Le Theatre du Grand Cadavre
The amputated hand was gushing blood but still managing to hop about the ground somehow. Each time that it landed, it was as though it received a shock of electricity, a spark that would send it sideways, skyward. It flopped around like this, rolling and writhing and leaping about, until it eventually surged wildly and tumbled out of sight. The theater filled with a customary clap. It might’ve been more enthusiastic if not for a singing severed head only moments prior.
The title of the play was Lively Extremities. The story was hard to pin down. It involved numerous factory laborers, dangerous machinery, and a fanatical manager. There wasn’t much of a plot aside from the graves—in this factory, death was compulsory. One worker would misuse a saw, and their arm would spin, flying off into the audience. Another would fire something into a stalling gear, only to have it ricochet into their ribcage. Someone would die, production around them would momentarily pause, and then the demented manager would emerge on his balcony and call down to those that were left to mop up the mess and get back to work.
A member of the audience, a soft-spoken and avid habitué of the theater, watched in awe. During the finale, which reached a distressing pinnacle of gore and theatrics, he leaned forward over the railing. As the workers perished in increasingly gratuitous and violent ways, the crazed manager erupted into song. The remaining workers joined him—despite many by then being in varyingly grotesque stages of disfigurement. The curtains closed in on the final note, following the vexing suggestion that the manager was on his way to do something unforgivable with his employees’ remains.
Applause filled the auditorium. It was one of the smallest theaters in the city though was by leagues the oddest and most unique. Angels wielding lances and swords battled demons and flames, chiseled in the stone walls. The old pews laden with musk and incense were incurably reminiscent of the chapel that the building once housed. The silhouettes of several long absent crosses imposed the walls with discoloration, apart from one very large crucifix that remained, just inside the front doors.
Le Theatre du Grand Cadavre, or The Haunted House as it was more commonly called, specialized in the grim and outrageous. It possessed a committed cult following, along with a regular stream of curious tourists, which together sold out every performance. All productions were notorious. Dismemberment, cannibalism, immolation, torture, impalement, coprophagia, and necrophilia were all common components. Stories ranged a great deal but were often of little or no overall consequence—each production was more exhibition or magic show than play. The cast and crew garnered ample praise at the conclusion of every year for their exceptional special effects and costuming. Contributing actors and artists changed frequently, and their names were rarely if ever publicized. There were no recurring roles, no company stars. The associates of the theater were referred to collectively, and only, as Ghouls.
Audience members rarely attempted to converse with the cast after a performance. Even the most zealous and eager fans found themselves, afterward, filled with a palpable feeling that to do so would be somehow improper—others simply felt no desire to. The barrage of shocking elements on stage would frequently leave people highly distressed, almost post-traumatic, which would manifest in various ways. Fainting spells were common before, during, and after shows. Nausea was all but customary. And an odd wave of catatonia was known to sweep through the hospitals at the conclusion of every performance cycle.
Performances ran twice per week, on Saturday and Sunday, for one month at a time. Even the closest followers and supporters of The Haunted House rarely knew more than a week or two in advance when a new play was slated to begin, and details about it each one were always kept a close secret. The viewer could seldom know what they were going to see before they saw it, and after the conclusion of each cycle, no play was ever repeated.
That soft-spoken and avid habitué of the Haunted House, a young man named Louis, felt utterly spellbound by what he had seen. He gazed down at the stage from the upper balcony, the curtain drawn on the finale performance of the theater’s latest run. This was the fourth time that he’d attended. Every week, he scraped together the cost of a ticket. Given his meager financial means, doing such a thing required careful budgeting, significant sacrifice. Purchasing one each Sunday for a full month required considerable planning on Louis’s part.
