We had been knee deep in pig shit for at least three hours when I finally asked Gramps for a story. The old man had been mostly silent that day, save for his grunts of effort while refilling the trough or corralling the hogs in and out of the different pens.
I couldn’t say that I blamed him - helping Uncle Russ on his hog farm was one of the more physically intensive jobs the two of us ever undertook, and we’d just gotten into the worst part. Shoveling shit. Wasn’t much to say anyways and the longer you kept your mouth open, the more you’d start to taste it.
I was shocked Gramps could still put in such a productive day of work in his increasing age - but the truth was, at nearly 70, the old man heaped pounds of manure into the compost pile even faster than I did at 17. Gramps was a large and powerful man, Father Time be damned.
Gramps liked the work though. Good honest labor was all the man had ever known, and he was gonna help his son in law on that farm whether Russ wanted him to lift a finger or not. That’s what men did.
We’d been working ourselves to the bone since sun-up - I never passed on a chance to spend some time with Gramps, and I knew that Uncle Russ would slip me a few bucks for the day, so I’d enthusiastically hopped in the old man’s pickup that morning at 5:00 sharp.
But it had been hours and I was tired and the air stunk. I hoped it was time for a little break.
“Gramps, can we take a load off? Just for a few.”
The old man sighed. He removed his weathered and stained trucker cap - the same one he’d worn my entire life - and used his forearm to wipe the sweat from his liver spotted head.
He plunged his shovel into the stinking and wet pile of manure we were working from as he spoke. “Ah hell, I guess we could use a break.” Thank god, I remember thinking to myself as I did the same with my own shovel and followed the old man over to the large apple tree that loomed over Uncle Russ’s farm.
We couldn’t head inside with our shit stained clothes and there was no point in changing or washing up. We still had a job to finish after our break. Russ had headed into town to grab some supplies and drop off some hogs to a few buyers, but he’d left us a cooler for the day filled with water and some food.
As we took our seats on the shaded but still warm earth beneath the apple tree, Gramps reached deep into the cooler. From it, he withdrew two bottles of water and two ice cold beers. He winked as he tossed me one of each.
I laughed, and we cracked our beer bottles open then clinked them together before taking a nice deep swig. That ice cold swill just hits the body different on a day like that. Really feels like you earned it. The days stayed pretty warm in Vernon, even in the fall. Especially after some hours of hard work. And these sun soaked days with Gramps were the best of times for me. Whether we were sitting on his porch doing a whole lot of nothing, or up to our elbows in stinking shit. I just loved spending time with the old man.
Of course, the real treat any time Gramps and I got together was the stories.
“Hey Gramps, long as we’re sitting here… got a story?” I grinned as I asked the question, couldn’t help myself.
I’ve mentioned before that Gramps always had a story. My grandfather was renowned throughout the town for his ability to weave a colorful and compelling tale.
Thing was though, no matter how outlandish or silly or sometimes scary they got, Gramps’ stories were always true. Comedy, tragedy. Didn’t matter. That was what made them so damn interesting. Whatever the subject matter, this was a recitation of a true event. I trusted the words that came out of that man’s mouth more than I trusted that the sky is blue and that a human being needs to breathe oxygen to survive.
He laughed - it was a mirthful sound, tinged with juuust a hint of annoyance. It was the way he always laughed when I asked the question. We both knew that he loved spinning his yarns as much as I loved listening to them.
Gramps took another swig of his beer, beads of cold sweat running down the sides of the glass bottle. As usual, he was in no hurry to answer. He set the beer down and cracked his aging knuckles, they popped so loud you’d swear the dusty old bones were snapping in two.
“Ah I s’pose it’s the perfect time for it, better’n sittin’ here with our dicks in our hands.” He leaned towards me, thrusting a knobby finger in my direction. “Just one now fuckface,” Gramps warned me sternly. “We’re not gonna piss our whole day away sharin’ stories under the apple tree. Got a job to do.”
I smiled. I always smiled when Gramps used my insulting but still endearing nickname. The kind of nickname you get living in a family of lively hillbillies who all like to drink and horse around a little too much.
Gramps had agreed to a story, just as I’d known he would. Gramps always had a story. He let the moment hang now. Cradled his beer loosely in his hand. He stared off ahead, into the shimmering summer afternoon.
