Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Two weeks later the food supply was rotten beyond even their desperation. Every last drop of dead blood—their only source of liquid besides the small reserve of bottled water and their own urine—had been consumed.

Starving now, Ian, whose fingernails were bloody pulps from his efforts to tunnel through solid rock, his throat raw from screaming for help hour after hour, wondered how long he would be able to survive on Caleb’s dead body.

Caleb was wondering the same thing … only he wondered if Ian would last longer if consumed while still alive. Wondered if the body parts would heal, providing Caleb with an endless food supply. Wondered what warm blood tasted like.

Staring at one another from opposite ends of the torture chamber, Ian and Caleb began another experiment in human nature.

The Burgers of Calais

Graham Masterton

“The Burgers of Calais” was first published in Dark Terrors 6, The Gollancz Book of Horror, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, 2002.

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Graham Masterton was a young newspaper reporter when he wrote his first novel Rules of Duel with the encouragement of his friend William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch. He went on to become editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines before penning his first horror novel The Manitou which was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead role. Since then he has published over a hundred horror novels, thrillers, historical sagas, short stories and best-selling sex instruction manuals. He lived in Cork, Ireland, for several years, and has written a new crime novel about a female Irish detective, Katie Maguire. He now lives in England. His wife and agent Wiescka established his name as the leading horror novelist in Poland, but passed away in April, 2011. He dedicates this story to her memory. Website: www.grahammasterton.co.uk.

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“The Burgers of Calais” is both a pun and a metaphor on the suffering of the people of Calais who were almost starved to death in a siege by the English in 1347, and had to eat rats to survive. They were saved only by the self-sacrifice of six eminent burghers who agreed to surrender themselves and hand over the keys of the city. But it was mostly inspired by Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation which describes how foul the ingredients of most American fast food actually is. Not rats, but pretty close.

I never cared for northern parts and I never much cared for eastern parts neither, because I hate the cold and I don’t have any time for those bluff, ruddy-faced people who live there, with their rugged plaid coats and their Timberland boots and their way of whacking you on the back when you least expect it, like whacking you on the back is supposed to be some kind of friendly gesture or something.

I don’t like what goes on there, neither. Everybody behaves so cheerful and folksy but believe me that folksiness hides some real grisly secrets that would turn your blood to iced gazpacho.

You can guess, then, that I was distinctly unamused when I was driving back home early last October from Presque Isle, Maine, and my beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis dropped her entire engine on the highway like a cow giving birth.

The only reason I had driven all the way to Presque Isle, Maine, was to lay to rest my old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III (may God forgive him for what he did in Colonel Wrightman’s cigar-box). I couldn’t wait to get back south, but now I found myself stuck a half-mile away from Calais, Maine, population 4,003 and one of the most northernmost, easternmost, back-whackingest towns you could ever have waking nightmares about.

Calais is locally pronounced “CAL-us” and believe me a callous is exactly what it is—a hard, corny little spot on the right elbow of America. Especially when you have an engineless uninsured automobile and a maxed-out Visa card and only $226 in your billfold and no friends or relations back home who can afford to send you more than a cheery hello.