The Cults, the Brain, the Meat Pt. I

It was dark outside, but cool as I walked up the sidewalk to the rear of the apartments to find the investigator hunched down, poking a pen into a pile of something. They had just erected the spotlights on small tripods and everything seemed well defined, albeit off by a few degrees of light here and there.

The pile he was investigating was pink. It was the bright color of freshly ground pork, but not steaming; it was just there, pink tubular butcher-ground flesh in an oblong mound, marbled with fat. It was scattered on the sidewalk, but piled largely in a grass-covered void just below the sidewalk that ended abruptly at a concrete wall that led about three feet down to parking spaces below. This was of note because while the pile was substantial in the void, there was little waste on the sidewalk itself or the space below the wall. There were obvious places where feet had tread through here, but little was scattered around as would be expected in such a sloppy mess. It was so compact, it was hard to tell where the original mass had come from even though it was largely near one particular back door.

The investigator stood up, a white male in his late 20’s. The corners of his mouth were curled downward in disgust and puzzlement while he tried to figure out what this was, where it came from, and how to disguise it from himself from what it may just be. The latter was a reflex by the human mind, but found only amongst those that either still have a bit of humanity left to them or have only had a few years on the job. He looked over at me as I approached and without a word expressed gratitude from the break in having to share this all to himself.

We consulted, and I found that this thing was barely in the infancy of its investigations; a caller reported a flurry of activity, the presence of meat en masse, and what we had left before us. This wasn’t the most common of scenes upon arrival, but for those that tend to death as a profession, the presence of large quantities of meat usually meant two things: Someone was dead, and Someone had to be told about it. This scene was by no means the norm, but the destination seemed inevitable. God, what a shitty job.

I turned back to the sidewalk, and began wondering where this had come from. All the doors aligning the complex seemed the same, but that was almost always the case. I walked along with some uniforms in advance and in tow, and found a door a few feet north that was slightly ajar. It was always the goddamn obvious, and here I was.

There is a dynamic to walking into a place where you know something awful has occurred, and that whatever it was that caused it may not be done yet, and you were likely the next candidate because ‘it’ knew that you were likely to be the last to be through such an opening without advance notice. It’s a lot to think about, but so little to do…when you just go through. I did.

The back door led into a kitchen as they so often do in homes. White vinyl floors broken apart in small squares separated by grey; wood toned cabinets…there was lighting from a small fluorescent above the sink, but the light was sickly. It showed enough, however, to reveal a stainless steel chute near the rear dining room table to a room below.

The chute was littered with the same pink marbled ground meat, but as with outside, there was little clutter of the same around. Baffling.

I approached the chute more closely, and the closer I came the more meat I saw in the chute. I looked around the room to gather signs of life…kids pictures, family photos, generic prints…but saw nothing that made the hairs on my neck curl. It was creepy; there was obviously a murder scene, but without a body or evidence outside of what appeared to be a butchers block. And so while I realized I had already realized it...my rational mind allowed ‘it’ to strike me.

I was in a slaughterhouse, however its architects intended it to be.