Coven (6 page)

Was her period coming? A cramp spasmed.
Suddenly she felt so sick she had to pull over. The cramp darted up
like a spike, or, perhaps, a penis. A headache flared. Yes, it must
be her period. “The Red Tide,” some of the girls called it. Why
should women have to bleed from their wombs once a month? It wasn’t
fair. Men should have to bleed from their penises too, then. But
next her nose began to bleed, and that had never happened
before.

Dizzy, she wiped her nose
with a napkin, then she felt fine again.
Weird,
she thought. When she got back
on the road, she realized her period wasn’t due for another
week.

The agro site was pitch dark.

She stopped in the gravel access. The office
lights were out; dark blotted the pens and white stables to ghosts
of themselves, and the front gates were chained shut. Mr. Sladder’s
little security car wasn’t to be seen. She looked past the wooden
post fences, past the stables. In the distance, fog rolled
along the wood line.

Power failure,
she thought. Maybe Mr. Sladder’s car was inside
the gate. But when she approached the compound, she knew something
else was wrong.

She got out of the car.
Total silence yawned over the site.
Of
course it’s quiet,
she tried to assure
herself. It’s the middle of the night. But it was more than that,
wasn’t it? The site was
too
quiet.

“
Mr. Sladder, are you in
there?” She reached in and honked her horn. The night sucked up the
sound. “Mr. Sladder!”

Headlights roved across her back. Startled,
she turned.

Mr. Sladder was creaking out of the little
white security car. He put a piece of gum in his mouth. “Nellapee?
Oh, you come to see the horses, did you? ’Fraid we gotta
problem.”

“
What happened to the
lights?”

“
Dag power went out. I just
come from the power station down the road. Thought some dag kids
mighta got in there, messed with the transformers or
somethin’.”

“
Did they?”

“
Nope. Place was locked up
tight. Come on, honey.”

He unlocked the front gate and took her to
the office, leading with a big boxy flashlight. “Dag quiet out
here, ain’t it?”

Penelope didn’t hear him. She was looking
out past the fence again. The fog seemed closer, thicker. It was
eerie.

“
Be with ya in a minute,
darlin’. Got to raise me some heck with them morons down campus.”
He sat at the desk and dialed the phone. Was it the chair that
creaked, or his joints?

Penelope stood timidly. The flashlight
seemed to warp the room.

First Mr. Sladder called the campus physical
plant department. He was told that no power failures had been
reported on campus and that the station meters showed no
fluctuations into the agro site. He called the state police and was
told that no traffic accidents that might’ve brought down a power
line had been reported. Lastly he called the power company, who
could not account for their power loss. But a “crew” would be sent
“first thing.” “First thing when?” Mr. Sladder shouted into the
phone. “First thing next week? Next month? Lugheads!” He hung up,
sputtering. “Dag dabbit. Like to kick ’em all in their
bee hinds, I would. Ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of blammed
shammers.” The draining light made him look shrunken in the stiff
uniform. His hat with a big badge on it sat ludicrously atop his
cropped head.

“
Come on, Nellapee.” He
gave her a flashlight. “Let’s go check the junction box. I musta
overlooked somethin’.”

Outside smelled funny. Something vaguely
bitter meshed with the usual ripe stable smells. They walked
between the white buildings. Penelope saw a flask in Mr. Sladder’s
back pocket.

The old man looked worried. Could he be as
afraid of the dark as she? She glanced past the fences to see how
far the fog had crept, then realized they were walking in it. It
came up nearly to her knees.

“
Dag ground fog creeps up
on ya. A fella can’t see where he’s walkin’. Careful of holes, hon.
Holes all over the dag place.”

Mr. Sladder slid into the utility shed as if
swallowed, light and all. Penelope stood alone in the fog, which
the moon had made opaque—a murky, graying half glow.

“
Blam it! Look at
this!”

Penelope entered the shed, which was full of
coursing rings of light. She smirked at an odor like burned
plastic.

“
Power surge musta blowed
through here. Fuse housing melted ’fore the breaker pole could
trip.”

The black pop switch on the center box
read “On.” The main class CTL fuse sat in the melted carrier
like a nugget of coal.

“
Has this happened before?”
she asked.

“
Well, sure, honey. The
lugheads don’t regulate the power proper is what. Just ain’t never
happened this bad.”

“
But you can fix it,
right?”

“
Me? Naw, hon. Have to get
a ’lectrician out here to replace these boxes.” Mr. Sladder
scratched his ear. Was 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 was that simple.
If you want the
girl, you go through me first.
Becalmed,
then, he opened the door and stepped into the aisle.

Penelope peeped around. The massive figure
had stopped halfway down the corridor. He held the ax from shoulder
to hip.

“
Hey, you fat tub!” Mr.
Sladder yelled. “Puttin’ in some overtime with the knife and fork,
huh? Fellas don’t come no fatter, that’s for dag sure.”

The figure faltered. “I’m not fat,” it said.
“A trifle overweight perhaps, but I wouldn’t say—”

Mr. Sladder laughed. “Trifle! Who you
kiddin’ trifle? I seen sea cows in Disney World skinnier than you,
ya big tub!”