text: [Themes: horror, horror, romance]
  
  That sound of movement could be anything, but it's hard to see how this trail through the dead grass and goldenrod could have been plowed by anything other than the creature that attacked the dogs. If you are going to get to the bottom of this mystery, you will only do so by tracking the obvious path of the beast.
  
  The trail is wide, almost as if someone drove a truck through here, but without the twin wheel tracks such a vehicle would have left behind. Whatever trampled this grass was big and low to the ground, leaving no stem unbent. And the fact that the grass stems and stalks of goldenrod are bent toward the pole barn are a clear sign the beast headed in that direction after devouring Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in the driveway.
  
  So what are these beasts, anyway? The stories are numerous, but the details are often conflicting. Because the state's environmental conservation officials don't want to waste their time with tales of subterranean beasts that rise on cold and snowy nights to feast on hapless livestock, often these stories are only told at the local taverns, between friends over bottles of Bud Light. The presence of alcohol never made the tales less believable, as the people telling them always seemed perfectly convincing.
  
  But from what you could gather, the beasts are vicious, with giant claws capable of slicing through gravel, and star-shaped mouths that enshroud the victim before it is sucked into the toothy maw. They are like moles, but the size of buffalo — vicious moles, of the kind that nature had no business producing.
  
  Therefore it makes sense that the tracks would head down to the cow barn, where the family's herd should be safely housed for the night. Elsinore is under contract with a yogurt plant south of Utica, and this has been the primary source of your family's income. In these trying times, you can't afford to be losing livestock to strange and fantastical beasts; your insurance policy doesn't cover losses to predators that officially don't exist.
  
  The barn is all lit up now, and you see no ominous shadows lurking around the periphery. Mr. Seymour, Elsinore's chief farmhand, should be busy tending to the herd tonight. As you get closer, this light also illuminates the trail of trampled grass a little better. You can now see where the beast did indeed try to head straight for the barn, but was then deflected by the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the grazing pasture. The beast turned right to scout along the fence, following it toward the trees that fill the bottomland along the Mohawk River.
  
  It seems that you have a choice. You could continue following the trail, or you could stop in the barn to ask if Mr. Seymour has seen or heard anything out of the ordinary tonight. Of all the people who either live or work at Elsinore, he has become one of the few you still trust.
  
  > visit Mr. Seymour in the barn.
  Mr. Seymour is the moral center of Elsinore, the pole star by which the rest of you can easily gauge your value to humanity. To the best of your knowledge, he has never missed a day of work and would never dream of saying anything false. He is as true as the beams that make up the barn's rafters, and as solid as the poles that hold them aloft.
  
  You squeeze through two of the wires in the fence and run toward the well-lit pole barn. Inside, you find Mr. Seymour and two of the other hands distributing feed to each of the stalls.
  
  "Dinner must be over, I see," he says. He is dressed in his customary green shirt and dirt dungarees. "And what on earth are doing in here with that gun?"
  
  "I came to see if you've seen anything unusual tonight," you say.
  
  You are surprised when he doesn't respond right away. Instead, he exchanges nervous glances with the other hands.
  
  "It looks like you might have seen something, Li'l Hammie," he says.
  
  "Yes," you say. "Something killed the dogs while we were sitting down for dinner, and I followed the tracks down here."
  
  One of the hands, a small fellow with greasy hair, turns to the other. "The Old Man used to bring us dinner on Thanksgiving," he mutters.
  
  Mr. Seymour ignores them. "Killed the dogs? Are you sure they didn't just run off?"
  
  "They were hooked up on steel cable ties, Mr. Seymour. Something severed each one."
  
  "Hammie, how many years do I have to work here before you start calling me by my first name?"
  
  "Horatio, sorry," you correct yourself, but saying that name feels as awkward as you imagine it would be to address your high school English teacher with the same familiarity. "But have you seen something or no?"
  
  "And if we did?"
  
  "Then I would want to know what did this!"
  
