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t was a golden autumn day, just after November had come to remind us that all flesh is grass, even yours.
Lisa and I were hunting pheasant on a farm I’d inherited from my eccentric and misanthropic Aunt Mariele—the fields were rented out to neighbors to plant. So the taxes were covered, and the upkeep, too.
Sadly, the old party who’d been the caretaker for so many years was dead, pneumonia following flu bundled that robust man off to the next chapter with stunning haste.
So besides shooting a brace of pheasant for supper, I was letting Lisa look the place over, I planned to float the idea of moving to the snug old farmhouse and leaving the city behind.
The recent boom in grain prices had made farming corn a paying proposition again, but this field had been reaped in late July to check an attack of some fungal disease, so it was row upon row of truncated stalks—nearby, a charred spot marked the pyre of the contaminated plants.
I hoped that some birds had moved in—pheasants were getting scarce, foxes and raccoons were eating the chicks, I suppose,even with stocking by the game people.
I had given the first shot to Lisa—ladies first—and she stalked along in her blaze orange cap and vest, with her Father’s magnificently ornamented Browning Superposed at the ready.
That gun had gathered dust in the gun cabinet while her Father was alive, too expensive to use, a showpiece.
Then it had been in storage for a long time, but Lisa loved to hunt, and when she got her hands on it, she took it to the field every season, if she was in the States.
I had a single barrel Rossi from K-Mart—but that was only being fair to the game, I’m not talented at many things, but I can shoot like a house a-fire.
We’d split a box of low brass Remington shells, ten each Number Six lead shot.
A bird exploded up, and Lisa shouldered, fired twice, saw the fine cock bird crumple.
“It’s up to you, lover!” she chuckled as she broke the gun and sent the empty green hulls tumbling to the earth. “I’m going to go to the car and clean this thing—do you have that flask?”
I handed the brandy to her, closed the breech of my gun and took a look over the landscape.
“Save some for me sweetheart,” I said to her, “I won’t be long.”
She opened her knife, as I set off down the rows.
Lisa had a vintage German knife with a gut hook in it, that very continental accessory—she slid it into the bird’s rectum, twisted it and drew the giblets out with a single deft pull.
I suppressed a shudder as she flicked the bloody tangle onto the ground.
I saw it a few minutes later.
At first I thought it might be a rotten melon, or an abandoned basketball.
Like the fool I am, I went a little closer.
Two empty eye sockets , the triangular aperture of the missing nose, the ruined, lipless mouth—I’d seen enough human heads to know what I was looking at.
Just then, a pheasant rose, and I dropped it offhandedly with a snap shot.
I opened my phone, and called it in.
The cop who came was someone I knew from teaching in-service classes, so he kept it short.
“I thought it was a pumpkin or a football, at first,” I told him, “But then I smelled the decomp, so I stayed away, to preserve the scene.”
“Pretty horrible.” he said.
“Looks like foxes and ’coons were at him, not to mention birds,” I said, “Kerry Martin rents that patch, he can tell you when he cut the corn—it had to be destroyed, fungus infection—I guess he’ll know when he was there last.”
“The damnedest things happen around here” the cop said—his name was Fuller—and he was exiled to the boonies for getting drunk and slugging a Sergeant at the FOP lodge, two years before.
“Enjoy the birds, I guess the detectives will be in touch if they need anything more.”
We got in my PT Cruiser, and booked.
The dogs were glad to see us, Molly and Spike, two burly and affectionate pit bulls we’d rescued, and we got to work on supper.
I chopped and sliced the vegetables while Lisa prepared the birds for the convection oven.
The wine was breathing on the counter when the phone rang.
It was Ted Morris, one of the DA’s investigators.
“It wasn’t a severed head,” he told me, “it’s a body, tied up and buried to the neck, looks like it’s been there since around the beginning of August.
“He was probably buried alive.”
I told Lisa.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
“Lammas is around August first,” I said, thinking a mile a minute, “But something seems off, if the pattern of sacrificial killings we worked out is right, it should be fire this year, not Earth.”
“Pour me some wine, lover,” Lisa said, “We can think about this tomorrow, and I’m hungry.”
She pulled on the oven mitts, and favored me with a wicked glance.
“Handcuffs tonight?”
“Want your ankles tied, too?”
