A story introduction from 2013.
Hundreds, thousands: impossible to tell – even at a vantage point like this. I remember of what goes on inside, of a little girl who was sucked into one of their sub-land vacuums and whisked away into a confined, metal room. In there a voice started interrogating her.
‘Where do you come from,’ a monotone, computerized voice blurted out in a jumble of syllables and intermittent, randomly accented letters.
‘L-London,’ the girl stuttered.
‘What is your name?’
‘M-mu-Clara,’ she replied.
‘M-mu-Clara, do you have parents?’ the drone continued in a lower, monotonous, yet far more menacing tone than before
‘Ye…. Hang on… I-I-I,’ She was beginning to cry now, ‘I don’t know,’ Clara said in such a hushed and quiet voice that it was barely audible.
‘M-mu-Clara, are you armed?’
‘No!’ M-mu-Clara exclaimed which was followed by her suddenly screaming like a new-born baby, ‘But I wish I was!’ which led to a chromatic, eerie noise being produced by an unseen amplifier that was accompanied by a deep, malevolent red light in the shape of one large extended sheet being levered up and down the scrawny body of poor Clara. Finally the deafening screeching siren started to diminish into nothing more than a mere bleep, bleep, bleep.
‘M-mu-Clara, do you have friends?’
‘Yes,’ Clara said, in such a quiet, yet surprisingly confident voice, sure of the fact that her life still had hope.
‘M-mu-Clara, welcome to the farm.’
And the floor beneath Clara gave way and hell was revealed…
— Edmund Wilson, 2013. All rights reserved.
Edmund Wilson 