The Hen House





By Martin Alexander
© October 2000



Chapter 1


A Mess in the Henhouse

It was half-past five in the morning: dark, and bitterly cold. Under the thin blanket, Victoria shivered, and curled more tightly into herself, but her warmth wouldn't reach her toes and she drifted out of restless sleep and into wakefulness.

"I'm twelve today," she thought, and then pushed that thought away where it wouldn't make the day any more miserable than it was going to be already.

The square of the window was pale against the misty dawn and she knew that it was time to get up. That blanket had hardly kept the cold at bay and she hopped from foot to foot on the bare boards as she struggled out of her mother's old nightdress and into her clothes. She put on both her pairs of knickers and all three of her t-shirts before slipping on her shorts and then her jeans; and then she pulled her two sweatshirts, one already inside the other, over her head. She was already wearing three pairs of socks, and she sat down on the edge of the sofa to pull her mother's boots on.

The others were asleep upstairs. She hated them.

Victoria's footsteps made hardly any sound on the kitchen's big stone slabs as she stumbled sleepily from the settee to the sink by the door. There was a faint gleam from the stove, but Turnip had banked it up and tamped it down so well before he'd gone to bed that not the slightest bit of heat leaked out to warm the freezing air. The tap snorted, belched air, and spat out a mouthful of icy water. Then it settled to a trickle. Victoria tied back her blonde hair with an elastic band and splashed water quickly onto her face. She gasped. Now she was awake! She crossed the wide room to the great oak door and turned the big old key in the lock. It made a grinding noise and squealed as the bolt shot back. Victoria looked anxiously up at the dim rafters, but there was only a creak and a cough from Turnip, and a cross, sleepy moan from The Hag.

Outside, the farmyard was white with frost and moonlight, and long black shadows spread inky fingers from the fence almost to the barn. Across the fields, the long sheds of Mr Slaughter's Fur Farm lay low against the earth's curve, and beyond that, in the distance, the tops of the huge cooling towers of the nuclear power station drifted white smoke against the black horizon. The paddock next to the farmyard was empty, overgrown and abandoned: Victoria had a faint memory of horses, Sam and King, and her mother smelling of saddle and sweat while the horses steamed. She sniffed, and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her mittened hand. The farmyard pond was covered in ice. There was a barrel there, half-submerged, and Victoria half remembered winters when, wrapped warm against the cold, she'd run across the ice and slid on her bum through the barrel's arch while her mother laughed with anxious pleasure. The tractor slept against its trailer, wheels caked in mud. As she walked across the farmyard towards the enormous henhouse, the loud crunch of frost and gravel under her feet made Victoria feel like a thief. She hated it; hated it. This was her own farm, hers by right, and here she was, tiptoeing across her own yard to do the morning chores while Turnip and The Hag snored under the thick feathers of their quilt.

The sky behind the henhouse was brightening: she'd better hurry, or they'd be up and snarling, and then there would be hell to pay. "Hell to pay" - there was always hell to pay when Turnip woke up, however hard she'd tried to do things right.

First she had to start up the conveyor belts: there were twelve of them, each eight feet wide, running from the farm end of the henhouse down to the enormous pit where all the night's mess was stored until the sludge truck came. And then she had to go into the henhouse and switch on just enough of the lights to see the eggs. She flicked each of the switches on the outside wall, and the conveyor belts started their grumble.

Now she was by the door. Victoria hated chickens and she hated eggs. She hated the smell of feathers and of chicken shit; she hated the way the chickens' sleeping mutter became a roar as she opened the door and switched on those bright lights in pools all down the darkness of the henhouse aisles; she hated their pathetic excitement as she opened the grain chute and pressed the button that would send their gritty breakfast down along the rows of cages into the distance. It would all end up as sludge and eggs.

Victoria reached into the shadow where she knew the lever for the sliding door ought to be. But it wasn't there. Her heart thumped as she realised that the door must be open. "But how could it be?" she wondered, and she stepped inside and reached around, to where the light switches were.

