Cows

by Matthew Stokoe

  He looked at Lucy, still sleeping, sunlight on her hair, and realized that murdering the Hagbeast by degrees was an unnecessary prevarication. In the clear, stripping light that filled the room he saw he had been weak and frightened, but he saw also that these emotions were now outmoded. And as hard as he looked he could see no barrier to action.

  He was eager to start.

  Naked out of bed he felt like a god, reaching high into the air, a theomorphic diver stepping willingly to the edge of a cliff for the plunge into transforming waters. His movements were sure and exact, he marveled at them as he dressed.

  Lucy slept on.

  Walking downstairs—each step certain and excited. He knew what he was going to do. This morning would corrode the past, leave it a honeycombed and fragile shadow falling to pieces miles behind him. Why had it taken him so long to act? The resolution of everything he wished was so obvious and easy. He didn’t understand.

  Then he was through the door of the flat and understanding didn’t matter.

  He wanted a knife but the kitchen was dark. The Hagbeast had covered the windows. Steven stood in the doorway groping for the light, wondering what the bitch was up to. He could sense something in there, something heavy and waiting. He heard movement at the far end of the room, the start of motion, a mass shunting forward, gathering speed too quickly. Like a train, or a bull, or a rhino.

  Switch clicks down. Light. And there she is, three-quarters of the way across the room already. Too fast and too close. Thundering. Arms pumping, mouth sucking in air and spraying spit, blasting that body, that unstoppable bulk, straight at him. Time just to think SHIT! and try to make it back out into the hall. But not enough time to do it.

  The Beast hit him hard in the back, bodyslammed him face-first into the floor of the hall. Sprawled on top of him, pinning him there, grinding his face into the wood. Impossible weight crushing him. Sagging fat of belly and breasts engulfing and smothering, preventing the use of arms or legs. Far up the hall Dog looked fearfully out of Steven’s room.

  “Too late, Steven. Mama beat you to it, you little fuck.”

  The Hagbeast lay on top of him, shouting at the back of his head. She had a length of coarse rope and she looped it around his neck.

  “Did you think I’d let you do it to me, you moron? That I’d keep eating your shit until it killed me? Gutless cunt. Wouldn’t dare do it properly, would you? Well, Mama said she could still hurt you, and now she’s going to show you how.”

  Her stink was overpowering—shit and stale sweat and rotting cunt blood. Steven thrashed and humped his body in short jerks off the floor, but her fat absorbed his movements and he could not escape. She lay immovable, slowly tightening the rope, pissing over the backs of his thighs in her excitement.

  He felt his throat closing, pressure building in his head, making his eyes bulge. The Hagbeast had her face nuzzled close against him and he could hear her grunting with the rope. Down the hall Dog dragged itself toward him, stumping one foreleg after the other as fast as it could, panting, twisting its face with the strain on its heart, eyes locked on Steven, begging him not to die.

  “See, Steven? See how Mama is still so much stronger than you? Shit was too slow, dummy. You should have known. Can’t sneak things in the back way, not with Mama.”

  She hauled tighter on the rope. Steven’s face went dark and the veins above the rope got thick with dammed blood. His vision was starting to fade but he could see that Dog was close now.

  Yes, Dog was almost there now. It was going to save its master, the source of all love, even if it meant death. Even if the race along the hall burst its little heart and made blood run out past its dog glory of sharp white teeth.

  And the Hagbeast didn’t know. With her head pressed so close to Steven she could not see it coming.

  Steven felt himself draining into the floor, going cold and slow and heavy. His lungs sucked against nothing.

  The Beast was laughing.

  Dog in a mist, but close. Steven could pick out the white whiskers in its muzzle and the darker hairs further back and the foamy dabs of spit along its lips. Dog’s head expanded as it came, filling his vision until there was nothing in the world but this dog face and the love pouring from its brown eyes. And the Hagbeast’s laughter in another corridor somewhere very far away … And the absence of air.