Gramps’ eyes were locked on the hogs. As they rolled in their dirt and sloppily ate from the trough, milled around in their pigpen. Squealin’ and snortin’ the whole time. I always liked the pigs. Didn’t do much like shoveling mountains of poop but the pigs were alright. They were disgusting sure, but they were intelligent creatures. Cute too.
I didn’t much like the thought of Uncle Russ loading some of those pigs up and selling them to the butcher and market. Packing them into the truck and driving them to their doom. It was the way it always was and the way it always would be, I understood that. Just didn’t much comprehend how you could spend your whole life caring for things just to serve them up to a death sentence.
Gramps cleared his throat, disrupting my train of thought. A serious look crossed his face. He kept his eyes locked intently on the frolicking animals. I could already tell by Gramps expression and demeanor that this story wasn’t going to be a comedy.
“Well,” he finally said. “How ‘bout a pig story?”
I leaned toward Gramps, eyes wide with anticipation.
“You ever hear your uncle talk about a bad sow, fuckface?” I nodded. There were many days on Uncle Russ’ farm that I’d heard whispered talks between adults, talks they thought I couldn’t hear. About things like rifles and needing to take a pig behind the shed.
“Well, all that badness started way back when… had to be about forty years ago now by my estimation. When that damned thing showed up the very first time.”
Delmer Wurlick wasn’t a very nice boy. That’s what the adults in town always said about him. To be honest, that was putting it mildly. He was the kind of nasty little punk who left a bag of flaming dog shit on someone’s front porch and laughed as they stomped it out. The type to key cars just for a laugh, prank call old ladies with sex talk and heavy breathing at 2:00 in the morning after stealing their numbers from the church register.
Those were the things that made Delmer not a very nice boy. But the adults in town, they didn’t all know the extent of Delmer’s misdeeds. He wasn’t just a vandal and a punk. He was a killer. He’d started young - squishing bugs a little too enthusiastically and sticking firecrackers in the mouths of frogs he yanked out of the creek. Eyes lighting up as they exploded into wet and slimy chunks of sizzling gore.
At around age fifteen or so, Delmer upgraded to larger animals. Wrapping stray cats in barbed wire, mixing crushed up glass into hunks of raw meat and feeding it to neighborhood dogs.
There was one summer where livestock at various farms all over town fell prey to a mad shooter - a lone gunman in the dark of night firing one right between the eyes of any cow or sheep or goat he could get his hands on.
All the kids in town knew that that was Delmer Wurlick. He’d bragged about taking the rifle once his old man passed out from the gin, and blowing those defenseless critters’ brains out so fast that them and their farmers didn’t know what hit ‘em.
Delmer talked about how they twitched and sputtered even after the life left them. How red chunky ooze bubbled from their pulped and jellified skulls.
Of course Delmer saw no trouble with the law. There was no hard evidence, just a kid talking. And it helps when your alcoholic mess of a dad was once the town sheriff himself, before the jack and the gin and a few too many glassy eyed and slurred speeches at morning roll call did him in. Friends in high places.
So ol’ Delmer pretty much did what he wanted when he wanted. He had a taste for blood and the imagination to indulge.
Hate to say it, but a lot of the kids hung around him anyway. He had this charisma about him, a strange aura that drew you in. There was somethin’ behind his eyes. You didn’t wanna know what it was but you just couldn’t look away.
Didn’t hurt that he’d take groups of kids for a ride in daddy’s caddy. Cruising the streets of Vernon on the nights he wasn’t busy torturing livestock, getting the other kids involved in his car keying and window soaping and all the debauchery.
Things took a turn in the Autumn of ‘53. Bill Wurlick’s good friend Enis was picked up in St. Claire, cruising the streets for a boy to spend the night with. Enis owned a farm just on the outskirts of Vernon, one he’d inherited from his daddy some years back. A middling and not at all spectacular little patch of dirt. Didn’t grow much there. Enis was no green thumb. He had some livestock - a few cows, half empty chicken coop.
Mostly pigs. Wandering, zombified sows and boars that seemed especially apathetic and lethargic. Brought down by the malaise of the place.
