She didn’t open the other eye. “Fine.”
“You were up before dawn this morning,” Monsieur Le Coq stated, recalling asking her about her worm hunting that morning.
“Yes. The worms are only out at night, so you have to get up when it’s dark if you want to catch them.”
“Gamin said that you saw Monsieur Marcel this morning. Have you seen him on other mornings?”
“No. He doesn’t usually come out until after Rex sounds the morning alarm.”
“Thank you for your time, Mademoiselle. You have been most helpful.”
Monsieur Le Coq ushered Gamin outside the coop. “It seems that Monsieur Marcel might have seen who killed Rex.”
“Are we going to question him?” Gamin asked.
“No, I don’t think so. The Monsieur doesn’t speak chicken.”
Monsieur Le Coq touched his wing to his beak. The investigation was at a standstill. He could not question the human and there was no one else to question. The killer might never be found.
“What now, Sir?” Gamin asked.
From the back door of the house, Monsieur Marcel appeared. He walked past the chicken coop and towards the barn.
“Let us follow him,” said Monsieur Le Coq. “Maybe we’ll find more clues.”
They ran across the yard, keeping the man in sight until he disappeared around the corner of the barn.
Monsieur Le Coq stopped at the edge of the barn. He could feel Gamin pushing his way in front of him.
“Look around the corner,” he instructed the young chick. “Do you see Monsieur Marcel?”
“Uh huh. He’s at the place we found Rex’s feathers.”
Monsieur peered around the corner of the barn.
Monsieur Marcel was with the old rooster at the stump. He was holding him sideways by the legs, resting his head on the flat top of the wood. The bird didn’t move. In one swift movement, Monsieur Marcel brought the small woodchopper down, severing the rooster’s head from his body.
Monsieur Le Coq’s mouth hung open.
Monsieur Marcel was the murderer?
No.
It couldn’t be him. He and the madame cared for them. The madame took eggs to hatch and raise the chicks as her own. The madame fed them and the monsieur kept predators like Faucon away.
The macabre scene played out in front of him. The rooster ran about without his head, spraying blood everywhere while his beak moved in silent screams on the ground.
The squeak from below him reminded him the chick was there. “Run back to the yard! Now. And stay there. Tell no one what you saw.”
He had to push the young one along to get him to leave.
Should he tell the others that the person they trusted with their lives was killing them? It was only fair to let them know. They should no longer go on under the delusion that the Monsieur and Madame cared for them. They were tyrants using them for their sick purposes.
With a heavy heart, Monsieur Le Coq returned to the yard. The other birds were in a frenzy. It seems the chick had not kept what he saw to himself.
“Is it true? Did Monsieur Marcel murder Rex?” Mademoiselle Padovana asked when he entered the coop.
“I’m afraid it is. And now the old rooster,” Monsieur Le Coq said.
“Are we all going to die?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know. It appears as if Monsieur Marcel prefers to kill cocks and roosters, but there is no guarantee that he won’t go after the hens as well.”
“What are we going to do?” Mademoiselle Padovana asked.
“Fight back!” Monsieur Le Coq raised a wing in the air.
The La Flèche imitated him. “Fight!” they said in unison.
Monsieur Le Coq walked around the coop, talking to each chicken as if they were the only ones in the coop.
“Show them no kindness. Show no cooperation. Do not go freely with them. When they come for your eggs, bite them.”
Monsieur Le Coq hopped up on the perch above the flock.
“We will no longer be their captives.”
“We are to revolt?” one of the La Flèche asked.
“Non, ce n’est pas une révolte, c’est une révolution.”
The End
About the Author
Dawn Witzke writes speculative fiction tales of vice and virtue. She is the author of the Underground Series and a bunch of short stories. She hails from flyover country where she lives with her husband, evil minions, and their flock of birds. Find out more at https://dawnwitzke.com
A Chicken for Miss Cuthbert
An Earthcore Story
Grace Bridges
A Chicken for Miss Cuthbert
Grace Bridges
Laura Schultz peered down through the canopy of the big pohutukawa tree and hoped her viscosity calculations had been correct. To be fair, success relied less on the substance itself than on the timing of its delivery, to which end she had deputised her twin sister.
