yawn/scream

It had been some kind of factory once, in the decades before the boy and his friend discovered it. The grass and the weeds had moved in since then, bursting between the bricks and growing to cover the collapsed walls. The crumbling factory had once been home to some mysterious, mechanised creation, and despite the wear and weight of time, some parts of it still stood. Almost three stories remained near the entrance, with an uneven, ever-decreasing sprawl stretching away towards the one remaining chimney.


The boy and his friend would race through the archways that leaped about the crumbling factory’s once-grand courtyard and they would explore the mouldering spaces within. Dank, red-bricked caves that shaded them from the summer sun and kept the wind from the fires they would set in winter. There were shadows that moved in the corners of those damp, dark spaces; shadows that sometimes whispered to them as the wind howled; shadows that would frighten them back into the daylight, where they would pass the time by climbing the disembowelled heaps of brick that had spilled from the crumbling factory; loose piles of faded crimson, spreading low and uneven along the valley’s slope, in squared and jagged dunes.


The boy and his friend learned to tell time by the shadow of the chimney standing worn but proud a short way back from the spilled walls. A home for birds now, roosting in the broken brickwork that towered precarious over where the boy and his friend played. They would occasionally harry these birds, hurling rocks high and clumsy towards the roosts when boredom or the mood for violence took them. And the boy and his friend were harried in their turn by older ones; by Not-Yet-Men that would gather in that place as the daylight began to leave it. On some evenings, girls would join those older ones, after they’d dislodged the boy and his friend with insults and threats. On some of those evenings, the crumbling factory became home to mysterious games of adolescent fumbling; to excited, clumsy explorations that had a habit of becoming their own accidental acts of creation.


The boy and his friend were terribly afraid of the older ones. Afraid that the threats of terror and shame would be visited upon them should their flight from the crumbling factory be too slow. But fear, as it often does, eventually gave-way to curiosity, and the boy and his friend set themselves to finding a place from which they could watch the mysterious goings-on in the crumbling factory at twilight. Searching the upper levels, around the old production floor, they eventually settled on a vantage that suited them; a small room with a wall and part of the floor fallen away to provide a clear view of the space below. The cavernous room beneath was littered with old mattresses and abandoned car seats, beer bottles and cigarette butts, and all the collected detritus of bored adolescence. From their corner, in their room, the boy and his friend would be able to survey, in secret, the site of the older-ones’ evening rituals.


The boy and his friend worked the day transporting piles of the old, red bricks up to their new hide-away. They worked the afternoon, stacking them into a rough wall near the edge of the room’s fallen floor, leaving gaps here and there through which they could view evening’s activity. And eventually, as the sun fell, the older ones came, shouting their threats and insults while roaming the crumbling factory’s exterior, before making a lazy search of the spaces within. The boy and his friend held one another tight as the older-ones stalked and called out to them, but the reconnoiter was half-hearted and they soon quieted, settling into their appointed places to begin their games. Large brown bottles were passed around. Song and chatter and laughter echoed about until the bottles were emptied and, finally, spun on the ground to whoops and shouts. Before this ritual’s climax could begin in earnest though, the boy, growing a little too curious and leaning a little too far forward, disturbed his makeshift bunker and the wall gave out with a painfully slow moan. The boy and his friend crouched, frozen, as the bricks fell away before them, disappearing with dull, chalky clatters into the room below.


In the short silence that followed, the boy and his friend did not wait. They turned and raced through the nearest broken doorway, scrambling together, deeper into the crumbling factory. They heard footfalls and threats from a corridor behind them as they spun wildly in the gloom, looking for an escape. The boy saw a staircase at the end of the hall. Rough concrete stairs with an iron scaffold railing, its corners spiralling down into the gloom. The boy grasped his friend’s hand, rushing onward and down. Together they fled from the terror, twisting down the staircase into the depths and the dark.


The boy led his friend at random, desperate to put some distance between them and the older ones. The gloom soon grew too dark to see and they were forced to stop. The boy felt out a corner in which to settle and to soothe his crying friend. He held his friend in a tight embrace, both for comfort and to muffle the sound of his friend’s sobbing. Time passed slowly in the dark but an eventual consistent silence assured the boy that the older ones had not braved the factory’s innards. The boy grew bored and then grew brave, while his friend shivered in the dark. He decided to scout out the darkness in search of a way out, promising to return and lead his friend to safety. 
 The boy fumbled at the walls, guiding himself away from the soft sounds of his friend’s fear. Onward into the dark depths of that crumbling factory he stumbled, turning this way and that, going forward then back, growing increasingly convinced that he was lost. Eventually, tired and afraid, he came to a stop, leaning back and sliding down the wet stone wall. The boy rocked back and forth, hugging his knees. And then he began to cry.


After a time, between his sniffs and sobs, the boy heard a voice. It was a voice of many whispers and it seeped out from the shadows that wrapped themselves about him. The voice scared him at first but he managed to calm himself enough to listen. And within that whispered static the boy heard promises. The darkness said it would show him, said it would open itself to him. The darkness would deliver him to the surface, but at a cost. He must give up his friend. That other must remain, a sacrifice to the darkness. 
 The boy knew his answer immediately. It had settled in his mind as soon as the offer was presented. But he pretended think. He made a show of wrestling with his conscience, working to build himself a more noble memory. So that, in time, when the boy looked back on this moment, he might be able to live with himself.


-yotchki