He reached the chicken-run without encountering any of them face to face.
There were still a few figures lingering around the pig-house. The wall of the sow’s compartment was lined with candles, dozens and dozens of them. They burned steadily in the still air, throwing a rich warm light on to brick, and on to the faces of the few who still stared into the mysteries of the sty.
Leverthal was among them, as was the warder who’d knelt at Lacey’s head that first day. Two or three boys were there too, whose faces he recognized but could put no name to.
There was a noise from the sty, the sound of the sow’s feet on the straw as she accepted their stares. Somebody was speaking, but he couldn’t make out who. An adolescent’s voice, with a lilt to it. As the voice halted in its monologue, the warder and another of the boys broke rank, as if dismissed, and turned away into the dark. Redman crept a little closer. Time was of the essence now. Soon the first of the congregation would have crossed the field and be back in the Main Building. They’d see Slape’s corpse: raise the alarm. He must find Lacey now, if indeed Lacey was still to be found.
Leverthal saw him first. She looked up from the sty and nodded a greeting, apparently unconcerned by his arrival. It was as if his appearance at this place was inevitable, as if all routes led back to the farm, to the straw house and the smell of excrement. It made a kind of sense that she’d believe that. He almost believed it himself. ‘Leverthal,’ he said.
She smiled at him, openly. The boy beside her raised his head and smiled too.
‘Are you Henessey?’ he asked, looking at the boy.
The youth laughed, and so did Leverthal.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. No. No. Henessey is here.’
She pointed into the sty.
Redman walked the few remaining yards to the wall of the sty, expecting and not daring to expect, the straw and the blood and the pig and Lacey.
But Lacey wasn’t there. Just the sow, big and beady as ever, standing amongst pats of her own ordure, her huge, ridiculous ears flapping over her eyes.
‘Where’s Henessey?’ asked Redman, meeting the sow’s gaze.
‘Here,’ said the boy.
‘This is a pig.’
‘She ate him,’ said the youth, still smiling. He obviously thought the idea delightful. ‘She ate him: and he speaks out of her.’
Redman wanted to laugh. This made Lacey’s tales of ghosts seem almost plausible by comparison. They were telling him the pig was possessed.
‘Did Henessey hang himself, as Tommy said?’
Leverthal nodded.
‘In the sty?’
Another nod.
Suddenly the pig took on a different aspect. In his imagination he saw her reaching up to sniff at the feet of Henessey’s twitching body, sensing the death coming over it, salivating at the thought of its flesh. He saw her licking the dew that oozed from its skin as it rotted, lapping at it, nibbling daintily at first, then devouring it. It wasn’t too difficult to understand how the boys could have made a mythology of that atrocity: inventing hymns to it, attending upon the pig like a god. The candles, the reverence, the intended sacrifice of Lacey: it was evidence of sickness, but it was no more strange than a thousand other customs of faith. He even began to understand Lacey’s lassitude, his inability to fight the powers that overtook him.
Mama, they fed me to the pig.
Not Mama, help me, save me. Just: they gave me to the pig.
All this he could understand: they were children, many of them under-educated, some verging on mental in-stability, all susceptible to superstition. But that didn’t explain Leverthal. She was staring into the sty again, and Redman registered for the first time that her hair was unclipped, and lay on her shoulders, honey-coloured in the candlelight.
‘It looks like a pig to me, plain and simple,’ he said.
‘She speaks with his voice,’ Leverthal said, quietly. ‘Speaks in tongues, you might say. You’ll hear him in a while. My darling boy.’
Then he understood. ‘You and Henessey?’
‘Don’t look so horrified,’ she said. ‘He was eighteen: hair blacker than you’ve ever seen. And he loved me.’
‘Why did he hang himself?’
‘To live forever,’ she said, ‘so he’d never be a man, and die.’
‘We didn’t find him for six days,’ said the youth, almost whispering it in Redman’s ear, ‘and even then she wouldn’t let anybody near him, once she had him to herself. The pig, I mean. Not the Doctor. Everyone loved Kevin, you see,’ he whispered intimately. ‘He was beautiful.’
‘And where’s Lacey?’
Leverthal’s loving smile decayed.
‘With Kevin,’ said the youth, ‘where Kevin wants him.’ He pointed through the door of the sty. There was a body lying on the straw, back to the door. ‘If you want him, you’ll have to go and get him,’ said the boy, and the next moment he had the back of Redman’s neck in a vice-like grip.
The sow responded to the sudden action. She started to stamp the straw, showing the whites of her eyes.
Redman tried to shrug off the boy’s grip, at the same time delivering an elbow to his belly. The boy backed off, winded and cursing, only to be replaced by Leverthal.
‘Go to him,’ she said as she snatched at Redman’s hair. ‘Go to him if you want him.’ Her nails raked across his temple and nose, just missing his eyes.
‘Get off me!’ he said, trying to shake the woman off, but she clung, her head lashing back and forth as she tried to press him over the wall.
The rest happened with horrid speed. Her long hair brushed through a candle flame and her head caught fire, the flames climbing quickly. Shrieking for help she stumbled heavily against the gate. It failed to support her weight, and gave inward. Redman watched helplessly as the burning woman fell amongst the straw. The flames spread enthusiastically across the forecourt towards the sow, lapping up the kindling.
Even now, in extremis, the pig was still a pig. No miracles here: no speaking, or pleading, in tongues. The animal panicked as the blaze surrounded her, cornering her stamping bulk and licking at her flanks. The air was filled with the stench of singeing bacon as the flames ran up her sides and over her head, chasing through her bristles like a grass-fire.
Her voice was a pig’s voice, her complaints a pig’s complaints. Hysterical grunts escaped her lips and she hurtled across the forecourt of the sty and out of the broken gate, trampling Leverthal.
The sow’s body, still burning, was a magic thing in the night as she careered across the field, weaving about in her pain. Her cries did not diminish as the dark ate her up, they seemed just to echo back and forth across the field, unable to find a way out of the locked room.
Redman stepped over Leverthal’s fire-ridden corpse and into the sty. The straw was burning on every side, and the fire was creeping towards the door. He half-shut his eyes against the stinging smoke and ducked into the pig-house. Lacey was lying as he had been all along, back to the door. Redman turned the boy over. He was alive. He was awake. His face, bloated with tears and terror, stared up off his straw pillow, eyes so wide they looked fit to leap from his head.
‘Get up,’ said Redman, leaning over the boy.
His small body was rigid, and it was all Redman could do to prize his limbs apart. With little words of care, he coaxed the boy to his feet as the smoke began to swirl into the pig-house.
‘Come on, it’s all right, come on.’
He stood upright and something brushed his hair. Redman felt a little rain of worms across his face and glanced up to see Henessey, or what was left of him, still suspended from the crossbeam of the pig-house. His features were incomprehensible, blackened to a drooping mush. His body was raggedly gnawed off at the hip, and his innards hung from the foetid carcass, dangling in wormy loops in front of Redman’s face.