To afford living in the city, Louis maintained numerous jobs, none of which paid well. Most were positions in the busy kitchens of upscale restaurants in the area. His titles ranged from Prep Bitch, to Dish Bitch, to Sweep Bitch, to Garbage Bitch, to Fetch Bitch— all informal titles, given to him by the cooks and waiters and managers and his other petty, hostile superiors. Work was inglorious but regular. He took shifts whenever he could, often working from morning until night on any given day in a week, and he routinely worked for weeks at a time without any day off. He refused this unforgiving schedule only to attend performances.
Sunday was the only reasonable day for him to go. The Saturday slot was always held at midnight, when he would almost always still be working or otherwise unable to arrive on time; the Sunday performance was always held at noon. The latter was often compared to attending mass—despite the profane content of the homily—on account of the time of day, and the odd, ecclesiastical residue of the theater. The former was often compared to attending some sort of macabre, clandestine ceremony. The lone remaining cross at the entrance—an imposing, shining, wooden depiction of the crucified Christ—was suitable for either theme. Such is the difference that daylight makes.
After the curtains closed on the final performance of Lively Extremities, Louis traversed the staircase. The theater cleared slowly around him as he approached the stage. Several young men and women were laughing as they passed. One daft, incoherent man wearing a white tuxedo was being supported on his left and right by two garish women that one could only assume to be prostitutes. When the auditorium was finally free of everyone save himself, Louis began to have a closer look around.
There were no doors leading backstage. The curtain looked like a wall: a heavy maroon velvet which barred any entrance. He stood there awhile, observing at great length the gothic interior around him in the now coarse, raised light of the theater. Although much about it felt decrepit—the smell; the wear of the moldings; the loud creaks and wheezes of the place with each step about—there was a grandeur there also. A faded but still magnificent fresco which curlicued the ceiling. The fine detail of old, stone sculptures. The once grand, filigreed walls. The sagging amphitheater still enclosed behind its curved, dusty brass railing. To stand there alone in the presence of it all felt to Louis like being granted a brief audience with a fallen monarch in a ruined city. He wasn’t sure what he would ask of it, even if it were to listen.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, he returned from a daydream. He had flown through what he imagined to be a long and tumultuous theatrical history. He watched as workers labored with stone and wood, molding and shaping, stacking and building, raising the place where Louis now stood from ground to ceiling. He looked on through resplendent ceremonies and heard beautiful choirs and booming orators and watched communion gather around the chancel. He stood at the door as boards were nailed across it, and he saw the carpets become inundated and then molded. He watched as the balcony began to sag, and the color in all the paintings faded. He saw minute specks of stone ash weep from the faces of angels and demons. He slept beside the squatters and peered out from the corners of his eyes as they burgled every last book, painting, and cross save the very heaviest. He bore witness to it all disintegrating—and then, with a magical bursting of energy, he envisioned change. He saw the boards ripped off, the wood restored, and the carpets and the walls cleaned. He imagined the stage being raised, the vast curtain being hung, and the first production’s announcement. And just as the theater filled with people, and the lights were being brought down, and the velvet gate was parting, a voice cut straight through his elaborate historical fantasy.
Someone had spoken from behind the mysterious maroon curtain.
“Hello?” Louis’s voice echoed in a weak, hollow sort of way, bouncing around the room like a split grain of rice.
“What is that you’re looking for?”
“I don’t… I just…”
“You just…”
“I just wanted to…”
“You come here every Sunday.” The voice was distinct: firm and coarse; fine but elderly; a rusted, formerly classic car’s engine grumblings.
“Yes. No. I mean, yes, I’m here every week. But no, I just…”
“You just…”
“I do come every Sunday. I love your theater.”
“As though it were mine. But it thanks you.”
“It’s the only thing that I look forward to. Coming here. The only…”
“It thanks you.”
"I suppose that’s it.
“Is it?”
“Well yes. Or—I don’t really know.”
The voice exhaled long and slow. It seemed to fill the auditorium with chill.
“You would like to be on this side of the curtain?”
“Yes! I mean, I,” Louis stuttered. “Yes!”
“Return on this day in two months’ time.”
“For an audition?”
There was no reply.
“Hello?”
