Then he heard the grunt, the low, asthmatic grunt of the sow, and straight ahead she emerged from the swimming light of the candles. She was bright and beautiful no longer. Her flanks were charred, her beady eyes withered, her snout somehow twisted out of true. She hobbled towards him very slowly, and very slowly the figure astride her became apparent. It was Tommy Lacey of course, naked as the day he was born, his body as pink and as hairless as one of her farrow, his face as innocent of human feeling. His eyes were now her eyes, as he guided the great sow by her ears. And the noise of the sow, the snaffling sound, was not out of the pig’s mouth, but out of his. His was the voice of the pig.
Redman said his name, quietly. Not Lacey, but Tommy. The boy seemed not to hear. Only then, as the pig and her rider approached, did Redman register why he hadn’t fallen on his face.
There was a rope around his neck.
Even as he thought the thought, the noose tightened, and he was hauled off his feet into the air.
No pain, but a terrible horror, worse, so much worse than pain, opened in him, a gorge of loss and regret, and all he was sank away into it.
Below him, the sow and the boy had come to a halt, beneath his jangling feet. The boy, still grunting, had climbed off the pig and was squatting down beside the beast. Through the greying air Redman could see the curve of the boy’s spine, the flawless skin of his back. He saw too the knotted rope that protruded from between his pale buttocks, the end frayed. For all the world like the tail of a pig.
The sow put its head up, though its eyes were beyond seeing.
He liked to think that she suffered, and would suffer now until she died. It was almost sufficient, to think of that. Then the sow’s mouth opened, and she spoke. He wasn’t certain how the words came, but they came. A boy’s voice, lilting.
‘This is the state of the beast,’ it said, ‘to eat and be eaten.’
Then the sow smiled, and Redman felt, though he had believed himself numb, the first shock of pain as Lacey’s teeth bit off a piece from his foot, and the boy clambered, snorting, up his saviour’s body to kiss out his life.