CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories

by J. F. Posthumus

  Frozen Chicken Master

  L. Jagi Lamplighter

  Frozen Chicken Master

  L. Jagi Lamplighter

  “’Ere, Farmer Valiant! Come quick! Chickens floppin’ everywhere!”

  Farmer Valiant stomped into the long aluminum-roofed chicken barn, feathers and wood shavings sticking to his mud-spattered wellies. His frantic assistant pointed wordlessly. All around them, white chickens listed like drunken sailors. Some hopped on one foot, their other foot hanging limp. Some dragged one wing. Some wiggled their tail feathers, their heads entirely motionless as they ran into each other, bowling over their fellows.

  “Not this again.” The gruff old man rubbed the back of his sunburned neck and sighed. “I’ll talk to ’im.”

  The Valiant farm, on the outskirts of Minions, Cornwall, specialized in dairy and poultry. The milk was sent by tanker each day to the Cornish Cheese Company there in Minions and the Trewithen Dairy in Lostwithiel, where it was made into, among other things, the world famous Cornwall clotted cream. The chickens, raised in long barns that could easily house up to 96,000 at a time, would be sold as broilers. A small number of speckled Sussexes, Easter Eggers, Bantams, and Lakenvelders, with their distinctive black and white plumage, were kept for their eggs in a traditional chicken coop closer to the old farmhouse, along with some of the native fowl. It was here that the venerable father found his son, surrounded by wobbly Cornish hens.

  “Using that nonsense you learn at school on the livestock again, are ye, b’y?” his father grunted. “Thought I told you no.”

  Gaius Valiant was a short yet handsome boy of seventeen dressed in a plaid shirt, dungarees, and thigh-high, green wellingtons, with his chestnut hair drawn back into a queue. The son was the polar opposite of his taciturn father: cheerful, erudite, light-hearted—yet the two were fond of each other.

  Gaius spoke in a lazy, cheerful drawl that held but a trace of the heavy West Country accent so prevalent in the speech of his father and the farmhands. “You told me not to practice on the cows. You said nothing about the chickens.”

  The young man squinted at a cream-colored Easter Egger as it strutted by. He waved a foot-long length of teak and brass. A stream of blue sparkles left the sapphire set into the wand’s tip and struck the leg of the fowl, who immediately flopped over, unable to move that limb. The rest of the bird’s body flapped about as it clucked in confusion.

  The farmer took off his hat and scratched his balding pate. “You’re scarin' the men, not to mention the fowl.”

  “Can’t you cover for me?” asked his son. “Come up with some crazy explanation? I’m… er… testing a concoction from the labs at Ouroboros Industries? They all know I interned there last summer. This is an unparalleled opportunity for me to learn a spell variation that very few people know. I need to practice if I am to master it, and where else am I to find so many willing…” Gaius glanced at the squawking, wobbling chickens. “Er… uncomplaining test subjects?”

  The old man gazed at him with hawk-like intensity. “If they go off their egg-laying, it’ll be you who misses breakfast.”

  Gaius gestured expansively. “It’s a chance I will have to take.”

  His father watched a hopping speckled hen. The hen gave a sudden squawk and flopped over into the mud.

  Farmer Valiant scowled and snatched the wand from his son’s outstretched hand. “Put this right. This is a farm, not a freak show.”

  “What…? But…? My wand!”

  “You can have this contraption back when school time comes. Until then, see to your chores.”

  Farmer Valiant stomped back to the chicken barns. Gaius stared after his retreating back, crestfallen. Then, sighing, he performed the Word of Ending, raising one finger and moving it in a short horizontal motion as he pronounced the cantrip. Freed from the partial paralysis hex, the hens rushed away from him, back into the chicken coop, clucking scoldingly all the way.

  “Dogs mauled another sheep today,” Farmer Valiant remarked, as he and his son cleaned up after lunch with the farmhands. Hannah, the farmhouse’s housekeeper, was away on her half day. “Up on Bodmin Moor.”

  “This is the fifth time since I came home for winter break,” Gaius said, frowning.

