The Coliseum

by Patrick Lestewka

  “Wakey, wakey.” Edward stares down at him. “How you doing, Lurch?”

  “Hell of a welcome wagon you got.”

  Edward smiles. “Got to know who’s boss, huh?”

  “Sure. Keep the priorities straight.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  Harlan swings his legs off the makeshift bed. The stadium stretches below him. Albert Rose still sits on the arena floor.

  “So,” Harlan says. “I’m naked.”

  “Observant son-of-a-bitch, ain’t you?”

  “Very…hedonistic.”

  Edward squeezes Harlan’s thigh. “Name’s Edward Tonnere.”

  Edward Tonnere is the second-most infamous serial killer in Canadian history. A halfbreed born on the Sawaganigh Reserve, Edward learned the art of slaughter at an early age. His father ran a backwoods hunting resort catering to wealthy Americans who arrived via pontoon plane from Kentucky and Alabama and Texas, mostly, hoping to bag a fourteen-point buck or a hibernation-grogged grizzly. It was here Edward learned the basics of hunting, trapping, camouflage, and deception that would serve him so well in the future.

  He celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday by rigging a bear-trap over the cabin door and waiting for the tungsten jaws to snap shut around his father’s neck, killing him instantly. Next, he hopped in a ’95 Ford Taurus and drove west, Dryden to Winnipeg to Saskatoon to Banff to Kamloops, killing a procession of vagrants, street-walkers, late-night convenience store clerks, and hitchhikers as he went. The Mounties found him holed up in the Double Diamond motor lodge in Burnaby, BC, ten miles north of the American border. Although it never made the papers, officers found him methodically skinning the corpse of Reginald Kent, a 23-year-old handicapped man reported missing from his group home. The room was hung with Tonnere’s “pelts”: Translucent human skins stretched taut on drying racks. The Ford’s trunk contained several rotting, skinless corpses that resembled, as one young patrolman stated, “400-odd pounds of freshly ground chuck.” He is one of the original twenty convicts, of which only three remain.

  Harlan knows about Edward Tonnere. But he’s not afraid of him. Not in the slightest.

  “Name’s Harlan Ruddock.” He extends his hand.

  “That’s not the way we do things in here, boy.” Edward runs his hand over the flesh of Harlan’s abdominals and inner thigh. “What you’ve heard is true: It’s a jungle in here. There may not be palm trees or hanging vines or savage animals—” He bares a mouthful of decay-dappled teeth, “—not the four-legged kind, anyway. Outside it’s all about restraint and denial, about subverting animal impulses. But this place is full of people who don’t play by society’s rules.”

  The others listen, enrapt, while Edward sermonizes. Harlan knows better. He’s met people like Edward, men of empty mantras and hollow words, weak men who gain strength by manipulating weaker men. Harlan sees Tonnere for what he really is: A naked sociopath, a snake-oil peddler, a rank charlatan.

  “Ever watch how society functions in the animal kingdom?” Edward continues. “Very simplistic: You have territory, you have a leader, you have power struggles. It’s the same in society, except territory is governed by municipal regulations, leaders are democratically elected, and power struggles are power-suit-and-board-office affairs.”

  Edward grunts and the group surges over Harlan. They pin his arms and pull his legs open. He could easily break free and toss them over the ledge like writhing bales of hay…but that would only weaken a group he’ll soon command.

  Edward steps between his spread thighs. “In here,” he spits on his palm and slicks his erect cock, “territory is taken by force and maintained through violence. Leaders survive through attrition, not election.”

  Edward spreads Harlan’s buttocks and circles his cockhead around Harlan’s bunghole.

  …Oh, ye’ve got a bonny wee arse…

  “Power struggles are swift…” Edward inserts his pecker into Harlan’s anus, “…vicious…” a sharp hiss between clenched teeth; a shuddering moan, “…and final…” thrusting with brutal strokes, busting Harlan wide open, sliding in on the blood.

  …Oh, me good leetle soldier, me good leetle soldier…

  Harlan does not try to break away, or clench, or hurt his rapist in any way. He lies very still. His huge body rocks steadily.

  “You’ve got a nice tight tooter,” Edward says, slipping out with a moist pop. Blood pools on the plastic seat and drips onto the cement. “Now you know,” Edward smiles, “who’s boss.”

