Meat-Filled Chapel

BY FRANCIS CROT

Brenda stood in the softly-lit queue, sucking in her lower lip and peering up to the transept, where shadows moved behind a rather perfect Charles Eamer Kempe. There an elfin child perched easily upon His virgin ledge, but at this time of day there was little light to make them glow. Up front, the wafer had billowed, the supplicant found herself poked with a meat bun. The wine scabbed.



The faithful wavered, then slipped diversely forward to see the commotion, the queue disintegrating, but the Church assembling itself in their muttered and sung astonishment and prayer.

Though Brenda was aware that what happened was unparalleled, except perhaps in the early days of the Church, nevertheless she hung back, beckoned - or transfixed, it seemed to her - by whatever little dark triangle scratched against the stained highborn seraphs glass.

As old and young, lay and cleric, thronged in the nave, the large constellation of tapers and candles occupying the chapel all in one instant flared up, as if the building had drawn in breath, though the air was quite dead and close, and dazzlingly sent shadows scuttling into its nooks, then in another darkened so every shadow blackly wavered back over the stones it had covered and father across the walls. There were fifty-three inside the chapel, not counting the useless wizards. Forty-nine of them now thronged in the nave.

Some deep and small part of Brenda cogitated rapidly. It was as though a thought, authentically new, immediately was buried by the several contraries it unfortunately gave rise to. It seemed to her that she yearned to think of incantations, energy, honour, misery, Black Masses, creation, the caress of her eccentric sex, The Consoler, the triangle cut out of his silver tongue. But this other main part of her – this sluggish, rivetted, sick yet calm person, who saw her own hair at her vision's edge, who watched the manta in the half-lit glass, this main part, in ever-improving obedience to her holy and righteous Father, threw out every profane flutter the instant it had form.

Energy, honour, misery. It is some trick, to hesitate, to loiter near to the back, given the Body of the Church – vivified by the Holy Ghost, discrete and distinct in its different members in various times and ages and divided in its distributed receipt of gifts, yet as one certain husk, wherein His Love ever pours, united – began with Abel, the first just man, and given that it will be consummated in the last of the Elect. The triangle withdrew. The lidded mountaineer seemed to have wrenched off His mother’s breast, or else packed a spongy hip flask.

“Sanctus!” reiterated Father Jeremy, who already knew better. “Hallelujah! My brothers and sisters, from the pews all of us can –”

There was a staunch *GLOP* and the altar wine spat a missile out of, it was apparent, membranous clot, falling providentially upon Father Jeremy’s foot, a little sacramental hacky sack ready to go. “Hallelujah,” persisted Father Jeremy glumly. An aroma had arisen. In the ciborium, a sausagey and black puddeny muffin had begun to slop.

Then the widow Mrs. Williamson, who of all the inspired crept into the zone they all exalted littlest by littlest, was beside Brenda, coming past her. Brenda sought Mrs. Williamson’s expression, but could only meet it at an angle, for the woman was engrossed by the marvellous events ahead of them both. Still Brenda could make out, in those offset and darkly-lit looks, what was probably peace and zeal, the bingo-wings of Mrs. Williamson’s highest humour unfurled to their fullest, and this had an awakening effect on Brenda, so that she did not return her gaze to the transept, but fixed it forward, riveted beside Mrs. Williamson’s, and felt for the first time the kind of cloudy joy that had stolen into her own limbs, which dreamily she reined onward, to join those who ecstatically bore witnessed to congealing estuaries of coarse flesh. And Mrs. Williamson, still as agile as she had ever been upon her cemented femoral stem, matched Brenda’s pace. The air was now as though agitated by small insects. It smelled singed, or Mrs. Williamson did.

The meat pumped from the ciborium and the chalice. Mrs. Beckett, keeping an eye on the vicissitudes of thes gibs, stretched her hand into her handbag and begain anxiously to unwrap her untouched lunch of corned beef sandwiches. Meat paving progressed. Toby gazed casually upon squirts of nearly liquid muscle and then was seized by that, as the glass and light and other thing had transfixed Brenda. His heart overflowed with tenderness. A dampness in the air.

