CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories

by J. F. Posthumus

  “Rachel, me beauty” Gaius began, falling into the Cornish way of greeting in his disoriented state. He was impressed with how calm his voice sounded. One almost could not tell that, moments ago, his whole body had been shaking. “You grew up with all this magic stuff. You know the local lore. Are there any legends about giant chickens?”

  His girlfriend’s voice came over the bracelet, high and sweet. It sounded as if it were speaking just beside his ear. “On the moors, you mean? Here in Devonshire, there is. I don’t know about Cornwall.”

  “Really? And what might that be?” he asked airily.

  Rachel’s voice took on that tone she used when reciting from memory. “A few centuries ago, a local vicar, here in Devonshire, began dabbling in the dark arts. He possessed a large collection of forbidden books and manuscripts. Once, while he was conducting services, his servant Moorcock opened one of these tomes and, foolishly, began to read. Moorcock was not a learned man, so, of course, he read aloud.

  “He had scarcely read a paragraph when the sky grew dark, and great winds began to shake the cottage. The door blew open, and in came a black hen. It was normal sized at first, but then it began to grow and grow, until it was as big as an ox.

  “At that point, the vicar broke off his sermon and ran home. When he arrived, the hen’s head was brushing the ceiling. The vicar threw down some rice, and as the hen pecked at the grains, it returned to its original size.”

  “What happened to the servant?” Gaius asked.

  “Um… no idea. It’s not part of the legend.”

  “Interesting,” he mused. “Thanks.”

  “Always happy to help,” she replied cheerfully.

  Staring off the way the rooster had gone, Gaius paused, torn. Should he ask Rachel to contact her father, who was an Agent of the Wisecraft? The Agents were part magical policemen and part supernatural animal control. This thing was right up their alley.

  But then he thought of Tyach and of the doc. Agent Griffin was a nice man, but his loyalty was to the laws of the Wise, not to Gaius. Would he want to wipe the memory of everyone who might have encountered the monster bird?

  That was not a price Gaius was willing to pay. He would have to solve this himself.

  Gaius returned home one more time, where he grabbed a bag of chicken feed. He had no rice, but he hoped this would do. He considered asking his father for his wand again but knew that if he explained why he wanted it, the old man would not let him go. Instead, he grabbed the hunk of quartz he kept on the shelf above his bed. It was hardly a thaumaturgy-grade gem, such as normally topped a wand, but it was a type of crystal. This meant that it could hold a few spells. He played two paralysis hexes with his harmonica—the regular, full-body kind, not the special variety he had been practicing—and then cast the Word of Ending twice, the Word of Opening once, and a fog-removing charm for good measure. Each of these spells, he placed into the quartz, which he then put in the pocket of his peacoat.

  In an emergency, he would have something ready.

  Then, tossing the bag of feed over his shoulder, he set out for the moors.

  He found the place that he had been standing when he first saw the giant rooster. With the stone Hurlers at his back, he walked slowly westward. The dusting of snow was melting, so the monster’s huge talons left deep marks in the muddy ground.

  Gaius followed them.

  Lying on his stomach atop a rocky ridge, Gaius focused the binoculars on a seemingly-uninteresting hill surrounded by a low outcropping of crumbling rock. The area was about half an acre in size. Even in the summer, when Bodmin was crawling with hiking and picnicking emmets, as the locals called the tourists, Gaius had never seen a single person climb over that hill.

  To him, that said: obscuration—i.e. magic that deceived the senses, to keep the Unwary away from places of the Wise.

  Could there be something hidden there?

  “Other men get to investigate spies or quest for mythical animals,” he murmured aloud. “While I am stuck following the most stupid of animals, the chicken.”

  Something moved to the north! Gaius swung his binoculars that way.

  The six-foot rooster!

  The gigantic fowl ran across the snowy moors. Gaius tried to keep his binoculars trained on it, shifting this way and that to find a comfortable spot atop the uneven rock. It was hard to concentrate on the black bird with something digging painfully into his stomach. With a hiss of annoyance, he pulled all the bumpy things out of his coat pockets—the harmonica, the quartz, his pocketknife—and thrust them into the seed bag. Then he inched forward, following the big bird, first through the binoculars and then with his naked eye.

