The NoSleep Podcast - S19: NoSleep Podcast - Sleepless Decompositions Vol. 15

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

We're sleeplessly decomposing during hot August nights. Enjoy Sleepless Decompositions Vol. 15“The Radio Game” written by J H Sullivan (Story starts around 00:02:35)Produced & scored by: David CummingsCast: Narrator – Kyle Akers, Jack – Elie Hirschman, Tom – Matthew Bradford, Elliot – Jeff Clement, Auntie – Erin Lillis“Pigfoot” written by Daniel Barnett (Story starts around 00:19:00)Produced by: Jesse CornettCast: Narrator – Mike DelGaudio, Jerry – Dan Zappulla, Lloyd – Jeff Clement, Sasha – Sarah Thomas, Lucas – Graham Rowat, Pigfoot – Jesse Cornett, Grandma Erin LillisThis episode is sponsored by:Betterhelp – This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/nosleep and get on your way to being your best self.Click here to learn more about The NoSleep Podcast teamExecutive Producer & Host: David CummingsMusical score composed by: Brandon Boone“Sleepless Decompositions” illustration courtesy of Kelly TurnbullAudio program ©2023 – Creative Reason Media Inc. – All Rights Reserved – No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors.

Sleepless listeners, and welcome to Sleepless Decompositions, Volume 15. I'm your host, David Cummings. As I mentioned last week, we're gearing up for some exciting changes when we launch season 20. So while we continue to work behind the scenes to get everything in place, looking sharp, smelling delicious, and feeling, oh, so sleepless, we have a special upcoming treat for you. During the month of September, we're going to be presenting a four-part series from author Manon Lyset. It's a series we're calling Tales of the Mooncrawler.

In it, you'll learn of a very unique cryptid you've likely never heard of before, and the series will explain how this creature has been horrifying humankind from its earliest days. The first three episodes of the series will feature a tale to go along with the moon crawler installment, and the fourth episode will be the moon crawler finale. We think it's the perfect series for the start of the school year, a terrifying tale to study and learn about. So make sure you tune in during September as we present the Mooncrawler series. And when the weekend of October 1st strikes,

the month of Halloween itself, you can brace yourself fully for the launch of season 20. Now, for this volume of sleepless decompositions, we celebrate friendship. Having friends, especially when you're a kid, means you have people to share fun and adventures and sleepovers with. But since this is the No Sleep Podcast, friendship can also mean going through experiences which can leave you shaken for years to come. So come on, dear friends, join us and brace yourself for the sleepless decomposings. In our first tale, we meet some young kids who are friends via family. Siblings and cousins, all of whom get to enjoy fun and sleepovers together at their grandparents' home. But as we learn in this tale, shared with us by author J. H. Sullivan, the boys decide to play a late-night game during a sleepover,

which involves trying to tune in strange signals on the radio. Only they learn there's more than music on the airwave. Performing this tale are Kyle Acres, Ellie Hirschman, Matthew Bradford, Jeff Clement, and Aaron Lillis. So perhaps it's best just to sleep after the lights go out? Anything's better than playing the radio game. When I was younger, my brother Tom, cousin Jack, and I invented what we called the radio game. We only had the opportunity to play the game whenever we would all be staying over a. our grandparents' house. This happened a couple times a year, whenever our respective parents would

go away together for the weekend. Our grandparents had a fairly old-fashioned house for the 90s, and as portable technology wasn't as common in those days, our grandparents would let us all have a sleepover in their dining room to make the experience less boring for three eight-to-ten-year-olds. The dining room also happened to be where they kept their old 1970s wireless. We'd make forts during the day, playing with the limited toys and one Game Boy color, we'd be able to fit into our sleepover bags. After dinner, we'd demolish the forts and turn them back into our beds. Grandma and Grandpa went to bed at around 10 p.m., which is also when they expected us to have our lights out and be ready to fall asleep. The lights would be out, but obviously no sleeping would occur. Murder in the dark,

hide-and-seek, very compact flashlight tag. That last one got us in trouble on more than one occasion. We'd be so exhausted the next day that we'd be sleeping in the car the whole way home, probably much to our parents' glee. On Saturday, we were still up at 1 a.m., having worked ourselves up with sugar and a VHS of A Nightmare on Elm Street that Jack had snuck out of our aunt and uncle's house. This is when Tom told us about the radio game. He'd heard about it from his friend George in school.

So you just flick through old stations? That sounds kind of dumb. We both stared at Jack at this remark. What do you mean old stations? What? That radio was really old. Like 20 years or something? Who wants to listen to a bunch of stuff from the 70s? Tom and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

You don't know. Don't hear 70s radio from a 70s radio man. It works from like today's radio signals, dumbass. Jack began hitting us with pillows in a fairly good-natured anger, which started a full-on pillow war and ended with me clattering into a dining chair and a stern word from grandma about how grandpa is old and needs his sleep. Once we'd settled back down in the dark, attempting to quell our fits of laughter, Tom began talking about the radio game more earnestly.

No, seriously, though. George told me his dad has a friend that's a paranormal investigator. He said that radio signals can pick up ghost frequencies. Bullshit. That's what I said, but I heard it. What? Yeah, me and Elliot tried it at George's. We were just scrolling through stations to see if we could find anything weird. Nothing happened at first. Just a lot of crackling and it was kind of boring loads of classical music. We were going to give up, but then, well... Tom faltered. Looking uncomfortable for a moment.

I nudged him. What? Why are he stopping? Tom looked back up at me. Okay, just don't laugh at me, okay? I looked into Tom's eyes. When he'd first started talking about the radio game, he'd seemed excited. Now, however, he looked almost as if he wished he hadn't brought it up in his sugar-crazed state.

He looked terrified. I motioned for him to continue, but the sugar crash and the late hour the shadows being cast from the plants outside the sliding glass doors were beginning to get to me too. Okay. Okay. I wasn't going to bring this up because it was so awful, but I need someone else to hear it. To, well, you'll see. Tom shuffled over to the radio and turned it on.

Almost immediately falling to the floor and yelping with his hands, clamped firmly over his ears as an incredibly deafening way all limited from the speakers. We hadn't accounted for our granddad's radio habits, who, as a partially deaf man who enjoyed listening to music whilst he did the garden, always had it set at a ridiculously high volume. Five minutes after another, well-earned by now, telling off from Grandma, and an assurance that we were firmly in our beds with the lights off, we all jumped back out of bed and crawled over to the radio, now silent, the yellow-orange light casting an eerie glow around the cabinet.

Tom began to slowly twist the tuning knob back and forth between stations, and I started to feel trepidation from the quiet crackling and distorted sounds emitting from the radio, adding to the sinister atmosphere in the now eerily quiet house. George said it can help to talk to it, so the spirits can tell you're trying to get through or something. Um, I stared at Tom and Jack. Unsure what I'd want to say to a ghost, if anything. I wasn't sure it was a good idea to invite them in. Is anyone there?

As Tom finished speaking, the radio picked something up. We all jumped. Staring at each other in the silence and static, I noticed even Jack's face look pale, as Tom tuned the radio back to the frequency on which the noise had responded. We could hear something, but as we'd turned the volume really low since the Grand Ma incident, none of us could make it out.

