They still wanted to talk to Alan.
“Hello?” Alan said when Mrs. Turney finally surrendered the phone to him.
“Alan Johnson?”
“This is he.”
“You reported your mother Judith Johnson as a missing person some while back. Yes?”
“Well, it was just a formality. I figure she just took off without leaving a forwarding address. I don’t really know if that counts as missing. Why?”
“Because we’ve found a body we think may be her, but we need someone to come in and make an identification.”
“She’s dead?”
“Assuming it’s her. If you’re free now, we’ll send a car over there to pick you up.”
“Oh, I can drive to New Ravensburg myself. Where was she? How did she die?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss this any further until there’s been an identification. The car’s on its way there now.”
“They found your mother?” Mrs. Turney asked, with ill-disguised avidity, when Alan hung up the phone.
“They think so. They wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but I don’t suppose it’s liable to be someone else.”
He wanted to call Diana, but she was having one of her migraines and had asked him not to phone. Anyhow, what could she do to help? He wasn’t even sure it was his mother yet. And if it was, he wasn’t sure how he felt. He’d already been through so many feelings about her disappearing the way she had—anger, hurt, resentment, even some grief. Now he’d have to reshuffle the whole deck and deal it out again like a new game of solitaire.
In fact, his feelings about almost everything else were in the same state of chaos. He still hadn’t adjusted to the idea that he was married. Which he wasn’t, except in a legal sense, since the ceremony in Brainerd hadn’t worked any magic on his sexual dysfunction. The real wedding ceremony took place in private, with just the bride and groom attending, and that ceremony was permanently pending.
For a while he sat and stewed, but Louise was still going around whacking the mosquitoes, so he took up his swatter and joined her, and in no time at all he was completely absorbed by the job at hand and leaving a trail of bloody splotches all over the wallpaper in the downstairs rooms. Blat! Blat! It was like a virtual reality arcade game.
His score had mounted to 27 by the time the police car arrived. There were two officers, and they were no more communicative than the man on the phone had been. It seemed to Alan that he was being treated like a murder suspect. They hadn’t read him his rights or put him in handcuffs, but what he felt, sitting by himself in the backseat of the police car, was pure panicky fear.
Then, when he thought things could not get worse, something really awful happened. The police car’s radio crackled to life and said to watch for a speeding car heading their way on the highway, a white Camry, license plate SVS 329, with a Yamaha motorcycle behind, both pushing ninety. The officer radioed back to say he was already on assignment and would not be able to respond, but he did slow down enough, as the headlights of the speeding car approached from the opposite direction, that Alan was left with no doubt in the matter. The car was Diana’s Camry, and it was speeding like crazy in the direction of the Kellog farm, with a guy on a motorcycle close behind, almost tailgating.
He hadn’t actually seen her behind the wheel, but he wasn’t jerk enough to try to think of some way another person might be driving her car. The situation was pretty clear-cut—she was having sex with someone else, and probably had been right along, and their marriage was even more of a fraud than he’d supposed.
He sagged back against the stiff vinyl cushion of the backseat with the sense of weirdly blissful release that can come in the wake of total disaster—a tornado that’s leveled your house, or the news that you have an inoperable brain tumor. The police seemed to suspect him of killing his mother, and the newlywed wife he’d never had sex with was having an affair with a biker. And it didn’t matter! It was all okay! Because he knew he was innocent. Dumb, maybe, but he’d done nothing to be ashamed of. He was a genuine example of what his god-damned father was always sounding off about—a righteous man. And the promise to the righteous was there in the first Psalm: “For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.” There it was, plain as could be, just after the Book of Job, which finally made sense to him, now that he was in the same situation: all you need is a clear conscience, and whatever shit may happen, it’ll all work out in the end. That’s what Job believed, and it was probably what had kept Jim Cottonwood sane all those years in prison, and now Alan believed it, too.
When he got to the coroner’s office, it was ten-fifteen, and ten-thirty before the coroner got there. Alan waited in the basement corridor of the county courthouse with one of the policemen while the other went off to fetch the coroner. There were no benches. One of the two fluorescent lights flickered and made a sound like bacon grease. The policeman never once tried to start up some small talk, which Alan found amazing, unless he was under orders.
At last the coroner arrived and opened up his front office and then the little half-room behind it where there was a special refrigerator for corpses, like a deep freeze, only instead of white enamel it was the color and texture of a galvanized-steel bucket.
The body inside was covered with a white sheet, which the coroner lifted and pulled back. The body seemed to be completely naked, although the breasts had not been exposed. Everywhere the skin was shredded or chewed up, as though animals had been at it.
“Well?” said the coroner. “Is that your mother?”
Alan couldn’t think what to say. Finally he managed, “I… I don’t know. I mean, the face is all… messed up. What happened to her?”
The coroner exchanged a significant look with the policeman, and the policeman answered, “That’s how she was found.”
“Is it your mother?” the coroner insisted.
“Honestly, how could I tell? There’s just… meat. I guess the hair could be hers. Was she wearing any kind of jewelry? Mom’s ears were pierced.”
