He paused, and then he said, "What"s your name? Next time your buddy calls by, I"ll tell him that you were looking for him."

"Ralph Waldo Emerson. I"m staying at the Chandler House on Chandler."

"Okay ... Ralph Waldo Emerson. Funny, that. Name kind of rings a bell."

I borrowed Velma"s car and drove back out to Robbinstown. I parked in the shadow of a large computer warehouse. St. Croix Meats was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor-wire and the front yard was brightly floodlit. A uniformed security guard sat in a small booth by the gate, reading The Quoddy Whirlpool. With any luck, it would send him to sleep, and I would be able to walk right past him.

I waited for over an hour, but there didn"t seem to be any way for me to sneak inside. All the lights were on, and now and then I saw workers in hard hats and long rubber ap.r.o.ns walking in and out of the building. Maybe this was the time for me to give up trying to play detective and call the police.

The outside temperature was sinking deeper and deeper and I was beginning to feel cold and cramped in Velma"s little Volkswagen. After a while I had to climb out and stretch my legs. I walked as near to the main gate as I could without being seen, and stood next to a skinny maple tree. I felt like an elephant trying to hide behind a lamppost. The security guard was still awake. Maybe he was reading an exciting article about the sudden drop in cod prices.

I had almost decided to call it a night when I heard a car approaching along the road behind me. I managed to hide most of me behind the tree, and Mr. Le Renges drove past, and up to the front gate. At first I thought somebody was sitting in his Lexus with him, but then I realized it was that huge ugly Presa Canario. It looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a hound from h.e.l.l, and it was bigger than he was. It turned its head and I saw its eyes reflected scarlet. It was like being stared at by Satan, believe me.

The security guard came out to open the gate, and for a moment he and Mr. Le Renges chatted to each other, their breath smoking in the frosty evening air. I thought of crouching down and trying to make my way into the slaughterhouse behind Mr. Le Renges" car, but there was no chance that I could do it without being spotted.

"Everything okay, Vernon?"

"Silent like the grave, Mr. Le Renges."

"That"s what I like to hear, Vernon. How"s that daughter of yours, Louise? Got over her autism yet?"

"Not exactly, Mr. Le Renges. Doctors say it"s going to take some time."

Mr. Le Renges was still talking when one of his big black vans came burbling up the road and stopped behind his Lexus. Its driver waited patiently. After all, Mr. Le Renges was the boss. I hesitated for a moment and then I sidestepped out from behind my skinny little tree and circled around the back of the van. There was a wide aluminum step below the rear doors, and two door-handles that I could cling on to.

"You are out of your cotton-picking mind," I told me. But, still, I climbed up onto the step, as easy as I could. You don"t jump onto the back of a van when you"re as heavy as me, not unless you want the driver to bounce up and hit his head on the roof.

Mr. Le Renges seemed to go on talking forever, but at last he gave the security guard a wave and drove forward into the yard, and the van followed him. I pressed myself close to the rear doors, in the hope that I wouldn"t be quite so obtrusive, but the security guard went back into his booth and shook open his paper and didn"t even glance my way.

A man in a bloodied white coat and a hardhat came out of the slaughterhouse building and opened the car door for Mr. Le Renges. They spoke for a moment and then Mr. Le Renges went inside the building himself. The man in the bloodied white coat opened the car"s pa.s.senger door and let his enormous dog jump out. The dog salaciously sniffed at the blood before the man took hold of its leash. He went walking off with it-or, rather, the dog went walking off with him, its claws scrabbling on the blacktop.

I pushed my way in through the side door that I had seen all the cutters and gutters walking in and out of. Inside there was a long corridor with a wet tiled floor, and then an open door which led to a changing-room and a toilet. Rows of white hard-hats were hanging on hooks, as well as rubber ap.r.o.ns and rubber boots. There was an overwhelming smell of stale blood and disinfectant.

Two booted feet were visible underneath the door of the toilet stall, and clouds of cigarette smoke were rising up above it.

"Only two more hours, thank Christ," said a disembodied voice.

"See the playoff?" I responded, as I took off my raincoat and hung it up.

