by David Neal
Pasha knew his work. I did not hear him slicing through the safety ropes of the rival collectors, fibers unwrapping like severed tendons as they were set free from the security of their horizontal tethers. He just slit the throats of the anchor men minding the ropes in the undergrowth, and tipped their unresisting bodies out onto the plough furrows.
It wasn’t that I had a particular problem with killing, or that Pasha was better at taking lives. If necessary, I could be as efficient as him. The other part of the job—the collection—freaked him out. Me? I didn’t mind getting up close to the crushing stones as they consumed the fields in which they stood. Maybe it was the relentless hunger that unnerved him. Too close to home. Saw too much of himself in the continuous grinding of those stone teeth.
Half an hour later he was sat next to me again with a black eye and cut across his face, rope tethered back around his waist.
“One of them put up a fight, but my knife was bigger than his,” he said, and tapped the bloodstained wooden handle of the machete with a grin.
Next was the waiting game. Heavier objects like livestock, or dead bodies, got carried toward the stone circles quicker. Taking turns with the night vision goggles, we watched ten bodies tumble across the field, like enthusiastic crowd surfers carried by an aggressive audience. We listened to the sound change as sandstone crushed ribcages instead of soil and dead crops. We waited until the powdering of bone finished and the noise dulled back to a steady hum.
“You’re up.” Pasha said, patting me on the back. I nodded and rechecked my ropes, and checked them again, because you can’t be too careful. I watched him roll a cigarette and light it, coal end glowing in the scratching twilight of the hedge, wondering, not for the first time, why I trusted him. Money. Money was the reason I trusted him. Money was the reason why I let such a cutthroat watch my back. Without me he got nothing.
I could have just let the tide of shifting dirt carry me to the stones, but that was uncontrolled, and slow. Instead, I dragged myself on all fours, using some of the momentum of the field to push off with each foot. Getting there was the easy bit.
Digging my steel toecaps into the constantly moving furrows I leant forward and scraped my fingers down the surface of the stones. White ambergris felt like congealed fat, peppered with splinters and grains of soil. I pushed my fingers deep into the paste trying not to gag at the smell. I’d only smelt it in two other places—abattoirs and battlefields. A mixture of fermented grass and warm, clotting blood. Bone splinters stuck to my skin. This was what we wanted. I opened the first canvas bag and wiped the mixture inside.
Working my way around the outside of the circle, the danger was the rope becoming snagged between the orthostats and severing, leaving nothing to drag myself to safety. Every couple of feet I checked the knots, checked the tension, and moved onto the next gap, trying not to think what might lie inside that stone mouth. What might be at the bottom of the throat. In the early days they tried sending men down. Experienced cavers. When they did not come back, they tried drones. There were rumors the operators never recovered from what they saw on their monitors. I tried not to listen to rumors. They slowed you down.
In an hour, I’d worked my way around one side, back to the center, then around the other, two full bags across my back. Two more tied to the rope.
Getting out was like walking up a down escalator. Several times I felt myself losing momentum. Several times I felt sure the churn of dirt would drag me like Pasha’s victims between the stones, but over the next hour I made my way back to the hedge, landing exhausted in the ditch.
“How much?” Pasha said, turning on a torch and letting the beam scud across the haul.
“Four bags.”
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t seem much for ten people does it?”
“Not at all,” I said, rested my head back against the branches behind me and closed my eyes.
* * *
Even in the dark, the crane-like dragline was too large to comprehend. Over twenty-two stories tall, it looked as if a small city block had been dropped into the field. The boom stretched above overgrown hedges, immobile like a gallows pole.
We got out of the car and I opened the boot to take out the bags. Pasha locked up, not that there was anyone around to steal the thing. The air smelt of silicone grease and human sweat.
“That’s just showing off,” Pasha said, sounding more impressed than he meant to at the scale of the vast excavator. He grabbed two of the bags and I went to open the field-gate. Each cross piece had row upon row of small mammals nailed to it.
“What are those?” Pasha said, the note of disgust in his voice unexpected from a person who slit throats for petty change.
I knelt down for a closer look.
“Moles. Dozens of dead moles.” I reached out and touched one, my finger brushing the desiccated skin of its paws. I wondered how many had ended up milled between the teeth of animated stone circles. Maybe these were the lucky ones.
All but the smallest draglines walked on feet, and this was one of the largest, balanced on hydraulic pontoons each the size of a small truck. Few had been converted into private fiefdoms though. Even this far from any megaliths, the ground rumbled with the constant, unyielding consumption. Maybe a walking fortress the size of small village was a good idea.
A curve of arc lights pinned us in place. We put the bags on the ground and waited for the reception committee. I had no doubt that beyond those lights there was enough firepower to blast us to bone meal.
We stayed still. Footsteps rattled down the outside of the dragline until five men stood in front of us. The bodyguard bruised us in their thorough search for weapons, found our knives and showed them to each other, laughed and handed them back. A sixth figure stepped out of the shadows and stretched out his hand.
Even by the standard of high level drug dealers, Papa Yaga was pure evil, and the knowledge he’d personally requested to meet us made me very nervous. You survived in my industry by not being noticed. Mundane and average were the qualities for a long career. We’d been too good too quickly and we were now on the private property of one of the most dangerous men in the country.
