The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  “There is little that terrifies me more than the possibility of something or someone else gaining total power over me, as might happen if I ventured up that rutted driveway.

  “Set close-to-home, ‘Pinkie’ plays with that fear in several different ways.”

  COME SEPTEMBER, RENNIE DIDN’T LIKE Pinkie so much anymore. The friendship had been going sour throughout the summer, and when it was time to attend the State Fair, Rennie wasn’t sure he even wanted to bother. Who wanted to ride two hours to Richmond with a hulking, bristly pig that stared at you, drooled on the passenger’s seat, and popped his little red stick in and out, in and out, like an angry, bald prairie dog?

  Rennie had few friends besides Pinkie, if you could call the cashier at the Farm Bureau Co-op and the mailman friends, but that never bothered Rennie much. He had a sturdy 110-year-old house on a fifty-two acre mountainside farm, and a television that caught a little NBC and CBS when the night was clear. He had inherited the farm from his father and mother, who’d taken off to explore the country seven years ago and had never come home. Rennie’s younger sister, Regina, had left a year after that. She didn’t want the farm; she wanted big cities and bright lights and so had moved to DC. Currently, she worked at some museum gift shop selling some sort of educational shit, according to her last Christmas card.

  Raising chickens was Rennie’s main occupation. Selling eggs, broilers, and nesters didn’t bring in a living wage, but he supplemented it with money earned by leasing his pasture acreage to an absentee cattle rancher. Rennie liked his solitude, interrupted by the occasional telemarketer call and visit to the Farm Bureau Co-op when he went for the essentials – chicken feed, canned goods, seeds, new jeans, duct tape.

  Pinkie had been with Rennie for two years. The farmer had found the tiny, peach-skinned piglet in the forest, offspring of a neighbor’s escaped Hampshire and one of the feral boars that had run the woods ever since Rennie could remember. The sow had been killed and half eaten by the boar after giving birth, and only one piglet was still alive. Rennie had lifted it from the tangle of poison ivy and thistles, wrapped it up in his flannel jacket and carried it home. He fed it cow’s milk and oatmeal until it was able to forage the pastures and woods for itself.

  Pinkie grew into a very large, very bright, and very amiable pig. He learned to pull the rope to ring the bell beside the front porch at six each morning to keep Rennie from oversleeping. He nosed open the mailbox down by the road to collect whatever the postman had brought that day. He ate at the table, chewing chicken and cabbage delicately with his sharp little teeth then rubbing his nose and lips on a folded paper towel when he was through with his meal. He could light a match, throw clothes into the washer, and punch in channels on the television remote control.

  Rennie took Pinkie to the Augusta County Fair when the pig was not quite a year old and entered him into the most talented hog contest. Pinkie won hooves-down, lighting men’s cigars, folding newspapers, and tying ropes into knots. Some irritating, scraggly-haired girl with a red, second place 4-H ribbon pinned to her T-shirt took a special liking to Pinkie, and kept coming back to the hog tent to feed Rennie’s pig funnel cakes. She called Pinkie “Wilbur,” which made no sense to Rennie, and he at last got rid of the kid by telling her that when “Wilbur” got tired of little girls, he bit them and licked their blood. The prize money, twenty-five dollars, went into the truck’s gas tank and to burgers for the trip home. The blue ribbon was nailed on the door to Pinkie’s shed and looked nice for a couple of weeks, but then rain and sleet chewed it up and took most of the color out.

  Pinkie won the most talented pig at the county fair the following July as well, having learned to breathe “Three Blind Mice” into a harmonica, squeeze mustard onto a corndog, and to carve his own name in the dirt with his foot. The other pigs posed no threat to the crown as they rolled balls with their noses and play dead on command. Rennie collected his cash and the ribbon to the cheers of bleachered onlookers. Several pig-raisers approached him afterwards with “How much stud fee you charge for that hog?” Rennie clutched Pinkie’s leash and said, “Ain’t for stud.” Pinkie tilted his head, and gave Rennie a cold look that made him flinch.

