Fortnight of Fear Read online

  For a very long moment I couldn’t think what to do. Jill and Robbie watched me without saying a word, as if I were a hostile outsider who had deliberately set out to interfere, and to destroy their lives.

  But at last I grinned, and nodded, and said to Robbie, “You’re back, then! You’re really back! It’s a miracle!”

  He smiled lopsidedly, as if his mouth were anesthetized. “I knew you’d understand. Jill said you never would; but I said bull. You always did, didn’t you? You son-of-a-gun.”

  He rested his hand on my shoulder; his dead gray hand; and I felt the bile rise up in my throat. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and if I had betrayed any sign of disgust, I would have ruined it.

  “Come on through to the kitchen,” I told him. “I could use a beer after this. Maybe a glass of wine.”

  “There’s some champagne in the icebox,” said Jill. “I was just going to get it.”

  “Well, why not let’s open it together,” I suggested. “Why not let’s celebrate. It isn’t every day that your brother comes back from the dead.”

  Jill dragged the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around Robbie like a toga. Then they followed me into the small green-tiled kitchen. I opened up the icebox, took out the bottle of champagne, and offered it to Robbie.

  “Here, you were always better at opening up bottles of wine than I was.”

  He took it, but looked at me seriously. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve got the strength any more. I’m alive, you know, but it’s kind of different.”

  “You can make love,” I retorted, dangerously close to losing my temper. “You should be able to open a bottle of champagne.”

  His breath whined in and out of his bandages. I watched him closely. There was doubt on his face; as if he suspected that I was somehow setting him up, but he couldn’t work out how.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Jill coaxed him.

  I turned around and opened one of the kitchen drawers. String, skewers, nutmeg grater. “Yes, come on, Robbie. You always were a genius at parties.”

  I opened the next drawer. Tea-towels. Jill frowned and said, “What are you looking for?”

  Robbie began to unwind the wire muzzle around the champagne cork. “My fingers feel kind of numb, you know? It’s hard to describe.”

  I opened a third drawer, trying to do it nonchalantly. Knives.

  Jill knew instantaneously what I was going to do. Maybe it was genuine intuition. Maybe it was nothing more than heightened fear. But I turned around so casually that she didn’t see the nine-inch Sabatier carving-knife in my hand, she was looking at my eyes; and it had penetrated Robbie’s bandages right up to the hilt before she understood that I meant to kill him. I meant to kill him. He was my brother.

  The champagne bottle smashed on the floor in an explosion of glass and foam. Jill screamed but Robbie said nothing at all. He turned to me, and grasped my shoulder, and there was something in his eyes which was half panic and half relief. I pulled the knife downwards and it cut through his flesh as if it were over-ripe avocado; soft, slippery, no resistance.

  “Oh, God,” he breathed. His gray intestines came pouring out from underneath his toga, and on to the broken glass. “Oh God, get it over with.”

  “No!” screamed Jill; but I stared at her furiously and shouted, “You want him to live for ever? He’s my brother! You want him to live for ever?”

  She hesitated for a second, then she pushed her way out of the kitchen, and I heard her retching in the toilet. Robbie was on his knees, his arms by his sides, making no attempt to pick up his heavy kilt of guts.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Get it over with.”

  I was shaking so much that I could hardly hold the knife. He tilted his head back, passive and quiet, his eyes still open, and like a man in a slowly-moving nightmare I cut his throat from one side to the other; so deeply that the knife-blade wedged between his vertebrae.

  There was no blood. He collapsed backward on to the floor, shuddering slightly. Then the unnatural life that had illuminated his eyes faded away, and it was clear that he was truly dead.

  Jill appeared in the doorway. Her face was completely white, as if she had covered herself in rice powder. “What have you done?” she whispered.

  I stood up. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. We’ll have to bury him.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s still alive … we could bring him back to life again.”

  “Jill –” I began, moving toward her; but she screamed, “Don’t touch me! You’ve killed him! Don’t touch me!”

  I tried to snatch at her wrist, but she pulled herself away, and ran for the door.