Louis stood there a moment or two longer before he hustled out of the theater. Glancing more than a few times over his shoulder on his way out.
-
The next several weeks flashed. It was the middle of summer, the busiest time of year for every establishment that employed Louis. Tourists were everywhere. Hotels and restaurants were all fully booked and couldn’t keep up with demand. This led to corners being cut in one form or another.
Louis was promoted daily, which is to say that he was far too often the last resort. A cook or a waiter or a hostess would lose their patience during a mad stretch of business, storm out in a flurry of profanity, and those who were left behind were forced to make do. Louis found himself wearing an apron, answering the telephone, or being quickly dressed in a button-down shirt and shoved in one unfamiliar direction after another. He would sign for deliveries, bus dirty dishes, wash glassware, plate desserts, take reservations, climb ladders, stack chairs, stock freezers and refrigerators and pantries, and seat wealthy couples and families at their tables, sometimes all in the course of a single day or night on the job. He was now referred to by the more encompassing, but still informal title, Everything Bitch.
One night in the midst of this stretch, a series of knocks came on the backdoor of one of the restaurant’s kitchens. Louis, who was nearby, carefully reading a recipe, slowly adding flour to a large mixing bowl filled with sugar and eggs, glanced about. After a second series of knocks, he removed his gloves and answered the door.
“Delivery,” the man croaked. He was holding two large, brown paper packages bound by thin, frayed string. He wore a fine black coat and a tall hat that shaded his eyes. His hands were painted with crooked blue veins that throbbed beneath his pale grey skin.
Louis accepted the packages. The man tipped his hat and scurried back down the alley.
“Do you have something for me to sign?” Louis called after him.
Louis closed the door with his foot and laid the packaging down on a large, metal table near his mixing bowl. He began to untie the string when the Executive Chef—one of the few fairly compensated members of the kitchen, and one of the few staff who had not yet quit—walked by.
“What’s this?”
“Delivery. He didn’t give me anything to sign.”
“Give me that!” The chef coiled the packages close to his chest and turned to Louis with bulging, blue-veined eyes. “Back to work!”
“Yes, Sir.” Louis added a few spoons worth of vanilla extract to his mix. After this, there were still the potatoes to peel, the carrots and the celery to chop, and the mushrooms to quarter; another tedious series of jobs that he had recently inherited, to which there seemed no obvious end.
The very next evening, whilst bussing a table at another equally understaffed, equally upscale restaurant, Louis was unexpectedly addressed by one of the wealthy patrons that was there dining. Louis was not accustomed to being addressed. He was not accustomed to being noticed at all.
“You tell them?” the man began, and then waited for Louis to stop what he was doing. “The kitchen? Tell them that was the best meal I’ve had in months.”
“Yes, Sir.” Louis set coffee cups on the table.
“Months.”
“Splendid cuisine,” his pale spouse agreed. “Wonderful.”
“Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you,” the man recited the psalm verse with satisfaction, dabbing at his mouth with an embroidered maroon napkin. Louis heard the words, recognized the passage. He’d attended mass when he was a boy, before his mother and father died, but he hadn’t been to service in a very long time. Something about the ornate buildings and resplendent stained glass and satin vestments and opulent colors had made him, somewhere along the way, feel as though he didn’t belong there, had made him feel that those places and those ceremonies, those hymns and those promises were not in fact meant for him.
“The meat was awfully strange,” the couple’s young daughter complained.
“You have no taste for the good stuff yet.” The father smirked at his wife.
“She’ll learn,” the mother said. “Only the finest restaurants cook this way.”
The daughter sank further into her chair and mumbled something unintelligible.
Louis unloaded his tray onto the counter in the kitchen. He scraped away the substantial remains of the food from the dishes into the garbage and siphoned the rest of the trash from the linen napkins which were then tied off in plastic bags bound for laundry. He continued over the remainder of the counters toward the back, cleaning and gathering garbage along the way, when he came upon a stack of brown butcher paper. A ball of string, with thin hairs sprouting all over, was next to it. After a pause, he gathered it all and tossed into a nearby bin.
