall. The other three walls were missing, except for some supporting columns at the corners. The light turned the white tiles red. At the edges of the floor, some had just fallen away into space. Above the fireplace were three large framed paintings, though the colours had long since faded and the subjects were impossible to discern.

Alan and Spider held Eyes between them as they
descended endless stairs. Glasstowners lurked in the shadows. One walked up the stairs towards them as they came down and stood directly in front of Nora, blocking her way. She put a filthy hand to her chest. ‘There is another world, in which people live in small houses,’ she said. ‘When those people die, they come here, and all of the rooms they ever lived in are here, connected, all of the rooms connected to each other, their childhood bedroom and the room where they first made love and the room they died in, and all of the kitchens, all of their houses combined into a big house, a memory house. Old spaces in a new configuration. This is that afterlife, sister. We are their shades.’

She turned and stared into Alan’s eyes. Her skin was smooth, her teeth yellow, her long hair lank. ‘We’re the dead, seeking for the places where we used to live. Some of us know it and some of us don’t.’

Nora shook her head in panic and rushed on down the steps.

Alan hadn’t thought that anything could shake Nora like that, least of all something as innocuous and nonsensical as the Glasstowner’s comments.

The Glasstowner slowly turned and watched Nora disappear around a corner.

The stairs went on and on, and every now and again, Nora would dart through a doorway and lead the group through a series of rooms, before plunging down yet another staircase. Some were grand, some were not; some
were narrow and dark, some were precarious and exposed. Some were wooden, some metal, some stone.

Nobody spoke. At one arched window a great glass raven peered in, its detail shining red. Everything that was not under darkness was red. At the next window Alan saw that there were a great many great glass ravens adorning the nearby buildings. Some had their wings folded; others were poised as if to strike.

The deeper they got, the more the stonework wept. Lichen gave way to slimy mould. Vines with fat green leaves crawled through windows. Slugs oozed along beneath mantelpieces. Water dripped from dark, damp patches in the ceilings of rooms they cut through. Toads bathed in puddles. Eyes was pale and shaking, and he smelled bad. Alan could feel the swamp getting closer. ‘Down is out,’ he muttered. ‘Down is out.’

Nora looked at him askance. ‘Stop saying that,’ she said.

‘That’s the first time I’ve said it.’

‘No, it isn’t. You keep saying it, over and over. It’s like I’ve got a parrot at my shoulder. A stupid parrot.’

‘My voice is not that of a parrot. And I don’t keep saying it.’

‘You have been saying it since the chequered floor – the first chequered floor.’

Alan shook his head, then he realised his lips were moving and he put his hand over his mouth. He caught Nora looking at him again, but this time she quickly looked away and didn’t say anything.

Head-sized snails with whorled pearlescent shells left trails so wet and viscous they dribbled down the walls and sagged from the ceilings. They webbed dark rooms like the spinnings of spiders. And there were spiders, too: pale, round ones with long sharp legs that reached out in front of the globular bodies. The spiders clustered together where the shadows met the light.

Faintly glowing slime coated the insides of old pots. These places were not just empty or sparsely populated: they were abandoned and decaying – abandoned by people, that is. There was lots of life. Pale lizards sloped away behind old bookcases.

‘You’re talking again,’ Nora said.

‘No, I’m not.’

When they came to a window, the light shining in was red. In all directions they could see endless sheer vertical surfaces, all invisible behind coats of moss and leaves and tiny stunted trees. Everything was discoloured by the light. Snakes, curled around branches, gazed back at Alan and he saw himself through their eyes: a pale face at a window in an infinite wall, a small pale oval here for a moment and then gone. These windows weren’t really windows; they were just more holes.

Several storeys later, Nora opened a door and on the other side was a spotlessly clean bathroom. A white bath stood on four reptilian feet. The walls were white tiles. The floor was black tiles and the ceiling was decorated with swirls of black and white. There was a white sink,
with a tall silver tap. Nora turned the tap and clean water spilled out.

Alan stared. Churr stared. Spider stared. Nora washed her hands. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘Eyes first, then everybody else. Then we clean Eyes’ wounds. Then we clean ourselves.’

‘Wait—’ Alan said.

‘We know places,’ Nora said. ‘Places to go.’

‘But the pipework – the source – everything. Where does it come from?’

‘There are maintenance teams,’ Nora said. ‘They travel in caravans.’ When that did not alleviate the bemusement, she threw her hands into the air. ‘Certain features are maintained!’ she said. ‘You think it all just hangs together?’

Once they were clean and refreshed, Alan washed Eyes a clean bandage and tied it around his head.

They came to a long room full of long belts made out of wooden slats. The belts were wrapped around cylinders designed to roll, though everything was gummed up and the metal cogs were rusty. But Spider managed to get one working – he turned a heavy handle and the belt groaned along, before something snapped and the handle spun loosely round, smacking him in the knees and putting him down. There were chunks of painted metal on the belts, which appeared to be some kind of assembly mechanism; at the side were baskets containing more bits of metal, which had evidently been attached to the chunkier items as the belt moved along. Churr picked up one of the things, which fell to pieces in her hand as she
examined it. ‘They’re crocodile toys,’ she said. ‘They were green once.’

‘And not just any old crocodile,’ Nora said. ‘Three eyes and six legs.’

‘They were making Old Greens?’ Spider said from the floor. ‘For the churches?’

‘Or for children.’

‘Why would the Builders have created a place for people to make little metal Greens?’ Alan wondered.