  Dog was past Steven’s face, climbing awkwardly onto his shoulder, pushing its head forward, up up up to the Hagbeast. Still she didn’t see. So Dog got into position and with the last of its strength opened its mouth and closed its eyes and sank its sharp white teeth into the Hagbeast’s neck and held on as she shrieked and reared up. And let go of the rope.

  Steven rolled out from under her and gulped air while she twisted and battered at Dog, trying to dislodge it from her throat. He wanted to move, he wanted to save his dog and tear his mother into bleeding pieces of flesh, but his airstarved muscles would not respond. So he knelt, slumped against a wall, dry retching, breathing in sobs, and watched the Hagbeast rip Dog from her neck in slow motion.

  She held it like a spear and pulled her arm back over her shoulder, then paused and turned to smile at Steven. He tried to scream but he couldn’t and the fat arm shot forward and drove Dog’s head into the wall. Steven followed the whole of the movement, from the start of the arc to the explosion of blood and brain against the flaking plaster. Dog held his eyes through all this terminal journey and they were loving and sad at the same time. It looked like Dog was smiling, just a little bit. Until its eyeballs burst.

  Then muscle power came up in a rush and Steven was a blur of vengeance across the few feet that separated him from his mother. His body flowed like water, unfettered by thought, channeling a lifetime of hate. He struck the grinning Beast mouth with his elbow and she collapsed facedown in the stuff that leaked from poor Dog’s shattered head. Steven was back on track again, back on the path that had started this morning at Lucy’s, the sure straight path that led from lonely TV nights, through the slaughter room and Lucy, to here and on to dreamland.

  He lifted the Hagbeast under the arms and dragged her into the kitchen.

  She woke sitting on her knees on the floor, bound and immobile. A rope ran around her forehead to her ankles, pulling her head back, stretching her throat out straight. The marks of Dog’s attack were turning blue. She had difficulty speaking, but that didn’t stop her.

  “Do you think Doggie enjoyed that? I did. Fucking mongrel. No more dog suck-offs for Mama’s best boy now, eh?” She cackled and tried to twist her head to see Steven better, but the rope would not allow it and her eyes rolled in jagged circles.

  “What’s the rope for, Steven? You know Mama’s going to be mad if you keep her here too long. Better let her up right now. Ooo, Steven, what’s that mark on your neck? Looks like a rope burn. Let Mama have a look at her poor boy.”

  The Hagbeast stopped abruptly and ripped out a stream of phlegmy laughter. She started to choke and spat in a high curve back over her head. When she was breathing normally again, Steven wedged a small block of wood between her right rear teeth, jamming her mouth open wide. She gurgled and looked frightened.

  “You were right, Mama, shit was too slow. But I don’t think you’re going to like the alternative.”

  The pliers were heavy and had rubber grips. They were a solid man’s tool and he felt very confident holding them. The Hagbeast still had most of her teeth—they were a little yellow, but they were there. He started with the small lower incisors at the front.

  The knurling on the nose of the pliers rasped off small pieces of enamel even before he applied much pressure. The Hagbeast whimpered and tried to swallow. Steven closed the pliers firmly and jerked them forward, splintering the tooth and snapping it off just above the gum. Her body went hard with the pain and she screamed. Blood ran backward over her tongue.

  Steven let her relax a little before he crunched the pliers closed again.

  The teeth at the sides were harder to break and so
me of them came out by the roots. There was a lot of blood and Steven had to push her over onto her side twice so she wouldn’t choke.

  He was sweating by the time he finished. Fragments of tooth were embedded in the soles of his shoes, they grated against the floor when he moved. The Hagbeast was still conscious but her eyes were glazed and she had stopped making noises. Her gums were a pulpy red mess with the sharp remains of teeth poking through. The front of her dress was soaked.