“Oh, my, yes!” she breathed.
The minx wriggled a little at the thought.
After wards, the perfect time to broach serious topics with a woman, I asked her about the idea of occupying the farm.
“Can I have a horse?” Lisa asked me, “My own horse?”
“There’s a barn, with stalls, a horse is certainly required, avoiding waste, and all.” I said.
Lisa loved horses, the school she’d been sent to after her family died had stables and the girls were trained to ride—she learned to shoot on their trap and skeet range, too.
In her boots, breeches and hacking jacket, eyes shaded by a tweed cap, she looked like the square root of class.
“I’ve always admired your elegant seat, Lisa.”
“Leave my seat out of this, lover, if I can have a horse, you have a deal.”
We started moving.
Lisa was in the city, packing up the essentials, while I was exploring the farmhouse.
I found the old notebook on a shelf of poetry and photography—Old Hamilton was a rustic intellectual, a near hermit with a hundred different interests.
It was an old composition book, yellowed and foxed with time, but in the rectangle on the front cover it plainly said, “Read this, if you’ve come here to live”. I opened it, sat down in the easy chair and lit a Cuban Bullet.
I was glad I’d brought the brandy.
And glad I’d not brought too much of it.
The book was a sort of journal, and it told the story of the neighbors over the ridge.
I vaguely knew that there was a sort of religious community there, one of the numerous eccentric sects that settled in York County.
Hamilton had been secretly observing and researching them for about forty years—the old fashioned way, what he might have done with the Internet, I hesitate to say, but he had learned much with just letters and interlibrary loans—I think the only reason he went into York was to obtain books.
He was an intelligent man—a Chinese mine had mutilated him cruelly in Korea, and made a family impossible, so he lived alone and isolated, filling his mind.
Like any autodidact, he had some strange notions, but considering his field of study, he managed to keep things rational enough.
What he had found would scare the knob off an oak door.
“These people are entirely concerned with animals,” he wrote, “they breed cattle, hogs, chickens, and there are so many goats wandering about their compound, it astounds me.” he wrote.
“They deal in meat—every sort of meat, they make exquisite sausages, cuts of pork, ham and beef, lamb, turkey and chicken of all kinds.
“There are kennels for dogs, stables for horses and ponies, pens for sheep, but the goats wander freely, they seem to be pets.
“I have bought my meat from them for a year, however, I have recently begun to wonder what else they might raise, or train there, because it seems that I see an ever changing array of very pretty young women.
“The slaughter frequently, nothing is wasted . . . buckets of blood pour out on the ground . . . I went secretly, one night, when they were dancing and playing wild, outlandish music, I saw a lovely young woman stripped and bound to a whipping post, to be flogged bloody . . . The goats dance and frisk among the people . . . They chant deep and sinister litanies . . .
It went on like that, as he discovered that his neighbors raised and sold fighting dogs, game cocks and ferrets.
And one night, as he spied on them he saw “a black, writhing chaos” form above the rough stone altar they worshiped before.
He fled, and never returned.
He continued to investigate these sinister folk, and to eventually associate them with the evil Danchinos, a wandering and barbaric people who sold slaves and human freaks in Europe—often to the nobility, for jesters and clowns, but sometimes, to hard hearted beggarmasters.
The Danchinos had been linked to the strange appearance of Kasper Hauser, and perhaps to his unexplained death.
And to worse things, as well.
The utterly depraved occultist William Seabrook, a self confessed cannibal, mentioned them obscurely in a minor work, as a source of human flesh for cannibal feasts, secretly arranged in Paris and Berlin.
He also revealed that they sold young women into prostitution, or as victims for torture shows in vile and secluded venues.
Years later, he found a young woman cowering in the barn—she told him she had escaped from that compound, where she was being trained as a sexual toy for a wealthy buyer—she displayed a cruel brand on her right shoulder blade, a jagged and Gothic glyph, that she told him was their sign of a trained girl.
She had hinted that this trade was very old, and very profitable for the Danchinos—these branded girls were prized for their training in the erotic and domestic arts.
Hamilton shuddered, and got her on a train for Portland, Oregon—he never heard from her again.
My cell phone nearly sent me into a low Earth orbit.
“Hey, it’s Barney Finn!” He was a homicide cop.