With Enis’ looming legal trouble, he turned to his good friend Bill Wurlick to tend to his farm in the meantime. The only man he thought he could trust. Bill Wurlick, gin drunk and not one to rise from his spot on the mangy living room sofa - ‘cept to buy more gin - turned to his son.
So that’s how Delmer Wurlick became the caretaker
For someone like him, this was an all you can eat buffet. Unlimited access to a cadre of defenseless and sickly animals , on secluded farmland where no one would ask any questions.
He’d wake up at dawn each morning and make the 15 minute drive to the farm in Bill’s caddy, snagging a few of his old man’s beers from the fridge on his way out the door.
Once arriving at Enis’ farm, Delmer would get to drinking and begin his “duties.” He planted seeds - half heartedly, tossing them asunder without really looking. Not taking the time to make sure they were distributed properly on the pathetic and wanting earth. Delmer never could get the old and rusting riding mower that sat still in front of Enis’ run down barn to run properly, and so keeping the grass trimmed was permanently checked off of his list of chores rather quickly.
The animals. Delmer was to feed them, provide water. See that their needs were taken care of. The first day or two, Delmer mostly kept his sadism at bay. Hurled handfuls of dry feed at the chicken’s faces. Splashed water at the cows as he filled their drinking trough, yanking on their tails as he left their corral.
There seemed to be some kind of honest attempt by the boy to truly honor his father’s wishes and help out the man’s good friend.
He got bored fast though. Delmer had some kind of insatiable bloodlust. There was something deep within him that needed to see that pain and that hurt.
Maybe it was that pain and hurt were all Delmer Wurlick’d ever known.
When your mother runs off with a band of coke-addled gypsies before you even turn 3 years old. When your cousin takes you into the bathroom only a year or two later at your grandmother’s funeral. When your father is so down in the drink that he cries tears of pure whiskey during those miserable late nights that he leans on your shoulder and asks you for all the answers
What does somebody like that have to offer the world but pain?
On the third day, he crushed one of the chickens to death with a rock. Then took that same rock inside the coop and lifted it up as he could before letting it fall directly onto a waiting cluster of diminutive baby chicks. Delmer licked his lips as the feathers and chunky gore oozed from beneath the stone.
He withdrew a knife from the kitchen and wandered into the cow pen, casually puffing away on one of Enis’ cigarettes. A small and sickly looking brown calf huddled next to its black and white spotted mother. Delmer slowly ran the blade along its skin as the calf mewled plaintively. Then he turned the knife and started cutting.
He’d hacked the thing to pieces in no time at all, a dark red puddle pooling on the hay beneath them. The mother cow stared at him, expressionless, the entire time.
Delmer wasn’t too concerned about getting rid of the mutilated cow parts. He knew that pigs ate pretty much anything. Taking a sledge hammer from the tool shed, Delmer set about mashing the bits of cow into a more digestible paste. Once he was finished, he scooped the jellified mounds of gristle up with a snow shovel. Deposited heaping helpings into the hogs’ feed trough.
The pigs chowed, snorting and huffing as they hungrily gulped down the chunks of flattened meat. Delmer chuckled as he noticed one exhausted looking sow, pink belly swollen to bursting with a litter of piglets, waddle over to the trough with great effort and try to eat her fill
The threshold was crossed. Delmer’s sickening pastime escalated quickly.
Over the ensuing days, he stabbed and shot and tormented. He’d dunk the chickens in turpentine and take a lighter to their feathers. Drop them into an empty barrel and piss on them to put it out. Twisted a cork screw into the eye of one of the cows, so deep that he couldn’t get a grip to retrieve it. He sliced its neck while it tried to buck him away with its weakened legs.
Delmer’d even invited a few of the local kids over to partake in the booze and the cigs and sometimes yes, even the hurting. Most of them didn’t like it much. Most of them were downright disturbed by it. But the allure of an older boy with ready access to a car and beer and all the tantalizing freedoms of adulthood was hard to pass up. If that freedom meant that the boys and girls had to bash a chicken to death with a fire poker, or slice a pigs snout from its face while it squealed and cried for mercy, many weathered the storm.
The corruption was the part Delmer liked.
Things changed when the sow gave birth. Delmer had watched the fattened pink creature keel over that brisk October day, flatten itself on its side and start breathing frantically. He certainly was excited to see those little piglets.
