‘Everything okay, Vernon?’
‘Silent like the grave, Mr Le Renges.’
‘That’s what I like to hear, Vernon. How’s that daughter of yours, Louise? Got over her autism yet?’
‘Not exactly, Mr Le Renges. Doctors say it’s going to take some time.’
Mr Le Renges was still talking when one of his big black vans came burbling up the road and stopped behind his Lexus. Its driver waited patiently. After all, Mr Le Renges was the boss. I hesitated for a moment and then I sidestepped out from behind my skinny little tree and circled around the back of the van. There was a wide aluminum step below the rear doors, and two door-handles that I could cling on to.
‘You are out of your cotton-picking mind,’ I told me. But still, I climbed up onto the step, as easy as I could. You don’t jump onto the back of a van when you’re as heavy as me, not unless you want the driver to bounce up and hit his head on the roof.
Mr Le Renges seemed to go on talking for ever, but at last he gave the security guard a wave and drove forward into the yard, and the van followed him. I pressed myself close to the rear doors, in the hope that I wouldn’t be quite so obtrusive, but the security guard went back into his booth and shook open his paper and didn’t even glance my way.
A man in a bloodied white coat and a hard hat came out of the slaughterhouse building and opened the car door for Mr Le Renges. They spoke for a moment and then Mr Le Renges went inside the building himself. The man in the bloodied white coat opened the car’s passenger door and let his enormous dog jump out. The dog salaciously sniffed at the blood before the man took hold of its leash. He went walking off with it - or, rather, the dog went walking off with him, its claws scrabbling on the blacktop.
I pushed my way in through the side door that I had seen all the cutters and gutters walking in and out of. Inside there was a long corridor with a wet tiled floor, and then an open door which led to a changing-room and a toilet. Rows of white hard hats were hanging on hooks, as well as rubber aprons and rubber boots. There was an overwhelming smell of stale blood and disinfectant.
Two booted feet were visible underneath the door of the toilet stall and clouds of cigarette smoke were rising up above it.
‘Only two more hours, thank Christ,’ said a disembodied voice.
‘See the play-off?’ I responded as I took off my raincoat and hung it up.
‘Yeah, what a goddamn fiasco. They ought to can that Kershinsky.’
I put on a heavy rubber apron and just about managed to tie it up at the back. Then I sat down and tugged on a pair of boots.
‘You going to watch the New Brunswick game?’ asked the disembodied voice.
‘I don’t know. I’ve got a hot date that day.’
There was a pause and more smoke rose up, and then the voice said, ‘Who is that? Is that you, Stemmens?’
Heft the changing-room without answering. I squeaked back along the corridor in my rubber boots and went through to the main slaughterhouse building.
You don’t even want to imagine what it was like in there. A high, echoing, brightly lit building with a production line clanking and rattling, mincers grinding and roaring, and thirty or forty cutters in aprons and hard hats boning and chopping and trimming. The noise and the stench of blood were overwhelming, and for a moment I just stood there with my hand pressed over my mouth and nose, with that fried shrimp sandwich churning in my stomach as if the shrimp were still alive.
The black vans were backed up to one end of the production line and men were heaving out the meat that they had been gleaning during the day. They were dumping it straight onto the killing floor where normally the live cattle would be stunned and killed - heaps and heaps of it, a tangle of sagging cattle and human arms and legs, along with glistening strings of intestines and globs of fat and things that looked like run-over dogs and knackered donkeys, except it was all so mixed-up and disgusting that I couldn’t be sure what it all was. It was flesh, that was all that mattered. The cutters were boning it and cutting it into scraps, and the scraps were being dumped into giant stainless-steel machines and ground by giant augers into a pale-pink pulp. The pulp was seasoned with salt and pepper and dried onions and spices. Then it was mechanically pressed into patties and covered with cling-film and run through a metal-detector and frozen. All ready to be served up sizzling-hot for somebody’s breakfast.
‘Jesus,’ I said, out loud.
‘You talking to me?’ said a voice right next to me. ‘You talking to me?’
