He looked around for someone he knew, hoping Bethany would be here. She hadn’t answered his texts that morning. In the front, a group of pigs stood together, all of them sweating in too-tight suits. Hogboss stood with them, long-faced and hollow-eyed. When the pig man noticed Henry and his sister, he motioned to an empty space beside him, right at the front of the church.
Their mother was already there, sitting with Hogboss in the front row. She wore a yellow floral dress. Her forehead and arms were slick with heat, her cheeks glistening. Unable to hug Henry or Jane, she gave them a small wave.
“Have you seen him yet?” Hogboss gestured to the casket at the front. “Go see what they did.”
Jane sat near their mother, leaving Henry to walk up alone. There was a short line. People streamed by, covering their mouths to hide disgust or thrill. He reached the head of the line and looked down, not understanding at first what was in front of him.
There was no body. At least, no whole body. There were parts. Pieces stripped of skin and bone and wrapped in cellophane against Styrofoam plates. A head. A piece of leg. Hooved feet. Dennis’s skin had been washed pale and bloodless. The brutal ghosts of Swine Hill and the vicious men who animated them had processed Dennis like an ordinary pig. He had been carved up and packaged for a grocery store shelf.
Henry stood over the mess for several minutes, too shocked to move. Something cold trickled onto his foot. There was a bed of ice in the bottom of the casket, melting and pooling on the floor.
He sat back down by Hogboss, the pig man huge and straight-backed, scarred hands folded in his lap. “Did you see what they did to my sweet boy?”
“Maybe we should close the casket.” Henry’s voice was hollow through the mask, strange and unreal.
“I want everyone to see,” Hogboss said. “They think the plant being closed is cruel. Let them see what cruelty looks like. Let all of them ask what hand they had in this.”
Henry looked over his shoulder. “Some of them are laughing.”
Jane squeezed his shoulder, keeping him from saying more.
Hogboss gave him a tight smile, made more human for the malice written in his lips and teeth. “They won’t be laughing for very long.”
A few people came to Hogboss, shaking his hand and offering condolences. One man lingered afterward, the palest hint of ghost-shine behind his eyes. He cleared his throat to speak.
“Mr. Hogboss, you can count on us to run the plant for you while you get through this. There’s no need to leave it shut down. You can take as much time as you need.”
“The plant won’t be reopening,” Hogboss said.
The ghost-light in the man’s eyes bloomed and deepened, the spirit almost pushing out of his body. “For how long?”
“It will never reopen. Corporate wants to start the self-slaughtering pig project at other plants out of state. There won’t be any need for the Swine Hill location.”
The man walked away, his hands spasming and limbs moving erratically. He fell back into his pew and told the other workers around him. A hissing, vicious whisper spread through the group, eyes glowing with their raging ghosts. They stared at Henry, faces full of accusation. He turned back to the front, wishing he hadn’t sat next to the pigs, but he could still feel their eyes on him.
Jane flinched and reflexively covered her ears, like she stood in the middle of a shouting crowd.
Henry tried to run the numbers on how the plant’s closing would affect the town. Home values were already low. His mother had told him that they owed more on their house than it was worth. But without the plant, their house and everyone else’s would be worthless. The last few businesses would fold. The town would crumble and fall apart. For the people left behind, no money and no possessions of any value, what would they do?
“What about all the pig people?” Henry asked.
“Corporate will move us wherever it needs. We lived here and we tried to make a good life for ourselves, but Swine Hill was never ours. Our houses, our trucks, even our appliances. It all belongs to Pig City. I tried to tell Dennis that, to make him understand that the world wasn’t his.”
“You told them to close the plant,” Jane said. “To punish people. Do you know what that will do to the town?”
“I have an idea,” Hogboss said.
Henry tried to imagine his family putting all their belongings in two cars, locking up the house, and going somewhere else. His paranoid, mute father tied up in the back seat. His mother sucking on a cup of ice and blasting herself with the air conditioner. The robot, its legs still broken, hanging out of the open trunk. And Henry, wearing his painting mask and facing the road ahead.
