"Nothing, Pa."
And his father would shove him aside and take a swig from the whiskey crock on the porch. "Musta done something. Threw stones at it, something."
"I didn't do nothing, Pa. He just don't like me."
"One a these days I gonna catch you, boy, hear? And I gonna give you a lickin' you won't forget."
The pig was going to get him a licking, Jeremiah knew, whether he did anything to provoke it or not. His father would use any reason to beat the boy for not slopping the hog himself. Damn fat pig, Jeremiah thought as he leaned against the corncrib at a safe distance from the animal. Probably eat anything, eat until it burst. His fingers played at the crinkly dry ears of corn in the crib. Pig food.
And suddenly, he could see it, an image so real, it blocked out all the sights and sounds around him, a picture in his mind more intense with color and texture than anything in reality. The image was of the pig gobbling up corn until it exploded, raining pork chops all over the yard. It was a funny image, but so real that Jeremiah's laughter was more hysterical than mirthful.
At the same time the picture popped into Jeremiah's brain, the pig began to huff and skitter around its pen, drawing toward the trough, where it began to eat voraciously.
"Pig food! Pig food!" Jeremiah shrieked gleefully, and threw two ears of corn into the pen. The pig finished everything in its trough and went for the corn.
"Pig food!" He carried an armload of corn to the pen. The pig reared back on its hind legs, screaming, as he approached, but began gobbling the corn as soon as the boy moved back toward the corncrib, its eyes frenzied and wide.
He brought over four more armfuls. "Eat till you burst, fat pig," Jeremiah whispered, the image in his head still vibrating quietly. The pig snorted and stomped and ate and searched for more food and ate it.
"Till you burst."
And then the pig moaned, a low, keening sound, and sniffed at the half-eaten ear of corn at its feet, and shuddered. It lay its head in the mud, and with a great thump, its massive body followed. The pig kicked twice in the air with its hind legs, panted, moaned, twisted its neck so that its head faced Jeremiah, and died. Its eyes were open. They stared vacantly at the boy. Jeremiah screamed.
Inside the house, his father stumbled off the couch, shaking himself awake and growling, "What'd he do now? Snotty little pup, prob'ly bothering with that hog again."
He had killed it. Through his screams, a part of Jeremiah realized with utter coldness and clarity that he had done something— something with his mind— to cause the occurrence in the pigpen.
His father saw the pig, started to drag its immense corpse out of the mud, then stopped.
"I think I'm going to take care of you first," he said. He ran for Jeremiah, but the boy didn't move. He was still thinking of the pig and the strange, unearthly image that had come into his sight, the killing picture. He had seen death, and death had been created.
He hardly felt his father's rough hand grab hold of his arm and whirl him around. Then the big hand headed straight for his face and jolted it back. The sting brought involuntary tears to his eyes. His father hit him again.
"Don't," the boy said, feeling light-headed. The hand came down again, across his eyes.
"Don't!" It was a command. And while the blow struck, Jeremiah's watering blue eyes locked into his father's, and the lights and colors appeared again. But this time there was a sound along with the colors, a hissing, crackling noise mixed with the orange and yellow of... his father's hair...
"You're on fire," the boy said, astonished.
His father screamed, a wild, mountain yell, and slapped frantically at the too-orange flames on his too-blue flannel shirt.
It's the picture, Jeremiah said to himself. It's not real— yet. He wanted to move— help his father, run away, anything— but he was rooted to the spot. He tried to make the killing picture go away, but he knew it was too late. He couldn't stop.
His mother, alarmed by the screaming, ran onto the porch, a broom in her hand. She dropped the broom, and both her hands flew to her mouth. She was running toward her husband.
"Go away," the boy snapped, but the picture was too strong. With a gasp, she clutched at the place on her skirt where the flames had erupted. His father caught her by the wrist, and they stumbled off together like two giddy dancers engulfed in flame.
It's not real yet...
They were headed for the pond.
It's not real...
Where they drowned.
* * *
"Can't nobody rightly say how it happened," Pap Lewis told the woman from the welfare office a week later at the train station. The woman had come to take Jeremiah to Dover City where, she told him, he would live in a place full of other children who'd lost their parents. Pap Lewis had wanted the boy to live with him and his family, but the welfare office said they were too poor to support another child.