  Steven threw the pliers in the sink and picked up a file to smooth down the spikes. The Hagbeast passed out at the first screech of steel across enamel. It made it easier for Steven to finish his work.

  When she came to, he stripped off his trousers and pants and looked down at her for one last moment—this mother who had never been a mother. She bubbled thickly up at him but he couldn’t work out what she was trying to say.

  He stuffed her nose with wadded toilet paper, then backed up to her until her wedged-open mouth was pressed between the cheeks of his ass, tight around his hole. He used a roll of industrial adhesive tape to bind her there, wrapping it round and round, over his abdomen and behind her head. The seal was airtight and he could feel her shake as she fought for breath she was never going to get.

  The shit was packed in his guts—twenty-five years of terror and loneliness, of brutality and an endless rain of hate. He breathed in deeply, tightened the muscles of his stomach, and shot every ounce of it in a thick pole down her throat. The Hagbeast thumped up and down, vibrating in a mad death dance as the shit blocked her from mouth to belly. Steven had to reach around and hold on to her head until she went limp.

  He dragged his clothes back on, sat at the breakfast table and looked at her. It was done. The obstacle was removed. He would bring Lucy down and there would be a home here for him at last. And if Lucy and he could not be like others they would at least approximate the happiness others had. Lucy would watch TV with him and learn how to live. They would scale down and copy what they saw, and they would call it contentment.

  Although he was staring straight at her, each minute that passed made the Hagbeast seem less real. It was as though she were fading back into time—almost as if killing had expunged the memory of her mistreatment … But no, she was here now and she had been there through all those years. She had made him what he was, he would not forget that.

  And he would not forget the pride that coursed through him as he sat there. He had done what he thought he could never do—he had destroyed the source of his misery. And he had done it powerfully and like a man.

  He left the Hagbeast where she was and went to get Lucy. They spent the rest of the day moving her things into the flat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Evening. They were drinking coffee in the kitchen. Lucy had her eyes on the body. “Will you let me have her, Steven? Something that ugly must have stones in her. Can I look inside? It can be a present to mark the start of our life together. Let me open her up.”

  Steven sighed. This weirdness of Lucy’s unsettled him, it did not fit with his picture of how things should be. In his dreams he’d seen an instant normalizing of behavior when they began living together. It was clear now that things were going to take a little longer.

  “Okay, but she goes tonight.”

  Lucy kissed him and unzipped her wallet of scalpels. He left her to it and headed for the bedroom, picking up poor Dog’s body on the way, holding it close. He needed to sleep for a while.

  When he woke at two a.m. he was giggling. For a long moment he was inside the TV, running across green fields of crops to a white sunlit house with animals playing all around where Mom was waiting to hug him to her big soft chest and say, Gosh, I love you so much, Johnny, I could eat you right up, you’re so scrumptious.

  Then he was back in the room, the room that would have to be changed so much. The TV was on and everything it showed looked possible.

  Out into the hall. Into the flat. Into HIS flat now. The walls glowing with pleasure to see him how they always wanted—lord of the place, uncontested and safe. And he did feel safe. He was certain of everything. In here, with the Hagbeast gone, his dreams of love and comfort would harden into reality around Lucy and himself, undisturbed by the currents that tore at the world outside.

  He knew what he would find in the kitchen and it was all right. It was part of a necessary transition.

  Lucy stood crying by a pile of shredded meat that had been his mother. The mess on the table was unrecognizable, every organ and every piece of flesh had been stripped from the carcass and minced. Many of the bones had been splintered and torn from their holding cartilage, even the skull was open and scooped clean. The face hung from it in a peeled flap of skin, like an inside-out Halloween mask.

  He held Lucy and stroked her hair, whispering reassurance, smiling gleefully to himself over the top of her head because her search through the foulness of the Hagbeast had been fruitless. Now that she had looked inside a human, picked one apart with her own fingers and found nothing, she was more his than ever. This final, unequivocal loss of hope would force her into the hidey-hole of life with him and a child.