  Back home, Pinkie started to act obstinate. He would take his time when Rennie called him to dinner, and he took a couple craps on the front porch beneath the swing. While waddling through the living room, he carelessly bumped into the furniture and display cabinets, sending glass trinkets that had belonged to Rennie’s mother to the floor. The pig even humped one of the chickens in the chicken yard, squashing the brown-feathered bird to death. Rennie didn’t know exactly what to do; he tried bribing the hog into good behavior with special treats of cookies and tomatoes. He made the bed of straw in the pig shed twice as deep. Instead of bathing Pinkie in the aluminum tub out back, Rennie brought the boar inside to his own bathtub, built a little wooden ramp, and let the hog soak in warm, sweet-smelling water instead of cold water from the garden hose. None of it seemed to appease the pig or make a difference in his behavior. Pinkie just took it all in as if warranted, and continued to dump, bump, and hump.

  One morning in mid-August Rennie awoke to Pinkie crouching over him in bed, his pointed hooves pressing into Rennie’s chest. Rennie squealed and knocked the pig off, then looked over the side of the bed to the floor. His chest felt like two branding irons had been driven into his ribs.

  “Damn, that hurts! What the hell you doin’ in here?” he squawked. “Ain’t six yet! You ain’t supposed to come in the house ’til I unlock the door for you.”

  Pinkie righted himself on the rug, shook his great head, and sniffed.

  “What’s the matter with you?” insisted Rennie. Then, his chest feeling suddenly more cold than hot: “Wait. I dead bolted the front door last night. How’d you get in?”

  The pig sniffed again and licked the slobber from his snout. Then he reached down and licked the skinny dick between his legs. But, of course, he didn’t answer because in spite of his many talents, Pinkie couldn’t talk.

  The day progressed as days did. Meals with Rennie on one side of the kitchen table, Pinkie on the other. Rennie feeding the chickens, sorting through junk mail, writing checks for the heating oil and electricity, and walking the perimeter of the farm to check the security of the fence. But this time, Pinkie didn’t walk the whole fence line. Instead, he followed a ways, then disappeared into the woods and returned several times.

  “You lookin’ for something?” Rennie asked Pinkie on the pig’s fourth return. “I don’t like it you goin’ away from me like that. Am I gonna have to keep you on a leash like I do at the fair?” The pig blinked at Rennie and then turned a rock over with his nose and lapped up the earthworms beneath it.

  That afternoon a man came calling, a fellow from the Mid-Atlantic Hog Breeders Association. He had an official car with black lettering that read “MAHBA” and a brown silhouette of a hog rooting the ground. Rennie was collecting eggs in the chicken yard when the car pulled up and the horn honked. The driver was clearly a country-born man; strangers didn’t take the chance of coming upon another man’s farm unannounced.

  “Mr Monroe?” the man called. He came around the side of the house to the chicken yard, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his windbreaker. He wore a tie, tasseled loafers, and an impossibly wide smile. He was young, early thirties, with a head of bushy red hair. “Mr Rennie Monroe? I’m Vernon Via.”

  “Yep?” replied Rennie as he tossed feed and scraps to the hens wrangling in the dust around his boots.

  “Got word you still have that hog you displayed at a couple county fairs. Your postman told me.”

  “Yep?”

  Pinkie appeared from inside the untrimmed tangle of boxwoods against the house. A small ring neck snake dangled between his teeth. He sucked it most of the way in and stared at Rennie.

  “Mind I have a look?” asked Vernon Via. “I saw it in July, was mighty impressed. Not sure the breed. You never stated it on your talented hog appli
cation.”

  “Didn’t need to. He wasn’t in no breed competition.”

  “Oh, I know that. But your hog is very unusual. May I see it?”

  “Him.”

  “Yes, him. May I?”

  “Why?”

  “I might like to make an offer to buy him.”

  Pinkie waddled to the wire fence that separated the chickens from the yard. The tip of the snake’s tail wriggled between his lips and then in a quick tip of pig’s head, the tail vanished. Rennie looked at Pinkie, then at Mr Vernon Via.

  “Oh, here he is,” said Vernon Via. He clapped his hands together. Rennie thought that was so prissy, clapping hands like that. “He looks quite healthy.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?” Rennie frowned. “I feed him good.”

  “Well, of course you would. But many things can affect an animal that has no proper veterinarian care.”

