Salt Snake and Other Bloody Cuts Page 8

  “But they’re moving around in there, Mr Winters. And they’re making these horrible sounds. You can hear them above the gas jets; I bet you can hear them over the phone. They’re going—”

  “Danny, Dan—just listen to me, Danny. If I come down there now, I’ll have to file a call out report. When my gaffer sees why I’ve had to come out at midnight you’ll be out faster than shit off the end of a shovel. Now, do you still want the job?”

  “Course I do. It’s the first one I’ve had in a year.”

  “Didn’t any of the blokes down there tell you what to expect?”

  “They said I’d got the cushiest job going. Just sit here all night and keep checking the burners are working all right.”

  “Bugger,” said his boss stoically. “Look, Danny. As I said it’s not a pretty job. We burn people right? Burning people isn’t like burning old cardboard boxes. They’re complicated mechanisms made up of skin, muscle, bone. Inside they’ve got organs, bags of fluid and gas. You with me?”

  “Aye.”

  “Also they’ve got mouths and arseholes. So if you heat them up fast, fluids boil, and I’m talking about blood and piss now, gasses expand and they’ve got to come out somewhere. So what you’re hearing is basically belching and farting. Sometimes it works the vocal chords so you can actually stand outside the crematorium oven and it sounds like someone is groaning their head off. I’ve heard it. It is nasty and takes some bloody getting used to. Believe me, Danny, I’ve heard a burning corpse actually sound as if it’s singing; it nearly turned my bastard hair white.”

  “But how can they move?”

  “Well, you must have good eyes, Danny. When I look through the spy-hole into the ovens all I can see is flames. How do they move? It’s the muscle. When it burns it shrinks. I’ve heard stories of burning corpses suddenly sitting up. There’s other things too. You might hear bangs. And I mean really loud bangs like a cannon going off. Fluids boil in the stomach making it inflate like a balloon. Eventually the pressure’s so great—bang; it explodes.”

  “I didn’t know that. They never told me.”

  “All right Danny. They should have warned you. You all right now?”

  “Yes, Mr Winters. Sorry to disturb you. It gave me a bit of a scare that’s all.”

  “Don’t worry, Danny. As the blokes at the Crem said, you’ve landed a good job. All we’re asking is you keep an eye on the place. Apart from that the time’s your own. Is that radio still down there?”

  “Yes, over on the fridge.”

  “Switch it on, it’ll drown out the sounds.”

  “Thank you, Mr Winters.”

  “Good night, Danny.”

  The phone clicked and purred softly into Danny’s ear. He replaced the phone and switched on the radio. Country and Western music. He wasn’t fond of it, but it hid the sounds coming from the oven doors.

  He did feel better now that he’d talked to his supervisor. So, it’d all been natural what he’d seen and heard. It had given him a bloody flight though. He made himself a cup of tea and sat on a chair with his back to the wall, facing the oven doors. The room consisted of bare white washed walls and a concrete floor that was still damp and reeked of industrial strength disinfectant where it’d been sluiced down earlier. This was basically the loading bay for the crematorium oven, he’d been told. In the crematorium chapel they held the funeral services. The coffin rolled along the conveyor belt and through the curtained hatchway into here, where it was stored with the other coffins until evening. Then the evening shift stacked the day’s crop of coffins, and their contents into the oven, removing lids and brass handles as they did so. When all the coffins were inside, the doors were shut, the controls set, gas ignited and they’d burn through the night until all that was left was white ash.

  This was the easy job. Just sit and watch and wait. Then clock off as the morning shift came on at six to clear out the ovens. Even so, Danny, like most, was frightened of dead people. Even in butchers” shops it’s rare to find a recognizable dead animal. All you get is nicely processed meat. No pig’s heads with ears and eyes, no cow’s legs covered in fur.

