by Mark Samuels
(iii) The broken body of a child sprawled in the middle of a motorway, its limbs twisted into unnatural angles and surrounded by a pool of its own blood, followed by the caption “Progress Dept”.
(iv) A rabid monkey in a cage surrounded by wires, convulsed in the instant it receives an electric shock—its eyes bulging, foaming at the mouth, followed by the caption “Science Dept”.
(v) Multiple aborted foetuses inside a half-transparent white plastic bag, with a pool of blood at its base, lying on a tiled white floor, followed by the caption “Humanism Dept”.
(vi) The skeletal remains of burnt trees, their silhouettes stark against a bleach-white sky. The trees standing in a landscape of grey ash, followed by the caption “Ecology Dept”.
(vii) The gutted remains of a cathedral, its twin spires like leprous fingers, raised towards a jet-black sky, followed by the caption “Rationalism Dept”.
(viii) An obscenely old man copulating with a teenage girl, followed by the caption “Genetic Dept”.
(ix) A tableau of a puppet-show, in which the puppets’ strings have been cut and the dummies lie in a confused heap but with the cut-out faces of real human corpses replacing their original faces, followed by the strange caption “Dead Dreamers: Management”.
Quite what this series of unnerving images had to do with the “regeneration” that the N Factory promised to provide seemed a question not easily answered—but in a soul-destroying epoch of hopelessness they, at least, contrasted with the prevailing ethos of total pessimism.
So it was that I, merely another prospective employee amidst the multitude who had succumbed to the horrible desperation unleashed by the lure of the N Factory, found myself wandering the streets at the fringes of the city, and following the directions provided in order to gain admittance to the immense red-brick edifice wherein all the promised regeneration was to occur.
The process was to begin during the half-hour of twilight and, along the route, a variety of postcards stuck on lamp posts indicated that the prospective attendee was drawing nearer to the venue—and yet each of these cards was more ghastly in appearance than the previous one.
Finally the wanderer spied the twin towers of the vast structure, which became visible above the low clustered rooftops of the single- and two-storey buildings that dominated the skyline of the suburbs.
Most of the dwellings in this region had been deserted once the full effect of the financial crisis had bitten to the core, the inhabitants either having destroyed themselves in spasms of despairing ennui or else having moved away, hauling with them their meagre possessions, taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the oversights of the former government—whose hollow promises of relief from debt were exposed as a ruse to entice the non-productive into “voluntary” extermination camps.
Given this last horrendous prospect, the sudden initiative by the N Factory, providing the alternative possibility of a vast number of jobs available to all those who sought them, proved irresistible.
The gigantic building was emblazoned with a sign declaring “Welcome to the N Factory”, and, outside the sheet-covered entrance, there was a kiosk where tickets and pencils were handed out to those seeking admittance. The tickets contained spaces where a scant degree of information had to be completed—name, address and age. A line of job applicants ran for thousands of yards in front of the structure, and was constantly being added to.
The numbers of those seeking to gain entrance appeared to be in the thousands, and the factory’s capacity must have been immense, enough to contain the entire populace of the city itself. The murmuring, the chatter and the atmosphere of tense expectancy could be detected close up to the structure, its broken windows providing little barrier to the noise generated within.
My disordered imagination associated, bizarrely, the noise with that which an immeasurable mass of tomb bugs might make if given a single voice.
It seemed as if the soul of decay had manifested itself within the titanic, decrepit structure. Yet still the populace remained, almost in their totality, to seek their salvation inside.
I walked in line, despite my black thoughts, and doubtless my face was as pale and wan as all those others, and my thoughts, too, avidly turned towards the grim expectancy of release from the nightmare, from all of the charnel desolation the people were experiencing in the dying world outside.
I collected my ticket at the kiosk, filled in the cursory information required, and reflectively turned over the remains of what spare change I had in my pockets—the last of my available cash. It would enable me to purchase nothing more than a cup of coffee and a sandwich for my evening meal.
I was looked over with disdain by a grey-suited functionary, but was nevertheless waved inside.
Entering, I found myself in an antechamber, with rows of desks where groups of men “processed” the tickets.
A further grey-suited functionary, as anonymous as the others, then beckoned me over to stand in front of him. He rubber-stamped my ticket with the word “approved”, and then asked, in a flat monotone, when I would be available to begin work.
“Immediately,” I replied.
“Today?” he asked.
“Immediately,” I said.
“Right now?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Very good.” The functionary added: “Take the door to your left.”
He pointed to the doorway with a languid gesture and then turned his attention to the next applicant, who had been standing directly behind me. Several flights of steps led downwards and I began my descent. At the bottom of the stairway was a double door with a sign above its frame declaring: “Factory Floor—Employee Processing.”