  "Look, Hammie, there are more things on this earth than are dreamt of in that school they sent you to. More things in this earth, too."
  
  "All right, now I know something's happened," you say.
  
  "He might want to count the stalls," the greasy-haired hand chuckles to his companion.
  
  "You two!" Horatio says to them. "If one of you ever puts in an honest day's work, I'll cook your Thanksgiving Dinner myself!"
  
  "What do they mean, I should count the stalls?"
  
  "Just that, I'm afraid. When we brought the girls in this afternoon, there was one missing. We found her back by the woodlot."
  
  It strikes you as odd that he would entertain the notion of keeping this information from you.
  
  "Look," he continues. "Your family has been through a lot this fall. It was too late in the afternoon to do anything about it, so I was going to tell Claude first thing in the morning."
  
  "For all that would accomplish," you say, your ire roused just at the thought of your uncle-father.
  
  "What else is there to do?" Horatio says. "We could report this to the police, but they'll just file a report saying the heifer was killed by coyotes. Next thing you know there'll be a bunch of guys coming around to shoot every coyote they can find."
  
  "But you know it wasn't coyotes that did this."
  
  "No, it wasn't no coyote."
  
  "So what if it comes back?" you say. You're pretty sure that you are both considering the same stories at this point.
  
  "All the other girls are safe here in the barn," he says.
  
  "But how can you be sure, Horatio?"
  
  "They've never gotten inside here before. What I'd be more worried about that dead heifer out there, and what else it will attract."
  
  "Isn't it too late for that?" you say.
  
  "Until you came along, I wasn't going to worry about it," Horatio says. "But clearly losing the dogs has upset you. If you like, we can take the quads out and stand watch over the carcass. What you see might be... educational."
  
  Based on the tracks that you saw leading straight to the barn — stopped only by the barbed-wire fence — you're convinced the immediate threat is here. That's what your gut says, anyway. Your brain says to listen to Mr. Seymour — Horatio — and take advantage of his knowledge and experience in these matters.
  
  > protect the barn.
  "You don't understand," you say. "I'm here because I followed a trail of trampled grass down from the house. Whatever did it was huge."
  
  "We never saw it here," Horatio says.
  
  "Well no — the fence turned it away."
  
  "Then it's a good thing we fixed the fence that day a couple months ago." He takes a rag out of his back pocket. "All right, I'll tell you this, Hammie. I can see this business has you all worried. This is your first time dealing with this. The Old Man — your Dad — and I used to fret about these nights just as much as you are now. The way I see it, this would be your farm now if Claude hadn't gotten in the way; if he doesn't run it into the ground first, it might still be your farm someday. So if you want to stand watch over this ol' barn all night long, then by God I'll stand watch with you."
  
  "Thank you!" you say.
  
  "My pleasure. And frankly, it's been a long time since anyone around here has seen you take such a strong interest in something. Can't say I blame you there, as you've been nothing but dumped on the last few months."
  
  "I was thinking we need to cover this back door," you say, pointing to the sliding-track door leading out to the pasture behind the pole barn, where the tracks had been heading.
  
  "All right," Horatio says. "But that little deer rifle of yours might as well be a pop gun. Your Dad and I kept these beauties around for occasions such as this."
  
  From one of the upper shelves above his workbench, he pulls down a pair of sawed-off shotguns, both quite dusty, along with a box of shells. You had no idea such guns existed on the property.
  
  "We probably won't see anything," he says. "But if we do, it'll be like trying to bring down a bear. Or a buffalo. These things are vicious enough in their natural state; wounding it will only make it more ornery."
  
  All of this talk of an unnamed threat has spooked the two farmhands, so Horatio dismisses them for the night; both live in trailers just down the road, and neither man can get there fast enough. Then your trusted family friend shuts of most of the lights inside the barn, but turns on the outside floodlights.
  
