The Redemption Factory

by Sam Millar

  Paul grinned.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, boringly, blowing on the dampness of her fingernails.

  “Paul Goodman.”

  For the first time, the young woman looked up. Her eyes – focused and intent – were the greenest he had ever seen – as green as the skin of an iguana. They looked hungry, ready to eat. But something beyond hunger hid in there. Something cunning and malevolent. “Are you?” she asked, smiling a smile that was neither pleasant nor natural, but smug and slightly sinful.

  Immediately, Paul thought of a snake, its bad skin flaking on the table. He wondered how such a massive head simply did not break away from the neck. She looked the type of woman who asked for trouble out of pure boredom.

  “Am I what?” asked Paul.

  “A good man.” She laughed, but a laugh meant to hurt. “I prefer my men bad. Very bad …” Pushing herself away from the table’s lip, the young woman walked towards a door directly behind Paul, knocking once before entering. A moment later, she reappeared. “You can go in … good man. Shank will see you. But don’t say a word until he speaks to you. Understand? He doesn’t like to be disturbed while he’s thinking.” She smirked, and once again Paul thought of a snake.

  Directly outside the door, a burly figure stood, unmoving. He was dressed entirely in black. From ear to ear, a horseshoe of bristles shadowed what little skin his face revealed. His demeanour was that of confident bouncer waiting for some fool to step out of line and there was little doubt in Paul’s mind that this was the legend known as Taps.

  He had earned the nickname Taps as a young enforcer for the local gangsters in the neighbourhood. Any time someone couldn’t understand ‘pay up’, Taps was sent to teach them elocution lessons, usually with a baseball bat, but sometimes with only his bare hands, the size of dogs’ heads. The victim would be beaten to an inch of his life, a bloody pulp of bones and blood. Released from hospital, the victim, if fortunate, would emerge balanced on crutches, tap tap tapping his way home.

  Taps never once killed anyone – an envious achievement considering the numerous bodies he transformed. Some said he was lucky never to have killed, but they were wrong. Luck had nothing to do with it. He was a professional, a brilliant surgeon-in-reverse who knew precisely when to stop.

  Paul smiled feebly and nodded. Taps ignored him.

  Shank’s office was badly lit and it took a moment for Paul’s eyes to focus, moving on the blurred features.

  On a table sat a bust of a severed pig’s head, its languid tongue resting between yellow and bloody teeth. A tiny plaque beside the bust read: It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend: William Blake (1757–1827).

  Skeletal statues lined the room. One particular figure was so repulsive Paul could not look at it directly, momentarily averting his eyes from it.

  A female skeleton held a tiny skeletal frame of a baby in its hand. It was a shrine to the Virgin and her son, and in a perverse way, the scene evoked love stripped, literarily, to the bone. The bones had been bleached so thoroughly their lines held dark, almost carbon shadows.

  Paul found the scene repulsive, almost sacrilege despite his irreligious views.

  Repulsive, yes, but thoroughly compulsive as he glanced at it again, allowing his eyes to rest upon it.

  The figure of Shank sat behind a desk. He appeared massive. Even while being seated, his bulk dwarfed the room. His head housed not a stitch of hair and immediately Paul thought of the lollipop-sucking cop from an old TV show. Shank’s skin had the pinkish tone of a healing wound. A trellis of wrinkles covered it in thick layers guarding eyes as dark as the undersides of decayed leaves. He has the look of a total bastard, thought Paul.

  A cigar smouldered in an ashtray, long forgotten by its owner.

  Shank appeared engrossed in a jigsaw puzzle on the table. It looked like an unfinished picture of an angel.

  Paul found it strange for such a large man to be doing jigsaw puzzles – and puzzles of angels, into the bargain. The puzzle held the same withered appearance as the large painting on the outside of the abattoir and similar in design to the paintings on the wall.

  “Blake,” replied Shank, as if reading Paul’s mind. “All the pictures in here and throughout the building are from the brilliant mind of William Blake. The greatness of any painting is measured by its ability to keep surprising us, revealing something new every time we go back to look at it. If you look closely enough, you can see a woman’s face on the chest of the angel, over in the corner. If you look hard enough, you can see all sorts of things …”

  Shank’s voice was deep, confident with power.