Turn it up! There was excitement and fear in Jack's eyes. Tom slowly increased the volume of the radio until we could make out the sound on the other side. It was a late-night station playing Cottonide Joe. We collapsed on the floor in hysterics together, the tension removed from the situation by sheer ridiculousness. This, again, gained us a final, final warning from Grandma,

at which point we absolutely had to go to sleep, no questions asked. We were all suffering majorly from sugar crashes at that point anyway. And with Cotton-Eyed Joe cleansing away our fears of the time being, we all eventually passed out asleep. The radio game became a fun bedtime activity for us over the next couple of fears. Although we'd sometimes freak each other out in the darkness, we didn't really get scared much anymore. Even Tom seemed to forget about the fear from whatever it was he'd heard at George's,

probably assuming it had just been another silly incident like our Cotton-Eyed Joe experience, a random station playing something weird. We stopped playing the radio game after one Saturday in late August. We began, as usual, giggling quietly to each other as we skipped through the stations, pretending to pick out words in the static, trying to make ridiculous sentences between stations and finding the stupidest broadcasts we could. Then we heard the scream. Jack and I started laughing, thinking we'd stumbled onto another weird station when we looked at Tom.

In the moonlight, I could see his pallid complexion. The color drained from his face. I looked down at the radio. His hand had jerked away from the dial, and he was shaking. This, this is it. Jack and I exchanged glances, and then looked back to the radio, listening intently to whatever had frightened my brother so much. I wish we'd stopped playing the game after the first night.

Maybe then it'd be a nice memory, something my brother, cousin, and I could look back on. and laugh about. Now that I know what was behind that station, I hear those sounds whenever I attempt to sleep at night. Most unholy, hellish screams were emitting from the radio speakers. We still had the volume down low, but the pain and desperation in those shrieks, cries, and wimperes stabbed at my chest. We listened to the wailing, pleading, banging, and begging in horrified silence for around five minutes until jack began to whimper himself and reached for the dial tom grabbed his hand jack tried to struggle away wait tom didn't take his eyes from the radio his tone so intense that jack ceased his attempts to switch it off

that's when i realized that i could now hear another sound behind the screams nasty maniacal laughter The cruel noise and an icy trickle down my spine, and I snatched the radio plug from the socket, then dialed the tuning knob all the way to the left. We discussed our theories about the radio game in hushed conversations at school the following week. Was it ghosts attempting communication? A really weird song, some kind of death metal? We stopped discussing the game after Elliot shared his particular theory. It sounded like hell.

We forgot about the radio game eventually. As we all grew up and moved to opposite sides of the country for university, as I aged, I'd tell it as my ghost story. You know, the one that most people seemed to have. However, I assumed our more practical theories were correct as kids. Just some strange broadcast we managed to stumble upon and build up in our juvenile minds. I hadn't thought about the radio game for years until Christmas 2019, when my brother, cousin, and I were all together again at my family house. Hey, remember that creepy radio broadcast we found as kids? Man, that thing freaked me out for months. I had to sleep with my TV on, remember? Tom grinned at us across the dinner table. Jack smacked his forehead comically. Oh, do not remind me of that game.

Every time I'm reminded of that, I can't get the damn screaming out of my head. Screaming? My auntie chuckled silently. We all laughed along in semi-embarrassment, and launched into the tale of the radio game. As we began to describe the screams with vigor, mock shuddering at the memory, I noticed that both of our sets of parents had stopped eating.

Their forks clattered, mouths agape, and eyes staring at us. Tom and Jack noticed too. What? Tom's chuckles had stopped, and he looked at our mom confused. My mom and auntie exchanged glances. My mom faltered on her first word,

bit her lip as if considering something, then sighed. Then she solved a mystery from my past that I wish had remained hidden. As I mentioned, I'd moved across the country for university, found a job and career, and so had my brother and cousin, which meant that we weren't up on local news from the last several years. Mr. Martin, who'd been my grandparents' quiet, garden-obsessed neighbor, had been arrested in 2015. It had been a massive shock to the first.

quiet community. He was arrested and marched out by police officers, neighbors, and passers-by looking on in curiosity, my mom among them. They should have kept walking. Shortly after Mr. Martin, a team of paramedics emerged from the house, carrying an amaciated, beaten, disheveled woman on a stretcher. Her eyes looked haunted. She was bleeding and broken, but she was alive. She'd been locked in his basement for 19 years. The local news report on the matter provided more details. How and when he'd taken her, how he tortured and taunted her, details that I won't go into here.

However, they did give away one significant detail. Mr. Martin, sick bastard that he was, kept her in a soundproof room, but couldn't stand missing out on her streams. So he kept a baby monitor in her basement prison, making sure he didn't miss anything when he wasn't down there abusing her. The baby monitor must have interfered with radio signals, causing the sounds to intermittently be picked up by nearby devices. My grandma and grandpa had died in my late teens, and a young couple moved into their house. In 2015, they'd put in a report to the police that they could hear hellish, tortured screams coming from their radio.

In our final tale, we meet Jerry, a kid from New York who's had to relocate with his family to Kentucky, and he's certainly not happy about it, even though he's made some very friendly friends. And in this tale, shared with us by author Daniel Barnett, Jerry gets introduced to a local legend, one which makes his new locale much more fascinating. Performing this tale are Mike Delgado, Dan Zepoula. Jeff Clement, Sarah Thomas, Graham Rowett, Jesse Cornett, and Aaron Lillis. So fry up some pork chops for this one. You're about to learn about the legend of Pigfoot.

Arlo wasn't a cold town back in those days. It was a slaughter town, and the man who couldn't wear a tie carried a knife to work. Stickers, they were called, and the best of them was Harold Coleman. Harold could carve a thousand throats in one day and not get a drop on him. He loved those pigs, was greedy for him. Other guys, they'd crack jokes and have smoke breaks every chance they'd got. Anything to lighten the mood, but not Harold. He'd like to be alone in the kill room for hours.

Just him and his pink little friends. He'd whisper to him. Scratch their stubbly ears, and all the while his knife would go flick, flick, flick. To Harold Conlin, the sweetest sound in the world was a squeal. Jerry Michaels yawned. He was bored. These days, he was always bored, unless he was angry. Thought you said this was a scary story. Lloyd Friendly would not be deterred. It is, and it's not a story.

Sorry. Just shut up and listen. Lloyd's twin sister, Sasha. It was dark inside the bedroom, with Lloyd's chubby face hogging most of the flashlight's beam. But Jerry was pretty sure Sasha winked at him. Not that he cared. Much.

Lloyd cleared his throat and resumed his tale teller's voice, which was fuller, more robust than his real voice. He wanted to be a movie director when he grew up, And he was probably framing this moment as a scene in his head. The three kids huddled in darkness, the creaky old house settling in around them. The moonlit track leading through the woods outside. It was the summer of 88 that old Betsy shut down for good. Old Betsy?

The slaughterhouse. They named her like she was a boat. Then you should have said she sunk. But old Betsy? See, didn't sink. She burned. Lloyd pushed his round glasses back up his nose. That summer was hot, even for Kentucky, and dry.

My daddy, he was a kid then, and he says that summer nobody sweat. You couldn't finish swallowing your water before you were thirsty again. There was dust everywhere dust wasn't meant to be. You had to wipe down the top. table before every meal and rinse her hair in the morning because the dust would climb right into bed with you. Your daddy said all that? Jerry let slip a little smile. The friendlies countryways were still new to him. Back in New York, where he'd come from, 12-year-old boys who called their dad's daddy suffered a short life expectancy. Most of it. Lloyd shrugged.