He hopped on the kitchen phone and called a few of the boys and girls over, telling them he had the beer and the cigs and something they wanted to see.
A small flock of kids had arrived by the time the sow pushed out her first piglet. The soft, squinting thing was covered in a fine layer of fuzz. Its pointed ears pressed backward, a calm expression across its face.
Delmer immediately raised his leg and smashed the piglet in one stomp. He cackled as it exploded into a chunky red mist. The crowd of children looked on, aghast at this display. Cruel and twisted and sick even for Delmer Wurlick.
A boy toward the back vomited, tears streamed down one girl’s face. It suddenly wasn’t so easy to look the other way, or to participate in these atrocities. The adult freedoms, doing what you wanted when you wanted. It was a kind of cage.
The sow seemed to lock its solid black eye on Delmer, and began loudly shrieking as it continued pushing out its litter of newborns. Its body writhed and shook with pain or anxiety or maybe some awareness of what was happening to its kin.
Suddenly, Delmer withdrew a buck knife from his back pocket. He lunged forward and sliced the sow open from neck to ass. The entire contents of its stomach spilled out in a steaming, stinking mess. Purple guts and thick rivers of blood. The rest of the piglets.
Covered in their mother’s gore and introduced to the world via this hellish act.
Delmer’s smile widened as he loomed over the pile of writhing and helpless newborns. His eyes widened as they met one particular pig in the mound of viscera.
Plunging his hands into the mess, Delmer spun around as he withdrew the object of his attention.
Facing the group of neighborhood children, cradled in Delmer’s outstretched hands, was a shaking and blood covered newborn piglet.
It didn’t look like any pig they’d ever seen.
The thing’s eyes bulged out of its head, its snout was basically nonexistent - a receding patch of flesh with two curved holes to breathe. Its mouth hung open wide, wider than a pig’s mouth should. It didn’t look like a pig’s mouth. No, with its broad width and rows of square teeth, it sure as hell looked like a man’s.
On the thing’s head were two pointed, fleshy bulbs. A sobbing boy yelled that they looked like horns.
As the mutated piglet gulped air and clacked its hideous teeth together, the crowd of children went into a frenzy. Many of them sprinted away in fear.
Delmer spun the twisted thing around and stared in its bulbous and swollen eyes. He thought of all the things he’d do to this pitiful creature that should not have been born.
Something happened though, in that moment. Something that even Delmer’s depraved mind couldn’t comprehend.
It spoke.
“You’re going to Hell Delmer. Your soul is going to be raped, your brain replaced with nothing but writhing maggots. You’ll be impaled on the endless and barbed horns of the great one. Forever. Split right down the middle, split in two. An eternity of agony.”
The tiny creature clacked its teeth together maniacally, cackling as it continued, in its garbled and inhuman voice. Delmer was frozen in silence.
“It’s already begun. For eons you’ve been tortured, chewed up and spit out. Forced to relive the evil deeds that placed you here. Your soul is black. Unclean. The kind we love. In that empty world of twisted hills and encroaching dark, you’ll wander and wander. Searching for hope and relief. All you’ll find is torment. We have your mother. Your cousin too.”
The thing’s voice took on an excited lilt as it spoke those last words. A blackened tongue emerged from between its lips, running back and forth across yellowed teeth. Delmer didn’t like to think about his mother or that cousin. He felt his bladder start to lose control.
“They’re suffering too Delmer, that’s all we ever do really. We suffer and we hurt. It’s because of them that the hollow world lives between your ears. We are going to tear your flesh off strip by strip and watch you eat it. You’re a vile creature, just like me. ”
Delmer screamed. He flung the thing to the ground with all his might, and it landed with a wet thud. That didn’t stop it.
It lifted its head and stared at Delmer, that hideous visage glaring up at him from the pile of smashed gore that was once its body.
“You can’t save yourself Delmer. You’re a damned sinner , and sinners reap what they sow!”
The scant few kids who hadn’t had the mental capacity to run watched in abject horror as the bug eyed demon suddenly began rising from the earth. All the mutilated animal parts - the mother pigs guts and the blood slicked bodies of the awful pig creature’s brethren - they coalesced into a terrible form. A mass of viscera in the vague shape of a humanoid.
