"The
ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless
landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only
the most unobtrusive place within the gray emptiness of its
surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate
horizon." So begins this Ligotti tale that reads more like a
journalist's essay than a conventional character-driven story.
However,
I can relate to the above description for a deeply personal reason:
this was EXACTLY my memory of infamous Toms River Chemical/Ciba-Geigy in
New Jersey where my dad sweated it out year after tortuous year as a
factory worker.
"The phenomenon of a large factory so closed off
from the outside world was a point of extreme fascination to me." Damn,
this brings back my own feelings as a kid when I looked from outside
the guardhouse and gate that fenced off my dad's factory.
Oh,
yes, I recall my dad returning home, his hands coated with red when the
factory worked with red dye that day (Ciba-Geigy was the country's
leading producer of epoxy resins and dyes for plastics back in the 50s
and 60s). I even overheard my dad saying he would frequently piss red.
And
what happened to Ciba-Geigy's chemical factory in Toms River?
Eventually completely shut down amid numerous court cases involving
massive pollution of lands and drinking water along with widespread
instances of cancer resulting in the sickness and death of thousands of
men, women and children. Keep this in mind as you read Ligotti's tale at
the point where the narrator writes, "Long before the complete
evaporation of machinery in the Red Tower, something happened to require
the shut-down of all operations in the three floors of the factory
which were above ground level."
Of course, Thomas Ligotti, master
of horror, transcends anything that could be limited to the facts
surrounding this factory or any other factory. Indeed, the narrator's
descriptions of the subterranean levels of the Red Tower have more in
common with a Hieronymus Bosch hell realm than anything we could see and
record with a camera. Here are direct quotes hinting at the
freakishness, morbidity and grotesquerie that must have been the Red
Tower when in full operation:
"As the unique inventions of the
Red Tower achieved their final forms, they seemed to be assigned
specific locations to which they were destined to be delivered, either
by hand or by small wagons or carts pulled over sometimes great
distances through the system of underground tunnels."
"For the
longest time — how long I cannot say — my morbid reveries were focused
on this murky vision of a graveyard beneath the factory, a subterranean
graveyard surrounded by a crooked picket fence and suffused by the
highly defective illumination given off by phosphorescent paint applied
to stone walls. For the moment I must emphasize the vision itself,
without any consideration paid to the utilitarian purposes of this
place, that is, the function it served in relation to the factory above
it."
"Machines were becoming obsolete as the diseased mania of
the Red Tower intensified and evolved into more experimental, even
visionary projects. I have previously reported that the headstones in
the factory’s subterranean graveyard were absent of any names of the
interred and were without dates of birth and death."
"As implied
by their designation as hyper-organisms, this line of goods displayed
the most essential qualities of their organic nature, which meant, of
course, that they were wildly conflicted in their two basic features. On
the one hand, they manifested an intense vitality in all aspects of
their form and function; on the other hand, and simultaneously, they
manifested an ineluctable element of decay in these same areas."
"Yet
there are indications that below the three-story above-ground factory,
below the first and the second underground levels, there exists a third
level of subterranean activity. Perhaps it is only a desire for
symmetry, a hunger for compositional balance in things, that has led to a
series of the most vaporous rumors anent this third underground level,
in order to provide a kind of complementary proportion to the three
stories of the factory that rise into the gray and featureless landscape
above ground."
The Red Tower will surely contain
additional power and horror for anyone who has been touched either
directly or indirectly by the brutality and dehumanization of factories
and/or factory work.
American author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
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