  “Them’s taken fifty sheep so far, altogether.”

  “That’s… a lot of sheep.” Gaius blinked, shocked. “Why doesn't someone do something?”

  His father shrugged. “Can’t catch 'em.”

  Gaius glanced up toward the moors. If he were to take on a pack of feral dogs, even his father would not begrudge him use of his wand, right? His wand represented everything he had become since going away to school. It practically was him.

  Without it, he felt empty, lost.

  “Can I go take a look?” he asked casually.

  His father shook his head. “Tomorrow, the trucks come.”

  “So, load chickens on trucks like mad. Then, clean the barn like mad. Soon as we’re done—maybe next week?—unload chicks like mad. I understand.” Gaius sighed cheerfully.

  His father gave a gruff, nigh-involuntary chuckle. “Such ’tis the lot of a farmer.”

  The next day the trucks came from the distribution company. Workers jumped out and rounded up the broilers, all 96,000 of them. They corralled the chickens, picking some up by their feet and carrying them, several at a time. The company was willing to send more employees and do all this work, but Farmer Valiant chose to increase his profits by volunteering his farmhands to aid in gathering the birds.

  So Gaius labored alongside the permanent farmhands, working well into the night. He did not utter a word of complaint, despite how different this backbreaking task was from his normal day during the school year. He knew how much it mattered to his father to have his son working beside him, so he gritted his teeth at the soreness of his muscles and held his tongue.

  The following week was the yearly cleaning of the chicken barns. The entire farm, even Hannah and the cowhands, pitched in, removing droppings, scraping the dirt floor, laying down new wood shavings, repairing walls, roof panels, and other related tasks. The cows were left to themselves, except at milking time. They could graze on the moors or wander through the center of town as the mood took them. Either way, they would find company in the form of sheep and even ponies owned by other local farmers.

  Minions was that kind of place.

  If only his father would let him have his wand. It would have been so much easier to clean this barn with magic. He had a number of different spells stored in its gem that could have made this job a snap—have the whole place sparkling and smelling like flowers before his father’s workers could say backofforillsmackee.

  Even if he had his wand, however, he probably could not have gotten away with using it openly in front of the entire staff. Most of the farmhands were Unwary—modern mundane folks who knew nothing of the World of the Wise.

  If word were to get out that he had used magic in front of them, the Agents of the Wisecraft would come and wipe their memory. No one deserved that.

  The day after they finished, in rolled the next set of new baby chicks. The chicks came off the trucks in large, brightly-colored plastic crates. So soft and pliant were the little birds at this early stage that dropping the crates caused them no harm. The crates could be tossed from one worker to another without concern.

  In fact, during a water break, Gaius scooped up a handful of the little yellow fluff balls and juggled them. He managed to keep up to six at a time in the air. This was two more than he had been able to do before he went off to school. All that dueling practice must have improved his reflexes.

  His new prowess impressed the farmhands, who grinned and clapped, shouting, “Add more! Add more!” until Farmer Valiant cleared his throat, and they all rapidly rushed back to work.

  Half an hour later, Gaius’s father called for everyone’s attention.

  Farmer Valiant spoke right to the point. “Dogs got Bessie. Wounded Clarabelle, too.”

&nbs
p; “Not Bessie!” Gaius cried, momentarily shaken.

  He recalled feeding Bessie with a bottle back when she was just a wee brown calf. He blinked hard, twice. Nor was he the only one affected; anger erupted among the men. Some called for the dogs on the moors to be poisoned.

  After a time, they glumly returned to work. Gaius sidled up to his father, speaking to him in a low voice. “Father, let me have my wand. I’ll stop these dogs.”

  “Giss on! You use that blasted thing too much. Can’t expect to solve all your problems that way.” His father frowned. Then he added, “I can spare you for the afternoon if you wanna take a stank up on the moor, but you’re not getting’ that blasted contraption back.”

  Gauis sighed.

  His father continued, “Take the binoculars and your cell. If you spot any sign of the pack, call the Council and ask them to send the dog warden. If you can’t get a signal, come right back.”