Delmer screamed as the thing lurched forward, stretching out a long and appendage-like strip of dripping entrails. The wet spot on his jeans grew. In one swift movement, the thing spread itself apart and engulfed Delmer. He was covered head to toe in that horrible mess. Stuck inside of it.
The children could see him, writhing and pushing from inside the thing. Trying futilely to escape.
The pig creature clacked its teeth even more frantically. It suddenly let out a deep and guttural wail, loud enough to split the sky. The movement from within ceased.
It stared at the kids with those bulging, leaking eyes. Wide smile growing so large that it eclipsed its diminutive face, tearing the skin as it opened its mouth again to speak.
“I will come for each and every one of you, come in the night when your parents can’t protect you. I’ll make you feel every ounce of agony that the suffering souls of the endless void have endured for eons. This pain and bloodshed is absolute, and the screaming of tortured children will ring out and echo up to the ebony sky of the hollow world. Delmer doesn’t live here anymore.”
Then, it exploded. Chunks of wet meat flew in every direction, splattering the chicken coop and the barn and the children’s faces.
Mass panic ensured. The children finally dispersed and ran from the farmhouse for the comparative safety of anywhere else on earth. Through their tears and their horror, they screamed a single word.
Devil.
Gramps took a long swig from his beer as I stared at him in disbelief. It was another horror story, a terrible tale of horror and evil. Animal torturers and real life devils.
I had to ask.
“Well… then what happened? What happened with the farm? And to all those kids?”
Gramps signed. “Well, I was already grown and on my own back when this mess first happened. Only really heard about it third hand at the time. Those kids that were there with Delmer Wurlick that day had a real fear in ‘em. Little shits. Got home and told their mommies and daddies everything. Ah, the sheriff cleaned up the mess at Enis’ farm. Burnt the place down not long after. Just didn’t seem like the energy was any good there. All that death and bloodshed.”
I swallowed nervously, saying nothing and allowing Gramps to continue.
“No one much missed Delmer, not even ol’ Bill. Boy’s own father. So I can’t tell you there was a concerted effort to really solve the mystery of whatever bad forces grabbed the little prick that day.”
I could already sense that there was more to this bizarre tale. An epilogue, a postscript.
“But ya see fuckface,” Gramps’ voice sounded tired now. “Ever since that day, every year around October, we see one a’them things.”
My expression must’ve been quizzical, because Gramps clarified
“A bad sow.”
My eyes widened.
“Yep, every autumn a female pig’ll push out a litter, and at least one’a those little bastards’ll have bulgin’ eyes and fleshy horns and rows and rows of square yellow teeth.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But I mean… what do people do with them?” I asked.
Gramps stared at me like he thought I must’ve been stone stupid to ask that question. “Well, we pull ‘em away from the littler and take ‘em behind the barn and we…” Gramps trailed off, his gaze leaving me to settle on the hogs once again. “We do what we need to do.”
“I think Delmer Wurlick brought the devil to Vernon that day, fuckface. Only, the devil never really left.”
Gramps suddenly stood, stretching his legs and groaning as he straightened his back.
I was still comprehending the insanity of what I’d just heard, and stared up at him from my seated position.
“Folk around here though, we always try our best to keep those things in check. Mind our own and deal with the problems as they come. Delmer Wurlick was just a kid but, I reckon he deserved what he got. If you go lookin’ for hell, eventually the devil’s gonna find you.”
Gramps was still gazing out at the pigs when he realized I was still cemented to the ground. “Well god damn fuckface, hop to it. Story time’s over, got a job to finish.”
I leapt to my feet, nodding. I ran my hand over the back of my neck as we made our way back to the pig pen, back to the shit.
Gramps chuckled under his breath. “A’course,” he said with a devilish wink, “who’s to say folk always find the bad sow in time?”
My heart stopped, skin went pale.
Gramps laughed louder now as he withdrew our shovels from the manure pile and thrust mine into my hand.
I didn’t pay much attention to Gramps or the farm or the stench of shit the rest of that work day though. My mind was elsewhere as we shoveled that stinking slop.
I couldn’t possibly focus on anything but the lone pregnant sow wandering about Uncle Russ’ pens. Pink belly full and protruding.
Sure to soon give birth to a happy and healthy litter of beautiful little piglets.
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