But the pig was inside the house. Rennie could hear him in the living room, trying to get up on Rennie’s big recliner, rhythmically whacking the coffee table with his spring-loaded tail, grunting with exertion.
“Pinkie?” called Rennie. His throat was dry and his heart picked up an uncomfortably rapid rhythm. He wanted to let the pig know he was coming. He didn’t like the idea of coming up on the animal by surprise. Pinkie might not like that.
The pig was on the recliner, the lever flipped back – how could he flip back the lever? – his mouth drawn up in what might have been a smile, revealing the rows of tiny sharp teeth.
“How’d you get out of the shed, Pinkie?” asked Rennie as he pushed the coffee table back into place. “I didn’t teach you that. How’d you get out, then get in here?”
Pinkie wriggled himself deeper into the cushion of the seat. His little eyes didn’t blink, but focused on Rennie. They reflected light from the window, making them look damp and white.
Rennie swallowed, hard. “What do you want, Pinkie?”
But then Rennie knew. He drew back as the realization hit him, and his jaw opened with a click. “Did you want to go with Vernon Via? Are you mad because I wouldn’t let you go?”
The thick, hairy pig tongue flicked out, then back.
“Is that a yes?”
The tongue flicked out again, then back.
“You want to belong to the Mid-Atlantic what-the-hell Association, to be a stud?”
Pinkie’s pinkie popped in and out, catching the same wet, white light as his eyes. He grunted with what sounded like expectation, anticipation.
“Oh, Jesus, Pinkie.”
Pinkie blinked.
“But you an’ me is bachelors. You ain’t gettin’ any, but neither am I.”
The pig stretched his neck and looked at the ceiling. He farted.
The phone rang.
Rennie went back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver from the wall unit. His heart thudded against his ribs. “Yep?” he managed.
“Mr Monroe? This is Marla Via, Vernon Via’s wife. Vernon drove out to see you yesterday afternoon. He hasn’t come home. Did he make it to your place?”
“Yep.” Goddamn! I should have said no. “But he left not a half hour after gettin’ here.”
“Oh.” A long pause. She sounded young and scared. “Did he say where he was going after he left your place, maybe?”
“No, sorry.”
“Maybe he had car trouble?”
“Maybe.”
“He has a cell phone, though. I’ve called it a bunch of times and couldn’t get through. Do you live where there’s service?”
“I don’t think so.”
There was a deep, ragged sigh on the other end of the line. “Okay, thanks. I guess I’ll have to call the authorities to find him. I’m scared.”
Me, too.
The line went dead. Rennie slowly put the receiver back. He could hear the hog’s footsteps and raspy breathing. Rennie whipped around. Pinkie stood just inside the door, his eyes narrowed and his ears up. “What?” asked Rennie. “That was the wife of the dead guy, if you have to know.”
Pinkie went to the fridge, tugged the door open, and selected a large piece of fried chicken from an uncovered plate. He dropped it on the floor and began to gnaw at the meat. The cold grease rode up Pinkie’s mouth and glistened like frost.
Rennie stomped into his work boots and went outside.
The garden’s hills were battered but not gouged; Mr Vernon Via’s parts remained buried. Rennie stood in the garden, one foot to either side of a long strip of lumpy soil, leaning on his shovel, wondering how long it would take for a human to literally return to the earth from whence it came, dust to dust, like the Bible said. He didn’t know. But when the cabbages and pumpkins pushed up, what might they bring with them? Maybe the garden was a stupid place to hide a body. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
A dull pain caught Rennie at the back of the skull and he closed his eyes. Pink and orange sparks pulsed in the darkness. Overhead, there was the honking of Canada geese, arriving for the winter. They would settle in the pond on the southwestern side of the farm. Nest, raise some babies, fly home in March. They didn’t have much to worry about, those geese. No planting. No bills. No goddamned smart-ass pigs.
Rennie’s eyes jerked open. The geese were gone, the shadows beneath his feet had shortened significantly. His shoulders burned from having leaned on the shovel too long. He thought he heard the phone ringing from inside the house but he wasn’t running for it.
