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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. 
    He paused as a realization came to him.  Like the other two rooms, this part of the barn was familiar to him.  He remembered it from his dreams.  And he even remembered the strange chickens, now that he had seen them.  In his dream he’d had the same reaction to them:  disgust and distrust mixed with a certain morbid curiosity.  But he realized now that he didn’t recall seeing them in the previous room in his dream.  And he didn’t recall seeing as many in this room, either. 
    But of course, it had only been a dream.  Not every detail