I passed through the door and found myself inside a gigantic basement. The volume of people took me aback. The interior of the basement had been completely gutted, creating a space of enclosed immensity. In the centre there was a raised platform, rather like a stage, on which stood a number of podiums. Radiating out from this focus were rows and rows of machines, like over-sized computer terminals, at which multitudes of people sat. Their hands were tied to the arms of the chairs, but instead of staring into LED screens they were staring into the circular mirrors that were wired up to the machines. Their features were distorted and magnified by the cracked, concave, circular surfaces, producing crazed reflections.
I was seized by a couple of grey-suited functionaries and bound to a chair in front of one of these machines.
After a few minutes the array of interior arc lights set into the ceiling dimmed, casting the enclosed immensity into darkness and causing, as if on cue, a buzzing drone, like the grinding of enormous metal gears. The machines began to operate and the mirrors started to glow with an unearthly radiance.
*
The flickering neon lights picked out various corporate officials standing upon the dais.
A man in a tar-black business suit was there, whom I sensed was a supervisor or manager. His face was monstrously decayed.
The hideous woman marked out as representing “Beauty” was also present, as were the persons depicted as “Success” and “Progress” and “Genetics”.
And then, from the back of the vast chamber, the grotesquely damaged monkey that had been identified as representative of “Science” was led down between the aisles of machines. This bizarre simian carried a transparent plastic bag of bloody foetuses—previously described under the label “Humanism”—and from which grisly source it absent-mindedly fed itself, as if consuming nothing more significant than kernels of dyed-red popcorn.
A huge sheet was drawn back from a niche at the far end of the factory floor and “Ecology” was therein represented by blackened and burnt tree branches nailed together to form an inverted crucifix, at which conjunction there had been hammered into place a piss-coloured parchment that bore the legend “Rationalism”, scrawled in blood-red crayon by a childish hand.
But, as yet, of the mass of the puppet folk described as the “Dead Drea
mers”, there was no sign.
*
And then a strange lethargy seemed to creep over the remainder of the crowd, and around me I saw people beginning to show signs of tiredness and even exhaustion. The process was rapid, as if drugs had been recently administered, perhaps in the form of a gas contaminating the atmosphere. I myself felt the effect, but struggled against it with all the will power at my command, fighting to keep awake for as long as I could.
Eyes rolled in sockets, limbs twitched and a chorus of yawns ran across the mass of people, one after the other, their minds falling in domino fashion. Eyelids finally closed, though mine were the last to do so. I felt dread at the coming of unconsciousness, for, as my waking senses ebbed away, I had the horrible sensation of being suspended over an unimaginably deep gulf of dreams. And I knew that the dreams lurking in those depths were not the dreams of human life, but some strange variant from outside of the species, some form of thought and sensation opposed to the healthy workings of the brain.
I knew that to plunge into the depths of the dream-gulf would not be to experience mere nightmares, but rather to experience the source of nightmare itself, and I visualised it as a hideous reversed sun, of whose blinding darkness all nightmares, like feeble shadows, are merely the projection, its tenebrous rays polluting human imagination.
Resistance was useless and into the realm of darkness and dreams I fell, along with all the others around me.
I perceived I was not awake and yet I experienced a sensation akin to having awoken. It seemed scarcely an instant before I was again aware of all the people around me stirring and murmuring as they, too, appeared to have mentally clawed their way back to consciousness, recoiling at the prospect of being devoured forever within the Tartarean chasm of the pit.
I alone, I am convinced, knew that this respite was nothing but a cruel illusion and that we were all already buried down there in the abyss, interred in a prison-cell as definite as any coffin lying under six feet of earth.
We filed out of the N Factory, groggy with the horrors that we had glimpsed, and made our way back to the various run-down and dilapidated homes in which we dwelt. As we went through the gates, a grey-suited official thrust a greasy handful of low denomination notes into our palms.
And when we returned to work over the following days, no one could recall afterwards what further work we had done whilst we were there, for time spent on the production line in the N Factory was akin to a state of dreaming so horrible that the mind blots out the recollection.
But after all, a job is a job. And if one didn’t work then starvation was the only alternative.
*
During the following weeks the crisis in society deepened. The rate of suicides, riots and murders intensified. And the fanatic popularity of the N Factory increased to even greater proportions.
It seemed that there was no one in the city who had not been to the production line, and all those who had done so, without exception, now became subject to full recollection of that ultimate abyss of nightmare into which they had descended. We cared nothing for the fact that the promise of regeneration held out by the N Factory had been a lie, and that its purpose was to accelerate a process we, the human species, had brought upon ourselves. Some said the Dead Dreamers were charnel demiurges, some said they were future spectres and others said that they were our own dream-selves, acting beyond good and evil. Whatever the truth regarding their faceless domination, “they” had now assumed ultimate control.
For now a devastating permanent winter swept across the globe, bringing with it an unaccountable eternal twilight that defied the laws of planetary rotation. And, accompanying this suspension of the laws of physics, there suddenly reared in the heavens a monstrous, never-ceasing black aurora that dominated the sky like an inconceivably enormous shadow.
