Cows (9 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

E
vening. 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

T
he 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, Happy 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.

It took a week of sniveling through early-morning hours until he understood what he needed. A death. Killing. Killing had given him the strength to start things and he needed more of it to continue. He needed another blood-burning injection of certainty. He needed what Cripps had shown him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

S
teven left very early for the plant, before the streets filled. Left while the sky was still an orange-scummed blackness so that the bus would be empty. He felt flayed, as though every paranoid receptor he possessed was trained on the gulf between himself and others. His brief escape from inferiority only intensified the pain of his return.

He made it, but it was hard. He kept his eyes closed and pushed himself tight into a corner of the dirty vinyl bench at the back of the bus. He counted stops until it was time to dash into the coolness of the dawning city. Trash cans in an alley at the side of the plant hid him until the gates opened, and then he made another dash.

Inside, back at the grinder, it was better. The process hall, with all its ghastly content, held some degree of familiarity that made the world easier to bear. A month’s absence seemed to matter to no one. He clocked in as usual and was assigned as usual, sat on his stool and humped meat as usual. Once, far down the hall, Cripps stuck his head out of the slaughter room, looked straight at him and smiled, nodded, then disappeared again.

At lunchtime the Guernsey pressed its face against the ventilation grille and spoke to Steven.

“You’re back, man. We been waiting a long time and I gotta say our faith was getting shaky.”

“What faith? I told you I wouldn’t do it.”

“Well, us cows got that old intuition, we knew you’d change your mind.”

“Who says I’ve changed it? Maybe I’m back because I need the money.”

“Sure, dude. And maybe I take it up the ass. We saw you hiding out there at the side of the plant this morning, twitching and jumping. Cold turkey, man.”

“Bullshit.”

“That supposed to be funny?”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it … You can’t kill without getting infected. It don’t have the effect Cripps says, but it gets under your skin in other ways. We warned you.”

The Guernsey’s voice got harsh and Steven saw the muscles of its face tighten.

“Now stop fucking about and tell me how you’re gonna arrange things with Cripps.”

“I’m not setting him up for you.”

“Dude …” The Guernsey shifted threateningly.

“I want to do it myself.”

“Huh?”

“You can watch and be there, but I do the killing.”

The Guernsey was silent a moment considering this, then: “My, my. What happened to the boy who puked when someone else shot one of us measly cows? I don’t know, man … I wanted to do that fucker myself. The herd wanted to be involved.”

“You won’t get him without my help. You said yourself he’s too careful.”

“So we’ll wait for him to get careless.”

“You could wait forever and you still wouldn’t get him. You know that. Make your choice—let me kill him, or let him stay alive.”

“I don’t like it, man. You’re taking away something that’s ours.”

“If he dies, he dies. As long as you’re there to see it happen, what difference does it make? What can you do with those hooves, anyhow?”

“Give him a fucking good stomping. What do you mean?”

“Look at my hands.” Steven rippled his fingers. “I can do things you can’t. I can hurt him more.”

The cow studied Steven, chewing cud and breathing noisily. It swallowed and stamped.

“Okay, man. I ain’t happy about it, but okay. And we gotta be there, real close, understand?”

“From start to finish.”

“Good. What’s the plan?”

“Watch the slaughter room at the end of the shift. Come when you see us.”

The Guernsey nodded and faded back into the shadows of the duct.

There was a little time left before the meat started to roll again and Steven used it to set up the evening.

Cripps was alone in the slaughter room staring at a wound in the head of a dead cow. When he saw Steven he straightened and walked quickly to him.

“Hello, boy. You look well. You look as a man should—without fear of killing, without fear of himself.”

“I want to do it again.”

Cripps embraced him. “Of course you do, boy. Of course you do. You were gone a long time.”

***

Steven spent the rest of the afternoon trying to work off a steadily building stress. He threw meat into the chute of the grinder as fast as the machine would take it. He wanted to run the length of the hall, to tear around it, screaming and shouting and smashing things. But it wouldn’t have done any good. Nothing could stand in for the ecstasy of becoming another person.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

W
hen the men had gone home and the plant was quiet, Steven returned to the slaughter room. Cripps was there by himself with a cow in a grabber. Somewhere at the back of the room water dripped slowly from a tap onto concrete. The halogen above the grabber was on but the other lights were dead and it was hard to see anything beyond the purple-bright cone of light.

The cow in the grabber gave Steven an unexpected twinge of disappointment. He was disappointed it wasn’t a man. It would have doubled the night’s score.

“I have it ready for you, boy. Ah, how willingly you come now. How strongly you walk. This one will bring you no sickness.”

“I’m past getting sick.”

“I know you are, boy. Here, take a knife.”

Cripps’s face stretched into a grin. His fly was open and his dick poked through it, pointing at the roof. Steven held the knife, an electric flensing tool, wondering how long he would have to wait. Did the cows expect some kind of signal?

“I’d rather use the gun.”

“As you wish. Give me the knife, I shall use it.”

