The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam

by Tom Fletcher

  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.

  ‘The Builders probably got just as much wrong as you do, Alan,’ Churr said. ‘Maybe they didn’t account for everything people needed, or wanted. We’re not in the concrete at the moment, remember: we’re in brick. This came later.’

  ‘But we’re lower down. We were in the superstructure, and then we spiralled down, remember, and then we came out under the glass … but … everything was brick. We came out lower down, and everything was brick.’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘Am I making sense? My brain feels bad. Nora, are we close to water? How long since we ditched the bikes? How many days?’

  ‘The Oversight was once the top of a tower,’ Nora said. ‘Now the rest of Gleam has risen to its level. Yes, we came down, but we have moved sideways out of the superstructure into architecture that came later. Probably Old Green was not even a story when the Builders were placing Gleam’s foundations, let alone a god.’

  ‘Growth,’ Churr said. ‘Look, on the wall there. That’s what it says, I bet.’ She pointed at one of the two long walls. The large letters ‘TH’ were visible from where they stood, but when Alan moved his bike lamp along the wall, they all saw the ‘W’ emerge from the gloom. The rest of the wall was coated with a fur of tiny black mushrooms.

  Alan started sweeping them away and they turned to mush beneath his sleeve, splattering his face with bitter, foul-smelling droplets. But Churr was right. The word ‘GROWTH’ had been painted on the wall, and after further exploration, the long wall opposite revealed the word ‘GLEAM’, and both short walls bore the word ‘FOR’.

  ‘It says: “GROWTH FOR GLEAM FOR GROWTH FOR GLEAM FOR GROWTH”, repeated,’ Alan told Eyes.

  Eyes nodded, grimaced, said nothing.

  Later they found a large glass bottle full of a pale yellow liquid inside the once-locked drawer of a wooden desk now slowly turning to mush.

  Alan picked the cork out with a penknife, getting increasingly agitated as it resisted. ‘Let it be whisky,’ he muttered, ‘not piss. Whisky, not piss.’ When he finally broke through the plug, the odour spilled out and he rolled over onto his back. ‘Oh, thank fuck,’ he said. ‘Thank fuck, thank fuck, thank fuck.’ He sat back up and put the bottle to his lips.

  Then he pulled it away again without tasting it. ‘Eyes,’ he said, ‘whisky.’ He went over to the old man and put the bottle in his hands.

  Eyes sipped it gratefully, and winced, and sipped it again. ‘Thanks, lad,’ he said. His voice was hoarse.

  Then Alan had a drink, the liquid burning his mouth and turning into hot mist inside him. He felt as if it were evaporating through his brain and clearing it out. He closed his eyes and shuddered with pleasure.

  ‘Everybody,’ he said, ‘fill your flasks.’

  ‘They’re full of water now,’ Spider replied.

  ‘Seal the bottle with a candle,’ Churr said. ‘Nora’s got candles.’

  ‘Here,’ said the Mapmaker, handing over a red one.

  After drinking a little more, Eyes grabbed hold of Alan’s arm. ‘Lad,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to go down into that swamp.’

  ‘I know,’ Alan said. ‘I’m trying not to think about it.’

  ‘Aye,’ Eyes said. ‘You’re good at that, all right.’

  20

  Swamp Life

  ‘We’re here,’ Nora said. ‘The swamp.’

  The party stood in a room that looked like Maggie’s kitchen, though it was dark and damp. Oh, how I want to be back in Maggie’s kitchen, Alan thought, with a pot of chilli bubbling away on the stove! The glass had fallen from a long window, and a row of plant pots crowded the windowsill, from which had grown a thick mat of some kind of lemony herb. The thin wiry branches had wound around a pair of heavy, sagging shutters that kept the room mostly dark. However, cold light peeped in around the edges and through little holes everywhere, dappling everything with patches of silver. Not red, Alan thought. A long rotten table occupied the centre of the room, and the walls were lined with wooden cupboards, the tops covered with rusting pots and pans of all sizes. A huge black wood-burning stove sat dormant in a wide alcove. The door glass was cracked and ash had spilled out across the flagstone floor. The kitchen was far too big to have been purely domestic: this must have been a tavern of some sort.

  ‘Doesn’t look much like a swamp.’

  ‘Look at you,’ Nora said. ‘You’ve got whisky back in you, and now you’re full of fight again. Shut yourself up and open that.’ She pointed at a door that looked much like the one they’d come through.

