A Weasel in the East pt2. (A Weasel Excerpt).

And so I came day in day out, lulled by the stillness, til a barely discernible trickle of oddness seeped into the days, and it all began to change.
One sleepy still afternoon as I lay on the soused floorboards, I saw the light inside the house glimmer and brighten to a brilliance that smacked of visitation.
And the day the ladybirds swarmed in the weeds was the day the slats fell from the metal framed windows high-up by the ceiling in factory three. The dusty sunbeam hit the dead engine and lit up its carapace, rusty red with spots of soot, and its coiled-wire poky antennae.
To a head unversed in signs from the empty, these may have seemed mere quirks of the mundane, but as I said long ago, two and two means so much more to me than a paltry four, and although I was wary of my own trickster judgement, I had a sneaky sniff that this was a warm-up, a laying of the ground for a more overt discovery that would tap on the membrane stretched between this and that, between the seen and the glimpsed, between the land and the forgotten.

The next bright morning, I walked thought-free with the breeze off the river blustering at my face, and climbed the four concrete steps leading into the nearest of these industrial cathedrals.
And there it lay.
Overnight, or some time since when I had last been here, the dust had formed itself into long heaps and ridges, sweeping into freeze-frame waves that washed across the factory floor.
A closer look, and I discerned the makings of a pattern.
To get a clearer view I climbed the rusted iron ladder that clung to one wall, its purpose long forgotten. The ladder rattled in its bolts, complained in creaks about my disturbing its long rest, but it held and I twisted round on the final rungs to look down upon the ridges and piles, now revealed to be the picked out lines and pathways of an intricate concentric maze, splaying out across the concrete. The lightest of breezes had followed me in and flicked at the ridges, blowing away specks of dust, but it could make no dent on the pattern; no freakish wind could have created this complexity, these twisting paths that turned in on themselves and doubled back again, working their way out to the sides. An intelligence lay behind this creation.
Who, I wondered, had disturbed this space, had stolen in during the night to lay out this dusty device. I hung from the ladder, listening to the creaks and draughts, wondering what was here with me, what had crept past me and left this sign. And why.
But patterns are a bit of me and as I gazed down on the maze I felt myself drawn into the loops and convolutions. Its energy emanated from the centre, so I would go and stand there, and walk it out.

Having climbed down and stepped up to the periphery, I realised I could not walk to the centre without disturbing the dusty rows; they were so closely aligned. It filled the floor to the four corners and it dawned on me that it must have been some great undertaking for its creator to lay this out without leaving any personal trace. I was loathe to be the one to tarnish its trackless pristine state but the urge to walk the maze won out and I tiptoed to the centre point.
And carefully, one foot in front of the other and arms held out like an aeroplane for balance, I walked the maze. It was tight circles at first, then wider, up and down the factory floor. I could only rest by standing still, or else I'd risk smudging the pattern, and I grew dizzy from staring down at my feet.
The one time I stopped and dared to look up, I found I had worked my way across the floor and stood surrounded on all sides by emptiness. This was a turn up, I'm one for the shadows, sticking close to cover and hidey-holes just in case; you won't find me out in the big wide yonder unless I'm on the move, and yet here I was out in the open.
Stood still in that empty I was sure, there was more than the usual to my feeling exposed. This space was dead no longer. Something had come in. The pigeons were on it; I could hear them fluttering nervously from girder to girder above me. I reckoned we had company.
I walked out the rest of the maze.

By the time I trod its final lines I was dizzy enough to fall and I stepped carelessly now, messing the pattern either side of me. I reached the end. It had served me up at the top of the steps leading down into the basement that spread out beneath the factory. I sat down heavily, letting the cold draught that rose up from below cool me down after my dizzying walk.
Somewhat recovered, I ventured down the steps, and peered into the black under the factory. I couldn't see a thing, but the shifting cold damp air circled gracefully around me, revealing the vastness.
For the first time in the East, there was a hint. A sniff. I dared to believe that just maybe I could sense it, weak as it was: that spirit of emptiness. Holding on out here in exile.

I stood there long enough to finally discern the different depths and shades of blackness ' amorphous lumps and hard corners in the black air that drifted between, and on for a thousand miles.
And thicker and closer than these, the line of a black mound lumped up in front of me. I could just make out its ragged slopes, rising a head above me and crowned by a square black stone, prominent and meaningful.
I looked up from the foothills at the squat obelisk, offered up on its underground mountain. I stepped onto the slope.
It wasn't steep but it was no easy climb; the surface shifted continuously under my feet as I disturbed its delicate balance, and I leaned in to use my hands, pulling myself up the incongruous junk, the women's shoes, milk crates, magazines and lightbulbs, and the factory'waste strangemoulded metal all twisted into each other and transforming in the piss-poor light. An upright workboot halfway up still contained the iron bones of a long rusted machine worker, and the tattered paisley rags of its starved-to'death slaves lay strewn over their building block drink-crates, built up by long-gone hands so I could climb to the block, and once there, maybe find why they fell, as I too would fall into the trap, and starve, die and rot onto the heap, adding to the rags, shoes and bones.
With a head full of ghosts I crawled to that top square of black.
On its surface, something glinted: jewels embedded in obsidian dug from deserts by a people long gone, who'd known the secrets of this world and others. I pushed my face close enough to lick it.
It was a satchel.
With my nose so close I could smell the leather under the musty, and made out its metal clasps.
I pulled and it came out easy, and I slid back down with my prize, my shoes filling with dust and small stones.
Sat back on the steps, I flicked the clasps and threw it open. The satchel gave up its secrets.
First out was a notebook, crawling with the familiar tiny writing of an unsound mind. Another pad, and a stamp album, no stamps but more words, teeny tiny round and round, beautiful to look at, difficult to read.
And one more thin small book, in a blue clothbound hardboard cover, emblazoned with the title "A Streetmap of London and an old-money price in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover.
I opened the notebook first. It had been a while.