In a blighted field, where dead weeds like the last wisps of hair combed over a balding head pitifully endeavored to cover waves of dried mud, stood the conglomeration of architecture that composed the home of Family Publishing Enterprises, an ignoble patching together of brick steel and concrete jutting out as if the various parts were trying to escape from the centrifugal pull of the main buildings' center. The only sign of life in the unincorporated area Northwest of Blakeshire, Connecticut, Family Entertainment was a castle looking out on a fiefdom of nothing, standing squat in a barren, brown waste. Yet the location was ideal for Jacob King, owner and director of the Family empire, as it was convenient to the state highways, just a piece, as the locals would say, down the road from the blossoming city of Blakeshire, a comfortable commute to New York, making business possible. And he was able to buy the land incredibly cheap during the Great Depression.
                    The only consistent element in the mismatched architecture was the water line of a height of approximately 5 feet around the aggregation of buildings, the results of last year's flood. The '52 Flood, as it came to be known, was the first indication to King that his business was located at the very nadir of a gently sloping basin. In fact, his was the only business or home in the entire county affected by the flood. The waters played havoc with the printing plant and destroyed huge quantities of supplies, as well as water and mold damage to the buildings themselves.
                    So one spring morning after the water had been drained, Jacob King, patriarch of Family Publishing Enterprises, called together all the employees from every shift of the plant, and solemnly intoned his despair of the great losses to his business, of the setbacks involved and the personal discomfort the experience caused for himself and his family. With sad, moist eyes imploring from the crevices of his lumpy features, Jacob King, in wavering tones, informed all the of the employees of Family Publishing Enterprises that they would have to pull together to overcome this great adversity, this almost Biblical flood, and that each and every employee would need to shoulder the burden. Evoking the spirit of self-sacrifice that our nation felt during World War II, King asked every employee to do their part to help. The name of Eleanor Roosevelt was evoked at one point. And after praising their dedication to the company, King asked his workers to aid in surmounting this disaster and accept a one forth cut in pay to help shoulder the burden.
                    And though Family's pay rates were already at the lower end of the non-union scale, and the cut would place them marginally lower than any publishing firm of the day, the workers were so moved by they're employer's frank, emotional appeal that not a single voice was raised in objection to the reduced wages. And even though many quietly resigned over the next few months, no complaints were made when the employees were asked to work extra hours at little or no recompense to try to keep the release dates of Family periodicals and corporate printing jobs. It was many months before anyone dared to mentioned the deteriorated and sometimes odiferous condition of the water-damaged furniture and machinery judged "good enough to keep" by management.
                    Pull through they did. Family's output was quickly back on schedule, and soon the works were even more productive, even without replacing the employees that deserted under fire, as the business manager referred to them. And by the end of 1952, Family Publishing Enterprises had its best year ever.
                    And that wasn't even counting the massive government flood relief received by Jacob King.
                    At the north corner of the works, the last remnant of one of the original structures to be built in the basin, a pocked and weather-beaten brick wall, stood, a vestigial tie to the now-forgotten hamlet of Glory of God, Connecticut. The wall was a back to the bowling alley, and had been originally part of a burned down church, the blacked brick worn down to its reddish innards.
                    Glory of God was originally built on the location of an abandoned Indian settlement by a small group of Fundamentalists disgusted by the iniquity of the nearby city of Blakeshire and hoping to escape that town's damnable attitude of tolerance and permissiveness. When in 1849, the town elders of Blakeshire made the decision to hold a fall festival, at which dancing would be permitted, the honorable Reverend Enoch Middlesexton commanded Satan behind him and gathered up as many of his flock as were willing to set up a new, decent town, free from the evils of the community at large. Through 1863, the small gathering of families established themselves in Glory of God, building the church, the central structure of the town, next to a large brook, perfect for baptisms, named Middlesexton Lake against the pious, though mildly expressed, wishes of their leader. Around their place of worship, a dozen buildings sprouted. And for over a dozen years, the community flourished as well as they could under the strict tenants of their millenialist sect and the watchful eye of their beloved, yet feared leader, until his death in the fall of 1863.
                    It had been a hard year of bad weather and poor crops, and the hamlet's male population was thinned out by the call of the War Between the States. So the town's morale was already low when Middlesexton was trampled by a pair of oxen he had been admonishing with a whip. Though the creatures were, as he expressed between blows, lazy, slow and disinterested, the town father, by then an octogenarian, crumpled like a dry leaf between their phlegmatic hooves, the animals unaware of his presence as they walked over him a score of times in search of a fecund patch of vegetation to gnaw. When the honorable reverend was discovered later that day, there was not much left of the venerable town leader.
                    The blow to the small community of Middlesexton's death was compounded by his previous assurances to his followers that he would lead them to the New Jerusalem as soon as Christ returned, which he was certain would be very soon, quite possibly before the year's end. The next day, what began as a confused wake, fueled by fears as to how to put to rest the holiest of holy men, was made more difficult by the discovery of a large supply of wine in Middlesexton's home. During the funeral services, led by a nervous deacon, obviously uncomfortable with public speaking and self-conscious of his pronounced speech impediment, Middlesexton's daughter, the lovely and fair Chastity, broke down and revealed that she was actually of no familial relation to the deceased, and under the spell of the opened wine casket, confessed to being his lover as well. Explicitly detailed stories of the frolics of Middlesexton, herself and his now revealed to be common-law wife flowed from her mouth like the wine she vomited upon the church floor. This was followed by further ribald tales concerning the town father told by the woman who was thought to be Middleseton's sister, as well as many of the womenfolk and a few men folk of Glory of God.
