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Jack Weaver had started bade towards the barn, when he heard a terrified scream from the'direction of the pigpen. The voice was so strained, so filled with horror that he could not even recognise it as his wife's, though he knew it must be hers. A tall picket fence separated him from the pen, and he was forced to run back through the barn again. He stumbled in the relative darkness of the structure, tripping on a length of hose, and fell against the packed-earth floor. He picked himself quickly up, and ran, leaving the pitchfork behind. The scream had not been repeated, and he called out his wife's name.' Merle! Merle! Merle!'

As soon as Jack had disappeared into the barn after something to help her locate the amulet, the sow Louise had knocked against Merle, and the farm woman tumbled into the mud. She fell forward and sprawled helpless there a moment, upset by the combined misfortune. Her feet slid in the mud, and it was difficult, in her distress of mind, to raise herself out of the mire. She had made a half turn on her hands and knees, intending to take hold of the rails and lift herself out by that expedient; she had even reached out to grasp one, when suddenly Louise scurried forward, right up to Merle, and bared her teeth menacingly in Merle's face.

Merle was alarmed. She had never seen her own pigs attack before, though she had heard stories, and she wanted to know no more about it than she did. She supposed she had fallen on to one of Louise's piglets, or that Louise was just angry at the intrusion, but in any case, Merle made a great effort to scramble away. Other pigs gathered round her, curiously, and began to nudge her. Louise advanced sfowly on the crawling woman. Merle backed away from Louise, looking like a crab in a flowered dress, until she came up against another great hog, the largest in the pen, who impeded her path. The bristles in its coat scratched the flesh from her arms. It was at this point that Merle screamed in terror.

Merle tried to raise herself against the back of this great animal, but she kept slipping in the mud. All the pigs in the pen began to scream together, and the sound made Merle very, very cold. 'Jack! Jack! You come here!' she cried, wanting to shout, but her voice was only a whisper.

Merle was opening her mouth, prepared to scream again, scream in terror, when Louise suddenly lunged forward, and in one swift motion tore out the poor woman's throat.

Jack emerged from the barn only in time to see his wife's body falling back, stiffened with horror, into the mud.

'Merle! Merle!' he screamed and ran back through the barn, and out to the truck. He pulled open the cab door, and took down the rifle that was set on a rack in the back window. He scrambled for shells in the glove compartment, and then loaded the piece as he ran back through the barn.

When he had reached the pen again, he was weeping, moaning his wife's name. He shuddered to see her body again, floating on top of the mud, with a number of piglets burrowing in the earth at her side, as if she were a nursing sow, and all squealing that they could find no teats to suck.

Louise had blood all around her snout, and was tearing viciously at Merle Weaver's feet. It was a horrible, vindictive action that was wholly out of keeping with what Jack Weaver - if he had the presence of mind to think about such things - knew about the habits of pigs, and especially of Louise, who had been something of a pet to his dead wife. Jack Weaver stared at the bloody tendons of his wife's foot as it was scraped between Louise's jaws. The sow began to drag the resisting corpse through the mud.

Jack took aim and shot the sow through the spine; the animal collapsed suddenly. Wailing piteously, Jack Weaver climbed into the corncrib, and began to hurl ears of com at all the pigs, hitting them as hard as he could with the cobs. The pigs squealed, and ran about, and trampled the body of the dead woman beneath their hooves.

When the house was quiet and dark, and Sarah Howell lay turning sleepiessly, on the couch in the living room, she thought about Jo and Dean and the amulet. She would contrive all manner of stories that explained where Jo had got hold of such a tiling, would think of ways in which it would cause somebody to die, would imagine herself snatching it out of someone's grasp to grind it beneath the heel of her shoe. In those long, hot minutes Jo and Dean became powerfully evil in her imagination, and in the blackness she could not tell when her directed thoughts left off and when her nightmares began.

