“I thought the world would end in months,” said Lyle softly. “Maybe I was optimistic.”
He stood, turned, and walked out of the room.
56
Wednesday, December 5
2:14 A.M.
Byrne Family Farms, Ireland
9 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Somebody screamed.
Alan Byrne woke frantically, eyes wide, chest heaving. A dark wind moaned outside his windows, creeping ice-cold tendrils through the gaps along the sill. Shadows shook and trembled on his wall—a pale moon shining feebly through a wind-tossed tree. He looked at his wife, but she was lying still; he put a hand on her shoulder, not shaking but simply feeling. She was warm. He leaned close and heard the low hiss of her breath. She was fine. The scream hadn’t come from her.
The wind moaned again, and Alan looked up at the window, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. It must have been the wind, he thought, just a howling gust of wind, but then he heard it again: a high-pitched scream, short and desperate. It was a scream of pain and terror. And it was unmistakably human.
Alan pulled back the covers and sat on the edge of his bed, shivering as he pulled on a pair of thick woolen pants. They were as cold as the room, and he hoped they would warm quickly. He added a heavy flannel shirt and his thickest winter coat, and when he heard the scream again he cursed and ran, shoving his feet inside his boots and racing outside without waiting to tie them. The wind bit his cheeks and whipped his short hair. His lead farmhand, Brendan, was standing in the yard already, scowling at the darkness.
“You heard it, too,” said Alan.
“It’s a banshee,” Brendan spat. “Death is here for someone.”
Alan shook his head. “You know that’s just old stories.”
“And you know they’re true.”
Alan didn’t answer. Brendan had always been superstitious, leaving shamrocks on the door frames and leaves of ivy soaked in water. Alan didn’t have time for it, with the farm failing and the family nearly bankrupt. He peered into the night. “Did you hear where it came from?”
“North,” said Brendan, pointing, “by the barns.”
“Someone’s rustling the animals.”
“Or being trampled by them.” Brendan started walking, not north but northeast, and Alan hurried to catch up.
“Where are you going?”
“The barns.”
Alan scowled. “The barn is that way. You’re headed straight for the irrigation ditch.”
“Aye. And there’ll be water in it,” said Brendan. “Crossing running water wards off evil spirits.”
“You’re a damn fool,” said Alan, but the scream sounded again, long and wailing this time, and Alan shivered despite his heavy coat. He could hear it better now, and it was different than he’d thought it was; stranger and darker. It wasn’t the cry of someone hurt or dying, and the silence between each scream meant it wasn’t desperation. Someone was screaming, a woman, he thought, loud and terrible and for no reason he could think of. Sadness, maybe, or fear. A loss of hope, or a lament for death.
Maybe it was a banshee.
“Across the canal, then,” said Alan, turning on his flashlight, “but hurry. I don’t want Cassie to hear it.” If you didn’t hear the banshee, then it wasn’t your death that made her cry.
They crossed the yard and passed through the gate, latching it tight behind them, then trudged through the mud and snow across the field to the ditch. A pair of footprints had already come and gone this way, bouncing in and out of the beam of Alan’s flashlight.
“These are yours?” asked Alan.
“Aye,” said Brendan, “when I opened the gates for the water.”
That eased Alan’s mind, but only some. The darkness screamed again when Alan was halfway across the walk that spanned the ditch, and he gripped the rails for support. The flashlight slipped from his hand and disappeared into water with a gulp; the light diffused through the liquid like a ghost, then guttered and died.
“The second barn,” said Brendan. “By the pigs.”
“We should never have crossed the ditch,” said Alan. “It doesn’t do any good to keep the spirits from following, if we’re walking right toward one.”
“Maybe there were more,” said Brendan.
“And maybe we’ve wasted time and lost a light just to approach the barns from the back side.”
They crept forward, ears pricked up for any sound in the darkness. The pigs were squealing now, riled by something, and Alan heard the creaks and thuds as they butted against the boards of their enclosure.
“They’ll be trampling each other soon,” said Brendan.
“Then we hurry,” said Alan, and walked more quickly around the side of the barn. Someone in the barn screamed, unformed and inarticulate, and pigs squealed and stamped and bit, and Alan ran the last few steps to the door and flung it open. The pigpen roiled in the darkness, fat shadows running and tumbling and fleeing madly from everything and nothing. Alan clicked the light switch, and the bulbs above exploded with a blinding flash and ear-bursting pop. Sparks showered down, and Alan’s eyes were seared with a single frame of vision: hairy pink shapes and blood-streaked snouts and wide white eyes.
“The light!” Alan cried. “There’s someone in there, find the light!” Brendan pushed past him through the door and fumbled on the workbench for another flashlight. He found it, and swept the light across the pen: pig after pig, snouts and hooves and tails. The scream came again, mingling with the squeals and filling the barn like a wraith. Alan ran to the edge of the fence but he didn’t climb in, didn’t dare wade through that field of gnashing, trampling flesh. The battered planks shook beneath his hands. The screams came faster now, formless and terrified and horribly, painfully human amid the bawling of the pigs, and all Alan could think was It knows we’re here, and it was all he could do not to turn around and run. The narrow light darted back and forth, across the chaos, searching for the screamer, and when it passed across a human face Alan cried aloud and staggered back. It shone in his mind like the afterimage of a flash, bright white in the light beam, eyes wide with terror, mouth open and screaming, nose flat and thick and brutish. A snout.
Brendan swore and crossed himself, and brought the light back slowly, almost unwillingly, to shine again on the screaming face. It was a human, yet not a human; it was a pig, yet not completely. Wide and misshapen, sitting up on haunches a pig would never have, wires of black hair bristling up above a face both human and pig and profoundly neither. One pig ear flopped on the left, while a curled human ear pressed against the other side like a squashed pink cabbage. Its mouth held human teeth and porcine tusks; its snout dripped strings of mucus; blue eyes peered out in abject terror. It raised its foreleg, two jointed, human fingers probing helplessly beside a deformed hoof. The pigs around it swirled in a frenzy, goaded to madness by the beast’s endless, awful screaming.
