Chapter 8: The Factory

Chapter 8: The Factory

Back in the suffocating silence of the cellar, the kerosene lamp cast long, dancing shadows that seemed to mock the memory of the grotesque spectacle in the square. Tamara knelt on the cold stone floor, her body wracked with tremors she couldn't control. The afterimage of the boy—Lev—being unraveled like a cheap Christmas cracker was burned onto the inside of her eyelids. The sickly-sweet smell of blood and pine still clung to the back of her throat, a phantom stench that made her stomach heave. This was no longer an investigation. This was a war.

Rory moved around the small space with a grim, restless energy, his cynical mask firmly back in place, but his eyes held a haunted, faraway look. He’d seen it before, Tamara realized with a jolt. He’d been forced to witness this horror again and again, a lifetime of public executions disguised as festive warnings. The knowledge settled in her bones, turning her fear into something harder, colder. It was rage.

“He was just a kid,” she whispered, her voice a raw, broken thing. “They just… watched.”

“We always watch,” Rory said, not looking at her. He pulled a heavy, leather-bound ledger from a high shelf, dust billowing in the lamplight. “We watch, we say the prayer, and we thank the Merry Man that it wasn't us. That’s how you survive a day in Solenvol. And a week. And a lifetime.” He dropped the book on the desk with a heavy thud that echoed the final toll of the summons bell.

“There has to be a way to fight it,” Tamara insisted, pushing herself to her feet. The academic in her was dead, replaced by a survivor. “Everything has a weakness. A source. An origin.”

“You’re thinking like an outsider,” Rory countered, though without his earlier bite. He sounded weary, worn down to the bone. “You think there are rules, logic. This thing is the logic here.”

“No,” she said, her voice gaining strength. She looked down at the hideous orange and green socks encasing her feet, the brand of the beast. “No. Before that… that thing happened to Lev, Marta said, ‘The Merry Man is the giver of all things in Solenvol.’ She was wrong. She had to be. That boy’s mother gave him those socks. That was a human gift. A real one. It hates that. It has to destroy it. That’s a weakness.”

Her conviction seemed to chip away at Rory’s cynicism. He stopped pacing and looked at her, truly looked at her, for the first time since the summons. He saw not just a terrified visitor, but the granddaughter of Elena Volkov, the only person who had ever broken the cage.

“It wasn't always like this,” he said quietly, his gaze dropping to the ledger on the desk. “My grandfather wrote in this. And his father before him. Our family… we’ve always been the ones who remember.” He flipped open the book to a page of faded, spidery script. “The stories from before the Soviets came, they describe the Merry Man differently. It was a… thing of the forest. Old. Capricious. It demanded respect, left strange gifts on your doorstep—a perfectly ripe apple in the dead of winter, a lost tool returned. But it also punished the greedy and the cruel. There was a balance to it. A twisted, folkloric logic you could navigate.”

He ran a finger along a line of text. “The punishments were sharp, but they were never… this. They were never so public. So… celebratory. It was a local spirit, a dangerous one, but it was ours.”

“What changed?” Tamara asked, moving closer to the desk, her eyes tracing the old words.

Rory looked up, his gaze directed toward the west, toward the edge of town. “The Soviets changed it. They came in the fifties. They didn’t believe in local spirits, but they believed in control. They built the factory.”

He pointed a grimy finger toward the map of Solenvol tacked to the wall. At the westernmost edge, a large, rectangular building was outlined in red ink. Solenvol Textile Combine No. 4. The place the old man had called Rust End.

“They wanted to industrialize this whole region,” Rory explained, his voice low and intense. “They saw our ‘tradition’ as a tool for productivity. A way to keep the populace docile and obedient. A daily ritual to enforce conformity. So, a few Party officials, men who dabbled in things they shouldn't have, decided to try and harness it. They thought they could bind it, control it, make our local god their local foreman.”

He let out a short, bitter laugh. “There was an accident. An explosion. That’s the official story, the one the elders tell. But it wasn't a chemical spill. It was a ritual that went wrong. Horribly wrong. They didn’t bind it. They amplified it. They took this thing of the forest, fed it the power of a state ideology, and fused it with the factory’s machinery, with the very threads it produced.”

The socks. The connection clicked in Tamara’s mind with the force of a physical blow. The ugly woolen socks, mass-produced and identical in their coarseness, were not just markers. They were the product of that unholy union.

“After the accident,” Rory continued, his face a grim mask in the lamplight, “the Merry Man became what it is today. Ravenous. Insatiable. Its influence spread from the forest to every home, through the plants. Its punishments became spectacles. The factory shut down, of course. The Soviets walled us in with their science and their fear and left us to rot. No one goes near the factory now. It’s a tomb. They say its shadow is long enough to steal your soul.”

Tamara stared at the map, at the red rectangle that dominated the edge of their world. The cryptic warnings from the old men finally made sense. Old things are best left to rust. Be careful which threads you pull. The factory wasn't just a derelict building. It was the epicenter. The wound. The place where their monster was forged into its current, horrifying shape. It was the one place in Solenvol steeped in more terror than the Merry Man itself.

“That’s it, then,” she said, her voice trembling not with fear, but with a terrifying, newfound purpose. “That’s the key. If that’s where it changed, that’s where we can find a way to change it back. Or destroy it.”

Rory looked at her as if she’d just proposed they try to fly. “Destroy it? Tamara, people who get too curious about that place disappear. Not in a flash of ribbons and gore. They just… vanish. The factory takes them.”

“Then we have to be smarter than they were,” she insisted, her gaze meeting his. The image of Lev’s mangled body flashed in her mind, fueling her resolve. “Your family has been remembering for generations. For what? To write down the names of the dead? My grandmother ran. But she sent me back. She left me your name for a reason. We can’t just sit in this cellar and wait for the bell to toll for one of us.”

The silence stretched between them, thick with the weight of generations of fear and a single, flickering spark of defiance. Rory looked from Tamara’s determined face to the ledger filled with the names of the dead, then back again. He was the archivist, the keeper of their sorrows. But she was right. What was the point of remembering if you never acted?

He let out a long, slow breath, the air of a man making a decision he knew would likely kill him.

“Alright,” he said, his voice a low growl of resignation. “Alright, folklorist. You want to see the tomb? I’ll take you to the tomb.” He moved to the grimy window, peering out at the skeletal silhouette of the factory against the permanent golden dusk. It stood on the horizon like a dead god’s ribcage, a place of profound and absolute wrongness.

“It’s a suicide mission,” he added, his voice flat.

“It’s suicide to stay here,” Tamara countered, standing beside him, her eyes fixed on the looming structure.

Rory gave a grim nod. “We go tonight. After the second bell, when everyone locks their doors and prays they don’t dream.”