“We got an ID on the stiff from the cornfield—his name was Desmond Jones, he was a rude boy out of Kingston, he took a couple of short time falls in New York and Baltimore.”
I thanked him, God-damning him to Hell under my breath.
My heart rate was about the same as a star-nosed mole being chased by a weasel.
I had another pull at the brandy, after all, what could it hurt now?
The rest of the notebook was just as unsettling.
Lisa came in, kicked off her shoes and hung her coat in the hall.
She came in, padded up behind me and hugged my neck.
“You’re snockered,” she said flatly.
“Yes, I am, but I’ve been worse.” I said, “Give it an hour and I’ll be OK.”
“If you don’t drink any more, that is.”
“I won’t.” I told her.
“Good. Is there any left?”
“Actually, yes.”
She got the bottle, squinted at the level remaining, poured a lethal knock into a balloon glass, and sprawled decoratively in an armchair, sipping.
“What have we gotten into now?” she asked brightly.
I handed her the notebook—she read for a few minutes and let go a long, low whistle.
“My God!” Lisa said, “It’s like discovering an open sewer in your basement!”
“It’s unsettling, that’s for sure,” I told her,“ the hidden things in this world are there, but nobody notices them, until they get shoved in your face, after that, nothing is the same.
“I remember reading stories about invasions from outer space as a child, and never had a clue that the aliens had been here first—the Great Old Ones walked on Earth before the crust was fully cooled—they made the Moon for a night light, influenced evolution, created many creatures for reasons we could never understand, then sort of faded into dormancy.”
“Why?”
“They’re sensitive to astronomical alignments” The dogs were frisking around the room, nuzzling and licking for attention, so I petted Molly while Lisa cuddled Spike, “When the stars are right, they have enormous power, but then the positions change, and they become almost dead.
“They lost a war with the things we call the Elder Gods, what that might have been like, we can’t imagine, and most of them were imprisoned in other dimensions or on remote planets, or reduced in potency to near ghosts.
“Shub-Niggurath can manifest in certain places, Nyerlathotep is free to roam but has little freedom of action, in the direct way, Cthulhu is trapped in R’leyth, under the ocean, dormant, most of the time, but able to send out his dreams to some people—all of them are waiting Yog-Sothoth to re-enter this plane and set them free to rule again.
“Once, there must have been trillions of them, leaping around in the vastness of space, turning whole solar systems into fiefdoms where they could practice magic—that’s actually a science to them, we don’t understand it—and bend the principles of the universe to their will.
“After the war, only a few were left, they reproduce very slowly, and even though they’re virtually immortal, they can be destroyed, at least by the Elder Gods, so since then, they’ve been fixated on rebuilding their power base and reconstructing their empire.”
We can never win, can we?” Lisa asked, sadly.
“It’s a holding action. We win by keeping them from winning.”
“I seem to recall we talked about this before, and I still think it sucks!”.
“Job security!” I laughed.
“Piss-poor retirement plan,” Lisa groused.
“We have the Danchinos next door, but at least we know who they are,” I said, “And we can make sure they don’t harm us.”
“What the Hell are these Danchinos, anyway?”
“I think they mirror the civilization of the Great Old Ones—our civilization is mechanical, theirs was biological, organisms instead of machines, self repairing, capable of independent thought and reason to whatever degree desired, able to make copies of themselves as needed.”
“And these dancinos can do that?” Lisa was aghast.
“Not to the extent the Great Old Ones could, but they can breed and train living things—even people—to accomplish their aims, and serve the Black Goat’s purposes.”
I thought of the crippled and deformed children they had set to beggary, the women condemned to whoredom, the slaves and later athletes, prizefighters and acrobats they had manufactured almost to order.
Issigarrab, the Dark Mother, Kybele her shadow, Kali, her reflection in a warped mirror, centuries of blood, pain and bondage, all of it seemed to oppress me for a moment.
It left me angry, a cold anger, ready to fight, to bring this thing to a battle and hammer it to the Earth.
I found an observation point, put on insulated coveralls, and took my high power binoculars, and began surveillance.
Mostly, I saw a busy farm, up to date and prosperous.
Sometimes, a large truck pulled up, and several pretty girls were hustled off, then man-handled into some sort of underground bunker.
One of the women seems to have been a little uncooperative, so they picketed her.