“You refuse to make an identification?” It was the policeman this time.
“I don’t refuse to. I can’t. Would you know if it was your mother?”
“Don’t get smart, kid.”
“Smart? I’m sorry, I’d like to leave. You won’t tell me anything, and I can’t help you identify her. I’m not used to looking at… anything like this. Plus, the smell is getting to me.”
The policeman heaved a sigh and signaled to the coroner to close the lid on the cooler. Then he announced to Alan that he was being arrested on suspicion of murder, and that he had the right to remain silent. In the police station across the street from the courthouse he was told he could make one phone call. He couldn’t trust himself to phone Diana, but he did try to reach Bruce McGrath at his home number, which he knew by heart. But he only got an answering machine. So it looked like he would be spending the night in jail.
The cot in the cell he was locked in was no more uncomfortable than the one he’d been sleeping on at Navaho House. Even so, he had a little trouble getting to sleep, but after he recited the 23rd Psalm a few times he popped right off.
42
Magic is like knitting a sweater, a patient, persistent intertwining of a single purpose shaped in the form that the moving needles have insisted on. But let that single thread be snapped at any of its linkages, and the whole fabric is at peril: the sweater may unravel to become a mere skein of yarn again.
So it was with Diana’s witchcraft. The first break in the yarn had been Judy Johnson’s disappearance, which Diana had given little thought to at first. Cats will run off, or get run over. Some stay on longer than others, but even the luckiest are not much sturdier than houseplants. It is part of their charm that they don’t have nine lives but only one, and that one likely to be brief if they are free to range the countryside and highways.
It had been a milk delivery truck that killed Judy as it backed out of the Min
nawichee Dairy garage early in the morning. She had spent the night beneath the truck, lured there by the sweet stench of spoiling milk and the lingering heat of the engine. Her feline body was found later that day and deposited in a trash bag, which was taken to the local transfer station with the rest of the dairy’s garbage two days later. As luck would have it, the trash bag was not at once buried beneath each day’s tons of new garbage but came to rest at the top of a mound slated to be bulldozed into a waiting pit. It waited too long. First the crows and then the rats tore the trash bag open to feast on the cat’s carcass. And then, before the remaining scraps could be plowed under, the weakened thread snapped altogether and Judy, in death, reverted to her human shape, although her corpse still bore the ravages inflicted by the truck and the vermin at the landfill. Alan was not being cagey when he insisted that he could not identify her remains. Only a forensic scientist could have done that with any certainty.
All Diana’s magic had not been undone at once. Only the weakest link had snapped. The four pigs remained in their sty, and remained pigs—at least to the eye of a casual observer. But they had undergone, it seemed to Diana, an inward change. Their behavior seemed less piggish when she approached the sty to slop them. They did not fight for precedence at the trough, but hung back, looking at her. It can be unnerving to be stared at by four large pigs. She did not know to what degree each of them might be aware of his changed condition. She had been assuming they were pigs through and through, mere dumb brutes, but now those mere dumb brutes seemed more like the inmates of some prison camp, caged in the sty—and caged, as well, in their own porcine flesh.
Finally it was Merle who proposed the simple obvious solution to the problem. The pigs had to be slaughtered. They weren’t pets, after all, or lodgers, like the old ladies at Navaho House. They were food for the table. Merle had friends who had the necessary equipment—the block and tackle, a scalding vat, barrels for chilling the carcasses in brine, and the various items of heavy-duty cutlery—hooks, saws, cleavers—needed for the butchering. Diana already had a working smokehouse and a functioning freezer in the garage that had stood empty for years waiting for just this occasion.
She had not told Merle how she had come to be raising the pigs, but he seemed to understand their special character without her having to spell it out. Sometimes when he visited, he would study the pigs from a distance as they were being fed, and perhaps he caught glimpses, as Diana sometimes did, of the men they had been before their transformation. What explanation did he need, after all, when he possessed the same powers she did—and had already exercised them against her? His interest in the pigs seemed professional, like that of a physician looking on during a colleague’s surgery, making no comment but alert to assist.
Of course, Diana had always intended that the pigs be slaughtered, but she’d been daunted by the prospect of undertaking the work herself on her own or (which amounted to almost the same thing) with only Alan’s assistance. She was no longer as squeamish as she’d once been about the shedding of blood or dealing with the larger cuts of meat one might bring home from a supermarket, but she was not confident that she could kill and butcher an entire animal larger than, say, a rabbit or chicken. But when she heard the news that Judy Johnson’s body had been found at the local landfill (and she had no doubt it was Judy’s body), it led her to wonder if the same reverse transformation might take place with one or other of the pigs after they’d been slaughtered, so that where a butcher had hung a fresh-cured ham one day he might return to discover a human thigh and buttock. It seemed prudent, in light of such a possibility, to store the meat from the butchered swine where she could keep an eye on it until such time as it was to be cooked. Four pigs represent a lot of meat, so the ladies at Navaho House were in for some nice barbecues.
