Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
"So I hear your making your public debut at the Bookman thing this weekend." Eric mentally gave himself a pat on the back for successfully predicting the first thing Colin would say to him. It was amazing how the guy kept track of everything going on, like an old-fashioned village priest. The difference was that Colin was dedicated to the free flow of information. 'Off the record' to Colin meant that he would keep the source confidential, not the tale. He liked to open every conversation in that tradition, just to let you know he was on his toes.
"Hey, Colin," Eric greeted him, "Yeah, Tess started talking and next thing I knew I was promising to write a poem about the evils of sport fishing. She's one driven individual."
"Oh, she moves along pretty good," Colin said sarcastically, "But I'm not sure that there's any intelligent life at the wheel." He fumbled around the trunk of his Saturn, finally pulling out a small cassette recorder in a leather holster arrangement. "I hate using this thing," he commented, "But it beats trying to write with a flashlight held in your mouth. I'll tell you whenever it's on."
"You don't have to do that," Eric replied.
"It's my standard procedure," Colin assured him. "When someone does me a favor and takes me around a place they're guarding in the middle of the night, I don't want to repay them by having their voice matched to a subpoenaed tape." He got the arrangement strapped comfortably on, and attached the miniature microphone to the collar of his T-shirt. "Testing, one, two." He played it back to check that it was operating O.K., then rewound it to the start again.
"Recording," he said and depressed the button again. "This is Colin Keith. It's Thursday, July 14, 2001, 12:30 AM. Make that Friday, July 15th. I'm about to enter the Wilkins Valve facility in Springfield, Massachusetts as part of my ongoing investigation into abandoned industrial sites in the Northeast. The facility is quite dark, so I will be proceeding by flashlight. There is a live security presence here," he added with a wink at Eric, "So I will be proceeding with caution." He switched off, and they entered through the front door.
"How's your girlfriend making out with the new job," he continued in a more conversational tone.
"Oh, she's happy to have the work, but she's not to crazy about the way they do things."
"Not surprising. Despite all the gravy on the government train, a lot of people won't go for a second ride. Let me guess. Do they have her reading every environmental impact studies done for a new rail route in the past fifty years?" He qualified it quickly, "Not that there would be that many, of course."
"No, she's working for the head PR guy on the project. Believe it or not, her first assignment is to go see some state senator out here about the alleged health effects of magnetic fields."
"Must be Hardwick," Colin laughed, "Poetic justice."
"Hardwick, that's amazing! You should work for the CIA or something."
"Don't even joke about that," Colin replied harshly, "They don't search for truth, they manufacture lies. Not my line at all."
"Sorry," Eric said sincerely, and busied himself with preparing for the round. He hung the heavy clock over his shoulder, clipped the interlocked family of key rings to his belt, and took up the flashlight and the clipboard.
"What do you do if you run into someone out in the dark," Colin asked, wanting to show that he wasn't angry about the CIA comparison.
"Run like hell in the opposite direction." They started off on the round, and three Detex key stations later, they were out of the administration and into the first of a series of cavernous pitch dark buildings. "Worst scare I ever had here came in this building." Eric began his favorite security guard story. "It was about a week after they shut down for good, but before they got the heavy equipment out. The electricity had been shut off the day before, so it was as dark as it is now. Watch your step here, the bricks are expanding," he interrupted himself.
Colin knelt down and picked up one of the loose wooden bricks which had erupted from the floor. He examined it closely with his flashlight. "Looks like it's been pickled in oil," he commented. "So what happened to you in here."
"I was walking down the middle of the floor, keeping my flashlight pointed down in front of me. There was a lot of junk scattered around back then, and scanning a dark building with a flashlight just makes me paranoid anyway. Some guy leaves his jacket draped on a chair, or a baseball cap on a hook, and when the beam sweeps by you'd swear it was a person. Anyway, I'm walking along in the dark, and someone clocks me on the shoulder with a club or something, hard. I sort of yelled, and jumped to the side, weaving and bobbing and trying to spot someone with the flashlight, and I got myself all turned around and wham! I get it on the back of the head. Not so hard, but I was so shocked that I dropped to my knees."
"I had the flashlight in one hand still, and I took off on all fours, the clock bouncing along on the floor, until I could get my feet under me again and get upright. The flashlight had gone out, and I damned near broke my neck stepping on a small piece of pipe in the dark and ending up on my back. I froze, and listened, but I couldn't hear anything except myself panting. The pipe I wiped out on was about three and a half feet long, black iron, maybe two inch diameter. I eased the clock off, trying not to make any extra noise, and got a grip on the pipe with my right hand, holding it against my chest. Then I shook the flashlight a couple times with my left, and it came back on, so I started walking it towards where I got hit, playing the beam back and forth in small arcs. All the time I still couldn't hear anything but my own breathing, and I was getting pretty pissed, so I start yelling stuff like, "Come out you asshole motherfucker. Come on out so I can beat your fucking brains in." Then I caught this little movement through the top of the beam, and I lift the flashlight a little, and realized what had happened."
