by Ellen Datlow
Ned sees it. He stands firm. “Now, Mary-Grace . . .”
“Yes, Ned?”
“You got to understand something here.”
“Do I, Ned?”
“Yes, you do.” Ned bites the inside of his cheek. “I know we had a little altercation . . .”
Mary-Grace spits.
“A little altercation,” Ned forges on, “but I want you to know that I forgive you.”
“Oh,” says Mary-Grace. “You forgive me. That’s downright decent of you, Ned.”
“And,” Ned continues, “I’m willing to let it go if you are. Way I see it, we can just go right back to the way things have always been. No harm, no foul.”
“Mm. Well, actually, Ned,” Mary-Grace says, “that isn’t really the way I see it. No. That’s not the way I see it at all.”
Ned watches her. The bag twists in his fingers. “Come on now, Mary-Grace. Let’s try and make some sense here. You know as well as I do that you can’t get by without protection.”
“Oh,” says Mary-Grace, “I got protection.”
Ned pauses. “How’d you mean?”
Mary-Grace grins so wide it just about splits her face in two. “I got me a guard dog,” she says, and snaps her fingers.
I nudge the screen door aside and lope out, on all fours, into the sunshine. My uniform is long gone. I wear nothing but my flesh and my fur. My muscles pull and stretch, every tendon taut, every nerve humming. A shiny metal disk swings from a collar around my neck. It says that my name is Frankie, and that I belong to Mary-Grace Hogue.
Ned’s eyes grow huge as I come to rest beside Mary-Grace, crouching at her feet. She gazes down on me with a look of pride so fierce it makes me tremble. She slides a hand through my hair; I nuzzle my face into her palm.
Ned takes a step back. “What in God’s name—? Frankie? Frankie, boy, what’s she done to you?”
I don’t hear him anymore, not really. His voice means nothing to me. Not compared to Mary-Grace’s bare foot, rubbing up and down my back. Not compared to this body I live in, listen to, fully inhabit, for the first time in my life. I may be just a dumb dog, always have been, but I know what I am and I know who I belong to. I’ve got a thousand years of doghead blood in my veins and a choke-chain around my heart.
I love you, Mary-Grace. Until the end of this world.
“Frankie,” Ned says. He drops the bag. The meat scatters. “Frankie, boy. Come on now.”
Mary-Grace leans down. Her lips graze my ear. “Throat,” she whispers.
I feel myself begin to smile. More than smile. My mouth is open and every last yellow steak-knife tooth in my head is bared to the world. The growl starts deep in my guts and builds up and up, a chainsaw snarl at the back of my throat.
Ned backs away, starts to run. And I am moving, sprinting down the lawn, every blade of grass alive beneath me and hot blue Heaven open wide above my head. Mary-Grace is laughing and clapping, wild with joy. Ned is running and I am gaining, and I am starving.
My name is Frankie. I belong to Mary-Grace Hogue. And today is the day I am born.
THE JAWS OF OUROBOROS
STEVE TOASE
Broken feathers slid out of pinioned songbirds in the hawthorn hedge above me, falling as rotted grey rain. The ditch was not the dirtiest place I’d hidden myself in my life, but it was by far the most unpleasant. I knelt on sun-faded crisp packets, crushing down festering fur and hollow bones that snapped as I shuffled around and tried to get comfortable.
Pasha rested forward on the ditch edge, staring through a set of night vision goggles into the field beyond. Grains of silt and clay clods smeared across his cheeks as they forced their way past, dragged upward and out of sight. Out of habit, I reached down and checked the drab-colored climbing rope around my waist, fingers tracing the knots like a rosary.
“Four other teams around the edge, and one in the fox covert on the far side of the stone circle,” he said, not bothering to quieten his voice. Over the sound of sandstone grinding against sandstone we barely heard each other speak.
“Are you going for all of them?” I asked, leaning close.
He grinned, rubbing his face to smudge more dirt across his skin, and pulled out the machete from inside his jacket.
“Every single one.”