  After about five minutes, it approached the wall of crumbling rocks that encircled the area Gaius had noted as suspicious.

  For a micro-second, the rooster walked into solid rock.

  Then, with something like a snap, the knob of the hill was gone, and where it had seemed to be stood a small farm.

  The rooster trotted down an incline to a rusty gate in a high chain link fence that surrounded an open area filled with barnyard fowl. The big black bird pecked a lever on a post, and the gate swung open. It strutted inside, and the gate swung closed behind it. Then, it crossed the entire enclosure, walking near the front fence so that Gaius could only see its upper body as the bottom of the enclosure was lower than the surrounding rocky hillside.

  In the far-right corner stood what looked like a feed dispenser with a green lever to one side and a red one to the other side. The gigantic bird pushed a red lever and lowered its head, as if pecking at newly-dispensed grain. Out of the corner of his eye, Gaius caught a glitter. He moved the binoculars and adjusted the distance.

  Was that a crystal set into the post? A strange thing to put in a run-down chicken coop. Could it hold a spell of some kind? Maybe something to help keep the chickens healthy? No way to tell from where he was. Gaius turned his gaze back to the food dispensers.

  The giant rooster was gone.

  Gaius cautiously closed the rusty wire gate behind him and walked into the enclosure where the black rooster had vanished. A ridge of rock ran all the way around the enclosure, outside the chain link fence. Over this rocky wall, to the west, he could see the tall, slanted roof of a weather-beaten stone cottage. There was no sign of a human owner, though a bit of smoke trailed up from a chimney.

  He wondered who might live in that house. A witch, he wagered. Cornwall was famous for witches. Even the Unwary knew about Tamsin Blight, the “White Witch of Helston” and Betsy, who could kill a horse with a look or keep a pig from dying with a word, even if its throat had been cut. There was even a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, up on the north coast.

  As a child, he had assumed these witches were just myths, like the Hurlers. It had never occurred to him before that these witches might be real, as real as the other young sorcerers with whom he went to school.

  Moving into the enclosure, he surveyed the situation, blinking at what he saw. Slowly, his jaw fell open. Chickens were everywhere, but almost no two were the same.

  When Gaius was six, his mother had died. During her last days—to occupy her little grandson and keep him from being underfoot—his maternal grandmother had given him a large picture book depicting chickens by breed, both mundane breeds and exotic ones. He had spent some of the last hours of his mother’s life giggling at the funnier-looking chickens with her. In the months and early years after she was gone, the book had been his favorite.

  Now, standing here, it was as if the pages of that book had come to life. Gaius had never seen so many breeds of chicken in one place in his life.

  Some were ordinary, such as the two pure white Ixworths—or maybe those were Bresses. He had trouble telling those two breeds apart. Well, at least, without eating them. The Bresse was said to be the best-tasting bird in the world. Others were extraordinary fowl Gaius had never seen before in the flesh, such as the Yokohama, which resembled a black and white phoenix. With
its exotic tail feathers, the Yokohama resembled the kind of fancy rooster one would see on tea towels that city-dwellers bought to give their flats that “country kitchen” touch.

  Gaius walked among the chickens clucking to some and chuckling at others. A brown and black Polish strutted by, with its ridiculous pompom of a crest. The crest was so fluffy that it blocked the bird’s range of vision and made them vulnerable to being carried off by birds of prey. Gaius’s father had stopped stocking them years ago, calling them “the dumbest possible birds.”

  Pulling seeds from his bag, Gaius threw it to the nearer hens. A handful of Dorkings and Old English Game gathered around him, breeds so old that they had been eaten by Romans. As a farmer’s son, Gaius preferred the Dorking. The Old English Game tended to get overly protective of their young and attack his ankles when he came to feed them.