Some of it. Will you stop interrupting my brother? Will your brother get to the point? Hot summer, dry summers, so what? So, there wasn't anything to stop that first spark once it set into the hay bales behind old Betsy. No one knows for sure where the fire came from. There were clouds that day, and some swear they saw dry lighting and flickering after dusk. The hay, though, that had been burned.

brought in for the pence so the pigs could have something to lay on. The flames spread fast. They licked up old Betsy, goblin at every part of her that one brick, and soon they found their way inside to the meat. A fresh shipment had just come in. Two thousand-some swine all packed in and waiting to be stuck. There wasn't nobody in Harlow that night who didn't he hear the squeals. But it was Harold Coleman who answered them fastest. He couldn't stand it, hearing those pigs screaming, knowing the fire was having all the fun. He ran into old Betsy with his knife and no shoes on, he was so excited. No one saw him alive again. One day later, when the fire died, the wind came up and carried ashes from old Betsy's husk.

And last, enough blew away, and they found him. His clothes burned. His blade still in hand. The pigs had escaped their pens, and he'd killed them by the hundreds, buried himself in them. Their blood cooked black on his skin. Their flesh and fat molded to his feet

from every step he took over their melting bodies. before he finally fell. Lloyd let the image hang over them in the dark. It's been 30 years now, but on some nights, you can still see him out there, trudging through the slaughterhouse in search of another throat to cut.

His lumped pink feet dragging on the ground. They're not quite human anymore, those feet, and they're not happy either. That's how you know he's coming By the sound they make That's how you know

Pigfoot's coming Lloyd snapped off the flashlight A scuffle took place between he and his sister During which Sasha somehow managed to relocate herself Next to Jerry's bed Jerry felt a cool finger run up his legs in the dark And then the overhead lights turned on Stabbingly bright

His father stood in the doorway, wearing an apologetic smile underneath his sad brown eyes. Lucas Michaels looked like someone waiting for bad news. He'd look that way as long as Jerry could remember. Mr. Michaels, he scared me. Sasha clutched Jerry's calf to cover up the tickle she'd been giving it. I'm very sorry. Jerry thought that about summed up his old man. Very sorry. Jerry wondered how long he'd been listening in on them. They had moved to Harlow two

months back after budget cuts in education caused his dad to lose his teaching job in New York, and his dad was already moving around this rangy old house with ease, as if he'd been here his whole life. Meanwhile, Jerry couldn't take a piss in the night without barking his shin on something. It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. What's up, Dad? You have a bad dream? It's almost one. Time to pack up the campfire stories and turn in.

And Sasha? He nodded to her sleeping bag. Her parents had given three justifications for letting Sasha sleep over at a boy's house. Mr. Michaels was a teacher. Her brother would be in the same room. And the boy in question was 12, not 13, whatever that meant. Sasha finished segregating herself on the other side of Lloyd, who squirmed down into a sleeping bag. Jerry's dad reached for the light switch.

Pause. You know, maybe he didn't do it for fun. Your pigfoot. Maybe he went in there to save those pigs. And when he couldn't, he killed them out of mercy so they wouldn't have to burn. The lights turned off. The door shut. Jerry listened to his dad's footsteps retreat quietly to the upstairs.

bedroom. What a bastard. He didn't realize until he spoke that he wasn't joking, that he was actually mad. He has to find the softness inside everyone. He can't even let a monster be mean. Even a stupid monster like Pigfoot. Everything's got to be a tragedy, a misunderstanding. Boo fucking who.

Jerry thumped his head down onto the pillow. He sat back up as if launched. And screw you. guys too. You told me I was going to shit myself over your story and it wasn't even scary at all. Squee, squeeze, squeeze, squee! You both can go suck one. You only say that because you haven't heard the best part yet. What do you mean? How do you think Harold Conlin got there so fast? The night old Betsy burned. Sasha was smiling. He could hear it in her voice. I don't know.

He lived close, he and his son. When the fire started, he could see the glow from the kitchen window. Wait. Pigfoot had a son? Sure. Kid named Kyle, about our age. What happened to him? Got sent off to foster care, I think.

Where he spent the rest of his childhood getting diddled and doodled. That's gross, sis. That's foster care. Jerry swung his legs off the bed. So what? They lived close to the slaughterhouse. How's that supposed to scare me? He hasn't figured it out, Sosh.

No, he hasn't. He's pretty slow. You want to tell him? You tell him. I told the rest of the story. It's supposed to scare you, Jerry, because... Because you're living in his house. You and your dad are living in Pigfoot's house.

There was a muffled thumb that might have been a punch to the arm. Hey, jerk, you said I could tell it. You were going too slow. I was building suspense. The suspense was already built. You were just dragging it out. What's not? Sis, sis, listen.

I know this stuff. I study it. I'm going to write a new. direct my old movies one day. You couldn't direct traffic if you were a street sign. Tell her, Jerry. Tell her she was dragging it out. Jerry?

Jerry was thinking about his frown of a father, about home so far away and his own unhappiness, always close, a next-door neighbor to his heart. The kitchen window faces the same way as my window. Yeah. That means the slaughterhouse is that way through the woods.

Jerry stared out to the moonlit track leading into the dark trees. Yeah, down a path, I think. Well, what are we sitting here for then? Old Betsy's waiting. Let's pay her a visit. The room hushed at Jerry's suggestion. Then Sasha's face appeared over the flashlight, pale. nervous, excited. For serious? For serious? No, no, no, no.

That's a stupid idea. That idea is how you die. What? You don't really believe in Pigfoot, do you? No. I mean, Harold, he was real, but... What then? What's the problem?

It's dark, that's the problem. And that place is... dangerous. There's barbwara all over, old Betsy, just to keep stupid people out. We'll just take a peek. We won't go inside or anything. Come on. I'm new to town. You're supposed to show me the sights. Tomorrow. In the day. Now. Your dad told us to go to bed. Funny how dads were only daddy when they were your own. My dad is a wimp. He won't even know we're gone.

And if he did find out, if? He'd probably apologize to us. You don't have to come, Lloyd. Me and Jail go alone. You just want a chance to stick your tongue down his throat. Shut up! He's a city boy. And you just think that's so so cute.

Another friendly scuffle took him. place on the floor. Jerry stepped around there struggling bodies, went to the window, and climbed out quietly into the warm night. Who's coming? Sasha was coming, and in a hurry. She straddled the windowsills in her pajamas, or rather tight pajamas, and landed next to Jerry with the flashlight. The hell. Her brother rustled out of his sleeping bag and got to his feet. What? Go without shoes. What are you? You an idiot? Trails are like humans in at least one way.

They need to feed to survive, and the trail to old Betsy had not been fed in a long, long time. Untrodden in decades, the path had starved, thinning from a packed lane to what was little more than a crack in the dense wall of the woods. The three kids followed it, single file. Jerry in the lead and Lloyd in the rear, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. Witch grass tickled at their ankles. Branches clawed at everything else. They forced their way deeper, the glow of their flashlight pocketed by the trees,

the full moon playing peek-a-boo through the stitchwork overhead, a pale sliver here, a bony slice there. And then, under that same moon, old Betsy. She did not announce herself. She did not need announcing. She stood alone on stage, under her spotlight, where she had always stood, like a forgotten starlet waiting for her audience to return. Her dress was as red as the blood that had once been spilled inside her. The bricks were blackened by char, torn and sewn back together in places by lacy green

threads of ivy. Wind hooted owlishly through her open mouths. She sang a sad song, old Betsy. She had sung it for many nights, and she would sing it on many more. Jerry stared up at her from the edge of the clearing. He'd gotten through the woods a few paces ahead of the others, and he couldn't have been hard for Sasha to see since she was the one carrying the flashlight, but she still managed to bump into him. She didn't exactly unbump herself either. Wow. Whatever. He wasn't playing cool. He was bored, and annoyed with himself for being bored when he should have been something, anything else. Sasha took his hand one exquisitely cool finger at a time. He thought about letting go.

