Dead Prayers in the Far West Corner

J. saw the shadows in the far west corner of the factory even though no one else in the plant would ever speak of them. He saw the twisting shadows in the strange recesses of the far west corner every time he used the forklift to move a load of wire cable or steel platforms from the receiving area to the assembly floor. He saw that the shadows moved – and not just the movement of shadows as the sun moved across the sky, or the forklift’s headlamps swung across the wall; the shadows in the far west corner moved on their own. Strange behavior for shadows, especially since shadows really don’t even have behavior. In the few months that J. had worked in factory, he’d never had opportunity to look closely at the shadows. He drove past them as he moved pallets or hauled away dumpsters of trash, but he never stopped to explore. He wasn’t paid to explore.

On this particular day – it was a Wednesday, he remembered, he always felt the most tired on Wednesdays, and according to the watch board in the break room it had been 66 days since the last recordable time-loss accident – he was moving a crate of industrial hoses for the blast booth when he drove past the far west corner and he stopped. J. put the forks down and shifted into park. J. stared at the twisting, tenebrous void.

Slowly he realized that he couldn’t hear the roar of the blast booth any longer, nor the hum of the grit vacuums. He couldn’t hear the crackle and pop of the welder’s torches or the warning sirens of the cranes in motion overhead. Even the blatty rumble of the forklift’s diesel engine seemed muted and shushed. The factory was quiet, but not silent.

The shadows twisted in front of him, receding deeper into the corner from whence came the murmur of voices – chanting. Chanting prayers. Prayers in some forgotten language. A dead language. Dead prayers in the shadowy, dark corner of the factory.

Lulled by the soft syllables of the chanting, J. felt sleepy. Dizzy. Faint. But still the foreign tones drew him in; they called him. And though he could not understand their dulcet words, they filled him with ominous, incomprehensible, irresistible dread. “I’m drowning,” he thought. “I’m drowning, and she’s watching me. Watching me from the shore. She is watching me drown.” The rhythm of his internal soliloquy gradually assumed the cadence of the unseen chanters in the shadows.

And then

the horn that signaled lunch break broke his reverie. J. realized with a start that he’d sat with the forklift idling for at least 15 minutes. And he still hadn’t delivered the hoses to the blast booth. He knew he’d have to work double quick after lunch to get caught up. He also discovered that he was, from helmet to steel-toe boots, coated with a fine pink powder. This powder he would later have chemically analyzed and the analysis would show it to be some sort of anhydrous crystal residue.