“You’re the team who have been so successful in harvesting high quality product for me?” He smiled, feldspar glittering in the greyed enamel of his teeth. So he was a user, too.
He was short, only up to my shoulder, and slender, wearing heavy tweeds, mud-caked, expensive hiking boots, with a shooting stick on a leather strap across his shoulder.
“We’ve been lucky,” I said. Pasha normally left the talking to me. Not that he couldn’t string a sentence together. He just never knew when to finish, his mouth finding more words than was good for the situation. I preferred to speak with precision and never for very long.
“In my experience, luck is something crafted with chisels and hammers. Your acquisition has been too good to be pure luck,” Papa Yaga said. He walked forward and rested a hand on Pasha’s arm, his other on mine. “Let’s walk to my office, and inspect your latest crop.”
I expected us to go inside the dragline, and when his men turned in the direction of the boom I felt sure we were going to get powdered into the plough soil. He felt me tense.
“Don’t be so nervous all the time. You two are my golden egg-laying geese. My prize sows. My show-winning heifers. I have no intention of disposing of you just when you’re making me so much money.”
The bucket of the dragline was vast. We waited while one of Papa Yaga’s men found a torch and led us inside.
The sheer scale started to sink in. The bucket was big enough to hold a large boardroom table, several bookcases and filing cabinets. The walls left bare metal, stained with rust and rain.
One of Papa Yaga’s men wrenched down a heavy set of roller doors. We each pulled a chair up to the table and somewhere out of sight, a generator started. Above us, lights flickered like swallows. I glanced around the room. Cobbles and dirt accreted to the corners of the uppermo
st corners, making it more cave-like than industrial. Grains of soil shuddered loose with the dance of the generator, rattling and bouncing against the steel floor.
“Any questions before we start?” Papa Yaga said, sitting down opposite and folding his arms.
“What’s with the moles?” Pasha said. I looked down at my hands and prayed to the shreds of god that might still notice me.
“Moles?” Papa Yaga tensed. Behind him two of his bodyguards reached under their donkey jackets.
“He means on the gate. The skins nailed to the field-gate,” I said, glancing over at Pasha. He was oblivious, staring up at the lights.
“Oh those,” Papa Yaga said, laughing. He leant across the table. “Because the neighbors get too fucking upset if I nail the flayed torsos of my victims up in the lanes where the tourists can see.”
I glanced over at Pasha and just hoped he realized how close he was to getting us decapitated, golden eggs or no golden eggs.
“I’m joking. They’ve been there for years. Some old gamekeeper folklore. Meant to scare away the rest of the moles. Hasn’t fucking worked.”
“Would you like to test the product?” I said, lifting one of the canvas bags into the center of the table.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Papa Yaga said. Several of his men laughed. For a moment I was tempted to follow suit, but kept quiet.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum?” he continued. “I smell the blood of an Englishman? Grind his bones to make my bread?”
I shook my head. Clueless was better than cocky.
He pushed his hand inside the bag, pulling out a lump of the thick white paste. The smell was more subtle now, but still filled the room with the stench of wet hay and clotting. From the center, he dragged out a splinter of bone, a gobbet of muscle still attached.
“We call this Giant’s Dough when we market it to clients. When it has the additions you work so hard to acquire. My little joke.”
Dipping the bone back into the bag he came up with a strand of dirty white Giant’s Dough, placed it in his mouth, and with the tip of his tongue rubbed it into his gums. The whites of his eyes turned autumn leaf russet, fading to the color of stagnant water and dirty syringes. Infected wounds and seeping sores.
I’d never watched anyone use normal white ambergris, never mind the stuff we collected. Drugs weren’t my interest, apart from the money to be made from them. I had no idea how long the effect would last, and glanced across to Pasha who, with a sense of etiquette I’d not seen from him before, shrugged so small it might not have been noticed by any of the guards stood around us.
Something shifted within Papa Yaga, and his eyes returned to their previous grey color. He weighed the bag in his hand.
“How many went into this little mixture?”
“Ten,” Pasha said. “Some still breathing, others not so much. Don’t know if that makes a difference.”
“Can’t taste any as it unwraps inside you. Maybe the odd little gurgle of congealing blood around the edges, but I wouldn’t be where I am today if I was put off by a little congealing blood.”
“We don’t know how much actually gets pushed out between the stones,” I said quickly, making sure we didn’t oversell ourselves.
“Of course,” he said. “I know this isn’t some Cordon Bleu recipe. More a one-pot, cook-it-all, see what comes out at the end.”
“If you need more killing to improve the taste I’m happy to do that for you. Fifteen, twenty. Makes no odds to me.”
There was a manic energy in Pasha’s voice. Looking back I think that was the moment I decided to dissolve our partnership as soon as politic. Papa Yaga glanced over at me for a reaction. I distracted myself by lifting the other three bags onto the table.
“Canvas bags as requested, to avoid contamination,” I said.
Papa Yaga turned and spoke to one of his men who left, ducking under the roller doors. We all sat in silence until he came back with a set of scales and placed them in the middle of the table.