"There used to be overhead bridge cranes in here, running up and down the whole length of the building on tracks about thirty feet off the ground," he gestured with the flashlight. "All of the real production buildings here had them, twenty ton capacity, for moving the big valves from machine to machine. There was an operator booth right on the crane, but they also had a remote unit that hung down on one of those steel web reinforced power cords. Some asshole had been in demonstrating the crane, and he'd left this ten pound control box on this heavy cord dangling about five feet off the ground in the middle of the floor. I'd walked right into it, hard enough to start it swinging, and when I was dancing around in the dark, it had swung back and caught me again. I ended up with a big bruise on my head, and feeling like an idiot."
"That's a good story," Colin said, "I thought you were going to get the shit kicked out of you for a minute there."
"Naw, never ran into any intruders myself. Not a whole lot of excitement around this place. Only time I ever see the police out here is when they come by to use the bathroom."
"What's down there?" Colin asked, pointing with his flashlight to a spiral metal stairway disappearing downward in the corner.
"Old tool crib, I think. I never went down there until after Wilkins pulled out, and by that time it was flooded, so I didn't get off the stairs. There's a big hatchway arrangement around the corner there that probably leads to the same place, but it's padlocked with a combination lock."
"How did it get flooded," Colin wanted to know.
"Could be ground water not getting pumped out, or it could have been a broken pipe from the winter. You want to take a look?"
They headed for the corner, Eric stopping along the way to hit the Detex key next to a woefully undercharged fire extinguisher. Colin took the lead, and carefully climbed down the triangular treads.
"Shit," he exclaimed, pulling his foot out of the water, "I didn't even see it."
"Sorry about that. Happens to me all the time at night. Flashlights just don't pick up water and puddles real good unless the surface is disturbed," Eric commiserated.
"Hey, look," Colin sounded like a little kid as he held his flashlight near the surface of the water. The beam illuminated a dancing Technicolor rainbow, as ripples rebounded from the rows of empty shelves, creating complicated interference patterns. "What's that remind you of?"
"Oh, right," Eric's memory clicked into place, "I remember going out after rainstorms with some of that light lubricating oil I'd use on the bicycle chain. Put a tiny drop in a puddle, and it would spread right out and flash the whole spectrum at you." He started laughing, "I bet if I did it now, someone would call the fire department and they'd send some kind of emergency response team. Cordon off the block, and put some kind of special thousand dollar paper towel on the puddle to soak it up."
Colin was only half listening to Eric as he continued to move the beam around the basement. "Over there," he said, "Lend me your flashlight a minute."
Eric handed over his Guardsman Special, a five D cell waterproof halogen flashlight with a signaling option that nobody ever used. Holding it in his free hand, Colin focused the two beams on a wall about twenty yards away, partially obscured by the rusty shelving and racking. "Looks some 55 gallon drums, stacked up, can you see?"
"I'm not, yeah, I think so," Eric replied, moving his head around to line up the spaces between the shelves for a look. "Yeah," he repeated, "I'm sure that there's a couple light blue ones, and there may be a bunch of black ones, though I can't be certain."
"That's what I'm seeing." Colin sounded like a reporter again, cool and confident, "I'm going to record again," he said, handing back the flashlight and fiddling with his mike. "I'm near the bottom of a spiral metal stairway in the former heavy machining building next to the main entrance. The last three treads of the stairs are under water, so I'd say that it's a foot and a half, maybe two feet deep. The cellar is of indefinite size and the walls are constructed from common brick. The space is largely filled with wide metal shelves, about twelve feet high and four feet deep. These are mainly empty, saving some odd shaped metal parts and a few small tan colored cardboard boxes, The shelves reach almost to the ceiling joists, making it impossible to see over them."
"Against the side wall, uh, towards the administration building, uh, that's east I think, are some 55 gallon drums. I clearly see, uh ten, no twelve drums painted a shiny light blue, uh ten of those are stacked two high, and two are standing alone. To the right of these I can just make out some black drums, but I can't guess the quantity." He switched off the recorder. "Eric, could you find me something I can throw, I want to make a splash."
Eric gave him a funny look that escaped notice in the dark, then climbed back up the stairs to look around. He returned a couple of minutes later with a few of the displaced wooden paving bricks.
"Thanks," Colin accepted them, and repositioning himself on his knees, he threw a brick sidearm towards the wall. It hit the first row of racks and dropped into the water. He swore under his breath and tried again. This one skipped off a near shelf surface, then came to rest on another shelf, several rows away. "Three's the charm," he muttered, and flung the third. It disappeared smartly through a tunnel of openings, clunked off a few things, and dropped with a soft 'plunk', at least fifty feet away.
