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Three Points isn't much of a town.

There is the church, a general store, one gas station on the potholed road, and woods for miles around with the occasional rickety old house. The hilly terrain doesn't leave much room for anything larger than a family garden and ever since the coal mine shut down the place has withered. These days the occasional tourists exploring the back country brings in some money, and when none of those are around people keep to themselves.

Even a little town needs a school. This one is as tiny as the town, a two-room schoolhouse that serves kids from kindergarten through what passes for high school around here. Behind the schoolhouse is the clearing where the kids run and skip during recess.

It was lunchtime at the school and most of the twenty or so students sat at the couple of tables to eat. A few small groups sat on the grass instead and at the far end of the yard, sat by himself, was a kid in threadbare clothes.

None of the other students knew his last name. Most of them didn't know even his first name. They just called him the Weird Kid.

The Weird Kid sat cross-legged with his back to a massive old oak tree and ate the sandwich he'd carried in a cloth rucksack. As he ate he kept an eye out for the older boys. Ten years old, skinny and dressed in second-hand clothes, he was an obvious target for bullies.

"Thanks Kate," the Weird Kid said, for out of sight behind the bole of the oak a squirrel had run up and dropped a ripe walnut gnawed out of its shell. The dozen it had brought were a welcome addition to his lunch. Even more cautiously a red fox approached with a apple in its mouth from some forgotten fruit tree in the woods. It put the apple down by the nuts, ignoring the squirrel not two feet away. "Dana," the Weird Kid added.

Another squirrel up in the branches chittered and the Weird Kid ducked just in time as an orange went through the space his head had occupied. It splattered on the bark and he calmly picked it up and passed it to the fox sat out of sight behind the tree. He paid no mind to the two older kids laughing on the other side of the schoolyard.

The fox tore apart the orange and shared the pulp with the squirrel while the Weird Kid ate his lunch. He sat by himself, or so it seemed to those who couldn't see the animals.

He was poor and lived with his mother, who could barely afford to feed the two of them. They lived in a shanty down the street from the school and his mother cleaned houses to get by. They were the poorest family in a poor town and he ignored the other kids except to keep an eye out for more thrown food, or worse, rocks.

But if he wasn't looking around the schoolyard, other eyes were. There was a squirrel in every tree, a hawk seemingly asleep on a high branch, raccoons and groundhogs and yet other eyes that reported to him. Even the Weird Kid had friends. Not human ones, but friends nevertheless.

The other kids and the townsfolk weren't afraid of the Weird Kid. Maybe they should have been. The curiously stained shirt he wore once belonged to a classmate who didn't need it any more. His pants, to another. Two hobos, one a wandering child killer. Mean old Mr. McGrackett and a woman who claimed to be a traveling saleswoman but was something much worse. People come and go in small towns and no one knew where those six people had got to. No one but the Weird Kid and his friends.

He peered through his badly cut bangs so no one would see him looking. There was a new kid at the school, a thin blond girl his age. The other kids shunned her and he felt bad about that, but he felt worse that she had one arm in a cast.

She'd introduced herself to the class as Susie, newly arrived in town with her dad. "Fell off the swing," she said about her arm.

But the fading black eye didn't match the time for the month-old broken arm. One accident could be just that. Two made him wonder.

He did not approach her. He did what he did with no expectation of gratitude. The Weird Kid just didn't like bullies. It was as simple as that.

No one pays attention to the squirrels in the trees, the mice, the songbirds in the trees. No one realizes how many eyes are there to watch, or who they answered to. The Weird Kid stroked the red fox who was often by his side and made his plans.

*****

His name was Hank and he was new in town, come to fill a mechanic job at the gas station. Hank had moved from small town to small town, for he had a problem both with his temper and with alcohol. If the one didn't get him chased out of town the other did and he barely made it out ahead of the sheriff that last time he lost his temper. It wasn't anyone's business how a man raised his daughter, Hank thought.

He came home for lunch, only a five minute drive from the gas station, set his keys down and opened the refrigerator. When he closed it he almost dropped his beer. There was a squirrel sitting on the windowsill with the keys in its mouth.

"Hey!" It hopped out the window at the sudden sound and Hank was out the back door after it. The keys caught the sunlight as the squirrel darted toward the woods and he was right on its heels. Four legs is faster than two but his legs were a lot longer.

A scared squirrel is mighty fast, though. It stayed ahead of him as they ran between the trees. With the keen survival instinct of an animal that everything wants to eat it seemed to know that if it went up a trunk he'd catch it before it got out of reach.