The more alarming possibility, which neither she nor Merle spoke of, was that the reverse transformation she dreaded might take place before the pigs had been slaughtered. She did not like to imagine how her prisoners might behave if they were suddenly to be set free from the Bastille of their altered flesh. She would not want to be on hand for the rejoicing.
There was one further reason for conducting a slaughter ASAP. Prompted by Carl’s continued unexplained absence, the state parole board had arranged for Janet’s early release from prison. Could Diana turn over the charge of the house and of Kelly to her sister and continue to live on the premises? Even if Janet extended such an invitation, Diana shrank from the prospect of such a painful transfer of power. She had got used to being the boss. It was bad enough being subservient to Merle, but to Janet?
When she’d begun to raise the pigs, she had let herself assume that the status quo might be sustained indefinitely, that as her power as a witch grew, her luck would grow with it. Even now, she had not really abandoned that assumption. She might yet become the sole owner of the farmhouse she’d grown up in—in addition to those properties that Alan would now inherit without dispute. She had never imagined herself a woman of property, but the prospect was tempting. She only needed to exert herself. The power was there if she would summon it. It was there in the smokehouse, smoldering. It was there trembling in the dirty cobwebs above the air conditioner in Janet’s bedroom. It was there in the gravel of her heart.
43
A lot of the time lately he wasn’t in the sty. He was back in the lockup, but not at New Ravensburg. In a vast dirt compound surrounded by barbed wire. And he wasn’t a guard now, just one of the cons. There was a mob, thousands, and they were being starved to death. The warden was a woman with light blond hair in a feathery crewcut and she would preside at the cafeteria counter in the food tent at the far corner of the compound, dispensing dollops of shit-brown mush to each of the prisoners as he passed by. When he left the food tent on the way to mess tables, he’d be attacked by a gang of other cons who were after his little bowl of slop, so he’d be left with nothing. This had happened many times.
After lunch there was a lecture by the warden, who, using a pointer and flip chart, explained the theory of the corrections system in the state of Minnesota, the object of which was to terrorize and brutalize the inmates until they had become animals. Daily rape by the stronger inmates and regular beatings by the corrections officers accomplished this purpose best, as was shown by various bar graphs and tables of figures. To illustrate the same basic point, the warden offered humorous anecdotes from her own career in both public and for-profit institutions. Then, becoming more serious, she wanted to know which of the men were born-again Christians. They all raised their hands. From those who’d raised their hands she chose four for castration.
These were dreams. He could understand that afterward when he found himself back in the sty, baking in the mud, grateful to be a pig again. Once he’d thought it was these hours wallowing in a mire of mud and shit that were the nightmare, that he belonged on the other side of the fence with the guards who brought his feed. But there were too many proofs to the contrary: his ragged ears, the infected stump of his docked tail, the burning itch all about his scabbed and empty scrotal sac. And the other, human world was worse—its tortures crueler, its cruelties more extreme. In that world there were no mercies, no remission of the horror.
Here, although he had to fight for his place at the trough, there was almost enough food, and sunlight to drowse in (if he could keep from falling into the horrors of sleep), and the presence, from time to time, of a friendly guard. His favorite had been the girl who’d brought his feed when he’d first been put into the sty. Such a pretty thing. She’d seemed afraid of him at first. He could understand that, for she was such a dainty little thing, with such a pleasant smell, though sometimes, without thinking, he would snap at her. But gradually, as he came to associate her with mealtime, a liking had developed, even a fondness. Hogs are not usually noted for their affectionate nature, even toward their own young. Indeed, boars regularly devour their young, like the elder gods of Greek mythology, but Carl had retained a benevolent temperament even
as a pig. It was in his nature.
What he liked most in the girl who fed him was not the daily ration of mash mixed up with titbits of household garbage, but the fact that she would sit down on her side of the fence and talk to him. He could not understand the words, for his brain simply did not process human language. But he could catch her tone, which was one of melancholy and muted suffering, feelings with which he could easily empathize. Besides the mash she brought, those conversations had been Carl’s only solace during his months of captivity.
But then she stopped bringing him his food, and he was slopped by one or the other of the two full-size humans—either the female, who appeared in his nightmares as the warden of the prison colony (and whom he dreaded as though she were divine), or the male, toward whom he had come to have a certain fellow feeling, not as strong as what he felt for the girl but similar. The woman fed him (he knew) because she wanted him fat, and he knew why she wanted that. The man fed him from a sense of duty, and even, a little, of sorrow, as a prison guard will often pity the creatures under his charge.
That Carl’s frame of reference so often drew upon his experience at New Ravensburg, even though he could not remember his human life in its particular details, did not strike him as puzzling. He was a thoughtful sort of pig, but thoughtfulness in pigs has definite limits. He knew what he knew, what he liked and what he loathed, just those essentials. And what he loathed now more than anything else in his shrunken, sty-bound life was the new guard, Merle. That was the name she used to address him, and by the way she intoned the name Carl knew she had submitted to Merle’s authority, as Carl submitted to hers.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 23