Brenda uncertainly sought among the many who sleepstood her amigos’ faces. Fruit pastilles; a wet, black bough. Elisha’s was radiant with joy, song and reproof. Toby's and Corntrough’s were . . . somewhere else, for now, to be seen. Elisha looked pale and rather frightened now. Fifty-one of them, of us, assembled in the brawn’s drainage basin; three frightened by the entrance, the notional meatshed, one of those, him the communion wafer first had touched. Ground wandered into figure. Meat by now had filmed over all the sacraments and was rolling slowly outward from a puddle some four feet long. Strange qualms and misgivings, and what, if Brenda did not take it wrong, felt like xenophobia. Yet there were only a few in the congregation. There! – now Chanique was wrong-footed, and to steady herself put her palm in a griseous creek, and her ducking showed Brenda Corntrough, whose face was darkened, as though he were struggling with a morsel lodged down his throat. The stained glass distinguished its parts somewhat, it turned out its compartments like flaps, what was the sun doing out there? Hideous sunlit numbers. Calf calf calved from a calf floe in a flow of choppy chops. Teddy stretched his hand into his bag as withdrew his mobile, which he waved over the cramming out ham. He turned it to his fellows. The face of the paladin Martin swam through its screen and was ill. Shapes could be perceived in the flesh as in clouds: dogs . . . only dogs. Cartilage’s naiad.

The pressing meat flopped and winced; a vast cephalopod unpacking itself from a I’m On Jesus’s Team lunchbox. Like waves at the sea side in the evening it came except not usurping one another: layering.

When Toby turned his head from the zigzag of mellifluously wiggling faggots his eyes fell upon Brenda. On her lips words were forming which Toby felt sure would begin to recapture the marvellousness of the brute nature afoot, the the butchery food dangled in every wave. Time elapsed without anything like that feat. When Elisha’s voice not Brenda’s did reedily begin an assay which was to have risen ponderously above the dispirited murmur of rote rite and inundation of suet gunk slap, it seemed the container of a death’s head screech, for Corim, the first of the three finally to leave his threshold linger, shrinking aghast into the light, was seized immediately by the arm and not seen again. Gelatin ligaments turned in colon marsh.

It had become clear that the life of those who made to leave was being exacted at the circumference, but that, on the other hand, the enginery of the most profound incongruity which ripened and grew in strength on the altar beside them was as revolted by them as they by It.

The worshippers’ wandering and fiendish glances roved freely about the mass of accumulating muscle subtleified by currents of gristle and embedding flecks of bone like pigment in eye, the productive yet sepulchural force compelling them back, for a norm was made when the first few would not let it flow over them. Corntrough skipped shakily across a purplish-red oxbow lake the size of a child and came beside his chums. Brenda herself moved back from a cut of brook, queerly quivering. It was oozing from its own frayed streaks, like a birch-taught buttock. Martin's foot ploughed into fat sleepless ligaments spurting regurgitated skin and was sucked fast.

But the meat was climbable on, just. Though forcemeat, surely, showing them who was boss, it was not mince: a forest of membranes occupied the slurry, a venous patchwork of ad hoc cauls forever bursting and leaking compartment into compartment and regrowing, diversified moreover according to the paths selected by sick-backboned deltas. There were harder and spongier areas, and Corntrough was treadmilling upon a sluggishly convulsing verge of melted carrion, without sinking too deeply into its gamy flutters. A red rotisserie rolled out for Elisha and she against convention floundered towards the holy articles, tongues of grisly gills sickly nourished by pungent stir cutlets sliding against her shins, still softly singing. Elisha's feet learnt the cadence of the nomadic bleed, and teetering upon the gristlier outpourings in flume she had elected of drainage plasm flop cartilage flume, neared the fountain wherefrom it flowed. But when a wave of thews, nails, spittle, rushing with viscous callous and crested by a plethora of sustaining meat gases swole to her right side and proceeded, Elisha smelling its fretful provision grew giddy and as its diarrhea gristle flushed up her legs and torso she stumbled and slipped, a raising bolus of river hemorrhoids covered her. You may recall Brenda's vegetarianism.

Brenda thought for herself that they would be buried hastily and without ceremony if at all. Elisha's face gasped upwards from the shallots watercourse, laughing up skin cud wall mixed with topple-gush and fitful stagnant continuance nerves. The illness of many lay in the pouring flesh. Chanique knelt by a turning colon marsh for another spate of ill at the meat's inconstant viscous beck.

