Thomas enjoyed chocolate and confectionery as much as any other kid. He could still taste the small piece his father gave him at the 1832 Lord Mayor’s Show before he passed away. Meanwhile, the charity given to his mother, meant to support them after the loss of his father, had dwindled, leaving their bowls of porridge increasingly lighter each day. He would settle for a square meal over chocolate for sure.
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden slap on the side of his head. No one had ever hit him that hard before, and certainly not someone he had just met.
‘Stop looking at the chocolate and pay attention, boy. Do not get it into your head to eat one single scrap. The punishment is severe, and we check pockets at the end of shifts,’ said Mr Wright, annoyed by having to interrupt himself. Miniscule amounts of dust were just beginning to build up on his frock coat. Thomas could tell he rarely ventured onto the factory floor. Mr Wright attempted to brush each speck of dust off his coat with an obsessive determination.
‘We’ll try you out at a few tasks, sorting and grinding, and whatnot, until you can show your worth,’ Mr Wright continued. ‘I better see something in you, or you’ll be gone by the end of the day. If I catch you stealing, you’ll meet a much worse fate, lad.’
Head now aching, Thomas listened to the rest of Mr Wright’s spiel, threats and all, with astuteness. The factory floor was a din of grindstones and machinery, along with the occasional shout. It was naturally lit from a sparse window here and there, along with skylights above. He was led by the manager to a corner of the factory.
‘I’m going to start you here with Mark, who will guide you. This is where the cocoa beans are sorted before processing. It’s easy work compared to the rest, so I suggest you impress him. You seem to have a good head on your shoulders, anyway.’
Maybe before you slapped it, prick, Thomas thought to himself. His tour guide walked away without any formality. Presumably back to his office, away from the dust and noise.
‘Alright, Thomas, is it? I run the sorting crew, so if Mr Wright brought you here first, maybe he sees something in you. Like he said, I’m Mark.’ The shift leader, covered in dust and soot, looked both in his twenties or as old as fifty, depending on the angle of the dim factory lighting at the moment. He also looked well fed, and Thomas envied him for that.
Following a brief introduction to cocoa beans, he shadowed Mark for a few minutes of sorting and was eventually left on his own. Fearful of losing an opportunity, or what his mother would say if he lost this job on his first day, he dared not mention his poor eyesight to either of his superiors. Despite that, he worked at the sorting as best as he could next to some other lads. They were moving much faster than Thomas, but he attempted to shadow their pace as well as he could.
After an hour or so without incident, his confidence was beginning to build that his eyesight would not hold him back. He was still nowhere near the same pace as the others, but he felt like he was making some progress. Then he heard Mark shout for the first time from a distance, making his way towards Thomas.
‘Put those bloody beans down! Are you blind as a bat? Can you not listen to instructions, boy? You should be shovellin’ animal shit on a farm, son. We got a whole line backed up over there because of you!’ Mark grabbed Thomas by his ear and pulled him away from the workstation. ‘How many fingers am I holding up, kid?’
‘Two,’ Thomas guessed. He had no idea, and the dim lighting was doing him no favours.
‘You’re lucky I’m the one who came over here and not Mr Wright. You just got demoted to the boiler room. Either that or be off with you, per Mr Wright’s orders.’
Despite the roar of machinery, he could hear the gasps around him among the other young workers when they heard ‘boiler room’. In unison, as if a switch had been flipped, they picked up their pace and avoided the shift leader’s gaze. The boiler room was for lames and halfwits. Most didn’t last long down there, anyway. If ol’ Johnny Raw knew what they knew, he might give begging in the streets on the brink of starvation another thought.
As they made their way down the iron stairs, the chatter of machinery faded while the groan of the massive boiler introduced itself to its newest drudge. The heat pressed down with a suffocating weight as they descended the iron stairway deeper into the bowels of the factory. The air grew thick with a gritty dust of soot, a far cry from the bittersweet aroma of cocoa and sugar. Thomas’ shame weighed heavily, its presence as palpable as the acrid scent of the burning coal below.
The growling furnace cast a hellish glow on the sweating faces of the coal heavers. If the chocolate filled paradise above was heaven, then this, surely, was its infernal counterpart. Mark led him past the boiler and toward a group of half a dozen or so kids who were painted with coal from head to makeshift shoes. One of them was missing an arm. They seemed indifferent to Thomas; he was just another to come and go until he proved otherwise. One of them, who was older than the others, immediately dropped his tools and presented himself to Mark for instruction.