I turned around. It was Mr Le Renges. He had a look on his face like he’d just walked into a washroom door without opening it.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘I have to cook this stuff, Mr Le Renges. I have to serve it to people. I thought I ought to find out what was in it.’
He didn’t say anything at first. He looked to the left and he looked to the right, and it was like he was doing everything he could to control his temper. Eventually he sniffed sharply up his right nostril and said, ‘It’s all the same. Don’t you get that?’
‘Excuse me? What’s all the same?’
‘Meat, wherever it comes from. Human legs are the same as cow’s legs, or pig’s legs, or goat’s legs. For Christ’s sake, it’s all protein.’
I pointed to a tiny arm protruding from the mess on the production line. ‘That’s a baby. That’s a human baby. That’s just protein?’
Mr Le Renges rubbed his forehead as if he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. ‘You ate one of your burgers. You know how good they taste.’
‘Look at this stuff!’ I shouted at him, and now three or four cutters turned around and began to give me less-than-friendly stares. ‘This is shit! This is total and utter shit! You can’t feed people on dead cattle and dead babies and amputated legs!’
‘Oh yes?’ he challenged me. ‘And why the hell not? Do you really think this is any worse than the crap they serve up at all of the franchise restaurants? They serve up diseased dairy cows, full of worms and flukes and all kinds of shit. At least a human leg won’t have E. coli infection. At least a stillborn baby won’t be full of steroids.’
‘You don’t think there’s any moral dimension here?’ I shouted back. ‘Look at this! For Christ’s sake! We’re talking cannibalism here!’
Mr Le Renges drew back his hair with his hand, and inadvertently exposed his bald patch. ‘The major fast-food companies source their meat at the cheapest possible outlets. How do you think I compete? I don’t buy my meat. The sources I use, they pay me to take the meat away. Hospitals, farms, auto repair shops, health clinics. They’ve all got excess protein they don’t know what to do with. So BioGlean comes around and relieves them of everything they don’t know how to get rid of, and Tony’s Gourmet Burgers recycles it.’
‘You’re sick, Mr Le Renges.’
‘Not sick, John. Not at all. Just practical. You ate human flesh in that piece of hamburger I offered you, and did you suffer any ill effects? No. Of course not. In fact I see Tony’s Gourmet Burgers as the pioneers of really decent food.’
While we were talking, the production line had stopped and a small crowd of cutters and gutters had gathered around us, all carrying cleavers and boning-knives.
‘You won’t get any of these men to say a word against me,’ said Mr Le Renges. ‘They get paid twice as much as any other slaughterhouse-men in Maine; or in any other state, believe me. They don’t kill anybody, ever. They simply cut up meat, whatever it is, and they do a damn fine job.’
I walked across to one of the huge stainless-steel vats in which the meat was minced into glistening pink gloop. The men began to circle closer and I was beginning to get seriously concerned that I might end up as pink gloop too.
‘You realise I’m going to have to report this to the police and the USDA,’ I warned Mr Le Renges, even though my voice was about two octaves above normal.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mr Le Renges.
‘So what
are you going to do? You’re going to have me gutted and minced up like the rest of this stuff?’
Mr Le Renges smiled and shook his head, and it was at that moment that the slaughterman who had been taking his dog for a walk came onto the killing floor, with the hellbeast still straining at its leash.
‘If any of my men were to touch you, John, that would be homicide, wouldn’t it? But if Cerberus slipped its collar and went for you - what could I do? He’s a very powerful dog, after all. And if I had twenty or thirty eye-witnesses to swear that you provoked him …’
The Presa Canario was pulling so hard at its leash that it was practically choking, and its claws were sliding on the bloody metal floor. You never saw such a hideous brindled collection of teeth and muscle in your whole life, and its eyes reflected the light as if it had been caught in a flash photograph.
‘Kevin, unclip his collar,’ said Mr Le Renges.
‘This is not a good idea, Mr Le Renges,’ I cautioned him. ‘If anything happens to me, I have friends here who know where I am and what I’ve been doing.’
‘Kevin,’ Mr Le Renges repeated, unimpressed.
