How It Grows
This short horror tale appeared in issue number three of Eulogy. Story copyright 1993, William D. Cissna.


"Rico," said the short, squat man in the pinstripes and the silk tie, "get your butt over here."
Rico, big enough to make the other man look shorter in everything except clothing budget and intellect, loped
across the dusty lot from where the heavy trucks were parked, awaiting a load. When he reached the
nondescript concrete block box that served as an office, the short man motioned him inside and slammed the
door behind him.
"Dagnabit, Rico, that machine's noisy."
"Sure is, Boss," Rico agreed, wondering what had brought the Boss over here in the first place.
"Well, hell, it's a business, right?" said Carmine Condato, who knew about business. The car dealership, the
boat dealership and the concrete factory, all on relatively prime Brooklyn real estate. Wonderful businesses,
legally owned and operated. And so marvelously useful in what the Condato family really did for a living,
involving some high demand commodities of a less legal variety, made available in lower rent sections of the
city. Speedboats, custom cars, disposal -- good stuff all the way.
Maintenance of this wide ranging empire usually, however, kept Carmine Condato off the premises of his
least desirable operation. A daylight appearance when the concrete grinder crunched away was a rare surprise.
It made Rico nervous.
"Lissen, Rico, nothin' important, just wanted to know how it went last night."
Rico relaxed inside his size 48 sport coat. It wasn't anything he'd done wrong, then. He could feel his heart
slowing.
"Went smoother 'n smooth, Boss. The guy was a real piece a work, dint suspect a thing. I mean, he actually
said he'd never seen how a concrete maker worked, climbed right up the ladder and everything."
"You're kidding."
"Nah. Leaned right over to look in. Just took a little push. 'Course, we had a little pink load first thing this
morning, but so what? The guy's part of a Long Island City parking garage by now."
"Good work, Rico. As always."
Rico beamed. "Who was the guy, anyway?"
"Ah, just some two bit punk giving me some competition. Only he didn't know it was me he was competin'
with."
"Will there be a war, like last time?" Rico asked, ready.
"Nah. He wasn't connected or nothin'. Goin' solo. Stupid."
"Okay," Rico said, managing to sound disappointed.
"Now, is there anything else going on out here I should know about?" the Boss asked.
Rico could feel a light sweat building up quickly on his brow. The question was unexpected, and he knew he'd
have to answer it. "Well, yeah, there's one thing."
Carmine nipped the end off his third cigar of the day and lit it. "Tell me."
"Well, it ain't much really. But the guys seem to be havin' some trouble with the dumper. It's ... well, it's up a
little too high for the trucks and the bulldozer both. It's spillin' over some when we load the finished
concrete."
"Is this a new problem?"
"Yeah, only the last coupla months. It worked fine when we first ran it, that was, what, January, nine months
ago?"
"And you didn't tell me until now?"
Rico's sweat felt like a bath. "Well, it didn't seem that bad 'til just a little while ago. You know, about the time
we dumped that first guy, Bonisari, in there."
"Okay, five or six weeks, that's okay you didn't tell me. I got a lot to worry about. Now, what you do, you call
that son of a bitch that built it, Allan what's his name, and tell him for me to get his tail over here and get it
fixed. And I mean like right now!"
"Sure thing, Boss," Rico said, trying to inconspicuously wipe his forehead as the Boss stormed by and gave the
door a resonant slam on the way out. As the Cadillac spit gravel, Rico sat, still shaking, thumbed the Rolodex,
found a number and dialed it furiously.
***
Allan Porsky was worried. One of his best clients -- though not always in a direct, traceable line -- was pissed
off. And he knew enough about Carmine Condato to be scared.
When Rico's call had come in, he had feverishly grabbed the plans for the grinder, a measuring tape and a
notepad. Now, as he stood before the stilled device just after the shift had ended, perplexity began to take the
place of fear.
He stared up at the machine he and his men had built with such care, knowing who would be signing the final
check. Its four angled legs supported something resembling an inverted missile on a gantry: a cylindrical top
with a cone that narrowed towards the bottom. A ladder climbed up one side to a catwalk around the top of the
cylinder, and a chute came down from the slightly higher gravel making building to the east. Excepting for the
grinding machinery inside of it, the structure was fairly simple. What could have gone wrong?
He looked for a while longer. Everything seemed fine. But he couldn't help the feeling that, somehow,
something had changed since he'd walked away from the finished tower back in January.
He unrolled the drawings and took in the specs. Diagonal measure between tower legs, fourteen feet. Vertical
measurement from concrete pad to bottom of cone, eighteen feet. Specs checked and initialed by him before
construction, the previous September. And a second time after final measurement, dated January 23rd. After
construction and before mailing of the final invoice to Carmine Condato.