"Yeah, what a G.o.dd.a.m.n fiasco. They ought to can that Kershinsky."

I put on a heavy rubber ap.r.o.n and just about managed to tie it up at the back. Then I sat down and tugged on a pair of boots.

"You going to watch the New Brunswick game?" asked the disembodied voice.

"I don"t know. I"ve got a hot date that day."

There was a pause, and more smoke rose up, and then the voice said, "Who is that? Is that you, Stemmens?"

I left the changing-room without answering. I squeaked back along the corridor in my rubber boots and went through to the main slaughterhouse building.

You don"t even want to imagine what it was like in there. A high, echoing, brightly-lit building with a production line clanking and rattling, mincers grinding and roaring, and thirty or forty cutters in ap.r.o.ns and hard hats boning and chopping and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. The noise and the stench of blood were overwhelming, and for a moment I just stood there with my hand pressed over my mouth and nose, with that fried shrimp sandwich churning in my stomach as if the shrimp were still alive.

The black vans were backed up to one end of the production line, and men were heaving out the meat that they had been gleaning during the day. They were dumping it straight onto the killing floor where normally the live cattle would be stunned and killed-heaps and heaps of it, a tangle of sagging cattle and human arms and legs, along with glistening strings of intestines and globs of fat and things that looked like run-over dogs and knackered donkeys, except it was all so mixedup and disgusting that I couldn"t be sure what it all was. It was flesh, that was all that mattered. The cutters were boning it and cutting it into sc.r.a.ps, and the sc.r.a.ps were being dumped into giant stainless-steel machines and ground by giant augers into a pale-pink pulp. The pulp was seasoned with salt and pepper and dried onions and spices. Then it was mechanically pressed into patties, and covered with cling-film, and run through a metal-detector, and frozen. All ready to be served up sizzling-hot for somebody"s breakfast.

"Jesus," I said, out loud.

"You talking to me?" said a voice right next to me. "You talking to me?"

I turned around. It was Mr. Le Renges. He had a look on his face like he"d just walked into a washroom door without opening it.

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing here?" he demanded.

"I have to cook this stuff, Mr. Le Renges. I have to serve it to people. I thought I ought to find out what was in it."

He didn"t say anything at first. He looked to the left and he looked to the right, and it was like he was doing everything he could to control his temper. Eventually he sniffed sharply up his right nostril and said, "It"s all the same. Don"t you get that?"

"Excuse me? What"s all the same?"

"Meat, wherever it comes from. Human legs are the same as cow"s legs, or pig"s legs, or goat"s legs. For Christ"s sake, it"s all protein."

I pointed to a tiny arm protruding from the mess on the production-line. "That"s a baby. That"s a human baby. That"s just protein?"

Mr. Le Renges rubbed his forehead as if he couldn"t understand what I was talking about. "You ate one of your burgers. You know how good they taste."

"Look at this stuff!" I shouted at him, and now three or four cutters turned around and began to give me less-than-friendly stares. "This is s.h.i.t! This is total and utter s.h.i.t! You can"t feed people on dead cattle and dead babies and amputated legs!"

"Oh, yes?" he challenged me. "And why the h.e.l.l not? Do you really think this is any worse than the c.r.a.p they serve up at all of the franchise restaurants? They serve up diseased dairy cows, full of worms and flukes and all kinds of s.h.i.t. At least a human leg won"t have e-coli infection. At least an aborted baby won"t be full of steroids."

"You don"t think there"s any moral dimension here?" I shouted back. "Look at this! For Christ"s sake! We"re talking cannibalism here!"

Mr. Le Renges drew back his hair with his hand, and inadvertently exposed his bald patch. "The major fast-food companies source their meat at the cheapest possible outlets. How do you think I compete? I don"t buy my meat. The sources I use, they pay me to take the meat away. Hospitals, farms, auto repair shops, abortion clinics. They"ve all got excess protein they don"t know what to do with. So BioGlean comes around and relieves them of everything they don"t know how to get rid of, and Tony"s Gourmet Burgers recycles it."

"You"re sick, Mr. Le Renges."