She was dragged out, nude, and one wrist tied to an overhead carcass rack.
Then she was hauled up off the ground, with only a wooden peg to put her bare foot on and ease the strain.
They left her there until sunset.
A few days later, another woman, whom I took to be the wife of one of the cultists, was strung up by the thumbs and beaten with a knotted scourge.
Maybe she burned supper, maybe she sassed the boss man, no way to know.
She wasn’t stripped, just had her dress opened down the back—membership has its privileges.
Again, Lisa and I consulted our sources.
Information was scarce, unreliable as well.
A few of our usual fonts of information were reluctant to even admit they knew anything at all.
“Leave the Danchinos alone,” one said, her eyes running over with stark terror, and a few tears, “There are worse things than death, and they know all of them—they can wring every crumb of suffering out of a human body—if you make them angry, you’ll be in danger of finding out what Hell is like, while you’re still alive.”
In Cambodia—on other business—I chanced upon an old Tcho-Tcho man selling curious feather charms in a thieves market, not so far from the center of Pnomph Penh.
He smiled at me with betel nut blackened teeth.
“You killed many of my people.” he said.
The Tcho-Tchos are a strange bunch.
“But they were fools, and so will not be missed—and now, the Dancinos will avenge us!”
“Broken ribs are Hell at your age, old man, and these boots have steel toes”
“Hah, you think I fear you?
“What can you do to me that the Khmer Rouge didn’t do in their prisons—life is a heavy yoke on my shoulders!
“The Danchinos will never stop hunting you!”
I threw a wad of the local funny money at his feet, noticing how twisted they were, and that he had several toes missing, as well.
“Remember me kindly.” I said, and walked away.
I was home in a week, international travel is no fun any more, and American money isn’t what it was.
These little expeditions of mine were getting old, but when you enter the world of the shadows, getting out is impossible.
The world of the occult, the sweaty sexual underworld, the twisted universe of the cults and conspiracy theories are surprisingly important to the intelligence services—nobody wants to see the people who live those lives, so they’re invisible, and nobody seems to take them seriously.
Think nothing is invisible, unless you can’t see it?
Seeing is an art, looking is easy, but seeing takes concentration, knowledge and the willingness to believe the unbelievable, even when that’s something you desperately want not to exist.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, it really doesn’t make much sense to me, either. |
Lisa thrust her feet into a pair of rubber clogs and eeled into a heavy roll neck sweater.
The dogs chuffed in their sleep, tired from a days running and playing in the late autumn chill.
Lisa slipped quietly out into the night—she wanted to check on her gray gelding, Mosby, to be sure he had enough food for overnight.
Actually, she just wanted to look at him—it had been too long since she’d had her own horse.
There was a quarter moon for light, and she knew the way well enough.
She was swaying just a bit to her own music, as she belted out a version of ‘Gilded Splinters’ that would have made Doctor John contemplate self defenestration—Lisa had a low, smoky voice that was very pleasant to listen to, but her singing was akin to Chinese torture, always off key and slightly off the beat.
“Kon-kon. the kiddy kon kon,” she wheezed—to make things worse, she sang loud, and forgot chunks of the lyrics, as well.
She was thinking of the explanation of that sinister song, and missing her guy like crazy.
“It’s a voodoo bocor, staking his claim—he makes a threat sound like sympathy,” he’d told her.
“Like Mr. T. with ‘I pity the fool’, Lisa had replied, “Pretty standard thug-speak”.
“Precisely,” he said, “it’s a tradition of the New Orleans voudon that the worst fate a bocor or a zombi can inflict is “driving them to the dogs,” meaning sending a rival to the gutter with drink and legal trouble—making them poor trash, taking away the little bit of respectability they might have.”
That made her smile—just as the wooden baton began to squeeze her windpipe.
Manila was a hard kind of town, and she had taken her Escrima studies seriously during her years there, so she reacted by long training, whirled her butterfly knife open with the blade below her hand, and drove the point of the five inch blade into her attacker’s thigh, than gave it a sort of twisting, stirring motion.
The man yelled, “FUCK-STICK,” and released his hold on the club.
Two more men appeared out of the darkness and began to close on her—she hoped it was only the three she could see—as she snatched the wooden truncheon with her left hand and laid it across the closer of the pair’s shins, causing him to utter an inarticulate cry of anguish and fall to his knees.