  “Sure I do.”

  Never forget. Never forgive.

  Wait. Watch.

  Kill.

  ««—»»

  The Skineaters occupy the arena’s bottom bowl. They’ve torn out the seats to form a graded clearing strewn with shards of bone and curlicues of dried blood and stray teeth glittering like dull pearls. The tribe sits in a circle around Jackson Cantrell. Gregor addresses him.

  “What brings you here?”

  “I was imprisoned for my beliefs, brothers. Imprisoned for working the Lord’s will.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Gregor nods. “Didn’t we all suffer the intolerance of others?”

  Every man who has ever served time has an excuse: The trial was rigged. I had a bum DA. It wasn’t me, it was the one-armed man, or the third gunman on the grassy knoll. Gregor, a.k.a. Jeremy Hanson, also has an excuse: Society frowns unjustly upon cannibalism.

  Jeremy killed for the first time when he was just eight years old. He was playing in the sandbox when his three-year-old brother Craig struck him with a Lincoln Log. Jeremy’s response could be charitably described as excessive: He crushed Craig’s skull with a cinderblock and beat Craig’s body to paste with a baseball bat before eating a portion of the corpse.

  Jeremy’s parents refused to believe their darling could have committed so heinous an act. But confronted with a wealth of physical evidence—several of Craig’s baby teeth were found in Jeremy’s stool the next day—they sent their son for psychological treatment. When confronted with evidence of his deed, Jeremy never cried or confessed. In fact he claimed, and seemed to truly believe, that someone else had murdered his brother. I vow to find the real killers, he said on more than one occasion. His counselors were struck with the poignancy of his resolve.

  Ten years after killing his brother, Jeremy was released into parental custody. After the homecoming party—mother and father hired a magician and hung a piglet-shaped pinata and adorned the living room in tasteful crepe-paper streamers—he’d drugged their bedtime toddies and lashed them to antique colonial chairs before beating them to death with a recoilless hammer. It was not a crime of passion: Jeremy broke a painstaking path up his parents’s bodies, feet to shinbones to kneecaps to elbows to skulls.

  Then he began to feast.

  Officers broke down the Hanson’s door to find Jeremy, the prodigal son, neck-deep in his father’s still-warm carcass. He looked, as one bystander noted, like, “An eager child eating a watermelon from the inside out.” His mother’s uterus adorned his head like a grotesque baseball cap. He’d cut her breasts off and shoved the fatty sacks into his underwear. Her labial lips were found in a nearby ashtray, badly burnt. His father’s plastic-sword-skewered testicles floated in a martini glass behind the wet-bar, his flattened scrotum serving as a poor man’s coaster; the glass had been filled with lime Kool-Aid. When officers dragged Jeremy out of his father’s corpse he was clutching a loop of intestine between his teeth. It unfurled for a good twenty feet across the polished walnut floorboards like 50lb test-line off a Shimano reel.

  Official Testimony, Calgary Federal Court:

  PROSECUTOR: Why did you eat your parents after killing them?

  JEREMY: I wanted to see how they tasted.

  PROSECUTOR: And tell me, Mr. Hanson, did they taste good?

  DEFENSE: Objection, your honor!

  PROSECUTOR: Did Mommy taste better than Daddy?

  DEFENSE: Objection! Irrelevant!

  PROSECUTOR: Salty? />
  DEFENSE: Objection!

  PROSECUTOR: Savory? Scrumptious? Better than chocolate?

  DEFENSE: Objection!

  JEREMY: They tasted…shitty. Then again, I did eat their colons.

  Jeremy was sent to Gellsburg penitentiary. When Triggs and Knight were campaigning their prison initiative, there wasn’t anyone to urge for clemency on Jeremy’s behalf, as he’d eaten them all. As a result, he became one of the first twenty inmates.

  Jackson says, “Why do you call yourself Gregor, brother?”

  “I cast off the shackles of the outside world when I entered my new one.” Gregor sweeps his hands around the tribe. “We all adopt new names. It is part of the initiation.”