  This job frightened him. But it was the only job he was likely to have again. For thirty years he’d been a skilled craftsman in an engineering firm, cutting differentials for tractors. He’d been proud of his work. So, what if he did wear a boiler suit? He was a professional with skills that took years to acquire. Then, in his early forties, he’d been struck by crippling Osteo Arthritis. The back pain could be so bad he had to move around on all fours at times. Then just a week after his fiftieth birthday they’d sacked him because he’d been forced to take so much sick leave. If you’re short term sick you get cards and sympathy. If you’re long term sick you’re treated to contempt and cruelty. Like wild dogs that turn on one of their own kind that’s diseased, society turns nasty on you.

  But he’d got this job, thank the Lord. He was determined to keep it.

  Keep busy he told himself. Don’t let it prey on your imagination. It isn’t easy when you know that just behind that steel and asbestos door twenty men and women, even children are being burnt up to fertilizer.

  Danny went to the employees’ rest room. It was a cluttered place: girlie pin-ups mixed up with work rotas and union circulars on walls. Scattered on the sink work-top, pieces of pastry and bacon, bits of foil that had wrapped sandwiches, tea stain rings, used tea bags in the sink. On the radio some part-time cowboy was yodelling about his best friend being killed in a bar fight. It drove him back to loading bay.

  For a while he stood and stared at the oven doors. The thing might as well have been a magnet; he found himself putting one foot forward. Then another. Before he even knew it, he stood at the doors. The spyhole covered in inch thick glass glowed white from the fires inside.

  It had been a shock. He’d looked in expecting to see nothing but vague oblong shapes being gobbled by the inferno. What he saw had been very different.

  He swallowed at the bitter taste in his mouth. He felt queasy again, his ears rang, and his neck ached where the muscle tensed.

  “Never mind, Danny boy—only ten more years of this, then you can retire.”

  The first time he looked through the spy-hole he saw nothing. It was pretty much like looking through one of those viewing windows at swimming pools. You know the sort—you look out under water; it’s a bluey colour and every so often a body appears as someone jumps in, in a mess of bubbles and arms and legs. Here, instead of water you see fire filling the space between the walls; it fills it completely like it’s a liquid.

  Then as his eyes adjusted to the glare he made out the oblong shapes of coffins on fire. Then suddenly, as if someone had rung a bell he’d seen bodies just sit upright in their coffins. His eyes bulged; he couldn’t move his head. All he could do was watch twenty dead men and women sit bolt upright in this yellow fog of gas flame.

  Mow-wurr… Mow-wow-wurr-harrr…

  When they had begun to groan out loud Danny moved back so quickly it brought pain jabbing through his back.

  He limped away holding his back. The bloody thing seemed to ring like a bell with jabbing pains.

  Mow-wow… uck-uck-uck-urrr…

  Now he knew it was just expanding gas forcing its way outward through the anus or vocal chords. But the sound was still bad, so bloody, bloody bad. It sounded as if they were crying to be let out. As if the fire hurt them.

  “Christ, bury me when I die. Please bury me.”

  He put his eye to the spy-hole. “Don’t put me in there with …Jesus!

  Inside the oven, within all that fire and light, he saw the twenty burning men and women. They were working.

  “How did it go, Danny boy?”

  It was one of the morning shift, grinning and walking in swinging a plastic bag full of sandwiches.

  “Fine… Not much happens, does it?”

  “Dead quiet.” The man laughed. “See y’later, I’m going for a dump.”

  Danny’s mouth di
dn’t have so much as a pin head of spit in it. Dry as the ash the morning shift would soon be raking. He didn’t know how he managed to say the words, or drive to the supermarket to buy the bottle of whisky he’d drink at home while his wife worked. Later he drank so much he couldn’t walk, but the words kept coming out of his mouth: “I looked in. I saw them. They’re dead. But they’re working.”

  Two emotions worked powerfully in Danny. He was frightened sick by it all. But also curious. The next night he clocked on early. Was it some kind of miracle he was meant to see? Or was it some kind of nightmare he wasn’t?

  Soon he was alone in the crematorium loading bay; the concrete floor still wet; the stink of disinfectant roughening the back of his throat.

  The gas jets had been burning for half an hour now. Already it would be hot enough to melt metal in there.

