Genesis. Volume 2

October 4, 1986. Detroit. Ford Park Factory. Afternoon. The factory sat at the very dead end of a long, completely shattered road. A huge, grim bulk of red brick, darkened by dampness, greeted them with broken windows and a partially collapsed roof. Once, production had roared here—conveyors hummed, heavy machines churned, hundreds of workers bustled about. Now there was only dead silence, the smell of rust and utter desolation. The brick walls were crisscrossed with deep cracks and in places thickly overgrown with velvety green moss. In the air hung a mix of soot and a strange, cloying sweetness—the very same they'd sensed in the "Genesis" mansion. Only here the scent was fainter, heavily diluted by city exhaust and age-old factory rot. There wasn't a soul around. Complete emptiness, and even the birds somehow avoided the leaky roof. "Looks like a cemetery," Max adjusted his collar, turning his head to survey the wasteland. "It is a cemetery," Emma replied quietly, not slowing her pace. "Only here they don't bury people in the ground. They come here on their own and disappear." At the very entrance, she stopped short. Right on the cracked asphalt in front of the gate, someone had sketched strange symbols with chalk: thick circles, broken lines, intersecting arcs. Drawn hastily, carelessly, but a clear pattern could be discerned in it all. Here and there were smudged fingerprints and white chalk dust. "Someone really tried to seal this entrance," Lisa immediately crouched down, almost touching her knees to the ground, and traced the outline of the drawing with her finger. "Looks like those signs we drew in Grandma's basement. Remember? Against the shadows." "You think Marcus did it?" Arthur squinted, studying the scribbles. "Doesn't seem like him," Max shrugged. "He's not the type to handle pencils well, and he probably doesn't carry chalk around." "Maybe other victims," Jenny wrapped her arms around herself, shielding against a draft. "The ones who were here before him. Or the ones who never made it back." Emma stepped decisively over the white lines and looked around. The main gates were tightly bound with a thick rusty chain, but slightly to the side, an inconspicuous iron door with a massive padlock darkened in the brickwork. Arthur silently reached into his pocket, pulled out Marcus's heavy key, and inserted it into the lock. The padlock clicked shortly and dryly. The door gave way, opening with such a screeching, grating creak that the old hinges seemed to protest with all their might against uninvited guests. Inside the workshop, deep twilight reigned. Rare rays of daylight pierced through the grimy, broken windows, slanting across the thick, dusty air. For a hundred yards around, it smelled of mold, rancid grease, and that same cloying sweetness. Along the walls, long rows of frozen machines stood silent, shrouded in dense gray cobwebs. Underfoot, glass shards crunched unpleasantly, rusty rebar pins and some decayed oily rags lay scattered about. "Stay within sight of each other," Arthur commanded quietly, scanning the darkness. "Lisa, sketch a floor plan wherever you can. Max, take point, but watch your step." Max silently pulled out his knife, adjusted his grip, and stepped first into the depths of the workshop. The others followed. Lisa opened her notebook on the go and began quickly sketching the layout with her pencil: massive load-bearing columns, passages between the machinery, outlines of large machines. Every half-minute she'd lift her head to check against the darkness and then quickly scratch the graphite across the paper. "Listen, this is weird," Lisa stopped abruptly after a couple of dozen steps. "From outside, this workshop seemed way smaller. But inside, there's twice as much space." "Just an optical illusion—the walls press in, that's why it seems that way," Arthur muttered, though he too was looking around with obvious suspicion. "Yeah, sure, an illusion," Emma said skeptically. They went a little further. Somewhere in the darkest corner of the factory, water dripped steadily and dully. The sound—drip... drip... drip—worked like a stupid metronome. The hollow echo carried it throughout the vast space, making each drop hitting concrete seem several times louder than it actually was. Max moved as carefully as possible, trying not to make unnecessary noise, but he still didn't manage: the sole of his boot caught on a crooked piece of rebar sticking right out of the floor. The clatter was considerable. The piece of iron hit the concrete base with an unpleasant ringing sound, and the noise rolled under the workshop's vaults like a wave. Max muttered a juicy curse through his teeth and froze. "Quiet, you idiot!" Emma hissed at him furiously. "I'm trying, damn it." "Not hard enough." Everyone froze in place, listening. At first, a dead, ringing silence fell around them. But literally a couple of seconds later, a new sound came from the far end of the factory. Distant, but terribly distinct—a scraping noise. As if someone was forcefully rubbing a piece of iron against rough cement. Or lazily dragging something impossibly heavy across the floor. Shhhh... shhhh... "She knows we're here," Max whispered, gripping the knife handle tighter. "Shut up with your horror-movie one-liners," Emma snapped back, but her own voice noticeably cracked. The scraping sound slowly but steadily grew closer. The creature wasn't in a hurry—it moved unhurriedly, like an invisible predator carefully creeping between the machines, checking who exactly had disturbed its peace. Arthur sharply raised his hand, ordering everyone to freeze. Jenny suddenly let out a muffled gasp: the red thread on her wrist instantly swelled