He took out his measuring tape and ran it from one leg across the middle of the pad to the opposite corner. He
looked at the figure with disbelief. Sixteen feet, five inches. What the heck? He checked it three times to be
sure.
He borrowed a tall ladder from the building next door and dropped a plumb from the cone bottom to the pad.
Maybe the pad had settled some, but he still couldn't believe his eyes. Twenty two feet, two inches.
He fought with the thing in his mind as he drove, sweaty handed, to his sprawling home outside of Bay Shore,
the house that his association with Carmine Condato and others like him had made possible.
Somebody had really screwed up. Or had they? He had been scrupulously honest with the contract. The
initials from January 23 spoke for themselves. It had measured right nine months ago.
When he woke in the middle of the night, he tried to laugh away the thought that had come to him like a
dream. Could it be the grinder was growing? He thought, I'm losing my mind, I'm so scared. And what am I
going to tell that Rico guy tomorrow?

***
When Porsky called in his report to Rico the next morning, he put as much apology into his voice as he could
muster. "Look, Rico, it measured right when we built it. I don't know what happened since. But don't get me
wrong. We may have to shut it down for a while to rebuild. But we'll take care of it. No charge, of course.
"Somebody's gonna fix it, that's for sure," Carmine said after Rico reported in. "But it ain't gonna be Porsky.
I'll find someone who knows what the heck they're doing."
After a moment of silence on the line, Carmine, in a deeper, quieter tone, said, "And Rico, I think you oughta
have Porsky over for one more look, with you there. Why don't you show him that at least his damn grinder is
still working?"
"Sure thing, Boss," Rico said, and hung up with a smile.
***
Late the next day, Rico's smile had been erased, replaced with lines of worry. The day was shot, the boys had
gone home and Mr. Condato was on his way over.
It wasn't Porsky -- he'd disappeared into the jaws of the grinder with no sweat.
It was the darned dumper. This morning, a little overflow had become a flood. The trucks just couldn't get
closed enough to the flow to keep from losing half of every load on the ground. A minor irritation had grown to
the point of halting work altogether. The Boss would undoubtedly be royally pissed.
The Cadillac screeched to a halt near the office and Carmine Condato, steamed, stalked over to the metal
hulk that had given him more headaches in 48 hours than anything since those government hearings.
"So, Rico, I guess we'd better go up and have a look, eh?"
Rico could detect no threat from the little man, so together they climbed the ladder to the catwalk. From
above, the works looked fine. Except that, to Rico, it seemed like there was more room up there than there
used to be.
It was mere happenstance that Carmine had a hand on the outside railing when the machine suddenly burst
into a clattering sound. He tried to yell at Rico over the noise, but the structure began to rock and shimmy as
if an earthquake had struck. In Brooklyn, an earthquake, he thought, confused. But his hand tightened on the
railing as the catwalk started to roll.
Rico, standing away from the railing, had no handhold. As if shrugging a shoulder, the catwalk pitched him
inward and down. As there was no gravel coming in from the chute, Carmine's subconscious mind had to
accept that the sound he heard was the crunching of Rico's bones.
The motion of the metal subsided without stopping, but Carmine, accustomed to taking chances, grabbed for
the stanchions of the ladder and pulled himself across the grating until he could swing his legs over and onto
the first steps.
The fifty feet to the ground took the better part of a lifetime as the tower creaked and groaned around him.
When he finally released the handrails at the bottom, his hands wanted to cramp up from the tightness of his
grip on the way down. He stepped away from the ladder on shaky, jello legs.
Then three of the huge metal bolts that secured the tower legs to their bases popped up into the air and landed
with a clang. As he watched, amazed, several more shot off into the dark. And then, with two more pinging
reports, he realized the feet were free. One at a time, they moved tentatively towards him, leaving the safety
of their concrete pads for the more tenuous gravel and dust lot.
On their third step, as he backpedaled madly away from the impossible thing, the gravel chute wrenched itself
away from the tower and crashed noisily into the side of the building where it was still attached.
The tower, free of all encumbrances except the ladder, which dragged behind it like a tail, moved faster and
more surely towards Carmine Condato, leaving a trail of red drops and indescribable pieces of something once
human.
In his overworked mind, Condato knew the car was his hope of escape. He focused on reaching it, trying to
ignore the fact that his leg span paled beside that of a sixty-foot creature.
It didn't help.
As he neared the Caddy, one huge metal clump -- he refused to think of it as a foot -- came down with the force
of immense weight directly onto the car's roof. The once proud Sedan DeVille was reduced in split seconds to
nothing more than glass chips, waste metal and shredded electrical wiring.
Carmine Condato fell to the ground and, for the first time in his adult life, began to cry. It wasn't so much the
loss of the car as the sudden, crystal clear realization of his situation.
The machine had eaten Rico! And it was still hungry!
***
Horror shorts -
by Bill Cissna
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