My wife used to work opposite an abattoir, and every time I picked her up from work I used to try and think of a story I could set in one. Of course, it had to be something horrific, hence...

Chickenlights

I am a slaughterer. A butcher. A killer of beasts. But not only beasts. I have murdered in my time at the abattoir. No, murder is too strong a word. Manslaughter suits better. But then they weren’t altogether men, where they?

-oOo-

Most people remember –and yes, probably with a shudder–the cold of ’04 for the snow that smothered the country weeks on end, causing untold chaos and hardship. I recall it too, of course, but with thanks as temperatures rose with the blizzards. Only slightly, admittedly, and still remaining below freezing, but it was enough. Enough to let them pass on.

It was the weather prior to the snow that makes me shudder.

Early January of that year brought a cold more intense than most had ever experienced. Even the abattoir’s freezers somehow felt warm in comparison – perhaps because theirs was a manufactured cold governed by stats and heat exchangers, whereas the weather was uncontrollable, wild, and all the more terrible for it. Days and nights were things of crystal. All surfaces were hard, all edges razor-sharp. Objects stood in sharp relief to their neighbours, separate and alone without the connectivity even a vestige of heat somehow lends.

The most basic functions of life were threatened. Breathing was done through scarves to lessen the ache of lungs-full of frozen air; blood abandoned the extremities to concentrate around the body’s vital processes, leaving toes, fingers and noses detached in every respect except actuality; bones throbbed at the marrow.

And the frost – so thick it may as well have been snow. But whereas snow could be held back by wall and roof, frost coated everything, insidiously reaching where its cousin could not. Only direct sunlight banished it. During the sharp days I watched it creep around my shed, crowding the bright, slowly-moving beams from the grimy skylights where they hit concrete floor and ceramic tile, hustling them away so the glittering sheen could be all-pervading once more.

Warmth was sought everywhere, and at every opportunity. The few portable heaters the abattoir possessed had, of course, gone up to management, leaving us with the hot water geyser in the smoke room and the animals we slaughtered. Those that worked in the pens amongst the sheep, cattle, and swine, were the luckiest. Condensed sweat, fetid breath, warm dung and urine, and the heat generated by hundreds of terrified hearts bursting with the knowledge of imminent death, were enough to thin the frost and curb the air’s bite. Those of the butchering sheds made more desperate stands against the cold. Disembowelments became lengthier processes than ever in warmer seasons as hands were thrust amongst slippery lungs and intestines, relishing the last body-heat before it steamed away. And the lucky sods in the skinning shed sported new woollen cloaks every day of the week.

My own department had none of these luxuries. I was overlooker at what was commonly called the covered wagons shed, but officially known as Governmental Overflow Facility, Number One. And our charges’ physiology varied too much to be a reliable source of heat.

-oOo-

It was the third of the month and the day shift was over. My workers had left for the night after hosing down their benches, blocks, racks, restraining hooks, knives and saws. I slid the shed’s door closed, grunting as I forced it through the thick, near-frozen grease of its runners, my mind full of the sausages and mash I had planned for tea. In the already dark yard, beneath the only working sodium floodlight, a flatbed truck idled contentedly – the whirring fans of its heater audible even above the engine. In its cab were four governmental fitters waiting patiently for me to leave in order to continue the commissioning of a new automated slaughtering mechanism. They were miserable bastards to a man – any attempted banter had only resulted in witheringly polite smiles government-types affect when a member of the lowly public addresses them. They were fitters, for God’s sake! Not secret bloody agents!

There came a sudden, rather startling shout from the poultry shed at the other side of the yard. A figure I recognised only through his voice –silhouetted as he was by the mercury glare from the open shed doors– was beckoning me over. It was old Curried Colin, night overlooker at poultry. “They’ve come back,” he shouted. “The chickenlights are back!”

