The Red Tower by Thomas Ligotti

 


"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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