  Not knowing what to say, Paul said nothing while he stared at the angel’s chest, searching for a woman’s face.

  He failed to find it.

  “You’ve come for a job in my abattoir?” said Shank, glancing up from his task.

  His eyes are impossibly black, like milk-less coffee, thought Paul. They have no pupils.

  “Yes. I was hoping –”

  “Hoping? Ha! I would leave that at the door, Mister Goodman. Only reality exists here, not tidy little words like hope. Think you can handle working in a place like this? Think that just any person can work in this place? Think you can work in the House of Redemption?” asked Shank, holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle between finger and thumb, seemingly debating its niche. “Think you can work in a place without hope, and that you’ve got the stomach for it, Mister Goodman?”

  Stomach wasn’t part of the equation – a paycheck was. “I don’t have any problems with my stomach,” replied Paul, his words full of false confidence. He hardly recognised his own voice. It sounded like tin, shaky, cowardly.

  Shank gently placed the jigsaw piece into place and nodded to himself. “This place is like a jigsaw puzzle, Mister Goodman. One piece out of place and nothing is achieved. We are all soldiers in the same trench, all fighting the same battle.”

  There was arrogance in Shank’s voice that seemed strangely justified as he reached for a cloth to wipe his hands. “Well, tell you what, Mister Goodman. I’ll do a deal with you. I’ll show you about the place, and if you don’t vomit or faint …” Shank smiled a tight smile, forced and devious and immediately Paul thought of the girl with bad skin and large head, the girl who resembled a snake. “Okay?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Let’s go,” commanded Shank, laughing. “Let us prepare for the shadows of the dead.”

  Paul moved for the door, but not before Shank told him to wait, he had something for him.

  “Here. Put this on. Don’t want your head getting hurt, do we?” Shank handed Paul a yellow hardhat. “All would-be recruits wear yellow until they have proven their worth. Green is for the apprentices; red for the qualified butchers. Black, like this one I’m wearing, is for the boss. There only is one black hat in here. Understand, Mister Goodman?”

  Paul nodded. He wished he were some place other than here. What he would give to be in the Tin Hut, playing snooker, listening to his best friend, Lucky, talking a load of shit.

  “Oh,” continued Shank, stopping at the door. “You just could be blessed to spot one or two gold hats. Those are … warriors.” He smiled a scary smile. “They are people who were born to be butchers of creatures … blood and death is second nature to them. They are dedicated to their craft. So, a little piece of advice: if you do happen to see a gold hat – pretend you didn’t. Avoid their attention without causing unpleasantness. That’s one of the important survival skills in here. They don’t like people staring at them. No, not one bit …” Shank laughed.

  A shiver touched Paul despite the freezing temperature already mounting in the room and throughout the building. He wished Shank would stop lecturing. It sounded degrading, full of malice.

  Resigned, Paul placed the hardhat on his head, knowing it was two sizes too big, and walked out the door and up the stairs, directly behind Shank. He knew he looked stupid in the yellow, oversized hardhat, but realised this was all
part of the game played by Shank.

  Two enormous steel doors were pushed aside by Shank who, like a ringmaster, indicated for Paul to enter. “Feast your eyes on the beauty of death and you will know that this place has no equal.”

  Hesitating, Paul stopped, as if to take a breath of air.

  Shank grinned before pushing Paul ahead. “Doubt is the gate through which slips the most deadly of enemies, Mister Goodman. Hesitate, and you die. Surely, we don’t want that on your first day, do we?”

  Reluctantly, Paul entered, and immediately felt as if an invisible hand had slammed against his stomach. The place was massive and held no boundaries. It was breathtakingly horrible, like the Sistine Chapel blooded by barbarians, seething with rage in a hideous frenzy of activity. Its dank coldness reeked with tension and void of all things human. The massive floor was littered with sawdust chips speckled red with imperfections while above him thousands of withered electric wires hung dangerously like spindly skeleton bones on a giant spider. There was a sense of danger about the place; a sense that someone was going to be killed before the day was complete.

  Ruddy violins of sheep carcasses captured on unforgiving ‘S’ hooks dangled grotesquely from above, mingling with dead, cello-shaped cows, like a bizarre scene from Hieronymus Bosch marrying the surrealism of Salvador Dali.