In the morning, when she first awoke, things seemed better. There was light in the room, for when she went to bed, Sarah pulled the drapes and opened the windows for air. She dismissed all her thoughts about the amulet, about murder and revenge and intended evil, as she would disregard any discomforting dream. For a while she would be overcome with pity for Dean, lying in the next room, in exactly the position in which she had last viewed him six hours before. Jo woke, and from her bed began telling Sarah to do this and bring her that but the woman was simply lazy and cantankerous, and Sarah was relieved to imagine that she was no more than that. And the amulet was a hunk of cheap jeweller)' brought to the house through the mail, from Sears or Montgomery Ward. And Dorothy Sims had had one just like the one that got burned up in the Coppage house.

Sarah rose at five-thirty and left for work at a quarter of eight and in that two hours, she got enough of her husband and her mother-in-law to last the whole day. She had to prepare breakfast for them, after she had attended to Dean's sanitary needs in the bedroom - or what was worse - had to clean up after him. Some days Sarah put a load of laundry in the washing machine first thing, so that she could hang it out before she went off to the plant, and on other days Jo liked to see her take a broom and dustcloth to the rooms, 'just so she could earn her keep'.

And invariably, just before Sarah was about to go out the door, with Becca honking the horn in the driveway, Jo would think of one more thing that absolutely had to be accomplished before Sarah went off. This was usually to move Dean somewhere else; to guide him to the sofa, help him struggle into the backyard, to set him down on the living room floor in front of the television set that he could not see. Dean's legs shuffled along - almost comically - and Sarah wondered that if he could do this much, if he actually remembered how to walk, even in this limited, depressing fashion, why could he not respond to anything else? Why did he never move again once he had been put into his bed? Why didn't he even try to talk; why wouldn't he chew his food?

It was horrible for Dean; Sarah knew that. If he could think at all, then he must be thinking about nothing but the difference between what he had been and what he was now. But there was such great disparity between what the doctors said his progress should be and what she had to put up with every day; even such disparity between his complete motionlessness and insensitivity for just hours on end, and this staggering gait which got him from the bed to wherever his mother wanted him - that Sarah occasionally entertained the thought that Dean was deceiving her, that he was better than he let on, that he was only pretending that he had no speech, no mind, no control over his limbs and digestive tract. But these thoughts only came to her late at night, when she did not have before her the utterly debilitating spectacle of the man himself, head and neck swathed in reeking bandages. That sight demanded that she do for him what was asked of her by Jo, by the doctors, by her own conscience.

Every morning Sarah would leave the house distrustful of Jo and Dean. One day after another, she would find an excuse to run back inside, in hope and dread that she would catch Dean and Jo in some unexpected commerce. But no matter how quietly Sarah would reenter whatever room she had left them in - and sometimes she simply stood outside the closed doorway and listened intently - there was no sound, and Dean was in the same position, atom for atom, in which Sarah had left him.

Jo always laughed at Sarah for these contrived entrances, as if she knew what was behind them, as if she were gloating: Dean and I'll never be caught at it, never be caught!

These little traps, that invariably failed and that Sarah still couldn't refrain from executing each morning, left her unhappy and frustrated. If she could only see some little change in Dean, something that indicated that he wasn't as bad off as he seemed, she wouldn't even mind that he was trying to trick her.

The drive away from the house was welcome, even though it meant that there were eight long hours ahead of her at the assembly line. Sarah smiled and joked with Becca, and did not speak at all of her husband and mother-in-law except to reply with a brief 'all right'to Becca's unvarying interrogatory: 'How you this morning? How's Dean and his mama?'

Becca Blair and Sarah Howell arrived at work just a few minutes earlier than usual. The two friends arranged themselves leisurely in their little cubicles, procured cups of coffee, and then talked idly to one another over their partition, nodding greetings to the other women who passed by them every minute or so. The belt was still, and the Pine Cone rifles lay in every stage of assembly, like a,textbook diagram of the fashion in which such a piece of goods is constructed.

'You know', said Becca, 'I think that this is the sweetest five minutes of the day.'

