The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven Read Online Free PDF

could nothing more threatening than a fiery sword compete with the high pride that only an exalted and exultant sense of self could inspire? (As it happened, it had taken no more than Declan’s own leggett to dispatch him when the time came to snuff out his own quite quenchable flame.)
    In no way was it possible for Kitty not to be standing at her husband’s side when he and the apparition would meet. She jumped, stumbled, and clattered her way down the winding stair. The great hall was crossed in what seemed a single bound and the door flung open with a ruthlessness that almost unhinged it. Having made an end-run maneuver that kept her clear of the visitor, she came to Kieran’s side, where, with a breathless determination, she turned to challenge this latest haunting of her beloved castle.
    But something was wrong. The ghost was talking—talking to her husband. He was speaking not of tenebrous things or sepulchral happenings, but of a subject so commonplace that he could be any Kerryman who had returned after a season’s absence, expecting to be welcomed home.
    â€œI wasn’t looking for it to be that way,” he was saying. “I went to the cliffs, and I was sure the house would be there along with the stretch of pasture, but there’s not so much as a single stone to say where it had all once been.”
    â€œThe sea took it,” Kieran said, his tone as conversational as if he were dispensing information about any everyday happening.
    â€œThat I could tell. But it’s a bit of a surprise to someone not that long away.” During this last, he took note of Kitty standing there, her hand holding fast to Kieran’s arm. “But you’ve got the castle,” the apparition continued, “so I needn’t feel too much regret, should I?”
    â€œNo.” Kitty found it impossible not to whisper. “No need for regrets.”
    â€œBut you miss it, the house.”
    â€œI … I … yes, I miss it. I think I miss it.”
    â€œA lot was lost.”
    â€œYes. A lot. Lost.”
    â€œTaken into the sea.”
    â€œAll taken.” Kitty tried to achieve her husband’s simple conversational tone, but she couldn’t quite do it. “Yes. All. The sea. It … it was the sea that took it.”
    She did not say that the sea had taken him—or, rather, his bones—along with everything else, that she had seen the house become his private mausoleum as he and it sank, without struggle, into the eager waves.
    â€œAnd the garden, too, went along.”
    â€œThe garden. Yes. The garden.”
    â€œAnd all that was in it. Cabbages. Everything.”
    â€œYes. Everything. Everything that was in it.”
    Kieran seemed quite willing to let Kitty do the talking, but she had no idea what she should be saying. She knew she was staring, unable to blink, transfixed. Her lips, too, had lost their easy, effortless mobility, their habit of forming words. Had he come to inquire as to the whereabouts of his remains, to be given some clue that might lead him to the place of his final disposal? Would he hold Kitty accountable for the disappearance of his mortal leavings? All Kitty could hope for at the moment was that, as Taddy and Brid were wont to do, he would vanish. Surely he had accomplished what he had come to accomplish: to announce his presence, charged with the promise that he would reappear from time to time and, in a revision of the usual ghost protocol, engage her and Kieran in conversation.
    But he did not vanish. He simply shifted the sack he was carrying from his left hand to his right, causing the tools inside to clank against one another, a sound not unlike the rattle of collected bones. Was he about to throw at their feet this retrieval from the ocean floor? Would this meeting become a confrontation between the quick and the dead, between Declan Tovey’s indestructible spirit and her and Kieran’s challenged credulity? If