He went to the hen house, chased the chickens out, and gathered most of the eggs in the plastic tray he kept in the rafters. Then he took the egg tray across the yard toward the kitchen door. Pinkie was sitting on the step, something floppy and red in his mouth. Rennie stopped.
“What you got there, Pinkie?”
Pinkie rolled his great bulk from the step and trotted happily toward his master, gut swinging. Dangling from his mouth was a set of human fingers. The egg tray flipped from Rennie’s hand and landed in the grass. Egg yolk slathered the plastic.
With the pig on his heels, Rennie hurried to the front of the house. In the weedy driveway sat a white sedan, the driver’s door hanging open, a thin young woman lying face down on the ground with her feet still in the car. One arm was crumpled beneath her. The other was out, reaching. The hand was missing from the wrist.
God God God God!
Pinkie dropped two of the finger bones at Rennie’s feet like a cat offering a dead bird.
“Marla Via?” Rennie said, tapping the woman with his boot. But the woman didn’t answer and didn’t move.
“You want me in trouble?” Rennie turned to Pinkie, his teeth bared. “You playin’ with me, you stupid slob? You want me arrested so you can go fuck some damn sows? Huh?”
Pinkie rubbed his ear on Rennie’s leg and Rennie jerked away. “Where I am supposed to bury this one, huh? Tell me? Show me! You don’t, and I’ll . . . I’ll butcher you up for supper tonight, don’t think I won’t!”
Pinkie bared his own, scarlet-streaked teeth.
Rennie’s heart clenched. “Show me a place!”
And Pinkie did. The dry well was deep, and the body small. A couple shovels full of ash, lime, and soil dumped in afterwards would keep Marla Via from probing eyes and noses. Rennie stood back from his work, breathing heavily, his nerves prickling inside his skin.
Then there was the matter of her car.
With Pinkie by his side Rennie returned to the driveway. Marla Via’s car was gone.
He caught his breath. It hurt his chest. “What the hell?”
Pinkie laughed. Not a grunt, not a squeal, but a genuine, dark laugh. Then he rolled his head to the side and said, “Didn’t think I could drive, did you? I watch. I learn.”
Rennie clutched his scalp and wailed. “Where did you put the car?”
“For me to know and you, or the police, to find out.”
Rennie’s incisors clamped down on his lower lip, piercing the skin and drawing blood. The surface was ragged, salty. It tasted like the calf’s liver his mom used to cook. He pulled the tongue back into his head and clapped his jaws so the tongue couldn’t snake out again to probe the wound. He didn’t want Pinkie to smell the blood.
“Where . . . is . . . the . . . car?” he said slowly.
“You selfish, ignorant, impotent son of a bitch,” sneered Pinkie. “You made your mess, now lie in it!” With that, the pig turned on his heels, strolled up the front porch steps, and let himself in the house.
“I didn’t teach you to talk!” Rennie screamed after him. “You’re a mutant, a freak, if you ask me!”
Pinkie didn’t come out to defend himself. Clearly, he knew he had the upper hand.
Rennie spent the next few hours sweating, cursing, and searching the fields and forest for Marla Via’s car. The only things he found were briars and thorns, and they made trash of his jeans, his shirt, his legs. Pinkie would have hid the car somewh
ere on Rennie’s land so the police would locate it and blame Rennie for the woman’s death. But wherever the car was, it was well concealed.
It was nearly dark when Rennie returned to the farmhouse. Pinkie had turned on the porch lights for him. Rennie climbed up the steps and dropped onto the porch swing. The rusty chains groaned under his weight. He stared at the cuts on his legs through the flaps of denim. He looked at his hands; they were raked and bruised.
Pinkie came out with a small tray with a glass and a bowl of iced tea clamped in his teeth. Had Rennie taught Pinkie how to make iced tea? Numbly, Rennie picked up the glass and drank it down. It was weak, but cold. Pinkie lapped his from the bowl on the slatted wooden floor, then flopped onto his side and went to sleep.