‘Arthur here keeps things working down here, and that’s where you come in. Help with the cleaning and whatever else he needs. If you can’t cut it here, we got no use for you,’ Mark said. He walked away without acknowledging Arthur directly. After retreating up the iron stairs, Thomas could hear Mr Wright work the lock mechanism of the door. It was now crystal clear that he took theft prevention in his factory seriously.
‘Hope you’re the cleaning sort, chap,’ Arthur said without emotion.
It took almost a month for the other lads to warm up to Thomas or even address him directly. Several others came and went along the way. One kid even kept passing out over and over from the heat until Mr Wright himself came down and led him out by his ear. After weeks of no one dragging him off by his own ear, he stopped looking over his shoulder for the same fate. The work was gruelling, but so was starving.
The dancing shadows of the lamps and boiler flame played tricks on Thomas’ poor eyesight. Like the spectre of starvation, it relentlessly terrorised his peripheral. The busier he worked, the less he noticed them or his hunger. As for the heat and humidity, you never really get used to it down there.
One evening, he and two others were cleaning some ventilation grates in a far corner of the factory cellar. The boiler room had got hotter than ever in recent weeks, and Mr Wright ordered a thorough cleaning of all the vents. Most of the factory floor crew were off, with only the three of them in the cellar with Arthur poking about somewhere.
Maybe a shadow, maybe not, but Thomas thought he saw something slithering away inside a vent as he removed a grate. There were plenty of rats around, but the movement he saw was serpentine and elongated. At least he thought it was. He wasn’t sure.
‘Something startled you, Tom?’ his workmate, George, asked with a condescending chuckle. The boiler room crew never dared show weakness, not to each other nor to any creature lurking around. Though around the same age as Tom, Mark was so covered in soot and grime that he might as well have been a banshee, risen to wail her call.
‘No.’
‘Probably just another rat, mate,’ said William. He was older than the other two and sounded annoyed by the interruption. ‘No telling what they survive on in these vents. Lots more than just coal going through that boiler, but you didn’t hear that from me, right?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Thomas. This was one of the rare times they were off on their own, away from the gaze of their ear snatching superiors. William looked at Thomas, as if he needed to size him up one last time to be sure.
‘If you were that sluggard, Mr Wright, and some of your industry chums owned other factories with flammable industrial waste oils, why pay for coal, right?’ William waited for it to sink in, but Thomas still looked confused.
‘These other factories, which are making stuff nowhere near as sweet as chocolate, they have extra chemicals left over that need to be rid of. It’s flammable and gets the boiler going,’ William explained. ‘It’s rancid when it burns, even compared to coal. Don’t worry, though. They usually just use it to bank the furnace overnight and keep it warm.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look over here, I’ll show you,’ William said with a gesture.
They walked together to a storage area nearby, and William pointed to a collection of carboys and wooden barrels. They were too far for Thomas’ vision to make out much detail on, but he did not dare go any closer.
‘Where are they from?’
‘Who knows? He keeps company with all the other rich nobs around. I heard it’s from some place they dispose of bodies no one cares about, right? Always experimenting with new ways to break down dead riffraff so we’re less of a burden, eh?’ William opined. Thomas had not heard so much out of the older boy at one time since they were introduced.
‘Not just the chemicals, though. Even the sludged output of human flesh is highly combustible,’ William continued. Thomas was getting the impression William knew more about the situation than his disingenuous demeanour led on. ‘It shows up here as a mix of liquefied flesh and who knows what else.’
‘Just to save money on some coal?’ asked Thomas.
‘Anything to skin a flint, that Mr Wright,’ William said with a chuckle of his own, but his satisfaction was cut short.
George’s piercing wail reverberated from the stone walls. There was a startled scuttling of rats in the darkness; a few fell from the pipes above in their desperation to flee. They both ran back to him to investigate, William leading the way.
They returned to see George on the ground, still screaming, while struggling with his leg. Whatever he was wrestling with had attached itself. It was too dark for Thomas to see what it was with any clarity. As William went to help, he was forced to retreat when a lamp on the wall was knocked off and its glass shattered, spilling out a mixture of whale oil and flames. At first, the ignited puddle of oil provided more light to aid George’s struggle. However, the details of the creature it revealed to them only further stoked their terror.
The light provided them with a clear view of the tentacle that protruded from the ventilation. It was pitch black with filth, but there was a layer of moisture all over, with thick, dark drips spattering the walls and the floor during the struggle. The circumference increased further up into the vent. It was not just some creature latched to George’s leg; it was a small part of something much more sinister that had claimed the ventilation as its own.