"Recording," Colin started the cassette again, "The water definitely extends at least most of the way to the barrels, and if they are standing in a couple feet of water, they must contain something or they'd be floating on their sides. I'll have to get some hip waders and come back. There is a slick of fine oil on the surface in places, but that could be coming from anywhere."
They climbed back up the stairs and continued on the round. Eric had his own order for doing the buildings, and the next two dozen Detex keys went by without anything interesting showing up. They skipped the buildings that weren't part of the regular round because neither of them wanted to fall through a rotten floor in the dark. Colin was amused by the mess in the old iron foundry, but he showed no desire to start rummaging around in the junk. Back out in the dipping yard, he worked his way under the maze of skeletal I-beams, ducking and sweeping the ground with his flashlight.
"Damn," he said, "I'd like to do this part in the daylight."
"What're you looking for?" Eric asked.
"Fill pipes, a gauge. Some way to check if there's anything in the underground tanks."
"Gets light around 5:00 A.M., if you want to hang around all night." Suddenly Eric was stuck by a thought. "How are you sure that there's underground tanks out here?"
Colin stepped out from under the rusty steel mess and straightened up. "What did Brian tell you I wanted to snoop around for?" he asked.
"Well, he said you're working on a story about environmental hazards abandoned by companies pulling out of the area."
"That's true, but it's only half the truth. I'm also here to do a favor for one of my sources. You know that Wilkins is trying to fob this place of on the locals, right?"
"Sure, the sergeant told me. He said some politician types had already come around to see the place."
"Two of those politician types were Senator Hardwick and his trusty aide, the lovely Susan, who I have a sort of a relationship with." Going on what Brian had told him, Eric had a pretty good idea what sort of relationship that would be, but he was surprised when Colin went on to explain it. He knew the reporter was taking him into his trust. "A good reporter and a good source are kind of like an old married couple," Colin went on, "It's a two way street, lots of give and take. In this case, it's more complicated then that, because Susan is really more of a conduit then a wife. Maybe one of those medieval royal family marriages for joining two houses would be a better analogy."
"Hardwick and I can hardly meet and exchange information, we're practically on different sides in a war. If I could catch him taking a payoff, or in any ethics violation, I'd nail his hide to a headline. And he," Colin said with peculiar sort of respect often granted to a worthy adversary, "He tries with every innocent bit of gossip that Susan passes on to manipulate me into doing his dirty work for him. I try to be objective, but he's a crafty old bastard. I laughed earlier when you told me about his health objections to the maglev because I hadn't figured out what his angle was going to be. It was from Susan that I heard about the contract that your girlfriend got."
"So," Eric reasoned, "He wants you to give this place a bad rundown in your story, to give him a stronger bargaining position."
"Good guess, but that's not what he's after, although that might give you an idea of how tough it can be to know when you're being manipulated. Susan said she'd appreciate it if I took a look around to see what they'd be getting into if they wanted to facilitate setting up a business incubator in the place, keep them from getting pie on their faces. It's always between Susan and me, you understand. If you hooked Hardwick up to a polygraph and asked him if he leaked information to the press, he could deny it." Colin gave another short laugh. "Of course, he could probably deny being Jason Hardwick and still pass."
"Why didn't he call in the Department of Environmental Protection, the DEP?"
"My cynical guess would be that he wants to keep his visibility low, for in case he turns out to be a silent partner in a independent management group that ends up owning this place."
Eric fumbled with his key chain, and let them into Seven Building, a large functional structure built from cinder block and sheet metal that had served as the small valve finishing plant. The building was in better shape then most, having been in active service as the Northeast repair depot right up to the bitter end. He hit the Detex key just inside the door and they began winding their way through a labyrinth of large booths, open on one side, enclosures that had been used for spray painting rebuilt valves. Some traces remained of fire engine red and glossy yellow and black, but the predominant color was metallic silver. Colin was distracted by the possible presence of thinners and solvents, and Eric had to prompt him to explain where the underground tanks fit in to his story.
"Sorry," Colin said, "I'm usually more focused. Susan brought me photocopies of the blueprints for the place, buildings, structures, tanks, pipelines, utilities. Pretty tough to decipher with all the engineering changes, and in a place this old, you always got to be prepared for a surprise if you start digging. There's old buried fuel oil tanks scattered all over the place, which are expensive to get rid of, but comparatively, no big hassle. Out in the dipping yard, though, there are some buried tanks for pickling chemicals, rust inhibitors, super solvents, stuff like that. These were big tanks, like twenty thousand gallons or more. If they weren't drained before Wilkins pulled out, it could cost hundreds of thousands just to get rid of them. And if they leaked, forget about it."
