Hen's Teeth

The vile rain. A poor creature, changed.

HEN’S TEETH

HEN’S TEETH

“Do you suppose that the chickens mind the rain?” Alexander was contemplative, and asked the question to nobody in particular. It seemed unlikely that anyone would hear him, over the lashing wet beyond the window. The panes rattled with the primordial force of it. With the black of it all, it was difficult to see where the wet touch ended, and the window began. If you squinted, it almost seemed like fingers were pressing in, from the outside.

But his father had heard. “They’re used to it.”

And they were, Alexander supposed. But it couldn’t be pleasant. He often wondered if they should bring them inside – but where would they go? There wasn’t room in the house. They had their metal coop, and that should be enough. He imagined it rattling and screaming in the depths of the violent night. He imagined poor Chaunter, huddled in the fervour of terror, her feathers slick with…sweat? But chickens didn’t sweat, whether due to fear or anything else, he was certain.

The night seemed darker, when the rain came.

In times of rainfall, the black outside became a vortex of oily midnight. And its effect was clear, when the day arrived.

‘Residue,’ they called it.

Residue from what? It was never made clear to him. And yet in the morning, everything would be coated in its umbrous, slick film. He had known the sight of it since he had been a child, and it seemed…normal. Typical.

But Alexander grew increasingly concerned at the sight of it. Sometimes it was as though great cans of sickly paint had been thrown across their yard. Other times it was as though dread hell-slugs had manifested, and sluiced their essence over the world.

It was neither of those things, though. It was something else entirely.

‘Run-off’ he’d also heard his father refer to it as. Once, when he was drunk, he had called it, ‘that fucking disaster.’

A disaster from the sky. An eternal, recurring, disaster.

When the rains approached, the sky would become much darker, and seem to swell with fury. Not the anger of a normal storm – he knew those – but the hatred of something else. If he dared to, as a child, he would watch that approach. It sometimes transformed into a face, stretched and bulbous across the entire firmament.

But it wasn’t a face. It was just rain approaching, from the distant, dark mountains.

It was here now. He watched it. The unguent spit cascading across everything, spiking poor Chaunter’s coop.

A shadow broke away from the rest of the darkness and seemed to flit through the yard.

Was that…Chaunter?

He didn’t dare ask. His father wouldn’t allow him to leave, in any case.

He hoped he was wrong. He hoped that she was nestled, fat and sleepy, in her coop.

-

Alexander couldn’t find Chaunter, in the clear dawn. The other hens clucked at one another, though mutedly, as if the quiet of shock.

He was himself shocked by her absence in the coop, and he and his father were more surprised to find the change to the structure.

“Looks like something bored its way in,” his father observed, indicating to the tunnel of wire and wood and metal that had splayed outward, forcefully. “Your hen probably got got by a fox.”

Outward. Alexander was perturbed. Nothing had forced its way in. How could a fox dig through metal? And when was the last time anyone had heard of a fox active during the black rain?

Alexander, in turn, pointed to the black drips seeping from the seams at the coop’s roof. “I think some of it got in,” he said.

His father’s eyes darkened at the sight, which he had missed, and he simply nodded. “I’ll get that patched.”

--

It was two days later that Alexander found her. It was another strangeness – a flit of shadow, this time in the bronze of evening. But the shadow, though quick, had been a rusty red, and he knew instinctively that it was Chaunter. He followed her into the undergrowth across the tree-line from their family yard.

In the half-gloom of the shrubbery, beady eyes looked back at him. Not with the familiarity he had come to expect, but with something more like defiance.

She shivered, and her auburn feathers were flecked and greased with shadow. She was marred by the rains.

“It’s okay, girl,” Alexander ventured, but he paused.

There was something else. A deep rattle. A laboured breath, like something from a rasping man, not a bird.

Even as he stopped, Chaunter made to flee, rustling her feathers and springing to leap further into the beyond of the thicket. Why would she flee? Alexander reached out hard and grasped her before she could do so.

He only relented as a stabbing pain throbbed throughout his hand, causing him to relinquish his grip. Chaunter was a shadow in the wind, and was gone. Her movement had been erratic, jostling up and down as though lumbering – albeit quickly – on strange feet.

He inspected his forearm, lacerated and bleeding as though torn by the spur of a rooster. But Chaunter was a calm hen. A good bird. Just spooked…

From that brutally-carved seam, he plucked a single tooth. Hard, and square, and black as oblivion.

--

Alexander continued to fret after her.

“She’ll be back, eventually,” his father advised. “They get a taste of freedom, and if a fox don’t get her, she’ll be back. We should’ve got a rooster, to keep them in line.”

That sounded right, and sensible. But in the night, he heard his father praying. He was not a pious man, usually.

“Take it. Whatever it is, don’t let it back.”

--

He had been right.

She came back.

The defiance shone ever more painfully in her beady eyes, and the other hens – who had been cackling and clucking just moments before – turned silent.

“Chaunter…” Alexander made to whisper, but his father cut him off before he could do so.

“That’s not your bird. Not anymore.”

And it wasn’t. Not really. There had been no further rain, but her feathers were tarred with it – a midnight sweat. More than that, it seemed to fester in mounds as though vile boils, ripe to burst. She seemed more rooster than hen now, all sharp and sinewy and certain. Alexander shirked. This was not the bird he had cradled, and stroked, and cared for. The creature wore poison like a cloak.

And then there was the teeth, erupting from her beak in all directions. Square, and flat, and human. She seemed to flash a dread smile with them.

She lumbered toward them, on malformed feet that seemed to have been stolen from something else. Unwieldy and wrong and flat, like a nightmare vision of what a diseased human might walk on.

He found himself wishing that a fox had taken her.

Alexander did not think that she would attack them. He had to think that the rain could not fundamentally change a sweet creature in such a way. But Chaunter, standing defiant and warped and twisted and other, was not given the chance to prove herself. His father raised the gun and did not hesitate; its crack rang out sharp and true and final.

“Vile fucking thing,” was all his father had said. Somehow the epitaph was more upsetting to Alexander than the death itself. Chaunter – the hen that he had known – had never been vile.

Until she swallowed that vileness.

--

He had been sent to bed, but Alexander knew what his father was doing. He slipped out and observed the ritual. Chaunter was just a hen; a hen did not have a funeral. And in the end, she wasn’t even that – she had become something else.

And it was certainly not a funeral. He watched with growing disgust as his father beheaded what remained of the corpse, slit across the skin. Each opening burst with oily ink. The workshop was splashed with it, this vile ichor.

He could not remain and watch. He peeled away just as his father had cracked the body open wider and began to pull some other secret from the desiccated carcass. A small, shadowy thing, all feet and teeth and bone and…

--

The rain would come again, sometime soon. The air burgeoned with it again. It was a promise; a dread threat.

What was coming down from the mountains? What was so vile, so twisted and primordial?

Alexander found himself rubbing the wound that Chaunter had left him; the last grasping memory of her and her terrifying form. In certain lights, the wound seemed to pulse with black.