Barn Dairies

Table of Contents

It was the summer the wells went salty. That was the first sign, though we didn’t know it then. Old Man Hemlock’s prize collie was the second. We found it in the dawn light, drained of blood, its body crisscrossed with strange, surgical-looking scratches. The sheriff blamed wild dogs but we knew better.

My little brother, Leo, saw it first. He had a habit of sleeping on the screened porch, claiming the desert air helped him breathe. He woke me, his small hand cold and damp on my arm, his eyes wide as full moons.

“Mateo,”

He whispered.

“There’s a thing in the goat pen.”

I grabbed my rifle, more for the weight of it in my hands than any real belief it would help. From the porch, we could see the pen, bathed in the weak silver of a half-moon. The goats were silent, a bad sign. They were huddled in the farthest corner, a single, trembling mass of fear.

And then we saw it. It was smaller than the stories said, no bigger than a large dog, but built all wrong. Its spine was a grotesque ridge of quills against its hairless, greyish skin. It stood on its hind legs, hunched and unnatural, with forelimbs too long and thin, ending in claws that clicked softly against the dry earth. It didn’t have the face of a wolf or a bat, but something in between—a elongated snout, eyes that shone with a sickly green phosphorescence, and needle-like fangs that glistened with saliva.

It was inspecting our nanny goat, Beatrice, not with the frenzy of a predator, but with a chilling, clinical detachment. It ran a single, grotesquely long finger down her flank, and Beatrice shuddered but made no sound, paralyzed.

“Chupacabra,”

Leo breathed, the word a prayer and a curse all at once. I raised the rifle, my heart hammering against my ribs. I fired. The crack of the shot shattered the desert silence. The thing didn’t startle. It didn’t snarl. It simply turned its head, and those glowing green pools fixed on me. There was no anger in its gaze, only a vast, ancient, and utterly alien curiosity. It tilted its head, and I saw its throat work, not to growl, but to make a sound like stones grinding together deep underground.

Then it moved. It didn’t run. It flowed, a liquid shadow pouring over the fence. It was impossibly fast, a grey smear in the moonlight heading not for the open desert, but for the house. For the porch. For Leo. I fired again, wild, the bullet splintering the porch post. The screen door exploded inward, ripped from its hinges by a single swipe of those claws. The smell hit us then—the reek of old graves, of spoiled meat, and of ozone, like the air after a lightning strike.

I shoved Leo behind me, leveling the rifle as the creature crouched in the doorway, its form blocking out the moon. It was even more horrifying up close. The skin wasn't just hairless; it was leathery, stretched taut over a skeletal frame, and it pulsed with a faint, internal rhythm.

It ignored me. Its glowing eyes were locked on Leo, who was sobbing quietly behind my back. It took a step forward, its claws making a soft tick, tick, tick on the wooden floorboards. I fired the last shot. The bullet hit it in the shoulder. A dark, viscous fluid, black in the dim light, oozed from the wound. The creature didn’t flinch. It simply looked down at the injury, then back at me, and for the first time, its lipless mouth peeled back from those impossible fangs in what might have been a smile. A low, chittering sound, like a swarm of insects, echoed from its throat.

It was laughing. It lunged. Not to bite, not to maul. One of its spindly arms shot out, the claws retracting for a moment, and it touched Leo’s cheek. Just a touch. A caress. Leo’s sobbing stopped instantly. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he went rigid, a statue of terror. The creature leaned in close to his face, its grinding-stone voice forming a single, guttural word that should have been impossible for it to speak.

“Mine.”

Then it was gone. A rush of foul wind, the sound of scrabbling on the roof, and then silence. The goats were fine. Beatrice was untouched. But Leo, Leo hasn’t spoken since. He just sits by the window every night, staring into the darkness, a single, faint, scratch-like scar on his cheek. And sometimes, when the moon is right, I see a flicker of sickly green reflected in his eyes, waiting for the thing that marked him to return and claim what it called its own.