(Originally published in The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror.)
Broken feathers slid out of pinioned songbirds in the hawthorn hedge above me, falling as rotted grey rain. The ditch was not the dirtiest place I’d hidden myself in my life, but it was by far the most unpleasant. I knelt on sun-faded crisp packets, crushing down festering fur and hollow bones that snapped as I shuffled around and tried to get comfortable.
Pasha rested forward on the ditch edge, staring through a set of night vision goggles into the field beyond. Grains of silt and clay clods smeared across his cheeks as they forced their way past, dragged upward and out of sight. Out of habit I reached down and checked the drab coloured climbing rope around my waist, fingers tracing the knots like a rosary.
“Four other teams around the edge, and one in the fox covert on the far side of the stone circle,” he said, not bothering to quieten his voice. Over the sound of sandstone grinding against sandstone we barely heard each other speak.
“Are you going for all of them?” I asked, leaning close.
He grinned, rubbing his face to smudge more dirt across his skin, and pulled out the machete from inside his jacket.
“Every single one.”
He pushed himself out of the back of the hedge, using his rope to help him gain a solid footing on the convulsing soil.
The standing stones had always been teeth. We did not see the jaws until they started chewing the earth from under our feet and tyres. From underneath our towns. All across the country the landscape was eating itself, the topsoil itself digested. If you stilled yourself and watched the fields for long enough it seemed the plough furrows themselves were being torn from the land. Branches, hay bales, empty fertiliser sacks, old farm machinery, and dead sheep. Anything too immobile to resist the gnawing of the stone circles was ground to paste and swallowed down hollow, echoing throats. Some of the masticated substance leaked out, pressed between millstone grit incisors to dry on the exposed sun-beaten rock. White ambergris was the popular name. For those brave enough to risk their lives collecting it from between the crushing orthostats, it was worth a lot of money. Feed a family for months. Much more than whale vomit. Our client’s taste, however, was a little bit richer.
Pasha knew his work. I did not hear him slicing through the safety ropes of the rival collectors, fibres 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 freaked him out. The collection. 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 cut-throat 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 snagging 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. Then, when they did not come back, they tried drones. There were rumours the operators never recovered from what they saw on their monitors. I tried not to listen to rumours. They slowed you down.
In an hour I’d worked my way around one side, back to the centre, 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, as I 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 storeys 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 a 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 smear us to bone meal.
We stayed still. Footsteps rattled down the outside of the dragline until five men stood in front of us. The bodyguards 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 uppermost 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 gods 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 neighbours 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 realised 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 centre 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 centre 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 colour 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 anyone of the guards stood around us.
Something shifted within Papa Yaga, and his eyes returned to their previous grey colour. 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 your employee 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 centre 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 rumours. If there are rumours 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 metre 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 too many details. Even over the sound of my own torn tendons I heard the whimpering.
“It’s rare theses day I have a reason to fire up this old darling. I felt finding your ex-colleague’s cousin justified the cost in electricity.”
The dragline came alive. Vibrations from the engine sent tears further into my tendons. I screamed despite myself. Above me, steel cable rattled against metal guides then started to move. The cousin was dragged further into the crush of the pulley, hoist ropes resisting the blockage.
Papa Yaga held me.
“Don’t close your eyes or look away. I’ll cut your eyelids off myself.”
The air filled with the stench of friction, until momentum eroded through the cousin’s pelvis. The two halves of torso tumbled into a patch of corn stubble, plumes of steam rising as the last of the body heat hit the cold air.
“If you’re amiable, I would like you to track down your ex-colleague and give me the address. Then we really will never have to see each other again.”
If this was a film I would have asked, “And if I don’t?” He’d have tortured me in increasingly inventive ways. It wasn’t a film, and I had every intention of doing this last bit of dirty work for Papa Yaga. It wasn’t like I had any lasting loyalty to Pasha.
Over the next few hours they gave me a few more scars, just to make sure I understood my place in the plan, but all the while they seemed almost apologetic.
Another syringe finished me off. When I woke I was in a nice, anonymous medical facility overlooking some rolling moorland. I was sure the purple heather was dancing and I couldn’t help wondering where the nearest stone circle was, or how long it would be before the walls would be crushed to splinters between the orthostats molars.
I don’t know what worried me more. Papa Yaga suspending me until my shoulders tore out of their sockets, or paying for the best healthcare money could buy to patch me up before I did his hunting for him.