  A motley Brabanter pecked at his offering, a hardy breed that was not particularly pretty but was ideal for surviving on these cold windy moors. Over to the left, he spotted a pair of big, shaggy Cochins. They looked light grey to his eye, but he knew that their color was categorized by the ridiculous name of lavender. The Cochins were a breed so fond of brooding that even the roosters occasionally sat on the eggs. According to some legends, basilisks hatched from the eggs of roosters. Gaius had long suspected that they were really laid by some other creature but incubated by male Cochins.

  A curly-feathered young Frizzle, as shaggy as a Muppet, strutted beside him. Gaius itched for his wand. The fuzzy, goofy little thing was practically begging him to freeze it and watch it flop around in the mud.

  A roof had been built along the back wall, giving the birds a place they could go to avoid rain, snow, or excessive heat. Near the beginning of the roofed section was an egg hatch. It stood open, allowing him to peek within. Gaius drew back in surprise. He was used to Easter Eggers that laid blue eggs and even Olive Eggers who laid green ones, but there were egg colors here that he had never even imagined: reds, pinks, lavenders, weirder colors that only girls knew the names of. Backing away, he nearly stepped on a rare Norfolk Grey that looked almost sullen as it huddled in front of the hutch, as if attempting to avoid the judgmental gaze of three imposing-looking German Deathlayers, with their white heads and spotted bodies.

  Deathlayers were so named because—unlike most hens, who only laid for a set number of years—they were known to lay eggs until the day they dropped dead. Gaius considered them to be the egg-laying equivalent of a D&D character.

  Gaius continued forward, slowly pressing through the birds, using his hiking stick to gently move the hens aside as he searched for where the black rooster could have gone. Was there a back gate he was missing? The fledgling Frizzle ran after him, bumping against his ankle, almost like a dog. He dropped a bit of seed for it. Maybe the bigger birds picked on it, and it was hungry. He looked ahead, scanning the many birds.

  Wait. Was that…

  A large bird sat among the chickens, but it was not the giant rooster. Gaius blinked twice, but his eyes were not deceiving him. Wide body, narrow fuzzy neck, evil-looking eyes, it was an emu. What was an emu doing among the chickens?

  Gaius’s hand went for his wand, but, of course, it was not there. He sighed. Emu could be dangerous. At least, he thought they could. He drew the harmonica from the seed bag and held it in his hand, ready to play the three notes of the paralysis hex, if necessary, but the emu remained where it lay, watching him warily with its beady eyes.

  He turned slowly in a circle. There were over a hundred chickens here, possibly two hundred. This was no mere family chicken coop but nor was it a commercial farm.

  This was a chicken fancier’s farm.

  Apparently, the farmer also fancied emus.

  The little Frizzle ignored the grain and pecked at his ankle. It was constantly underfoot wherever he stepped.

  Putting on his best Foghorn Leghorn accent, Gaius declared, “Go, I say, go away boy. You bother me.”

  The little chicken stopped following him.

  Gaius gave an involuntary surprised laugh. “A chicken finally listened to me. What are the chances of that?”

  He glanced back. The little Frizzle had hunkered down and looked… depressed? Did chickens get depressed?

  “Just kidding, little guy,” he joked, “You can follow me.”

  The little chicken popped up and ran back to his leg.

  Okay. That was weird.

  Then he spotted it. Strutting around on the far side of the enclosure, near the food dispensers, was the black rooster. Only it was small. It strutted around the enclosure, passing a bronze-necked Campine, the black cock was only a tiny bit taller than the hen.

  What the cluck?

  Gaius moved closer for a better look. Something glittered to his left, followed by a plume of red mist, an unpleasantly familiar red mist. Gaius shouted, dropping his bag and hiking stick in surprise, and lunged to the side. Only he lunged to the wrong side, right into the red mist.

  The world turned upside down.

  Or rather, it grew. Everything all around him grew bigger, much bigger. The whole world had become gigantic.

  The chickens had become gigantic.

  Oh, no.

  He had been transformed, hadn’t he?