The dogs came boiling out of the darkness, then, the pet door swinging behind them with the violence of their exit.
They took care of the third one, while she gave the original owner of the rod an old fashioned “wood shampoo” until he dropped, unconscious.
She proceeded to whip the second one across the kidneys a few times, mostly to express her pique.
They were actually glad to see the cops, when they arrived.
The next few days were full of trouble.
Since the dogs had their shots, and Lisa’s old friends on the paper gave the incident a positive spin, Molly and Spike were soon home again, but they were two puzzled dogs.
There were also several hearings—which didn’t amount to much, but were inconvenient and nerve wracking.
The neighbors were still across the ridge—and even when the three assailants pleaded guilty at the first chance they got, Lisa was sure they were far from pleased.
She wanted her man, and she wanted him now.
When I got home, and Lisa told me that story, I was ready to take a grenade launcher and make my displeasure felt.
Lisa calmed me down enough to avoid a major incident, but I was still in the grip of an outbreak of the red-ass when the meat truck came crunching gravel into our yard.
A bearded moon-calf with a port wine stain on half his face walked to our door and rang the bell.
I slipped my Taurus nine into the back of my belt and opened up.
“Elder Turner wants to apologize to you for those men, “he said, in a gurgling, rasping voice.
I looked at all three hundred pounds of him, his eyes were downcast, his hideous face full of remorse.
“Tell him to come in,” I said.
“I’m sorry, “ Frankenstein’s ugly brother said, “The Elder can’t walk any more—he asks you to come to him, bring your pistol if you want to, and if your lady friend will also come, he wants to offer her his humblest amends.”
The Elder must have been closely related to Ugly Kid Joe—maybe his father.
He was huge, a whale carcass stranded on a lonely beach, a decomposing dollop of suet on a butcher’s block, a neck less, semi gelatinous mass reclining across the front end of the compartment in an untidy jumble of throws and pillows, dipping his swollen, stubby hand into a huge bowl of sausage pieces from time to time.
His face was like an aluminum foil mask, crumpled in a fist and imperfectly straightened, utterly hairless, but perhaps the most startling thing about it was its color.
The man’s skin was a dull, pale slate blue.
His voice was phlegmy, raspy and very, very deep.
“Them boys was foolish,” he grated, “They got some fool idea about scarin’ you two away, ’cause they was scairt you’d find out too much about us.
“Find out all you want to, you think we can be hurt?
“We deal in flesh, an’ flesh is the most precious thing they is, constrained flesh, flesh you can own, bought fer money—live flesh, dead flesh, animal bird or human, you want flesh, finest kind, you come to us.
“We make the bestest meat products knowd to man, every sort and variety, fit to make you crave it again and again.
“Our hosses are blood stock that’s never been topped in the show ring or in the rodeo—I’m sendin’ over a couple of fine hunters—you won’t be able to send ’em back, no matter what yer thinkin’ now.
“You was different sorta folks, I’d send a wench, we train ’em perfect, manys the Senator had one of our gals hid in an apartment in Washington, many a rich man, too, but you’d not go for that.
“We don’t mess with children any more, not in this country, but we know all the people who do, and many’s the other secret we have got holt of, gummint men don’t bother with us, not lessen’ they wanta go to the gutter, or maybe wuss.
“So ya see, we ain’t got nothin’ to be skairt of—but we’s a peaceable bunch, so, like we always do, I’m gonna make peace wit’ you, and strike another agreement,” and he laughed a low, utterly horrible laugh, “We lives by agreements an’ arrangements we make with folks, that’s a proper way to live.”
“And the bottom line is?” I asked this horrible blue man, this puddle of fat with shrewd blue eyes boring into me from the slits that made in his tumbledown face.
“We ignores each other,” he said. “That’s a good offer—I tell you what, I’ll send a boy over with a bucket of hearts for them dogs, every slaughter day, dogs love ’em, biled or raw, just to make the bargain sweeter—and you know wust you gonna do is annoy us.
“An’ just so you know, we don’t know how that fool got hisself buried in your field, wasn’t no work of ours—we’d a done it, you’d never have found him.
“I’ll have some questions asked, quiet like, see what I can find, ‘cause I can see you’re a man who’ll be satisfied in his mind, or won’t let it go.”
