The Pigsty

I'd stared at the pigsty for months now, through the uppermost window of my town house. In indolent mood, I seemed summoned to look. 

It's decrepit state fascinated me; the broken walls, the tangled stones, the rank tussocks failing to grow with any vigour whatsoever.

It was a carbuncle, the sty, situated as it was across the wide field the farmer struggled annually to tend. 

It was approximately halfway along the field's longest edge, opposite, by some length, an enormous sickly oak tree in the very centre of the plot, standing like a tired old guard, it too was succumbing to the malady of it's ward.

I could see it all from my window. 

It was clear every summer that the farmer's already necrotic wheat always suffered the most nearest the sty, some seemingly malignant force stifling the growing crop around it like a garrote. 

It was compulsive to witness this annual malaise and I remained at my window transfixed. 

No blackbird nested there, no wren made song, no fox sloped past, no crow flew by.

The sty was instinctively known to both man and beast as somewhere to be avoided, to be shunned outright and to stay clear of at all costs, lest some pestilence ensue.

So why then was I so animated by this heathen ditch? Why was I drawn to it?

I discussed it's apparent canker with my esteemed friend Torsten, at our late October dinner, who he himself had a penchant for the unusual and the strange.

"Obviously there's a rudiment of poison in the soil thereabouts Eric old boy, a relict of some erstwhile industry on that very spot, which I daresay wasn't farming as we know it," reasoned my old friend, gracefully dropping his monocle from his eye to underline the point.

"But why a pigsty?" I asked.

"I would assume the corruption pre-dates any agriculture, perhaps a bronze age smithy or some such ironmongery involving metals and ores. These have abraded over centuries into something toxic. I doubt the pigs were ever very happy porkers at all with all that below them!", Torsten deducted. 

"Yes, I agree, some past occupation may explain it. Before the piggery. Indeed, an old map may offer a clue as to what was there before," I concluded.

"Indeed!" 

We finished our after-dinner brandies and I bade my friend goodbye, as he stepped out into the dark mews shrouded by fog, the autumn clime more fretful this year than ever.

Inside I was invigorated by our conversation and retired to the small but well-stocked library. There I sought our my late Father's ancient maps. He was a connoisseur of local history and I was sure he would have something of use in the cabinet. 

Yes, there it was! 

A treatise on the medieval and pre-historic usage of local field systems including hand-drawn maps. 

How fortuitous!

If only Torsten had stayed an hour longer, we could have perused the papers together.

But no matter. 

I spread out one of the mouldy folding charts on my desk and turned up the gas lamp mounted on the wall behind. 

The yellow light flickered across the vellum and gave the lines and symbols a particularly eerie presence.

Studying the maps this way and without any modern infrastructure to rely on, it was difficult to calibrate the field's precise circumstance, but I persisted into the early hours of the night.

Eureka!

At last I'd found the large field adjacent to my house, inscribed on the map in black lines of an irregular shape, which certainly bore no relation to modern farming patterns. 

This was a prehistoric tract, delineated by the lie of the rough land, upon which basic frugal gathering may have occurred, perhaps some hunting for meat and maybe even primitive horticulture. There did appear to be strips.

But then I saw it. 

One of the strips was clearly broken, it's long geometry stopped by a dark patch which .....

"By Jove! It's the pigsty's spot!" I cried and in my exuberance knocked over my brandy glass.

Having mopped up the spill with my handkerchief, I looked more intently at the area I now felt sure was the damned place.

The gas lamp wavered and as I peered at the map a shiver ran up my spine, which I could not reasonably explain, other than the nocturnal chill one can expect on this the last day of October.

Brrrr!

Taking a lens I magnified the location and focused my eye.

It was there. Clear to see. A symbol scrawled above the small blackened shape on the tract's boundary. 

A tentacle.

A tiny inked tentacle but one nonetheless. 

My shiver returned and I realized that my concentrated labours had instilled a sort of apprehension, an unease, which had now settled upon me. 

The unease could be even better defined.

It was fear.

The blacked-out spot on the paper had been shunned even then, it's dank structure  unnatural to the earliest of folk. They had singularly linked it to whatever nefarious entity or practice the tentacle inferred.

I inferred my own meaning.

Devilry!

So excited was I; so profoundly stirred by my nocturnal study and it's baleful sum, that I vowed to visit the pigsty in person that very day to test the theorem of the map and in so doing settle my indecent curiosity for the thing once and for all and put my mind at rest.

But first sleep.

It was late afternoon, when I awoke in the study. I had not made it beyond the next room from the library when exhaustion from my fervour had obviously taken me. I slept on the chaise longue with a blanket draped across.

It was chilly that October the 31st. Moreso than the season demanded and I questioned my earlier resolve to visit the sty.

"If only Torsten were with me," I mused but he would be wisely ensconced in his comfortable villa with the hearth blazing and a servant proffering a clipped cigar. 

I gathered my resolve and after a small repast of quail eggs, toast, butter and a cognac, I collected the chattels needed for my hike across the huge field: sturdy boots, thick coat, hat, hip flask for further resolve and as a result of my tardy slumbers, a tilly-lamp.