                    Chastity had only begun recalling the litany of sins performed by Middlesexton at the brothel outside Blakeshire when the town had exploded into chaos. The congregation of rudderless, repressed denizens of Glory of God erupted into a bacchanal of lupercalian debauchery. Almost every member of the community was involved, willingly or not. Soon the tide of flesh twisted in Byzantine complexities, as many tried to duplicate the bizarre exploits depicted in Chastity's tales or else inspired by the large cache of pornography unearthed in the church basement.
                    Soon the population of the tiny village writhed in the open air, and few seemed to take note as Middlesexton's house was set ablaze. The courtyard of the church was a teeming mass of undulating meat, shining an evil crimson by the light of the conflagration. Past midnight, passions sated, they collapsed on the ground; few were conscious when the church itself caught fire in the earliest hours of the morning. By dawn the migration from the wreckage of Glory of God had begun.
                    Attempting to avoid their neighbors, the people abandoned their homes, stealing each other's horses, valuables and even wives in a mad dash from the town. By the next evening, the only citizen left was the corpse of an of unfortunate accidentally killed during a more vigorous period of the previous evening.
                    When the remains of Glory of God were discovered a few weeks later, the conclusion was that a rogue regiment of Federal soldiers had gotten a little too excited on leave and murdered the inhabitants. And for the next twenty years, the area was left abandoned, except as a playground for young and bored vandals from Blakeshire or as a shelter for young lovers.
                    The eastern side of Family Publishing Enterprises is made up almost entirely of what was left of a Victorian mansion built in 1885 by Eustace P. Willflower and now housed the business offices of the company. After making a small fortune in Wyoming, Willflower returned home with a wife, Eustace, and proceeded to deplete his acquired sum through fooling investments. When he died in 1895, he left Eustace almost penniless, with the house as her only asset. To make ends meet, she decided to return to the trade she plied at the time she met her beloved husband, though this time she would take a managerial role in the business. Eustace Willflower rented out rooms to local girls and supplied the establishment with liquor, a piano player and a touch of class. The bordello outside of Blakeshire had been empty since 1892 when the madame had been driven out of town during a syphilis epidemic.
                    Eustace retired in 1910, selling the property to a longtime customer, Silas Cragg. She then moved back west to live with her sisters in Wyoming. Cragg tried to make a go running the house, but he was a much better customer than proprietor. The Willflower House, as it was still referred to, closed its doors in 1917, when WWI had taken away too many customers.
                    The south side of the Family Publishing Enterprises compound was contributed by Cragg. While living in the mansion, and enjoying the fringe benefits of the business (a few girls stayed with him after the house closed for business), Cragg built the large Cragg Dairy Farm facility on the land. He supplied milk, butter, ice cream, cheese and cream to Blakeshire until 1929, when he was unwillingly engaged in territorial war with a smalltime bootlegger cum dairy farmer named Luiggi Maggio. The Sicilian decided he wanted a legit business, Maggy's Milk, and put the squeeze of the competition. Cragg wouldn't back down, even after many of his milkmen had been roughed up. The local grocers were told that it wasn't safe for them to carry Cragg's products, and they fearfully capitulated to the gangsters' threats. Public sentiment eventually turned against Maggy's Milk when an innocent bystander was machine gunned in the street during an attempted hit on one of Cragg's ice cream stands, but by then Cragg's own business had endured too many losses, allowing the Connecticut Milk Dairy company to sweep in and set up their own farm, effectively destroying the two warring businesses.
                    The Cragg milk works were abandoned in 1931, and though Cragg still owned the land, he had become disheartened, and what was once the township of Glory of God became a popular haven to the homeless in the increasingly difficult atmosphere of the 1930s. A hobo camp had been set up in 1932, and over the next few years, a little community had gathered. Families who had hit hard times congregated there, and though destitute, they managed to keep the area mostly clean and lawful, driving out any who wouldn't hold by their few and simple rules. Until 1937, they had worked together to make as good as a life as they could in their circumstances and had managed as a community to keep their population fed, their children clothed, even succeeded in bringing simple forms of public education and religion to their little community. In 1937, Jacob King bought up the land from Cragg and had the Blakeshire sheriff drive the indigent population off of the land.
                    During their stay, the citizens of the camp had done very little work on the architecture on Cragg's land, but they had managed to level out certain areas and had dug a new well on the southwestern side of the field. The western side of the Family land was taken up by a field of concrete and was one of the areas which benefited by the work of the shantytown denizens. In this area were the trucks that delivered Family Periodical Publishing Products around the nation. It was also the complex's parking lot.
                    And this is where Seamus McMahon stood June 13, 1953 after almost falling out of the bus from Blakeshire. He looked up at the huge central building, housing the bulk of the Family works, a heavy mass of cinerous hues, dark and uninviting. It was the first day at his new job.