-oOo-

The year before had seen its own cold snap, though during mid December this time and nothing like as long or intense as ‘04’s. It was then that Curried Colin discovered the chickenlights. Hundreds of thousands of birds had been processed that week in the Christmas run-up, and as Colin switched off his shed’s lighting early Sunday morning –the only production-less day– he saw the residue of such slaughter.

During that summer an automated system had been installed. The heart of this complex mechanism of hoops and conveyances was a v-shaped decapitation blade, and it was here that the chickenlights made themselves manifest as a scintillating blue glow.

It was just visible from the door, and, on closer inspection, was revealed to consist of a mass of crawling pin-prick lights that writhed and flitted randomly and almost hypnotically. There was no sound, no smell, and no feeling as Curried Colin’s hand –once he had plucked up the necessary courage– passed through the glow without sensation.

That day the weather changed, bringing cloud and cold rain. When Colin returned for Monday’s night shift the lights had gone. Apart from, I think, his wife, I was the only other he told about them. “You read all those ghost books,” he said, “These other bastards wouldn’t give a shit ‘cause it isn’t paying their wages to look at pretty lights. But you’ve got some culture to you. You’d appreciate them.”

I would say I had culture enough to know I wasn’t cultured (how could such a person be working in an abattoir?), but his words warmed me nevertheless.

-oOo-

Over the next year, usually whenever he came across me reading, Colin reminisced about his lights and we speculated over what they might have been, without conclusion. Personally I thought he’d been at an early Christmas bottle of port, but I was willing, in my vanity, to entertain the old fool if he thought I was cultured.

Yet here he was, yelling over the darkened yard to me: “The chickenlights are back!”

I trotted over. Before I was within ten foot of him I got a whiff of his breath. “Jalfrezi tonight, Colin?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” he grinned, “Chicken Jalfrezi! You’ve got a good nose, lad.” Colin ate a different curry every evening. He ushered me into the blazing white light of his shed.

The poultry shed is the noisiest in the abattoir. Just within its main entrance, along the left-hand wall, is the storage battery – racked crates packed with birds pecking at and shitting over one-another; relentlessly squawking and screeching at headache-inducing volume. Here a pair “hangers” select birds to depend them by the neck from constantly moving hoops for transportation into the plucking tunnel, their indignant cries joined with the squeaks and rattles of the mechanism. From the tunnel they emerge clucking or quacking in shock and dismay at their new comical appearance, bouncing like so many bags of water as they are carried on to the v-shaped blades. If they are lucky and the blades sharp, their heads will be cleanly sliced off just before the weight of their body is taken by conveyor up to the first floor gutting and packaging rooms. The unlucky ones? The ones that suffer blunted blades? Their heads are more torn from their bodies than sliced. It’s surprising how much a bird can scream before its throat gets stretched beyond use.

Then there’s the smell. To me and my, ah, accustomed nose, it’s merely a little musty. However, I’ve seen visitors and new employees, who managed to keep their breakfasts within them whilst touring the other sheds, puke copiously after only a few minutes of poultry miasma. There is something peculiarly other to the combined stink of feathers, guano, and guts; something almost alien that certainly isn’t present when slaughtering pigs, cows, sheep, or even my own concerns at covered wagons. Perhaps it’s a case of mammalian sensibilities –I won’t say sympathies– clashing with the avian? Even reptile?

Curried Colin directed me to a group of his workers gathered around the decapitation blades. As we approached they grumbled about lost bonuses. Colin attempted cheerful pacification, “We won’t be a minute. My mate here just wants a look.” Which, of course, caused every face to turn towards me in accusation. “Someone turn off the lights.”

For a moment no-one complied, then with a muttered, “Ah, come on. Sooner we let them look, sooner we can get our bonus back on fucking track,” a switch clicked and contactors clunked open.

For a moment there was silence as the sudden darkness cowed the poultry in the racks. My eyes adjusted to a gloom alleviated only by extant lighting in other parts of the shed. Then, as Colin whispered, “Look at the blades – it’s brighter than last year,” the birds’ usual clamour abruptly resumed as if another switch had been flicked.

