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.
He slept badly, and woke early. He lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. He found it difficult to believe now that what had happened yesterday evening had been real. He felt almost as if it had all been a luridly-colored film. But he felt a cold and undeniable difference inside his soul that told him it had actually happened. A change in himself that would affect him for the rest of his life – what he thought, what he said, what people he could love, what risks he was prepared to take.
Just after dawn, he saw the lights in the pig-houses flicker on, and he knew that Dougal and Charlie had arrived. He dressed, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he drank half a pint of freezing-cold milk straight out of the bottle. He brought some of it directly back up again, and had to spit it into the sink. He wiped his mouth on a damp tea-towel and went outside.
Dougal was tethering a Landrace gilt and fixing up a heater for her piglets in a “creep”, a boxlike structure hanging alongside her. Piglets under four weeks needed more heat than their mother could provide. Charlie was busy in a pen further along, feeding Old Jeffries, their enormous one-eyed Large Black boar. They bred very few Large Blacks these days: the Danish Landraces were docile and prolific and gave excellent bacon. But Malcolm had insisted on keeping Old Jeffries for sentimental reasons. He had been given to them by their uncle when they took over the business, and had won them their first rosette. “Old Jeffries and I are going to be buried in the same grave,” he always used to say.
“Morning, Mr David,” said Dougal. He was a sandy-haired Wiltshireman with a pudgy face and protuberant eyes.
“Morning, Dougal.”
“Mr Malcolm not about yet?”
David shook his head. “No … he said something about going to Chester.”
“Oh … that’s queer. We were going to divide up the weaner pool today.”
“Well, I can help you do that.”
“Mr Malcolm didn’t say when he’d be back?”
“No,” said David. “He didn’t say a word.”
He walked along the rows of pens until he came to Old Jeffries’ stall. Charlie had emptied a bucketful of fresh feed into Old Jeffries’ trough, and the huge black boar was greedily snuffling his snout into it; although his one yellow eye remained fixed on David as he ate.
“He really likes his breakfast today,” Charlie remarked. Charlie was a young curly-haired teenager from the village. He was training to be a veterinarian, but he kept himself in petrol and weekly Chinese takeaways by helping out at Bryce Pork before college.
“Yes …” said David. He stared in awful fascination as Old Jeffries snorted and guzzled at the dark red mixture of roughage, concentrate and meat meal that (in two horrific hours of near-madness) he had mixed last night out of Malcolm’s soupy remains. “It’s a new formula we’ve been trying.”
“Mr Malcolm sorted out that bearing on the feed-grinder, then?” asked Charlie.
“Oh … oh, yes,” David replied. But he didn’t take his eyes off Old Jeffries, grunting into his trough; and Old Jeffries didn’t for one moment take his one yellow eye off David.
“What did the health inspector say?” asked Charlie.
“Nothing much. It isn’t erysipelas, thank God. Just a touch of zinc deficiency. Too much dry food.”
Charlie nodded. “I thought it might be that. But this new feed looks excellent. In fact, it smells so good, I tasted a little bit myself.”
For the first time, David took his eyes off Old Jeffries. “You did what?”
Charlie laughed. “You shouldn’t worry. You know what Malcolm says, he wouldn’t feed anything to the pigs that he wouldn’t eat himself. I’ve never come across anybody who loves his livestock as much as your brother. I mean, he really puts himself into these pigs, doesn’t he? Body and soul.”
Old Jeffries had finished his trough, and was enthusiastically cleaning it with his long inky tongue. David couldn’t help watching him in fascination as he licked the last fragments of meat meal from his whiskery cheeks.
“I’m just going to brew up some tea,” he said, clapping Charlie on the back.
He left the piggery; but when he reached the door, he could still see Old Jeffries staring at him one-eyed from the confines of his pen, and for some inexplicable reason it made him shudder.
You’re tired, shocked, he told himself. But as he closed the piggery door he heard Old Jeffries grunt and whuffle as if he had been dangerously roused.
The telephone rang for Malcolm all day; and a man in a badly-muddied Montego arrived at the piggery, expecting to talk to Malcolm about insurance. David fended everybody off, saying that Malcolm had gone to Chester on business and no, he didn’t know when he was coming back. Am I my brother’s keeper?
That night, after Dougal had left, he made his final round of the piggery, making sure that the gilts and the sows were all tethered tight, so that they didn’t accidentally crush their young; checking the “creeps” and the ventilators; switching off lights.
His last visit was to Old Jeffries. The Large Black stood staring at him as he approached; and made a noise in his throat like no noise that David had ever heard a boar utter before.
“Well, old man,” he said, leaning on the rail of the pen. “It looks as if Malcolm knew what he was talking about. You and he are going to be buried in the same grave.”
Old Jeffries curled back his lip and grunted.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” David told him. “He was dying, right in front of my eyes. God, he couldn’t have lived more than five minutes more.”
Old Jeffries grunted again. David said, “Thanks, O.J. You’re a wonderful conversationalist.” He reached over to pat the Large Black’s bristly head.
Without any warning at all, Old Jeffries snatched at David’s hand, and clamped it between his jaws. David felt his fingers being crushed, and teeth digging right through the palm of his hand. He shouted in pain, and tried to pull himself away, but Old Jeffries twisted his powerful sloped-back neck and heaved David bodily over the railings and into his ammonia-pungent straw.
