The Foundry Hall

They came in the night and drove us from the alleys and the derelict shanties under the bridges. Some of us looked about with wild panic in our eyes as we ran. Others staggered along apathetically as drug-induced deliriums fed them to the ravenous hooves of the pursuing horses. Into the waiting wagons and camions they herded us. Thus we were taken to the foundry where we were locked in a great hall. We screamed and gnashed our teeth and pounded the colossal iron door with our fists until we collapsed in exhaustion. When our rage dwindled to despair, they came to us and taught us how to work metal. We set to work in an effort to dull our senses. For years we labored in the darkness, our shadows leaping about in the furnace light and the blinding glare of the welding torches. Our sweat and blood mixed with the coolant fluid as we slaved tirelessly over old mills and lathes. We worked day and night. The tiny windows high above had panes of smokey glass that admitted light only in the evenings when they glowed pink. Day and night became nothing more than silly words whose obsolescence made time linger to visit as it passed. The clanking of chains, the rumbling of the gantry cranes, the giant machines rattled our teeth in their sockets. At times, the showers of sparks were so thick that they sucked the oxygen from our lungs and bleached the walls so that they glowed like burning phosphorus. The metal screamed in agony as the machines chewed and spat.

In the early days, fist fights would break out at the towering scrap piles that we mined for choice pieces of stock. Metal shavings in our beards, fists flying in the light of the furnace and the sparks, we were a brutish bunch. They used to hand parchments through the slot in the iron door when they gave us our bread and beer. The parchments were strewn with tangled diagrams and geometric blasphemy. Beaver Steve was our oracle and as we reclined on the cold oil-stained granite floors and gnawed on our bread crusts, he would move from man to man, interpreting the parchment for each. Sometimes, at dusk, when the smokey glass high above turned pink, we would gather at the scribing bench and listen to Beaver Steve as he told tales of epic battles between the stoic machinists and maniacal engineers of yore.

In time, we grew civil and camaraderie burgeoned. The work consumed us. Thus the years coalesced into decades and our beards grew long and our hands gnarled. The arc welders' electrodes cackled and hissed, the great mills roared in the dark and tepid shadows. When at last our work was complete, we knew no life apart from that which we lived within the sooty stone walls of the foundry hall.

One evening, Beaver Steve addressed us. His glass eye twinkled behind his monocle, his beard was yellow from pipe smoke and sweat. His three teeth peered out over the crest of his crooked lower lip as if they were looking for their missing comrades. With a voice that sounded like jostled marbles, he told us. We turned to see it, and although it had begun to be among us long ago, we saw it now as if for the first time. From our forges was born the Theistichron, a mechanical god who needed no lever to move the universe.