  She clung to him all the way back to the bedroom and when he fucked her she held on and didn’t let go until she fell asleep.

  He left her curled in damp sheets, twitching and murmuring unhappily to herself, and lugged the sodden remains of the Hagbeast up to the roof in black plastic garbage bags.

  When he climbed out into the night the city was young again, as it had been during the secret visits of his youth. He stood by the low wall at the edge, drinking it in, caught in its regenerated spell. Neon, distant music, even occasional laughter floated tantalizingly about him.

  He leaned against the wall and looked out over the endless sprawl of buildings. Two bricks fell away and smashed on the empty street below. He felt like a king, like he could command the buildings to tear up their roots and march away if he wished. He was beyond and above it all. Only a week ago the sight of so much living would have crushed him. What had given him this strength?

  Links of conclusion formed chains as he tracked backward through increases of power. He held his breath.

  Cripps was right.

  It had been killing, obviously, that had allowed him to reach this position of self-determination. He killed cows and he was able to start poisoning the Beast. He went further with Gummy and was able to kill her outright. The slaughter sessions had worked.

  He went downstairs and came back with a can of gasoline and Dog’s dead body. Dog had waited all its life for Steven to take payment for a broken back and it was only fitting that the remains of the animal should witness this final destruction. Steven wedged the stiff bloodstained canine between two chimney pots and made sure it had a good view.

  The Hagbeast meat made sucking sounds sliding out of the bags and some of the bones tore holes in the plastic. It took all the gas in the can to set the mess alight.

  Beast barbecue.

  Muscle sizzled, wads of fat caught fire and burned along with the gasoline. Then it all got black and started to smoke and the pile sank in the middle and collapsed in on itself.

  At the end of it all the Hagbeast was a greasy smear on concrete and powdery lines of bone ash lifting on the night breeze. Dog looked so settled that Steven left it where it was between the chimneys, staring with its burst eyes out past the Hagbeast remains to the pretty lights of the city.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The weeks that followed were happy. Lucy recovered from her disappointment at the emptiness of the Hagbeast and buried her horrors under a fevered procession of decorating, fucking, and molding herself to Steven’s vision of life. She watched TV with him late into the night, taking notes and listening carefully as he pointed out particularly relevant scenes and networks of emotion. Together they painted and cleaned the place, destroying every trace of the Hagbeast and the life that had been lived there before. They made a simulacrum of all the perfect family-show houses—Brady Bunch, Hap
py Days, Cosby Show—so they could live perfectly themselves.

  The flat opened out and breathed again, and the sun changed minutely its course in the sky so the rooms were filled dawn to dusk with its shine. There was cleanness and order and warmth and companionship.

  Steven had made his dream real. Lucy was pregnant and eventually there would be a child, and with it would come the family he had seen night after night on TV. He would have to get another dog.

  Although he was still prone to the great wretched comparison of lives—his and the rest of the world—he felt at times superior to other men. They were blessed with happiness from birth, but he had had to force his into being with the strength of his own hands and will. And when he padded through the flat in the early morning, savoring the completeness of his satisfaction, he knew he had crafted well enough to be worthy of TV.

  But things did not stay that way. As time passed he became less sure of himself.

  It started three weeks after the Hagbeast’s death—a nagging anxiety that daily became more definite. At first he dismissed it as a reaction to sudden change, but the unease grew until each morning was a dreaded thing, bringing as it did a fresh increment of fear. The confidence of the first weeks left him and an impotent knowledge of the thousand massing things that could destroy his new life took its place.

  His will alone maintained the world within the flat, and the strain of resisting its collapse became unbearable. So many things could happen—Lucy might crack irreparably, the building might fall, he might wake one day to find he simply could not support his new freedom. And money … The rebirth of the flat required funds and he had not been to the plant since that night with the pliers. It was too much for a weak man.

  But he had been strong before. He had had the strength to kill his mother.