There it was – a glittering ball of pulsing azure, its heart bright as a candle-flame, fading beyond perception at six inches. Again it encompassed the decapitation blades (bloody and unchanged since last shift), and bobbed ever-so gently.

“My God, Colin,” I said, “I thought you were taking the piss.”

A hand thumped my back in the dark, and Colin’s dim presence at my side replied, “Not me, matey! ‘Ave a closer look.”

The other workers shuffled aside at our approach, grumbling again as they jostled one-another in the dark, “Fucking Health ‘n’ Safety issues ‘ere, you know.” But they presently became quiet – spellbound in spite of themselves.

Closer inspection revealed the globe consisted of billions of pin-prick lights that darted, danced, and merged –like Colin had said of last year’s phenomenon– almost hypnotically. Occasional specks of green and red moved at a statelier pace than the blue majority. I looked at Colin, and realised that, for all the apparent glow of the lights, none was reflected back from adjacent surfaces – I could hardly see his face. Mystified, I returned my attention to the sphere.

So absorbed was I that a sudden shout of, “Alright, you’ve seen them now. Switch the bloody lights back on. Colin, we’ve got fuckin’ bonuses to make!” and a simultaneous fluorescent blaze actually made me jump.

The chickenlights were rendered invisible.

Colin was beaming. “Beautiful, aren’t they, matey? And look down there.”

He indicated a bin beneath the blades. I bent to inspect it. At first I only saw –predictably– chicken heads. Uniformly gaping beaks exposing rigid red tongues; eyes seemingly glittering with life but actually glazed with rime; and all frozen into a single mass like a modern arts sculpture. Then, with a wince of unease, I saw just how wide the beaks gaped. They were open to the point were they actually split at the hinge, and in no few cases beyond even this to near-bisection of the skull.

Then, impossibly, there was movement. A head at the top of the pile twitched. There came a sharp, crack!, just audible over poultry racks, and a frozen red tongue was propelled two inches into the air before skittering over the icy mass and becoming lodged in a bloody stump.

“It’s the chickenlights making them move, matey!” Digesting Jalfrezi wafted over me as Colin bent closer to make himself heard over the clamour of the now-operating conveyer mechanism, “I think they’re souls. Chickens’ souls. And turkeys’, ducks, geese – whatever we kill here. I think the cold traps them on... on this plane! They can’t pass on!” He proudly emphasised the words, no doubt thinking they would resonate with one of my high-brow reading. “They’re trapped and trying to get out, so they move into whatever’s nearest. Like them heads. An’ the longer the cold and the processing goes on, the stronger, more concentrated, they get. Thousands o’ birds get killed on them blades, Matey, thousands at the exact same place.”

-oOo-

On the short bus-ride home, I considered the phenomenon.

Was Curry Colin’s theory right? Where the lights souls? They were certainly something – everyone could see them. And yet the light they produced did not reflect from any surface, only our eyes registered it. Physically impossible, surely? Like animated decapitated heads.

Accepting we had seen something impossible, something on a level beyond science, could we not say it was spiritual?

Christ, I sound like a priest.

What of other animals? If it was deep cold that somehow stopped the souls “passing on,” what about other deaths occurring during this weather? Perhaps –as Wise Curried Colin had hinted– it was the fact that the chickens’ deaths had occurred at the same place: the decapitation blades. The souls congregated around that point, becoming denser and denser until they impinged on the physical world. Other deaths were dispersed and did not congregate in the same manner.

Where there chickenlights at other poultry sheds across the country while this demon cold continued?

-oOo-

Over the next couple of days Colin kept me informed. During breaks to avoid his workforce’s irritation, he regularly switched off the shed’s lights and studied the spectral globe. “It’s still bloody growing – big as medicine ball now. And I can’t let the head bin get more than half full – they jump about like bloody popcorn!”