  Once upon a time, he had gotten into an argument with one of his best friends at school and ended up as a sheep. This was better than that. He could still think. When he had been a sheep, he had not remembered that he was Gaius. That had been a very disturbing evening.

  Gaius looked down, extending one leg, so he could see it, and then putting it back quickly, lest he flop over as his balance seemed off. His legs were chicken legs. His feet were… hidden beneath fluffy white feathers.

  No! No, no, no, no. Don’t tell me, I’m…

  He strutted over to a round black bin containing water and looked over the brim at his reflection.

  Then he closed his eyes very quickly.

  Then he opened them slowly.

  It was true. He was a chicken. And not just any chicken. He was a Sultan—the worst, most foppish of all, fluffy, plushy chickens.

  He gazed at himself in the water. He had pure white feathers, a red V-shaped comb that disappeared under a white crest nearly as ridiculously puffy as that of a Polish, feathery muffs, feathery shanks, blue legs, and five toed feet. If an eighteenth century Corinthian were transformed into a bird, it would be a Sultan.

  Sultans were the foppiest of fops.

  Stepping back from the water, Gaius sighed. Or at least, he tried to. Instead, he just made a kind of a rattling noise.

  Well, it could have been worse, he thought cheerfully. He could have become a Silkie, which were practically puffballs, or a Shamo, which had such long necks that they looked like real-life versions of those stretchy rubber chicken.

  But still, a Sultan?

  Really, fate? Really?

  A cold chill ran through his chickeny body as a new thought struck him, a disturbing thought. He knew very little of the darker side of the World of the Wise. The Cornish witches might be real, but they seemed like a different breed from the cheerful sorcerers he went to school with. Educated privately, passing their secrets from one to another, there was nothing to keep witches from straying into black magic, like the vicar in Rachel’s story—nothing to keep them from practicing their talents on their neighbors. In fact, he realized, a tingle slowly moving up his spine, they might be very bad people indeed—able to perform magic on a mundane population who had absolutely no ability to resist them.

  No wonder the Wise called those without magic the Unwary.

  If he only had brought his wand.

  A frisson of fear nearly paralyzed him. Stuck as a chicken, he could neither play a harmonica nor cast cantrips—for he could neither speak nor make hand gestures. Had he had his wand, however, he would still have been able to use it, because the spells stored in a crystal could be activated by thought. Without it, he was as helpless as the Unwary.

  Of course, i
f his wand had been on him when he was transformed, it might have gone the way of his peacoat and his wellies. So maybe it would not have saved him after all.

  Some days, it sucked to be a sorcerer.

  The little Frizzle had come up beside him. It tilted its head this way and then that. Never in his life had Gaius seen a chicken make such an intelligent-looking gesture. He glanced up at the glitter he had seen right before he transformed. Sure enough, it was the gem he had spotted when he was up on the ridge. Was that what had transformed him? He had seen the red mist that went with transformations come from that direction.

  Had it transformed other people, too?

  “Are you the little tacker who went missing from Clover Farm?” he asked the Frizzle.

  Or he tried to ask.

  Because what he actually said was: “Cock-a-doodle-do!”

  Apparently, being transformed into a chicken did not give him any special chicken-speech powers, because the little Frizzle just stared blankly.

  Either that, or it was just a chicken.

  He looked around again and took two shuffling steps backwards, startled. The black rooster was back! Or, rather, it had grown big again. It cocked its head to the left, a nasty gleam in its eye. This was not good. A murderous monster was on the loose, and Gaius was the size of a rich lady’s lap dog and about as fuzzy.

  But how had the black rooster grown big again?

  Gaius looked around. The gigantic bird was standing right next to the food dispenser. The last thing he had seen before he lost sight of it up on the ridge was the bird pushing the red lever. Then it vanished—apparently because it had shrank to proper chicken-size.

  If the red lever produced something that made a big chicken small, what did the green lever do?

  The great black cock made its way across the enclosure, peering at the fowl. Chickens scattered before it, clucking in fear. Even the emu gave way.