Cripps pressed the stud on the handle and the eighteen-inch blade started to buzz. Steven swung a boltgun down from the slaughter platform and charged it by pulling back on the lug behind the grip. The hiss of compressed air into the weapon was sharp in the empty room and the cow in the grabber jerked. Cripps walked around and stood close to the animal’s head. He nodded to Steven.

“The jaw.”

Steven looked behind him but could see no cows approaching through the surrounding blackness. So he fired the gun into the animal, into the lower jaw, midway between the chin and the cheek. The cow squealed through its nose and lunged against the grabber. It was not mortally wounded but its mouth was smashed and hung blood-slobberingly open.

“That was fine, boy. No hesitation at all.”

Cripps winked at Steven then put the blade of his knife between the dribbling lips and cut backward, using both hands, through the cow’s head—through the corners of the mouth, back under the eyes, deep into the skull about an inch below the ears, then out through the back of the neck into air. The entire top of the animal’s head came away in an eruption of blood. Cripps shrieked laughter and pushed his face into the red fountain, cupping his hands around the brain half that lay cleanly sliced in its shallow dish of bone, jerking it away from the spine and lifting it out. He found the other half somewhere on the floor and handed them both to Steven.

“Do me this service, boy.”

Steven held the pieces of brain like a bun while Cripps slid his cock backward and forward between them until he came. A thick gray paste built up in the folds of his foreskin and the semen that splashed across Steven’s wrists was tinged pink.

After he finished, Cripps leaned against the side of the slaughter platform, wiping his face, laughing between gasps. His hair was thick with blood, the lines of his face filled red. Steven stood beside him, toying with the boltgun.

“You make me proud, boy. You had so much further to come than the others. You prove it works for all men.”

“Yeah, it works.”

The cows arrived. Steven could see them dimly beyond the curtain of light, moving carefully, quietly, closer. Cripps had blood in his eyes and did not notice them immediately. Steven readied himself.

“But it works better with men.”

“That it does. These beasts are poor substitutes … What was that?”

A hoof scraped on concrete, then silence.

“There is something here with us. We must leave.”

Cripps pushed himself away from the slaughter platform then stopped dead as the cows moved into the light. There were ten of them in a solid half-circle that curved around the grabber, trapping him.

“Use the gun. I have suspected this for some time. They will kill us if we give them the chance.”

Cripps was not frightened. His movements were smooth and unhurried as he pressed the switch on the knife and raised it before him.

“It won’t be them doing the killing, Cripps.”

Cripps frowned over his shoulder, puzzled. Steven bent quickly forward and fired the boltgun into the side of his knee. Cripps grunted and dropped the knife. The joint was shattered, white bits of bone stuck through skin and trouser fabric.

“What is this, boy?”

“They want revenge. They’ve been waiting a long time.”

“But you? What are you doing with these animals? You should be with me.”

“I’m doing what you showed me. Gummy wasn’t enough. And my mother too. I killed her, but it didn’t last. I need more and you’re it. You should understand, Cripps.”

Cripps steadied himself against the rail of the platform. His voice was quiet when he spoke. “I taught you the secret, and yet you can do this?”

The Guernsey stepped forward and kicked Cripps’s shattered knee. Cripps hit the floor.

“Shut the fuck up, man. It’s time to go. Come on, Steven.”

Steven picked up the flensing knife, checked that it was well charged, then dragged Cripps across the floor to an open vent. The cows slid through first, Steven pushed Cripps after them, onto the back of the Guernsey.

Then he was in the duct himself, shoving the vent grille back into place, climbing up behind Cripps as the posse started to move. Cripps tried to raise himself but Steven held him firm and clubbed him unconscious with the haft of the knife.

The cows did not speak or joke on this journey. They moved quickly, intent on their destination, and in this short time between capture and kill Steven could relax. The swing of the animal’s stride, the rhythmic sideways rolling, the play of muscle under hide lulled him. He closed his eyes and let himself be carried, remembering the feeling of strength he had discovered the night the Hagbeast choked on his shit.

He wanted this thing with Cripps to be over so he could carry that same feeling back home to Lucy and the flat. He wanted to do it now, here on the Guernsey’s back—but he knew the cows would not stand for it. He would have to wait. Just a short time.

When they hit the central chamber the waiting herd shouted. The place was dim like last time and there was a tension in the air that turned the warm earthy smell of manure and cow breath sour. The cavern was no longer a place for unguarded resting and loving and children’s playing. The edges of things were strained and sharp, and where the herd had been so unconcernedly scattered before, they were now ranked tightly at the edge of the stream, watching Steven’s approach.

The posse trotted forward to join them, but the Guernsey stayed slow, moving with measured steps as though this moment carried gravity in the cow scheme of things.

The herd parted before them, opening a corridor to the edge of the stream. As Steven passed along it every cow tracked him with its gaze. He held himself straight under the scrutiny, aware of the need for ceremony, knowing that for these gathered animals the killing would section the past from the present. While Cripps lived they were less than they should have been. Today they wanted things to change.