They looked at the embarrassing bait. They who had reserved the life of the mind for situations of surpassing deadliness, so they thought, surveyed a ground of pig, disarrayed by breakers of fine cartilage flop and rills of rheumy sustenance, and knew themselves to be trapped, maybe doomed, flown with wine and insolence. Their limbs stiffened and their hairs erected, their eyes half shut, and their mouths gaped.

We're Going To Eat You!

BY FRANCIS CROT

So ardently and so eagerly did the one lot go prying meat out of the other lot, and so spirited and wriggle-some were the latter in their reluctance, that amid the frolics points of extraordinary and fell localised stress, like that point where the revenant Missus Williamson lent all her eight stone onto the olecranon fossa of Brenda’s humerus, came frequently into being, and as these little systems discharged themselves, as when Missus Williamson’s smashed hose thwuck'd heavily into Brenda’s forehead and then hip, this or that liberated component, a rib perhaps or an eyeball with a trailing ribbon, regularly would ping in a high arc away from its unfortunate, who knelt and wept from its middle its intestines, for instance, criss-crossing oftentimes aloft with more such morsels, and, indeed, it was just these little impulses, these moments of gore pinging to and fro above the chapel lawn, which sometimes decided other highly-pressurised engagements at the margin, as for example the jolly-hockeysticks SMUCK of a triangular piece of Elisha’s cranium, and its subsequent whizz twixt Henry and wee Marco startled the one without bothering the other, whose childish hands then quickly pliered ribs from him and lit his nerves as they did, such that, taken at an airborne view, the bright lawn about the chapel had the aspect of a touch-me-not, or impatiens bush, whose distended seed pods, if disturbed in one place, may ripely cannonade and crackle left and right and up and down the whole foliate structure, without regard for the artificial membrane of organism, pod setting off pod till the next nervous equilibrium arrives.

So complicatedly elegant – and so laden with humane significance like pain and death – were the forces that vomited and tumbled themselves about the dead things’s feedground, that we can at best make of them a very brief and arbitrary tour.

Congregations boast crazies. Most of these cravens had been among the first fallen, stampeding through the sly slaughter mouth. Henry, a legendary psychopath who always wore his kilt like a true Scotsman so to keep a spare skein-dugh under his foreskin, appreciably reduced their numbers before being clawed and bludgeoned to death. In the corner of her eye – so it seemed to Brenda – it tore off his dick, which was hard with fear, and stabbed him in the eye with it, and his brains and blood landed up Elisha’s vagina, causing her to vomit her unborn child into his pelvic wound, which was unfortunately brimming with piss and shit.

Who loaded the tennis ball machine with black pudding? In that sunlit rift, Brenda had misperceived, and Elisha yet lived. And who were the eight survivors? They were Brenda, Elisha, Toby, Corntrough, Henry McDonagle – no longer, let the foetus have his place – Chanique Akinfemu, Helen Freemantle and Father Jeremy Farrier.

“Oh gosh. We’re not getting out of here in one piece,” said Toby. “Are we?”

“We’ll get out in loads of pieces!” said Brenda, and Toby smiled tolerantly, but took his leave.

The inflamed meat sprouted from every chapel aperture but there ceased, quivering, advancing no further. It was not bashful. “Could I be possibly insane?” Brenda entreated an emo Jesus, “Um. Just because I don’t say anything . . . doesn’t mean I don’t like you . . .” Brenda stared at the pert door and began to trace in it a nebulous logic of Satanic cautery. Brenda determined never to go back there. But flesh-eaters interrupted her reverie, as was becoming more widespread.

Brenda saw a dead man stagger towards Toby, his own headstone (either) held before him. Toby, ever socially awkward, misinterpreting the gesture, leant in, trying to read the worn stone. The rotter flogged him to paste right down to the torso with that immense slab.

A cohort of sandy zombies straightened from where they had fed, along with what they had fed on, and all together staggered and skipped towards Brenda, gesticulating their arms like slave oars in a wilderness, chattering their soaking mouths and braying through the wrecks of their throats. If she fell into the hands of the sinuous, segmented, misshapen men, who were about ten yards away, they would tear a hole in her midriff and eat her. She ran, but where? Arabesques. Helen Freemantle reached the outer gate, and a shoal of hands covered her.

