Full Dark, No Stars

agony. When she blundered into the aisle, I saw her back legs were smeared with blood. She reared up like a horse (something I never saw a cow do before), and when she did, I saw a huge Norway rat

clinging to one of her teats. The weight had stretched the pink stub to a taut length of cartilage. Frozen in surprise (and horror), I thought of how, as a child, Henry would sometimes pul a string of pink bubble-gum out of his mouth. Don’t do that, Arlette would scold him. No one wants to look at what you’ve been chewing.

I raised the gun, then lowered it. How could I shoot, with the rat swinging back and forth like a living weight at the end of a pendulum?

In the aisle now, Achelois lowed and shook her head from side to side, as if that might somehow help. Once al four of her feet were back on the floor, the rat was able to stand on the hay-littered

barnboards. It was like some strange freak puppy with beads of bloodstained milk in its whiskers. I looked around for something to hit it with, but before I could grab the broom Henry had left leaning

against Phemonoe’s stal , Achelois reared again and the rat thumped to the floor. At first I thought she had simply dislodged it, but then I saw the pink and wrinkled stub protruding from the rat’s mouth, like a flesh cigar. The damned thing had torn one of poor Achelois’s teats right off. She laid her head against one of the barn beams and mooed at me tiredly, as if to say: I’ve given you milk all these years and offered no trouble, not like some I could mention, so why did you let this happen to me? Blood was pooling beneath her udder. Even in my shock and revulsion, I didn’t think she would die of her wound, but the sight of her—and of the rat, with her blameless teat in its mouth—fil ed me with rage.

I stil didn’t shoot at it, partly because I was afraid of fire, but mostly because, with the carbon lamp in one hand, I was afraid I’d miss. Instead, I brought the rifle-stock down, hoping to kil this intruder as Henry had kil ed the survivor from the wel with his shovel. But Henry was a boy with quick reflexes, and I was a man of middle age who had been roused from a sound sleep. The rat avoided me with ease

and went trotting up the center aisle. The severed teat bobbed up and down in its mouth, and I realized the rat was eating it—warm and no doubt stil ful of milk—even as it ran. I gave chase, smacked at it twice more, and missed both times. Then I saw where it was running: the pipe leading into the defunct livestock wel . Of course! Rat Boulevard! With the wel fil ed in, it was their only means of egress.

Without it, they’d have been buried alive. Buried with her.

But surely, I thought, that thing is too big for the pipe. It must have come from outside—a nest in the manure pile, perhaps.

It leaped for the opening, and as it did so, it elongated its body in the most amazing fashion. I swung the stock of the varmint gun one last time and shattered it on the lip of the pipe. The rat I missed entirely. When I lowered the carbon lamp to the pipe’s mouth, I caught one blurred glimpse of its hairless tail slithering away into the darkness, and heard its little claws scraping on the galvanized metal.

Then it was gone. My heart was pounding hard enough to put white dots in front of my eyes. I drew in a deep breath, but with it came a stench of putrefaction and decay so strong that I fel back with my hand over my nose. The need to scream was strangled by the need to retch. With that smel in my nostrils I could almost see Arlette at the other end of the pipe, her flesh now teeming with bugs and

maggots, liquefying; her face beginning to drip off her skul , the grin of her lips giving way to the longer-lasting bone grin that lay beneath.

I crawled back from that awful pipe on al fours, spraying vomit first to my left and then to my right, and when my supper was al gone, I gagged up long strings of bile. Through watering eyes I saw that Achelois had gone back into her stal . That was good. At least I wasn’t going to have to chase her through the corn and put a nose-halter on her to lead her back.

What I wanted to do first was plug the pipe—I wanted to do that before anything—but as my gorge quieted, clear thinking reasserted itself. Achelois was the priority. She was a good milker. More