Jeremiah waited quietly as the train steamed up to the platform and the woman took the boy's hand. Pap Lewis gave him a pat on the back and hoisted him up the steps into the train.
That was the last time Jeremiah saw him, because the train ride to Dover City was the setting for the second incident, the one-in-a-million chance that took Jeremiah Purcell from the ordinary world and thrust him, literally kicking and screaming, onto a new pathway that ended at Devil's Mountain, with the ultimate Master of Death as his guide.
On the train, Jeremiah left the woman from the welfare office to make his way to the lavatory two cars away. The route took him past a bank of sleeper cabins, where a boy not much older than Jeremiah sprawled on the floor with dozens of baseball cards around him. When Jeremiah tried to step around the boy, he accidentally walked over some of the cards. The boy scrambled to his feet with a shout and pushed Jeremiah into the door of one of the sleeper cabins. Jeremiah didn't strike back, since the boy was bigger than he was and, besides, Jeremiah wasn't much of a fighter. But as he watched the boy gather up his baseball cards, one odd, incongruous thought entered his mind and glowed there like a beacon: Rabbit.
The boy did look like a rabbit, with his knees bent near his body as he hunched over the floor. Still, the color in the train was so bright...
The boy looked up, his eyes frozen with terror. He abandoned his cards with a sniff. No, Jeremiah thought. As the boy bounded away on all fours, Jeremiah ran with all his strength in the other direction.
At the end of the sleeper car, he smashed full force into a man who had emerged from one of the cabins. A witness! Jeremiah looked around wildly to see if others had been standing around while he had turned the boy into a rabbit. There was only this single passenger, dressed in a blue suit like any businessman, whose face was expressionless as Jeremiah disengaged himself and continued running.
But what a face, he thought as he ran cold water over his head in the lavatory. It was the strangest face he had ever seen. A face that was human, and not disfigured, but unlike, any face he had ever looked upon. The color, the shape, the features. He had never seen a face that even remotely resembled it...
The man was waiting for Jeremiah when he returned.
The boy didn't acknowledge him, but he knew that the strange man was following him through the cabin. When he arrived back at the welfare lady's side, the stranger sat down opposite them. Jeremiah trembled with fright. But the man opened a newspaper— harmless enough— while the welfare lady slept.
More than an hour passed. Outside, snow was falling in wet, fat flakes that coated the landscape as the train chug-a-chugged slowly through the Kentucky highlands. The boy dozed. Chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug. A hypnotic stillness fell over the car. The snow was falling with a chug-a-chug beat, chug-a-chug and the snow, the bright, white snow, bright and white, too bright, the snow, chug-a-chug...
The snow!
Jeremiah snapped awake to the sounds of people shrieking wildly as a storm of whirling snow blew through the train.
"What— what's this?" the welfare lady grumbled as the snow slowed and ceased and disappeared without a trace of moisture. She looked around for the source of the noise, then went back to sleep.
"It isn't even wet," someone called from a distance. And everyone turned and marveled about what could have caused such a mass hallucination, except for Jeremiah, who fought back tears of panic and sorrow and shame because he knew that he had caused it. He felt as if he'd just had a wet dream in front of fifty people, and he knew they would continue. He was a freak, a dangerous, uncontrollable menace who'd be locked up in prison or killed as soon as people found out about him.
He straightened up. What if nobody did find out about him? If he could get away from the welfare lady who was already beginning to snore, perhaps never reach the home in Dover City... If he could live alone in the mountains, no one would ever know...
But someone did know. The strange-looking man with the newspaper was staring straight at him, unsmiling, appraising. He knew. It was all over. He knew.
With a movement so fast that Jeremiah didn't know what was happening, the man lifted him off his seat and clamped his hand over the boy's mouth. He carried him to the sleeper cabin where Jeremiah had first seen him and threw him inside.
Before Jeremiah could get to his feet, the man swatted him across the cabin with the back of his hand. The motion looked effortless, but the boy felt as though all his bones were broken.
"If you scream, I'll kill you," he said.