It was a cruel April morning when I returned to the farm. The lurking grey sky spat into a cold breeze. The jeweled green of onion shoots huddled in their beds seemed afraid to peek any further out of the saturated mud.

Three months prior, to celebrate its eighth consecutive year of level 8++ humane care husbandry and sustainable organic operation, Hog Hollow swine farm had decided to experiment with a new set of humane treatment procedures. On my first visit, I had interviewed Darrel, the Hollow’s Chief Swineherd, and his enthusiasm was as hard to stomach as the rich, cloying scent of pig-shit.

“We’re hoping to usher in a new era of humane swine-farming, you know”, he said. “We hope to define a precedent for care level 8+++. Who knows, we might even qualify for the first ever level 9.”

For those of you who are not regular readers of my column let me recap:

Hog Hollow Swine Farm is a ways off the 120, nestled in God’s country outside the town of Driftwood, in Cameron County Pennsylvania. Unlike Hatfield, the eastern pork mecca and home to Hatfield Quality Meats, Driftwood is a small community; the moldering fallout of a once thriving lumber industry. Don’t get me wrong, its moss-shingled clapboard houses and railway bridges do hold a rustic appeal.

The Hollow itself is laid out in an attempt at the traditional Iberian style. The driveway cuts between the hay and oat fields. The main house sits to the left of the gravel drive, with the laborer’s bunkhouse and chicken coops behind. If you continue on the drive, the horse pen and stables border on the right; a path leads between them to the pasture. Further down the drive, off to the left, are the straight rows of apple and oak trees in the orchard, where the hogs are allowed to roam for pig-nuts and windfall. The drive dead-ends before the piggery; two large white aluminum barns and a massive blue feed-silo. Beyond them to the left is the pond. And beyond the pond, the abattoir.

As you may know, some think pigs capable of great intelligence. For the eight quiet and progressive years that Hog Hollow had been in operation, Darrel had been instructing the herd in simple English. The pigs caught on quickly and were soon able to recognize many verbal and written commands.

“The herd really seems to enjoy it,” Darrel told me in February. “We’ve even taught them tougher words like tremendous, radiant, and humble, just for laughs. It helps bring a feeling of community to the Hollow, you know. It’s more than just a farm. It’s a home, for us and our swine.”

“Doesn’t the property also include an abattoir?” I inquired.

“Well, ehm, yes. But we don’t slaughter en masse. It’s not a mechanical process. Each hog has its own place in the dynamic of the herd. Sometimes, we have to control the numbers so we can maintain herd stability. Sometimes we have to quell rivalries, or eliminate hogs with anti-social habits. But every slaughter we undertake is done with the utmost humanity and always for the greater wellbeing of the herd.”

By the time I returned, things had indeed changed. The chill air was hush as I rolled down the gravel drive. The bone-white barns lay cold, their open doors gaping throats of darkness.

Darrel did not greet me at the gate as he had done previously. I put this down to the weather. I parked my car in the spaces nearest the big house, and hop-scotched puddles on my approach to the front door. To my surprise, it was slightly ajar. A silence hung in shadow just over the threshold.

I searched the house for Darrel. I wouldn’t typically walk into a house uninvited, but something vacant hung in the dead air, and there was still the dream. Walking the ground-floor, I thought I heard the sounds of movement from the large kitchen at the back. Entering, I found the tap dripping irregularly into the porcelain basin. More than a few flies buzzed above a pile of unwashed dishes smeared with unhealthy color. The butcher’s block was empty of its knives.

Upstairs was no different. In the hall a landscape painting of high foreign mountains rested askew. The bed lay unmade and the hamper overflowing in Darrel’s room. In the office, a pile of unopened letters and bills dominated the desk. The phone was missing.

Late in February, I called down to Darrel to get the answers to a few questions my fact- checkers had raised. I called on a Sunday, assuming someone would be available. There had been no answer. A few days later, after several additional unanswered calls, Darrel finally called back. He sounded tired. I could not distinguish if it was the effect of the rural landline, or if Darrel’s once robust voice had withered into an airy drone.

“How are the new procedures working out?” I asked.

“Uh, well, they’re working. We installed the bells.”

Darrel had told me about this project. After having taught the hogs to read a few words, the Hollow had erected an elaborate modern bell-pull system. It employed the programmable wireless doorbells one might find at Ace or Home Depot fixed to a series of posts in the pig- yard. Above each post was a word that the pigs understood. Yes, no, food, clean, with others to follow becoming their language.

“Oh, and...?”