  “Jill! Jill, listen!”

  She was out in the corridor before I could stop her, and running toward the elevator. The elevator doors opened and the Italian-looking man stepped out, looking surprised. Jill pushed her way into the elevator and hammered wildly at the buttons.

  “No!” she screamed. “No!”

  I went after her, but the Italian-looking man deliberately blocked my way.

  “That’s my wife!” I yelled at him. “Get out of my goddamned way!”

  “Come on, friend, give her some breathing-space,” the man told me, and pushed me in the chest with the flat of his hand. Desperately, I saw the elevator doors close and Jill disappear.

  “For God’s sake,” I snarled at the man. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”

  I shoved my way past him and hurtled down the stairs, three stairs at a time, until I reached the lobby. The doorman said, “Hey, man, what’s going on?” and caught at my arm.

  He delayed me for only a second; but it was a second too long. The swing doors were just closing and Jill was already halfway across the sidewalk, running into Central Park South.

  “Jill!” I shouted at her. She couldn’t possibly have heard me. She didn’t even hear the cab that hit her as she crossed the road, and sent her hurtling over its roof, her arms spread wide as if she were trying to fly. I pushed open the swing doors and I heard her fall. I heard screams and traffic and the screeching of brakes. Then I didn’t hear anything, either.

  It was a strange and grisly task, removing Robbie’s body from Willey’s apartment. But there was no blood, no evidence of murder, and nobody would report him missing. I buried him deep in the woods beyond White Plains, in a place where we used to play when we were boys.

  We buried Jill a week later, on a warm sunny day when the whole world seemed to be coming to life. Her mother wouldn’t stop sobbing. Her father wouldn’t speak to me. The police report had exonerated me from any possible blame, but grief knows no logic.

  I took two weeks away from work after the funeral and went to stay at a friend’s house in the Hamptons, and got drunk most of the time. I was still in shock; and I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to get over it.

  Down on the seashore, with the gulls circling all around me, I suppose I found some kind of unsteady peace of mind. I returned to the city on a dark threatening Thursday afternoon. I felt exhausted and hung-over, and I planned to spend the weekend quietly relaxing before returning to work on Monday. Maybe I would go to the zoo. Jill had always liked going to the zoo, more to look at the people than the animals.

  I unlocked the door of my apartment and tossed my bag into the hallway. Then I went through to the kitchen and took a bottle of cold Chablis out of the icebox. Hair of the dog, I thought to myself. I switched on the television just in time to see the end credits of As The World Turns. I poured myself some wine; and then, whistling, went through to the bedroom.

  I said, “Oh Christ,” and dropped my full glass of wine on to my foot.

  She was lying on top of the comforter naked, not smiling, but her thighs provocatively apart. Her skin had a grayish-blue sheen, as if it would be greasy to touch, but it wasn’t decayed. Her hair was brushed and her lips were painted red and there was purple eye-shadow over her eyes.

  “Jill?” I breathed. I f
elt for one implosive instant that I was going mad.

  “I used the spare key from the crack in the skirting,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if her chest were crushed. I had seen her hurtling over the taxi, I had seen her fall.

  “You said the words,” I told her, dully. “You said the words.”

  She shook her head. But it was then that I remembered watching her asleep, and reciting that childish rhyme. Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever after.

  She raised her arms, stiffly. The fingers of her left hand were tightly curled around, as if they had been broken.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered. “Please, make love to me.”

  I turned around and walked straight through to the kitchen. I pulled open one drawer after another, but there wasn’t a single knife anywhere. She must have hidden them all, or thrown them away. I turned back again, and Jill was standing in the bedroom doorway. This time she was smiling.

  “Make love to me,” she repeated.

  Pig’s Dinner

  Bakewell, Derbyshire

  Bakewell lies on the River Wye, in a valley between the high ridges of mid-Derbyshire. The town’s name was derived from the Saxon bad-quell, meaning “bath-well”, but these days Bakewell is better known for the Bakewell Tart, which is a pastry filled with strawberry preserve and glazed with egg. The Derbyshire Dales are some of the most peaceful and beautiful countryside in England, which made them a natural (for me) for one of the most horrifying stories I have ever written.