  Two tribe members return from the arena floor, dragging something that glistens wetly in the dim light. Jackson notes, without a hint of pity, it is Pierre. The Frenchman’s body is pocked with ugly red divots. It looks like he’s been swimming laps in a piranha tank.

  “Why do you eat others?” Jackson says. “Do the guards not feed you? Are they so barbaric?”

  “At first it was a necessity. Now it is a pleasure.” Gregor points to a hatch in the dome roof. “Anyway, the savages control the sky-meat.”

  “Sky-meat?”

  “The watchers drop meat from the sky. There is perhaps enough for everyone, but they,” he gestures to the third tier, “take it all for themselves. The watchers know,” gesturing now to the cameras, “but they want us to kill for the sky-meat or die of hunger. But we’ve outfoxed them.” He smiles, revealing dual rows of sharkish teeth. “We are slyboots, we are.”

  “But, this, this is,” disgust etches the sharp angles of Jackson’s face, “ungodly.”

  “Your taste will soon turn…or you shall become meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “Like him.” Gregor points at Pierre. “Those who do not feed become food.”

  Jackson took in the faces that surrounded him. He saw the same blind devotion he’d seen in his disciples as Eden Revisited, the same willingness to be led by someone, anyone.

  “Good my brothers,” he addresses them in his dulcet preacher’s tone. “I see what we must do. I understand your cravings. It is not your fault you must subsist on unnatural—”

  “What’s your name?” Gregor interrupts.

  “Jackson. Jackson Cantrell.”

  “And what will your new name be?”

  “But…it’s the name I was christened with.”

  Gregor pulls something from the folds of is robe. Flat, rectangular, cross-hatched metal. A file. “What…will…your…new…name…be?” The slap of the file on the flat of his palm provides a point of emphasis on each word.

  Jackson’s self-preservation instinct kicks in. “Messiah,” he says quickly. “Call me Messiah.”

  Gregor smiles. “Welcome to the Skineaters, Messiah.”

  The others start to whisper: Messiah, Messiah, Messiah.

  “Thank you, brothers. And I shall be your Messiah. Trust in me and I shall—”

  Hands grab at his arms and legs. Several Skineaters drag the preacher into a chair and hold him there.

  “Judas Iscariot, w-wuh-what are you doing?”

  Someone clamps his skull in a vice-like embrace. Gregor balances the file between his thumb and index finger as if it were a precision surgical instrument.

  “You have taken a new name, and that is half the initiation. The easy part, I’m afraid.”

  Someone’s fingers are in his mouth, prying his jaw open. A metal rod is nocked between his teeth and prized backwards until the metal is flush against the intersection where his jawbone meets his skull. His lips are pulled taut, the skin shiny as patent leather, every tooth fully exposed.

  “Eer Od!” Jackson screams around the metal. “Ooo! Ooo!”

  “Hold steady,” Gregor tells him. “This is liable to…sting.”

  He rakes the rusted file across Jackson’s teeth, ruining a perfect dental record in one stroke. Jackson squeals and bucks against his captors. His mouth is aflame; it feels like a bone-saw is tracing the curve of an exposed vertebrae. Enamel dust sifts onto his tongue and coats the back of his throat. Jackson bites down convulsively and shatters his molars against the metal bit and then he’s choking, pitifully, on his own teeth-shards.

  Again and again, back and forth, side to side, the tool grinds. The sound it makes is unique, tshy-tshy-tshy, a sanding disk run across a cinderblock, or a very dull knife pressed to a very rough whetstone. Jackson’s nerve centers explode with overstimulation and pain, white-hot and fibrous, yo-yos up and down his spine, roars through his shoulders, through his neck, until it feels like it’s going to rip the top of his head off.

  It will be hours before each tooth is honed to a fine point. Gregor is a perfectionist.

  The preacher’s screams echo off the Coliseum roof. The sound is a familiar one.

  And, somewhere beneath the sound of screaming, deep in the arena’s bowels, there are other sounds.

  Scratching. The determined, endless, mindless scratching of fingernails on rock.

  And laughter. High, sweet, childlike laughter.

  ««—»»

  “Psst, buddy. Get up.”

  Albert Rose has aged exponentially in the months following the killing of his wife’s lover. The sight of his sweet, loving Pamela taking the stand and pointing a manicured finger, calling him a degenerate, an animal, a fiend…it had killed something deep inside him, snuffed a trembling flame. Now just a shell remains: Only the flesh, and bone, and blood.