He thought about it some more and decided he would. Not now, though. In a few seconds. A few at the most. Well, there's your peak. Lloyd must have been saving his voice for a scream, because he hadn't spoken since leaving the house. Can we go now, please?

You said there was barbed wire. Jerry waved an arm. The clearing was bare except for fox tales and a few boulders growing moss over ancient burns. There's not even a fence around the place. I wishful thinking. You mean you've never been here after all that talk? Well, he hasn't. A shadow of awe or fear, laced Sasha's voice.

Nobody comes here. The road to old Betsy, you can't see it because it's on her other side. Her front side. The road cuts through the woods, and they just let it go like the path from your house. Now there's just a couple of green ruts with baby trees growing all around him. This place is shut off, like Dracula's castle up in the mountains. People in town I'll whisper about it

But half of us don't really believe it exists And Pigfoot, he's the count Pigfoot is dead So was the count, technically Jerry thought about saying Instead, he nudged Deloid with an elbow You listening, pal? Your sister really set the scene there.

I'm practically shivering I think she should get the director's check when you two grow up. Screw you. No, thanks. I'm saving myself for someone special. Sasha's hand tightened on his, but Jerry couldn't say if that was in response to him

or to the low, mournful note rising from old Betsy. The slaughterhouse seemed bigger, closer. Good thing the moon was out, where they wouldn't even know she was there. And what if they heard her singing then? What if they heard her singing to them from the dark Ben? The thought was enough to give Jerry a chill, and for a moment, for the first time in a long time,

where he was didn't feel so far away from where he wanted to be. He was here. He was here, and it wasn't fair, but maybe it was all right. Jerry searched the hole inside him, the one that was made when he was forced to leave behind his friends in New York for this nowhere on the middle of the map. The hole no longer seemed quite so deep, so full of echoes. Then the chill faded and the anger came back freshly cooked. Anger at nothing, at everything. But most of all, anger at his father, who didn't care.

And that was the root of it, wasn't it? His father didn't care. Sure, he looked sad. He looked like he'd been hung up on the cross, like this was so hard on him. But he never once asked how it was on Jerry. He couldn't even see Jerry past himself. Hell, he probably wouldn't even notice

if Jerry never came home tomorrow. Not until Mr. and Mrs. Friendly came looking for their kids. Fuck it. Jerry was grinning broadly. His eyes felt 10 degrees. is too hot in their sockets. Let's go in. Let's see if Count Pigfoot is home.

He let go of Sasha's hand and headed off without waiting for an answer, leaving them no choice but to follow or abandon him to old Betsy and whatever waited inside. Lucas Michaels lay awake in the bedroom that had once belonged to Harold Comlin, the man whose death had given birth to Pigfoot. He couldn't sleep. He really could since return. turning to this house. God knew he had his share of nightmares here, back in the days when the

slaughterhouse was still in operation, when old Betsy was just Betsy, and he was an 11-year-old boy named Kyle, listening to the squeals of her tenants through his window at night. They never stopped crying those pigs, not until they met the knife. Lucas turned on his bedside lamp. He rubbed his face, which was the face of a man pushing 40, except for the gray hairs on his cheeks, and the distant, some might even say sorrowful look in his eyes. The gray had come in before his beard finished growing. The look in his eyes had been there much longer. Lucas poured himself a drink from the bottle in his nightstand. Bourbon, Kentucky blooded, just like him, though Jerry didn't know that. Jerry didn't know a lot of things about him. And that was a lot of things about him. And that

for the best. No boy deserves to carry the sins of his father, especially when the sins were as heavy as Lucas's. He'd been born the son of Harold Comlin, and he'd gone to school the son of Harold Comlin. The kids at Harlow Elementary used to sing jingles to him about his old man. Slice, slice, slice, they squeal so nice. Or stick them, lick them, slip your prick in them. Eventually, the worst it happened. Lucas had begun to believe their rhymes. He'd begun to see the monster everyone else saw in his father. And then, Lucas downed his drink. The bourbon hit his stomach like a lit match. But the fire died down after a while, as fires almost always do, and left him feeling hollowed out and burned. He walked to the closet in the slow way he had walked through the last 30

years. On the top shelf was a shoebox, which he had kept with him since moving in with his aunt and uncle in Nashville. He had lived with him until he was 18, at which point he'd taken their last name, Michaels, and done away with Kyle for good. Jerry knew them as grandma and grandpa, and they were more than fine with that, having no actual children of their own. The house had come to them in the will, and they held on to the deed in case the time should ever come when Lucas wanted to return to Harlow. That time never did, but the time where he needed to had. Lucas hadn't told Jerry, didn't want him to worry, but the two of them had been a breath away from homeless in New York, and so he had manufactured a little white lie, a job opportunity

at a middle school in the country, where teachers were in high demand and the cost of living. was cheap. Only one person in town remembered him. Ms. Beaufort, the principal of Harlow Junior High, where Lucas worked and where his son went to school. Ms. Beaufort had roosted there since time immemorial. Before Lucas's aunt had taken him in, before she had married and become a Michaels, she herself had sat at a desk in Miss Beaufort's class, she and her quiet, sensitive brother, Harold Comlin. Lucas took the shoebox. down off its shelf and carried it to bed. He hadn't gone through the box since Jerry was born, but he had never stopped adding to it over the years. Oh son, I hope you never have a box like this one.

I hope you never need something to hide all your hurt and your guilt. He lifted the lid. Inside were newspaper clippings and pages printed off the internet. The newest editions sat closer to the top, covering the old. Lucas took out the first. It was of a fire. All the items in the box were of a fire. This one had taken place in 2012, four years ago, at the Harlow Liquor Store. The owner had made the unknowing mistake of kicking on his old Jenny after a power outage killed the electricity on the block. The Jenny blew, and before long, things were hot enough in Harlow's sips that the bottles of Bacardi 151 and absent, legal now and high enough in alcohol content to be set aflame were popping like fireworks.

Being a stubborn old fool, the owner had made several trips into the burning store to save his higher shelf inventory. On his last rescue mission, he had seen someone pacing the back aisle of the store. Just a shadow, a big, shouldery shadow walking behind the smoke. The owner had called out, but he'd barely been able to hear his own voice over the glass cracker. and the mysterious figure had marched out of sight, never to be seen again. Lucas searched the fire in the photograph. The flames were so bright they rendered everything around them blurry. He saw nothing.

The next article was dated 2006 and featured the heading, Eight Dead After Explosion. Someone had tapped into a gas pocket down in the coal mine, and a wall of burning air had rushed through the tunnel in six. incinerating everyone in its way. All of this was rather unextrinary, though tragic, except for the testimonial given by the only survivor who had been caught behind falling rock and saved from the explosion. This man swore that in the minutes following the blast, he heard footsteps in the tunnel,

heavy, slow footsteps. He himself pointed out that this was impossible. The tunnel had been full of boiling smoke, airless, and anyone able to draw breath wouldn't have been doing so for long, let alone walking around. It was probably just my head, he told the Harlow Herald. My head had been pounding something awful. Lucas agreed. It probably had been the man's head. Probably.