Towards the end of the week there was unease in his voice. “It’s a fucking beach ball now, matey. The blades, too – I have to change them every break now. They’re not blunt, they’re bent. Chickenlights are bending them. And you want to see the conveyer shake when the birds come up. They’re getting strong, matey. Bloody strong.”

On Saturday evening (overtime for me – government’s been busy), Colin announced that he had brought a gas heater from home. “I’m freeing them. Dunno what’s going to happen if they just keep growing. Don’t think I want to know, either. I’m going to let them pass on.”

Not for the first time I suggested contacting the press, but Colin would have nothing of it. He was of the firm belief that doing so would be the start of something fundamentally wrong, culminating in the involvement of religious nutters, cultists, and, worst of all, scientists and their inevitable experiments (unspoken was the company policy that no employees were to contact the press concerning any abattoir matters – the lucrative covered wagons contract was at risk if we did).

Like I’ve said: Wise Colin.

-oOo-

Sunday morning found him Dead Colin.

During the final break of the night shift he had gone to free his lights. He wasn’t seen until two hours later when gutting on the first floor had complained as to the lack of produce coming up. His body was found slumped beneath a pile of headless, blood-sprayed chickens. The forked decapitation blades were embedded in his neck – seemingly snapped off in a tumble perhaps brought on by a dizzy spell (something nobody had known Colin suffered from… but he was old, wasn’t he?). The gas heater stood nearby, on full blast.

Monday, after his body had been transported to the mortuary, I, and his workforce, with a palpable ritual solemnity, darkened his shed again.

The chickenlights had gone – passed over with the help of Colin’s heater.

-oOo-

In the hills above the abattoir is a large governmental facility. I say large, I’ve never actually seen the place, but sometimes, on cloudy nights, the sky above it is lit with fantastic displays of reflected light more far-reaching than any football stadium’s. What’s more, it produces a great amount of waste – a lot of which I have seen.

The facility, amongst other things, problematically built infantry. It was something to do with “balancing the matrix,” as their drivers told us, because when it’s unbalanced –or whatever– mistakes got made.

And the abattoir was ideally situated to dispose of those mistakes. The contract almost doubled the profits of conventional slaughter – not because of work done, but due to the monetary gag swearing management to secrecy and putting jobs at risk were us lowly employees ever to blab.

During ’04’s summer the facility’s output skyrocketed. The covered wagons arrived twice daily; and for every one entering our yard another continued past – evidently production methods were improving.

The increase prompted the government to install the automated mechanism in my shed. Three days after Curried Collin’s death, we received a demonstration in its use by one of its junior designers.

“Well,” he hastened to add after so introducing himself, “Not designer as such. That was done by the new Manchester computer they’ve built. We just prompted it in the right directions. And it didn’t need much prompting. Scary place, the future.”

My workforce looked at each other bemusedly. I smiled good-naturedly. The man’s hair was a tangle of curly, greasy black; he sported bottle-bottom glasses that continuously slipped down his nose; and, to top it off, wore a stained white coat. Government types and their delusions of grandeur! MI5 fitters and mad scientist bloody designers!

“Right, where’s the ‘On’ switch? Ha-ha. Oh, here it is.”

The system rumbled and rattled into life.

“From now on all arriving containers are specially adapted. The driver just backs up and a crane pops them into place at the door. There’s one there now, isn’t there? Isn’t there? Good. Just follow the numbers on the instruction panel here. ‘Nought’ is for the crane. That’s done. Now, ‘One’ for the doors. Who wants to press it? You? Come on, then. That’s it, very good. See how easy it is? Now for those, erm, what? Clients? Ha ha. Yes. For those clients that can’t make it in themselves, or aren’t inclined to, we have these automated prodders and claws. Just press ‘sub-One’ to activate – they decide themselves how to proceed. In this case he’s coming in quite happily isn’t he? He’s… My God! That’s monstrous!”