I watched Pasha while they weighed the white ambergris, or Giant’s Dough, or whatever they wanted to call the crushed paste of several acres of English countryside and ten corpses. He couldn’t keep his eyes still, gaze flicking from the piles on the scales to Papa Yaga and his men. There was a hunger there that was going to get us killed if I wasn’t careful. I did not want to die because of his appetites.
One of the men noted down the quantities, did some conversions on an old desktop calculator and showed the total to Papa Yaga, waiting for approval which came with a slight nod.
“Do we get to see how much you’re paying us?” Pasha said. I reached into my pocket for my knife. Maybe if I slit his throat first I might get out myself.
“You worry too much,” Papa Yaga said. “As before, you will be well compensated for your work. I know how specialist your skills are. No need to worry about me conning you. I can pay you a very good rate and still make myself a small fucking fortune. Don’t worry about that, little killing man. Follow me.”
Papa Yaga walked out first, back to us, his men dropping in behind. It took a few moments for my eyes to adapt to the darkness. Until then I followed the sound of his footsteps. We stopped by one of the pontoons, a narrow ladder built into the giant hydraulic foot.
“I don’t like to bring currency outside until it’s leaving my possession,” he said by way of explanation.
He climbed first. I followed. I had the feeling if I let Pasha go next he would get some stupid idea he could take advantage of that turned back. From the top of the dragline’s foot we climbed a second ladder, then a third.
I’m only guessing, but I’m pretty sure when the dragline was tearing millions of years of geology from open cast mines there was no need for a panoramic penthouse.
In the center was a small lounge. What wasn’t covered in leather was coated in chrome. Two young, half-naked models, one male, one female, draped over a white leather sofa the size of a family car.
“Please, take a seat,” Papa Yaga said. He nodded to one of his men who returned a few minutes later with a holdall. I glanced in the top. Stacks of 500 Euro notes bulged against the open zip. I caught Pasha’s eye and got a gut feeling he was going to say something. I shook my head and hoped no one else noticed. Beside me, one of the models smirked.
“That all looks fine,” I said, the need to be somewhere else getting more intense by the minute.
“Another delivery soon?” Papa Yaga said, the glow from the in-floor lighting glittering off his igneous teeth.
“As soon as we can. We try to not harvest the same stone circles too often. We need tragic accidents, not rumors. If there are rumors there won’t be any product.”
“Of course,” Papa Yaga said. “But not too long. I have a lot of buyers waiting.”
* * *
I spent three more nights with Pasha, on the edges of stone circles consuming the land, while he severed throats and ropes. Three seemed like a good number to put distance between the audience at the dragline, while still getting out before Pasha got me killed.
My instincts were right. Each time we went out he got more erratic. More unpredictable. I could tell his attention was elsewhere. If I’d have known where I’d have let the stones take him.
I went to see Papa Yaga in person, because he struck me as a man who believed in etiquette, and explained Pasha would be carrying on with a new partner. Explained I was retiring for family reasons.
“Families can be very problematic in our line of work,” he said, and held out his hand. I moved to Hamburg where I had no family and knew no one.
* * *
They caught me in Munich six months later, grabbing me as I left a small goth club in Kultfabrik. Whatever they injected into my arm cascaded me through a thousand personal hells. It was a long time before I smelt dry ice without checking to see if my skin was being scalded from my face. Waking to find both arms dislocated was a relief.
It was dusk and I was halfway along the dragline boom, legs a meter above the ground
, arms wrenched out of my sockets behind my back. All my weight hung on narrow bracelets of gristle eroded into my wrists. I gritted my teeth and tried to stay still.
“I really appreciated your honesty in coming to speak to me in person, even though you were lying about family. It was an understandable, and acceptable, lie.”
Papa Yaga was below me, sitting on his shooting stick, his tweed jacket thrown across his shoulder.
“If I’d found out my partner was so much of a liability I would have lied for a solution. The better lie would have been: ‘I’m sorry Papa Yaga. My partner had an unfortunate accident where he impaled himself on an iron spike, and as I’m too old in the tooth to work with another partner I wish to retire.’ I’d have tried to persuade you. You would have reluctantly, but politely, declined, and we’d have parted ways to never cross paths again.”
He grabbed my bare foot and massaged the arch with his fingers, a soothing sensation going up my leg.
“I knew you weren’t retiring to look after family. You struck me as far too sensible to work for me and have any relatives. Your ex-colleague, it won’t surprise you to find out, was not as bright. He decided to try and rip me off. Keep the Giant’s Dough for himself and give me some white ambergris with cattle bone pushed in. As if I couldn’t tell the difference. We caught his partner, some junkie amateur, and flayed the blistered skin from him over several days. Pasha must have got wind and ran. We had to pick up some cousin he stupidly visited a couple of months ago. The cousin didn’t know anything.”
Using my bare foot, Papa Yaga slowly spun me around until I faced the main body of the dragline. The figure was pinioned just below the pelvis, steel cable on one side, pulley wheel on the other. Precision-placed to prolong life. The early evening light was too faded to make out to many details. Even over the sound of my own torn tendons I heard the whimpering.