Sarah nodded her agreement to this proposition.

'But then it goes on until five', sighed Becca.

'We get dinnertime', said Sarah.

'Dinnertime's not hardly enough time to get home and back though', said Becca. 'You practically got to stay around here.' Becca paused in these reflections on the workday, and said suddenly, as if she had just remembered something, 'You know the Weavers, Sarah?'

Sarah shook her head.

'You know who I mean though', said Beeca. 'They was the ones that run down that woman in the highway, and then brung poor little Mary Shirley back into town. Two corpses in the back of the truck, and a orphan in the front. And driving that way at night! Can't be no fun driving corpses around the back roads at night! But that was the Weavers - so you
do
know who I mean

Sarah was suddenly very interested in Becca's story. 'What about them?' she demanded. They aren't dead, are they?'

'She
is', replied Becca, wonderingly. 'How'd you know, Sarah?'

Sarah did not reply; she avoided Becca's glance. Her lips were set in anger and alarm, and involuntarily she thought of Jo and Dean, as she had left them at the house that morning: Jo spread across one of the living room chairs watching the
Today Show
, and describing to Dean what everyone was wearing, and her husband lying on a quilt spread lengthwise on the floor at the foot of the couch. He looked like a mummy that had been tipped out of its sarcophagus on to the floor of the tomb.

But much worse than this involuntary vision, which she had hoped to avoid through the course of the day, was the knowledge that her nightmares had not gone away with the morning light. Becca had very often told her never to tell a dream before breakfast, because it was sure to come true; Sarah always took that precaution, just to be on the safe side, but it hadn't done her a bit of good.

'How'd she die?' asked Sarah after a moment.

With a little hesitancy, Becca said, 'Rooted to death by her own pigs.' Sarah grimaced; that was worse than she could have guessed. Becca continued, 'While her husband was
watching,
and they say he's just not the same. She fell in the trough, and they just tore her throat out, right by the roots!' Sarah's glance still wandered over the large room, focusing idly on this woman and that, but her mind raced. Becca waited for her friend to say something, but when she did not, Becca went on. 'Terrible way to go, and I bet you wouldn't be the same now, if you had seen it, like Jack Weaver did.'

'Becca?' said Sarah.

'What?' Becca still wanted to know how her friend had found out that Merle Weaver was dead.

'Becca', said Sarah cautiously, 'what you think's causing all these people dying?'

'What do you mean?' Becca asked.

A whistle sounded, and the two women broke off their conversation; in a moment, they knew, it would be impossible to continue it.

'Get ready, Sarah', said Becca, 'here we go.'

Sarah was thinking hard. 'Becca', she said, 'did you know these people with the pigs?'

'Daddy knew 'em', replied Becca.

'Let's you and me go out there', said Sarah.

Becca was surprised. 'What for?' she asked.

'I want to see the place', said Sarah softly. The assembly line began to vibrate, and Sarah picked up her screwdriver. Becca stared a moment longer at her friend, over the partition. She started to say something else, but the noise of the machinery grinding up to begin the day covered her speech and her thoughts on the subject.

At five o'clock, when they left the factory building and got into the purple Pontiac, Sarah again asked Becca Blair to drive her out to the Weaver farm.

'You crazy', said Becca shortly. 'You crazy to want to go out to that place.'

'Maybe', said Sarah, quietly. 'But will you take me out there?'

'No', said Becca adamantly. 'I'm not gone do it. Iknow what you 're thinking about, and I think it's crazy for you to think that way, and I'm not gone be no part of it.'

'Well', said Sarah seriously, 'would you let Margaret take me out there?'

'I wouidn't let Margaret have this car to do a damn-fool thing like that for you, Sarah Howell!' But Becca wasn't refusing her friend so much as pleading with her to give up these nonsensical ideas. Becca was a superstitious woman, but the things that Sarah was hinting at were ideas too unpleasant and too dangerous to entertain.