"I didn't realized that kind of money was involved," Eric was properly impressed. "What would it cost to get rid of those drums we saw in the basement."
"If they're full of dirty water, with just enough leftover chemical content to register on a hand-held tester, the minimum ante is a couple hundred each. If they have anything in them other than a burnable oil, you're talking in the thousands. Look," Colin continued, "I've done a lot of writing about environmental protection and I believe strongly that industry should be forced to act in a responsible manner. I also see the other side of the coin, and I believe that most of the companies in the cleanup game are no better than war profiteers. And the edge of the coin tells me that some of the laws are out and out overkill, like with asbestos and lead paint."
They finished Seven Building, and crossed the street to go up to the new foundry. The huge square structure loomed above them in the dark as they hiked up the broken pavement of the driveway. Eric let them in through a orange metal door, and they wove through a few mounds of old furniture before entering the cavernous foundry proper. The beams from their flashlights were lost in its gloomy vastness, and when Eric began to speak, his voice sounded strange and empty.
"You're not the way I would have expected from reading your articles," he said, "I mean, I think they're great, but I figured you for a, well, more of a Northampton type."
"You mean you thought I'd have it in for any business that uses technology invented after the arch." Colin offered. The strange acoustics made his own voice sound to him like that of a stranger's.
"Yeah, well, don't ask me to go in the basement of this place," Eric deftly changed the subject. "I'm not ashamed to tell you that it scares the hell out of me at night."
"I'd like to see the area where they had the x-ray equipment, actually."
"That stuff is long gone, it's nothing but a big empty space now. I think the Navy took it all out in the Eighties. Hey, c'mon up here and I'll show you the strangest bathroom you've ever seen in your life."
They moved up the right branch of a pitch dark staircase directly off the foundry floor, and through a large double doorway at the end of a short hall. Eric played his powerful flashlight over four large stainless steel tubs, each around twelve feet across and supported about a foot and a half off the floor. The sidewall of the tubs brought them to just around waist height, and a perforated pipe ran around the tub in a smaller circle, about two feet higher and closer to the center. A large drain was visible in the slightly depressed center.
"Man," Colin said, "That's the weirdest looking urinal I've ever seen in my life."
"Gotcha!" Eric laughed, "Although that's what I thought it was the first time I saw it too. There were several hundred guys a shift working in this building, and you got really dirty working here. This is a sort of hybrid sink, where a bunch of guys could wash their face and arms at the same time. There's a shower room at either end here, and a huge bathroom over there. Look at all the lockers," he moved his flashlight to illuminate the inside wall. They were all full height lockers and the faded number plate on the one nearest Colin read 938. "There's over a thousand of them," Eric finished.
"All right, it's a big place. Anything here I'd be interested in?"
"Lab's next." Eric said by way of a reply, and they went back into the hallway and down to where the left branch of the stairs would have taken them. Painted black letters on the miraculously unbroken pane of glass in the door proclaimed 'Metallurgical Laboratory'. The lock had been removed from the door, and Eric led the way, stopping to register the inevitable Detex key.
"Christ!" Colin exclaimed, moving his flashlight around, "It's fully stocked. How could they just leave all this stuff? Some of it's got to be worth real money."
The walls and counters were lined with shelves containing hundreds of large brown glass jugs with identification labels taped to them. There were boxes of powders and pellets, and enough glassware to film a Frankenstein movie. In short, it was a fully equipped chemistry lab.
"My guess is the chemists and the lab techs were long gone when they finally closed the building, and nobody else wanted to handle the stuff. There used to be some nice balance scales around, but someone finally grabbed them a few months ago. Probably sold 'em to drug dealers."
"I got to admit I've never seen anything like this in a abandoned building before. Hg, that's mercury, right?"
"Last time I checked."
"There must be gallons of it. Poisonous as hell, isn't it?"
"Valuable too," Eric replied, "It's just that none of the guards know that."
"What's in there?" Colin pointed his flashlight at a door standing ajar, the top hinge dangling.
"Couple of offices for the staff, and a huge room sized piece of equipment that I think is an old fashioned mass spectrometer, Forties vintage."
"What a waste," Colin commented sadly, "Let's get out of here, it's depressing."
Eric hit the remaining keys around the periphery of the foundry in silence, and they walked back down to the main post via Wilkins Road. The entire round had taken about two hours. They were both trying to imagine the valve factory in its glory, buildings lit up around the clock, intense flashes of hot light from molten iron pouring into molds. Acetylene torches shooting sharp blue flames, arc welding electrodes pulling fiery white arcs. The grinding noises and the clanks and squeals from machining and moving around the heavy valve bodies would have been terrific.
The monotonous hum of an old transformer on a utility pole and the jangling of Eric's keys were the only sounds to break the ghostly stillness.