It was already completely dark as I stepped out of my door.

The entrance to the farmer's field was by way of an ancient gate with tremendously weathered gate posts. I stepped in and made my way slowly across the pallid winter wheat, at some point disturbing a large hare, which scampered away like spring-heeled Jack himself.

I watched with interest it's quick retreat over the field via the light of my lamp, as it ran in haste toward the pigsty in the distance. 

It was as it broached the fallen walls, I fancied that it hesitated, attempted to turn, but was ensnared by something darker than the dark itself, a seeming tendril of the night and with a loud throaty shriek the hare was gone. 

"Oh Lord!" I whispered and despite having glimpsed it all in the sulphurous light of my tilly I now doubted that which I had seen.

"Damn hare!"

I took a sip from my hip flask and steadied my nerves. The oak tree was close and thus the half-way mark. 

I can make it.

Reaching the vast oak I heard a noisy gang of crows high up in the canopy, their tortured sleepy chatter ricocheting like hail on an empty church roof. I stared upwards and saw their sable forms held fast to branches beginning to sway.

A wind was starting up. It arrived suddenly and was much more than an Autumn breeze. I braced myself and went headlong  into it, it's fury building rapidly and I imagined some sinister agency at work as I got ever closer to the sty.

It was then that I found the monocle.

I picked it up and my heart sank entirely. This was Torsten's monocle, the very same he had been wearing at my home the night before.

What on earth was it doing in this field?

The reality hit me like a cannonball. 

Torsten, my best friend, had himself secretly been consumed by the self-same curiosity as I and after leaving my house had deigned to see the dreadful sty himself. 

But where on earth was he now?

"Torsten, Torsten! For God's sake!" I bellowed through the tempest, my voice a mere purr in the tumult.

But then the wind ceased as abruptly as it had begun and I realized that I was standing directly outside the derelict wall of my destination, the pigsty.

Quivering, I took one tentative step to the side when my foot trod on something, something soft and pliable, something wet.

I looked down and to my disgust I had stood on the mangled remains of the hare I'd seen earlier. The poor creature had been torn apart, it's entrails cast aside like canapés and it's pelt wrenched off as if some mad butcher had got to work. It's damp crushed innards had risen over the top of my boot.

I grimaced.

It was at this point that the darkness seemed to intensify, to thicken, and an unimaginable stink arose from the sty, an aroma so foul that I had to wretch. It was the smell of a thousand abattoirs, the scent of Hades itself.

As I heaved I became aware of a faint light in the dark within the sty and as it grew stronger I began to make out a form in the blackness.

"Oh dear Mary Mother of God!" I cried as the form fully materialised within the gloom.

Before me was a sight so dreadful, so heinous that my blood ran cold and froze.

I began to scream.

In the abyss within the ditch writhed a collosal and hateful thing, a hissing, quaking red morass of tiny eyes, huge fanged lipless maws and worst of all, yes, by far the worst were the long, coiling, slithering yellow tentacles, horribly festooned with enormous pouting suckers. It slopped and contorted in its cauldron of steaming ooze like a primordial wretch.

But an even more damnable sight in this vision of Gehenna was waiting for me; it was not the beast itself nor it's infernal coils, but the pitiful soul stretched across it's awful palps.

My mind began to slip.

"Tooooooooooorsten!" I wailed as reality collapsed and my reasoning shrivelled.

My friend was mercilessly entangled in the mollusc's seething barbels, his body defiled by despicable hooks, which had ripped away entire chunks of his flesh and muscle. His feet and hands had been shortened by the thousand drooling mouths and his scalp peeled off like a slice of beef.

With tears in my eyes for the unbearable plight of my friend, unfathomably I saw him purse his lips and attempt to speak.

A single sentence echoed around the stygian hovel, a string of anguished words from his mouth so utterly devastating that I will never ever forget them.

"For God's sake, run Eric, for this truly is the gate of ...

...... Hellllllllllll!"

Torsten's final tortured yell, twisted into a  muffled agonised scream as a fat glistening tentacle harpooned his open mouth, was audible enough to ring in my ears the whole frantic run back across that insufferable field, stumbling most of the way in the devilish crop, my wracking bouts of sobbing hindering my progress home.

Home. 

The word had the hue of salvation, the very shape of escape from what surely has been a nightmare this All Hallows Eve, a most harrowing one for certain, but a nightmare nonetheless. 

Surely!

I shambled into my living room straight to the drinks cabinet and gulped a large tumbler of whisky, my hand shaking all the while.

I have been asleep and woken too quick.

Surely?

Yes, that's it. Of course.

It was then, whilst reaching for my handkerchief to dab my unaccountably damp brow, that I found once more Torsten's monocle in the snug of my jacket pocket and in turn saw the hare's wet crimson viscera clinging clearly to my boot.

It is at this point I began screaming and haven't stopped screaming since, my small asylum window the only hint I still have of the hellish world outside.