There is a place, where a brown wind blows over black seas. Where, when the sky is blue, it is a dangerous blue and the sun is always shrouded by a single perfect cloud. A place where bright shafts of light slice the edges off the impenetrable shadows. A place of stark geometry and simple sound, where sudden drafts flute through strange skyscrapers. Where every gap provides a whistle and each hanging metal leaf supplies a random timpani.

Each tower is a pile of russet cubes. Each cube is a mass of crumpled metal; an instrument that, with each shift of wind, emits new sounds to add yet greater loneliness to this dread citadel. Between the square towers, dark random pools of oil lie only millimetres deep, but seem quite bottomless. Despite the wind the oil is stagnant. In its depths the towers fail to find a footing and stand instead on the tiptoes of their own reflections. It is, as if they float in a second, darker sky.

Once within the maze, the world becomes boundless, bleak and terrifying, yet eventually all ways lead to the centre. There one brushes the wind-blown, brown dust from ones sleeve, blinks the grit from ones eye and gazes in awe at the creators of this sprawling, rusting, metal city. There, in the centre of the clearing stand the ultimate machines; lords of both creation and destruction. The machines that by compacting the buzzing, humming things of man, built this city for the brown wind to sing in.

The wind does not sing in the central clearing. The massive mechanoidic gods enjoy a special silence in their place of ancient sacrifice. Now, only in the mind does one hear the groan of crumpling metal stubborn unto the final fold; the explosions as each curving reflection of the sky erupts into sparkling showers of safety-glass; the skitter of bright paint as flakes fall from the steel; the sharp crack of plastics shattering and the hiss of black blood spurting from shattered sumps.

Measured to the hinge, the crusher is taller than a man. Then above and higher still, the massive rusting jaws gape at the ranks of victims past. Smooth, shiny, greasy rams still leak their last few millilitres of hydraulic fluid, adding their essence to the sluggish streams of victims' oil. In attendance, a lattice jib, soaring even above the city’s highest tower, sits square on folded tracks. Beneath its up-tilt tip, dangling and spinning, not a noose, nor massive magnet, but a three-toed claw, still hung with shreds of wiring-loom and remnants of fabric seating.

Like the walls of rusting cubes, the mechanoidic gods are dead. The place is abandoned, too remote and polluted to be worth recovery. Sometimes, when the mood is on me, I alone enter and enjoy this melancholy place. My reason? I seek the past, the happy days of early youth, when cars were cars and fun to be with. She’s here somewhere, I know it; my first love, my companion of fifteen years, but that is aeons over, as the brown dust flies.

How could I have parted with her? - the car I learned to love in.

Copyright The Mundesley Hermit ©1998