They had family out of state, his uncle, cousins, and grandparents. But Henry had barely spoken to them in years, didn’t even know what town they lived in. They had escaped Swine Hill and its clinging ghosts a long time ago. They wouldn’t risk Henry’s family bringing all that past and pain back to haunt their door.
The preacher stepped behind the altar and spoke platitudes. He did not know Dennis or any of the pigs. It was still an open question in the churches scattered through Swine Hill whether God could love a walking, talking animal, whether salvation was for the pig people, whether it was a sin even to harm a pig. But the preacher put all of that aside. He talked about Dennis being in a richer place, read verses from Revelation about streets paved with gold, and spoke of building prosperity on Earth. Under the Bible verses and talk of Heaven, his appeal to Hogboss—Reopen the plant—was nakedly clear.
They sang hymns at the end, and the pigs raised their rough, scalpel-made voices to scrape through songs of love and forgiveness. But they were united with Hogboss, the first of them, the one who’d lost so much. They had no forgiveness for Swine Hill.
Hogboss pulled Henry aside after the service. People were already leaving, the lines of cars dissolving and heading home before Dennis was lowered into the dirt. “There are things you never told me,” Hogboss said.
Henry thought of the guys at school who harassed Dennis. The pig boy’s friendship with a ghost. His own nose being cut off for having spent time with the pigs. Yes, there was a lot Henry had kept from him.
“After you made me,” Hogboss said, “you taught me what I needed to know to work and live.”
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“You taught me to keep my hands away from fire. You taught me that knives could hurt, but I remembered that from when you made me. You taught me the taste of poison, how electricity could grab me, what could break a bone. But Dennis isn’t even here, and he hurts me so much. You never told me anything about this.”
Henry hugged him, his facemask rubbing painfully against the pig man’s side. Hogboss laid a massive arm over his back.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “You’re right. I should have told you.”
The car’s engine moaned, and the steering column shook whenever Jane had to slow down or stop. Even to Henry, the car felt full of spirits. They burrowed into its metal like mold, drifting viral through the veins of gas lines and electrical wiring. Everything about it felt heavy and slow.
Breathing through his nose still burned. Henry looked at himself in the car’s dash mirror, readjusting the painting mask. It was hot and cut angry lines across his neck and face. Still, it was better than seeing the bandages, the flatness where the end of his nose had been. He was afraid of the day when the bandages would be ready to come off.
Jane took him to the bridal shop to return Trigger’s tuxedo jacket and her dress.
“You can stay in the car if you want,” she said. “It should only take a few minutes.”
After the funeral, Henry just wanted to be alone. He didn’t want to feel strangers staring, to wonder if another attacker was slipping up behind him. But he had told the dancing girl that he would say goodbye to the ghost in the mirror.
“I’ll come,” he said. “Are you feeling okay? You know. About him.”
Jane got out of the car. “Let’s hu
rry. It’s too hot to sit in the car and talk.”
A bell chimed when they walked in. The store was cramped, surrounded by mirrors along the walls. There were two pig boys inside, trying to explain to the owner how they had stained and torn their tuxedos. Henry didn’t remember seeing them at prom. They must have had their own dance, maybe at the factory. So strange that he could have made them but knew so little about their lives. For a moment, he felt a rush of happiness. All his life, he’d wanted to do something great, to solve a problem that mattered or do something that would make his name famous. His ghost had left him, and he wasn’t sure anymore if he was as brilliant as he’d always believed. But he’d made the pigs, and somewhere a few nights ago they had danced. That was worth something, wasn’t it?
While Jane returned the dress and jacket and the pigs tried to talk the owner out of charging them extra, Henry walked through the racks of clothes, dresses as satiny and soft and cool as milk running along his arms as he passed. At the back wall, he stood in front of one of the giant mirrors, its surface cloudy with dust.