  More of the same type of biblical paintings, such as those in Shank’s office, lined the walls. There seemed to be hundreds if not thousands of them, and like those intense displays, the eyes in the surrounding pictures seemed to stare at him – at everyone – like sentinels on duty, illuminated by garish fluorescent lights.

  Workers were saturated in blood and moving in perfect harmony, as if part of some farcical play performed for an invisible audience. They all seemed to be talking at once.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Your attention, please!” screamed Shank, his voice rising above the skull-rattling noise of machinery.

  But if the workers heard his voice, they showed nothing, continuing with their hacking and sawing of meat, some of which was dead, some of which was clearly not.

  “A contestant has entered our domain, our magical kingdom of life and death. He believes he is our equal. What say you?”

  The workers were as bloody as the mangled wreckages of meat they hacked at, and distinguishable only by the tiny whiteness of their eyes, teeth and fingernails. They continued working their endless preparation of death as if they were immune to the question uttering from Shank’s mouth.

  Paul’s nostrils began to flood with a stomach-churning smell. The same stinking stench from outside the building came at him with force, but more powerful in its taste of rotten flesh, and of fear and hate oozing from the ruins of carcasses and their tormentors.

  One group of workers, their faces obscured by the steam rising from giant mugs of tea cradled in their massive hands, sat comfortably in a corner, seemingly immune to the chaos all about them, talking, reading newspapers roughly handled by reddened hands. Other workers devoured meals of fried eggs and freshly slaughtered meat, wiping their stained mouths with bloody, ragged handkerchiefs and soiled aprons.

  Paul felt his stomach move at the thought of eating a creature he had seen alive minutes ago. How could their stomachs hold down the food? He felt his head go light and wondering if he was going to vomit, if his resolve would evaporate?

  Swiftly, he remembered Shank’s warning about fainting and vomiting and he willed himself to win, not to succumb. He needed this job, badly. He would not leave this terrible place without it.

  “Are you feeling okay?” asked Shank, grinning. “You look pale. Perhaps we can arrange a visit for some other time? It’s nothing to be ashamed about, Mister Goodman. Many are called, but few are chosen …”

  Paul barely collected himself sufficiently to frame a thought. “Thank you for your concern, Mister Shank,” he replied. “But I’m fine. More than fine …”

  “Good!” replied Shank, slapping Paul’s back. “That’s what we want to hear. Isn’t it, ladies and gentlemen?”

  No one heard. If they did, they did not answer.

  Shank walked ahead, talking loudly, his voice filled with pride. “My abattoir is the biggest single killing unit in the country. The major activities involved in the operation of the abattoir are slaughter and chilling of carcass product, boning and packaging, as well the drying of skins for leather. Nothing goes to waste here, Mister Goodman. Nothing.”

  Moving swiftly, Shank walked towards a cluster of open doors, followed closely by Paul.

  “Over there, to your left, are the by-product rooms housing dripping, fertiliser, oil, sinews, hoofs, hair, glue, bones and horns.” A sound kept interrupting the flow of Shank’s words, a sound so soft it was barely perceptible, of muffled voices emanating somewhere from inside. Only the terror in the sound sharpened its appeal to be heard. The voices weren’t loud, but their clarity grew.

  Paul traced the sound from some place near the upper entrance, an independent floor governed by a cluster of red-hats who stood menacingly about like a hierarchy of Spanish Inquisition cardinals about to pronounce death on a heretic. There was an absence of movement, a core of quiet and stillness complete, as if they were waiting on a photographer. He had the edgy feeling that all the activity must mean something, even if he couldn’t make any sense of it.

  As if in trance, Paul followed the sound, followed its Pied Piper magnetic power even though he didn’t want to and for a brief moment he thought he saw the flash of a gold hat and felt his resolve being undermined a little by Shank’s words not to look at the gold hats, as if they were Medusa, capable of turning flesh to stone.

  Turning his head slightly, Paul watched as bewildered creatures entered one end of the large room, only to emerge naked, humiliated and dismembered at the other atop a large conveyer-belt slithering its way ominously in his direction. The workers moved quickly on the creatures, in a frenzy of activity, infected by the fervour, their hands gesticulating like traffic cops on too much caffeine.