“And the damn hogs have the run of the place!” he hissed like a radiator. “I mean they’ve driven all the WOOFers off. When we started asking what we could do to improve their wellbeing, they insisted on no outside labor. Then they increased their demands for food. Then accelerated the mucking schedule. I shouldn’t even be telling you this. But there’s no one left here but me.”

“Are you alright?”, was all I could think to say.

“The bells almost never stop ringing,”, he continued. “They keep me on a strict schedule. I’ve had to sneak away from the orchard. They have me shaking the trees for them so they don’t have to wait for the fruit to fall. I told them it’s spring and there is no fruit, but they insist.”

A series of bells clattered to life in the background of his call.

“I have to go.” And the line went dead.

That conversation, the last I had had with Darrel, was ringing its eerie echo through my head as I left the empty bunkhouse and continued my search. I had called in to local law enforcement, but they said everything seemed fine when they had stopped by for a visit.

White chickens pecked about the yard unconcerned. A light snow began to ride the dry cold air. Tiny flakes that hit and dropt off to ride along the ground in eddying swirls.

When I opened the red stable door, the kerosene heater sat oozing its vapory warmth in the center. The mares munched away at their oats, and the grassy richness of stable muck lay like a blanket. Their water troughs were fresh and full.

I hadn’t been able to reach Darrel by phone for several weeks after the police had paid their visit. Having usually reported on the weight of the prize pumpkin at the local harvest festival, or which family’s Christmas ham recipe was the toast of the town, this type of investigation seemed doubly strange to me—Walking through another’s outbuildings in search of a man whom I had met only once.

I knew I had no choice. Between the vacant straight orchard rows, I nervously kept trying to raise the zipper of my coat past its top. I was the only one who knew there was anything wrong. The apple-flowers frozen mid-bloom shivered in the strengthening wind.

As I had seen driving in, the large doors of the piggery stood open. The building’s white aluminum sides kinking irregularly in the steady wind. The tiny flakes of snow seemed to appear spontaneously against the dark hollow interior. Burnt chunks of farm wood lay scattered around the gaping doors.

It had not been part of my plan to return to Hog Hollow so soon. The follow-up interview had been scheduled for mid-summer. I don’t usually go in for this sort of thing but I had a dream the prior night that unsettled me. I was standing at the base of a large pagoda, dwarfed by jagged mountains all around. The struts and crossbeams of the structure painted solid blue. The sun in my dream glared harsh and sliver through a veil of thin cloud. Snow and wind and a man trying to ring a large gong atop the pagoda.

Then suddenly the wind gusted up. The rope holding one side of the gong snapped and it lifted like a bronze sail. The man with the mallet in the blue kimono held fast to the second rope, hopelessly attempting to stay the loosed gong. It snapped and the gong flashed to the ground, terror and excitement; havoc. The mallet man was left bending with all his force backward, against the wind, away from the ledge, exerting every last ounce of effort, which gave the effect of all of this occurring very slowly, then he too was gone, dropping from the pagoda in an instant, falling in silent dive to a deadening thud. And the berserk gong rolled violently on. And the snow. And the wind stealing sound. And the silence.

When I awoke, I packed my things and made a thermos of coffee for the long drive back to the Hollow. And there I was in the same wind, and glaring sun, and snow. The wet mud sucked each of my steps around the corner of the noiseless piggery. I observed a deep rutted groove in the wet mud leading contumaciously toward the abattoir. Its unfinished bleached brown wood hulked the snow-dusted horizon.

The pond churned in the icy breeze. Its murk a lighter shade of the dark muddy drag I squished my way through. Inside the abattoir the wind jangled hanging chains and hooks. The cold air held a metallic scent.

I turned the corner at the back and found Darrel. He sat on an overturned crate smoking a cigarette, his apron caked stiff with blood.

“Darrel...”, I started but stopped after another step forward brought the herd into sight.

There they lay, throats agape all, some still steaming lightly, and the squash of mud, blood, and shit all around. The snow fell on the piles of the dead.

“I couldn’t keep it up. You weren’t here. You wouldn’t understand. Their demands. Their appetites.”

I stared at him in silence. He stared off into the hazy snow driven sky. He exhaled again.

“I killed ‘em all yesterday.”

He dragged his cigarette.

“Dragged ‘em all out here, one by one, and cut their throats. Every single last one of ‘em.”

“What are you going to do now?”

Arthur Seefahrt’s work has appeared in previous issues of God’s Cruel Joke, The Honest Ulsterman, floorplan journal, Bodega Magazine, Strangeways Magazine, and College Green, as well as in translation in the Leipzig based Fettliebe. His debut collection Decay Studies is available for purchase in the US and is forthcoming on Wallop! Press in the Ireland and the EU. More of his works and contact details can be found at arthurseefahrt.net.