with insane, searing heat, as if boiling water had been splashed on her skin. "She's right here," Jenny said barely audibly, pressing her hand to her jacket. "I see her," Arthur replied. In fact, he couldn't see a damn thing, but he could feel it with his skin—the air around them had suddenly become unnaturally dense and heavy, making it hard to breathe. Even the faint light from the broken windows shifted somehow, turning into a dirty gray, exactly like in the rooms of the cursed mansion. Emma furtively glanced back, estimating the distance to the lifesaving exit. "If things kick off—we bolt for the door without looking back," she breathed. "No bolting," Arthur cut her off. "We stay put for now. We need to figure out what we're dealing with." The scraping stopped just as suddenly. A thick, tangible silence fell, so intense they could hear the heavy, uneven breathing of each of them. Lisa stood frozen, pencil poised over her notebook. Max shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot, and the crunch of fine gravel under his sole boomed in that silence like a gunshot. "What's she waiting for?" Max whispered. "Maybe for us to step toward her," Arthur slowly exhaled and took one short step forward. Then another. Nothing happened. He passed neatly between two massive milling machines and peered intently into the darkness. There, at the dead end of the passage, an odd, indistinct shadow wavered. The air at that spot shimmered and rippled finely, like above scorching asphalt in mid-July. "I think I see her," Arthur said quietly. "And what's there? What's she doing?" Lisa tried to peer over his shoulder. "Just standing. Or hovering in the air... Hard to tell in this darkness." Jenny carefully took a couple of steps toward Arthur and placed her hand on his shoulder. Her wrist was now burning as if white-hot wire had been threaded under her skin. "Don't get any closer," she pleaded, her voice trembling with pain. "Don't. Let her come on her own." They stood like stone statues. The shadow at the end of the passage swayed from side to side, and then very slowly, languidly, moved straight toward them. It didn't walk across the floor—it drifted straight through the cast-iron machines and brick columns, as if they didn't exist. The thing had no clear shape, but it filled all the space around it, resembling a dense, swirling fog or a wave of suffocating hot air. "Fall back," Arthur commanded, not taking his eyes off the approaching haze. "Just don't panic, move slowly," Emma added, backing away first. They began to carefully retreat toward the exit, trying not to trip over the scattered debris. The shadow didn't speed up, maintaining a steady distance, but the workshop grew hotter with every step, and the sweetish smell became unbearably cloying, nauseating. Lisa, without looking at her notebook, frantically scribbled on the paper—some circles, jagged lines, broken strokes. She didn't understand why she was doing it; she just needed to occupy her trembling hands to keep from howling in fear. Suddenly, the shadow stopped. For a split second, Arthur thought he could see the outline of a human face in that swirling fog—terrible, blurred, with completely empty black eye sockets. But the image dissolved at once. "She's studying us," he said quietly. "Or tasting us, like Marcus said," Max gripped his knife tighter. "That's it, let's get out of here," Arthur commanded. Back to back, they covered the last few meters and reached the iron door. Max threw his shoulder against it—the door swung outward with a crash. The sharp cold wind and smell of gasoline fumes hit them from the street. That familiar, dirty city smell now seemed like the best fragrance in the world. They burst out onto the cracked asphalt one by one. Arthur was the last, backing out facing the darkness of the workshop. The shadow stopped at the very threshold, not trying to cross the invisible boundary, but the gray haze around it literally boiled and bubbled with heat. And then, in all their heads—not in their ears, but inside their skulls—came a strange, heavy jolt. As if someone else's thought had rudely intruded into their own reasoning: "Not your place." Arthur, without knowing why, stubbornly shouted into the empty doorway: "Tomorrow! We're coming back here tomorrow anyway!" The shadow at the threshold froze for a second, and then slowly, soundlessly dissolved into the deep blackness of the abandoned workshop. The suffocating sweet smell instantly evaporated, replaced by ordinary damp air. The temperature around them dropped back to normal. Arthur slammed the iron door shut with force and turned the key in the lock twice. "What the hell was that?" Max leaned on his knees, breathing heavily and hoarsely; sweat poured from his forehead in streams. "The Void," Jenny sat down exhaustedly on a concrete block by the wall. "Or whatever has made its nest inside it. And it knows us. It definitely knows who we are." "How the hell?!" "It recognized us by smell. By blood," Jenny held up her trembling hands and stared at her pale skin. "The Brooks family are old acquaintances for that thing. It remembers them." "Alright, enough, let's get out of here," Emma nervously shook the lock, checking it was tight. "We'll hash it out at the motel. This place is no place to talk." They hurried back along the broken road. Lisa lagged at the tail end of the group, clutching her sketchbook desperately to her chest. On a clean sheet, without realizing it in the frenzy of fear, she had sketched a clear drawing: a completely empty human face. Without the slightest hint of eyes, nose, or mouth. She quickly flipped the page, hiding the drawing away so none of the others would accidentally see it.