The Factory Read online

  Chapter 3

  Two days later, As usual, Amina was walking home from school and as always passed an alley steeply walled by brick walls on both sides. As she did, she heard the whimper of a puppy dog somewhere up in the alley. Although her kind heart thought it was strange and out of place, she did not take the time to investigate. It was time to get home and do the chores. Continuing along the street, she looked ahead and saw an old woman trying to pin something to a wooden telephone pole.

  As she approached, she saw the woman was symbolic of a doting grandmother complete with rosy red cheeks. A kerchief covered gray hair. Black rimmed glasses just like hers were in danger of slipping off a boney nose. She saw the old woman was struggling to pin a picture of a puppy dog to the pole. Beneath the picture were the words, ‘Please help me find my puppy.’ Although Amina was in a hurry to get home, she was nevertheless compelled to stop and help the old woman. Pointing to the alley just down the block, she reported,

  “Just now I heard a puppy whimper in that alley over there.”

  A dishonest act of joy came over the old woman’s face and false kind eyes pleaded,

  “I’m an old woman, would you be so kind as to come into the alley and find him with me?”

  Amina’s naiveté to the dangers of life failed to see the danger and wanted to help but there was still the pressing need to get home on time. She regretfully said,

  “I’m sorry but I can’t. I have to get home.”

  The old woman adjusted her black rimmed glasses and sweetly countered,

  “Not to worry. I have a car and can drive you home.”

  Seeing that a solution had been reached, Amina gladly nodded her willingness to help.

  When walking into the alley and looking deep into it, far ahead was a wire fence blocking the way. It was clear that if there were a lost dog in here it would be spotted easily. To Amina’s delight there was a cute little puppy at the fence whimpering. She saw that it was crying and wanted to be picked up. Again, Amina’s innocence failed to see the danger. She did not question why the puppy was tied to the fence. With the old woman cuddling her puppy and Amina feeling good that she was able to help, both walked out of the alley.

  Down the street, a black Cadillac Escalade slowly turned a corner onto Elm Street and stopped beside them. The old woman said,

  “As promised, if you help me I will drive you home.”

  Impressed to see such an expensive car, Amina was very pleased to scamper into the back seat. She slid over to make room for the old woman who suddenly seemed rather agile getting in next to her. Making sure that both were secure in the car, the driver turned around to look at Amina. She noticed that he had blond hair and blue eyes. The old lady said to the driver,

  “Hanz, I promised Amina that I would drive her home. Would you be so kind?”

  Hanz nodded and drove away. It never occurred to Amina that the sweet old lady knew her name or how it was that the driver already knew where she lived.

  While sitting proud and holding the puppy, suddenly Amina smelled a pungent odor. Because she thought it strange, she turned to the old woman who was holding a small vial. Amina asked,

  “What’s that liquid? How come you are pouring it onto a rag?”

  Considering what was going to happen, the old woman sweetly grinned and said,

  “Why it’s just something to make you go to sleep.”

  Amina’s last thought was why the nice lady wanted the dog to go to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  A month after poor Amina Green was abducted and four thousand miles away from Twin Rivers was a west coast city named Lexington. It was a beautiful city with mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean lapping at its shores to the west. Its main economy was shipping and fishing. It was also where Gary Albright lived.

  Although for different reasons, Gary was also an odd child. By the time he was twelve he had already walked on the moon, run into a burning building to save three children from a fiery death and killed a grizzly bear with only a small hunting knife. He had already lived in the harshest jungle surviving only on grubs and insects. Another time he was lavishly catered to in the great palaces of Europe. Gary was the type of boy who preferred the joys of his imagination, shunning the severity of reality.

  On the other side of his imagination, the harsh side of reality, Gary was a timid boy who mostly walked with eyes to the ground as if mesmerized by the pacing of his feet. His reclusive behavior, small stature, red hair and freckles greatly added to his isolation in school. More often than not, he sat at his desk staring blank eyed into the voids of nothing. His teacher wondered what adventures he was involved with today. He certainly was not attentive to the lessons.

  Outside, at recess and lunch he sat alone watching other children play. In his imagination, his better world, he defiantly dared the school bully once again push him to the ground. Although his name was Albright, the children started calling him Never-bright. Such hounding was the principle reason Gary lived in his imagination. It was a good place to hide.

  After school, as always, Gary slowly walked five blocks home and always alone. His house was in the middle of the block and indistinct from the other homes. All were Veteran Housing project houses built in the true style of a ‘cookie cutter’. Over the years, some had been remodelled and even added to but largely there was no mistaking the original design. Gary’s house was one of the few that had never been remodelled.

  The front door key was on a string around his neck. Unlocking the door he entered a lonely house. As always on a school day he tossed his backpack on the living room floor, turned on the TV, sat on the couch and started playing his video games. They were the kinder side to his lonely existence. Because his mother worked late, there was no set supper time. Before going to work, she prepared a sparse meal for him and put it in the fridge. Gary ate when he was hungry. By this time he was adept at using the microwave to heat whatever was on the plate.

