He reached the chicken-run without encountering any of them face to face.
There were still a few figures lingering around the pig-house. The wall of the sow’s compartment was lined with candles, dozens and dozens of them. They burned steadily in the still air, throwing a rich warm light on to brick, and on to the faces of the few who still stared into the mysteries of the sty.
Leverthal was among them, as was the warder who’d knelt at Lacey’s head that first day. Two or three boys were there too, whose faces he recognized but could put no name to.
There was a noise from the sty, the sound of the sow’s feet on the straw as she accepted their stares. Somebody was speaking, but he couldn’t make out who. An adolescent’s voice, with a lilt to it. As the voice halted in its monologue, the warder and another of the boys broke rank, as if dismissed, and turned away into the dark. Redman crept a little closer. Time was of the essence now. Soon the first of the congregation would have crossed the field and be back in the Main Building. They’d see Slape’s corpse: raise the alarm. He must find Lacey now, if indeed Lacey was still to be found.
Leverthal saw him first. She looked up from the sty and nodded a greeting, apparently unconcerned by his arrival. It was as if his appearance at this place was inevitable, as if all routes led back to the farm, to the straw house and the smell of excrement. It made a kind of sense that she’d believe that. He almost believed it himself.
‘Leverthal,’ he said.
She smiled at him, openly. The boy beside her raised his head and smiled too.
‘Are you Henessey?’ he asked, looking at the boy.
The youth laughed, and so did Leverthal.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. No. No. Henessey is here.’
She pointed into the sty.
Redman walked the few remaining yards to the wall of the sty, expecting and not daring to expect, the straw and the blood and the pig and Lacey.
But Lacey wasn’t there. Just the sow, big and beady as ever, standing amongst pats of her own ordure, her huge, ridiculous ears flapping over her eyes.
‘Where’s Henessey?’ asked Redman, meeting the sow’s gaze.
‘Here,’ said the boy.
‘This is a pig.’
‘She ate him,’ said the youth, still smiling. He obviously thought the idea delightful. ‘She ate him: and he speaks out of her.’
Redman wanted to laugh. This made Lacey’s tales of ghosts seem almost plausible by comparison. They were telling him the pig was possessed.
‘Did Henessey hang himself, as Tommy said?’
Leverthal nodded.
‘In the sty?’
Another nod.
Suddenly the pig took on a different aspect. In his imagination he saw her reaching up to sniff at the feet of Henessey’s twitching body, sensing the death coming over it, salivating at the thought of its flesh. He saw her licking the dew that oozed from its skin as it rotted, lapping at it, nibbling daintily at first, then devouring it. It wasn’t too difficult to understand how the boys could have made a mythology of that atrocity: inventing hymns to it, attending
upon the pig like a god. The candles, the reverence, the intended sacrifice of Lacey: it was evidence of sickness, but it was no more strange than a thousand other customs of faith. He even began to understand Lacey’s lassitude, his inability to fight the powers that overtook him.
Mama, they fed me to the pig.
Not Mama, help me, save me. Just: they gave me to the pig.
All this he could understand: they were children, many of them under-educated, some verging on mental instability, all susceptible to superstition. But that didn’t explain Leverthal. She was staring into the sty again, and Redman registered for the first time that her hair was unclipped, and lay on her shoulders, honey-coloured in the candlelight.
‘It looks like a pig to me, plain and simple,’ he said.
‘She speaks with his voice,’ Leverthal said, quietly. ‘Speaks in tongues, you might say. You’ll hear him in a while. My darling boy.’
Then he understood. ‘You and Henessey?’