At the conclusion of the night, when most of the staff had gone home and the kitchen was quiet, Louis remained, tending to the last of his substantial list of duties. He dated two large bins, and walked one to the freezer, and the other to the refrigerator. Both were well overstocked with supplies. It was hard to move around inside either without pushing something out of the way or pulling something else completely out. The pantry was in a similar state of overabundance and required careful maneuvering.
The refrigerator was where one found the most valuable items with the shortest lifespans. Slabs of prime rib inundated with herbs and wine and vinegar. Cedar wooden planks draped with bright, thick salmon carcasses. Marinated mushrooms and onions and peppers. Fine cheeses and raw pork shanks. All things prepared on a weekly if not daily basis. The smell was pleasant but busy: sharp garlic and pepper in one corner, raw fish and pickled cabbage in another; somewhere nearby, raw oysters, lemons, basil leaf, crab cakes. Louis often lingered here at the end of his nights, reviewing the vast array of options, imagining what he might cook himself for dinner, before going home with an empty stomach.
He took a long, deep breath from a bowl of pickled ginger and carrots and then turned to leave. But as he took hold of the door handle, he noticed something familiar to his left. Tucked into one of the shelves, hiding in the shadow of a pan, he glimpsed the worn, frayed end of a string. He slid a few things aside, setting several small tins and other things onto the ground, before another one of the brown paper packages presented itself.
He slowly undid the string, and then he stared awhile at what was revealed underneath: Vibrant red meat in layers of thin transparent paper sheets. He felt relieved in a strange way to see it there. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting.
-
Two months elapsed, along with most of the busiest part of the tourist season, and Louis went to the theater as instructed. He stood again below the stage, beneath the same velvet curtains. He’d already gotten wind of the staging of a new production. There was very little that anyone in the public knew about it, as per usual, but a collection of unfamiliar faces had reportedly been seen slipping in and out of The Cadavre’s back door, and several stagehands were witnessed loading and unloading truckloads of materials in unmarked boxes. It seemed likely, to those that were paying attention, that a new play was afoot.
“Hello?” Louis spoke to the maroon curtains. There was no reply, but he could discern a good deal of commotion coming from behind it.
Louis was about to yell when a screech echoed above him, followed by a swift, clanking noise. The curtains trembled, and then they parted. A crowded, busy network of people were on the stage. Several were attempting to hoist a large light onto a tower, all teetering, slightly, from three different ladders in an effort to balance it. One man in stained, ripped jeans was painting a small section of the floor a teal green color. Three women stood in a circle holding a few sheets of long butcher paper, pointing this way and that, and then either nodding yes or no to each other before moving onto the next point of contention.
“And you are?” one of the three women in the middle of the stage called down to Louis.
“Louis. Hello.” He waved to them, and then to everyone else on stage, though few were paying him much mind. “I was told to be here at this time.”
“Another fly then?” the second one added rhetorically.
“Shut up,” the third said to the second. “Come on up.”
There were no stairs nor ladder to get up to the stage, no obvious ways, that Louis could see, to join the company, short of perhaps levitating. The three women, all of them, presumably, actors, stared at Louis as he considered their ambiguous direction.
“Well?” the first one said.
“Sorry!” Louis hoisted himself up. He brushed his worn pants and old shirt, sawdust and dirt rising into small clouds all around him.
“Would you like to see the part that we’re reviewing?” the third actor asked Louis.
Louis smiled. “Of course. Wow!”
The third woman handed him a copy of the sheet which they were reading from, much to the obvious annoyance of the other two. Louis hardly noticed. He was overcome with delight to be standing there on stage. As soon as he began to read the paper that he was handed, whether from excitement, surprise, or just plain nerves, he began to chuckle.
“Obscene.” Louis smiled. No one else smiled.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” the second woman said.
“You’re familiar with the theater’s work?” the third asked.
