The boltgun swung heavy and smooth on its supporting chain, its butt warm from the slaughterman’s grip. The chipped gray enamel of its surface was brightly caught in the purple-white net of light that fell from the halogen spot above the grabber. Steven could see the thickness of the paint, and the minute shadow this thickness cast on the scratched patches of bare metal. The slaughterman helped him guide it to a new cow, his hands were hard and crusted with blood.
Everything narrowed down. Steven saw the muzzle of the gun and a tight oval of light brown hide immediately beyond it. There was nothing else. The activity of the slaughter room rolled away like stage scenery into some distant other world and he was alone with white noise hissing in his ears.
In this blurring, roaring cocoon he felt the weight of the gun, and he felt Cripps against his back, arms circling to the front of his pants, unzipping, pulling down.
Then Cripps was in him, pounding at his ass, whispering encouragements he couldn’t understand but which filled his head with a mounting pressure, and the gun felt more real than anything he had ever touched. He had both hands on it and Cripps’s breath hot on his neck, and he knew the cow was pissing on the floor with the agony of the stretching seconds and then … time … stopped … Until something sucked away every sound that had ever been made and the world zeroed to aching curled fingers and the shadow of the gun on the cow’s skull and he pulled the trigger as Cripps shrieked somewhere a long way off and sprayed seed into his ass.
Slumped over the guardrail. The end-of-shift horn sounded dimly out in the process hall. Steven felt the flaccid length of Cripps’s withdrawal and opened his eyes to the twitching, fallen carcass of the cow and its dark collar of blood. Strong arms pulled him upright, tearing the white crepe of his half-faint, shunting him back to the din and the killing and the mad, channeled exertion of the slaughter room.
“That’s it, boy, breathe deep, breathe deep.”
Cripps’s voice was gentle as he led him to the observation platform overlooking the slaughter floor.
“Lie down.”
Steven curled himself on the concrete, looking down on the men who still appeared to be working despite the end of the shift. Cripps sat beside him, touching his shoulder.
“The nausea is normal, it will pass. Your body is reacting to change. You have killed, you have started to learn.”
The work on the slaughter floor had changed. The men stood close to a single cow held helpless in a grabber, passing around an instrument like an apple corer. Each in his turn used the serrated steel circle to cut a hole in the side of the animal. Blood ran down the curve of its belly and pooled between its feet, but it remained conscious and standing, bellowing its humiliation to unseen cow gods who couldn’t be bothered to answer.
The room went dark at the edges and Steven felt again a tightening of vision that excluded everything but the spotlit cow and the crowding men. Gummy had appeared from somewhere and was bent close to the animal’s hindquarters.
When all the holes were cut the slaughtermen pulled out thick, hard cocks and stuffed them into the wounds. Steven watched buttocks clench. Three men on either side, linking arms over the back of the cow to counterweight their thrusts.
“Do you see, boy, that you still have some way to go? Your killing was a stumbling first step. These men have learned to run.”
“Gummy … ?” Steven’s lips felt numb, it was an effort to speak.
Cripps laughed quietly and sneered. “No, not Gummy. We give him this as charity.”
Steven’s eyes were heavy but he kept watching. Down on the floor, while the men rammed in and the cow screamed, Gummy, his open mouth sucking the animal’s ass, slid a cattle prod into its cunt and triggered the electric charge. The cow’s rear legs lifted off the ground and Gummy fell backward under a blast of shit, vomiting in rapture.
The slaughtermen hung on and moved faster, blood on thighs and stomachs, howling through corded necks until one of them fired a boltgun and made the beast close like a fist and all six of them shot seed into the torn, dying guts that had hoped one day to swell with the weight of a calf.
Steven’s eyes closed.
CHAPTER FOURTEN
At home. In the kitchen Steven played his mind against itself, diverting it from the slaughter room obscenity with small domestic actions. And then, when the deception of these actions became too obvious, ricocheting back into curtains of blood and streams of semen splashing from jagged cowhide holes.
He drifted in the kitchen, blank-faced, picking up plates and wiping them, putting them down, wiping them again, polishing cutlery against the side of his leg. Somewhere at the back of the flat the Hagbeast made dim shunting sounds as she moved about, but Steven didn’t hear them.
The killing of the afternoon was stored inside him, weighted by the heavier, following torture, but he was afraid to examine it, afraid to search for its effects. That part of his brain was temporarily locked.
And he was afraid of what he was going to do now, with these plates and forks and spoons. This was the beginning he had wished for but never expected to see. Tonight the Beast would eat the first of the meals that would send her down to hell. But if he failed? If he hesitated or was weak? Then she would rise like a gorgon and split him open.
He had planned, on the bus the morning before Cripps’s horror show, to use some disguised ingredient subtle enough to escape detection and of a borderline virulence that would eventually destroy her but allow him, stanchioned by youth, to recover.
But now … ? But now … ?
As he squatted in front of the cupboard under the sink, staring at ancient and unused bottles of disinfectant, bleach and drain cleaner, trying to choose between them, he felt a sudden wild boldness flood his guts. Subtlety was pointless. She would eat whatever he did. She had to, her hate for him would not allow her to refuse the challenge.
