Sam didn’t expect Sheldon to die but, on the plus side, Shelley left behind a terrific Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy book collection. He and his friends all gathered to plunder them. A cluster of humans feasting like vultures on this literary banquet, eyes glittering at the prospect of treasures soon to be theirs.
Sam grabbed a book with a brightly coloured cover and, unaware, picked up a little red book with a faded cover as well, pulling them both into his backpack. ‘Sheldon was a good guy,’ he thought as he stumbled out the door.

Days later, Sam found the small book. Picking it up he noticed the red cover was ragged, made of almost skin-like soft leather, hopefully just calf or pigskin. None of his books had leather covers. This book must be old. He opened it to the title page where he saw an optical illusion as black lines slid in and out all tangled together like snakes. ‘Weird! ‘he thought as he shoved the tiny book back on the shelf.

His dreams that night were troubled. He dreamt of snakes and caverns as old as time. His unconscious mind seemed to be writing a supernatural horror story by H.P. Lovecraft. In the morning, feeling weary, he trudged to work. On the subway, he felt uneasy being underground. He hurried to the surface at journey’s end with a distinct feeling of relief. On the elevator to the 12th floor he felt as if he were standing on a small platform at the top of a long, long pole which swayed from side-to-side.

‘Morbid’, Sam thought, ‘I'm getting morbid’. Back at his familiar, cluttered desk he sank into his chair and felt he had achieved some stability. He booted his computer and began editing the latest instalment of the Books for Kids franchise “The Further Adventures of Perky Pig”.

Perky Pig was a sunny, happy-go lucky piglet, always keen to try something new. He romped through life looking for the kind of adventures kids wished they could go on. Perky never gave up. He was always smiling, and he always won in the end. The cartoon of Perky was on the page before him as he started work on a new piglet adventure.

Sam’s mind veered in another direction. His I\imagination made the pig illustration before him taller and leaner. The leaner pig’s body seemed to move, but not in a friendly way. Perky’s front trotters were sharper. His tongue lolled snake-like from flaccid lips. Skin colour went from pink to grey. Sam jerked back, and his imaginary amendments faded into non-existence, moving back into the small, plump, innocent kind of pig kids liked to play with. The leaner more feral pig still lurked in his mind, a darker vision.

He used to draw a bit. On his break, Sam started to sketch out in his mind what would not be called Perky Pig. He needed a new name for his darker version. He decided to call the beast ‘Pigman’.

After work, Sam ordered in some Thai food. After he ate, he started turning his desk into a drafting table. After pulling together his drawing and painting supplies, he began sketching, working in bold, slashing strokes. The monstrous pig came alive on paper, a vision in red and black.

The story told itself. Pigman was a loner. His only loyalty was to himself. Wealth was not his motivation. His main motivation was power. He liked being in charge. He loved chaos! He didn’t care whom he hurt. Moving forward though the night through blood and wreckage he felt his power grow. Pigman became less pig and more human. His sharp trotter morphed into dagger like fingernails.

Obsessively, Sam worked on the drawings. Telling the story was more difficult. He felt as if there were two of him, arguing with each other but Pigman won and went on the rampage in a Jekyll and Hyde scenario. By night, Pigman roamed sombre city streets seeking mayhem and dark pleasures. The day belonged to Perky Pig. The night, however, belonged to Pigman.

Sam slept and the night brought horrors. He found himself underground in vast cavern, dimly lit by torchlight. Not alone, he walked in a crowd of, perhaps, one hundred beings. Approximately human in size and form, they had the look of beasts, with strangely shaped heads and sharply pointed teeth, which were visible through the sneering gape of their mouths. These beings chanted a slobbery hymn. Sam could not understand the words but, in fear of the things around him, he mimicked their chanting. Looking ahead he saw a faintly glowing altar above which he made out a horrid creature, carved in greenish stone and oozing slime and moisture.
His mind gave up and he departed the dream suddenly, emerging into the reality of an early morning grey dawn. The horrors of the night still clung to him. His job was to create little stories to amuse children. This current reality did not match what he was paid to imagine. Sam felt disconnected, lost. He washed and dressed, prepared and ate breakfast automatically. His malignant dream seemed more real to him than his routine tasks in the grey dawn.