Leaves rustled and Alena pulled herself up to a perch nearby. “I think I got it.”
They waited in silence, a gentle breeze providing a welcome coolness on this summer evening.
The screaming began, a horrified wail cut off short, followed by another, then a whole bevy of them. The twins grinned at each other.
“Great job,” said Laura, and held up a fist as if to bump.
Alena raised hers and moved it up and down in a knuckle pass without touching. “We’re that good.”
Whimpers still sounded from the direction of the gym entrance, interspersed with the shouts of a teacher. It was Mrs. Jones, Laura thought. Not a bad type, but too strict.
The group passed underneath the branches. Laura peered down and smothered a laugh at the sight of the white gym shirts daubed with her mixture of tomato sauce and engine oil they’d found in the maintenance shed. Those stains weren’t going anywhere.
Finally, Mrs. Jones passed, shepherding one of the other girls—little Belle, it was, talking nonstop through hiccupping sobs. “As soon as we opened the door, the—the water balloons fell on us. Except it—it wasn’t water, and they were regular balloons, you know, the big ones—” Belle gestured to show the size, and she and her teacher walked on out of sight.
Alena shifted her weight as if to climb down.
Laura held up a hand. “No, wait!”
They froze. Everything was still and quiet. Moments stretched into a minute.
Alena shrugged, and swung to the next branch down. Laura waited.
Reaching the ground, Alena brushed herself off, and looked in the direction the group had gone. She raised an arm and an elbow and twitched them towards each other to begin a sprinkler dance move.
Before the “sprinkler” could spin, a shadow moved behind her.
Laura bit her lip. She couldn’t help her now.
A large hand descended on Alena’s shoulder and she jumped six inches in the air. She turned, her face a mask of horror.
“Interesting coincidence, that you were up in that tree just now.”
Oh, no. Laura closed her eyes. It was Miss Cuthbert, the principal.
“I—” Alena appeared to have lost the power of speech.
“No need to say anything. I can see it written on your face.” Miss Cuthbert marched off, her grip firm on Alena’s shoulder, propelling her ahead. Alena didn’t look back, of course.
Laura didn’t feel too bad. After all, she’d taken the rap for the scheme they’d cooked up yesterday, in which they had filled all the staffroom’s sugar bowls with salt. At least, she’d taken as much punishment as they ever dished out at St. Gerhard’s: an extra round of chores on the roster. Once they’d confiscated her phone for a week, there wasn’t much else in the way of a real threat.
It might seem unlikely for them to be found out so soon in both cases, but they’d been here nearly a week and the teachers were starting to twig that the excessive number of pranks might all be from a single source. Or rather, a double source of double trouble. Laura smirked. They’d show th
e teachers yet. They’d show their parents this boarding school was a bad idea.
When Miss Cuthbert’s heavy steps finally faded, Laura climbed out of the tree and headed in the opposite direction, back towards the dorms. She climbed upstairs and slipped into the tiny room she shared with her sister, shut the door and hoisted herself to the top bunk. It creaked slightly as she flopped down and closed her eyes.
She didn’t have long to wait. The door opened. Laura peered over the edge.
Alena stomped in and slammed the door, her dancer’s frame seething with tension. “Urgh!” she spat out.
“What did she do?” Laura rested her head on her hand, only to receive a glare.
“She’s moving me. I’m supposed to pack all my stuff and use a bed in the big dorm.”
Laura swung upright and dangled her feet over the bed’s edge several feet from the floor. “But—but she can’t do that! Dad paid for this private room for us—”
Alena hauled out a duffel. “You think I didn’t try telling her that? See if you can do any better.”