  Since there was nobody around demanding his attentiveness to bedtime or brushing his teeth, Gary often ignored those amenities. Many times an exhausted mother came home from work at ten o’clock at night to find Gary still on the couch lost to the intensity and rigors of his reality, the video games. All his drained mother could muster was a harsh reminder that he was now the man of the house and she expected better things of him.

  By either his choice or mother’s demand, once in bed Gary remained deeply lost in his preferred world. In a dark room with eyes wide open, on the screen of his imagination he fought fiery dragons and won battles in his spaceship against aliens determined to take over the world. His bravery and cunning had many times saved the world from a cruel fate.

  By nature and instinct, when one finds a friendlier place to live than the harshness of reality, one tends to stay in that better place as long as possible. By faulty reasoning, a naïve person soon falls into the trap of preferring the better place. Gary often had trouble separating where his mind wandered off and where he really was. Sometimes he would strut through the school halls with head held high exhibiting the gallantry of a hero. However, his peers only saw the posture and swagger as proof of his peculiarity. It was proof that there was something very odd about him.

  Yet, Gary was not always living inside his fanciful world. He had a real and tangible interest. Every Saturday morning, when his mom was still asleep, he would sneak out of the house and pull his bike out of the backyard shed. It was a one mile bike ride to the mall but he knew the way. In the mall was a small electronics repair shop called Mario’s TV and Radio Repair. Mario was a kindly old man, bald, stocky with thick glasses and the mirror image of a friendly old man. Having no sons to pass his business onto, he took to heart Gary’s interest in electronic components. Whenever he saw Gary walk into his store he knew what he was after.

  When seeing Gary, Mario reached behind the counter and placed a paper bag on it saying,

  “Here are some capacitors and light emitting diodes that need fixing. You can have
them all.”

  They were all broken or blown, never to work again, or in Mario’s mind, useless junk. That was the reality of the situation. However, reality was not where Gary lived. To him this was a bag of transistors and integrated circuits needed for his secret project. As always, Gary thanked him for the treasure and eagerly raced home with it.

  His bedroom desk was cluttered with ripped open computer towers, monitors with no casing, scattered electronics and most important of all, a soldering iron. This was how he often spent the weekends, soldering this to that and joining diodes to something completely unworkable. Occasionally, at no particular junction, he would connect a battery only to suffer a tingling shock or the smell of a burnt out capacitor. His proud construction was a muddle of wires and soldered circuits. It did not matter what was connected to what as long as it had electrical wires connected to something else.

  Most certainly, if an electrical engineer chanced into his room and saw the conglomeration of electronics haphazardly wired together he would only shake his head and walk out. But that did not matter to Gary. In his mind, he was building whatever his fanciful imagination could conjure up. One day it was a time machine and another it was a dimensional gate to another world. In his mind, it was simply something that he enjoyed doing, making something although it was nothing.

  One day in particular fate was cruel to Gary. In his mind, it was just another uneventful day wasted at school. As usual, he ate his sandwich alone and watched the other kids play baseball, a game he did not understand. It was Monday, so there was an urgency to get home and fuse together the rest of the electrical parts Mario had given him. Also, because it was Monday, his mother always came home early, so it was a task he wanted to get done before she came home and insisted on rules and chores.

  With quick steps under the tall boulevard oak trees he hurried home. Only a half block away he suddenly stopped his hurried pace and stared fearfully at something ahead. This could not be good. Fear prompted him to step behind a parked car. Furtive eyes hesitantly peered above the trunk of the car to see a police car parked in front of his house and an officer standing at his front door. The officer again pressed the doorbell and waited. With the conscience and guilt of most youth, Gary wondered what he had done wrong.

  The experience of a fertile imagination had taught him to stay hidden and wait it out. There was nobody home so obviously the officer would soon give up and leave. Suddenly a voice from behind jolted him alert.

  “Are you Gary Albright?”

  He snapped around to see a woman police officer looming over him. There was sternness about her. Her hair was done up in a tight bun in the same manner as the school librarian and he didn’t like her either. Slow eyes lowered to the gun at her belt. Running was not an option. A strict voice again asked,

  “I asked you a question. Are you Gary Albright?”

  He nodded and in a much softer tone she said,

  “I will need you to come to the police car with me.”

  Slow feet walked him to the police car with the officer right beside him. Mrs. Carver stood across the street looking at him with a most forlorn expression while shaking her head.

  After his mother’s funeral and two weeks in the care of Emergency Family Services, there was no hope for Gary Albright. Miss Worthington was a young lady and the child care worker handling his case. She was new to Family Services and still fortified with energy and kindness to help woeful children. She had spent many days searching for relatives who could take Gary in. In one of Gary’s many interviews with Miss Worthington she asked him,

  “I have no record of your dad. Do you ever see him? Do you know where he is?”

