Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories

2

Not many years had passed since the site was teaming with life, literally crawling with men and women, laboring, sweating, swearing, straining to meet production quotas, shipment deadlines, and the hundred-thousand other little chores that went into finishing products and moving them off the production floor and onto the road to their proper destinations.

Demand outstripped supply.

It was a chaotic time, a good time, though no one knew it then.

The phones were ringing off the hook.

It felt like the jobs would never be completed, even if the gods allowed you a million lifetimes, and steady employment was a golden guarantee to any able body with drive and ambition and the willingness to show up everyday for work.

The money was good.

The retirement, non-existent, but strong, youthful bodies had no thought of how they would provide for old age. Old age was non-existent to them then. No one thought about hard times. They didn't have the imagination or the inclination to dwell upon such gloomy subjects.

Funny how far away those days seemed now.

The colossal brick monuments to industry now stood empty, crumbling, and an easy target for vandals or squatters.

And that was just one more reason that Cleve hated this place.

You just never knew who might be lurking around.

Some punk always got a kick out of destroying property. Gangs loved to leave their marks on old building like these, like male cats spraying to mark their territory.

There was still some old machinery in the place, ripe for the scavengers who recycled that stuff, metal and junk-and-rust for peddlers. Or there were any number of teenagers who thought it was sporting to toss rocks into the old building, out of sheer boredom.

There were already so many broken windows around the place that you were lucky not to get a slice up your boot sole on a chard of broken glass. He brushed the dirt from side to side with his shoe, in case there were slivers under his feet.

There was no doubt. This place gave him the willies. He'd spent some time here as a loom operator in the waning days of the factory's life. Back then, the bosses all had a look of desperate hopelessness in their eyes.

They'd pared operations down to a single shift, always searching for ways to run the line more efficiently. Asking more and more of the few remaining workers. Squeezing blood from bone-dry turnips.

It was useless.

The tide had turned.

Anyone who had ever spent any time at all around the dying mill town knew for a fact that this old place was, well, there was no other word that could describe it but haunted.