  Alan did as she’d said and immediately recoiled at the stench. There was a ten-foot drop on the other side down to a smooth and featureless surface of thick green sludge. There was nothing else: no red brick, no glass ravens, no concrete superstructure, no hills or walls of cobble, not even any vegetation. Just the sludge, a blank and shiny green floor stretching off into the mist. Alan stared.

  He turned back to his companions. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘Where’s everything gone?’

  Spider and Churr ventured over to the doorway and looked out. From the middle of the room the doorway was just an opening into nothing; a void of white and green roiling together. Spider and Churr were silhouetted against it.

  ‘I feel like we’re at a high window, about to jump out,’ Alan said. ‘Like we’re high up – it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘A lot of buildings in Gleam have grown together at their higher levels,’ Nora said. ‘They have slowly leant against each other, or people have stuck extra bits onto their sides. They all end up looking like mushrooms, with other little buildings on top of their caps. Am I explaining it well?’

  Alan nodded.

  ‘So the deeper you get, the more space there is.’

  ‘How does it all stay up?’

  Nora smiled. ‘That is one of the mysteries of Gleam.’

  Alan looked back out of the door. ‘How do we move through it?’

  Nora’s voice came from behind him. ‘There is a Boatman coming.’

  The words made Alan’s bones cold. ‘There are people down here?’

  ‘There are people everywhere.’

  ‘But they always said the swamp is hell.’

  ‘People adapt. And besides’ – Nora appeared at his side – ‘they say that about the Discard too, don’t they?’

  At that moment, the sludge was disturbed. Something brushed the surface of it from beneath and slow ripples spread outwards. Small bubbles rose up and burst. Alan twisted the candle from the bottle of whisky and took a swig. He brushed flakes of wax from his hand. They floated down and settled onto the green and just lay there.

  ‘How are these regions illuminated?’ Spider asked.

  ‘The swamp itself gives light. See how there are no real shadows here? The light is too soft. But look at each other, look at the light on each other’s faces, see how it lands on the skin.’

  Alan gazed at his companions. ‘It makes us look ill and ugly,’ he said.

  ‘Iller and uglier,’ Churr sai
d.

  ‘There is something in it that glows,’ Nora said, ‘but we don’t know what it is.’

  Perhaps half an hour later, a stronger light showed through the mist; a quiet sucking sound accompanied the light. An indistinct figure appeared. The Boatman was approaching.

  ‘How did you get a message down here, Nora?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘The Boatman listens for visitors.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘Yes. But I have never been further. I have never taken the boat.’

  ‘You know the way?’

  ‘I will find the way. So far I have been merely your guide, pointing this way, that way, that rooftop, this door. Now I will be working.’ She looked up at him. ‘I will change, now. My nightly meditations are preparation, like a creature in a cocoon, rearranging itself on the inside.’

  ‘And the outside,’ Alan said.

  ‘Yes, but I have mostly just changed my insides.’

  The Boatman was more distinct now. He was very tall, and his bare arms and bald head were marble-white. The rest of him was cloaked in something rough and brown, like the potato sacks that had always ended up piled in the alleys of Market Top. He was punting a long, wide raft – to call it a boat, Alan decided, was a little bit generous. It looked more like a big crate. His progress was slow.

  Alan tried to quash a growing panic: the man’s flesh was glowing. His eyes were big and round and his gaze did not waver from Alan’s own. His face was gaunt, his fingers long and his ears were oddly sized, large and pointed. And he had a large wound in the side of his neck.

  The raft bumped against the wall and the Boatman picked up a hooked ladder from the bottom of the craft and raised it so that it was hanging from the bottom of the doorway. Then he stood back and waited. Alan turned to descend, then whispered to Nora, ‘Can we trust him?’

  ‘You can trust me,’ said the Boatman. His voice was deep and somehow off: the sound of a broken bell.

  ‘Dammit,’ Alan said, and dropped down the ladder and sat down in the raft. The Boatman smiled at him, but it was an empty smile and Alan couldn’t return it. Then he realised that the wound in the Boatman’s neck was smiling as well. It was not a wound; it was a second mouth, with thin ragged lips and little teeth. The end of the dark wooden staff he used for punting was carved into the shape of a woman’s torso and, as Alan watched, he stroked the model’s disproportionately large breasts.