  Bakewell has a splendid arched and buttressed bridge, nearly 700 years old; and its brownstone buildings are unusually warm in appearance for a Peakland town. Just as warm are Bakewell’s springs, which were known in Roman times, and still feed the Bath House, built in 1697 for the Duke of Rutland.

  Pig’s Dinner caused a considerable stir when it made its first appearance in the American magazine Cemetery Dance and is being recreated both as a graphic novel and a television movie.

  PIG’S DINNER

  David climbed tiredly out of the Land Rover, slammed the ill-fitting door, and trudged across the yard with his hands deep in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. It had stopped raining at last, but a coarse cold wind was blowing diagonally across the yard, and above his head the clouds rushed like a muddy-pelted pack of mongrel dogs.

  Today had been what he and Malcolm always sardonically called “a pig of a day.”

  He had left the piggery at half-past five that morning, driven all the way to Chester in the teeming rain with a litter of seven Landrace piglets suffering from suspected swine erysipelas. He had waited two and a half hours for a dithering young health inspector who had missed his rail connection from Coventry. Then he had lunched on steak-and-kidney pudding with a deputy bank manager whose damp suit had reeked like a spaniel, and who had felt himself unable to grant David the loan that he and Malcolm desperately needed in order to repair the roof of the old back barn.

  He was wet, exhausted and demoralized. For the first time since they had taken over the piggery from their uncle four and a half years ago, he could see no future for Bryce Prime Pork, even if they sold half of their livestock and most of their acreage, and remortgaged their huge Edwardian house.

  He had almost reached the stone steps when he noticed that the lights in the feed plant had been left burning. Damn it, he thought. Malcolm was always so careless. It was Malcolm’s over-ambitious investment in new machinery and Malcolm’s insistence on setting up their own slaughtering and deep-freezing facilities that had stretched their finances to breaking-point. Bryce Prime Pork had been caught between falling demand and rising costs, and David’s dream of becoming a prosperous gentleman farmer had gradually unraveled all around him.

  He crossed the sloping yard toward the feed plant. Bryce Prime Pork was one of the cleanest piggeries in Derbyshire, but there was still a strong smell of ammonia on the evening wind, and the soles of David’s shoes slapped against the thin black slime that seemed to cover everything in wet weather. He opened the door to the feed plant and stepped inside. All the lights were on; but there was no sign of Malcolm. Nothing but sacks of fish meal, maize, potatoes, decorticated ground-nut meal, and gray plastic dustbins filled with boiled swill. They mixed their own pig-food, rather than buying proprietary brands – not only because it cost them three or four percent less, but because Malcolm had developed a mix of swill, cereal and concentrate which not only fattened the pigs more quickly, but gave them award-winning bacon.

  David walked up and down the length of the feed plant. He could see his reflection in the night-blackened windows: squatter, more hunched than he imagined himself to be. As he passed the stainless-steel sides of the huge feed grinder, he thought that he looked like a Golem, or a troll, dark and disappointed. Maybe defeat did something to a man’s appearance, squashed him out of shape, so that he couldn’t recognize himself any longer.

  He crossed to the switches by the door, and clicked them off, one after another, and all along the feed plant the fluorescent lights blinked out. Just before he clicked the last switch, however, he noticed that the main switch which isolated the feed-grinder was set to ‘off.’

  He hesitated, his hand an inch away from the light-switch. Neither Malcolm nor Dougal White, their foreman, had mentioned that there was anything wrong with the machinery. It was all German, made in Dusseldorf by Muller-Koch, and after some initial teething troubles with the grinder blades, it had for more than two years run with seamless efficiency.

  David lifted the main switch to ‘on’ – and to his surprise, with a smooth metallic scissoring sound, like a carving-knife being sharpened against a steel, the feeding grinder started up immediately.