“He’s another fly who’s just landed on a body.” The first spat and then walked off stage.
Louis was more amused than was likely warranted. Perhaps it was because he held such nightmarish expectations for seeing the Ghouls of The Grand Cadavre in person. Stories spread far and wide across the city about them; of horror and disfigurement, of tails and horns and the like; all resulting from rampant inbreeding, or pacts with the devil, or other equally malevolent, sacramental practices. Though Louis held little stock in all this, a quiet expectation disappeared instantly the moment those curtains parted for him that afternoon. For at least some intents and purposes, this place was just like any other playhouse. The paper which he now read from began with the label Obscene Two, rather than Scene Two. To Louis’s genuinely mirthful surprise, they were not without a sense of humor at The Haunted House.
For the remainder of that afternoon, he was shown around the theater. He glimpsed the clever electrical devices rigged beneath the floorboards. He saw the gallons of artificial blood and meticulously detailed plastic limbs and cadavers. There were swords and guns and knives and pickaxes and saws and bats; there were containers filled with feces and urine and puss and semen; all of this, despite the convincing form, was pure forgery. Some of it was so persuasive, however, that it warranted extended examination to prove the case. There seemed to be a lot of meticulous detail and effort involved in making the things that the theater did appear to be real.
Louis was given a small role in the new play. His character was billed as John Doe #1— there were apparently six John Does altogether. He felt honored to be a lead among the lot. The play involved a morgue staffed by deplorable physicians who engaged in disturbing, despicable acts with the bodies they oversaw. The hospital stood adjacent a grand, ominous lighthouse, both on the shoreline of a vast black sea, whose painted, eerie likeness consumed the back wall of the stage.
His character was only present in the pages of one scene of the script and, oddly enough, he was told that he would not be performing on their opening Saturday—the theater required his services only for Sunday’s noon performance. This was confusing, to say the least, but Louis felt compelled to ask few if any questions. To be allowed any time on stage, in this theater, was an honor for him, albeit a mysterious one. There would be other performances, perhaps, if he did well with the small bit he’d been given. He promised himself that he would not squander such a chance with too much inquiring conversation.
Curiosity got the best of Louis when it came to some things about the play, however. He splurged on the price of a ticket to the opening night of the production that he was to take part in the very next night. He likely would’ve been given a ticket for free, had he simply possessed the nerve to ask someone at the theater for one, but circumstances and nerves being what they were, Louis preferred to remain anonymous in doing this. He ambled in amongst the rest of the crowd that opening night and took quietly to his seat in a back row.
The performance was spectacular. Louis could discern many whispers that this was the most shocking, most extravagant, most impressive performance that they’d ever seen from The Haunted House. Far more people than usual exited the theater mid-performance. Most holding their mouths, running from the stage as though it were a soon-to-expire time bomb. Audience members gasped, cried. People seated in the front row inched their feet back, more and more, from the pools of blood and excrement gathering on the ground below the stage. Noxious odors, and screams of agony and horror, as the cadavers in the morgue proved, one by one, to still be alive.
As the performance built to its staggering precipice, Louis was taken aback by something curious. On stage, though they hadn’t been there before as far as he could remember—nor had he recognized any of them during rehearsals—were several people that he recognized. John Doe #3, John Doe #4, John Doe #5, and a handful of other extras in the scene, were all people that Louis had worked with at different times throughout the summer. He saw a young girl who’d blown off her shift as a hostess for a date no more than a month prior. He saw a cook from the kitchen who he had seen have what was likely a mental breakdown, lighting a cigarette in the midst of dinner service, calmly smoking the entirety of it as tickets piled around him. When he was finished with the smoke, he dropped the butt into a pan filled with Béchamel and clams, and exited the kitchen without a word to anyone. The head chef at the time vowed to kill him, if he ever saw him again.
Another one or two that he recognized likely had similar stories, but it was hard for Louis to place them all precisely. He at least knew that there were several people on stage now, many of them grimacing or howling as they were being artificially sliced open or stabbed or burned or disemboweled, whom he had once been at least casually acquainted.
