He felt for the next step with his right foot but there was no next step. He’d reached a level floor. The sole of his boot crunched over the grit. The sound echoed. The space around him was large then. What must it have been? He put his back to the wall and edged along it. This way he could still see the sliver of light where he’d entered. A few sideways paces and the entrance itself disappeared from view. Still, he could see the glow coming from it. Just a few paces further and then he’d go back.
The sensation in his guts intensified. Maybe it was because the darkness had made him concentrate on what he could feel rather than what he could see. The feeling drew him deeper into the black space.
Shanti stopped.
The light from the entrance was now very faint indeed. He felt very far from familiar, safe things. The darkness became aware all around him. It was alive. There was something down there with him, coming towards him out of the depths. He couldn’t see it but he could –
– feel many hands taking hold of him, pressing him into the wall so that he could not move. By the time he tried to struggle, he was pinned. He felt the warmth of faces in the darkness, the breath of others. And then the tones of a familiar voice.
‘Glad you could join us.’
They led him across an open space and down more steps. This happened three times. They left the light far behind. Some insane corner of his mind fantasised that they were taking him to a new world. Somewhere down in all this darkness there would be a door and that door would open into a better place, a place without slaughter and violence.
It was the fear making him think that way, he reasoned. After all, he had no idea what they were going to do. He had discovered their secret place. They might wish to prevent that secret from ever being known.
No one spoke and he didn’t try to make use of their silence to beg for mercy or plead his innocence. Instinct told him to keep quiet. There were several of them; he could tell by the footsteps in front and behind. He considered trying to tear from their arms and run away but he’d only end up hurting himself. They seemed to know the way to walk without putting a foot wrong. He’d probably run straight into a wall or break his legs on unseen stairs. There was nothing to do but go along with them.
They came to a halt in a space that had no echo. The arms let go of him. Many footsteps retreated away but he sensed he wasn’t completely alone.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ suggested the voice.
Shanti felt around and below himself for something to sit on. There was nothing there.
‘Sorry,’ said the voice as if the person speaking had forgotten to provide milk with tea. ‘Just a second.’
In the dark Shanti heard a hiss and smelled the familiar odour of gas. A match flared and the lamp lit up the room. He was standing opposite a smiling John Collins.
‘Welcome to our temporary new home.’
Shanti looked around in the yellow gloom. They were in some kind of small office or storeroom cleared of all furniture except for a cot on the floor and some blankets folded into makeshift cushions. Collins gestured towards one and Shanti sat down.
Richard Shanti didn’t run the next day either. He rose again when he sensed the sun ascending toward the horizon and went outside with a new sense of purpose. An hour later he returned when the sun was well up. Maya rose and woke the girls, made their breakfast of grilled steak.
He assumed they all ate meat every day now. It had gone on long enough that he had begun to appreciate the irony of it rather than shouldering the guilt for them. There was another way to live and in time he would show them. First he had to prove it to himself. As a vegetarian he was halfway there already. The next step ought to be easy for him.
He’d usually left for work by the time his wife and the girls were up, having made breakfast for himself. Maya seemed to resent his presence. When she spoke, her tone was grudging.
‘Do you want food? I’ll make you some rice gruel.’
‘I’m fine.’
He watched Hema and Harsha sawing through slabs of steak and forking lumps of grilled meat into their mouths. They chewed hungrily and efficiently. In just a few weeks they’d been transformed into carnivores by the determination of his wife. The steaks oozed clear juice tainted brown onto their white plates. At least she cooked them all the way through. Or maybe she’d done that because he was here watching them.
It didn’t matter.
Finally, after so many years of hopeless wrestling with the implications of his job and the sickening realities of the town, there was a new hope for him, for the girls; something beyond his imaginings, beyond what seemed possible.
It could be the answer to everything. A chance to start again. To atone. Never in his life could he have believed this might come to him and yet, now that the time was near, it seemed predestined. It was everything he could have voiced in petition but never knew how to say.
‘I’m going to go back to work today.’
‘I thought Bob told you to take more time than this.’
He didn’t reply for a few moments.
‘Mr. Torrance’ll know when he sees me that I’m ready to start back. He’s an experienced judge of character.’
‘If he’s so experienced, he must have given you the time off for a reason.’
‘True. But he’ll be pleased to have me.’
She shrugged like she suddenly didn’t care and busied herself at the kitchen sink. He watched her back. There was language in the movement and he thought he understood it now like never before in their fifteen years of marriage. He knew what people’s bodies said, what the bodies of the Chosen said. Maybe he’d never allowed himself to read her before.
As far as he was concerned, she could eat all the meat she wanted and live in ignorance of the suffering she perpetuated. But the twins were a different matter.
When the time came, they were the ones he’d look out for. Veal.
Torrance couldn’t have given him a worse job. Shanti hoped he’d picked it because it represented a reduction in pace and pressure and not because Torrance knew what was troubling him.
The veal yard was a self-contained building, smaller than the dairy and the slaughterhouse. Once veal calves arrived and were installed, they remained there until they weighed enough to be slaughtered, which also took place on the premises. Even the butchering was performed on site giving Magnus total control over veal quality.
This meant the calves, secured for years in their darkened crates, could hear the sound of their own kind being killed every day of their lives. They used similar sounds to communicate but their language differed from the rest of the herd because they were isolated and had created words for things only they experienced.
Shanti didn’t understand all of it and he was glad. There was so much innocence to their communication, so much acceptance of their end that it broke his heart to listen. The older calves, usually the respected teachers among them, would become frightened as they neared their time and then the hisses and taps would become a kind of harmonised prayer to give them strength and courage. The dusky halls of the veal yard throbbed with their muted rhythms and Shanti was nauseated.
Torrance, knowingly or not, had given him the job of stunning the calves. The frequency was entirely different from the slaughterhouse. There was no chain speed – no chain even. They killed no more than eight or ten calves a day which meant one every hour or so. Shanti had plenty of time to think about what he was going to do to them.