“Done,” I said, not happy about it. But reality is reality, these guys were bullet-proof.
Lisa grabbed my arm, but I gently shook her off, and I could feel her accept the necessity of the situation.
We got out of the truck, with the old man’s horrid, death-rattle laugh ringing in our ears.
“Some apology.” Lisa said sourly, “And that blue skin!”
“Silver poisoning—I’ve seen it before, silver is important in a lot of occult operations.”
“I’m hungry.” She said, “I’ll make us a couple of Monte Christo sandwiches, what say?”
“I say yes,” I told her, and listened to the sweet woman sounds from the kitchen.
For some reason, I believed the Elder—they certainly had enough land to have buried that man in their own field.
It also didn’t fit the pattern of the sacrifices, and that was important.
I went into the kitchen to help Lisa—she was padding across the cold floor as though it was a fine Berber carpet.
I looked at her bare feet and laughed.
“Two out of three isn’t bad” I said.
She smiled.
“When I discovered how much fun men were, I stopped being a Feminazi”
“When was that?”
“After I stopped being a lesbian,” she said, “Before that I was a crotch kicking virago, and a serious muff diver.
“Then one night I was banging this chick, and it lost its thrill all of a sudden—she sort of had the wrong equipment, or at least it looked that way to me.
“I took a year or two off, went celibate, and thought things over—then I met a very nice man, and hauled his ashes one night—fireworks, lover, real fireworks—nothing as good as you, mind, but really spectacular just the same.
“What happened to the guy?” I asked her.
“He was married.” she said, flat and forthright. “Ready to eat?”
A few days later I was at the Central Market in York—it was snow season, and we were using the apartment in town for convenience—and I ran into one of the Coroner’s investigators, Bill Schmidt.
We got some food and sat down.
“That guy you found was an odd one.” Bill said, munching his falafel, “He was beaten to a pulp before he died, broken ribs, bruised kidneys and liver, ruptured testicles, one ear nearly torn off, all his teeth knocked out, some crushed facial bones, I think those were from a set of brass nucks, from the shape of the injury, narrow and deep, but that wasn’t the strangest part.”
I dug into some Singapore noodles—just the thing for a cold day in the city—chewed and swallowed the fiery stuff.
“What was so odd, sounds like a regular beat-down to me, a bad one, but not so strange.”
Bill tore off some of his pita bread, and gave me a funny sort of a look.
“Why was his mouth full of rock salt, then—did they try to Kosher him?”
The penny dropped.
“Who was this this guy working for, on the street?” I asked him.
“Natty Salazar. That Rasta claims he’s half Mexican, makes a big deal out of it,” he told me.
“Death Rides a Horse.” I said, and his eyebrows went up.
“Well, maybe he does.” Bill said, with a chuckle.
“No, Bill, it’s a spaghetti western, you know how the Jamaicans love those shoot-em-ups, and there’s a scene where one guy gets beaten up, buried to the neck in the hot sun, and left with a mouth full of salt.”
“That shit bird was late with his money before.” Bill said, speculating, “Maybe once too often?”
Natty Salazar was a savage kingpin, an urban heyduke who spread terror near and far by doing things like pouring Tabasco into the eyes of mules and runners who displeased him, and beating snitches to death with crowbars.
The Feds wanted Natty in the worst way.
And that’s how they got him—he decided to shoot it out when they came with the warrant, and a DEA agent blew him up with a machine gun.
That caused a chain reaction of very nasty homicides behind the succession to the throne.
Then the waters were calm again, Vivat Rex and all that.
I sat by the gas fire while a late March storm rattled the windows and made the weatherstripping hoot like the ghost of a diesel locomotive, Lisa had her head on my thigh, and the dogs were pressing against us.
“I think of all those people out there, the ones who don’t know what we know, sitting home and feeling safe,” Lisa said.
“Until it reaches out and grabs them,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Hold me tight, lover, hold me tight until the dawn comes and chases all these bogeymen into their holes for the day? Will you?”
“Remember, Lisa, these bogeymen are as afraid of us as we are of them.”
“Good,” she said, standing in a single, fluid motion, at 53, Lisa was still as lithe as an asp.
I was a lot creakier, but we got to the bedroom just fine, thank you very much. |
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