"Not sick, John. Not at all. Just practical. You ate human flesh in that piece of hamburger I offered you, and did you suffer any ill effects? No. Of course not. In fact I see Tony"s Gourmet Burgers as the pioneers of really decent food."

While we were talking, the production-line had stopped, and a small crowd of cutters and gutters had gathered around us, all carrying cleavers and boning-knives.

"You won"t get any of these men to say a word against me," said Mr. Le Renges. "They get paid twice as much as any other slaughterhous.e.m.e.n in Maine; or in any other state, believe me. They don"t kill anybody, ever. They simply cut up meat, whatever it is, and they do a d.a.m.n fine job."

I walked across to one of the huge stainless steel vats in which the meat was minced into glistening pink gloop. The men began to circle closer, and I was beginning to get seriously concerned that I might end up as pink gloop, too.

"You realize I"m going to have to report this to the police and the USDA," I warned Mr. Le Renges, even though my voice was about two octaves above normal.

"I don"t think so," said Mr. Le Renges.

"So what are you going to do? You"re going to have me gutted and minced up like the rest of this stuff?"

Mr. Le Renges smiled and shook his head; and it was at that moment that the slaughterman who had been taking his dog for a walk came onto the killing floor, with the h.e.l.lbeast still straining at its leash.

"If any of my men were to touch you, John, that would be homicide, wouldn"t it? But if Cerberus slipped its collar and went for you-what could I do? He"s a very powerful dog, after all. And if I had twenty or thirty eye-witnesses to swear that you provoked him ..."

The Presa Canario was pulling so hard at its leash that it was practically choking, and its claws were sliding on the b.l.o.o.d.y metal floor. You never saw such a hideous brindled collection of teeth and muscle in your whole life, and its eyes reflected the light as if it had been caught in a flash photograph.

"Kevin, unclip his collar," said Mr. Le Renges.

"This is not a good idea," I cautioned him. "If anything happens to me, I have friends here who know where I am and what I"ve been doing."

"Kevin," Mr. Le Renges repeated, unimpressed.

The slaughterman leaned forward and unclipped the Presa Canario"s collar. It bounded forward, snarling, and I took a step back until my rear end was pressed against the stainless steel vat. There was no place else to go.

"Now, kill!" shouted Mr. Le Renges, and stiffly pointed his arm at me.

The dog lowered its head almost to the floor and bunched up its shoulder-muscles. Strings of saliva swung from its jowls, and its c.o.c.k suddenly appeared, red and pointed, as if the idea of tearing my throat out was actually turning it on.

I lifted my left arm to protect myself. I mean, I could live without a left arm, but not without a throat. It was then that I had a sudden flashback. I remembered when I was a kid, when I was thin and runty and terrified of dogs. My father had given me a packet of dog treats to take to school, so that if I was threatened by a dog I could offer it something to appease it. "Always remember that, kid. Dogs prefer food to children, every time. Food is easier to eat."

I reached into the vat behind me and scooped out a huge handful of pink gloop. It felt disgusting ... soft and fatty, and it dripped. I held it toward the Presa Canario and said, "Here, Cerberus! You want something to eat? Try some of this!"

The dog stared up at me with those red reflective eyes as if I were mad. Its black lips rolled back and it bared its teeth and snarled like a ma.s.sed chorus of death-rattles.

I took a step closer, still holding out the heap of gloop, praying that the dog wouldn"t take a bite at it and take off my fingers as well. But the Presa Canario lifted its head and sniffed at the meat with deep suspicion.

"Kill, Cerberus, you stupid mutt!" shouted Mr. Le Renges.

I took another step toward it, and then another. "Here, boy. Supper."

The dog turned its head away. I pushed the gloop closer and closer but it wouldn"t take it, didn"t even want to sniff it.

I turned to Mr. Le Renges. "There you are ... even a dog won"t eat your burgers."

Mr. Le Renges s.n.a.t.c.hed the dog"s leash from the slaughterman. He went up to the animal and whipped it across the snout, once, twice, three times. "You pathetic disobedient piece of s.h.i.t!"

Mistake. The dog didn"t want to go near me and my handful of gloop, but it was still an attack dog. It let out a bark that was almost a roar and sprang at Mr. Le Renges in utter fury. It knocked him back onto the floor and sank its teeth into his forehead. He screamed, and tried to beat it off. But it jerked its head furiously from side to side, and with each jerk it pulled more and more skin away.

