The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  The incline seemed to flatten out. His descent slowed, and he dropped heavily into a deep pile of straw.

  He sat up and looked around, finding himself in an odd-shaped metal cage whose bars were like a giant rib cage. There was nothing much in there, just a pitcher of water, a hunk of dry bread, and, in a corner, a bucket. Overhead was an enormous vault, a space hollowed directly into solid rock, decorated all the way to the top with symmetrical florets, everything dimly lit by candles of enormous girth.

  The exit doors looked strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast.

  He heard a voice: “They always have to screw with your brain, Michael. Just because it’s the only thing you have that’s actually yours.”

  He saw something moving in the straw at the other end of the cage. A tousled head of hair appeared, and beneath it, a sleepy face and mischievous eyes.

  Ariel!

  The first moments passed in astonished recognition. There was a jolt of recognition as he moved closer to her smell, the shape of her arm and the softness of her neck. He pressed his face into her.

  “You made it, Ariel. I knew you would.”

  “I didn’t exactly make it. They put me here.”

  “We’re here; that’s all that matters.”

  “You soft git.” She stroked his hair, delighted in spite of herself, but also hurried. “I’m sorry but there’s very little time. We have to prepare; we’ll have time to talk another day. Let go of me, let go of your life, Michael. There’s no escape, there’s no way out of this and not even an ending. Soon our little friends above will lay on a procession for us with singing and music,” she said. “They’ll come down here and take us away to the stripping room. Then empty us, hang us up to dry off, roll us up in coffins and leave us for a couple of hundred years. As a special privilege, they said, they’d put us in the same box. Isn’t that touching?” When she saw his horrified face, she added: “Don’t worry. It sounds a hell of a lot worse than it is. To be honest, I was glad to wake up in Purissima’s kitchen sofa. I needed to find you, Michael; I had to talk to you and say sorry. If it hadn’t been for that I’d rather have stayed where I was. In the end that’s the really sad part about maggot people. They find life such a pain. They can’t bring themselves to admit it, but they’d really prefer to be rolled up in a coffin, off and away in their dream worlds. The dutiful ones, like those two fellows you’ve been knocking about with, try to make some kind of coherent ideology of it all… but the bottom line is they can’t wait to get their heads down.”

  Michael felt a sting of pain at the thought of Giacomo and Paolo, their pleasant banter over many a breakfast. He remembered first setting eyes on Giacomo behind the secret door in the priory. His quick and salty wit had given him vital sustenance. In many ways Michael actually loved Giacomo, also his faithful Paolo.

  “You mustn’t be taken in by their humanity, Michael; it’s only skin deep,” said Ariel and gave his hand a little squeeze. “What we have, my darling, is something few others of our kind will ever experience. We love each other; they don’t know what that means.”

  “And that’s another reason for putting us into storage?”

  “Correct. It’s a contributory reason. As far as they’re concerned, this is our chance to have a little chat before we’re put to sleep. Then once they’ve polished off the human race, killed off the cities, and mopped up any remaining strays, they’ll bring us back. Probably they’ll even give us a little pension, enough to take a suite at the Cannes Carlton and drink champagne cocktails for breakfast.” Leaning forward, she whispered, “Until the end of time,” and placed a puckered kiss on the end of his nose. “So that’s the theory. In practice, they forget about you, they always do. The brass plate on your coffin grows dusty; from time to time if you’re lucky some archivist gives it a polish and looks up your name in a book and says ‘Aha’, and you rattle around in the vaults for a few hundred years more and then when your time comes you’re chucked in the maggot tank. Before you know it you’re standing on your own two legs again, wondering what the hell that was all about.” She laughed. “And that’s the only good point about these Gnostic bastards. Suddenly the people who salted you away are also decommissioned. A new generation takes over… with a new set of hang-ups. That means you probably won’t have to deal with the same cunts who gave you a hard time in your last life. Of course you could be unlucky—you could wake up and find the same tossers still running the place.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, “before those candles burn down, let’s give them a real surprise. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Funny.”