I Have A Baaaaaaad Feeling About This

BY FRANCIS CROT

The gravestone-flogging had driven Toby’s feet into the earth, so his legs and pelvis still sort of stood there cropped with offal. Brenda cleared the wobbling hurdle. A skein of Missus Williamson’s cloudy skin disentangled from Brenda’s hair at the apex of this leap, floating for the briefest instant on a zephyr before smacked by an airborne length of viscera. They fell and they lay, the saddest flag.

Helen Freemantle, a choral scholar from Gonville and Caius, came apart like a blow-up doll full of vomit – no, that’s unfair.

Brenda skidded and, veering right, collided with the bloodsoaked but exultant Elisha. The girls’ arms tangled briefly but compassionately, then, while both quickly checked out the extent of the pocket between them and death, Elisha said, with faint proprietorial strut, “Hell has blown its top.”

“Why don’t they come?” Brenda wondered, looking to the horde of horrors standing at the church’s outer gates.

“They are like sin!” said Elisha, eyes blazing conscientiously, not understanding Brenda but guessing the general topic of concern. “They are one of those wonderful problems which still is there even when you solve it. Watch out!”

Brenda did not know what Elisha had meant either, yet an understanding was that moment formed between them, asymmetrical, yet in all its aspects to do with the hideous timidity, now, of any overly-solicitious self-expression. As for Corntrough, there was force sufficient, as his timid heart exploded, to send ribs out like the splayed, nervous fingers of a crap shooter.

Like fear – that’s how the feeling felt to Brenda. The emotion was probably actually just “sports.” Her sweat covered her. Within her narrow and God-given compass she and Brenda were libertines. She had kicked off her blood-spattered harlequin green La Senza slippers and went sticky bare-footed on the soft lawn. Who could have foreseen it after all. Elisha was in trainers, the triple knots of their neat bows for once vindicated, the socks down.

She did her best to assimilate the morning’s proceedings. The horde at the outer gate, Brenda had tried to say, looked nebulously different. Indeed little Helen ended her fine run when she mistook them for helpful. Brenda had witnessed Helen’s dip in the barracuda tank in her protective “meat” suit, and had got to thinking. But Elisha was cursed like all Leftists with powerlessness in making usefully nuanced discriminations among the terrible Satanic cannibals who preyed arbitrarily upon her and other screaming people. Henry wildly tore off Father Jeremy’s arms.

“There!” said Elisha.

Through the necromantic delirium the girls began a tactical trot. “Not something I did wrong?” Brenda blurted. She eyed uncertainly the frayed cemetary towards which they were shepherded. They would be slowed, crossing the hideous vacant earth. “In the service? Come this way –”

“Oh yeah,” said Elisha, with restless gloat, “like I really think that’s what God is telling us, Brenda! Get with the programme!”

“Fair play. Look out! Let’s try and go past – they’ve eaten Chanique now, or as much of her as they can stomach.”

To their left Father Jeremy roared and headbutted the freak – something of a freak himself. It drove its weed whackers deep into his stomach, yet somehow he freed himself and began to run towards the girls, more of the horde bearing down on him.

“Oh my gosh, we actually lived to see the Day of Judgement. Though they’re all dead and they’re like, hey whatever! ... we'll come!”

“Um, by the way your face called, Elisha? It wants its left side back.”

Elisha tossed back her braids of blood and laughed. Like fear, this feeling felt to Brenda, but in her private understanding with Elisha, that fear felt altered.

This fear was not wretchedness, fault and sin; it was not an itinerary of identifications with the alien, the counterfeit, and the obsolete or antique; it was not, as hitherto it had so often been, fear finely, irreversibly inmixed with self-loathing. It rather was the bloody and zephyr’d medium through which they two moved. It was a pleasant day.

Was it wrong, thus to flee? Could the Lord have planned them as snacks? They needed pastoral guidance!

“Oh God . . . please God . . . please please, Jesus, don’t let him . . . oh God, please stop him! Girls! Girls! Oh God! Please someone stop him!”