The following day, Louis arrived at the theater early and got himself ready with the rest of the cast and crew. He searched around for some of the familiar faces from the night before. Despite being certain of the identities of at least two of them, and at least recognizing several others, none of them were anywhere to be found as far as he could tell. Louis wasn’t the only recruit, apparently, to be restricted to specific performances.
The final scene of the night arrived, and it was Louis’s moment to shine. As the house lights came down, and a divine spotlight illuminated his eager face, one of the mad physicians approached his waiting body. The part was being played by the third of the three women who first greeted him for rehearsal. She winked as she lowered herself beside him.
By now, there was a staggering amount of blood and other vague, terrible liquid covering most of the stage. The effect was so real that Louis could almost taste the gore in his nose, on his tongue, the essence of it dripping down the back of his throat like sips of toxic, pestilential wine.
As she raised a scalpel from her apron, Louis watched it float above his head against the divine white stage light. She lowered it toward him, tracing the lines of his face, and slid the flat side across the front of his neck. Then she raised it again, and Louis watched the edge catch the spotlight again, shimmering into the shadowed pews of the theater. It appeared just as sharp and lethal as any surgical blade he could possibly imagine.
Le Theatre du Grand Cadavre really was the very best at what it did.
-
A few days later, a brown paper package wrapped in a thin worn string arrived at the door of Le Pichet De Rouge, one of the many upscale restaurants in the city where Louis was employed. The head chef, who’d been nervously smoking his third or fourth cigarette while awaiting the delivery, opened the door with great joy. He seized the packages, and afterward wrote the remainder of the recipe for that night’s dinner hour special which had, up until then, gone without a clear flavor profile.
“Where in God’s name is Everything Bitch?!” One of the other cooks stumbled by with bags of vegetables overflowing his arms. “Nothing is prepped!”
“Get one of the other flies to do it!” the head chef exclaimed and continued to write those wholesome words for his latest recipe.
That night, dinner service was bustling with fine people in their very best clean clothing, and the sweat-stained waiters that served them their beatific food and drink. At one point in the service, a frail, elderly priest from the local Catholic church joined a table of his family and two of his most valued parishioners, waving away one who tried to help him sit with his slight, blue-veined, pale hand. He removed his tall black hat and then tucked a fine maroon napkin in below his chin, his lips already slick and quivering with expectation.
One devout family who noticed the priest from across the room returned their attention to their son, a young boy with a cast on his right arm. He was of the proper age now to enjoy a good meal, along with the rest of his class, and they were eager to see if he’d appreciate this delicious supper. The mother, wanting to assist her son, and perhaps a degree more excited for doing this than was reasonable, instructed her boy to close his eyes as their waiter removed the lid from his plate. She gathered a bite with her fork and fed her boy as her husband poured a splash of wine into his glass, and the steam rose about them all like a gathering of mercurial, swindling spirits.
The son chewed slowly, uncertain of what he had eaten—and for some bizarre reason, he was reminded, in a vivid flash, of the accident he had earlier that summer. The family had rented bicycles for a ride around the city, and the boy had sped ahead of them and taken a corner blind, colliding with the side of a car parked outside an alleyway. He flipped over his handlebars, and when his face flew downward, his teeth sank into the flesh of his right arm as it broke and bled.
He opened his eyes and gazed down on his plate. It was filled with rare meat and thinly sliced potatoes, and a limp gathering of dull green vegetables, all drizzled with a heavy, brown sauce. He felt relieved in a strange way to see it there. He did not know what he was expecting.
***
Stephen Haines is an MFA graduate of Western Washington University and the former managing editor of Bellingham Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Los Angeles Review, Epoch Press, Hypertext Magazine, Pacifica Literary Review, Rathalla Review, Sidereal, Olit, Thin Air, Adelaide, Creative Colloquy, Bright Flash, and Bellingham Review.