  “I did it once before, remember? You told me to do it; you could tell me again.”

  “Michael, it’s time to settle up!” Her green eyes shone with agitation. “You have to understand most maggot people are just slithering sacks with a semi-vegetal brain on top and a gnawing urge to fuck. They couldn’t punch their way out of a paper bag, let alone an underground dungeon. You may not like to hear this, but you’re going to have to face up to it. You’re not so different. And neither am I.”

  32.

  The subterranean Gnostic basilica was filled to bursting with dignitaries watching with outraged disbelief as Cardinal O’Hara, once the most outspoken of all maggot critics, lifted the Holy Grail to his lips and, visibly disgusted, swallowed its squirming contents. The congregation seemed to hold its breath as he struggled against the gagging reflex. The sound of his gulp, with the movement of his Adam’s apple, drew wails from the back pews—where his most dedicated supporters had gathered. When the ceremony was over, the top brass retired to the da Vinci Chambers—a room designed to be an exact replica of the artist’s Last Supper painting, with a long table on a dais at the front. Here sat the replica Apostles, slightly elevated above the lesser ecclesiasts at rough trestle-and-board tables. Bread and wine were served, but it wasn’t quite as impoverished as it seemed; the bread was stuffed with beluga or veal. The wine was sublime, transubstantiation in its own right.

  Not ten minutes into their supper, O’Hara clattered his jeweled goblet and stood up. “May I humbly ask,” he said pompously, “for a few moments of your precious time?” Silence fell in fits and starts. O’Hara looked down on his enemies and bared his teeth in a ferocious, reflective smile. “We all know that in our congregation there has always been a lot of quarrelling between friends. This is inevitable. When people care about things they are always bound to see different solutions… and resolutions…” he blundered.

  “Nicely put, Cardinal,” someone roared.

  There was scattered laughter. Who the heck did this O’Hara shit think he was, coming here and drinking from the Holy Grail and behaving as if he had some sort of authority? O’Hara swallowed hard, looking out over a sea of hostile ecclesiasts nodding and conferring amongst themselves while knocking back huge amounts of red wine. Waiters sprinted round with ten-liter flagons, continuously refilling the carafes on the tables.

  My God, he thought. This is not a Christian congregation; this is something diabolical. I must steel myself. He raised his hand and soldiered on. “The quarrel in our beloved Church has always been this: should we make Eden, or should we pray for it. And the answer, my dear friends, is that… I no longer know.” He raised his hand. “But I will say this…”

  Giacomo stood up abruptly, with a scrape of his heavy chair. “Thank you, Brother O’Hara, for sharing your uncertainties. Now if you wouldn’t mind shutting up for a moment.”

  This time there was a roar of laughter. Then to his right, a bishop from Trieste, in the very action of raising his goblet to his mouth whilst fiercely cackling at Giacomo’s retort, was struck instantly dead. His stare grew glassy as he slumped forward and spilt his wine over the table.

  So silent was the room that, as the wine dripped onto the flagstone floor, each drop seemed like a spurt of blood from a severed artery.

  And yet there was something routine about this death.

  A group of waiters
came running in. By their combined efforts they had soon removed the dead bishop and even wiped the table where his crumbs now seemed an offense against decency.

  Slowly, conversation resumed everywhere; muttered words, small-talk… all trying with every fiber in their beings not to give in to panic.

  Giacomo frowned deeply, lingering on the spot where the bishop had sat alive and well not ten minutes ago. In the last month, he had lost three abbots, one bishop, a cardinal and close to twenty priests in Italy alone.

  No one liked to say so, but the fact was: mortality was back.

  The maggot, once a guarantee of immortality, had become a lottery. Their ranks were being depleted. Maggots were dropping everywhere.

  Giacomo turned to Paolo: “O’Hara’s finished eating. Why not show him round?”