There was a rap on the door. “I said no talking!” The voice was muffled, but unmistakably Miss Cuthbert’s.
“She’s trying to stop us from planning stuff.” Laura bounced her left foot on the ladder.
Alena rolled her eyes. “Well, duh.”
“This calls for Plan B.”
The two locked gazes. Alena nodded. “Plan B it is.” She stuffed a few more things in her bag and shuffled to the door.
After she was gone, Laura glanced at the two tiny desks and grinned. Both were still piled high with schoolbooks.
As the midnight hour drew near, Laura opened the ancient wooden window of her room. It was well-oiled by now, of course, and swung out without a sound. She hooked the climbing rope to the radiator and fed it gently out until its full length was extended. A final check of the room—yes, the door was locked from the inside—and she pulled herself up onto the windowsill.
Between the knots in the rope and an occasional push on the nearby drainpipe, she made her way past the darkened ground-floor window below hers and dropped to a crouch in the bushes. A critical glance up at the rope told her the brick-like camouflage colouring would hold for now, but she’d do well to seek out a more permanent type of fabric paint.
Darting among shadows cast by the nearly-full moon, she made her way back to the pohutukawa tree. Climbing it was only slightly harder in the dark. Laura heaved herself up to her usual perch and settled comfortably.
“There you are.”
The whisper jolted Laura, but she recovered quickly. “You’re early.”
“Meh. I got bored waiting. Everyone in the big dorm just goes to sleep at lights out, can you imagine how boring their little lives must be?”
“I know, right?”
They giggled a little, then hushed. That small sound was unlikely to be mistaken for a late-waking pigeon, if anyone had happened to hear it. Suspicion would be running high tonight among the staff. But the night remained still.
“Plan B works at least, so that’s good,” said Alena.
They’d discussed meeting here at midnight in case of separation. “Easy enough to get out of the dorm, then?”
“Oh, I just walked out.”
“And all the way downstairs and out the front door? Heh. Cool.” Laura nodded in the dark.
Alena took a deep breath and huffed it out. “So now that we’re here—what next?”
“Seems pretty clear to me.”
“Well, yeah, the target’s obvious, but not the method.”
“We do possess the ideas.” Laura tapped her fingers on the rough bark.
“And the creativity.”
The soft approach of footsteps turned them both to stone. A wandering figure paused as if looking up into the branches. Laura held her breath. Finally, the person sighed and walked on.
“So,” said Alena. “I say we throw everything we’ve got at Miss Cuthbert.”
Miss Isobel Cuthbert seated herself at her desk and laid her palms flat on the mahogany surface. It was time to do something about those Schultz twins—why, almost every day this week they’d pulled some kind of outrageous prank.
Yes, she would write to their father.
Diplomatically, of course. He’d made an enormous donation besides the substantial fees and private room for his daughters, and she hated to complain so early in the school year. She began to see why he had been so generous.
She pressed the switch on her computer tower, and it whirred into life. As she waited for it to start up, she gazed at the patch of blue sky beyond the office window. She squinted. Something was falling across the light, like dust motes, but… shiny? Frowning, she got up and walked around the desk, and straight into a cloud of glitter.
It appeared to emanate from the back of the computer. Waving to clear the air, she leaned down and found a piece of paper rolled into a funnel and placed over the computer’s fan. A last handful of glitter blew out of the paper and into her face.
She blinked, avoiding the stuff that came for her eyes. The paper was empty now, and she straightened, peering around the room. As a prank, it was fairly tame, but it meant that someone had been in here overnight, and she had a good idea who it might have been.
A sound of running water from above drew her attention to the ceiling. An innocuous sound. But there wasn’t a bathroom above her office. Her eyes narrowed as the ceiling tiles bulged out to the size of a grapefruit—and burst open.
“Gah!” She spat and grabbed at her face; a yellow liquid with a strong chemical stink poured out of the soggy tiles and all over her carefully groomed hair and suit. Those kids—!
