“With dearest pleasure,” he said. But the next visit held more dread than pleasure.
The big cart was standing in the yard full of squealing piglets when Gregory arrived. The farmer and Neckland were bustling about it. The former greeted Gregory cheerfully.
“I’ve a chance to make a good quick profit on these little chaps. Old sows can’t feed them, but sucking pig fetches its price in Norwich, so Bert and me are going to drive over to Heigham and put them on the train.”
“They’ve grown since I last saw them!”
“Ah, they put on over two pounds a day. Bert, we’d better get a net and spread over this lot, or they’ll be diving out.
They’re that lively!”
The two men made their way over to the barn, clomping through the mud. Mud squelched behind Gregory. He turned.
In the muck between the stables and the cart, footprints appeared, two parallel tracks. They seemed to imprint themselves with no agency but their own. A cold flow of acute super-natural terror overcame Gregory, so that he could not move.
The scene seemed to go gray and palsied as he watched the tracks come towards him.
The carthorse neighed uneasily, the prints reached the cart, the cart creaked, as if something had climbed aboard. The piglets squealed with terror. One dived clear over the wooden sides. Then aterrible silence fell.
Gregory still could not move. He heard an unaccountable sucking noise in the cart, but his eyes remained rooted on the muddy tracks. Those impressions were of something other than a man: something with dragging feet that were in outline something like a seal’s flippers. Suddenly he found his voice.
“Mr. Grendon!” he cried.
Only as the farmer and Bert came running from the barn with the net did Gregory dare look into the cart.
One last piglet, even as he looked, seemed to be deflating rapidly, like a rubber balloon collapsing. It went limp and lay silent a,mong the other little empty bags of pig skin. The cart creaked. Something splashed heavily off across the farmyard in the direction of the pond.
Grendon did not see. He had run to the cart and was staring like Gregory in dismay at the deflated corpses. Neckland stared too, and was the first to find his voice.
“Some sort of disease got ‘em all, just like that! Must be one of them there new diseases from the Continent of Europe!”
“It’s no disease,” Gregory said. He could hardly speak, for his mind had just registered the fact that there were no bones left in or amid the deflated pig bodies. “It’s no diseaselook, the pig that got away is still alive.”
He pointed to the animal that had jumped from the cart. It had injured its leg in the process, and now lay in the ditch some feet away, panting. The farmer went over to it and lifted it out.
“It escaped the disease by jumping out,” Neckland said.
“Master, we better go and see how the rest of them is down in the sties.”
“Ah, that we had,” Grendon said. He handed the pig over to Gregory, his face set. “No good taking one alone to market. 111
get Grubby to unharness the horse. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d be good enough to take this little chap in to Marjorie. At least we can all eat a bit of roast pig for dinner tomorrow.”
“Mr. Grendon, this is no disease. Have the veterinarian over from Heigham and let him examine these bodies.”
“Don’t you tell me how to run my farm, young man. I’ve got trouble enough.”
Despite this rebuff, Gregory could not keep away. He had to see Nancy, and he had to see what occurred at the farm. The morning after the horrible thing happened to the pigs, he received a letter from his most admired correspondent, Mr. H.
G. Wells, one paragraph of which read: “At bottom, I think I am neither optimist nor pessimist. I tend to believe both that we stand on the threshold of an epoch of magnificent progresscertainly such an epoch is within our graspand that we may have reached the ‘fin du globe’ prophesied by our gloomier fin de siecle prophets. I am not at all surprised to hear that such a vast issue may be resolving itself on a remote farm near Cottersall, Norfolkall unknown to anyone but the two of us. Do not think that I am in other than a state of terror, even when I cannot help exclaiming “What a lark!’ “