Fortnight of Fear Read online

  He was gripped by a sudden terrible compulsion that he needed to see. He scrambled back up the access ladder, gripped the rim of the vat, and stared down at Malcolm with a feeling that was almost like being electrocuted.

  The grinding-blades scissored and chopped, and the entire vat surged with blood. Malcolm was still bracing himself at the very bottom, his torso tensed as the grinder blades turned his pelvis and his lower abdomen into a churning mixture of blood, muscle and shredded cloth.

  His face was a mask of concentration and tortured ecstasy. He was enjoying it, reveling in it, relishing every second of it. The very extinction of his own life; the very destruction of his own body.

  Beyond pain, he had told David. Out of the other side.

  Malcolm held his upper body above the whirling blades as long as he could, but gradually his strength faded and his hands began to skid inch by inch down the bloody metal sides. His screams of pleasure turned into a cry like nothing that David had ever heard before – piercing, high-pitched, an ullulation of unearthly triumph.

  His white stomach was sliced up; skin, fat, intestines; and he began a quivering, jerking last descent into the maw of the feed-grinder.

  “David!” he screamed. “David! It’s won –”

  The blades locked into his ribs. He was whirled around with his arms lifted as if he were furiously dancing. Then there was nothing but his head, spinning madly in a froth of pink blood. Finally, with a noise like a sink-disposal unit chopping up chicken bones, his head was gone, too, and the grinder spun faster and faster, without any more grist for its terrible mill.

  Shaking, David climbed down the ladder and switched the grinder off. There was a long, drying whine, and then silence, except for the persistent worrying of the wind.

  What the hell was he going to do now? There didn’t seem to be any point in calling for an ambulance. Not only was it pointless – how was he going to explain that he had switched the feed-grinder back on again, with Malcolm still inside it?

  The police would realize that the grinder didn’t have the capacity to chop up Malcolm’s entire body before David had had the opportunity to switch it off. And he doubted very much if they would understand that Malcolm had been beyond saving – or that even if he hadn’t begged David to kill him – even if he hadn’t said how ecstatic it was – finishing him off was probably the most humane thing that David could have done.

  He stood alone in the shed, shivering with shock and indecision. He and Malcolm had been arguing a lot lately – everybody knew that. Only two weeks ago, they had openly shouted at each other at a livestock auction in Chester. It would only take one suggestion that he might have killed Malcolm deliberately, and he would face arrest, trial, and jail. Even if he managed to show that he was innocent, a police investigation would certainly ruin the business. Who would want to buy Bryce Pork products if they thought that the pigs had been fed from the same grinder in which one of the Bryce brothers had been ground up?

  Unless, of course, nobody found out that he had been ground up.

  Unless nobody found him at all.

  He seemed to remember a story that he had read, years ago, about a chicken-farmer who had murdered his wife and fed her to the chickens, and then fed the chickens to other chickens, until no possible traces of his wife remained.

  He heard a glutinous dripping noise from the feed-grinder. It wouldn’t be long before Malcolm’s blood would coagulate, and become almost impossible for him to wash thoroughly away. He hesitated for just one moment; then he switched on the lights again, and went across to the sacks of bran, middlings and soya-bean meal.

  Tired and fraught and grief-stricken as he was, tonight he was going to make a pig’s dinner.

  He slept badly, and woke early. He lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. He found it difficult to believe now that what had happened yesterday evening had been real. He felt almost as if it had all been a luridly-colored film. But he felt a cold and undeniable difference inside his soul that told him it had actually happened. A change in himself that would affect him for the rest of his life – what he thought, what he said, what people he could love, what risks he was prepared to take.

  Just after dawn, he saw the lights in the pig-houses flicker on, and he knew that Dougal and Charlie had arrived. He dressed, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he drank half a pint of freezing-cold milk straight out of the bottle. He brought some of it directly back up again, and had to spit it into the sink. He wiped his mouth on a damp tea-towel and went outside.