He pushed himself out of the back of the hedge, using his rope to help him gain a solid footing on the convulsing soil.
The standing stones had always been teeth. We did not see the jaws until they started chewing the earth from under our feet and tires. From underneath our towns. All across the country, the landscape was eating itself, the topsoil itself digested. If you stilled yourself and watched the fields for long enough it seemed the plough furrows themselves had been torn from the land. Branches, hay bales, empty fertilizer sacks, old farm machinery, and dead sheep. Anything too immobile to resist the gnawing of the stone circles was ground to paste and swallowed down hollow, echoing throats. Some of the masticated substance leaked out, pressed between millstone grit incisors to dry on the exposed, sun-beaten rock. “White ambergris” was the popular name. For those brave enough to risk their lives collecting it from between the crushing orthostats, it was worth a lot of money. Feed a family for months. Much more than whale vomit. Our client’s taste, however, was a little bit richer.
Pasha knew his work. I did not hear him slicing through the safety ropes of the rival collectors, fibers unwrapping like severed tendons as they were set free from the security of their horizontal tethers. He just slit the throats of the anchor men minding the ropes in the undergrowth, and tipped their unresisting bodies out onto the plough furrows.
It wasn’t that I had a particular problem with killing, or that Pasha was better at taking lives. If necessary, I could be as efficient as him. The other part of the job—the collection—freaked him out. Me? I didn’t mind getting up close to the crushing stones as they consumed the fields in which they stood. Maybe it was the relentless hunger that unnerved him. Too close to home. Saw too much of himself in the continuous grinding of those stone teeth.
Half an hour later he was sat next to me again with a black eye and cut across his face, rope tethered back around his waist.
“One of them put up a fight, but my knife was bigger than his,” he said, and tapped the bloodstained wooden handle of the machete with a grin.
Next was the waiting game. Heavier objects like livestock, or dead bodies, got carried toward the stone circles quicker. Taking turns with the night vision goggles, we watched ten bodies tumble across the field, like enthusiastic crowd surfers carried by an aggressive audience. We listened to the sound change as sandstone crushed ribcages instead of soil and dead crops. We waited until the powdering of bone finished and the noise dulled back to a steady hum.
“You’re up.” Pasha said, patting me on the back. I nodded and rechecked my ropes, and checked them again, because you can’t be too careful. I watched him roll a cigarette and light it, coal end glowing in the scratching twilight of the hedge, wondering, not for the first time, why I trusted him. Money. Money was the reason I trusted him. Money was the reason why I let such a cutthroat watch my back. Without me he got nothing.
I could have just let the tide of shifting dirt carry me to the stones, but that was uncontrolled, and slow. Instead, I dragged myself on all fours, using some of the momentum of the field to push off with each foot. Getting there was the easy bit.
Digging my steel toecaps into the constantly moving furrows I leant forward and scraped my fingers down the surface of the stones. White ambergris felt like congealed fat, peppered with splinters and grains of soil. I pushed my fingers deep into the paste trying not to gag at the smell. I’d only smelt it in two other places—abattoirs and battlefields. A mixture of fermented grass and warm, clotting blood. Bone splinters stuck to my skin. This was what we wanted. I opened the first canvas bag and wiped the mixture inside.
Working my way around the outside of the circle, the danger was the rope becoming snagged be
tween the orthostats and severing, leaving nothing to drag myself to safety. Every couple of feet I checked the knots, checked the tension, and moved onto the next gap, trying not to think what might lie inside that stone mouth. What might be at the bottom of the throat. In the early days they tried sending men down. Experienced cavers. When they did not come back, they tried drones. There were rumors the operators never recovered from what they saw on their monitors. I tried not to listen to rumors. They slowed you down.
In an hour, I’d worked my way around one side, back to the center, then around the other, two full bags across my back. Two more tied to the rope.
Getting out was like walking up a down escalator. Several times I felt myself losing momentum. Several times I felt sure the churn of dirt would drag me like Pasha’s victims between the stones, but over the next hour I made my way back to the hedge, landing exhausted in the ditch.