They were far enough into the woods that he couldn't see the house any more when it finally dropped the keys and scurried away. Hank skidded to a stop and grabbed the keys, cursing the squirrel all the while. He was still cursing when the ground dropped out from under him.

A pit trap just wider than his feet opened, a dug-out tunnel one man wide and one man deep with a thin dirt roof that had easily supported a squirrel but caved in the moment he stood on it. He was falling before he knew it was there and one arm went down the tunnel with the rest of him. Only the fact he was reaching for the keys gave him any chance to save himself. Reflexively he threw himself forward and managed to catch himself with that one arm, but that just kept him from disappearing altogether. He was still in the narrow pit up to his chin.

"What the hell," Hank cursed. The pit was just barely wide enough to fit him and his left arm was trapped firmly against his side. Likewise his legs were stretched out straight and there wasn't enough room to bend his knees. His toes just barely grazed the bottom of the pit. If he hadn't caught himself with his arm he'd be staring up at the sky out of a pit perfectly sized to hold a man.

It was almost impossible to get any leverage to crawl out of the pit, but he had to try. Hank pulled his hand in close to his face and did his utmost to lever himself upward.

As soon as he started to move he heard a shuffling footfall behind him and redoubled his efforts. Not fast enough. Just as his face rose from the pit he heard a creak from above him and a set of fanged jaws slid down over him. As quickly as they opened they clamped down, blocking out almost all the light, and he felt a fleshy tongue pressing against the nape of his neck. Whatever it was - probably a black bear from the size of its mouth and the fangs - reached around with a forepaw to help pull him out of the pit.

That would be good except he also felt the tongue bunching up, ready to send him down its throat. It pushed its muzzle downward as its mighty paw pulled him from the pit and it rapidly worked its jaws over his shoulders. There was no way to pull back out of its maw and the top of his head pushed past its back teeth and into the slimy chute of its gullet. It meant to eat him as fast as he was pulled from the pit and he felt the muscular tongue tense as it prepared to swallow him whole.

"No, Ray," he heard someone say. The bear paused and he felt the tension go out of the throat. With its jaws wrapped around his upper arms the grip of its throat muscles would send him sliding helplessly into its stomach but instead its jaws creaked open once more. Strings of mucus meant to lubricate him for easy swallowing gummed his eyes shut but he blinked them clear and saw the boy sitting on a rock ten feet away.

As the bear released its grip he slid back into the pit and once more caught himself with his one free arm. He was still holding the car keys. They had escaped a trip through a bear's digestive tract and so had he, at least for now.

There was a red fox sitting next to the boy. On the other side, draped over a rock and watching Hank with ink-dark eyes was a very fat badger. Both animals were within an arm's length of the kid and as the boy looked up from something he held in his lap both animals looked up too. For just a moment their movements were perfectly in sync and Hank knew what he was looking at.

"Witch-child," he breathed, for he'd lived in these back woods, in one town or another has whole life. He'd heard the stories. Usually it was an old lady living all alone who could talk to the animals.

A fat drop of drool hit Hank on the forehead and he heard the bear's jaws creak open overhead once more. He looked up into a purple chute of gullet as the bear prepared to swallow him and heard the boy let out a bright little laugh.

"No, Ray!" He giggled, and Hank looked back at the boy as he heard the fanged jaws snap shut once again. The bear grumbled and put the paw that would have shoved him down its throat on his shoulder. Between the pit and the paw he wasn't going anywhere unless the bear - and its master, the boy - wanted him to.

Somewhere in the course of almost being swallowed whole, twice, he'd dropped the keys. A squirrel - maybe even the same one - scurried from behind him and carried them off in its mouth. It ran over to the boy, ignoring the fox and badger, and dropped them at his feet. Then it turned and sat. Squirrel, fox, badger, bear and boy looked at Hank.

Looking up at the smiling boy and his pets Hank didn't have good feelings about the outcome of this meeting. The only reason he wasn't already in the bear's stomach was the boy ordering it to stop.

"Don't mind Ray," the boy said. "He's just greedy."

The boy turned his attention back to what he held in his hands and Hank saw he was whittling something. The knot of wood already had a visible snout and ears. He was carving some sort of animal.

"Greedy," Hank said. He was trying to think how to talk his way out of this. He didn't want a hear a bear burp from inside the bear and he was sure that's where this was heading. As soon as the boy was done talking the hungry bear would yawn once more.