Just then, her door opened and closed. She turned to look. An orange chicken wandered across the polished floor, cooing gently.
The drips of smelly yellow turned into an oozing trail of slime that fell from above. Miss Cuthbert jumped back and stared at her fingers for a moment, now firmly stuck together with the gunk. Something moved above her, and she looked up again just in time to see a tile collapse. From the gap thus formed now fell a colony of roaches.
Miss Cuthbert screamed, but her sidestep was too slow. The insects landed on the goo that covered her and became stuck. The chicken suddenly took an interest and strutted over to peck at the stranded roaches.
It was then that Miss Cuthbert noticed the chicken was wearing a jacket with a bulging pocket on the back. Trembling, she reached for it and pulled out an oblong item with rounded corners. What could it be?
She got her answer when it began to emit red smoke. It floated up and obscured the top half of the room. A fire alarm went off; she strode to the door, but found it jammed. The chicken, unperturbed, continued to stab at the insects attached to her ankles, and she realised half-heartedly that she should probably let it get at the others.
And that is how it came to be that the staff came to find Miss Isobel Cuthbert sitting on the floor of her beslimed office, holding a chicken who pecked roaches out of her hair. She looked up at the shocked faces in the doorway.
The chicken pooped generously onto her lap.
Laura fidgeted on a chair in the deputy principal’s office. Alena sighed beside her and slouched in her seat.
Miss Cuthbert stalked in. She’d changed her clothes, but the slime still stuck to her face and hair. Something moved among the strands, and Laura stared openly. Slime and roaches both hit as planned. Inwardly, she did a fist-pump. Outwardly, only a slight tightening of her fingers gave away her pride in the success of that part of the plan.
Miss Cuthbert sat, with a squelching sound. She glared at the girls. “Your parents entrusted us with your care while they travel for business. They didn’t want you to stay alone in Samoa with a nanny, because you’re in high school now, and your education is important. And we tried, we really did. But you’ve gone too far this time.”
“You were first,” muttered Alena.
“I’m sorry?” Miss Cuthbert narrowed her eyes.
&nb
sp; Alena shrugged. “You sent me to the dorm and wouldn’t let me talk to my sister. That was clearly too far.”
Laura nodded. “You really should have asked our parents before doing something like that.”
“I was hoping for a reasonable conversation with you. See if we could start over.” Miss Cuthbert tilted her head, and a roach fell on the desk. She fixed her icy stare on Laura. “I see now that was too much to expect. You are simply toxic.”
A chill fingered Laura’s insides. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you you’re not supposed to say that to children?”
“I’ve spoken to your father, and he agrees with me.”
Alena gulped so loudly that Laura heard it. “I bet you didn’t use that word with him.”
“Notwithstanding.” Miss Cuthbert straightened in the chair. “I told him I have to expel you.”
The sisters shared a triumphant glance. Yes! They would be getting out of here. Going home. Laura found it within herself to smile at the principal. Maybe she’d even feel sorry for her, one day.
“He has instructed me to send you to live with your grandmother in Rotorua.”
Silence fell.
Laura gaped like a fish for a moment. “But—but who’d ever want to go there? Smelly little town in the middle of nowhere.”
Miss Cuthbert smirked. “That is where you will go. Since your parents want you to stay in New Zealand, your grandmother is the only option that makes sense. Her home will be the best place for you, and Rotorua has some perfectly adequate high schools.”
Claws clicked, and the three turned to the open door, where the chicken calmly walked in and collected the insects that had reached the floor around Miss Cuthbert’s feet. She pointed at it. “Put that bird back where you found it, and get packed. You’re leaving this afternoon.”
The bus pulled away from the dingy terminal with a shudder. Laura said nothing until it finished weaving through city blocks and entered the motorway. As it eased into a higher speed, she turned to her sister. “I still don’t want to go to Rotorua.”
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 9
