Children of the Fading Light

    There was a road that was barely two parallel trails where tires had once regularly driven. Nature had reclaimed a dirt road that was clearly unused since the last days of war. I turned my car onto the crescent moon road carefully. While overgrown with grass and flowers, I didn’t see any more severe damage to the way and decided to risk it.

    At the first sign of something my car wouldn’t be able to handle, I would back my car out the way I came. I couldn’t risk getting stuck out here. I wouldn’t be in danger, but I would be in for a long walk back to Boven and some stern lectures from Boma for inconveniencing which ever friend of hers or more likely the son or grandson of one of her friends that came out to rescue my car.

    I knew that the proportions on the map weren’t perfect, but they seemed to be really off when it came to the crescent moon road. The road seemed to go on and on forever and I wondered if I had the wrong road, one that would never bend back towards Boven.

    Then, I saw what I was looking for in the distance. Surrounded by a high wall. The factory. It was a building about four or five stories high, unusual for Boven as nothing other than the mine and new factory had buildings that large. The church was the tallest building in town. There was an old law that still stood in Boven as it did in several other European towns. No structure was allowed to be built taller than the church towers. I had to assume that the new church was taller than the old one. After all, it was built on the mountain of rubble that had been the previous church, its basement being the old church’s nave. If this factory had been built in adherence to that law, this building must have been shorter than the Oude Kerk, but probably not by much.

    As I got closer to the factory I noticed it. The odd, nearly supernatural, appearance the building had. The factory was bleeding, not blood, but what looked like spilled ink. I started to doubt myself. To worry that perhaps I had come too close to something toxic. After all, I had no idea what the factory used to produce. I could only assume that Uncle Arjo’s notes about metal work were accurate. Not wanting to race into something dangerous, I decided to stop my car and approach by foot. 

    I took a hammer from Boma’s ancient toolbox with me. The wooden handle of the hammer was bound to give me splinters and the metal hammerhead was starting to rust with age and neglect, but having the weight of it in my hands made me feel safer.

    I didn’t think I would need to use the hammer to protect myself, but the factory had a very different feel than the other sites I had been to, so the hammer was more for peace of mind. There was something about the factory oozing blue blood that made me feel like I needed to be on my guard.

    I locked my car and approached the factory with caution. When I started getting close to the first blue dot in the field, I recognized its color and shape. It was a blue azalea, like the ones I had placed at the feet of Saint Jude, like the ones Boma said grew on the moon.

    The closer I got to the factory, the more azaleas there were. The ink pouring out of the factory walls were just azaleas that had managed the impossible. They had taken root in the gaps between the bricks and grown sideways out of the walls to greet the sun.

    When I made it to the factory, I saw that I couldn’t climb the brick wall. The azaleas had taken over any finger or footholds and with their roots crumbling the bricks, I wasn’t sure if the wall would be able to support my weight if I started climbing on it.

    The only thing worse than having someone come out to rescue my stranded car would be for Boma to have to send out search parties when I didn’t return home after climbing the wall and having it collapse out from under me. So I continued on.

    The crescent moon road was met by a short driveway that led up to the factory gate. On either side of the driveway were the crumbling remains of wooden flowerbeds. A source of the flood of azaleas that had taken over the land. 

    The gate was large and iron and separated me from factory grounds. 

    I could see the factory courtyard between the bars of the gate. There were two large flowerbeds overrun with the blue azaleas on either side of a white gravel road that led up to the factory doors. Where the path between the flowerbed met the open gravel area in front of the factory, there was a white marble statue of a stag. The head was missing.

    It was hard to tell from this distance if it was intentional or not. Had the statue been built  headless as a reminder of the loss of the stag? Or had some smart-ass or accident repeated the tragic fairytale history of this place?

    The factory itself was an abandoned building with its windows cracked and broken. Its shutters hung off their hinges.

    It could have also been a trucking accident. Given the layout of the courtyard, it looked like the trucks that came to drop off or pick up items from the factory would pull up by the large doors and potentially into the factory by using the statue of the stag as a roundabout. The trucks entering the factory gave the trucks exiting the factory enough space by curving around the stag.

    Maybe one of the trucks had come too close with a wide load and knocked the head off  the stag statue without realizing it.

    When the courtyard and building looked as if they posed no real threat, I took a look at the gate to see if I would be able to find a way in.

