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!”
“This is absurd,” the figure said. “I won’t stand for this.”
“I’m surprised you can stand at all, fat as you are.”
The ax raised. The figure, offended, took a step—
—and Mr. Sladder fired the pistol.
Penelope flinched. It wasn’t like TV—the tiny gun made a loud, irritating pop! Then came a ping! A bullet ricocheted off the giant, flat ax blade. Mr. Sladder fired again. The figure howled, fell down, and crawled out the exit.
“He shot me!” he bellowed outside. “He shot me in the ass!”
“Dag straight!” Mr. Sladder affirmed, waving his stump. “Come on back for another if ya like, fatso!”
Penelope squealed, this time in delight. The tiny gun had worked! But then Mr. Sladder said, very slowly:
“What in creepin’ Moses is this?”
Two more figures stepped in the doorway, sleek, slim. They were just standing there. They looked like…women.
—Hello, they said.
But what was that? What was going on?
—We want to eat, please!
They began to step forward.
“You just turn right around!” Mr. Sladder ordered.
The twin silhouettes continued.
“I ain’t kiddin’, sweethearts! Dag dabbit, I ain’t one fer shootin’ a couple of gals, so don’t ya come no closer!”
The figures weren’t stopping, and clearly weren’t going to.
“Daggit! I warned ya, so here it comes!”
Four even shots slapped in Penelope’s ears; she clenched her teeth. When she looked again, the two figures were still coming.
Mr. Sladder scurried back, dragged Penelope out. “Come on, honey. Dag Saturday night specials, can’t hit fudge with ’em. I musta missed all four times.”
“Shoot more!” Penelope screamed.
“I ain’t got no more bullets! Now come on!”
They scrambled down the main stable walk, pushing through swing doors, bam, bam, bam, one after another. Mr. Sladder burst through the last one before the exit and—