Festival of Fear by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

somebody’s breakfast.
    â€˜Jesus,’ I said, out loud.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What the fuck are you doing here?’ he demanded.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Excuse me? What’s all the same?’
    â€˜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 our burgers. You know how good they taste.’
    â€˜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 shit! This is total and utter shit! You can’t feed people on dead cattle and dead babies and amputated legs!’
    â€˜Oh, yes?’ he challenged me. ‘And why the hell not? Do you really think this is any worse than the crap they serve up at all of the franchise restaurants? They serve up diseased dairy cows, full of worms and flukes and all kinds of shit. At least a human leg won’t have E. coli infection. At least an aborted baby won’t be full of steroids.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You’re sick, Mr Le Renges.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 slaughterhousemen 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 damn 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I don’t think so,’ said Mr Le Renges.
    â€˜So what are you going to do? You’re going to