David’s arm was wrenched around behind him, and he felt his elbow crack. He screamed, and tried to turn himself around, but Old Jeffries’ four-toed trotter dug into his ribcage, cracking his breastbone and puncturing his left lung. Old Jeffries weighed over 300 kilograms, and even though he twisted and struggled, there was nothing he could do to force the boar off him.
“Dougal!” he screamed, even though he knew that Dougal had left over twenty minutes ago. “Oh God, help me! Somebody!”
Grunting furiously, Old Jeffries trampled David and worried his bloody hand between his teeth. To his horror, David saw two of his fingers drop from Old Jeffries’ jaw, and fall into the straw. The boar’s bristly sides kept scorching his face: taut and coarse and pungent with the smell of pig.
He dragged himself backwards, out from under the boar’s belly, and grabbed hold of the animal’s back with his free hand, trying to pull himself upright. For a moment, he thought he had managed it, but then Old Jeffries let out a shrill squeal of rage, and burrowed his snout furiously and aggressively between David’s thighs.
“No!” David screamed. “No! Not that! Not that!”
But he felt sharp teeth tearing through corduroy, and then half of his inside thigh being torn away from the bone, with a bloody crackle of fat and tissue. And then Old Jeffries ripped him between the legs. He felt the boar’s teeth puncture his groin, he felt cords and tubes and fats being wrenched away. He threw back his head and he let out a cry of anguish, and wanted to die then, right then, with no more pain, nothing but blackness.
But Old Jeffries retreated, trotting a little way away from him with his gory prize hanging from his mouth. He stared at David with his one yellow eye as if he were daring him to take it back.
David sicked up blood. Then, letting out a long whimpering sound, he climbed up to his feet, and cautiously limped to the side of the pen. He could feel that he was losing pints of blood. It pumped warm and urgent down his trouser-leg. He knew that he was going to die. But he wasn’t going to let this pig have him. He was going to go the way that Malcolm had gone. Beyond pain, out on the other side. He was going to go in the ultimate ecstasy.
He opened the pen, and hobbled along the piggery, leaving a wide wet trail of blood behind him. Old Jeffries hesitated for a few moments, and then followed him, his trotters clicking on the concrete floor.
David crossed the yard to the feed buildings. He felt cold, cold, cold – colder than he had ever felt before. The wind banged a distant door over and over again, like a flat-toned funeral drum. Old Jeffries followed him, twenty or thirty yards behind, his one eye shining yellow in the darkness.
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
Coughing, David opened the door of the feed building. He switched on the lights, leaning against the wall for support. Old Jeffries stepped into the doorway and watched him, huge and black, but didn’t approach any closer. David switched the feed-grinder to ‘on’ and heard the hum of machinery and the scissoring of precision-ground blades.
It seemed to take him an age to climb the access ladder to the rim of the vat. When he reached the top, he looked down into the circular grinder, and he could see the blades flashing as they spun around.
Ecstasy, that’s when Malcolm had told him. Pleasure beyond pain.
He swung his bloodied legs over the rim of the vat. He closed his eyes for a moment, and said a short prayer. Dear God, forgive me. Dear mother, please forgive me.
Then he released his grip, and tumble-skidded down the stainless steel sides, his feet plunging straight into the grinder blades.
He screamed in terror; and then he screamed in agony. The blades sliced relentlessly into his feet, his ankles, his shins, his knees. He watched his legs ground up in a bloody chaos of bone and muscle, and the pain was so intense that he pounded at the sides of the vat with his fists. This wasn’t ecstasy. This was sheer nerve-tearing pain – made even more intense by the hideous knowledge that he was already mutilated beyond any hope of survival – that he was as good as dead already.
The blades cut into his thighs. He thought he had fainted but he hadn’t fainted, couldn’t faint, because the pain was so fierce that it penetrated his subconscious, penetrated every part of his mind and body.
He felt his pelvis shattered, crushed, chopped into paste. He felt his insides drop out of him. Then he was caught and tangled in the same way that Malcolm had been caught and tangled, and for a split-second he felt himself whirled around, a wild Dervish dance of sheer agony. Malcolm had lied. Malcolm had lied. Beyond pain there was nothing but more pain. On the other side of pain was a blinding sensation that made pain feel like a caress.
The blades bit into his jaw. His face was obliterated. There was a brief whirl of blood and brains and then he was gone.
The feed-grinder whirred and whirred for over an hour. Then – with no feed to slow down its blades – it overheated and whined to a halt.
Blood dripped; slower and slower.
Old Jeffries remained where he was, standing in the open doorway, one-eyed, the cold night wind ruffling his bristles.
Old Jeffries knew nothing about retribution. Old Jeffries knew nothing about guilt.
But something that Old Jeffries didn’t understand had penetrated the black primitive knots of his cortex – a need for revenge so powerful that it had been passed from a dead soul to a bestial brain. Or perhaps he simply acquired a taste for a new kind of feed.
Old Jeffries trotted back to his pen and waited patiently for the morning, and for Charlie to arrive, to fill up his trough with yet another pig’s dinner.