Steven dismounted. Cripps was muttering broken sentences to himself, clawing his way into consciousness. An active Cripps would only make things more difficult, so Steven worked fast.

There was a tangle of rope at the edge of the water, no doubt placed there by the cows for his use. And under it, four short lengths of wood and a heavy stone. He heaved Cripps from the Guernsey and dropped him on the hard earth floor, looked once at the crowding animals, then staked him out, naked and spread-eagled, like in cowboy films.

By the time he had finished Cripps was awake, looking up at him with a half-smile like this was just the endplay in some game and he was happy to be involved. Steven looked back at the man who had opened the door to his future, the man who had learned the secret of a nightmare and, having learned, pulled it close about him and fed off it, forsaking all other food until he grew strong enough to share it.

“I knew you had it in you, boy. You make me proud. You will be a man above all others after this. A man like myself.”

“I’m about to kill you, for Christsake.”

“And you do it for a reason, don’t you? You expect something from it, tell me you do.”

“Yes, I expect something from it.”

“There! You are my proof. When a man is truly free, he is capable of anything that serves him. I knew it, but I did not dream I would see such an exhibition of it as this will be.”

The cows shifted impatiently, the Guernsey stepped forward and spoke close to Steven’s ear.

“Hurry up, motherfucker. You wanted this for yourself, get on and do it or I’ll take over.”

Steven looked down again at Cripps.

“I’m ready, boy. Show these meat fuckers what we men are capable of. Show them the power we carry inside ourselves. Come on, boy, don’t keep me waiting.” Cripps was shouting. He shouted louder when Steven fired up the knife and made it hum. “Don’t keep me waiting, boy!”

Steven started on the left arm, slicing shallowly through the triceps, down from shoulder to elbow, taking away long slivers of meat until the bone showed. There was a lot of blood—it would be over too soon if it went on like this. He stopped and used what was left of the rope to tourniquet Cripps four times—once at each shoulder and once at the top of each thigh by the groin. The flow of blood from the left arm slowed.

Cripps did not scream or show pain beyond a tight squinting of the eyes. Instead, while Steven was close to him tightening the ropes, he whispered urgent endearments—encouragements that were the last rites in the faith of himself.

They meant nothing to Steven.

He started with the knife again, working from shoulder to wrist, cleaning both arms of flesh. Then on to the legs, letting bone see light for the very first time. Cripps lived through all of it, but his eyes got dull and he did not see the cuts of meat that piled in outline around him like a snow-angel.

Flesh-angel.

But Steven saw it all, each increment of death, each weighting of the scales toward that long black fall. And he sucked up each degree as it came, storing them away until there were enough of them to make up one whole death.

The slowness was only for the cows. Torture was not important to him, in fact it was annoying. If he had had the choice he would have strangled Cripps, felt the life go in one quick rush up his arms—in one slamming, changing wave.

Cripps was a torso stuck with four white bones that ended in hands and feet. But his chest still rose and fell and there was more to do. Obvious things like opening the stomach and pulling out handfuls of guts, like splitting the penis lengthways and cutting off his balls, like using the very tip of the knife to cut out his eyes. Things the cows watched in silence, breathing hard and swallowing rapidly, urging him on with a silent desire to see it done.

Somewhere in it all, Cripps died and Steven became as he had been immediately after the Hagbeast’s death. The destructive uncertainties of the last week ceased to exist, had never existed. He was back in charge and life looked smooth and straight and certain again. There was no question of his ability to cope with it.

At the end of the last long slice up through the chest Steven straightened, dropped the knife and looked at the wall of cows. For a moment it was like they all stopped breathing, then they knelt and bowed their heads—all but the Guernsey who stepped quickly to his side.

“Okay, you did it. Get on, it’s time to leave.”

Steven swung himself up onto the broad back. He was puzzled by the Guernsey’s haste, but there was nothing to keep him in the cavern. He held tight to the rolls of skin around the animal’s neck and they cantered quickly from the chamber, unaccompanied, out into the maze of tunnels beneath the city.

The Guernsey took him to the same storm drain as before, a shattered tube of reinforced concrete that opened into a pit in a garbage-strewn empty lot.

“Get what you wanted, dude?”

“You wanted it done.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t do it for us. I was watching. You needed it just as bad as them back there.”

“I’m going.”

“Okay, but they’re going to want you back sometime.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t see them? They were on their knees.”

“So?”

“It fucked their heads, man, a whole lot more than I figured. This ain’t the end of things, not by a long shot.”

“Whatever you say.”

Steven climbed out of the pit. The Guernsey was speaking from a different world and its words meant nothing. They were for somebody else, not the self-contained god who left them behind as so much noise and strode through the twilight along city roads that glittered with the phosphorescence of recognition. He knew these streets, had pursued them through dreaming Hagbeast nights, had plotted and examined each stone and dollop of tar that supported the TV lives of all the people who trod them. Tonight they opened effortlessly for him, empty and softly glowing, leading straight to his flat.