The Seventh Apprentice by Joseph Delaney

Author:Joseph Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER VII

THE SLAUGHTER PEN

FOR a while I almost forgot who I was. But after three or four days—it was hard to keep track of time—the pig witch returned.

I smelled her before I heard her: to my heightened piggy senses, she stunk like an old dead sow, rank, rotting, and riddled with maggots. Then I heard her pointy shoes squelching through the mud toward the gate. Terrified, I looked for somewhere to hide, but everything in the pen was open to view. In any case, it was too late. She lifted the latch, opened the gate, and with many a thwack-swish-thwack of her flexible stick, drove us out of the pen and across the cold, hard mud to another gate.

Peter was slow to go through the new gate, and she jabbed him hard with the pointed end of her stick. He squealed loudly, and as I trotted in behind him I saw a trickle of blood running down his side. Smarting with my own pain, I found myself in a much larger pen than the one we’d just left.

Before leaving us alone once more, the witch gave a cackle, and then she said something that made me so afraid that my heart almost stopped.

“A pen such as this is where most pigs end up!” she cried. “It’s your final home, so make the most of it. You won’t be here for long!”

That really scared me. If it was to be our final home, then only one thing could follow—death!

Without another word, the witch left us, shutting the gate and dropping the latch into place to close us in again.

Peter was still squealing with pain. I was so distracted by the noise he was making that at first I didn’t notice our three other companions. What drew my attention to them was a dripping sound that could be heard despite Peter’s uproar.

They were also pigs.

And they were all dead.

At the far end of the pen, two thick vertical poles supported a thinner horizontal beam. Hanging from this, by chains wrapped around their hind legs, were three dead pigs—two tusked boars and a sow. Their throats had been cut, and beneath each animal stood a hooped wooden bucket to catch its dripping blood.

Until that point, apart from the urge to eat, my thoughts had remained vague. Now the sight before me shocked the thinking part of my brain into action again. I had three distinct thoughts:

It looked like the work of a pig butcher.

Most likely it was the work of the witch.

We were now in the shape of pigs.

With that third thought came sheer leg-wobbling terror, and my whole body started to shake. This was why she had brought us to this pen, I realized. This was where pigs were slaughtered. Soon Peter and I would also be hanging from that beam by our legs. The witch would cut our throats, and our lifeblood would flow into buckets beneath us.

I was frantic to escape and began to run around the pen, butting my head against the horizontal planks of the fence.

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