  “I . . .,” said Rennie, but stopped his tongue. Pinkie had never been to the vet. Had never needed to go to the vet. “He don’t need a vet and he ain’t for sale.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” said Vernon Via. He tugged a checkbook from his back pocket. “At the last meeting of Mah-Ba, we agreed that we could offer up to,” he hesitated, “five hundred dollars for your hog.”

  Pinkie scraped his hide up and down against one of the chicken pen’s splintery fence post, but his little black bean eyes remained fixed on Vernon Via.

  “That’s a lot of money,” admitted Rennie. “But I’m doin’ okay. I don’t need anything I don’t got.”

  “You could put it in savings. Hold on to it for something you might want later?”

  Rennie shook his head. His fingers tightened around the pan of chicken feed.

  “But you don’t understand,” said Vernon Via, smiling and shaking his head as if he were talking to a child. “We plan on breeding your hog. See if we can get a crop of piglets with some of that ability, that talent.”

  “Pinkie wouldn’t want to be away from home.”

  “He’d be treated royally, I assure you. We’d mate him a couple times a year to a well-selected female, and he’d be given good food, a nice pen, plenty of space. Hog heaven, so to speak.” The man winked both eyes as if he thought he was very clever indeed.

  “Pinkie don’t need nothin’ I can’t give him. He don’t got nothin’ to worry about.”

  “Five hundred dollars and pick of the first litter, then. So you won’t be lonely.”

  “Ain’t lonely!” spit Rennie, a flare of anger catching the base of his neck.

  “Pardon me, but let’s be honest,” said Vernon Via, his eyebrows going up. “Out here on this mountain, with nobody to talk to except your pig and a pen full of chickens? Look at it this way. With the money we give you, you could buy yourself a bushel full of piglets to raise and train.”

  Rennie’s anger spread up to his scalp and crawled cross his shoulders. He felt his hog’s hot breath on the back of his leg through his jeans. Clearly, Pinkie was pissed, too, pissed someone wanted to take him away.

  Vernon Via didn’t move. His eyebrows remained up in expectation, like someone had put a staple gun to his forehead.

  Then Rennie said evenly through clenched jaws, “Get off my land.”

  The eyebrows came down. The driver was a country-bred man. He would know how serious that command was.

  Rennie went into the house through the back door, carrying the half-empty pan of chicken feed. His ears hummed and his hands were cold. Damned intruder! Damned outsider! Rennie slammed the pan on the kitchen table then went into the bathroom under the stairs to wait for Vernon Via to leave. He sat on the wobbly pot, his feet planted apart to keep from rocking. Damned pig collector! Rennie clutched his head and saw dark pink in his line of vision, a sickening, oily swirl that made his stomach cramp. He closed his eyes, breathed through his teeth, and listened for the sound of the car’s engine.

  The sound didn’t come.

  Rennie came out of the bathroom and went to the front door. He peeked through the glass beside the door. The car was still there.

  “Where are you, Mr Pig-Breeder?” Rennie said into the glass, his brows furrowed and his eyes narrowed. “Still here? Tryin’ to steal my hog?”

  Rennie went back to the kitchen. He looked out the window toward the chicken yard. Vernon Via was not there. Rennie picked up the shotgun he kept beside the door and pushed through the screen. He’d never used it except for scaring off foxes. But it did scare, that was for sure; a solid, ear-shattering blast would clearly say what Rennie didn’t want to have to repeat.

  He moved out to the back steps. The screen door clapped behind him.

  Then he saw Mr Vernon Via. The man was lying up under the boxwoods, with just his legs and shoes sticking out. Rennie almost laughed, because he was reminded of the Wicked Witch of the East who’d been crunched by Dorothy’s flying farmhouse, and thought for the barest of seconds how nobody would want Vernon Via’s prissy-pants tasseled loafers. But Rennie didn’t laugh. There was blood on the shoes.

  The heat behind Rennie’s eyes went suddenly cold. He put the gun aside and knelt on the damp grass. He grabbed one of the loafers and shook it. “Hey, Vernon Via, you trip?” The man did not answer. He did not move. Rennie grasped the man’s ankles and hauled him out from the bushes. The man’s face was battered away, leaving little but one eye, a nub of cartilage where the nose had been, and a flap of cheek skin. The rest was a red mangle that looked more hamburger than human.