I lost track of how many days I spent in that private room. At some nod from the consultant I was dressed in my own clothes, bundled into a van and dumped into the nearest town, a mobile in my pocket with a single phone number in the contacts.
•••
Addicts are creatures of habit. Goes with the territory. Around other people Pasha was always too keen to impress to give any truths away. The truth was too mundane. He gave up trying with me a long time ago, and had slipped into his natural accent several times without realising. Specific enough to identify his home town, if you paid attention. Other occasions he talked about a club night here, or a landmark there. Enough detail to confirm my suspicions.
The town was small and too many people knew each other’s business for Pasha’s whereabouts to stay hidden for long. He’d splashed around stolen cash to try and find a hiding place, and I splashed around my own to find him.
The squat was on the edge of town. A large house, insides gutted by fire. Recent enough for the stonework to be blackened with soot, and the air still thick enough with ash to stick in my throat. The people living there didn’t notice. They didn’t notice me. They didn’t notice what week it was. A bit of bad air wasn’t going to bother them.
I found Pasha in the basement. Seeing his silhouette I thought he was praying, knelt in the far corner, away from the worst of the leaking pipes dripping verdigris water into stinking pools on the stone flags. The damp made my wrists ache, and I rubbed the still raw skin to ease the pain.
I thought about saying his name, but he was always faster than me. We were far beyond trust and loyalty now.
At first I thought the noise was a wasp nest in the room somewhere. The sound of constant chewing and tearing. I stilled my breath and listened. The grinding sounded too familiar. A memory of dead songbirds and decaying rubbish came back. I turned on the torch.
I don’t know how much Giant’s Dough Pasha had used. From the look of him I guessed we were talking kilos.
All his teeth had turned to stone, erupted vertically from his upturned face, and started grinding against each other. His skin was split by needle thin rips. Inch by inch, fat and capillaries were dragged over the tiny menhirs and ground to paste. Around his neck wet muscle fibres were exposed, stretched taut as they too were dragged upward to be crushed and gnawed.
I shone the beam of light into Pasha’s face. His eyes were open, staring straight up at the ceiling. Feldspar glittered in his pupils. Clear gelatine seeped over his mineralised jaws and down his torn cheeks.
Wrapping my jacket around my hand I rolled up Pasha’s trouser leg. Underneath all the dried blood it was impossible to tell where his ankle ended and the flagstones began. I dialled the number and waited for the call to connect.
•••
Papa Yaga came into the basement by himself while his private army cleared the rest of the building.
I stood up from where I’d sat waiting on the damp steps.
“Weren’t you worried it was a trap?”
He just smiled, and even in the dark I saw his teeth glitter.
“Where is he?”
I took him over into the corner and turned the torch on Pasha, the chewing loud enough to drown out the sound of leaking pipes and footsteps on the floor above. He ran a finger over Pasha’s face, collected a nail full of the pale gel, and rubbed it into his gums. Reaching out, he steadied himself against the wall.
A woman came down the stairs, a chainsaw in her gloved hands.
“You okay, Papa?” she said, looking at me and placing the saw on the basement floor.
“I’m fine. You won’t need that. Call our land agent and have him buy this building. When you’ve done that, bring our guests from the holding cells. As many as you think this place can hold,” he paused, and nodded toward the stairs. “Bring down those individuals you found in the rest of the house. Let’s give them a purpose in life. Also, bring our entire stock of Giant’s Dough down here.”
“Everything is already on contract and packaged to go out,” she said, still looking at me, uncomfortable having this conversation in front of a witness. I knew I was uncomfortable being a witness to them having this conversation.
“Take samples of the white ambergris dribbling from that traitorous fuck in the corner, and get them out to our clients in the hour. First though, make sure we have the deeds to this building.”
The woman nodded and picked up the saw, leaving me alone in the cellar with Papa Yaga, and the constant sound of stone teeth grinding skin to paste.
“I’m sure you knew you weren’t getting out of this room alive,” Papa Yaga said, reaching out to take my hands in his. They felt warm and soft. Expensive. He massaged the back of my knuckles and leant in until his lips were against my ears. Peppermint on his breath stung my recently healed scars. “I hadn’t decided whether to let my people take turns on you, or cut you up and feed you to our little crushing circle of stones in the corner. But considering the amount of money your ex-friend is going to make for me I’m giving you one chance to fucking run.”
I looked at Pasha, now more self-consuming geology than man, and I did exactly what Papa Yaga suggested. I fucking ran.