"Yup," the boy said without looking up from his whittling. "He's ate four people. He's got to like humans. Last one he ate, that fake teacher lady, he must have thought she smelled like a she-bear. He was real naughty with her as he ate her. But I can't let him eat 'em all. That wouldn't be fair to the others."

The badger to the boy's left watched Hank out of inky eyes and licked its chops. It was a very fat badger and though it was still only half his size he had a pretty good idea what it'd eaten to get that fat.

"Too bad you're bigger than me," the boy said. "I could use a new shirt."

The odd stains on the ragged shirt and pants took on a sinister significance. Even the boy's shoes, in better shape than the rest of his outfit, looked as though they'd been through the worst rinse cycle ever. The original colors were hard to make out. Stomach acid does weird things to dye, Hank suspected. Pretty much everything the kid was wearing had been coughed up by one of his pets after the owner of the clothing digested away.

The clothes fit him well. Another boy no bigger than he was had donated the outfit. Fellow children, maybe even the kid's friends, had ended up in the stomachs of his pets. The boy wouldn't hesitate to feed a stranger to one of them.

"Look boy," Hank said as calmly as he could manage. "I never done nothing to you. Just let me out of this hole and we can be friends."

The boy's smile went away. He sat and thought for a moment, even the sharp little knife doing the whittling stopping its movements, and then he made a little gesture. The fat badger slid off the rock and padded toward Hank.

"Now hold on. Let's talk about this -"

He was sure he'd see a flash of fang-studded pink and then darkness. He was sure the badger could swallow him whole. The witch-boy's powers let his pets do unnatural things. A bear twice his size shouldn't be able to swallow him that but it almost had and he was certain that at least one person had worn a thinly stretched badger-fur coat.

But the fat badger's waddling approach didn't end with a yawn. Instead it put its long claws to work and started shovelling dirt into the pit.

"Hey! What are you doing, boy?" Hank tried to shove the badger away with his one free hand but it ignored him even when he hit it in the rump and nearly bowled it over. That did cause it to waddle around behind him where he couldn't get at it. Its long claws were hollow on the underside like shovels and despite its fat it was a powerful digging machine.

The dirt trickled into the voids around Hank's body, the few spaces where the walls of the pit didn't press tight up against him. In short order the badger dug out a saucer-shaped depression a few inches deep all around him. That would be good if it were digging him out, as it'd already exposed his shoulders. But all that dirt went into the pit and packed in around Hank until he was entombed in soil. It was hard even to breathe.

"See," the kid said, "I don' like bullies. An' yer one. I saw yer daughter at school, all beat up. I had my friends watch to see if it was you. An' it was."

The badger kicked a last pawful of dirt against the back of Hank's head, took a few steps away and lay down facing him. Just as it did the bear behind him took its forepaw off Hank's shoulder and put it back down on his outstretched arm. Hemmed in by a dirt-filled pit and with his one free limb under a bear's paw Hank could only move his head.

"Pete there," the boy said as he looked at the badger, "He's ate a couple of people. If I asked him, he'd eat you too. But if he gets any fatter his feet won't reach the ground. He's got short legs, you know."

"Dana here, though." The kid reached out and petted the red fox. It was a handsome, slender animal, its fur sleek. It would look bigger when its fluffy winter fur grew in. It might look bigger for a different reason, soon. "She's never ate anyone until today."

The boy held up the finished product of his whittling and Hank saw a fox. Parts of one, anyway. The slender limbs, the pointed muzzle and ears, the fluffy tail. That all made sense. So, unfortunately, did the grotesque bulge the various parts of it were attached to. The carven fox looked like it had swallowed something several times its size.

So skillfully had the boy whittled that the lumpy bulge showed the shape of the fox's meal. Here was a curve of shoulder, the bulge of the knees. The hollow eyes and mouth of a screaming face tried to push their way free of the fox's belly fur before they were digested, and failed.

The boy toed Hank's car keys where they lay by his foot. "My friends already took some stuff from your house. Stuff you'd take if you left. Dana?"

Hank's eyes were drawn by a movement and he looked to the side to see the real fox stand up. It stepped toward him, moving like a dancer on long slender legs and tiny paws.

The fox's face blocked his view as it drew close. The fox looked down at him, its whiskers twitching, its ears tall and alert. And then it yawned. Sharp white teeth and a long pink tongue, and behind that the glistening chute of gullet. He'd seen the bear's twice. Hers was a narrower one, but he suspected he would still fit.

"She's better off without you," the boy said. Hank watched the fox's jaws creak unnaturally wide, and wider still, and sucked in a breath to scream for help.