  Rennie squeaked and fell backward on his ass. He dug at his eyes with the heels of his hands, but the ghastly sight remained, unchanged.

  There was a wet snuffling beside Rennie, and he look around to see Pinkie licking blood from his lips and jowls.

  “Agh,” managed Rennie, his tongue a dry and swollen thing in his mouth. “What have you done, Pinkie? What is this you’ve done to me?”

  Rennie cut the man up with his chainsaw and worked the parts into the hills of soil he’d worked up for the late season cabbages and the pumpkins. He put on his winter gloves, lined the seat with a plastic trash bag, and drove the man’s car out to the end of the driveway and left it by the side of the road, then hiked the half mile to the house again. Pinkie had wanted to ride along, insisted on it, but Rennie shoved the hog back with a well-aimed foot and then slammed the car door.

  It was all Rennie could do to keep from losing his lunch in the hog breeder’s car.

  Back at the farmhouse, Rennie drank three cups of coffee and paced the floor. He looked at the telephone, willing it not to ring, and it didn’t. Pinkie sat at the kitchen table and chewed at burrs between his toes.

  Rennie couldn’t look at the pig. He had killed Vernon Via. Why had he done that? Did he hate the man that much for wanting to take him away? He was afraid to ask Pinkie, afraid that this time, the pig might actually open up his rubbery lips and give an answer. Pinkie stopped chewing the burrs and starting licking his balls. This made Rennie uncomfortable, so he went into the living room to watch the news.

  Bedtime came with a sudden and violent rainstorm. Rennie changed into his sweatshirt and sweatpants and stood at his second floor bedroom window, looking out through the wash of water on the glass, across the darkened side yard to the garden. It was nothing but a black pit until the lightning flashed, then he could see the ribs of the rows. Had he buried Vernon Via deep enough inside the cabbage hills? Would the water wash him out again? Would Pinkie dig the parts up?

  The phone rang.

  Rennie whipped about and stared at the phone on the nightstand. It rang again. Again. He walked over and picked it up. It nearly shook from his hand.

  “Yep?”

  “Rennie?” It was his sister. Had she heard about the missing hog breeder already?

  “Yep?”

  “It’s your birthday,” said Regina. “Thought I would call to say happy birthday.”

  “It is?” Rennie squeezed his brain. Yes, it was. He was thirty-seven today. How had he missed that? But a
gain, why would he have remembered? He certainly hadn’t taught Pinkie to read a calendar.

  “You forgot your own birthday?” Regina had adopted a nasally, northern Virginia accent. She was happy to be free of anything country or farmish. “Are you that busy?”

  “Yep.” Rennie put one foot on top of the other. “But thanks for calling.”

  “So you didn’t do anything to celebrate? Anything, I don’t know, wild and free for once in your life?”

  “No.” Well, Pinkie killed a man and ate his face. That’s wild and free in a way.

  “When you going to come visit me?” Regina didn’t mean it and Rennie knew that. Regina knew Rennie knew that so it was safe to ask. For some reason, she felt it was her sisterly duty to make such moot offers.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got the chickens, the fences, crops. You know. And it’s a thunderstorm so I better hang up. Don’t want to fry through the wire.”

  “Sure. Well, okay, enjoy the rest of your day. Night.”

  “Thanks.” Rennie hung up and crossed his arms. His fingers picked at the frayed elbows of the soft shirt. A loud thunderclap shook the house. He’d locked Pinkie up in his shed, but the pig had gotten into the farmhouse earlier. Surely he would be able to let himself out of the shed if he got a mind to it.

  Rennie went downstairs. He stared out through the kitchen door toward the chicken yard and the pig shed beyond it. The door was still closed, still sealed with the padlock. Rain was coming in sideways, spraying the grass and laying it flat.

  Okay, then, okay, Rennie thought. He sat at the kitchen table and spun the salt shaker around. Putting his head down on his arms, he tried not to think of the dead man’s body, all in pieces, fertilizing the pumpkins and cabbages.

  He woke with a start. It was daylight and the rain was over. His arms ached; his cheek was wrinkled from the fabric of his sweatshirt sleeve. The plastic teapot clock on the wall read 8:47. Rennie rubbed his neck and stood up slowly, working a kink out of his knee. He’d overslept, and Pinkie hadn’t rung the morning bell.