  Dougal was tethering a Landrace gilt and fixing up a heater for her piglets in a “creep”, a boxlike structure hanging alongside her. Piglets under four weeks needed more heat than their mother could provide. Charlie was busy in a pen further along, feeding Old Jeffries, their enormous one-eyed Large Black boar. They bred very few Large Blacks these days: the Danish Landraces were docile and prolific and gave excellent bacon. But Malcolm had insisted on keeping Old Jeffries for sentimental reasons. He had been given to them by their uncle when they took over the business, and had won them their first rosette. “Old Jeffries and I are going to be buried in the same grave,” he always used to say.

  “Morning, Mr David,” said Dougal. He was a sandy-haired Wiltshireman with a pudgy face and protuberant eyes.

  “Morning, Dougal.”

  “Mr Malcolm not about yet?”

  David shook his head. “No … he said something about going to Chester.”

  “Oh … that’s queer. We were going to divide up the weaner pool today.”

  “Well, I can help you do that.”

  “Mr Malcolm didn’t say when he’d be back?”

  “No,” said David. “He didn’t say a word.”

  He walked along the rows of pens until he came to Old Jeffries’ stall. Charlie had emptied a bucketful of fresh feed into Old Jeffries’ trough, and the huge black boar was greedily snuffling his snout into it; although his one yellow eye remained fixed on David as he ate.

  “He really likes his breakfast today,” Charlie remarked. Charlie was a young curly-haired teenager from the village. He was training to be a veterinarian, but he kept himself in petrol and weekly Chinese takeaways by helping out at Bryce Pork before college.

  “Yes …” said David. He stared in awful fascination as Old Jeffries snorted and guzzled at the dark red mixture of roughage, concentrate and meat meal that (in two horrific hours of near-madness) he had mixed last night out of Malcolm’s soupy remains. “It’s a new formula we’ve been trying.”

  “Mr Malcolm sorted out that bearing on the feed-grinder, then?” asked Charlie.

  “Oh … oh, yes,” David replied. But he didn’t take his eyes off Old Jeffries, grunting into his trough; and Old Jeffries didn’t for one moment take his one yellow eye off David.

  “What did the health inspector say?” asked Charlie.

  “Nothing much. It isn’t erysipelas, thank God. Just a touch of zinc deficiency. Too much dry food.”

  Charlie nodded. “I thought it might be that. But this new feed looks excellent. In fact, it smells so good, I tasted a little bit myself.”

  For the first time, David took his eyes off Old Jeffries. “You did what?”

  Charlie laughed. “You shouldn’t worry. You know what Malcolm says, he wouldn’t feed anything to the pigs that he wouldn’t eat himself. I’ve never come across anybody who loves his livestock as much as your brother. I mean, he really puts himself into these pigs, doesn’t he? Body and soul.”

  Old Jeffries had finished his trough, and was enthusiastically cleaning it with his long inky tongue. David couldn’t help watching him in fascination as he licked the last fragments of meat meal from his whiskery cheeks.

  “I’m just going to brew up some tea,” he said, clapping Charlie on the back.

  He left the piggery; but when he reached the door, he could still see Old Jeffries staring at him one-eyed from the confines of his pen, and for some inexplicable reason it made him shudder.
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  You’re tired, shocked, he told himself. But as he closed the piggery door he heard Old Jeffries grunt and whuffle as if he had been dangerously roused.

  The telephone rang for Malcolm all day; and a man in a badly-muddied Montego arrived at the piggery, expecting to talk to Malcolm about insurance. David fended everybody off, saying that Malcolm had gone to Chester on business and no, he didn’t know when he was coming back. Am I my brother’s keeper?

  That night, after Dougal had left, he made his final round of the piggery, making sure that the gilts and the sows were all tethered tight, so that they didn’t accidentally crush their young; checking the “creeps” and the ventilators; switching off lights.

  His last visit was to Old Jeffries. The Large Black stood staring at him as he approached; and made a noise in his throat like no noise that David had ever heard a boar utter before.

  “Well, old man,” he said, leaning on the rail of the pen. “It looks as if Malcolm knew what he was talking about. You and he are going to be buried in the same grave.”