  “Right. I’ll take a look around then,” Gaius replied.

  He did not add that he had used the Cornish word for a walk precisely once at school. It had been two months before the other students had stopped laughing whenever they saw him. In the greater world, stank meant something else entirely.

  “Take care you hei back before dusk. ’Tis cold as a quilkin up there at night. Oh, one more thing,” his father added. “Tyach swears he saw something big out there when he went to collect the cows. Not a dog.”

  After grabbing the binoculars, his harmonica, his enchanted black bracelet, and a sturdy hiking stick, Gaius found Tyach in the paddock with the heifers. Branok Tyach was balding with a toothy smile, dressed in green dungarees and black wellies. Gaius asked the farmhand for a better description of what he had seen, but Tyach, who had always struck Gaius as bluntly good-natured, seemed strangely reluctant to answer.

  “Father said big. Big… like the Hound of the Baskervilles?” Gaius asked.

  Tyach shuddered, shaking his head. “Weren’t no dog, b’y.”

  “What… was it?” asked Gaius, puzzled. “I’ve never heard of bears in this area.”

  But Tyach refused to say more. He just muttered something like “Wouldn’t believe me if I told ye,” and suggested that Gaius take a look at Bessie’s body.

  As Gaius departed, Tyach called after him “And, b’y, keep a sharp eye out for any sign of that wee ‘un, gone missing from Clover Farms.”

  Bessie’s body had already been hauled away by the knackerman. Gaius headed down to the barn to where the vet was treating Clarabelle. Luckily, the doc had not bandaged her up yet, or it would have been very hard for Gaius to explain why he wanted to unwrap the cow to look at the wounds. Doc Tremeth had sedated the old girl and was scowling at her black and white body in consternation. Gaius instantly understood why. It was a strange wound.

  It did not look at all as if the cow had been mauled by dogs.

  “Ah, young Gaius. How’s school?” the vet asked, looking up with a congenial smile.

  “It’s proper job,” Gaius replied airily. “How’s Clarabelle?”

  “She’ll be all right, but..” The old doc shook his head. “Don’t know what to make of this. Doesn’t look like dogs. Yet it’s becoming common. I’ve tended a number of sheep with wounds like this. Too deep and wide to be claws and teeth. What do ye make of it, b’y?”

  Gaius looked at poor Clarabelle and shook his head. A lump grew in his throat as he again recalled how he had carefully cradled Bessie, the little brown calf whose mama had died, on his lap as he helped to feed her. He had never bottle-fed Clarabelle, but he remembered her as a frisky heifer. He hoped fervently that she would recover.

  Then he froze. He had seen wounds like that once.

  Normally, barnyard fowl let mice come and go, but once, a mouse had slipped into the broiler barns. The chickens had pecked it to death. A farmhand had chased the birds off before they could eat it—which chickens will do—and Gaius had been given the task of removing the thing.

  The wounds on the little body had looked like this…only tiny.

  Mist was moving across the moors as Gaius hiked up the rolling hill where Valiant Farm backed onto Bodmin Moor. A light dusting of snow covered the rocky outcroppings and brown grass. After a quarter of an hour, he reached The Hurlers, three circles of standing stones that local legend claimed were hurling players who foolishly did not stop their game when dawn came on some holy day and, thus, were turned to stone. As a child, Gaius had assumed this was just fancy. Now that he knew about magic; however, he could not help wondering, had these standing stones once been men?

  There were a great deal more strange things in the world than he had previously imagined. His thoughts returned to Clarabelle and the dead mouse. Could Tyach have seen a gigantic chicken? Certainly would have explained why the man was hesitant to speak. Gaius lived every day with strange things, and he would have had trouble believing such a story, too.

  Turning up the collar of his peacoat against the winter chill, he hiked up the gravelly path, shading his brow as he searched for any sign of dogs, injured livestock, or the little boy Tyach had mentioned, the grandson of Farmer Angove over at Four Clover Farms. Word had come last night that the five-year-old had wandered onto the moors and had not been seen since.