He pulled out the photograph of a charred two-story house. The owner had forgotten to put the fire screen on before falling asleep on the couch in the den. and he had woken up inside hell, everything hot, crackling. On the way out, his arm over his mouth, this detail Lucas inserted himself. He had visualized this story more than once. The man heard what he thought was his infant daughter wailing upstairs. He didn't know that his wife already carried the little girl from the house and was holding her on the front lawn in tears.

Dad followed the squealing up to the baby's room, only it didn't. sound like his daughter up there, or any other human he had ever known. It sounded like an animal. Animals. When he opened the door, the squealing stopped. A man stood over the crib, a large man with a long knife that glinted in the firelight. The man turned. There were flames all around him, on the walls and in the crib, consuming the twisted blanket where the daughter had lain. There were flames everywhere but on the man, and yet his eyes burned, red, flickering. He took a step, dragging one foot through the smoke rising from the floorboards, and that was all the father remembered, except for the squeals that seemed to chase him from the house.

Lucas set aside the article, which had been published on a paranormal website titled, Pigfoot Walks. There were other supposed sightings of the legend, most of them reporting huge body counts that the media ignored. There was even a paternity claim. Woman raped by Pigfoot gives birth to swine. But the story of the burning house, Lucas believed, partially because of the fire, partially because the father had grown up outside Harlow and had not been weaned on its myths. Lucas went through the remaining pages one by one, going back one fire at a time through the town's history.

Not all the articles hinted at anything unordinary, but many came with at least one particular footnote, an out-of-place sound or the feeling for those involved of someone nearby in the flames. Someone glimpsed but never seen again. Someone looking. searching for another throat to cut Lucas shook his head

No, not that He didn't believe that At last he came to the bottom of the box To the worst, if not the most original fire To ever grace Harlow There were two photographs In the first old Betsy burned beneath a dark sky With the low clouds boiled orange and sweaty

soured red. In the second photo was a small boy whose name had been Kyle and whose face, underneath the ash, might have belonged to Lucas' own son. Lucas brushed the boy's grainy black cheek, thinking of Jerry, and shivered. It was like touching a ghost. The shoot down which pigs had been fed into the mouth of old Betsy remained upright after all these years. Its switchbacks stood shiny in the moonlight, like a line at a deserted amusement park, eerie, but also inviting. Jerry hopped the railing, a bit of soot smeared onto his palm when he landed, and he absently wiped it away on his shorts as he waited for the others to catch up to him. Sasha did first, followed a moment later by the walking no machine that her brother had become. No, no, no, no, no, no, just no.

Let's go back. No, no. Wait. Too late. You had your chance. Jerry headed down the chute. The ground was hand-picked and ruggedly uneven. And he knew why, as soon as Sasha's flashlight flicked after him.

They were walking over ancient hoof prints, tramped into the mud, and fossilized there. They were on the path of the soon to be slaughtered. No, boy, that thought should have terrified him. But it didn't. It exhilarated him. He wondered if his dad had known about old Betsy before moving to Harlow. Probably. Perhaps that's why they'd gotten the house so cheap.

Urban legends were terrible for the real estate market. Thanks, Pigfoot. What? Nothing. They exited the final store. switchback and started for the slaughterhouse's entrance. It was wide open. There had been a door once, like the kind on a garage, but the whole frame had collapsed during the fire. A pile of blackened beams and corrugated sheet metal lay off to the side, cleared away and left to rot

with the rest of the building. Jerry paused in the doorway, testing to see what he felt, standing where no one had stood in years, or even decades. Unless, you know, Dracula's castle was not empty, unless a certain squeeing count lived within these walls. The answer was, not much, a little colder maybe. Old Betsy's song was not just a sound here, but a real thing. Her cool breath tickled the exposed hairs on his legs. He could see her bones groaning softly. He could see, and the realization stopped him. he could see. Old Betsy's roof had been made of timber, and as a result, most had been eaten away. The moon peered down through great jagged rifts, pailing all it touched, and leaving the rest in shadow.

I'm not going in there. Lloyd licked the cleft in his lip. He and Sasha were twins, but the dice had rolled badly for him in their mother's stomach. Lloyd got crooked teeth. Sasha got a Hollywood smile. His hair was frizzy. hers was smooth and straight and that didn't even take into account the prepubescent acne or the extra rolls equipped to his stomach no the house had not favored Lloyd friendly I don't care if Sasha gets pregnant

I really don't I'm not going in there yeah sure whatever you say I'm serious okay see you inside No, you won't Okay Okay

Jerry walked into old Betsy And was surprised As well as disappointed when Lloyd stuck to his word Now there was no one left to protect him from Sasha He stole a glance at her You scared? Yeah Except she didn't look scared

Anxious maybe But not scared You? My pants are loaded with shit. Ew. They were moving between what used to be the pens. Bits of chicken wire were all that remained for the fences. The pen's floors looked black and crumbly.

And back in the corners where the wind and rain didn't have access, there were dark lumps that once might have been pigs. Do you smell that? If you're still talking about your shit, you can stop. No, really. It smells like... It smells like bacon. Ha, ha.

She elbowed him. Then a bone crunched under his foot. And the joke didn't seem that funny anymore. What would they call us... Huh? If there was something that ate us, what would we be called? High walls, reaching up toward the threadwork roof and sky above,

gave way to the low stone ceiling of a corridor as they passed beyond the pens. Pigs are pork, cows are beef, birds are fowl, what would we be? Jerry shrugged. Sasha was quiet for a moment. Folk. They'd call us folk, so they wouldn't have to feel bad about eating us. There'd be restaurants serving boke-fil-A and bulk liver pat-ae, and kid me it would be called something fancy and sophisticated, to make it sound like a delicacy. Adolesencia.

Hmm, too long. Adol, like the singer, kind of. Yeah, Adam. Served rare with a glass of Pino noir. Hmm, delicious. Jerry gave his hand a nibble and regretted the choice immediately. He still had soot on his palm. It was hard to see under the low ceiling,

and they were forced to rely on the flashlight to find their way. Where were they now? Jerry wondered, listened to the footsteps click off the stone. Some passage, it seemed. One last shoot between the pens and wherever the knives came out to play. A pale curve glinted in the dark overhead. A hook dangling from a retractable chain attached to a steel track in the ceiling. Shine that up a bit, will you?

Sasha lifted the flashlight. More hooks hung overhead, one every few feet. Fun. The hall ended, and the track continued into a closed circular space. Not too large, cozy almost, except for the railway of hooks running along the wall. The floor was grated, and the gaps in the grates were so wide, Jerry felt as though they were walking on solid darkness. The kill room. This is where the pigs came to be cut.

They trundled in on the track, hanging upside down from their ankles, and batch. After Batch, they went on bleeding from their throats into a square hole set high on the wall. If there was a pigfoot, they would find him here. Jerry cupped his hands to his mouth. Hello! His voice came back to him in the same hollow tune that old Betsy sang her song. The castle was empty. Dracula was dead.

Disappointment welled up inside him. There was nothing to be afraid of. here. Like his father's tragic revision of Harold Comlin's death, old Betsy was just depressing. At least Sasha hadn't tried to make out with him. He'd kissed a girl before, once, but his friend Joaquin from New York told him that country girls were like preachers' daughters, clean in public, but dirty and private. And what if Sasha wanted to do more than kiss? Last week, Jerry jerked off in the shower, thinking of Rooney Mara, and it hadn't worked right. Well, it had felt good for a second.

Really, really good. And then, there was no, and then. All the guys at school talked about grabbing for tissues so they wouldn't bead themselves in the eye. The way they told it, they all had fire hoses down there. But for Jerry, nothing. Not a single drop. He could live with being broken if he had to. Maybe.

