Coven by David Barnett Read Free Book Online Page A

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,