The pigs have trampled their pen to a floor of churned, sun-baked mud, except in the corners, where there are tufts of weeds and pale grass. As he approaches the nearest corner, he sees what looks like a fat pink lump of sausage, tangled in the grass. He slows. He smells something bad, like offal, like a warm split intestine in the sunshine. He shades his eyes with his hand.

The missing piglet is tangled in roots and weeds. There are tough wiry roots wrapped around and around its throat. Each little leg is bound up in more loops of weed. Roots twist around to fill its open mouth and cram deep into its throat.

As Jack stares, the roots seem to tighten. A fresh tendril squirms like a grass snake and pushes itself into the piglet’s half-open right eye with a faintly audible splort!

Jack doesn’t know he’s dropped the pork rinds until he finds himself on the other side of the pen, gasping for air, bent over and clutching his knees.

The piglets creep carefully toward the dropped bag, nervously monitoring that mass of squirming roots in the corner of the pen. The bravest of them grabs the bag by one flap and runs away with it, squealing triumphantly, while the others give chase.

14.

Jack McCourt has never felt less like going to sleep. He has a digital clock beside the bed, but he hardly looks at it. Instead he watches a rectangle of silver moonlight rise on the wall. It climbs higher and higher, moving from right to left across the room, raking the ceiling. Then it falls toward his bureau, dropping ever lower, until it vanishes. When he does peek at the time, it is almost 3:00 A.M.

His mother believed in astral spirits, and maybe there’s something to it. He is so quiet, slipping down the back stairs, he might be a ghost of himself. He lets himself into the greenhouse—the air is so steamy and warm it’s like stepping into a bathroom after someone has had a long, hot shower—and finds a trowel. Jack takes it with him to the graveyard.

He will tear up the mums, he thinks, when he gets to his mother’s plot, and he will see they are only plants. Something has come loose in his mind, like a nut slipping on a pipe, and bad-dream ideas are leaking out. He can’t be surprised. It runs in the family. Not for nothing did his mother want the clozapine.

Only when he arrives at her pink marble gravestone, he understands he isn’t going to find ordinary plants with hairy, dirty roots.

The head of the slaughtered piglet is here, balanced carefully on the top of her marker. Its eyes are gone, and the sockets have been filled with white and yellow daisies. It smiles idiotically.