The slaughterman leaned forward and unclipped the Presa Canario’s collar. It bounded forward, snarling, and I took a step back until my rear end was pressed against the stainless-steel vat. There was no place else to go.
‘Now, kill!’ shouted Mr Le Renges, and stiffly pointed his arm at me.
The dog lowered its head almost to the floor and bunched up its shoulder muscles. Strings of saliva swung from its jowls, and its cock suddenly appeared, red and pointed, as if it was sexually aroused by the idea of tearing my throat out.
I lifted my left arm to protect myself. I mean, I could live without a left arm, but not without a throat. It was then that I had a sudden flashback. I remembered when I was a kid, when I was thin and runty and terrified of dogs. My father had given me a packet of dog treats to take to school, so that if I was threatened by a dog I could offer it something to appease it. ‘Always remember that kid. Dogs prefer food to children, every time. Food is easier to eat.’’
I reached into the vat behind me and scooped out a huge handful of pink gloop. It felt disgusting … soft and fatty, and it dripped. I held it towards the Presa Canario and said, ‘Here, Cerberus! You feel like a snack, boy? Try some of this!’
The dog stared up at me with those red reflective eyes as if I were mad. Its black lips rolled back and it bared its teeth and snarled like a massed chorus of death-rattles.
I took a step closer, still holding out the heap of gloop, praying that the dog wouldn’t take a bite at it and take off my fingers as well. But the Presa Canario lifted its head and sniffed at the meat with deep suspicion.
‘Kill, Cerberus, you stupid mutt!’ shouted Mr Le Renges.
I took another step towards it, and then another. ‘Here, boy. Supper.’
The dog turned its head away. I pushed the gloop closer and closer, but it wouldn’t take it, didn’t even want to sniff it.
I turned to Mr Le Renges. ‘There you are … even a dog won’t eat your burgers.’
Mr Le Renges snatched the dog’s leash from the slaughterman. He went up to the animal and whipped it across the snout, once, twice, three times. ‘You pathetic disobedient piece of shit!’
Mistake. Big, big mistake. Cerberus didn’t want to go near me and my handful of gloop, but it was still an attack dog. It let out a bark that was almost a roar and sprang at Mr Le Renges in utter fury. It knocked him back onto the floor and it crunched its teeth right into his hairline. He screamed and thrashed and tried to beat it off. But the beast jerked its head furiously from side to side, and with each jerk it pulled more of his face away, inch by inch. Forehead first, then his eyebrows, then his nose.
Right in front of us, with a noise like somebody trying to rip up a pillowcase, the dog exposed Mr Le Renges’s bloodied, wildly popping eyes, the bubbly black holes of his nostrils, his grinning lipless teeth.
He was still screaming and gargling when three of the slaughtermen pulled the dog away. Strong as they were, even they couldn’t hold it, and it twisted away from them and trotted off to the other side of the killing floor with Mr Le Renges’s face dangling from its jaws like a slippery Hallowe’en mask.
I turned to the slaughtermen. They were too shocked to speak. One of them dropped his knife, and then the others did, too, and they chimed on the floor like church bells.
I stayed in Calais long enough for Nils to finish fixing my car and to make a statement to the sandy-haired police officer. The weather was beginning to grow colder and I wanted to get back to the warmth of Louisiana, not to mention the rare beef muffelettas with gravy and onion strings.
Velma lent me the money to pay for my auto repairs and the Calais Motor Inn waived all charges because they said I was so public-spirited. I was even on the front page of The Quoddy Whirlpool. There was a picture of the mayor whacking me on the back, under the banner headline HAMBURGER HYGIENE HERO.
Velma came out to say goodbye on the morning Heft. It was crisp and cold and the leaves were rattling across the parking lot.
‘Maybe I should come with you,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘You got vision, Velma. You can see the thin man inside me and that’s the man you like. But I’m never going to be thin, ever. The poboys call and my stomach always listens.’
