Candle in the Attic Window(17)
I was from the lower working class, so no one cared if I was scared or not when I arrived at Essen. I had simply no choice, if I wanted to make a living.
My post was at the Gischt, close to the blast furnace at the very heart of the complex, which seemed, with every passing day, more and more to me like a living being with a mind and will of its own.
The industrial complex included a confusing jungle of tubes and cables that often measured more than one foot in diameter, an iron and steel mill, conveyor belts with melted iron that led over kilometres of industrially-transformed land, high-pressure kettles, several forging presses and other means of forging the gathered iron. On the surface, there were hundreds of buildings of varying sizes, and bridges leading to watch towers and chimneys. The whole area measured 120 square kilometres aboveground, but there was, as well, a great mining area. A blasted area, mines and tunnels that led deep down. Five thousand men went to work each day; some did it reluctantly and with a bad feeling in their guts that they could not name. Not everyone was given to superstition, but this place was the likeliest to engender such a belief.
I worked as a machinist at the main gas supply, fixing leakages and building new mechanical linkages where old tubes were wholly worn beyond repair. Strangely, they proved unusually short-lived in my area and the tubes seemed not wholly blasted, but almost torn by claws.
In the glow and the smoke … sometimes, you didn’t quite see what was going on around you and strange shapes showed up that, even when the smoke was gone, only reluctantly vanished.
The sounds of artificial thunder and whizzing iron were almost unendurable and the smell was, in some places, dangerous, consisting of all kinds of unhealthy particles, and you had to wear a mask. The siren shrilled its warning whenever something wasn’t right. Things were often not right. You could not tame the fire and the treasures of the earth without paying the price.
Maybe the place was haunted, as many old workers stated.
At the very least, it was bizarre. I had worked under similar circumstances, at other mills, but never had I come upon a tube that should be glowing hot, but was icy cold to the touch.
Young and shy, and the new member of my crew, to boot, I chatted little with the others, even the friendlier youths like Florian or Karl. I kept my misgivings and my fears to myself. At least, for a while.
On one occasion, the alarm shrilled, as it often did. I felt it like a certain sign of doom. Panic-stricken men fled to the next point of safety, anxious and eager to know what had occurred. Hastily, I followed through the labyrinthine ways of tubes large enough for a man to easily crawl through, iron pillars and supporting beams. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I felt a warm breath in my neck, which might have been some other leakage, again, or something entirely different. When I reached the next meeting point, I saw around thirty others of my shift, with grave faces. Three men had vanished. Just ten minutes before, when another repair maintenance team had passed them, they had greeted each other with the ironmakers sign, as it was customary. But ten minutes were enough to change luck into doom and life into death … or worse.
I soon learned other details. There had been an explosion, but only an average one, and the rescue team looking for the missing men expected to find at least some remains of them. However, at the place of the accident, there were no clues. No blood, no shreds of flesh and no bodies. There was no trace to be found of the missing ones.
The source of the explosion was also deemed a mystery, if not such a bizarre one.
A valve had been stuck and the growing forces had finally found the weakest point to get out. Everything in nature was struggling for balance ... even if we could not understand it.
The place the explosion had laid waste had to be freed from its ruins and I was among the helpers. What puzzled me was the fact that everything was so clean, so unlike any outburst of gas or flammable substances. I tried not to think too much about it and worked on. What else could I do?
At night, it was hardest. When the flames shone more brightly. Often did I catch the impression of something rushing past me, soundless, yet somehow traceable. Like a shadow with luminous edges, but I was never sure if its source was the fumes that hung heavy in the air or the noises. The dust and the glowing heat could drive any man mad. But even so, I could not wholly shake myself free from the idea that something was lurking there amidst the cylinders and tubes.
This place was first known as ‘Astnide’, which was also the name of a Greek priestess who was eventually sentenced to death for having called upon great forces that were neither from Heaven nor from Earth. It was said that she had made a pact of a very mysterious nature, though with whom, I cannot say.
Artefacts from the Stone Age have been found in Essen, proof of some prehistoric past beyond our written and traceable history. Early buildings all centred around one vast temple complex of pits and small lakes. The inhabitants must have paid tribute to some kind of god or other powerful creature, for archaeologists found great amounts of ash, and pieces of plants and shells, as well as pieces of charcoal. The area had been discovered in the early 1920s, when archaeology was still at its beginnings and only the pyramids in Egypt, with their treasures of gold, and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum received attention. The temple complex didn’t fit into the owners’ plans and its buildings were either removed or simply filled in with soil. The past was forgotten, but it was never wholly gone and maybe it didn’t care what we thought of it.