  That had been five days ago.

  People went missing on the moors, a few every year. Usually, they were strangers who had come up here to hike, but occasionally, they were locals, like Mrs. Fiddock, the butcher’s wife, who went out for her daily stank last summer and never returned.

  Almost none of them were ever found.

  Gaius continued across the mist-shrouded, snow-speckled moors. At nine hundred and twenty feet above sea level, Minions was the highest town in Cornwall, but Bodmin Moor was even higher. With all the rises and old quarries, dogs—or gigantic barnyard fowls—could hide almost anywhere.

  Was that a motion? Gaius reached for the comforting presence of his wand, but, of course, it was not in its customary place by his hip.

  He sighed.

  Years of hard work had made him the best duelist at his school, but dueling required previously-prepared spells. The sapphire at the tip of his wand contained thousands of spells, ready to be fired by a thought. At school, casting charges to be stored in that gem was one of his main free-time activities. It was this preparedness that had led to him becoming an excellent duelist.

  Without the pre-stored spells, however, sorcery was a much slower and more awkward art. Many types of spells could not be performed at all without considerable preparation. Worse, because Gaius had been focusing his main effort on dueling, he had not been sharpening many other skills. Instead of performing many spells himself, he would talk other students into casting them for him. So, without his wand, up here on the moors, he was almost as unprotected as the Unwary.

  Almost.

  Gaius pulled his harmonica from his pocket. There were two types of spells that could be cast instantly or at least on the fly. The first was cantrips, such as the Word of Ending that he had used to release the hapless chickens from his paralysis hex. These were short words or phrases accompanied by hand gestures.

  The second was enchantment, which included hexes, and, particularly, charms that altered the weather. Enchantments were music-based. If one tried to whistle or sing, the magical force moving through one’s body vibrated and tickled too much, making it impossible to maintain the correct tones, and the spell was disrupted. With an instrument, however, one could focus the magic and perform amazing feats. Luckily, the spell for dispelling fog was one of the first things they had been taught his freshman year.

  Gaius put the harmonica to his lips and played the short tune. He was only a mediocre player, but luckily, one did not need to be a virtuoso to perform satisfactory enchantments.

  To his delight, the fog began to lift almost immediately.

  The mist vanished, and the snowy moors appeared. Northward, Bodmin Moor spread before him, brown hills and quaint rock formations, such as the Cheesewring
er, a giant stone outcropping that resembled the layers of hand-made cheese. Eastward, the hillside sloped downward to reveal the town and, some forty miles away, the rolling hills of Dartmoor National Park. With a slight, wry smile, Gaius waved. His girlfriend lived over that way. He turned back to Bodmir Moor. To the south lay farmlands, including his family farm. Westward…

  There, staring him in the face, was a gigantic black rooster.

  Sh*t! Giant Chicken!

  They stared eye to eye, the young man and the six-foot cock. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Gaius noted that the creature was an Ayam Ceman, a breed known for everything about them being black. Their feathers were black. Their cockscombs were black. Their eggs were black. Their fluffy chicks were black. Even their meat was black.

  Then, Gaius screamed.

  Startled, the giant rooster let out an ear-splitting Cock-a-doodle-do. Then, it spun and fled, strutting away with its great chicken legs, across the rocks of the rolling moors.

  “Stone the crows!” Gaius gasped. “One peck and that thing could have murderized me!”

  He pulled out his phone, his hand trembling. Then he just stared at it. Who in the world did he think he was going to call with this thing, even if he could get a signal up on the moors, which, frankly, he never had before?

  Was he going to explain to the local dog warden that he had seen a six-foot rooster?

  Should he ask for the humongous-barnyard-fowl warden?

  He put the phone away.

  Reaching under his sleeve, he touched the bracelet, a hoop of black metal, that he wore beneath his coat. With this, he could call a select group of other students who wore similar devices. Most of them could not help him as they lived on other continents. But his girlfriend was on this circuit, and she lived on Dartmoor, just over the horizon. She also knew an amazing amount of magical world trivia.