The sirens came soon thereafter. The police, three cars of them, came rolling up the driveway, bouncing along the ruts, cutting the night air with their blue lights, chasing cicadas from the weeds in whirling clouds. Rennie sat on the swing and waited for them.
They asked Rennie about Mr Vernon Via and Mrs Marla Via. They told him that Mrs Via had said she was on her way out to Rennie’s farm to try and retrace Vernon’s steps, and had said she’d be in touch. But she never was. Rennie didn’t say anything, but looked at Pinkie, hoping the hog would confess. The pig just lay, sleeping, his eyebrow ridges dancing in his dreams.
The officers searched all night and into the mid-morning as Rennie sat on the porch swing and Pinkie flopped back and forth contentedly near his feet, skin twitching beneath a cluster of flies. By ten they had an ambulance in the yard, and another two police cars. By eleven-thirty, they had collected Vernon’s remains from the garden, Marla’s from the well, two bodies from the cellar, and one from the floor of the hen house.
“Fucking maniac!” swore the cop that snapped the cuffs around Rennie’s wrists then slammed Rennie into the back of his cruiser. “The poor Vias, my God, what he did to them.”
It wasn’t me! It was Pinkie!
“And that helpless little girl, still wearing a second place ribbon from the county fair knitting contest two years ago! Goddamned perverted murderer!”
Little girl? The little Wilbur girl?
“And the couple in the basement,” said a second cop with a shake of the head. “Fucked up shit, that. Dead, what, seven-eight years? Hatchet’s still buried in the old man’s skull. The woman’s head was cut off and stuck between her legs.”
Couple, what couple?
Rennie sat with his nose pressed to the smudged glass of the cruiser’s window. “What couple?” he called out, but the police ignored him. Through the fog of his breath, he could see Pinkie waddling down the porch steps to go sniff at the shrouded bodies on the wheeled stretchers. He then wandered over to poke at one of the police car tires like some regular old pig, like some pig that didn’t know a teacup from a chicken pan, a La-Z-Boy from a wallow. “What couple?”
The bodies were loaded onto the ambulance. The ambulance rolled off. One officer jerked open the rear cruiser door and stuck a gold wedding band in Rennie’s face. “See the engraving inside there, asshole?” he sneered. “See? Was your dad’s. Your dad and mom, dead in the basement. Buried in the dirt floor after you cut them up.”
“I what? No! They just went away. They didn’t never come back.”
“No shit they didn’t!” The police’s fist drew up then he forced it back down again. He dropped the ring into a small plastic bag and slammed the car door.
“Pinkie did it!” Rennie said, his lips brushing the window. “Pinkie killed them. He doesn’t like the way I control his life. He doesn’t like living here with me. He wants me in trouble!”
Pinkie wasn’t born eight years ago.
Rennie sat straight. He frowned.
Then what. . .?
One of the officers tipped his head in Pinkie’s direction. “I hear that thing can do tricks. Hey piggy, piggy, can you write your name for us? Write your name, piggy.”
Pinkie wriggled his ass and then clawed the letters “P,” “I,” “G” in the ground. Then he went back to the porch and lay down in front of the steps.
“Well, that’s good for a hog, I think,” said the officer. “Can’t expect much more for a dumb animal than that. They do what they’re taught, that’s about it. They sure are more predictable than people. At least with the fucker in the car, he’ll be fryin’ like bacon in short order.”
The other officer chuckled, shook his head, and within minutes he was at the wheel of the cruiser and hauling ass down the drive toward the road, with Rennie in the backseat, forehead against the window, eyes bugged, staring at the trees rushing past.
They didn’t let me be with girls. They said sex was nasty and wrong. They said I should never touch myself or anyone else, said I didn’t need nothin’ they couldn’t give me.
They said they fixed it for me so I’d have nothin’ to worry about.
Rennie rubbed his crotch, and the empty space where his organs had once been. His vision blurred in pink and orange. He tasted blood.
Pinkie, what have you done to me?
MARK SAMUELS
Glyphotech
MARK SAMUELS IS A WRITER BORN, bred and in thrall to London. Such luminaries in weird fiction as Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and Ramsey Campbell hailed his 2003 collection of stories, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, as a major contribution to the literature.