  Now this hand on his shoulder and a sandpapery voice saying, “Stay here much longer, pal, the buzzards gonna tear you up.”

  Albert looks up at the man. He looks impossibly old. His face is carved with deep-cutting wrinkles over his forehead and cheeks. Hair frames his features in a wispy silver cowl. His deep-set eyes are so milky Albert wonders if he is cataracted. The man’s body is so scrawny it appears to be made of twisted coat-hangers, every square inch of visible skin badly scabbed. His yellow uniform is stained with sweat and blood and other fluids. He offers a rag-wrapped hand. “Quickly.” His eyes scan the arena floor. “Or you’re dead.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The only person who cares if you live or die. And only slightly.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The man turns and walks away. “You ask too many questions.”

  “No, wait,” Albert struggles to his feet. “I’ll come.”

  The first-level concession area was once lined with framed photographs of hockey legends—Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Maurice Richard. Now their faces scatter the floor, scuffed with boot prints and stains of unknown origin. Gretzky’s eyes have been punched out and a dried substance—mayonnaise or semen, most likely the latter— glazes his mouth. The glass he was once encased in has been broken into shards to make shivs. Overhead halogens flicker fitfully, bathing the debris-strewn hallway in intermittent flash-flares. Gaunt, pink-tailed creatures scurry amidst the refuse, black noses twitching.

  “Everything starves in here,” the man says dourly. “Even the rats.”

  They pass a concession stand. At one time it was busy with paper-hatted workers serving foil-wrapped redhots and mustard-slathered pretzels and ice cold beer. Now it is darkly silent, the formica countertop cracked like a dry riverbed. A prolonged rasping cough emanates from the blackness.

  “Buzzards all over the place” the man says. “Cut your throat for tribute.”

  “Trib—?”

  “Shshsh. In here.”

  They duck into a darkened alcove. The room is large, high-ceilinged, and dim. Smells: Mildew, rotting food, feces. The floor tiles are slippery with clotted filth. A row of standing urinals, porcelain hulls rendered parchment-yellow with age and neglect. Somewhere water is dripping, dripping, dripping in the darkness.

  “Men’s restroom,” the man says. “My territory.”

  A sodden strip of particleboard is laid down in the corner. They sit
.

  “Don’t people come here?” Albert asks. “To…to do their business?”

  The man snorts. “We go where we please. Hell, sometimes I pinch a loaf where someone’ll slip on it…maybe break their neck. What’s your name?”

  “Albert Rose.”

  “Charlie Henried.”

  Albert extends his hand. Charlie’s hands stay in his pockets. Albert’s hand withdraws.

  “I figure you want to know about this place, hmm?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” Albert considers. “What goes on in here?”

  “Ever done time?”

  Albert shakes his head.

  “Didn’t think so. This place is the same as any other prison, ’cept everything goes down on a higher level. In a regular super-max you can shoot your mouth off, even hit another inmate and live, because the screws are always there to break things up. Here, you hit anybody, trash-mouth anybody, you’re playing with your life. Most of us stick to the shadows and try to serve our time quietly.”

  “What about the others? The gangs?”

  “There are two: Skineaters and Baboon Boys.” Charlie shrugs. “You in one, you eat. Either the sky-meat or your fellow inmates, but you eat. If not, you’re a buzzard, you pay tribute and feed off the scrap-heap. It’s that simple.”

  Charlie pries up a grotty floor tile and produces a chunk of bread he’s stashed underneath. The bread is alive with mold: Veins of green fungus crisscross its surface. Something is terribly wrong with Charlie’s fingers and the bread falls from them to roll across the shit-slicked floor.

  “Goddamn!”

  He picks it up. Al notices the bread is denser, moister. Charlie wipes it on his overalls and raises it to his mouth. He sucks greedily, like an infant. His old toothless mouth is drawn in, reminding Al of a tomato that has been hollowed out and then left on a kitchen counter for a stretch of days. Brownish rivulets course down his chin.

  “I’d offer you some,” he says. “But you don’t know what I went through to get it.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Charlie finishes and says, “So what landed you here?”