Coven

he disturbed? “Just ain’t too keen on sittin’ around in the dark.” In the flashlight beam, the lines in his old face resembled knife cuts in meat.

Then a series of very loud crisp sounds echoed outside—

chunk. Crack!

Penelope jumped.

Again: chunk. Crack!

“Jiminy peter and Creesus Jeist! Ja hear that!”

She snatched his arm, which was thin as a wood rail in the starched shirt. “What was that? What’s happening?”

“Monkey business is what, dear. Scuse me while I consult my old friend Mr. Johnnie Black.” He took a quick sip from the flask and smacked his lips. “There she goes, much better. Now come on.”

The skinny arm led her out of the shed. The fog was everywhere now, a shifting great lake. It parted murkily around their steps.

“Mr. Sladder—”

“Jus’ you stay behind me, sweetheart.”

“Is someone here?”

“Dag straight I’m afraid, hon. Probably some town lugheads, comin’ up here all the time in their pickups, drinkin’, carryin’ on. ’Swhat happens ta boys when they’se not brung up proper.”

The farthest stables were out of use. Here, a section of the post fence had been broken, the twin crossbeams cracked.

“Looks like someone had a job here,” Mr. Sladder remarked.

Penelope remembered the two robust chunks. They’d been awful, irrevocable sounds. “Was it…an ax that did this?”

“’Fraid so, hon, and a big one, to drop beams as big as these.”

So people were running around the site with axes? “I’m scared, Mr. Sladder!” she whispered. “We have to call the police.”

“We’ll do just that, sugar. But first I wanna check—”

The animals, she finished in thought. An alarm went off in her mind. The horses! The ax! But that was too horrible to even think of…

They glided through the murk to the henhouses. The silence now seemed threatening. She prayed to hear something, but there was no sound at all. Not a rustle. Not even a single, simple cluck.

They aimed their lights through the chicken wire. Mr. Sladder’s words rolled out of his mouth like some slow, dark liquid. “Holy creepin’ Moses. What kind of dag madman—”

Penelope’s throat shivered closed. All the chickens were dead. All of them, dozens, lay on the dirt floor like piles of fluff, little tongues extruding from opened, tiny beaks.

Trails of fog led them to the sheep stable and the cow pen. They didn’t speak, or were perhaps unable to. They seemed to know—

The sheep were all dead, the pigs were all dead, faces slack on the floor. Worse were the cows, sidled over as if dropped. Their legs jutted stiffly, some frozen in rigor.

Penelope was crying. She was running. Dread propelled her down the wood corridors. No, no, please! Not the—

All four horses lay similarly dead.

“Aw, Moses, honey. Don’t look at this.”

Penelope stood with her back to the stable wall. She had no breath. Moonlight poured in through the roof’s gapped joists, tinting the corridor. Mr. Sladder went into the stables as Penelope strained to blank her mind, swallowing sobs.

“Looks like some right sick sons a bitches done poisoned ’em,” Mr. Sladder said.

Tears struggled down Penelope’s cheeks. How could someone kill the horses? They were the only things that meant anything to her. They were her dreams and her joys, and now someone had butchered them for a prank.

But Mr. Sladder said they’d been poisoned. Hadn’t they heard—

“We heard an ax, didn’t we?”

“That we did, Nellapee. No mistakin’ a sound like that. But it wasn’t no ax used on the critters. No wounds, no blood.”

All she saw in her mind, though, was the ax. Mr. Sladder took her to the stablemaster’s office, and as he dialed the phone, Penelope pictured a revolving display of axes in her mind, all shapes and sizes, cutting edges all agleam. It’s out there somewhere, she thought. She could not evade the question: Where’s the person with the ax?

“This is Sladder out at agro. Get me the—”

chunk.

The wooden building shook from the unseen blow. Penelope screamed. “Dag psychos chopped the phone box!” Mr. Sladder whispered. “They’re outside right now. We gotta haul tail to the car.”

Penelope was incoherent, haunted by the image of the ax. It knew—the ax knew everything before they did. Mr. Sladder hustled her back the way they had come. “We slip out back,” he whispered. “We use the buildings for cover. We weave between the buildings to the gate and jump in the car.”

She vaguely understood what he was saying. How could he think so clearly, so soon after hearing the ax? The chunk filled her mind, it possessed her. chunk. It was all the terror in the world. chunk. It was the sound of death.

They scrambled to the end of the stalls. There was the door, their escape. Moonlight drew its shape in imprecise gaps. The door seemed to stumble toward them. Almost there, almost…

chunk.

Penelope squealed shrilly. They froze as the blade bit through the door and then retracted with a creak.

Mr. Sladder was reaching for something in his pocket, but there wasn’t time, as—

chunk. CRACK!

—the ax tore down the exit door.

A figure stood huge in the doorway, shadowed black. The moon made a blazing halo behind its head. A stout arm held the ax half raised, as if to display it for them.

The ax was so huge it didn’t even look like an ax. A giant blade like an upside down L was attached to a haft over a yard long. Its cutting edge was flat. It looked old, like a relic.

“Holy Moses,” Mr. Sladder croaked.

The ax raised slowly, slowly…

Penelope screamed like a train whistle. Mr. Sladder leapt right. A pitchfork leaned out from the half door of the last stall. He was reaching for it, touching it, grabbing it. Then—

chunk.

Mr. Sladder made an indescribable sound, not a scream but a compressed suck. The ax chopped his arm off against the half door.

Now the figure struggled to remove the blade from the wood. Mr. Sladder pushed Penelope down the hall, to the stablemaster’s office and locked the door.

Sladder held the light while instructing Penelope to tie off his stump with a shoelace. Blood glistened at his feet. The old man’s remaining hand dug into his pocket and withdrew a pistol.

But the gun looked puny, while the figure outside, she knew, was huge, and so was the ax. How could something this small stop something that big?

Mr. Sladder got up, gripping the tiny gun. “You just sit tight, sweetie. I’m gonna poke some holes in that tub o’ lard out there. Ain’t gonna let no sick sons a bitches get their grubby paws on you, that’s fer sure.”

“But he has that giant ax! He’ll kill you!”

“Tojo and his whole fudgin’ army couldn’t kill me, puddin’. Be dagged if some fat lughead’s gonna rub me out.”

Mr. Sladder’s resolve was noble and obvious. Though he’d just been divorced of three quarters of his right arm, he put his fear aside. He would let this intruder, this animal killer, have Penelope only over his dead body. It