The House, Prologue 1—A Visitation

Prologue 1—A Visitation

The wolf stepped out of the shadows and into the dim light falling through the domed glass ceiling. Frost formed in its paw prints as it crossed the open space surrounded by towering shelves six stories high. The winding balcony connecting the access ways was empty, as were the ladders climbing up the rows of metal racks—the Factorship’s record keepers unlucky enough to be assigned to the restricted stacks had finished their shift, abandoning their charges to the silent whispers of long forgotten times.

The wolf shook its ruff, shedding more frost across the polished floor. A thousand years or more had passed since it, or its brothers, had walked these halls, and much longer since the Builders had last been seen. Their treasures might still haunt the glass cabinets, iron boxes, and polymer crates stacked high on the steel grates. But these were not the only ghosts that haunted these halls and it was not the treasures the wolf had come for.  

The airlock’s glass panels frosted over as the wolf crossed to the next stack. The air in the second hall felt dry and cool, almost brittle as if it could crumble at any moment. Time-worn volumes and yellowed manuscripts lined the shelves, their leather bound spines cracked and their pages fragile from age. As the wolf crossed the hall, starlight glinted in golden lettering as if tiny eyes followed its progress. But it was not the written word the wolf hunted today.  

The final hall greeted it with the metallic scent of machinery tinged with a hint of ozone. Night lights illuminated the stacks, casting shadows across the metal towers and countless shelves housing the active part of the Factorship’s stacks. The meticulously organised and labelled racks held the history of the last decades in layers from punch cards, stamped drums, and magnetic tapes higher up in the stacks to the quartz coins, data cubes and spelled holos on the ground level. The wolf sniffed the sleek reading desks and the stools neatly tucked underneath, but the scent it sought was not to be found amongst them. 

Outside a clock rung the last bell of nightturn. The wolf looked up to the glass dome and the thin sickle of the new moon. In its glacial eyes, blue skies fell into the void between the stars. First one, then two, then all of them, like sand trickling through an hourglass. 

The wolf lingered as the vision faded, then circled back to the first hall where it found a dark, cavelike space underneath a wooden crate stamped with faded letters and filled with the familiar scents of times long gone and shadows passed.  

It lay down, resting its head on its paws. The boy might not be here yet, but he would come.

And with him more than one of the restless ghosts would wake.