Somebody sniggered. The designer pushed his glasses back up his nose and collected himself. “Sorry. I fed the pictures into the computer too – should have known what to expect. Anyways. Onto the conveyer belt… More prodders and claws. Poisons can be administered here if necessary… If you think they need quieting down… And if you think they’ll have any effect, I suppose. On to the table, where –as you see– clamps fix on wherever they can and our little beastie is dragged down… My, he’s a fighter, isn’t he? …Down, like so. The whole thing is perfectly adaptable to whatever comes through the doors, and rumour has it that there’s going to be a lot coming through those doors, gentlemen… Oh, sorry, ladies too. You all look… Now, what stage are we at? Four? Who wants the honours? Perhaps your overlooker?

I stepped forward. The designer was beaming. I pressed the indicated button, marked, “Four: Sectioning.”

Up above the large round table on which our “client” lay pinned and keening in what may have been distress, a roller began to unwind a barely visible mesh of wire. Once it covered the table’s area it rapidly descended.

“Monofilament,” said the designer as we watched, “Cut almost anything.”

And it did.

For a moment we were all quiet, looking at the six-inch sections of greasy flesh –no blood in this particular one– that still conformed to the “client’s” form. “‘Five’ activates the bin paddles, then it’s wheeled off to the incinerator. Any questions?”

Malcolm, an executioner who spent far too much time polishing his slug gun, asked, “Where’s the fun in that?”

-oOo-

The trucks came constantly twice daily now, with an occasional third or even forth. The news was full of impending war. Relations Breaking Down. Ambassadors Sent Home. Loyalties Declared. And we at the abattoir were proud to Do Our Bit to feed the nation and clean up after its guardian.

The automated mechanism worked perfectly. No matter the form of our clients (what a wonderful euphemism that is), it dealt with them economically and quickly. It was inevitable, then, that my workforce began to predict job cuts. A day’s slaughter could be carried out by one man – only cleaning the mechanism took more. But I told them they had no worries. When the war starts the facility would go into overdrive, which of course meant we’d go into overdrive. This pleased them, and every morning I would get hopeful rumours repeated to me from the media, and conjecture over who would get what position when covered wagons went twenty-four hours.

It was one Monday morning in the last week of January that our version of Curried Collin’s chickenlights announced its infinitely more powerful presence.

I know you, reading this, would have been waiting for just such a statement. You knew something was going to happen in my shed. You extrapolated, didn’t you? And you wonder why I didn’t suspect the possibility then. Well, truth is I did harbour misgivings, but denied them when I considered the assumption that Collin’s chickenlights were caused by an amalgamation of souls. What soul could the vat-creations of a governmental war facility possibly possess? They were made things, constructs. Not conscious products of evolution.

Those were my thoughts then. Recently some explanation for the following events came to light. War now rages, and patriotism is rammed down our throats. Yet this doesn’t stop alleged atrocities being investigated – we are, after all, a civilised country.

During ’03 and ‘04, inmates from high security prisons were going missing. Not escaping, simply disappearing from His Majesty’s Convenience.

They were being taken to the governmental facility in the hills above the abattoir, to provide the matrix for successful troop production.

We have been killing people and their bad copies. Or what was left of them once the scientists finished their fucking experiments and processings.

And how much more powerful do you think a person’s soul is compared to a bloody chicken’s?

-oOo-

As I said, Monday morning.

For the first time in weeks, the sky was cloudy. The weather had finally turned and heavy snow was forecast – the terrible bite of the air was gone. Sliding the door to covered wagons aside I discovered my shed was still dark. Ordinarily I was the last to arrive, having been up to management for the day’s timetable. My workforce should have been preparing for the shift (which, since the introduction of the mechanism, basically meant putting the kettle on).

I stepped inside, reaching for the bank of switches.

My hand never touched them, as, with a screech, the door slammed shut and the lights operated themselves – all shining blindingly and directly upon me.

Nothing in covered wagons was where it should be.

The automated slaughtering mechanism had moved. Its entrance tunnel was no longer around the bay where the wagons deposited their loads, but around the actual entrance to the shed.