  Old Jeffries curled back his lip and grunted.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” David told him. “He was dying, right in front of my eyes. God, he couldn’t have lived more than five minutes more.”

  Old Jeffries grunted again. David said, “Thanks, O.J. You’re a wonderful conversationalist.” He reached over to pat the Large Black’s bristly head.

  Without any warning at all, Old Jeffries snatched at David’s hand, and clamped it between his jaws. David felt his fingers being crushed, and teeth digging right through the palm of his hand. He shouted in pain, and tried to pull himself away, but Old Jeffries twisted his powerful sloped-back neck and heaved David bodily over the railings and into his ammonia-pungent straw.

  David’s arm was wrenched around behind him, and he felt his elbow crack. He screamed, and tried to turn himself around, but Old Jeffries’ four-toed trotter dug into his ribcage, cracking his breastbone and puncturing his left lung. Old Jeffries weighed over 300 kilograms, and even though he twisted and struggled, there was nothing he could do to force the boar off him.

  “Dougal!” he screamed, even though he knew that Dougal had left over twenty minutes ago. “Oh God, help me! Somebody!”

  Grunting furiously, Old Jeffries trampled David and worried his bloody hand between his teeth. To his horror, David saw two of his fingers drop from Old Jeffries’ jaw, and fall into the straw. The boar’s bristly sides kept scorching his face: taut and coarse and pungent with the smell of pig.

  He dragged himself backwards, out from under the boar’s belly, and grabbed hold of the animal’s back with his free hand, trying to pull himself upright. For a moment, he thought he had managed it, but then Old Jeffries let out a shrill squeal of rage, and burrowed his snout furiously and aggressively between David’s thighs.

  “No!” David screamed. “No! Not that! Not that!”

  But he felt sharp teeth tearing through corduroy, and then half of his inside thigh being torn away from the bone, with a bloody crackle of fat and tissue. And then Old Jeffries ripped him between the legs. He felt the boar’s teeth puncture his groin, he felt cords and tubes and fats being wrenched away. He threw back his head and he let out a cry of anguish, and wanted to die then, right then, with no more pain, nothing but blackness.

  But Old Jeffries retreated, trotting a little way away from him with his gory prize hanging from his mouth. He stared at David with his one yellow eye as if he were daring him to take it back.

  David sicked up blood. Then, letting out a long whimpering sound, he climbed up to his feet, and cautiously limped to the side of the pen. He could feel that he was losing pints of blood. It pumped warm and urgent down his trouser-leg. He knew that he was going to die. But he wasn’t going to let this pig have him. He was going to go the way that Malcolm had gone. Beyond pain, out on the other side. He was going to go in the ultimate ecstasy.

  He opened the pen, and hobbled along the piggery, leaving a wide wet trail of blood behind him. Old Jeffries hesitated for a few moments, and then followed him, his trotters clicking on the concrete floor.

  David crossed the yard to the feed buildings. He felt cold, cold, cold – colder than he had ever felt before. The wind banged a distant door over and over again, like a flat-toned funeral drum. Old Jeffries followed him, twenty or thirty yards behind, his one eye shining yellow in the darkness.

  To market, to market, to buy a fat pig

  Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

  Coughing, David opened the door of the feed building. He switched on the lights, leaning against the wall for support. Old Jeffries stepped into the doorway and watched him, huge and black, but didn’t approach any closer. David switched the feed-grinder to ‘on’ and heard the hum of machinery and the scissoring of precision-ground blades.

  It seemed to take him an age to climb the access ladder to the rim of the vat. When he reached the top, he looked down into the circular grinder, and he could see the blades flashing as they spun around.

  Ecstasy, that’s when Malcolm had told him. Pleasure beyond pain.

  He swung his bloodied legs over the rim of the vat. He closed his eyes for a moment, and said a short prayer. Dear God, forgive me. Dear mother, please forgive me.

  Then he released his grip, and tumble-skidded down the stainless steel sides, his feet plunging straight into the grinder blades.