Right in front of us, with a noise like somebody trying to rip up a pillowcase, the dog tore his face off, exposing his bloodied, wildly-popping eyes, the soggy black cavity of his nostrils, his grinning lipless teeth.

He was still screaming and gargling when three of the slaughter-men pulled the dog away. Strong as they were, even they couldn"t hold it, and it twisted away from them and trotted off to the other side of the killing floor, with Mr. Le Renges" face dangling from its jaws like a slippery latex mask.

I turned to the slaughtermen. They were too shocked to speak. One of them dropped his knife, and then the others did, too, until they rang like bells.

I stayed in Calais long enough for Nils to finish fixing my car and to make a statement to the sandy-haired police officer. The weather was beginning to grow colder and I wanted to get back to the warmth of Louisiana, not to mention the rare beef m.u.f.felettas with gravy and onion strings.

Velma lent me the money to pay for my auto repairs and the Calais Motor Inn waived all charges because they said I was so public spirited. I was even on the front page of The Quoddy Whirlpool. There was a picture of the mayor whacking me on the back, under the banner headline HAMBURGER HERO.

Velma came out to say goodbye on the morning I left. It was crisp and cold and the leaves were rattling across the parking-lot.

"Maybe I should come with you," she said.

I shook my head. "You got vision, Velma. You can see the thin man inside me and that"s the man you like. But I"m never going to be thin, ever. The poboys call and my stomach always listens."

The last I saw of her, she was shading her eyes against the sun, and I have to admit that I was sorry to leave her behind. I"ve never been back to Calais since and I doubt if I ever will. I don"t even know if Tony"s Gourmet Burgers is still there. If it is, though, and you"re tempted to stop in and order one, remember there"s always a risk that any burger you buy from Tony Le Renges is people.

Ecstasy.

Nancy Kilpatrick.

"Ecstasy" was first published in Master/Slave, edited by Thomas Roche and published by Venus Books in 2004.

Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick writes and edits in the horror, dark fantasy, mystery and erotica genres. She has published 18 novels, including the popular 4-book Power of the Blood vampire series. A unique reprinting (in slipcase) of her seven novel erotic horror series The Darker Pa.s.sions (writing as Amarantha Knight) is available from MHB Press.

Some of her roughly 200 published short stories have worked their way into 5 short story collections. You can read a few of her recent pieces in Blood Lite, Blood Lite 2-Overbite (both Pocket Books), h.e.l.lbound Hearts (Pocket Books), The Bleeding Edge (Dark Discoveries), The Living Dead and By Blood We Live (both Night Shade Books), Don Juan and Men (MLR Press), Vampires: Dracula and the Undead Legions (Moonstone Books), The Bitten Word (Newcon Press), Campus Chills (Stark Publishing), Darkness on the Edge (PS Publishing), Vampires: The Recent Undead (Prime Books), Best New Vampire Tales #1 and Best New Zombie Tales #3 (both from Books of the Dead Press). Upcoming stories will appear in The Moonstone Book of Zombies and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women.

She has also written one non-fiction book The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (St. Martin"s Press), and has edited ten anthologies, the latest (from Edge SF&F Publishing) being a horror/dark fantasy anthology Tesseracts Thirteen (co-edited with David Morrell, 2009), Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (www.vampires-evolve.com , 2010), Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (August 2011). A new anthology is in the works.

For Brainstorm Comics, she scripted three of her short stories in VampErotica #5, 6, and 13 and these comics and stories combine with interviews to create the graphic novel Nancy Kilpatrick"s Vampyre Theater, out in 2011. You can find out the latest about Nancy on her webpage www.nancykilpatrick.com and follow her on facebook.

Ecstasy came out of my perception of how far some people will go to be loved.

The world, it seems, is bound for h.e.l.l. You grip the hand basket tighter, holding onto your life.

This is the first time you have come for him, and that unnerves you. With luck you will find him. With more luck, you won"t. Either way, intuition implies you are not in a good position, despite what you now believe.