  Paolo wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Absolutely.” Then, turning to O’Hara: “Come on, let’s go.”

  The two clerics set off arm in arm, looking like two friends reminiscing about the good old days.

  Two discreet guards accompanied them.

  “Don’t try anything,” said Paolo. “I’ll blade-bugger you if so much as fart without my say-so.”

  “So this is it, is it?” O’Hara said, looking at Paolo. “You’ll suck my innards out and dump my head in a coffin for five hundred years.”

  “Well, not yet we won’t. You haven’t blossomed yet.”

  “But once I have?”

  “What have you really done to deserve the light? There are others competing for the same privilege, most of them far worthier than you. Particularly now that people are actually dying, we have to weigh up who we should keep. And of course we won’t keep people who make a nuisance of themselves,” said Paolo. “You know what Giacomo’s like. He likes a quiet life, so he can concentrate on recipe research and eating.”

  The two men made their way down a long corridor that reached far into the gloom. O’Hara was doing his best not to look too impressed by the scale of the caverns, which he’d never seen firsthand although of course he’d heard all about them. Instead he took refuge in disapproval. “Who paid for all this?” he said. “It must have swallowed up huge resources over the years.”

  “Oh, we constructed it all with our own hands, and with faith, of course; nothing can be done without that,” said Paolo smugly, although he knew very well how enormous the bills had been since the expansion program.

  “So what’s next? Are you going to frog-march me to the gutting rooms?”

  “I can show them to you,” Paolo offered. “We have time. I was going to check on our protégés, Michael and Ariel, but we can do it afterwards. They’re undergoing self-purification in readiness for enshrinement.”

  “You do have some lovely words to describe disgusting things.”

  33.

  Shadowed by two clinking bodyguards, the two men came down a long concrete corridor more or less like an underground military complex, lit by sodium lights.

  Brother Paolo was still holding his old enemy firmly by the arm.

  “If you’d be kind enough to accompany me this way,” he said, eagerly turning off into an ultra-modern passage, the walls of which were decorated with silver fish moving in highly decorative shoals towards a gilded arch lit by shimmering lights, a sort of imitation of sunlight passing through water: “We commissioned this installation; it was done by a Dane. You know, they really are the best at design—of course she had to be maggotized afterwards to keep her quiet.” Paolo’s grip tightened. “Come on, I’ll show you the new processing center. We’re very proud of it.”

  As they entered an expansive, brightly lit complex, O’Hara felt he had entered a world of fiction—an industrialized, genocidal facility of the spirit.

  There was a good deal of machinery in there: tracks ran beneath the ceiling, with hooks sliding along, locking onto and picking up tubular aluminum chairs lowered by an automated crane.

  A group of naked maggot people on what looked like a train platform were preparing for their imminent retirement. Some were smoking, others embracing or talking emotionally to friends who had come to wave them goodbye from an auditorium to one side. One, probably an Englishman, was calmly leafing through a newspaper while taking long thoughtful swigs from a bottle and puffing on a pipe. Beside him, a woman was undressing and carefully folding her clothes and some other personal effects into a regulation-size case. An orderly behind a counter, having presented her with various documents to sign, attached these to the case and then threw it onto a slow-moving conveyor belt; it passed through a scanning device before exiting through a small gate hung with undulating plastic strips.

  “Now watch,” said Paolo, as the Englishman folded up his newspaper and left it on a table, then eased himself into a vacant chair like a traveler getting into his seat.

  A young priest adjusted his armrests, fixed his head in a clamp, and unceremoniously sprayed his buttocks with a lubricating unction—then joined him in a quick prayer before sending him on his way.

  O’Hara stared with mounting horror.

  The chair drew level with an industrial robot, which swung into action, inserting its long snout through an opening at the base of the chair into the rear end of the passenger, then made a whining sound. As the machine sucked, the man collapsed like a balloon—only the head was unaffected, held in place by rubberized prongs at the top.

