Fortnight of Fear (11 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.