Fortnight of Fear by Graham Masterton Page A

the skirting,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if her chest were crushed. I had seen her hurtling over the taxi, I had seen her fall.
    â€œYou said the words,” I told her, dully. “You said the words.”
    She shook her head. But it was then that I remembered watching her asleep, and reciting that childish rhyme.
Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever after
.
    She raised her arms, stiffly. The fingers of her left hand were tightly curled around, as if they had been broken.
    â€œMake love to me,” she whispered. “Please, make love to me.”
    I turned around and walked straight through to the kitchen. I pulled open one drawer after another, but there wasn’t a single knife anywhere. She must have hidden them all, or thrown them away. I turned back again, and Jill was standing in the bedroom doorway. This time she was smiling.
    â€œMake
love
to me,” she repeated.

Pig’s Dinner
    Bakewell, Derbyshire
    Bakewell lies on the River Wye, in a valley between the high ridges of mid-Derbyshire. The town’s name was derived from the Saxon
bad-quell
, meaning “bath-well”, but these days Bakewell is better known for the Bakewell Tart, which is a pastry filled with strawberry preserve and glazed with egg. The Derbyshire Dales are some of the most peaceful and beautiful countryside in England, which made them a natural (for me) for one of the most horrifying stories I have ever written.
    Bakewell has a splendid arched and buttressed bridge, nearly 700 years old; and its brownstone buildings are unusually warm in appearance for a Peakland town. Just as warm are Bakewell’s springs, which were known in Roman times, and still feed the Bath House, built in 1697 for the Duke of Rutland.
    Pig’s Dinner
caused a considerable stir when it made its first appearance in the American magazine
Cemetery Dance
and is being recreated both as a graphic novel and a television movie.

PIG’S DINNER
    David climbed tiredly out of the Land Rover, slammed the ill-fitting door, and trudged across the yard with his hands deep in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. It had stopped raining at last, but a coarse cold wind was blowing diagonally across the yard, and above his head the clouds rushed like a muddy-pelted pack of mongrel dogs.
    Today had been what he and Malcolm always sardonically called “a pig of a day.”
    He had left the piggery at half-past five that morning, driven all the way to Chester in the teeming rain with a litter of seven Landrace piglets suffering from suspected swine erysipelas. He had waited two and a half hours for a dithering young health inspector who had missed his rail connection from Coventry. Then he had lunched on steak-and-kidney pudding with a deputy bank manager whose damp suit had reeked like a spaniel, and who had felt himself unable to grant David the loan that he and Malcolm desperately needed in order to repair the roof of the old back barn.
    He was wet, exhausted and demoralized. For the first time since they had taken over the piggery from their uncle four and a half years ago, he could see no future for Bryce Prime Pork, even if they sold half of their livestock and most of their acreage, and remortgaged their huge Edwardian house.
    He had almost reached the stone steps when he noticed that the lights in the feed plant had been left burning.Damn it, he thought. Malcolm was always so careless. It was Malcolm’s over-ambitious investment in new machinery and Malcolm’s insistence on setting up their own slaughtering and deep-freezing facilities that had stretched their finances to breaking-point. Bryce Prime Pork had been caught between falling demand and rising costs, and David’s dream of becoming a prosperous gentleman farmer had gradually unraveled all around him.
    He crossed the sloping yard toward the feed plant. Bryce Prime Pork was one of the cleanest piggeries in Derbyshire, but there was still a strong smell of ammonia on the