“How much?” Pasha said, turning on a torch and letting the beam scud across the haul.
“Four bags.”
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t seem much for ten people does it?”
“Not at all,” I said, rested my head back against the branches behind me and closed my eyes.
Even in the dark, the crane-like dragline was too large to comprehend. Over twenty-two stories tall, it looked as if a small city block had been dropped into the field. The boom stretched above overgrown hedges, immobile like a gallows pole.
We got out of the car and I opened the boot to take out the bags. Pasha locked up, not that there was anyone around to steal the thing. The air smelt of silicone grease and human sweat.
“That’s just showing off,” Pasha said, sounding more impressed than he meant to at the scale of the vast excavator. He grabbed two of the bags and I went to open the field-gate. Each cross piece had row upon row of small mammals nailed to it.
“What are those?” Pasha said, the note of disgust in his voice unexpected from a person who slit throats for petty change.
I knelt down for a closer look.
“Moles. Dozens of dead moles.” I reached out and touched one, my finger brushing the desiccated skin of its paws. I wondered how many had ended up milled between the teeth of animated stone circles. Maybe these were the lucky ones.
All but the smallest draglines walked on feet, and this was one of the largest, balanced on hydraulic pontoons each the size of a small truck. Few had been converted into private fiefdoms though. Even this far from any megaliths, the ground rumbled with the constant, unyielding consumption. Maybe a walking fortress the size of small village was a good idea.
A curve of arc lights pinned us in place. We put the bags on the ground and waited for the reception committee. I had no doubt that beyond those lights there was enough firepower to blast us to bone meal.
We stayed still. Footsteps rattled down the outside of the dragline until five men stood in front of us. The bodyguard bruised us in their thorough search for weapons, found our knives and showed them to each other, laughed and handed them back. A sixth figure stepped out of the shadows and stretched out his hand.
Even by the standard of high-level drug dealers, Papa Yaga was pure evil, and the knowledge he’d personally requested to meet us made me very nervous. You survived in my industry by not being noticed. Mundane and average were the qualities for a long career. We’d been too good too quickly and we were now on the private property of one of the most dangerous men in the country.
“You’re the team who have been so successful in harvesting high quality product for me?” He smiled, feldspar glittering in the greyed enamel of his teeth. So he was a user, too.
He was short, only up to my shoulder, and slender, wearing heavy tweeds, mud-caked, expensive hiking boots, with a shooting stick on a leather strap across his shoulder.
“We’ve been lucky,” I said. Pasha normally left the talking to me. Not that he couldn’t string a sentence together. He just never knew when to finish, his mouth finding more words than was good for the situation. I preferred to speak with precision and never for very long.
“In my experience, luck is something crafted with chisels and hammers. Your acquisition has been too good to be pure luck,” Papa Yaga said. He walked forward and rested a hand on Pasha’s arm, his other on mine. “Let’s walk to my office, and inspect your latest crop.”
I expected us to go inside the dragline, and when his men turned in the direction of the boom I felt sure we were going to get powdered into the plough soil. He felt me tense.
“Don’t be so nervous all the time. You two are my golden egg-laying geese. My prize sows. My show-winning heifers. I have no intention of disposing of you just when you’re making me so much money.”
The bucket of the dragline was vast. We waited while one of Papa Yaga’s men found a torch and led us inside.
The sheer scale started to sink in. The bucket was big enough to hold a large boardroom table, several bookcases and filing cabinets. The walls left bare metal, stained with rust and rain.
One of Papa Yaga’s men wrenched down a heavy set of roller doors. We each pulled a chair up to the table and somewhere out of sight, a generator started. Above us, lights flickered like swallows. I glanced around the room. Cobbles and dirt accreted to the corners of the uppermost corners, making it more cave-like than industrial. Grains of soil shuddered loose with the dance of the generator, rattling and bouncing against the steel floor.
“Any questions before we start?” Papa Yaga said, sitting down opposite and folding his arms.
“What’s with the moles?” Pasha said. I looked down at my hands and prayed to the shreds of god that might still notice me.