    The gate was being held closed by an old bicycle lock. It looked like the factory had been forgotten like so many things in Boven after it had been abandoned. Yet, so far, unlike with Oude Kerk or Spooktfeld, I couldn’t see a reason as to why it had been left here to be overrun by the blue azaleas.

    The bicycle lock seemed to be more for just discouragement rather than protection. I honestly wouldn’t have known it was a bicycle lock if Boma’s bicycle in her storage shed behind the house hadn’t been nearly identical. It was basically a padlock attached to a metal chain. The links in the chain were thick, but not so thick that they wouldn’t be able to make the appropriate loop around a bicycle tire. It was a lock that had been produced shortly after the war.

    The chain bicycle lock was was kept from sliding down the poles by a large lock that was built into the gate. Either the owner of the factory had lost the key to the large lock or the person who locked the factory with the bicycle lock hadn’t been the owner as the large lock, which would have been much stronger than the bicycle lock replacing it, remained obviously unlocked. 

    The bicycle lock was old and rusted through to the point that I realized one solid hit with the hammer might break.

    The first time I swung the hammer, I missed. After that, I got in two direct hits and on the second one, the chain broke and fell rattling to the ground. I picked the chain up and moved it to the side before pushing open the gates.

    If time had stopped in the factory, I could only tell by the sound. The moment I set foot on factory grounds, I could hear the air raid siren in the distance. It hung in the air like the buzzing of bees in summer. I took a step backward, onto the safety of the road and the sound faded as if it had never been there. 

    It was like the fading of words of a dream when you wake. The moment you wake up, they are still clear as day, but once a moment passes, you can’t even remember they had been spoken.

    Stepping back onto factory grounds, the siren returned. If I had to place the direction the sirens were coming from, I would have to say the mines. They didn’t seem to be coming from the town square. I couldn’t remember where the air raid sirens had been in Boven during the war and I wasn’t sure if anyone had bothered to tell me. The mines made sense. There was always someone working at the mines. It had the tallest buildings outside of the church, someone on the roof of one of the mining building would be able to see much further than someone on one of the roofs in town.

    Then again, perhaps there had been an air raid siren on the old church as well. Perhaps this moment was frozen after the old church had partially collapsed in stopped time.

    I walked carefully down the white gravel road towards the factory. The blue azaleas had made their way onto everything. They were sprouting up on the gravel road, on the factory walls, and around the base of the marble white headless stag. The thickest clusters within the walls of the factory grounds were at the feet of the stag and in the former flowerbeds.

    The faces of the dark blue flowers were reaching towards the sun and swayed gently in the breeze. I wondered for how long these flowers had tolerated the distant siren sound and stepped carefully around the statue.

    I would have inspected its broken neck and felt its cold marble skin, but something about the statue unsettled the very core of me and I couldn’t bring myself to go near it. Whether it was the horror of war screaming through the air raid siren or the childhood fear of the Romans coming for the stag in the story, I didn’t know. The feeling was just there, a simple something within me that said that come what may, I had to leave this statue be.

    When I made it to the factory, I looked through the windows. There was nothing but an abandoned building with some old machinery rusting and rotting away.

    The factory was a likely target during the war. I thought that there would be bombs hanging in the air if not their shrapnel imbedded in the skeleton of a building blown out. Yet, here, the only trick in time, the only reason I could imagine why Boobejaan stopped the clock was the siren that never went away.

    With nothing other than the statue of the deer scaring me, I pulled on the large factory door. It was a sliding door of sorts. A large metal one. Large enough to let the trucks pull in for loading and unloading. It was the only unusual feature of the factory. The building itself and the tall surrounding walls were made of the same red brick that dominated Boven’s landscape.

    The door didn’t budge. I imagined that it was a combination of time, lack of maintenance, and the weight of the metal that held it in place. So I looked for other options. The ground floor windows seemed to be intact or broken in places too high for me to climb through. I knew better than to break a window on my own. Even if there was no one around to witness it, word always seemed to get back to Boma whenever I misbehaved and I didn’t want her scolding me for being a vandal.

    On the right side of the building was a door that led into an office. It looked like where the factory manager would have worked. A private entrance indicating their importance. I tried the handle and gave the door a good push. It didn’t budge. It was locked.

    I remembered then, the secret attic key tucked away in my pocket. I put it into the lock and turned. The head of the old key pressed hard into the flesh of my palm as it moved the old locking mechanism with determined stubbornness.