But no way was he running round third base and falling on the way to home plate. No way. He'd rather die. What now? He got no answer. He turned. Sasha? She was sitting on the grates.

Her legs crossed, looking down into the flashlight. The beam lit up her face. And it was not such a bad face to have lit up, Jerry thought. So that the worry there was plain to see. What's wrong? Nothing. Just thought it'd be different. That I'd feel different.

When we were outside, when I saw old Betsy for the first time, I told myself she was creepy, because how couldn't she be? And I got the Willys for a second, but they didn't stick around. And so then I thought, if I was creepy, if you were... I went inside, if I just followed you inside. You'd get scared? Yeah, but that's not it. Not all of it.

I wanted to show myself what to be scared about. I wanted to find something to scare me for real, so I could teach my head to see things straight. Lloyd, this place is real for him. He didn't need to see old Betsy because he already built her up inside of him with those stories. But me, you know what I was thinking when we walked through the pens?

She looked up at Jerry, and her eyes were painfully blue. I was thinking my legs look fat in these dumb sweats. And how's that for stupid? I'm in a slaughterhouse, and it's night, and there are dead things everywhere. And I'm still not here. My head's still saying, Sasha, you shouldn't have eaten that sandwich for dinner. There was so much bread on it. Sasha, your love handles, Sasha, your thighs.

Your legs aren't fat. Your legs are really nice. That's not the point. Her voice bounced around the kill room. It's not about what they are or aren't or what you think. Your opinion doesn't fix the way I feel. Nothing does. Because there's something wrong with me, and that's the problem.

I just thought you were trying to impress me coming here. Not everything's about you. So you weren't trying to impress me? She smiled. And of all the unfair things in the world, the most unfair was how pretty that smile made her. Maybe Jerry was a little scared after all. Maybe he'd only been angry

because he didn't miss New York quite as much as he used to. And the pain of losing something you loved was easier to hold on to than the pain of letting go of it completely. He held out his hand. She shook it, and neither of them let go once she found her feet. A light sweat came to Jerry's brow, despite the cool air circulating through the kill room. They started back the way they had come.

And yes, he would admit it. He was scared, terrified. Her fingers locked between his, her thighs brushing his own. His heartbeat pounded so loud in his throat and head. But at first he didn't hear the soft, steady sound coming toward them down the corridor, like pigs under the knife, like pigs to the slaughter. A pair of orange-red red eyes flickered in the dark. A husky burned voice whispered.

The worst thing in life was not realizing you were loved, not knowing you were home until it was too late. Lucas Michael set down the picture of himself as a boy, the picture that so closely resembled his son, and packed his collection of fires back into the shoebox. When he finished, the cardboard felt almost too hot to the touch. But that was only his imagination. The children's bedtime story had gotten the wheels of his mind spinning, and they wouldn't stop now until they carried him to the end of memory lane,

which for Lucas, now and forever, was a little bit of his mind. the path leading to old Betsy through the woods. Slice, slice, slice, slice. They squeal so nice. Lucas had listened to the rhyme so many times through elementary and middle school that it might have been the anthem. Kids in the halls would sing it to him as they passed.

He would open his locker to find the jingle written on the door in red permanent marker. Girls would run away from him, oinking and squealing. And once a rumor that he had brought his father's work knife to school caused the teacher to root through his bag in the middle of class in front of everyone. But worst of all were the rhymes he'd dream up in his sleep. Little variations of the original that offer darker, uglier insights into his father,

fears that Lucas would not even admit to himself. Squeal, squeal, squeal, they make me real. or squeal, squeal, squeal, squeal, I cannot feel. In these dreams, Harold Cumlin was a ghost who grew more solid with each stroke of his knife, becoming not human, but monstrous, a hunch-backed and bloodied mailman, laughing as he delivered his pink, screaming bundles to hell. They say his father was the reason his mother skipped town. They say he couldn't love anything unless it was upside down and hanging from a hook.

And Lucas, then Kyle, believed them. He became jealous of the pigs, of the attention they commanded from his father. And the stories told his father crooned to them as if singing them to sleep. He gave them smiles and pets, and he stroked behind their ears. While at home he was quiet, distant, always looking somewhere far off. Food was on the table every night, and new clothes and school supplies came to Kyle when needed, but he only ever got part of his father, never the whole thing. Old Betsy held on to the rest. And so, on a cloudy night in the particularly dry summer of 88,

Kyle paid her a visit. He snuck out after his father fell asleep and stole down the path behind the house. carrying the matchbook that sat on the hearth over the fireplace. He told himself he was saving his dad, freeing him from the slaughterhouse before it spoiled him completely. But in truth, he'd been trying to save himself, from the torment of school, from the lonely, angry kid he was becoming. He knew about the hay bales because his father had paid for them out of his own pocket so that the pigs would have something soft to lay on in their pens.

It never crossed Kyle's mind that this little act of kindness might explain the story surrounding his father, that every song, every soft touch and smile was Harold's way of making the pigs as comfortable as possible before he fulfilled the unspeakable duties of his job, the only job a simple man like Harold Comlin could get in a slaughtered town like Harlow. Kyle never thought of the pigs once as he lit the match and held its flame to the lower. Hayvale. They were just part of the slaughterhouse and its architecture, no different than the bricks in the walls or the timber in the ceiling, until the fire took hold, until the pigs began to scream. It started as a low, confused muttering inside old Betsy, a groggy conversation

that built into a noise as bright and terrible as the flames grappling up the woodwork. The clouded night sky glowed like a bottle full of angry fireflies. The temperature climbed. Kyle backed away from the hay bales, now a burning pyre that reached 30 feet high. Sweat poured off his face in rivers. The hairs on his arms twisted and curled from the raw heat. His eyes were wide and stinging, but he could not close them, could not look away from what he had done. And what had he done? Oh, God, what had he done? Old Betsy crackled, her roof spit and pop. Against the seething brightness, Kyle must have been a dark speck, almost invisible,

which explained why his father didn't see him standing there behind the slaughterhouse. Harold Comlin came to the clearing wearing his nightshirt and work pants, nothing else, not even shoes. He had woken to the sound of squeals and struggled into the dead. denim jeans lying on his closet floor, his workknife still hooked to the belt. Stepping out of the house, seeing the violent glow over the woods, he had forgotten all about the boots on the porch, and he had run. At least, that's what Kyle told himself later, fitting together the missing pieces of the story. There was one question he never could answer, though, one question that haunted him above all others. And that question was, what if he was, what if he

He had not seen his father coming out of the woods. What if he and his father had passed by one another unknowingly, like ships in the night? Would children today still whisper about Pigfoot? It didn't matter. Because what happened was this. Standing behind the slaughterhouse, in shock at what he'd done, Kyle caught a movement in the corner of his vision. The movement was his father, running around.

old Betsy. Kyle followed him in a slow, dazed walk, and when he saw him again, his father was standing by the chute, staring up at the burning building with a look of horror and sadness. There were flames reflected in his father's eyes. Finally, Harold Comlin made a decision. He opened the gate. He ran inside. Kyle wanted to follow him, but the doorway to old Betsy was so bright, So loud, her smoking mouth howled a thousand squeals. He could not say how long he stood there waiting for his father to return, only that with each passing moment the hot coal of his stomach grew hotter. Every nerve in his body was a blade.