“Moles?” Papa Yaga tensed. Behind him two of his bodyguards reached under their donkey jackets.
“He means on the gate. The skins nailed to the field-gate,” I said, glancing over at Pasha. He was oblivious, staring up at the lights.
“Oh those,” Papa Yaga said, laughing. He leant across the table. “Because the neighbors get too fucking upset if I nail the flayed torsos of my victims up in the lanes where the tourists can see.”
I glanced over at Pasha and just hoped he realized how close he was to getting us decapitated, golden eggs or no golden eggs.
“I’m joking. They’ve been there for years. Some old gamekeeper folklore. Meant to scare away the rest of the moles. Hasn’t fucking worked.”
“Would you like to test the product?” I said, lifting one of the canvas bags into the centre of the table.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Papa Yaga said. Several of his men laughed. For a moment I was tempted to follow suit, but kept quiet.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum?” he continued. “I smell the blood of an Englishman? Grind his bones to make my bread?”
I shook my head. Clueless was better than cocky.
He pushed his hand inside the bag, pulling out a lump of the thick white paste. The smell was more subtle now, but still filled the room with the stench of wet hay and clotting. From the center, he dragged out a splinter of bone, a gobbet of muscle still attached.
“We call this Giant’s Dough when we market it to clients. When it has the additions you work so hard to acquire. My little joke.”
Dipping the bone back into the bag he came up with a strand of dirty white Giant’s Dough, placed it in his mouth, and with the tip of his tongue rubbed it into his gums. The whites of his eyes turned autumn leaf russet, fading to the color of stagnant water and dirty syringes. Infected wounds and seeping sores.
I’d never watched anyone use normal white ambergris, never mind the stuff we collected. Drugs weren’t my interest, apart from the money to be made from them. I had no idea how long the effect would last, and glanced across to Pasha who, with a sense of etiquette I’d not seen from him before, shrugged so small it might not have been noticed by any of the guards stood around us.
Something shifted within Papa Yaga, and his eyes returned to their previous grey color. He weighed the bag in his hand. “How many went into thi
s little mixture?”
“Ten,” Pasha said. “Some still breathing, others not so much. Don’t know if that makes a difference.”
“Can’t taste any as it unwraps inside you. Maybe the odd little gurgle of congealing blood around the edges, but I wouldn’t be where I am today if I was put off by a little congealing blood.”
“We don’t know how much actually gets pushed out between the stones,” I said quickly, making sure we didn’t oversell ourselves.
“Of course,” he said. “I know this isn’t some Cordon Bleu recipe. More a one-pot, cook-it-all, see what comes out at the end.”
“If you need more killing to improve the taste, I’m happy to do that for you. Fifteen, twenty. Makes no odds to me.”
There was a manic energy in Pasha’s voice. Looking back, I think that was the moment I decided to dissolve our partnership as soon as politic. Papa Yaga glanced over at me for a reaction. I distracted myself by lifting the other three bags onto the table.
“Canvas bags as requested, to avoid contamination,” I said.
Papa Yaga turned and spoke to one of his men who left, ducking under the roller doors. We all sat in silence until he came back with a set of scales and placed them in the middle of the table.
I watched Pasha while they weighed the white ambergris, or Giant’s Dough, or whatever they wanted to call the crushed paste of several acres of English countryside and ten corpses. He couldn’t keep his eyes still, gaze flicking from the piles on the scales to Papa Yaga and his men. There was a hunger there that was going to get us killed if I wasn’t careful. I did not want to die because of his appetites.
One of the men noted down the quantities, did some conversions on an old desktop calculator and showed the total to Papa Yaga, waiting for approval which came with a slight nod.
“Do we get to see how much you’re paying us?” Pasha said. I reached into my pocket for my knife. Maybe if I slit his throat first I might get out myself.
“You worry too much,” Papa Yaga said. “As before, you will be well compensated for your work. I know how specialist your skills are. No need to worry about me conning you. I can pay you a very good rate and still make myself a small fucking fortune. Don’t worry about that, little killing man. Follow me.”