The author’s latest book is The Face of Twilight, a long novella recently issued by PS Publishing. He has stories scheduled for appearance in Alone on the Darkside, Terror Tales #3 and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #19, and is currently working on his first full-length fantasy novel, set in a subterranean city encased by ice.
“A couple of years ago, out of the blue, I was invited to participate in a three-day seminar run by a ‘human potential’ organization,” recalls Samuels. “However, before I decided whether or not to attend, I undertook some research of my own that left me in little doubt that what was really on offer was indoctrination, the handing over of my hard-won lucre and long-term psychological dependency.
“This actual organization has nothing to do with the organization ‘Glyphotech’, which is entirely imaginary.”
FRANKLYN CRISK DID NOT MIND THE JOB or even his colleagues in the office too much. Certainly, both bored him. No, it was the noise and the heat that were becoming intolerable. Outside the Mare Publishing House building, on the crossroads, some men in boiler suits were working on the road. Though the noise they made was more like fingernails clawing across a blackboard rather than the juddering of a pneumatic drill, which is what one would expect to hear. It was the middle of summer but the office workers were forced to close all the windows in order to stifle the sound. Since the company did not regard the comfort of its employees as its concern, there was no air-conditioning and the temperature inside the cramped offices was unbearable. The clean shirt he’d donned this morning was soaked with sweat and his head throbbed painfully.
He wondered how he’d wound up being employed in this company, housed in a whitewashed four-storey structure on the corner of Fytton Square. It was obvious to him now that he had spent too long overseas. Twenty years in Kyoto, Japan, had rendered him almost unemployable back in his home country. He had (without being particularly aware of it) picked up the Japanese obsession with ritual and social custom to the degree that even his speech patterns betrayed a clipped formality that set him apart.
This job at the Mare firm was the only vacancy that had been offered to him, despite several other fruitless positions he’d applied for and which he felt he was more qualified. His work was drudgery; inputting book royalties onto a computer system, printing them out and then mailing the statements to authors. It meant eight hours staring at a dim monitor screen. The computers utilised by the firm for the tasks were almost obsolete. Their lack of modernity meant that there was no spare memory capacity for any other programs that might serve as a welcome distraction. There was no access to the Internet, or even a
n email facility to connect him with the world outside.
And now this ceaseless noise and heat! The worst of it was that the labourers always worked behind a tall screen that they’d erected and no one could see just what it was they were up to. The junction looked like a patchwork quilt, with different shades of grey indicating the age of the tarmac that had been overlaid there.
The men were only glimpsed when they emerged from behind their screens, walking to or from their dirty green van. Strangely, one never seemed to see them carrying shovels or pickaxes. Invariably clad in their nondescript black boiler suits, despite the heat, the operatives were not of the type that one would willingly approach directly in order to ask their business. They had none of the raucous bonhomie common to labourers, but were silent, unsmiling individuals with pale white faces, mouths like a slash and eyes like huge inkblots. Their abnormally long hands and fingernails were caked with dirt and one of Crisk’s office colleagues joked that perhaps they dug with their bare hands.
The name on the side of the vehicle read “Glyphotech Reconstruction Co.”. But when one of the Mare staff dialled the telephone number that was also blazoned across the side of the van, he said he obtained a connection that rang without ever being answered. After a few days, however, the screens were taken away and merciful quiet reigned again. Strangely enough this happened to coincide with the onset of thunderstorms after the intense heat. A double relief, since as well as the irritating noise being gone, the temperature dropped.
“Sir,” said Crisk in that clipped Japanese manner that he could not shake off since his return to the West, “please be good enough to explain. You say that I should go. But why you have not made clear. Respectfully I ask, of course.”
“I am just,” James O’Hara responded, wincing as he listened to Crisk’s strangled English, “making a suggestion that may improve your quality of life. I’ve been watching you for a while and it seems to me that you’re down in the dumps a lot of the time. What Glyphotech can provide is a focus in your life: a way of realising possibilities that you yourself might not have thought of.”
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