Fearful of being underground, he did not take the subway to work, which meant a long walk. He started early, paying little attention to his surroundings until he came, to a street unknown to him and there a subway stairs leading downwards. The light around him, no longer grey, turned a not unpleasant amber hue. Looking down he saw a brightness, drawing him in. “Can’t be bad if there’s so much light,” he thought. “I can take a short ride the rest of the way to work.” He started down the steps.
Below, the subway platform seemed not quite right. On the wall he saw a poster advertising an old movie, Casablanca. ‘Must be a rerun festival thing,’ he thought. Casablanca dated back to the 1940s. Strange. He was the only passenger waiting for a train, but the overhead signs said he was enroute to downtown. When the train pulled in it had a strangely antique look. He stepped inside the car. The little ads above the seats were unfamiliar. ‘What the heck were Grape Nuts?’

Uneasy, Sam exited to the subway platform before the doors closed. On his last glimpse within he saw a lady passenger wearing a little hat with artificial flowers on it. Her dress, also flower-patterned, had an unfashionably long skirt. Her padded shoulders gave her a kind of square military look and her waist was held in tightly by a belt.

He ran up the steps to the street. When he looked back the subway entrance was gone. Blank cement sidewalk covered the place where it had been. He shivered and moved quickly onward.

At his work building, Sam debated with himself. Elevator or stairs? Tired from the long walk he took the elevator and, fortunately, did not repeat his former experience of vertigo.

The lady in the antique subway car was still on his mind. He described her as a possible character in a Perky Pig tale to Grace, the illustrator, who recognized the dated fashion look he described.

“That’s an Elsa Schiaparelli style from the 1940s - broad square shoulders, wasp waist and below calf length skirt. Grace Jones brought the look back in the 1980s. I don’t think Perky Pig is into fashion. Are you sure you want to use this in one of your stories?” Grace said.

“I guess it would be a bit odd,” said Sam.

“You could add some love interest in the form of a fashionable female piglet.”

“I’ll think about it. Thanks.” Sam wandered back to his desk.

That night he started to create a comic strip of pig adventures, featuring Pigman, and a cheerier character he called Picayune Pig. A female human called Lady of Fashion lurked in the background. He scanned the drawings to digitize them, bought a domain called piggles3.org and uploaded his creations to his new website featuring the doings of his triad of toons. He signed his new comic strip with a pseudonym, Phillip Porcinet.

His nightmares began to fuel his online stories of the two piglike humans and their doings. He even began to pull in some income as the strip became popular. Pigman became darker. Picayune Pig very gradually grew into a hero figure. It’s a rule in comic strips and role-playing games, no matter how fearsome he may be, the villain or monster always loses to the hero in the finale. When, in the end, Pigman was banished to the lower depths Sam placed an ornate “THE END” at the appropriate spot and went to bed. Overnight, the two piggies became a phenomenon as their fanbase grew, probably because of the dark masculine violence portrayed. Soon, Sam would sell the strip and its concept at a good price.

In the morning, Sam remembered the little red book with the writhing, snaky frontispiece and wriggled it out of the shelf where it lay between larger books. Putting it in in his pocket, he took a little trowel from his balcony gardening days and, with it in hand, he set off for his walk to work, determined to ignore any mysterious antique subway entrances. There was a small park on the way. He stopped there and buried the red book, patting down the turf with his little trowel, then stomping firmly on the spot where he had buried the thing. He went happily on his way feeling lighter somehow, and less pig-haunted.

A little brown squirrel had observed his actions. Suspecting food, it vigorously dug up the little book and carried it up a tree in his teeth. Finding it not edible, the squirrel dropped the book in mid leap to another tree. The little red volume was found later by a middle-aged administrative assistant lady, but that’s another story.