  "Sounds like there's a lot of people out there on the Thruway," Horatio says a few minutes later, as you're both sitting on wooden chairs just outside the sliding door. The night is cold, only twenty-eight degrees. You're wearing a borrowed Carhart jacket over your hoodie to keep warm; you noticed that someone wrote the name Yorick on the tag — the name of a hand who worked at Elsinore many years ago, and died of a heart attack just days after retiring from your father's service.
  
  "Everybody's got somewhere to go," you say in reply. "Hold on, quiet — do you hear that?"
  
  "The traffic? That's what I—"
  
  "No, listen," you say. "Out there across the field. I hear something digging."
  
  Horatio goes silent for a moment. "I'll be damned," he says at last.
  
  "Is that them?" you ask.
  
  "I suspect we'll find out soon enough."
  
  The pasture that you're watching backs up to a parcel of state land that encompasses an undeveloped section of the Mohawk River, and beyond that lies the Erie Canal. A stand of crooked willows covers the bottomland along the river, and the underbrush can be so thick and full of ticks that few people go that way. The fence around that part of Elsinore is intended to keep the cows in, or so you've always thought. Tonight you're also learning that it also serves to keep something out.
  
  "It makes sense, when you stop to think about it," Horatio says softly, as if talking to himself more than you. "They're subterranean monsters, so it was just a matter of time until one of them figured out they could tunnel under the fence."
  
  Whatever it is out there digging at the barbed-wire fence, it's huge. And it's stopped caring whether anyone is aware of its presence. A horrible bleating sound emanates from the darkness — worse than the sound the brakes on your truck made when the pads wore out last spring.
  
  Horatio stands up, shotgun at the ready. "There's more than one," he says. The concern in his voice is evident.
  
  You stand too. "What do we do?"
  
  "Wait 'til they get close, Hammie. The idea is to inflict maximum damage. Making noises won't scare them off; they can barely hear as it is."
  
  There is a reverberating ping as one of the strands of barbed wire is snapped, reminding you of what must have happened to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Then you watch as the shadows across the field start to move. You swear you see two going left and two going right.
  
  "You see that?" you say, not knowing where to point your shotgun.
  
  "I see it. But I'm gonna be straight with you: I've never seen this behavior before."
  
  The beasts are inside the perimeter of the fence, but they have once again slipped into the shadows, keeping just beyond the reach of the floodlights. This leaves the two of you nervously sighting down the barrels of your shotguns, fearing that you might be charged at any moment.
  
  Instead you hear a clatter down the side of the barn, as if the creatures have bypassed you and are trying to find their own entrance.
  
  And then there is a brief flash as sparks fly, followed by complete darkness when the floodlights go out. Seconds pass as your eyes readjust to the darkness. You see lights on up at the house, but the barn is now completely black.
  
  A barrel tumbles over, a window shatters. There is a horrendous crashing noise as something big falls into Horatio's workbench insde the barn.
  
  "Shit, they've broken in!"
  
  The barn may be dark, but it becomes a riot of confusion as the cows low frantically and struggle against their fretters. Something else is shrieking in an unearthly frenzy.
  
  "The door won't open!" Horatio says.
  
  "How could they lock it?" you say.
  
  "I don't know. Something probably fell in the way. We need to go around the other side."
  
  The two of you race to the front of the barn, aware of the grisly shadows in the windows. The cows are trapped in place as something is shredding them all to pieces. It takes only seconds to reach the main door, but for the animals trapped inside this is far too much time — and there is a trickle of blood streaming out of the barn.
  
  "Help me get it open!" Horatio says, and you both put your bodies into the effort. You are almost bowled over by two fleeing heifers, both severely maimed. Inside the barn are nothing but shadows: the leaping shadows of the vicious beasts, the pathetic and frantic shadows of the cows trapped in their stalls. It is a slaughter you can't prevent.
  
  You are so upset by the scene that you charge into the darkness, firing your shotgun at the nearest shadow.
  
  "Hammie, no!" Horatio shouts, but it's too late. The blast from your gun creates a strobe effect, lighting up the barn for a split second. In that tiny fraction of time you see a great mitt of sharp claws swinging down toward your face.