    When the key had turned and the lock had given way, I tried the door again. I turned the handle and pushed hard. At first, it resisted my weight, but then it gave, scraping loudly against the floor, and it opened into the dusty office.

    When I stepped through, things changed. The empty dusty desk was suddenly filled with papers. The chair behind the desk had a faded suit jacket hanging over the back of it. A calendar appeared on the wall with dates crossed off and important events circled or underlined. There was a large round clock hanging over a door that led to the factory floor. That clock was stopped at 4:40. The same as Boobejaan’s Fabriek clock in his cafe.

    There were windows facing the factory floor on either side of the door. I moved further into the room to look through them and was startled by a heavy set man in suit pants with suspenders reaching over his dress shirt. You could see where someone had lovingly sewn parts of the shirt to hide small holes. He was a man who took pride in his appearance but lacked the money to keep up with his pride. Clearly, he had someone at home who loved him enough to repair all the little bits of damage to his aging clothes, so that he could still wear them with his head held high.

    I wondered who this man was. If Boma had known him. If the person who was so good with a needle and thread sat at home for decades in the hopes that he would return. If that person had come here and sat at the factory gate, cursing that bicycle lock, hoping for a chance to come and look through the window of the office and see him one last time in his patched suit. Or maybe that person held the keys needed to enter the grounds and this room and entered every now and then to check the suit for new tears and speak soft kindnesses to the man they’d lost.

    Or maybe the person who patch the old suit with such care was here. Maybe they were trapped in time together. That seemed even more tragic than one coming to visit the other. The two of them trapped together in time making the short distance between them an insurmountable one was a heartbreaking thought. How long had they been waiting to run to each other? Did they even know that it had been decades that they had been apart?

    Yet one person, standing unmoving and unaging, as their loved one came day after day, growing older, weaker, and grayer as time went by until the day they stopped coming as their health or death no longer permitted it was its own tragedy. 

    This man’s round mustached face was nearly pressed against the window. He was looking upwards. I knew what that meant. I walked and stood next to him and looked at the factory floor. Despite the building being several stories high, it was just one high ceilinged open room. 

    There were some catwalks up near the ceiling with metal ladders that could be pulled down to access them. These gave access to some the machinery that hung from the ceiling or the tops of the machinery that was so massive that it nearly reached the ceiling while standing on the ground. 

    The ceiling was collapsing in a rain of fire and debris. The catwalks attached to it were hanging precariously from the parts that hadn’t been blasted apart. The poor workers that were caught on the catwalks when the ceiling gave way were either being thrown through the air or dangling precariously from the remaining bits of steal. The factory workers below were either running in terror from the fire and debris baring down on them or staring in shocked horror at the now open sky.

    The bombs were here and they were falling, but like Odiel had promised, they would never touch ground in Boven. I tried the office door to get out on to the factory floor. It opened with a click and when it did, I could have sworn that the man in the office had turned to face me. I turned back to face him, but his eyes were back on the bombs coming down on his workers below.

    I closed the office door behind me and walked out onto the factory floor. There I could feel the heat of the never ending fire above on my face. I could hear the air raid siren and smell the burning. The people around me had their clothing and hair flowing away from where the blast had come through the ceiling. It was the unseen force of that moment, one that I could feel pushing me away when I tried to move in closer to the fire in the sky above me.

    At this point, I had my hammer sticking out of one pocket. The eerie feeling of the place intensified and I pulled the hammer out to feel safe again. The motionless room with the wailing siren gave me a sense of insecurity. Perhaps it was the darkness and difficulty in seeing the bombs of the Oude Kerk or Pater Hannes’ company that let me feel safer there than I did here. The weight of the hammer in my hand eased the feeling of impending danger, but it didn’t relieve me of it entirely.

    As I looked around, I saw what made this place different than the old church. There were Nazis here. Nazi guards behind me at either side of the office door. Nazis standing by the workers at the machinery. Nazis running from the blast. The bright red sashes with swastikas on their uniforms glowing like a beacon, making it easy to identify who was a villain during the war.

    I worked my way along the front side of the room. Between the pressure from the blast that was keeping me away from the center of the room and my need to make a hasty retreat to the factory gates if need be, I didn’t want to stray too far from a window I could jump through.

    When I looked through the windows into the courtyards, I could see the next shift of factory workers arriving. I could see trucks loading up supplies. I could see every single one of them looking up at the sky or trying to take cover from the raining bombs.

    I jumped when I heard a voice.

    “Wer sind Sie?”