  In the next instant, he heard a hideously distorted shriek – a gibbering monkey-like yammering of pain and terror that shocked him into stunned paralysis – unable to understand what the shriek could be, or what he could do to stop it.

  He fumbled for the ‘off’ switch, while all the time the screaming went on and on, growing higher and higher-pitched, racketing from one side of the building to the other, until David felt as if he had suddenly gone mad.

  The feed-grinder gradually minced to a halt, and David crossed stiff-legged as a scarecrow to the huge conical stainless steel vat. He clambered up the access ladder at the side, and while he did so the screaming died down, and gave way to a complicated mixture of gurgles and groans.

  He climbed up to the lip of the feed vat, and saw to his horror that the entire shining surface was rusty-colored with fresh blood – and that, down at the bottom of the vat, Malcolm was standing, staring up at him wild-eyed, his hands braced tightly against the sloping sides.

  He appeared to be standing, but as David looked more closely, he began to realize that Malcolm had been churned into the cutting-blades of the feed grinder right up to his waist. He was surrounded by a dark glutinous pool of blood and thickly-minced bone, its surface still punctuated by occasional bubbles. His brown plaid shirt was soaked in blood, and his face was spattered like a map.

  David stared at Malcolm and Malcolm stared back at David. The silent agony which both joined and fatally separated them at that instant was far more eloquent than any scream could have been.

  “Oh, Christ,” said David. “I didn’t know.”

  Malcolm opened and closed his mouth, and a huge pink bubble of blood formed and burst.

  David clung tightly to the lip of the feed-grinding vat and held out his hand as far as he could.

  “Come on, Malcolm. I’ll pull you up. Come on, you’ll be all right.”

  But Malcolm remained as he was, staring, his arms tensed against the sides of the vat, and shook his head. Blood poured in a thick ceaseless ribbon down his chin.

  “Malcolm, come on, I can pull you out! Then I’ll get an ambulance!”

  But again Malcolm shook his head: this time with a kind of dogged fury. It was then that David understood that there was hardly anything left of Malcolm to pull out – that it wasn’t just a question of his legs
being tangled in the machinery. The grinder blades had consumed him up to the hip – reducing his legs and the lower part of his body to a thick smooth paste of bone and muscle, an emulsion of human flesh that would already be dripping down into the collecting churn underneath.

  “Oh God, Malcolm, I’ll get somebody. Hold on, I’ll call for an ambulance. Just hold on!”

  “No,” Malcolm told him, his voice muffled with shock.

  “Just hold on, for Christ’s sake!” David screamed at him.

  But Malcolm repeated, “No. I want it this way.”

  “What?” David demanded. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Malcolm’s fingers squeaked against the bloody sides of the vat. David couldn’t begin to imagine what he must be suffering. Yet Malcolm looked up at him now with a smile – a smile that was almost beatific.

  “It’s wonderful, David. It’s wonderful. I never knew that pain could feel like this. It’s better than anything that ever happened. Please, switch it back on. Please.”

  “Switch it back on?”

  Malcolm began to shudder. “You must. I want it so much. Life, love – they don’t count for anything. Not compared with this.”

  “No,” said David. “I can’t.”

  “David,” Malcolm urged him, “I’m going to die anyway. But if you don’t give me this … believe me, I’m never going to let you sleep for the rest of your life.”

  David remained at the top of the ladder for ten long indecisive seconds.

  “Believe me,” Malcolm nodded, in that voice that sounded as if it came straight from hell, “it’s pure pleasure. Pure pleasure. Beyond pain, David, out of the other side. You can’t experience it without dying. But David, David, what a way to go!”

  David stayed motionless for one more moment. Then, without a word, he climbed unsteadily back down the ladder. He tried not to think of anything at all as he grasped the feed-grinder’s main power switch, and clicked it to ‘on.’

  From the feed-grinder came a cry that was partly naked agony and partly exultation. It was a cry that made David rigid with horror, and his ill-digested lunch rose in the back of his throat in a sour, thick tide.