Whether it concealed some nightmarish horror behind its opaque veil, or whether it was itself the essence of the terror that engulfed the world, no one could say for sure. But I believed it to be the manifestation of those diseased dreams that had torn asunder all of the hopes and aspirations of our civilisation.
It was with the appearance of that cosmic blight that, simultaneously, bodily transformations occurred in the physical forms of the populace. The horrors previously contained within the hidden world of imagination were now given outward, corporeal, expression.
Bodies began to warp and twist into deformity, at first gradually, and then at an increasing rate. Spines bent, so that men and women assumed the appearance of hunchbacks; and then growths, like a deathly poisonous grey fungus, sprouted on people’s faces and limbs. Scientists spoke of the cause of these physical changes being massive doses of radiation filtering through the Van Allen belts and bombarding the Earth’s surface, but they could not account for the fact that this “radiation”, if that was what it actually was, proved undetectable via any of their delicate instruments.
For my own part, I believed that dreams had spilled out into external existence, taking on a diseased life of their own, like a cancer that contaminated reality. The N Factory had been the means by which these dreams had been finally liberated from their mental confines and had thereafter infected the structure of existence itself. Madness had become the normal state of being. It was the only form of freedom left to an enslaved populace that had had all of its humanity drained out of it by the relentless tide of machine-identity to which it had willingly succumbed.
And all of the hideous examples of degeneration that the N Factory had delineated were to become not exceptions, but the ubiquitous facts of human existence.
Nature itself began to rot, and, as whole species were wiped out, strange, new forms arose in their place, crawling out from the polluted wreckage.
Alistair
Gryme House had stood for centuries, having been built in 1706 as an out-of-town home for a wealthy merchant. At that time Highgate was still a country village beyond London proper, when the metropolis was surrounded entirely by open fields with a swathe of woods off to the west.
The house stood behind an outward-bulging brick wall that was thick with green moss and which was tall enough to obscure all but the top floor and roof when viewed from the street.
The garden that lay between the wall and the house was overrun by weeds and brambles, being long neglected during the time that the elder Grymes had occupied the place. They had little time or inclination to keep the grounds in order and had let unchecked nature take dominion. Only the path from the rusted trellis gateway to the entrance portico was free of undergrowth. Covering it was an ivy-wreathed wrought iron passageway.
The ivy allowed no other plant to encroach into its territory, inexorably strangling any such intruder with its sinewy vines.
One might easily imagine that it was not just simple neglect that caused Gryme House to be half-hidden away, but that a deliberate concession to good taste had been made.
The sight of the house had long ceased to be picturesque, for, unlike its close companions, it did not possess the same aura of antiquity. The impression formed was instead of some growth that had sprung up from deep within the earth.
It was rotten and festering, projecting from the thorny undergrowth in the manner of a colossal fungus. External buttresses held up one side of the house from collapse and the roof sagged visibly. Plaster flaked away from beneath the eaves of the top floor, revealing a yellowish tinge like jaundiced skin.
*
James Thorpe’s wife, Amelia, had inherited Gryme House from her parents. They had died last year, and he felt guilty that his relationship with his in-laws had been so distant, even though he had never liked them. He suspected that Amelia also had tried to keep them apart, though he had little evidence of this, only her vague indifference when it came to making a visit.
The house in Highgate had solved almost all of James and Amelia’s financial problems in one fell swoop. Now they needed to pay no rent and thus their disposable income, given London prices, leapt. With the arrival
of Alistair four years ago, their previous flat had been cramped, and now the child had the run of a three-storey house, albeit a decaying house sorely in need of major renovation.
Amelia’s parents, the elder Grymes, had been in their forties when she’d been born, and by the time James came to know them, thirty years later, they were elderly recluses who scarcely ventured out of the house. Consequently, the building had fallen further into acute decay, despite its being on genteel South Grove in a prime location in Highgate, backing onto the disused and picturesque cemetery with its woodland-like ambience.
Much to James’s surprise, Amelia had scarcely wanted to change anything in the house after they’d moved in. She was content, even glad, to retain all the furnishings and fittings that she recalled from her childhood: the antique furniture, the heavy drapes and the curios scattered inside cabinets and closets throughout the rooms.
Gryme House had been in her family for generations, and, being the only offspring of her parents, Amelia displayed enthusiasm at the prospect of entering into her birthright and passing it on to Alistair in turn. She would shepherd the boy around the rooms, explaining to him where each object came from, and how old it was, and how one day it would belong to him as it now belonged to her. This sometimes made James feel like an adjunct to the two of them, integrated as they both were into the soul of the house through generations.
The only part of the building that had undergone any significant change had been the room on the second floor that James had turned into a study.
It had formerly been a spare bedroom, used whenever the old Grymes had received visitors, which had been not at all except for those rare occasions in the past when he and Amelia had stayed over.
He’d kept the wall panelling and introduced several bookshelves in which to store his collection, added a bureau to store those papers he needed close at hand and a laptop computer so he could work on the biographies that formed his main writing income.