I turned, clawing at the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I looked up. One of the mechanism’s prodding arms held it shut.

A sharp dig in my ribs told me another was about its designed task. A sharp whack! on the nape of my neck informed me it was not to be ignored. I stumbled forwards, pleading with the mechanism, apologising to it. But the arm kept up its beating, driving me on. It was joined by others, not all ending in clubs. Syringes sucked and plunged spasmodically (and I thanked God that we had never as yet had reason to fill the mechanism’s poison reservoirs), stabbing shallowly with thick needles.

Soon I was bruised and bloody, hunched over in instinctive protection of my head and torso, stumbling forwards. My clothes were torn to shreds and I began to steam in the cold, the moisture easily visible in the glare concentrated upon me.

I collapsed. Let the blows rain down. I knew what was at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t going any farther. Surely someone had heard my screams?

But screams and an abattoir go together. And covered wagons produced lots of different screams.

The floor lurched. I was on the fucking conveyer belt!

Frantically I tried to scramble to solid ground, but the blows and stabs were overwhelming. I was forced on.

Simultaneously the lights pivoted from me and flooded my dreaded destination.

I closed my eyes, but not before I noticed the smears of bright, fresh red on the sectioning table. I screamed again.

And suddenly the beating stopped. Was this a reprieve? Was I to be spared the mesh?

But no, the conveyer belt was still moving. I opened my eyes for an instant to see handling arms reaching for me.

Rapidly, but almost gently, I was laid out spread-eagled on the slippery table. I screamed continuously now, mind overloaded with terror. But the process continued, as I knew it must.

Something fumbled at my face. Ice-cold metal fingers prised my eyes open, clamped my head in place. I watched the mesh unroll.

From somewhere behind I heard the incinerator roar, gas-boosted in preparation for the chunks of me soon to be tipped into it.

I watched the mesh descend, oh-so slowly, the malevolent souls operating, possessing it, revelling in my absolute horror. It was inches above me now… Sixteenth’s of an inch…

It touched my nose. Pressed slowly in. Cut.

Blood spurted over my face, washed into my eyes. The pain, however, was all but cancelled by my previous injuries. The cold wire now tickled my forehead, began to cut into my Wellingtons…

And went no further.

For a full minute I lay there, actually shouting to the mechanism to finish the job, wanting death’s release. There came a hiss, a whine. Motors ran down. Pneumatics eased. The fingers at my eyes slackened, fell aside. I could blink the blood away.

The fail-safe of the mesh kicked in with the loss of power. It rose.

The shed’s lights suddenly fell back to their normal positions, chains clattering.

Up through a skylight and against the blackened brickwork of the incinerator, as my screams finally evolved into actual words, I watched flakes of snow softly fall.

The slight increase in temperature had been enough to allow the vengeful souls their escape.

-oOo-

Covered wagons has been closed down, the mechanism dismantled. The troop construction process has been perfected and moved to factories in the Yorkshire Dales where they churn them out by the thousands.

Above the facility the night sky continues to flare with strange lights…

There were never any other reported “incidents” at other abattoirs, and now I think I know why. It wasn’t just a new army being constructed by those at the facility – they also made the first forays into the new dimensional shield technologies beginning to envelop our cities. Judging by the many reported incidents of peculiarities about the grounding pylons of these almost magical shields, isn’t it likely the abattoir’s location caused it to suffer similarly and so helped engender events?

Inquiries into my workmates’ deaths were brief, the official explanation the all-embracing “Freak Accident.” I wasn’t even submitted for psychiatric help, let alone accused of murder. In fact I am now deputy manager at the abattoir, after a surprisingly swift series of promotions (and yes, during the cold months I ensure heaters are distributed fairly).

This manuscript will be hidden once it is complete, not to be read until my death or the war’s end. I know upon which side my bread is buttered.

I could have been going through the mechanism a second time.

In one form or another.

-oOo-

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