But then she stopped. The door was open, but the silence inside was all wrong. She listened, and her hand found the first familiar switch in the dark. Still she hesitated, straining to hear the rustling and the muttering of all those restless, sleeping chickens. But there was silence, and a strange, heavy smell in the cold morning air. Victoria pressed down on the light switch and blinked at the glare, half turning her head away. And then, as her eyes became accustomed to the light, she looked into the enormous henhouse. Her jaw dropped like a cartoon character's, and if she'd not been so shocked and surprised she would have smiled at the thought of her jaw hitting the floor and bouncing back up again. But her mouth stayed open.

There was a terrible mess everywhere. Every cage, as far down the aisles as she could see, was open: there was blood and feathers everywhere, and the carcases of hundreds of slaughtered chickens were slumped in messy piles of feathers and other bits she tried not to look at.

"There'll be hell to pay!" she thought miserably, and she stepped into the strangely unfamiliar henhouse. The conveyor belts rumbled, eerily loud, making the silence of the hens echo unnaturally in her ears. Victoria picked her way around the rumpled piles and down the main aisle of the henhouse. Nothing moved except for the sludge on the conveyor belts, but in her head the thoughts and questions were bouncing round her skull like dizzy balls in some mad computer game.

What had made this terrible mess? What monster had come in here, pressed the button on the wall that opened all the cages, one by one, and then dragged out the chickens, one by one, each to its dreadful doom? She almost felt sorry for the horrid things. She wasn't afraid, as you or I might have been, that some terrible beast lurked like something out of a movie, waiting for her to step into its jaws. For a start, it was almost day; secondly, she knew she wasn't in a movie; and, most important of all, she had quite enough terrible monsters in Turnip and The Hag, who still snored, oblivious, under their duvet in the farmhouse. But she didn't think of this - she just walked slowly down that aisle, trying to take it all in, blinking hard, as though if she blinked hard enough the henhouse would return to its familiar squawking roar and the eggs would roll down their chutes and into the baskets that she had to drag onto the trolley and wheel down to the egg store at the far end of the henhouse.

And then, right down at that far end of the henhouse, she saw something move. It was a silvery flash; a sort of dog; a bushy tail; and then it was gone. More cautiously, Victoria came to the end of the cages and peered round at the entrance to the egg store. The wooden walls of the henhouse were dark, but the light from outside was beginning to come in through the spider-webbed windows, brighter than the bulbs that hung from the rafters. The door of the egg store gaped black and menacing, and to her surprise, she saw the gleam of slanted eyes glowing in the darkness of the doorway.

She faltered, not knowing quite what to do, pulled towards that door by a curiosity that only just outweighed her fear. She took a step across the concrete floor, and the eyes moved slightly, as if retreating. And then she heard a voice, low and rough-edged. At first she couldn't work out what it was, because it seemed to be inside her head, and yet, somehow, she knew that it came from behind those slanted eyes.

"It's a human. A small one. It doesn't look dangerous." And then a little louder, as if it were talking to her now, "We have been greedy, but we're going to leave. Please let us by."

Victoria took another step, and the eyes moved too, towards her this time, low down, out of the darkness of the doorway and into the gathering light. A black button of a nose, and then silver whiskers; a silver muzzle, black eyes and sharp ears pricked straight up.

"It is a dog!" she thought, and then, as the animal's body came carefully out into the main part of the henhouse and into the light, bringing its big bushy tail too, Victoria realised: it wasn't a dog, but something she'd never seen before - a silver fox. And behind it, filling the gap of the doorway, what seemed like dozens more pairs of eyes, keeping back, out of the light, waiting.

"Hello!" said Victoria aloud, and then she felt stupid, talking to a fox not as she would normally speak to an animal, but as though she was expecting it to reply. And, not entirely to her surprise, it did.



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