His hair was messy and needed to be cut, and the mask was bulky and strange. He looked like a survivor of the end of the world. He supposed he was. Behind his reflection, he could just make out the image of a ghost deep in the glass. She looked like she stood in the middle of the bridal shop, but she was only inside the mirror. She held a red gown in her arms and danced with it, crushing the fabric against her breast and wrapping its sleeve around her hand. Henry tapped on the glass to get her attention, wanted to tell her what the dancing girl had said, but she wouldn’t come closer. Maybe she already knew.
The pig boys walked out of the shop. Jane gave the owner Trigger’s legal name—“Riley Mason.” Hearing the name reminded him of losing his ghost. Such a small, stupid accident. Henry felt helpless and furious all over again. He had known the boy would be trouble when he first saw him, had known Jane was making a mistake. He tried to stomp down the feeling, to think of something else before his sister read his mind.
Henry knocked harder on the mirror, but the ghost wouldn’t acknowledge him.
“Krystal wants you to move on,” he said. “She loves you, but it’s time for you to go.”
But the spirit trapped in the glass was far away and dancing, twirling with the dress in her arms like she would never stop.
* * *
Bethany finally texted him back. Her parents had packed everything and were leaving in the morning. Both of them worked at the plant. With it closing, there was no reason for them to stay. Bethany was on her way over to say goodbye. Now that she had been so utterly defeated by something, her ghosts would surely relax their grip.
He should have been happy for her. Bethany was getting out of Swine Hill. She could go anywhere now, could be anything. But Henry couldn’t find anything to celebrate in this. His mouth was sour with the unfairness of it all.
He sat on the roof outside his window to wait for her, watching the sky grow dark and spirits rise from the pavement. They were oblivious to the plant being closed, eternally flowing up to the steel doors to take on form and toil with the past. When everything else in the town was gone, the dead would still be here.
Bethany pulled up in the driveway. Henry waved to her from the rooftop. She walked slowly to the door, testing her weight one foot at a time. When she came upstairs, Henry started to come back inside, but Bethany held a hand up to stop him. She climbed through the window, placing her feet carefully on the shingles, face tight with concentration. Bethany moved like the world under her was made of thin ice, ready to shatter and drop away. It made Henry burn with shame to see what he’d done to her.
She didn’t ask him about any more tests. They both knew that he couldn’t reverse what he had done. Whether she let go and fell into another reality or managed to hang on was entirely dependent on her. Strangely, it was easier for both of them that way.
“Do you see anything up there?” Henry pointed at the sky, dark clouds spreading in the fading light.
“Yeah,” Bethany said. “It’s a little hard to look at. Like a city made of light.”
Henry wondered if, somewhere in the infinite universe, there was a Swine Hill where he hadn’t made everything so much worse. Maybe there was a place where he was the kind of person he had always wanted to be.
From inside the house, Henry could hear Jane arguing with their mother. She had been trying to get him to clean up his room and pack all day, but it was hopeless. How could you plan to leave when you didn’t even know where you were going? How could you decide what to bring when there was no room to bring much of anything at all?
Their mother insisted that Hogboss would reopen the plant. She was talking to him about it. She said everything was going to be okay, but when had things here ever been okay?
The moon was heavy and bright over their heads. More ghosts surged up the hill, capping it in white like it was covered in snow. Beneath it, the town lay dark and still. Most streetlights were long burned out. Few cars cut the dark with their beams. Everything waited.
“When do the bandages come off ?” Bethany asked.
Henry turned away, the mask bulky, his own breath warm on his face. “I don’t know. I’ll probably just keep wearing the mask anyway.”
“Build yourself a better nose. Make it out of brass or gold or something. That’s what the Henry I know would do.”
He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “You should hate me,” Henry said. “Why are we still friends?”
She shifted on the roof, balancing with both hands. “I know you didn’t mean for this to happen. And I was the one who caught the ball of light. I could have just watched it fall. But I’ve always thought that I could do anything. Sooner or later, I had to find out that wasn’t true.”