Before William could reach George and aid his struggle, the flames singed the creature, igniting its viscous gunge coating for a brief moment until it released its catch and retreated to where it came from. Its victim jumped up off the floor and limped over to William and Thomas while keeping his gaze on the vent. The miasmatic stench of burned, filth coated flesh grabbed them with tentacles of its own. It was so putrid that all three gagged and choked in place before Thomas, followed by the other two, had the sense to run.
The light from the massive boiler ahead had never looked so warm and inviting. Arthur stood in front of it, noticing the commotion of their movement. As they drew close, he yelled to William, ‘What’s the meaning of this? What have you done? Is that smoke?’
Prior to any reply, the loud clanging sound of vent grates throughout the cellar popping off and hitting the ground echoed around them. A few were close to them, which put the boys back on full alert. Interpreting the noises as more of their shenanigans, Arthur’s face growled with anger as he went to strike William. Just as he raised his hand, something from above came down and wrapped itself around his neck. Unlike George’s leg, this time it had a firm grip—the sound of his neck snapping as his eyes bulged out of their coal coated sockets provided little satisfaction to the boys in their current state of terror. It pulled him up into the darkness and out of their sight.
‘The boiler!’ shouted William to the others. ‘We have to heat it up and kill it! Grab a shovel and get to it!’ He did his best to exude confidence to his younger charges. The last thing he needed was one of them panicking and making the situation worse for all of them.
The other two responded with diligence. William’s leadership was all the solace they had right now. The shovelling work was difficult for their small frames, but they had adrenaline pitching in to the cause.
The smoke from the far end of the cellar was growing, making the dusty air even more unbreathable by the minute. There were no more attempts on their lives by the creature. It did not appear keen to get anywhere near the direct heat of the boiler. Above, they could hear the dull thumping sound of its feeble attempts at pulling Arthur’s body into the ventilation. It would not be long before one of the smaller sacks of flesh below would become too enticing for even the boiler heat to keep it at bay.
Soon after, the boiler’s pressure relief valve howled as steam came rushing out into the cellar. ‘Keep going!’ yelled William. So they did.
As the piercing shriek of the steam valve subsided, a new sound emerged: the familiar creak of the cellar’s lock being worked open, followed by the heavy, metallic footsteps of someone descending the stairs in a fury.
‘What’s the devilry?’ shouted Mr Wright. His frock coat pristine as ever, he was moving towards them with his trademark aggression. His focus was on William as he made his way over.
‘The vents, sir! It’s in there! We need to burn it out!’ William shouted.
Mr Wright paused for a moment, his angry face briefly turning to bewilderment while contemplating if this was all just a ruse. Before he could reach a decision, a tentacle from above missed his neck and wrapped around his shoulders. William grabbed a hold of his coat to prevent him from being pulled up, but another tentacle had grabbed Mr Wright’s ankles and they both pulled until there was a second Mr Wright. William was left with only the wool coat in his grip and the grotesque sight of a man’s internals spilling onto the cellar floor.
Tom and George were too busy loading the boiler to notice or even care about the fate of the selfish factory manager. They had a job to do and were rewarded with another shriek of the pressure relief valve; this time it kept going in pulsating waves of varied pressure. The strong vibrations startled them both once again until they realised it was the boiler, giving its last warning that it was already stuffed for the evening. The humidity was as thick as the laws of physics would permit. They were drenched in sweat while trembling in fear, looking to William for direction.
William took what was left of the wool frock coat and set one side of it on fire. Then he swung it in circles above his head in the air and shouted for the other two boys to run up the stairs. There was no protest, and George rushed up the stairs with Thomas behind him. As they reached the top of the stairs, with the vibrations of the boiler louder than ever, Thomas looked back. The smoke now dense, he could barely make out William’s ankles surrounded by a wet, black grip. William’s confidence melted away from his face, and his gaze met Thomas’ before it snatched him into the darkness.
Another tentacle of filth was slithering its way up the bottom of the stairs. Thomas turned back to run away, noticing George was already long gone. He followed suit and ran wide open across the factory floor. Knowing the door would be locked, he went to the closest window and crawled out faster than he even knew he could. Thomas ran as fast as he could from that factory. The violent explosion of the boiler behind him could be felt each time his stride hit the ground. He could see George in the distance ahead up the street, which was quiet due to evening inactivity. He heard shouts and cries of bewilderment from the few who were around.
Feeling there was a sufficient distance between him and the creature from below, he turned back to look at the factory. The flames towered high while dark smoke blocked the moonlight in the evening sky. There was enough fuel under there to burn for days, maybe longer. Thomas hoped it was enough. He wept for William, but only for a moment. He still had the task of finding another way to provide for his family.
