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  ‘So Mr Le Renges is using rotten beef for his hamburgers?’

  ‘Looks like it. But what else? I can understand rotten beef. Dozens of slaughterhouses use rotten beef. But why did the van call at the hospital? And the veterinarian?’

  Velma stopped the car outside the motel and stared at me. ‘Oh, you’re not serious.’

  ‘I have to take a look inside that meat-packing plant, Velma.’

  ‘You’re sure you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew?’

  ‘Very apt phrase, Velma.’

  My energy levels were beginning to decline again so I treated myself to a fried shrimp sandwich and a couple of Molson’s with a small, triangular, diet-sized piece of pecan pie to follow. Then I walked around to the hospital and went to the rear entrance where the van from St Croix Meats had parked. A hospital porter with greasy hair and squinty eyes and glasses was standing out back taking a smoke.

  ‘How’s it going, feller?’ I asked him.

  ‘OK. Anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Maybe, I’ve been looking for a friend of mine. Old drinking buddy from way back.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Somebody told me he’s been working around here, driving a van. Said they’d seen him here at the hospital.’

  The greasy-haired porter blew smoke out of his nostrils. ‘We get vans in and out of here all day.’

  ‘This guy’s got a scar, right across his mouth. You couldn’t miss him.’

  ‘Oh you mean the guy from BioGlean?’

  ‘BioGlean?’

  ‘Sure. They collect, like, surgical waste, and get rid of it.’

  ‘What’s that, “surgical waste”?’

  ‘Well, you know. Somebody has their leg amputated, somebody has their arm cut off. Aborted fetuses, stuff like that. You’d be amazed how much stuff a busy hospital has to get rid of.’

  ‘I thought they incinerated it.’

  ‘They used to, but BioGlean kind of specialize, and I guess it’s cheaper than running an incinerator night and day. They even go round auto shops and take bits of bodies out of car wrecks. You don’t realize, do you, that the cops won’t do it, and that the mechanics don’t want to do it, so I guess somebody has to.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘What’s your name? Next time your buddy calls by, I’ll tell him that you were looking for him.’

  ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m staying at the Chandler House on Chandler.’

  ‘OK . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson. Funny, that. Name kind of rings a bell.’

  I borrowed Velma’s car and drove back out to Robbinstown. I parked in the shadow of a large computer warehouse. St Croix Meats was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire and the front yard was brightly floodlit. A uniformed security guard sat in a small booth by the gate, reading The Quoddy Whirlpool. With any luck, it would send him to sleep, and I would be able to walk right past him.

  I waited for over an hour, but there didn’t seem to be any way for me to sneak inside. All the lights were on, and now and then I saw workers in hard hats and long rubber aprons walking in and out of the building. Maybe this was the time for me to give up trying to play detective and call the police.

  The outside temperature was sinking deeper and deeper and I was beginning to feel cold and cramped in Velma’s little Volkswagen. After a while I had to climb out and stretch my legs. I walked as near to the main gate as I could without being seen, and stood next to a skinny maple tree. I felt like an elephant trying to hide behind a lamp post. The security guard was still awake. Maybe he was reading an exciting article about the sudden drop in cod prices.

  I had almost decided to call it a night when I heard a car approaching along the road behind me. I managed to hide most of myself behind the tree, and Mr Le Renges drove past, and up to the front gate. At first I thought somebody was sitting in his Lexus with him, but then I realized it was that huge ugly Presa Canario. It looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a hound from hell, and it was bigger than he was. It turned its head and I saw its eyes reflected scarlet. It was like being stared at by Satan, believe me.

  The security guard came out to open the gate, and for a moment he and Mr Le Renges chatted to each other, their breath smoking in the frosty evening air. I thought of crouching down and trying to make my way into the slaughterhouse behind Mr Le Renges’ car, but there was no chance that I could do it without being spotted.

  ‘Everything OK, 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 myself. But, still, I climbed up on to the step, as easy as I could. You don’t jump on to 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?’

  I left 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 gleanin
g during the day. They were dumping it straight on to 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 wrap, 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 our 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 an aborted 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, abortion 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 slaughterhousemen 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 realize 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 talking his dog for a walk came on to the killing floor, with the hell beast 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 eyewitnesses 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,’ 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 the idea of tearing my throat out was actually turning it on.

  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 toward the Presa Canario and said, ‘Here, Cerberus! You want something to eat? 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 toward 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. The dog 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 on to the floor and sank its teeth into his forehead. He screamed, and tried to beat it off. But it jerk
ed its head furiously from side to side, and with each jerk it pulled more and more skin away.

  Right in front of us, with a noise like somebody trying to rip up a pillowcase, the dog tore his face off, exposing his bloodied, wildly-popping eyes, the soggy black cavity 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’ face dangling from its jaws like a slippery latex mask.

  I turned to the slaughtermen. They were too shocked to speak. One of them dropped his knife, and then the others did, too, until they rang like 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 muffalettas 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 HERO.

  Velma came out to say goodbye on the morning I left. 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.