Henry sighed. “It was true, though. Until me.”
Her hands tensed on the roof, like she’d almost lost her balance. “I dream about swimming. I worry that I’ll make a sudden move in my sleep, and then I’ll fall through the world. And then, what if I never land? What if I just keep falling?”
Henry struggled to find something to say. He’d broken so much. After Dennis was killed, did the pig boy’s consciousness just slip through the world? Did he fall forever, or might he have arrived in the city of light only Bethany could see? Not even the ghosts knew what was next. Maybe it was only a starless nothing, an absolute silence, the fear that made ghosts cling so tightly to the world.
“Don’t worry about me,” Bethany said. “Maybe I can go to college now. My life was already going to change, whether I wanted it to or not. And being still is a kind of game. I can be good at that too.”
There was a stroke of lightning in the distance. Rain started to fall, a few drops striking the plastic screen of Henry’s mask. He waited for Bethany to go inside, then followed.
In the hallway, Jane sat in a circle of her own clothes, throwing things into boxes. She argued with her ghost, blurting out half sentences and staring ahead like she could see it. The spirit wanted her to stay. Jane was risking her own ghost, her best friend, to get Henry out of Swine Hill.
The lights flickered, steadied, and then went out completely. Darkness and quiet fell over them. Henry led Bethany downstairs, using his phone as a flashlight. His family gathered in the living room. Wind tossed branches against the windows, and the floor shook with thunder. The rain wrapped its big hands around the house.
Henry’s mother pulled candles out of the hall closet, but her skin was so hot that the wax deformed and wept in her palms, sliding apart. The robot wheeled over and tried to pick up the mess from the floor, wax dripping and hardening in long strings from its hands.
Bethany sat on the stairwell, arms crossed and head down, no doubt concentrating on not falling through the world. Henry wanted to say something to her, about how strong he thought she was or how much her friendship had meant to him. How much he would miss her when she left. How sorry he was that he’d changed things for her. He didn’t know
where to start.
Jane came over and put her arm around his shoulder, hearing everything he couldn’t say.
Headlights cut across their curtains. A car pulled up in their driveway.
Henry thought maybe it was Bethany’s parents coming to claim her, but when he looked through the window, a scattering of old vehicles were parked in the street outside. A truck sat blocking Jane’s car in the driveway.
“They were at the funeral,” Jane said. “They’re angry about the plant being closed.”
Henry watched people get out of their trucks. They wore Pig City work clothes—coveralls, hairnets, facemasks, gloves. Many of them were haunted, trembling with ghosts. Their eyes burned blue in the dark and they murmured senselessly, the crowd of souls inside their bodies fighting to speak past one another. But just as many weren’t haunted at all, their eyes dull and hard, possessed only by their own resentment and need to lash out.
One of the men saw Henry peeking between the curtains and shouted. “We’ve come for you. We’re taking back what’s ours.”
“We have to leave,” Henry said. “Now. Let’s go out the back.”
Jane tilted her head, listening to the storm of violent thoughts only she could hear. “People are in the backyard, too. They’re all around the house.”
Their mother threw open the curtains and looked out. A lightning flash illuminated the yard and the crowd closing in on them. “What do they want?” she asked.
“They want us,” Jane said. She turned to Henry, squeezing his hand. “But mostly, they want you.”
The door bounced in its frame and cracked as something slammed into it from the other side. Shining eyes stared through the splintered boards, their voices a murmur, so many ghosts trying to move one tongue. “We had nothing,” they said, “and you took it away.”
“Save us,” Henry told the robot. “Get rid of them.”
The robot shook its head in irritation. It thrust its arms through the cracked door and parted it like cloth. Rain blew in around it, lightning striking again and again in the distance, revealing the yard in sudden bursts. The machine rolled into the men, pressing them back with its weight and flailing its metal fists.
Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Page 20