'Just read the words, one at a time.'
'OK, I'll read. You see how many days it takes me.'
'Begin.'
'OK… here goes.'
And then I read out the word 'Possibly…'
You can see the problem, can't you? I'm telling you this story about the poetry book, just so you'll get an inkling of how Tom Sharpsaw's brain worked. Because I couldn't read out the next word, which was 'you', until the next day. And then each day after that I had to go round to the Vanishing Palace, just to read the next word. I got as far as reading out loud the passage, 'Possibly, you could say that one evening, late in the future, all the mirrors in the world…', which took all of seventeen days, and then I just couldn't be bothered any more.
To this day I'm still not sure if I lost that bet, or if I won it. Certainly, no money changed hands.
So then, Tom Sharpsaw had a brain a bit like the roads around here; he kind of met you halfway through a thought, but from another direction, if you see what I mean. The best way to describe it is to tell about the machines he made. He built these strange contraptions out of anything he could get his hands on really, including some products from the Factory. Stuff that other people saw absolutely no use for, he would combine into these bewildering games. I call them games; there wasn't any obvious way of playing them. You just had to find your way around them, work out what they were for, try to unravel their mystery as you went along. I think the object of the game was to find out how to play it.
And I guess the Factory works in just the same way. Sometimes we would go and stand alongside the outer fence, just to watch if anything was being produced. It never was, of course. Nobody ever saw the Factory actually deliver anything; the products would just turn up, left on the special platform that was the only part of the whole compound we could ever touch. Every other part of the fence was electrified. Robot guards circled the spaces between the fences.
The Factory protected itself.
There it stood in the distance, nested within the three fences and the moat; the centre of attraction around which the town of Grawl slowly travelled. A giant of a place it was, made out of crumbling red brick, on which the words hercules mill 1897 stood out in dirty white lettering. They told us in school that people had worked inside it once, a long, long time ago, before all the processes were automated. At the end, so they say, only one person was needed to operate the whole building. I was very excited when I learned that this last supervisor was a woman, I suppose because it's the kind of thing I could imagine myself doing, wandering alone around a cavernous factory, totally in charge of an army of robots. It was the kind of fantasy I had, when I was a young girl, and I would always see myself as wearing a long, flowing ballgown in these dreams, I don't know why. I would be dancing with a very handsome male robot.
Nobody knows what happened to that last supervisor. She must have died, years ago, centuries ago.
And now, at night, the Factory's lights come on, one by one, and the whole town listens to the constant purring of the secret engines. Tom reckons it just got caught in its own flow diagram one day, and had no more need of the human hand. But still, it produces, following the twisted instructions…
The best thing that ever happened was when I actually got to see the Factory make a delivery. No, that's not true. What it was, I was once the person who found a product on the delivery platform. I didn't see it being put there, nobody sees that, I just came down to the Factory early one morning and there it was, this… thing. It was a flat circular object, about thirty centimetres in diameter and made out of plastic. And this plastic was etched with a spiral groove on both sides of the disc. A paper label had been glued to the central area, and this was covered With writing. Reading this, I found out that the object was called Pixelkids Come Out Tonight, and had been made by somebody called Janus Fontaine. I didn't know what it was, but instead of taking it over to the Town Hall to be registered, I showed it to Tom at the Vanishing Palace. But he was just as puzzled as I was, and said that he would have to study it.
I kind of forgot all about the product for a while, because I never heard anything more about it from Tom. But then, about six months later, there it was, the thing I'd found, now a part of the Shark Magnet machine. Tom had set it up so the disc spun around, and the groove in it came into contact with a tiny shard of diamond he had prised out of a stolen necklace. And it made a noise! The spinning disc made a noise, a type of music I think, but nothing like I'd ever heard before.
So there you are; the Factory making these strange products that can hardly be used, until you break the code on them. And Old Tom Sharpsaw spending his lost days constructing perverse, uncontrollable machines. They were the mirror of each other.
Take the Snake Loop game he invented, for instance; all these metal pipes that twisted together, sometimes sending up clouds of green smoke. Here, the first thing was figuring out how to turn the machine on, because there was a different way of turning it on every time you put your money in the slot. And then, one day just when you think you've got the hang of turning it on, and you've successfully shot down all the fluffy green clouds with the attached perfume gun, what should you discover but that turning it on wasn't turning it on at all. Turning it on was just turning on the unlocking device which the clouds made. And killing the clouds in a certain order, that was the real way of turning on the Snake Loop machine. Only then could you really start playing the game, which had absolutely nothing at all to do with killing clouds, and a whole lot more to do with snakes and loops and the rhythm of the heart and the shadow of the eye…
Well, it's the Factory, isn't it? Tom's caught in the loop as well; we all are. And that's why nobody ever gets to leave Crawl, and why the goddamn graveyard is so crowded. And maybe one day we'll find out what the Factory is really making. The Big Product, Tom calls it. Because all these things it makes a gift of, they're just the side products, that's what the experts reckon anyway; things that have gone wrong, say, or failed experiments. Tom reckons it another way; he reckons the Factory is giving us these products just so we can help complete the process. And if we ever find out what the final product is, maybe then we all get to leave…
It scares me just thinking about it.
So there were five of these machines that Tom had made: the Snake Loop, the Butterfly Circle, the Plague Circus, the Shark Magnet and the Liquid Tiger machine. And like I said, all of them just kept on growing as the years passed by, and most of them included little things here and there that had come out of the Factory. But the Intravenus machine, that was different. Intravenus was a Factory product in itself. The whole thing had come out just as it was, complete in all its parts, ready for use. The only trouble being, nobody could work out the reason for it.
The shape of the thing didn't help any, being a perfect sphere made from a burnished metal of some kind. A hand knocked against it revealed a hollowness within, alive with echoes, and yet there appeared to be no way to open it up. Two small circular holes placed at right angles to each other allowed a glimpse of the contained darkness, which was smoky and smelled of ash. Certainly, at six feet in diameter, it was one of the largest products yet delivered, but that didn't mean anything; very often the smaller objects proved the most useful, like the bird shoes for instance, they were much sought after. But the Intravenus, what use was it? A large, hollow globe with two holes in it, that's it. So the thing was rolled on over to the Town Hall, which is where all products of the Factory were meant to be registered.