  He screamed in terror; and then he screamed in agony. The blades sliced relentlessly into his feet, his ankles, his shins, his knees. He watched his legs ground up in a bloody chaos of bone and muscle, and the pain was so intense that he pounded at the sides of the vat with his fists. This wasn’t ecstasy. This was sheer nerve-tearing pain – made even more intense by the hideous knowledge that he was already mutilated beyond any hope of survival – that he was as good as dead already.

  The blades cut into his thighs. He thought he had fainted but he hadn’t fainted, couldn’t faint, because the pain was so fierce that it penetrated his subconscious, penetrated every part of his mind and body.

  He felt his pelvis shattered, crushed, chopped into paste. He felt his insides drop out of him. Then he was caught and tangled in the same way that Malcolm had been caught and tangled, and for a split-second he felt himself whirled around, a wild Dervish dance of sheer agony. Malcolm had lied. Malcolm had lied. Beyond pain there was nothing but more pain. On the other side of pain was a blinding sensation that made pain feel like a caress.

  The blades bit into his jaw. His face was obliterated. There was a brief whirl of blood and brains and then he was gone.

  The feed-grinder whirred and whirred for over an hour. Then – with no feed to slow down its blades – it overheated and whined to a halt.

  Blood dripped; slower and slower.

  Old Jeffries remained where he was, standing in the open doorway, one-eyed, the cold night wind ruffling his bristles.

  Old Jeffries knew nothing about retribution. Old Jeffries knew nothing about guilt.

  But something that Old Jeffries didn’t understand had penetrated the black primitive knots of his cortex – a need for revenge so powerful that it had been passed from a dead soul to a bestial brain. Or perhaps he simply acquired a taste for a new kind of feed.

  Old Jeffries trotted back to his pen and waited patiently for the morning, and for Charlie to arrive, to fill up his trough with yet another pig’s dinner.

  Heart of Stone

  New Preston, Connecticut

  I can still smell the woodsmoke and the leaves of New Preston, twenty years after my wife and I visited the Housatonic and East Aspetuck valleys looking for a house. It was almost Hallowe’en, and the skies were blue and the wooded hills were yellow and red and every color in between. New Preston is a quiet, isolated community – and like most of the rural hamlets in Litchfield County, it now has a smaller population (less than 800) than it did in the 18th century. There is a wonderfully witchy atmosphere here. When you drive through those silent woods, and
arrive at those old tumbledown coaching inns, you feel that you have taken the wrong fork again, folks, and unknowingly entered an H.P. Lovecraft novel, where whippoorwhills cry from the hills, and retarded offspring sulkily stare at you from half-collapsed dwellings with gambreled roofs.

  We found a white house on a wooded hill that was our heart’s desire. But the day before we were due to complete the sale, my New York agent told me that my green card had been refused. So, for me, New Preston remains nothing more than a happy/regretful memory, and the setting for this story, Heart of Stone.

  HEART OF STONE

  Ron Maccione the contractor stood looking at the meadow for almost five minutes without saying anything, the peak of his Budweiser cap pulled low over his forehead, his tattooed forearms intertwined like the trunks of two gnarled old trees on to which long-dead lovers had carved hearts and flowers and secret messages.

  “Tennis courts, you say?” he commented, as if anybody who wanted to turn over five-and-a-half acres of perfectly good agricultural land to the playing of ball games was either mad, or a faggot, or both.

  “Six of them,” said Richard, confidently. “Six international class asphalt courts. But I’m bringing in Fraser and Fairmont to lay out the courts themselves. All I want you to do is to level the site off.”

  Ron Maccione sniffed. “Site slopes off to the northwest more than you think. One in eight, maybe one in six. Have to bring in the heavy earthmover. Then you got all them stones to clear. A whole hell of a lot of stones. Always was a hell of a locality for stones, Preston. Reckon I’ve spent two-thirds of my working life clearing away stones.”

  Richard said, “How about it? You want to quote me a price?”

  “Have to do some pretty close figuring first,” Ron Maccione told him. “But I can call you Friday for sure. Ballpark, I’d say three thousand.”

  “That’s about a third more than I had in mind.”