  Once extraction was finished—a procedure that took no more than three or four seconds—the robot withdrew its nuzzle. There was another short interval before a green light flashed and an all-clear signal rang out. The machinery jerked into motion again with much clattering of metal.

  At the other end of the production line, the chair slid onto a secondary track. Workers in white overalls unceremoniously unhooked the body-skin and transferred it to what can only be described as wheeled clothes-horse.

  There was one final stage in the operation. The head was tagged through its left ear with a bar-code, then scanned using a small handheld device. Once the wheeled units were fully loaded, they were slowly pushed through vats of heavy-duty moisturizer, then left in a drying room, from where O’Hara heard the whirring of giant fans.

  “This is monstrous,” he whispered, feeling his legs almost giving way beneath him. “I thought I was beyond forgiveness; I see now that I am nowhere near as wicked as…”

  “We can handle up to about two hundred and forty extractions per hour,” said Paolo, a certain pride and professionalism in his voice as he watched the system in action. “We got the top people at Fiat to help us design the process. For now we’re focusing more on extraction than refills—we haven’t re-modernized that stage yet, but eventually we’ll use that cavern over there for it.” He waved his arm towards a large, uneven opening in the rock wall at the far end. “The capital outlay is incredibly costly, so we thought we’d leave it for now. As we won’t be doing much refilling for the next hundred years or so, it wouldn’t be prudent to shell out all that money now. At this stage it’s all about safe storage. We have space for about a million sleepers, and that should do us for now.”

  “And you expect me to go through this. To sit on one of those things and…” O’Hara said.

  Paolo gave him a little pat on the arm. “Don’t worry, you’ll go through it all right,” he said. “We all will. It will be done hygienically and safely and we’ll be brought back when the time is right. See it as a blessing, if you can. Every person who enters this room is one of the chosen.” He sighed, and threw an envious look at the people waiting on the platform. “I’ll have to wait at least a hundred years before I can retire… That’s a day I’m looking forward to enormously.” Then, with a glance at his watch: “We must press on.”

  They returned to the corridor—O’Hara still feeling his legs rather wobbly—and descended a few levels into far gloomier parts of the catacombs, where dungeons were still dungeons, with all the usual attributes such as cobwebs, Gothic columns, and oak doors. They reached the massive doors leading to Micha
el and Ariel’s cell.

  “This area will be preserved for its historical value,” said Paolo. “I expect one day it’ll be a museum of sorts…” He hauled up a sturdy chain fastened in the depths of his pocket, then selected a small key from his burgeoning key ring and opened an electrical cupboard. Inside was a monitor, which he turned on. A high definition black-and-white image showed the cavern within. Using a joystick he rotated the camera, but there was no sign of those within—no sign at all.

  With a frown Paolo punched in a code and pressed a large green button. The doors swung open soundlessly. He went inside for a closer look, but it was empty. He stood thunderstruck for a moment.

  O’Hara inspected the cave, noting the chute coming out of the wall, the rib-shaped cage and the piles of straw. His mood lifted considerably. “There’s nothing lovelier than a prison with broken doors,” he called out gleefully. “Makes an old Paddy like me think he’s still in with a chance, know what I mean?”

  “Shut up, idiot. Let me think.”

  But there wasn’t a great deal of thinking Paolo needed to do. He went back to the electrical cupboard and picked up a telephone.

  Giacomo was sitting at his desk, thoughtfully looking at a custard roly-poly he’d been brought by one of the lay sisters—whose family’s bakery was famous in Rome for its pastries. The custard had just enough solidity to prevent it from oozing, yet enough lightness to avoid lumpiness.

  Beauty walks the razor’s edge, thought Giacomo.

  At this exact moment, the telephone, that ugly shrill modern invention, made its presence felt. Telephones were harbingers of bad news, disaster, and annoyance. He glared for a good while, then snatched it up and spluttered into the receiver: “Yes! What is it?”