  As if confused about the question, as in all other interviews, Gary sat draped in despondency. It eventually came to him that he now had no mother. Regarding the question about his dad, he answered honestly, albeit slowly.

  “Mom said that I never had a dad.”

  Curious, she persisted,

  “So you have never seen him, even maybe on your birthday?”

  A slow shake of his head produced a sad reply.

  “No. Mom said I was lucky that I never knew him.”

  Miss Worthington’s persistent search finally located a relative living on the other side of the continent. Her name was Ruth Albright, his grandmother on his mother’s side. At first, Ruth Albright had objected to taking in a twelve year old boy. In addition, it was a grandson that she had only seen when he was born. Now, with her husband dead and living alone, it would be too much of a financial burden and strain on an old lady to take on such a massive responsibility. As she was the only located relative, with Miss Worthington’s persistence and promise of financial assistance, Ruth reluctantly agree to take on what she was sure would be a great concern and disruption to her life.

  Chapter 5

  A few days later, Gary found himself on an airplane flying to Twin Rivers to live with an old woman he had never met. Miss Worthington sat beside him offering comfort and assurances that everything would be all right. Sitting on the airplane, heavily draped in despondency and a great feelings of desertion, Gary absently looked out the window and down on a floor of thick clouds denying him a view of his next life.

  Many times while looking out into the horizon, he tried to imagine flying saucers coming from the stars and teleporting him away to a much kinder fate. He would rather live on another planet than where he was being shipped off to. However, and strangely for him, he could no longer conjure up such an imaginative image. There was no relief or rescue coming from his overacted mind. Like his mother’s life, it was as if his coveted imagination had cruelly ended. The shock of his mother being killed introduced an unforgiving reality to his world. What was going to happen to Gary in Twin Rivers left no room for childish dreams. The winds of fate had picked up Gary and blown him four thousand miles from his comfort zone.

  All Gary knew of his grandmother was that he had one. He had seen her picture on mother’s dresser holding a baby, Gary’s mother. When asking where his grandmother lived, mom seemed sad to say that she lived far away. Because of his mother’s despondency at missing her mother, Gary had promised that he would never move far away. He would never make his mom cry because she missed him. But now it was her departure that made him cry.

  When the airplane descended on Twin Rivers, Gary looked out the window and saw the convergence of the two rivers, the Great Swanson and Copper River joining into one greater river. It was something that didn’t interest him and he could care less about. Little did he suspect how influential and dangerous that river would be in his new life.

  After a long cab ride through town, and eventually along Jasper Street, they arrived at what Gary had no trouble believing must be a haunted house. It stood alone between two empty lots of grass and overgrown blackberry bushes. It was easily one of the oldest houses in the town and clearly the most dilapidated. At one time it might have stood majestic and proud but that was then and this was now.

  The fence was missing slats and part of the length was missing entirely. With one broken hinge, the gate was barely hanging on. Clearly a lawnmower was an unknown gadget to the owner of this house. Not counting the basement, it stood two stories high, living quarters on the main floor and an attic. Five wooden steps led up to a wraparound veranda.

  After asking the cab driver to wait for her, Miss Worthington stood looking at the house. The same bad feeling of gloom flowing through Gary now flowed through her as well. She wondered if she was doing the right thing for him after all. Her first instinct was to push Gary back into the cab and race back to the airport. However, despite what she was looking at, Family Services had approved the relocation. Her only hope was that fate would intervene and supply a good family environment for Gary. Fate laughed.

  The wooden steps creaked with each hesitant step. Although she didn’t really want to, Miss Worthington stood beside Gary and bravely rang the doorbell. It didn’t work. A series of hard knocks followed and soon a shadow loo
med on the other side of the glass in the door. When the door opened a daunting old lady appeared and glared down at a scared boy. As he looked up at her, yet another weight was added to his already destroyed life. He did not recognize the lady he had seen in the picture. He just assumed that after all these years she would still look young and kindly just like the picture he once saw of her holding tight to his mother.

  Although old and stooped, there was a strange strength about her. Long gray hair was done up in a tight bun. Piercing eyes lowered to the scared Gary and then up to the stunned Miss Worthington. The look of a warm and loving grandmother was missing here. Again she wanted to grab Gary and run back to the waiting cab. Despite regret, papers were signed and the taxi drove away with Miss Worthington.

  It had been an arduous day and a long flight so Gary was sent to his room and told to go to sleep. Although he was given his own room it did not have the warmth and comfort of the one he had before the trap door under his feet sprung open and the noose tightened to end his once comfortable life. As he sat on his bed staring at nothing, he felt alone and unloved in a strange city. The creeks, moans and groans of the obviously haunted house kept his eyes wide open most of the first night. He often refused to close his eyes least the noises in the closet took to monstrous life and devoured him.