Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Mr. Le Renges seemed to go on talking forever, 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 hardhat 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 playoff?” 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 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 mixedup 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!”