He took two empty plates into the bathroom.
It was dark when the Hagbeast galleoned into the kitchen. The bare overhead bulb cut hard shadows into the sheets of newspaper tented over the plates on the table. Steven was seated and waiting.
“So, we have a new cook. What did you cook, Steven? Uncover it. Let’s see if you can match your mother.”
Steven drew away the paper and watched the tight compression of her smile, the narrowing of her eyes. On the plates, equally portioned, two curving lengths of shit lay dark against veined china.
“It won’t work, Steven. Do you think this is so alien to my system?”
It won’t work … Steven went cold. She knew what he was trying to do!
But she was pulling her plate toward her, pressing her fork into the softness of the stool, lifting a piece to her mouth. Her eyes in their mean folds of fat held his, and for a second the stink of shit absorbed time. Between them space empted of all the mists that usually swirled there and Steven saw how well she understood him.
Then she moved and the stink was just stink again and Steven had to carry on, whatever she knew. He saw thin fibers and lumps of still recognizable food poking from the broken end of the shit and prayed that her destruction would be swift.
The Hagbeast waited for him to eat first. He put a section of the shit into his mouth. It rubbed his lips and the chocolate-smear drag of its entry made him shudder. He could not immediately bring his teeth together and the turd lay acridly in the hollow of his tongue, forcing its thick, boggy smell up behind his nose and into his head, cinching his stomach in a rapid serial spasm that threatened to send bile squirting from his nostrils. He forced himself to bite down and chew quickly, but speed didn’t reduce the appalling foulness of the taste.
The shit was gritty against the roof of his mouth and made crunching sounds with his teeth. It worked itself into a clogging paste that built up under his tongue and inside his cheeks, so stiff he had to use his finger to hook it out. He felt he was drowning in the anus of some dysentery-struck mammal, vistas of the world made shit opened before him. Then, at last, a small amount of vomit
punched through his locked throat and mercifully allowed him to swallow.
He bent forward and gripped the legs of the table, screwing his eyes shut. Thin brown liquid ran from the corners of his clamped mouth and he jerked quickly on his chair, up and down, fighting his stomach, willing it to accept the returning waste.
Somehow he kept it down and when he looked at the Hagbeast again her smirk had faded. It was her turn. Shit in her mouth made her twist her head in a spastic half-circle and pump her neck into a tightly stretched red bag, like some obscene mating bird.
The force of her first retch blew snot into the air, but it didn’t part her lips. She lurched against the table, then steadied herself with weak arms while her belly shook. Bunching jaw muscles showed through the loose skin of her jowls and the sound of grinding teeth made Steven press his thighs together. How she must be damaging herself to compete with him!
Then she couldn’t hold it any longer and puked onto her plate in a screeching explosive torrent that spattered the front of Steven’s shirt. She heaved a few more times, until it came up dry, then sat, arms rigid to the edge of the table, shivering and silent, drawing breath. Steven felt dismay creep into his already churning guts. If the Hagbeast could not master a plate of shit, how could he fill her with enough poison to kill her? He saw his plans crumbling and was about to speak some desperate goading remark when her arms relaxed and she began to function again. She cut a piece of shit with the edge of her fork, speared it, put it in her mouth and swallowed. Her movements were deliberate, machinelike. She cut another piece of shit and ate it. Small tremors rippled across her breasts and shoulders, but they did not touch her throat. She looked at him and smiled ingenuously.
“Steven, I can’t keep eating without you.”
He slid his fork into the thing on his plate, thankful that it had escaped most of her vomit—her own plate dripped, the shit swam in it—and entered again the body rebellion of his first mouthful, and kept forcing it in.
“How is it?” He did not look at her as he spoke.
“It smells like your birth. I didn’t expect this from you, Steven. You’ve started a game with your darling mother, haven’t you? Those years in your room with that fucking mongrel and your precious TV, doing nothing but wanking and picking pus out of your face, and you think you can just crawl out and wipe off the slime? Just reach into your box of dreams and slip one on like a coat? You sorry fuck, you’re not strong enough to do it.”
“I think I’m getting stronger, Mama.”
The Hagbeast laughed and opened her mouth in mock surprise. Steven saw bits of shit stuck to her teeth.
“Strong? You were born a runt and you haven’t changed. How strong are you getting? Come on, show me.”
She finished the last nugget of shit and smashed her plate against the table.
“Get out of that chair and stand up! Mama wants to see how strong you are.”
Her bellow hit the dead walls of the kitchen and came back at Steven in a rolling chain of thuds, each one pushing him further upright, until he stood, arms limp at his sides, waiting for the coming humiliation. God, if he could be like Cripps for just one minute …
The Hagbeast moved close to him and their breaths combined in a sluggish cloud of shit and saliva. She was too close, he shut his eyes. He felt her fat fingers undressing him. His cells screamed, but his arms were too weak to fling her from him. Too weak to force her mouth apart until her jaws snapped, too weak to yank her head down so sharply that the spine broke a few vertebrae from the skull and stuck out into the air through the skin at the back of her neck. Too weak to enact a thousand killings wished a thousand times. He had spoken too soon.