  He stood ten feet from the spy-hole, building himself up to look in. The muscles in his back were so tight they curved his arthritic spine like a long bow. Pains sparkled up and down his legs, the slightest movement made him wince. But he had to see what happened in there. If it happened again. Last night, he’d looked in to see the burning corpses moving around. The heat was so tremendous it had ignited the fatty tissues so they moved round crackling with flame, spitting out gobs of fat like burning chip pans. Thankfully, you couldn’t see their faces; only that they were incandescent people shapes.

  Danny held his breath, then put his eye to the glass. His eyes adjusted to the brilliant glare. Now! It was happening now!

  He let out a stuttering blast of air from his lungs through sheer shock. One, two… three, four, five… six. One after another they sat up in their burning coffins.

  What now? What did they intend to do? What drove them? Was this proof there was a God? Did He make them do this?

  Jesus… Jesus… My back… Christ. He didn’t scream with his mouth; his back did all the screaming for him. The muscles spasmed and clutched around his spine as if a sharp toothed animal was trying to bite its way out.

  He held his breath again, leaning forward against the oven doors; his open palms taking some of his weight. He must keep watching. Only his back wanted to force him from the oven. He clenched his jaws together, screwed his eyes against the intense glare and watched.

  They were out of the coffins now; moving with speed and agility; even the geriatrics. Now he could see funeral clothes flash into flame to drift off in layers like burning tissue. The flames ate the skin, peeling it off in feathery pieces of ash.

  But the flame had no effect on their purpose. Danny watched them work.

  They picked up the coffins and quickly stacked them into two pillars side by side with perhaps a yard between them. It reminded Danny of his days at the tractor factory watching the old skilled workers. These people, even though they burned like fireworks, spitting jets of flame from mouth and ears, they worked like craftsmen, knowing exactly where each component went. When the coffin pillars were complete they laid the lids across from one pillar to the other until they had formed something like an archway.

  Even in that raging inferno they took their time, making careful adjustments to the archway as if it needed aligning perfectly with some invisible line.

  By now, even once fat corpses were thin as soft, fatty tissues boiled off into vapour, ribs began to show naked, fingers dropped away. Arms and legs became jerking sticks. Movements became clumsier.

  But the work was nearly complete.

  Danny whispered in wonder: “What are they making? For God’s sake, what are they making?”

  His eyes watered so much from staring into the brilliant flames, he had to look away and blink until they were clear.

  When he looked back, the shock of what he saw forced him to recoil so violently he fell flat on his back.

  Because, there on the other side of the glass, a face looked back at him. The face burned furiously. The picture burned into Danny’s mind was of a beautiful girl with hair blowing around her face; only the hair was aflame. Skin burned away in layer after shriveling layer. The teeth were chips jutting from bubbling gums. The tongue a charcoal stick sliding from side to side. The eyes alone seemed untouched; they stared back at him, coolly, with such a shocking intensity he couldn’t breathe. He saw them scrutinizing his face, assessing from his expression why he was there and what he was thinking. Maybe the burning girl wondered if he would interfere with their work. When she seemed satisfied he would not, she returned to her labours.

  After the furious pains in his back had at least eased sufficiently, he pulled himself back to the oven doors and looked in through the spyhole.

  Through the roaring gas jets, so bright he had to screw his eyes almost shut, he saw what the burning corpses had built. It was a doorway made from coffins and coffin lids. The wood blazed furiously. In that intense heat the construction would last no more than a few minutes.

  Then, as Danny watched, the burning corpses began to slowly file through the doorway. They never came out the other side. One by one, the burning corpses simply vanished.

  “Ahh-ah? The pains in Danny’s back grew so intense that he had to hobble through to the restroom. He dissolved three solpadol in a mug then swallowed the fizzing liquid down in one. Then he dragged himself back to the crematorium oven and the spy-hole.

  With a huge effort of will he forced himself to see through the inferno. The gateway was little more than a white flare; the outline skeletal now that it had been burnt almost to ash. It couldn’t hold together much longer. But still the dead men, women and children walked through.