His skin was a network of knives, whittling him down and down. At last, something emerged from the slaughterhouse, and another something and another. The pigs trampled through the chutes, running for the first time in their history with old Betsy, away from old Betsy. What the newspapers only mentioned in passing and what the tales of Harold Comlin never mentioned at all

is that over 300 pigs escaped the flames that night. For a full month after the fire, you couldn't step outside without seeing a hog wander by on the road or root around a dumpster. They wandered into backyards and got fed by kids. They drank water left out in dog bowls and slept under porches. Most were rounded up and slaughtered eventually. Not all of them.

Not all. And that was Harold Comlin's true legacy. He saved a few. He did what he could. The flow of pigs slowed to a trickle, and at the back of the stampede was Kyle's father. father, stumbling, his nightshirt pulled over his nose and mouth. The tops of his feet were black, blistered, sparks fizzled out in his long, dark hair. His eyes had closed to squinting lines,

and tears rolled from them, leaving clean tracks in the soot on his cheeks. Kyle was so relieved to see him that he called out. There's a reason that fire codes require emergency exits to lock from the outside. And that is because people who have inhaled enough smoke will sometimes become confused and go back into the burning building from which they have already escaped, thinking they are still inside. At the sound of his son's voice, Harold Kamlin's face registered bewilderment. He must have believed Kyle to be home in bed. The bewilderment became terror. He turned to old Betsy. Then he went inside, staggering drunkenly. the knife on his work-bout shining firelight.

The doorway to the slaughterhouse collapsed behind him. Kyle tried to dig his way through, but the pieces of wood burned his hands. He heard his father searching for him, calling his name. He heard pigs squealing inside the oven of the slaughterhouse. He heard them squeal as he would hear them squeal for the rest of his life,

in the dark shoot of his dreams. and he heard their punctuated grunts when his father began to cut their throats. Perhaps they were simply in his way. But Kyle didn't think so then and Lucas didn't think so now. No. Even while searching for his son, Harold Conlin had been doing what little he could for them, as he had been doing his whole life. Lucas put the shoebox back on its shelf.

His hands were trembling. The scars on them are reminder of the terrible price. he had paid to learn of his father's love. He hadn't said a word to anyone that night, not to the firemen who found him pawing at old Betsy's burning front door or the policeman who later questioned him, and he never told anyone of the matchbook he had taken from the hearth over the fireplace. The only person he had something to say to was his father,

but for that he'd never have the chance. He walked downstairs. It was cooler there and he needed. needed cool. After going into the kitchen for a glass of water, he went down to the hall to his son's bedroom. Not a sound came from inside. The kids were fast asleep. He started to turn when he remembered. Jerry had stayed over at the friendly house and had come back a tired wreck because Lloyd wouldn't stop snoring. With a frown, Lucas opened the door. The bedroom was empty. Through the woods, through the open window that had belonged to him as a boy

came a sound from Lucas' childhood. Squeals. Human squeals. From the slaughterhouse. The man was nothing more than a pair of firelit eyes in the dark. There was a note of recognition in his voice, and that Jerry could not handle. It surpassed his brain's ability to process.

He began to shake, not only his arms and legs, but his middle too, like his spine was a fault line. He wasn't shaking alone. The flashlight rattled in Sasha's hand, and as the eyes floated closer, growing brighter, its beam revealed the man's body in pieces.

A broad set of shoulders clung to by charred rags. A face cooked down to the skull. A thick hand whose fingers had been welded together, closed permanently around the handle of a long knife. Feet like charred globs of bubble gum. Feet that stuck wetly to the ground and stretched with every step and squealed, though they had no mouths to speak of, only folds of dripping pink skin. It was real.

They fled back into the killroom, holding hands tighter now than ever. The grates pounded and groaned beneath them. Everything was either dark or it was a hook, glinting briefly, cruelly, as the flashlight swept through in search of an exit. Sasha dragged Jerry toward the hole in the wall where the railway and its hooks disappeared. Help me up! She let go of his hand to grab the lip at the opening. He tried to push her, lift her, but his arms were full of air.

He was a balloon boy, floating away. Jerry began to laugh. They were scared now. Oh, boy, were they scared. Sasha slapped him. The sting in his cheeks killed the helium valve in his chest. He got his hands together, got her foot in his hands, and shoved her up into the hole. The squeals were getting closer.

The killroom sounded as it must have sounded in the days when old Betsy was still alive. Sasha sat down the flashlight, and Jerry took her hands in the dark. He climbed the wall, his feet sliding on the burned stone, and then he was crawling after her on all fours, like a pig in a shoot. Above them, the hooks rattled gently on their chains, tinkling like, evil wind chimes. A draft carried down the narrow passage from somewhere up ahead. Sasha screamed.

And Jerry heard her fall an instant before the rough stones gave way to nothing beneath it. He landed on her a few feet down. His neck cracked. He tumbled and stopped on his back, looking up but not seeing anything. They had forgotten the flashlight. Jerry, Jerry, are you okay? I think so. Where are we?

He tried to piece everything together, to put it all in order. The stone corridor, the killer, the passage that was just big enough for dancing pigs to pass through. What came next? What came next? His fear was a huge, clumsy thing plotting over his thoughts. I don't know. I don't remember. Behead something glimmered softly, not a hook. Those were much higher in this place.

No, this glimmer belonged to something bigger, fuller, something whose side was rounded gently, like the wall of a massive pot. The boiler! They boiled him, then they break down their bodies. Jerry got to his feet. Sasha had already found hers, and they set off in a panting shamble that was very much like a crawl. Above the boiler, some of the ceiling had crumbled, leaving the railway and its hooks intact. But letting in the shaft of cold moonlight, Jerry had never seen anything so pure, so beautiful. Follow the tracks. Follow the tracks, and they'll lead us out. The next room was bright by comparison. The ceiling had caved in completely, having lost the support of its wooden beams.

And here the Pigs Railway finally ran its course. Amid the falling stones sat steel flaying tables and the crude instruments that had once been put into practice on them. They staggered over the stones, making small landslides with their footsteps. Sasha looked as though she had been rolling around in a spent campfire, and Jerry's skin felt coated and grown. Somewhere along the way, the fingers of their hands had intertwined again, and she dragged him in excitement as a plain metal door came into sight. They had reached the end of the path. Past this point would be the pens, the entrance, the woods, home.

The door would not. though. Sasha pushed and pushed, but it gave no more than an inch. Jerry shoved her aside and threw himself against the matter. Something roared but did not budge on the other side. The door was blocked. Look for another way out. There was no other way out. The walls stood 12 feet high, too high and slippery to climb. Jerry's eyes caught on a slot in the stone above the flaying tables. There were so many of them, but his heart quickly sank. The slot was far too narrow to fit them. It must have been where the railway began its journey to the pens

after dropping off the dead pigs for disassembly. This was the last stop in the ride, and they were trapped. Think, think! There had to be parts of the bodies the flares threw away. The pigs came into the slaughterhouse in a shoot, and what was left of them would have exited the building in another shoot. A garbage shoe. Where?

Where? The answer came to Jerry, and he wanted to cry. The stones, the fallen stones. Whatever way out there might have been, the collapsed ceiling had buried it. Do you hear anything? He listened. No. Me neither.