He was naked.
“Look, Steven.” She hit his face. “Look at yourself.”
Steven looked down and saw what had always been there—soft white skin over bones, ribs, dick hanging.
She laughed, prodding his chest and stomach, lifting his balls to look underneath.
“I don’t see it, Steven. Where is this strength of yours?”
He stood mute. She was too powerful for him to survive direct and active confrontation.
The Hagbeast reached down and pulled her dress over her head. She wore nothing underneath and the sharpness of her crotch burned his throat.
“Are you as strong as this?”
She slapped her dimpled saddlebag hips, ran her hands over rolls of hard fat stacked from groin to breast. Steven looked at her matted gray cunt and the blood sticking in clots to the insides of her thighs.
“Look at this mountain of flesh, Steven. Throw yourself against it. Have you ever calculated its weight? This is strength, you whining bucket of piss. This is what you must measure yourself against. It stands between you and everything you want and you’ll never get past it.”
Steven knew she was wrong and he wanted to spit it in her face. Lucy was going to open up like a tunnel and he would crawl through her into a world impossible for the Hagbeast to touch. But it was too early yet to strut this before Mama, she could still destroy it at a stroke. So he stayed quiet through her ranting.
Later, in his room, the shit in his belly made him sick and he lay curled around Dog on the floor by the bed. Dog licked sweat from his master’s forehead and whimpered at his shiverings. Steven felt the animal’s nuzzlings through the gauze of his pain and dreamed he was somewhere underground with the velvet lips of a cow against his neck. In his fever he merged with it, knowing its thoughts, its fears, and the timeless species-desire for a place where men never came.
At dawn he was able to rise, pale and drained, and Dog yelped with joy and gave thanks to Dog God that there was still something left to love.
In the hall, as he left the flat, splashes of the Hagbeast’s vomit bloomed on the floor from the kitchen to her room, like flowers of hope. Steven felt good when he saw them.
CHAPTER FIFTEN
The door was unlocked and Lucy was up, so Steven walked in and stood behind her as she sat bent over a table. He kissed the back of her neck and looked over her shoulder. Pinned to a wooden block, a lab-bred rat lay on its back, alive, guts open to Lucy’s probing fingers. The rodent’s stretched eyes darted uselessly through a limited range of vision, searching for some way to escape the pain.
Lucy gave up with her fingers, took a scalpel from a clutter of sharp surgical instruments at her side, and began to remove, one by one, the exposed organs. She held each one up to the light and inspected it, then cut it into pieces on the wooden block.
Steven kissed her hair as she worked, running scenes of the future when she would tend to him with the same devotion she now reserved for the small rat organs. He would lie in a large bed under her kisses and plans for life would flutter down about them like rose petals.
When the rat was empty Lucy dropped her scalpel and leaned back against him, too disgusted to support her own weight. He could feel desperation radiate from her.
She put his hands on her breasts, but this was too little protection. She stood for him to hold her and closed her eyes and pressed loose fists to her chin like a baby sleeping.
Steven saw her night’s work on the floor—a pile of hollowed rats and a plastic bucket of guts—and knew that love was coming quickly. Her search for something to cut out of herself was getting frantic.
They fucked in a cold room hung with photographs of surgically opened bodies. Steven looked at them while he pumped. The light in the shots was hard and the exposed organs gleamed under it—dark kidneys and livers and hearts, paler stomachs and bladders, all of them floating in cavities of blood like the makings of some hideous stew. In one of the pictures the incision was stretched so far open it showed a cross section of abdominal wall. The striations of meat and fat made it look like a piece of bacon.
Afterward the concrete-dusted light of morning fell across them. They stared at the ceiling and Lucy’s cunt leaked the ichor of their beginning into dead sheets. Steven thought of the slaughter room, the recoil of the boltgun, blood and come
sliding down the sides of a punctured cow, Cripps in his ass. The act of killing.
“I killed a cow yesterday.”
“Were you trying to look inside it?”
“The foreman said it would change me.”
Lucy laughed softly, sliding toward sleep. “It isn’t that easy.”
The sun hauled its broken-backed way higher into the aching slum air, turning the windows dirty yellow. Was he different from yesterday? The Hagbeast had destroyed him at dinner as easily as she always did. Where was the muscle-charging certainty of action Cripps promised? The slaughter room cow-killing had overwhelmed him to the point of unconsciousness and he expected something in return. But all he felt now as he thought of it was a lingering revulsion at its bloodiness.
It got late and he went downstairs to wash the sardine stink off his dick and have a shit. His ass was sore and all he could force out were small dark pellets that stung his ring and lay heavily under the water like a handful of stones.
The Hagbeast wasn’t up and Steven turned circles in the strange freedom of the kitchen, gathering armfuls of joy at this foretaste of her absence. He drank water and felt it clean him. Then he left for the plant.
CHAPTER SIXTEN
The bus trapped sunlight that morning, the air in the aisle was hazed with it, and through arabesques of cigarette smoke and the chaos intricacies of floating dust the other passengers seemed less than they had been. Not quite the gods of yesterday.
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