  The gold hat was screaming instruction at the workers. “Keep it tight, Raymond, you stupid fuck! The cows are trying to leap over the barrier. Stun the bastards, will you!”

  Galvanized by the smell of blood, some of the cows, in a futile attempt to escape, were attempting to leap the barrier. Raymond, a tall skinny young man looked confused by the rush of cows heading dangerously in his direction.

  “Careless, Geordie!” shouted Shank angrily at the gold hat. “Bloody careless. They’ve squeezed out of the stunning tongs and head bars. You’re in charge, but you’re losing control of the situation. The animals have taken over the farm. Fix it!”

  Without hesitation, Geordie grabbed the stun gun from Raymond’s hand, pushing him backwards towards the crushing beasts, regardless of his safety. There was a unity of purpose in Geordie’s movements.

  Seconds later, the spa spa spa sound of the stun gun began, isolating the brain of each creature as the tiny metal pellets hit home at the back of the skull, devastating all feelings in the body.

  As each beast buckled to the ground, it was quickly set upon by the angry butchers, raging that the creatures had humiliated them in front of Shank. Most of the cows had their throats quickly slit, but a few not so fortunate suffered a slow and agonising death of stabs wounds to the body. A bloody highway of intricate veins and vestigial nerves were strewn everywhere, some ticking with shock.

  “Look at them move, Mister Goodman. It’s almost like poetry in motion,” said Shank, admiringly. “You know, sometimes I think they see the faces of their wives in those cows …”

  Paul said nothing. He was numb. He had never witnessed anything on this scale before, never imagined this was how his Saturday fry originated. He felt shame, disgust and hatred for the grinning faces. He had no other option than to look away.

  “It’s a great form of anger-management, is slaughtering,” continued Shank. “I could make a fortune selling this therapy – and it would work. Not like the nonsense o
f sitting on a couch and telling some shrink your problems. How can sitting on a couch and making a fool of yourself be beneficial? It’s all baloney. Voodoo magic and hogwash. No, this is the real thing. None of my butchers go home with anger in their hearts. It’s all released here, in the Bloody Garden of Eden. Isn’t that right, Geordie?”

  Geordie turned to face Shank.

  “Who’s this idiot? Another tourist come to visit Grisly World?” asked Geordie, ignoring Shank’s question. “And why is he staring at me? Think I’m a freak, Idiot? Never see someone wearing scaffolding?”

  To Paul’s horror and disbelief, Geordie was a young woman. Steel leg-braces looped the outside of her legs, and as she walked menacingly towards him like darkness on the move, her limps becoming more pronounced in their vertical stiffness. Her eyes were mirrored bullets, lethal in their intensity and savagely focused, bleaching the depth of his bones. Shadows jiggled on the wall behind her, seemingly human, following her every move. She seemed to have deliberately set her face into an expression that no worker could misinterpret: don’t fuck with me, it screamed. Now it said to Paul: fuck off; your kind isn’t welcome here …

  “Easy, Geordie,” said Shank, grinning at the look on Paul’s face. “Calm your arse down. I don’t want you killing a would-be recruit on his first day. This is Mister Paul Goodman. He’s passed all the tests. Almost. Hasn’t fainted once. Hasn’t even shit his pants. He’s defeated the lot of you.” Shank laughed. It was full of scorn and disdain for Geordie, for the workers.

  From a gold container, Shank removed a cigar, sniffed its leaves then lit it. The tobacco crackled, and for a second, his face became invisible, lost in the mist of smoke.

  “Has he, indeed? Not shit his pants? Well? What are we waiting for?” said Geordie, her eyes never leaving Paul’s. “He’s either with us or against us. Time for Paul the Baptist to find out if he’s a heathen or a butcher. Take him away!”

  They came at him from every direction, like ants, their hands grabbing and pulling him to the ground. Within seconds his clothes were ripped from him and he was carried trophy-high, naked. He felt he was losing his mind, as if this was one of those nightmares you awake from only to find yourself paralysed with fear at what your mind has done to you, recognising it as valid and real, but that perhaps it never really existed to begin with.