The last I saw of her, she was shading her eyes against the sun, and I have to admit that I was sorry to leave her behind. I’ve never been back to Calais since and I doubt if I ever will. I don’t even know if Tony’s Gourmet Burgers is still there. If it is, though, and you’re tempted to stop in and order one, remember there’s always a risk that any burger you buy from Tony Le Renges is people.
Graham Masterton has published four new horror novels - The Doorkeepers, Snowman, Swimmer, Trauma (aka Bonnie Winter) - since moving to Cork, Ireland, in 1999. Katie Maguire, a dark thriller set in the Cork underworld, is scheduled for publication in late 2002, while a young adult fantasy, Jessica’s Angel, is due early in 2003. ‘Despite some matchless pubs,’ Masterton reveals, ‘Ireland is a very productive place for writers. There’s something in the air, not all of which is rain.’ 2002 also saw a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his first horror novel, The Manitou, and the republication of much of his backlist, including Flesh if Blood and a double edition of Ritual and Walkers. Spirit and The Chosen Child were also recently both published in the United States for the first time. ‘I can feel a genuine resurgence of interest in horror - particularly from younger readers - but there’s no doubt that today’s fans expect great sophistication and very high quality. After all, they’ve been weaned on The Sixth Sense and The Mothman Prophesies, not Creepy Tales and Hammer House of Horrors, the way we were.’ The author has continued his support of abused children while in Ireland, and he was guest of honour at the 2002 ball held by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. About the preceding story, Masterton adds: ‘For those who didn’t get it… “Tony Le Renges” is an anagram of Soylent Green.’
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Hide and Seek
NICHOLAS ROYLE
It was a way to pass the time and keep the kids happy. Kids. When I was a kid myself I didn’t like the word. I didn’t like being referred to as one of ‘the kids’. It seemed unrespectful, dismissive. I preferred to be one of ‘the children’. When my own kids were born, I consequently referred to them always as ‘the children’, never ‘the kids’. In fact, to qualify that, it was when the first one was born that I stuck religiously to that rule, which lasted until just after the second one came along. The second and final one, I might add. Nothing I’ve ever done in my life drains the energy quite like having kids. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t unhave them. My life has been enriched - immeasurably. Practically anyone who’s had kids will tell you the same. Apart from the abusers, the loveless, the miserable. So no, I wouldn’t go back, but nor would I have any more. I’m sh
attered as it is; plus, how could I love another one as much as I adore the two I’ve got? Mind you, I thought that after the birth of the first one.
Harry, our firstborn, is a handful, as naughty as he is adorable. Good as an angel one minute, absolute horror the next. Would I have him any other way? The standard answer is no. I wouldn’t want him any different. The standard answer sucks, however. Doesn’t take a genius to work that one out. Sure I’d have him different. I’d have him good all the time. It would make life easier, that’s all. However, he’s lovable the way he is and if making him any less naughty made him any less lovable, then, no, I wouldn’t have him any different.
He’s funny. He makes faces and strikes poses I wouldn’t have thought a four-year-old capable of. He’s a mimic in the making. I love him like - well, there is no like. I love him more than anything or anyone I’ve ever loved. Before his sister came long. Now I love her the same way I love him. I’m nuts about her. If our relationship is less developed, less complex than the relationship I have with Harry, that’s only because he’s got two years’ head start. Our dialogue is less sophisticated, but we still talk. In fact she’s talking more and more all the time. For months, while other two-year-olds were chattering away, Sophie remained silent. She’d point and she’d cry, but she didn’t have much vocab. Then it started to come in a rush. Now she knows words I didn’t know she knew. Every day she surprises me with another one. The longest sentence she can speak gets longer every day. She’s also the most beautiful little girl you’ve ever seen (takes after her mum - my wife - Sally), but then they all say that.
Sometimes when I’m out with the two of them somewhere I forget that while Harry’s walking beside me and holding my hand, Sophie’s sitting on my shoulders, and I briefly slip into a dizzying panic. Where is she? Where have Heft her? Will I ever see her again? Sure you will, she’s on your shoulders, you dummy. It’s like forgetting you’re wearing your glasses. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that: searched for your glasses for a good quarter of an hour, only to realise eventually they’re stuck on the front of your head.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 15