His eyes swept across the ground as he again wondered if some invisible poison might be soaked into the soil, undetectable fumes rising around him, invading his body, poisoning and twisting his mind.

He forced the unpleasant thought away and peered through the open doors.

For a moment, he was confused.  He turned and looked back toward the sunlit front doors.  The barn was big.  Each set of double doors was more than large enough to allow entry for a sizable tractor, but it could not have been much bigger than this room when he stood staring at it from outside.  Yet through this door waited a second room easily twice as long as the first.  Empty stalls lined the walls on either side of a wide walkway that reached far past where the barn should have ended given its exterior dimensions.

It was impossible.  It was like stepping inside an M. C. Escher work.

It had to be an optical illusion of some sort.  There was no other logical explanation.

But then again, why would anything here be logical?  Nothing he had done today was logical.

And even as he tried to make himself accept what was happening to him, he realized that he recalled discovering these same impossible dimensions in his dream.

Movement drew his attention to the far end of the second room.  Something that appeared to be some kind of chicken was making its way across the floor near the next set of double doors.

Another bird…

As he watched it, he quickly realized that there was something wrong with the creature.  Though small and plump, like a chicken, it wasn’t moving like any barnyard fowl he had ever seen.  It didn’t hold its head up as it walked, surveying the room in lively jerks.  Instead, it looked as if it were hanging its head in a curiously forlorn manner.  Also, it didn’t strut like a chicken.  Instead, it moved in slow, lurching motions, as if on the verge of death.  It was either the most depressed little chicken he had ever laid eyes on or there was something very not right about it.

Again, that awful bleating noise came.  It seemed to come from beyond the far doorway.  It reminded him a little of a lamb or a calf, but it was gruff and choked, like something slowly strangling to death in the jaws of a steel snare.

The chicken-thing continued its labored lurching, unfazed by the terrible sound.

Still standing in the doorway, Eric checked his cell phone.  He wasn’t remotely surprised to see that he had no signal.  He returned it to his pocket and looked around again.  The sunlight drilled through the holes in the rusted roof and the gaps between the boards in the walls, just like in the last room of the impossible barn, but it did not seem nearly as warm and bright as it should have been.  The air felt cold against his skin.  Even the sound of the gentle wind outside was muted.  Only that awful bleating noise disturbed the stillness.

And yet, even the weirdness was familiar.  His dream unfolded before him, promising to reveal to him in vivid detail why he had awakened breathless and afraid these past three nights, but only if he continued to walk in the footprints of the nightmare.

Glancing over his shoulder at the bright strip of sunlight once more, he braced himself for whatever horrors his nightmare still had in store for him and continued toward the far doors and the mysteries that waited beyond them.

Chapter Five

It felt wrong in here.  The wrongness weighed down the air, seeming to ooze into his very pores.

And there was a stench, too.  He hadn’t noticed it when he was standing in the doorway, but as he moved deeper into the long, gloomy interior of the barn, it enveloped him.  It was far worse than the odor of ordinary farm animals.  It was a death-like stench, the sickly reek of decay.

He peered into each open stall as he passed it, finding one after another empty, just like in the previous room, until, about a third of the distance between the two sets of doors, he found a second chicken (or whatever the hell the thing was) sitting slumped in a corner.

He turned and approached the creature, but stopped short of the stall door.  He wanted to see it.  He wanted to understand what was so strange about it, but he dared not get any closer than absolutely necessary.

The wretched creature looked diseased.  It was mostly bald, with black and gray mottled skin exposed except for a few small, blotchy patches of black and yellow feathers.  It sat with its neck bent like a limp hose, the shriveled crest atop its head resting on the floor beside it.  Its black, beady eyes stared blankly back at him.

He thought the poor creature had died, but then it flexed its useless, naked wings and uttered a loud noise that was far less a cluck than a swine-like squeal.

He doubted there was a force anywhere on the planet that could have prevented his feet from leaving the floor at that moment.  His heart thumping hard against his ribs, his nerves electrified, Eric promptly left the freaky chicken to its roost and moved on.

What the hell was this place?

Three stalls down, he spied another of the strange fowl and he took a wide path around it, half-expecting it to dart out and attack him.

Another long and mournful bleating sound rose from the other side of the door and when he looked toward it he saw that there were now two of the ugly chicken things at the far end of the room.  A second had just emerged from the last stall.  Even from this distance, he could tell something was wrong with its feet, likely the cause for its odd, lurching gait.  The ones in the stalls had been sitting with their legs tucked beneath them, hidden from view and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pick one up for a closer look.

He continued to peer into the open stalls as he passed them, but he kept well between them and constantly ready to spring out of the way in case something small and barely feathered emerged with the intention of pecking out his eyes.

But as he approached the door, the two birds remained unconcerned with doing him harm.  In fact, the nearest one loped away with greater urgency, as if it were he who was a monstrous mockery of nature.

Empowered by the birds’ apparent wariness, he dared to take a moment and consider the nearest of the two.  He could now see what was wrong with its feet.  They were swollen and gnarled and clenched like bony fists.  They walked not with their toes spread, like other birds, but upon the knuckles of their feet instead.  But the true cause of their odd lurching appeared to be that their skinny legs didn’t quite hold their weight.  With every step they simply rose and then collapsed.

Earlier that summer, like he did every year, he’d visited the county fair and strolled through the various animal barns.  He was well aware that there were many breeds of farm fowl, some of them remarkably ugly.  Hell, your ordinary Thanksgiving turkey was no looker when you saw a live one close up.  Even breeds with very few feathers weren’t uncommon.  But he’d never seen anything quite like these things.  They weren’t just ugly.  They didn’t even look healthy.

Again, he thought about the stunted corn and shivered.

More and more, he wondered if something otherworldly was at work here.

As he pushed open the door, he saw that the barn had a third chamber.  That awful stench struck him with renewed force, knotting his stomach into an ever tighter ball.

At least a dozen of the ugly, loping chickens were stumbling around in here.

Again, he heard the sickly bleating noise and realized that it was originating from somewhere in this room.

He also could now hear the sound of buzzing flies.

His heart still pounding, he pushed on.  It was strange how it seemed to grow darker without the light growing any dimmer.  The shadows seemed to be taking on life and substance all their own, wholly separate from the shapes that cast them.