  Through into what? into where?

  The painkiller oozed through his body dampening down the back pains, lightening his head. He wasn’t afraid, no, only curious. In the name of God, what lay beyond that incandescent doorway?

  Then for a second, he saw.

  Going, going… gone. The doorway collapsed into ash. Those that hadn’t made it through the doorway, stood and stared vacantly at the pile of burning embers. Then they began working in an unhurried way on a second doorway. Only it was far too late now. Bone burnt to cinder maneuvered coffins that were little more than shells of ash. Futile. Within moments, the gas jets had devoured them; one by one the corpses that had been left behind sank to the floor where they stopped moving, to lay in this bath of roaring fire. In the morning they would be shoveled into urns.

  Danny staggered panting and red-faced to the rest room; there he sat on the floor, back to the fridge. It had only lasted a second but he’d seen beyond the doorway. He’d seen cool green meadows, a stream lined with willows; in the distance a great mountain of grey rock. Only this mountain had a human face. He’d seen the dead leave the inferno and walk into paradise—because he was certain it must be paradise—and he’d seen the burnt dead instantly grow young again. The expressions on their faces stayed nailed inside of him. Happy. Happier than he’d ever seen anyone before.

  He closed his eyes; before his brain shut down, the word HAPPY circled round and around inside his head like a new moon caught by the gravity of a cold and lonely planet.

  “Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,” he sang as he waited for it to happen the next night. He knew that it would. Inside, something new orbited the centre of his mind. Revelation. He knew, without the tiniest, most insignificant scrap of doubt that he witnessed a miracle take place every night. Would he tell anyone?

  Would he hell! Share your cake at school, Danny, said his teacher. He’d been left bleeding crumbs. Danny had learnt the tough way that sharing really meant let others take your possessions. No one’s taking this. This is mine!

  He’d lost his job; lost his health; lost his self-esteem. Now, he’d found the burning path to happiness.

  Eye to the spy-hole, he watched that day’s crop of corpses work in their life-giving atmosphere of flame. He rehearsed mentally what he’d do. As soon as the doorway was complete and they had begun their exodus to paradise, then he would follow them there.

  The exodus bega
n. Danny spun the gas valves shut, killing the flames. The heat would still be enormous, but he’d be in through the doors, across the floor and into the doorway in less than three seconds.

  Danny gripped the brass valve wheel and spun it shut, then he swung open the oven doors.

  Disaster. The hot air scalded his face; he gasped; eyes watered; roast meat smells filled his nose; post mortem grunts filled his ears. Without the flames the corpses simply collapsed to the floor. Danny stepped over them as they lay vomiting boiling blood. From mouths and anuses jetted fierce blue flames like Bunsen burner jets as expanding gases stuttered outwards.

  The doorway of still burning coffins was closed. All that lay beyond was the asbestos block wall. Choking, his skin scorching painfully, Danny stumbled back out into the loading bay, where he limped back to the rest room, dissolved more solpadol into a mug and gulped it down.

  Yes, it was a setback, he told himself as he glared at his scorched face in the mirror, but he’d find a way through. All it needed was effort and commitment, then he would pass through to the other side, where pain, loneliness and misery could not survive.

  Danny was ready the next night. The burning corpses had finished the doorway and were filing through into the cool meadows.

  Without fire, that incandescent life fled from the corpses, and killed the doorway. Tonight, Danny must leave the gas jets blazing.

  He would simply open the doors, dash into the oven and through the doorway. To give him some protection from the inferno he’d made a suit of kitchen foil and sacking; on his head, a helmet of wire netting covered in layers of foil. Two tiny holes punched by needles served as eye holes. For a whole five minutes he’d sluiced himself from the hosepipe; that and five solpadol to deaden the pain from the fire should get him through the burning doorway. He sang to himself as his gloved hands pulled back the oven doors. Anyway, he promised himself, any burns he suffered would be supernaturally healed the second he passed through the doorway. He’d rest for a while then he would enjoy a pleasant stroll to the mountain with a human face.