Maybe he couldn't fit through the passage. Maybe he can't get in here. But even as he spoke. the words. He knew them to be a false hope. Pigfoot was dead. This was his castle. From the other end of the flaying room came a soft squeal. Followed by another. Another. Sasha and Jerry clutched each other and screamed. Lucas stood at the window of his son's bedroom, listening to the screams from old Betsy. He knew who those screams belonged to. Even if he hadn't been able to recognize Jerry's voice,

crying out in terror, he would have known. Things always came full circle. His father had been here in a moment much like this, listening to the squeals from the slaughterhouse, squeals of his son's making. Now it was Lucas's turn, and he had a choice, but his decision first depended on a single question. Did he believe in Pigfoot? Yes, yes he did. And because he believed in pakefoot. It really was no choice at all. He could run to old Betsy, as his father had run, but he would never find them in time, not in the dark, and not in his father's domain. The path through the woods would only end in sadness and slaughter. His mind made up. No, his heart. This was a matter of the heart. Lucas walks back down the hall to the living room.

The fireplace was cold with winter a long ways off, but there was a box of matches above the hearth. Lucas shook out a handful. As a boy, he only needed one, but he was taking no chances. He went quickly, calmly to the office where he kept all of his lesson plans. He took his stack of old papers, crumpled a few into balls, and set them on the windowsill beneath the drapes. Then he lit the crumpled pages. As flames climbed the curtains, he carried the stack of papers into the living room, going from the windows to the couch to the sofa chair, leaving a little fire at every stop.

This work for my son, for his friends. Please let this work. Squeal by squeal, Bigfoot came. His walk was the walk of the burned, the suffering, the slaughtered. Jerry understood this. even as he screamed. He heard or felt old Betsy singing her sad song all around. And it came to him that they were a part of that song now.

Their voices, her voice. And he knew how terror and tragedy could become so deeply intertwined that it was impossible to tell the two apart. Fear and sorrow woven together like the fingers of his hand, Sasha's hand. He'd never kiss her now. They'd never make fun of Lloyd in his movies again. They were going to die. Pigfoot is coming.

They were going to die, and the dying was going to hurt so, so bad. His footsteps promised that. When the next squeal did not come, they kept screaming. For a long time, they kept screaming, unable to stop, unable to believe in the silence that had fallen over the flaying room. The door shuddered open behind them. They fell backwards onto dirty ground. Lloyd looked down at them.

Jesus, you two? How'd you get stuck in there? Pickfoot. Bigfoot, he chased us. Ha, ha, very funny. No, no, he's real. Sure he is, sure. And you can tell me all about him as we leave.

Seriously, haven't you guys had enough of this? place for one night? They had, and after they had all hopped over the charred beam that Lloyd had shoved away from the door, he was struggling to keep up with him as they ran through the moonlit pens. Jerry kept expecting to see a shadow rise from the floor and fixed them with burning eyes. But old Betsy stayed still. Burr horrors had gone back to sleep for the night, or else. Jerry didn't know what else.

The way outside came into the view ahead. He started to cry, and by the time they reached the chutes, the open sky above them, he was sobbing. Sasha was too. He grabbed her and kissed her, a big, clumsy, wet kiss on the mouth. Lloyd groaned. Jogging, laughing between sobs, they went around, old Betsy. There, behind the slaughterhouse, they stopped. The sky over the woods glowed an angry violet.

Jerry's house was on fire. You came. Lucas faced his father in the burning living room. The curtains were fiery wraiths, twisting, curling, as if in pain. The crouch was a smoking pit. Scorch marks spread across the crackling walls and ceiling. The bare floorboards were hot and growing hotter by the second. The only place untouched by heat was the fireplace.

Harold Comlin plotted forth in his death suit. His naked skull peaked through the charred flesh on his head. His eyes reflected new flames, old flames. This was how he saw the world, Lucas knew. This was the hell he had been sentenced to, an undying inferno where everything and everyone burn, where the only salvation was his sticking knife. Arrow's feet drips like candle wax as he walked,

Like lard, Lucas could smell the sweet stink of pork rising often. Beneath the rags of his nightshirt, his skin was black with cooked blood, pig's blood. His genes were holy. The flesh beneath seared to a crisp so that it crinkled and split with every step in turn. Lucas looked up at him. He was older now than his father, but standing before him, he was still born. Pigfoot's lipless, cracking mouth shaped a word. Yes, Daddy?

Yes, it's your tile. He found me. I'm sorry. You've been looking for so long. I'm so sorry. Flames licked at Lucas's calves. Flames climbed the sleeve of his shirt, but he did not move.

He reached up and cupped his father's ruined face. There were tears in Harold Comlin's blazing eyes. They shimmered orange-red in the light. Daddy, I'm burning. Hard to find words to focus. Daddy, it hurt. Pigfoot hugged his son, tight. The knife slipped in between the shoulder blades and stopped at the hill.

Blood dribbled from Lucas's mouth. He smiled. The fire didn't seem so hot anymore all of a sudden. We're home. We're home. They held each other in the flames. Jerry reached the house first, and through the living room window, through the smoke, he saw his father embrace Bigfoot. A moment later, the gas line exploded, and they were swallowed in the fire.

Sasha and Lloyd arrived at last. They had to hold Jerry back to keep him from running inside. Lucas Michael's body was bagged up by morning, and because no one had to be a lot of the reason to suspect anything other than an accident, what was left of him went unexamined to the crematory, where he was turned to ashes according to his will. News of his relationship to Harold Conlin broke soon after, and a new chapter was added to Pigfoot's legend. All this information Jerry took in and processed quietly, along with the other facts of his new life. He moved in with his grandparents, except they weren't really his grandparents in Nashville, which was a two-hour

away from Harlow, depending on traffic. Mr. and Mrs. Friendly brought their kids to visit him every other weekend, and he was grateful for that, though he didn't say so. Lloyd bought a new video recorder with three years of allowance money, and he showed Jerry the home movies he made on the Michael's small box screen television. He still didn't believe they'd seen Pigfoot that night, but he promised to make it all into a great movie one day. If that was, Jerry didn't mind.

Sasha never talked about old Betsy or what happened there, and that was all right. She and Jerry spent a lot of time kissing. That was all right, too. Jerry had nightmares for a few months, but never of the slaughterhouse or the march or squealing footsteps. His nightmares were always of the same thing, his father standing at the bedroom door. I'm very sorry, as dad would say, and Jerry would reply, What's up, Dad?

You have a bad dream? Then he would wake, shivering, and hug his pillow until sleep came again. In December, his grandmother, Jerry had decided she really was his grandma, after all, whether or not she had been his father's mom, knocked on his door and entered the room. She held a little box wrapped in reindeer paper.

This belonged to me and your grandpa. But we thought you should have it since there wasn't anything left. Jerry waited for her to go before opening the box. Inside was a framed photograph of his father as a young man and Jerry as a kid, small enough to be hooked in one arm. He was pulling his father's hair and his father was laughing. No frown to be found on his mouth or in his eyes. You set that fire, didn't you?

Dad. It wasn't an accident. I know it wasn't. If Lloyd ever made his Pigfoot movie, Jerry knew there'd never be a quiet ending like this, with a boy holding on to an old photograph. But Lloyd thought this was the story of a monster, when really, it wasn't. It was a story of fathers and sons. Join us next week for the start of the series Tales of the Mooncrawler. You won't want to miss each blood-curdling part. The No Sleep Podcast is presented by Creative Reason Media. The musical composer is Brandon Boone.

Our production team is Phil Mikulski, Jeff Clement, and Jesse Cornett. Our editor-in-chief is Jessica McAvoy. I'm your host and executive producer, David Cummings. Please visit the no-sleeppodcast.com for show notes and more details about the people who bring you this show, along with hundreds of hours of audio horror stories in our archives. On behalf of everyone at the No Sleep Podcast, we thank you for listening and for supporting our Dark Tales.

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