Entity story · 4 min read · Set in The Harrow Works ·
Check Tomorrow's Pockets
At a foundry that closed thirteen years ago a night shift keeps working in silence, and the crates at the loading door hold exactly what some household in the city is missing.
The Harrow Works closed in 1982 and the second shift did not. The security rota still showed a lit bay from 22:00 to 06:00, and had shown it for thirteen years, and no one had thought to write the discrepancy down until the year the rota's paper began to yellow. Then it was written down, in a complaint, and the complaint went into the Ward Office system like any other, and the answer came back in triplicate: *no breach of contract; the works employs no one; continue observations.*
Tariq Mahmood wrote the observations. He was on the night contract, winter, and the terms of it were simple: walk the perimeter, check the chain on the gate, log the loading door. The lighting on the roster was Bay 3. One bay, always. High strip lights with the ozone smell of lamps run too long, and under them the casting line ran its full length with men along it in leather aprons, moving in a practised rhythm, passing shapes from hand to hand through the pours and down the rollers as if the metal were above them and glowing. The moulds underneath rang dry. No ladle of the line ever carried anything that showed light. The rhythm did not falter when his torch crossed the floor, and no head turned.
They did not acknowledge him. They stepped aside for him. He learned this in the first week, walking the gangway at speed and finding each apron silently parting ahead of him as evenly as a curtain, and closing behind. He raised a hand when he passed. He never got one back. Nothing was ever said in Bay 3, and he understood that this was the shift's way of filling in time: quietly, in counts of eight, the works kept running through its dead hours like a clock that has stopped being able to tell anyone anything but the middle of the night.
The crates were not part of the observation terms. They appeared at the loading door between 05:30 and 06:00, one line of them, each stencilled in fresh chalk with a street and a number, each holding one item. A left driving glove. A house key with a light scratch across the shoulder. A wristwatch with the right inscription on the back. In the morning they were signed for by nobody that the dock sheet could name, and by six they were gone, and Mahmood's job was to note the addresses down before they were. Thirty-nine addresses in his reckoning, when the tally was finally made. All of them traced to living households. Every household confirmed, from the doorstep, the exact loss. It was the exactness that did it: the right dent, the right scraped paint. Two of the households, on later counting, had been given things they had not yet lost. The losses arrived within the month. Nobody had said this out loud in the security hut until Mahmood said it in his log, and then it was quiet for a while.
His own crate came on a morning of hard frost. Bay 3's corner door was chalked with his street and his number, and inside, on folded paper, sat his father's reading glasses, the pair with the left arm bound in black tape, which he had lost the previous winter and told no one about, because grief does not require witnesses and neither, he had thought, did a pair of spectacles. He stood a long time with the crate on the dock. Then he signed the sheet, because it seemed to be the polite thing to do in a building where the aprons moved aside for him, and left the crate where it stood.
By mid-morning it was gone. Nobody on the day shift had seen it leave.
He ran one test. He took a ballpoint pen he did not want, and threw it in the yard bin, hard, deliberately, so that it would be known to have been thrown away. It was never at the loading door afterward. Nothing he had thrown away ever came back. He did not test a second time, because the first result was conclusive and, in the way of conclusive results, slightly more than he wanted to know.
There was one crate that never went anywhere. It stood in the far corner of the dock, quartered away from the chalked addresses, and it was stencilled with the address of the works itself. It had been there since the first night. It was empty every morning. The straps were never buckled.
The corner crate was not lost, and it was not thrown away, and it was not yet gone, and Mahmood could not fit any of those into the log under a heading the system would take. He put the log together in the end with a line he had been composing, off and on, for three winters.
*The works has its own crate waiting, and it has been waiting longer than I have, and the works has lost nothing yet.*
He checks his pockets before the night rounds now. Torch. Chain key. Logbook. Then, before signing off, he checks them once more, because the crate in the corner is for the building, and his building is beside it, and tomorrow's pockets — as the works knows better than anyone — are not always yours yet.