Too late. Unable to pull back, he could only watch as the fox slipped its long nose up over his forehead. Its lower jaw slid down his face and with a sudden duck of its head it forced its cheeks over his own. The scream burst out of him to be absorbed by inward-pressing flesh as the fox forced its maw over his face.

A vast bulge swelled out of the fox's furry cheeks as it engulfed his whole head. Sharp little teeth dug into Hank's scalp and chin as a fox that by all rights shouldn't gulp down anything bigger than a mouse bunched its tongue up under his chin and swallowed.

What should have been a bony tightness at the back of its mouth stretched wide and slimy throatflesh slid over his face. A massive swelling slipped down into its neck and even part of its slender body as its flesh and fur stretched unnaturally. He felt its sleek neck fur slide over his face and remembered the little wooden sculpture with a face straining to escape its digestive fate. He wasn't in the fox's stomach yet but he was on his way.

The good news was that as its nose slid down the back of his neck it soon ran into the ground. No matter how stretchy it was it couldn't swallow the whole planet to get him down.

The bad news was that the fox wasn't working alone. Ray the bear dug at the earth surrounding him with the paw not pinning his arm and there was a scrape of long claws as Pete the badger dug on the other side. Between the two of them they unearthed his upper arms and as the dirt was dug away the bear kept his free arm pushed down against the dirt even as the badger dug underneath it.

If it didn't have help, and even with just one arm he could have fended it off. No matter how elastic its jaws, it was just a fox, not that much bigger than a big house cat. He could have grabbed it by the ears, pulled it off and thrown it at the kid. But it wasn't working alone. All he could do was curse as it twisted atop him, got its nose over one shoulder and its lower jaw over the other one, and pushed.

It was like being eaten by a much too tight fur coat. The scrape of sharp but small fangs was followed by blunt back teeth and then a slimy gullet that stretched over him. No more than a finger's width of flesh and fur was between him and the outside world as its ribcage expanded to let his face slide into the waiting stomach.

The fox's slow struggle to gulp him down should have seen him suffocated before his head squeezed through the sphincter between throat and gut. Instead its effort to eat something at least five times its weight made its throat fit imperfectly and air got in every time it moved its muzzle. With its jaws stretched improbably over Hank's shoulders the fox paused to pant and the badger began to rip into his shirt with its claws.

That was how Hank went down the gullet of a fox a fraction his size. The bear and badger would dig away some of the dirt imprisoning him, the fox would pull itself over the revealed portion like a sock being forced over a much too large foot, and when it paused to rest the badger would rip away whatever clothes it could get at. Bit by bit there was less of Hank outside the fox and more inside and he was awake for the whole thing. The unnatural stretch of the fox's little jaws and throat meant it swallowed plenty of air to keep him going.

Eventually, scratched from scalp to ass by sharp fox fangs and all but naked, the bear wrapped its paws around his thighs and dragged him out of the pit. Nothing was left of him but a set of legs hanging out of a set of distended fox jaws attached to a furry, grotesquely swollen body. The bear had used its brute strength to pin his free arm and then the other one too as the badger dug it loose from the soil.

The fox gathered its strength and swallowed. Hank's hands slipped into its cheeks and he began to kick with all his might.

But only briefly. Left to his own devices he could probably save himself even now. Bend over - he was so much larger than the fox lifting it would be no harder than moving while wearing a heavy coat - get his feet against its lower body and straighten. It would pull off him like a slimy, hungry sweater. There is a reason few humans get eaten by foxes.

But a fat badger was hanging onto one of his feet as it pulled the shoe off and the bear trapped his other leg to the ground the second it started to move. It pinned the other one with its free paw as the fox braced all four of its little paws against the ground and slowly slid its jaws forward.

When it reached his knees Hank thought about locking them straight. It had managed to fold him over in its gut but if it couldn't bend his legs his feet would be left hanging out. By the time he thought of that he was worn out from the long struggle to keep from being swallowed. And what good would it do, anyway? He knew what would happen if it looked like he would escape. He'd somehow squirm out of the fox's jaws and a set of bear or badger jaws would be waiting.

He couldn't fight all three of them. The bear alone was too much. It hadn't helped the fox swallow him, other than holding him still. If it decided to break his legs to make him easier for Dana to swallow it could. Any way you looked at it, he was somebody's lunch. It might as well be the fox.

It was almost with a sense of relief that he felt the fox struggle to lift its head, its narrow jaws wrapped around a naked set of feet. It was so swollen around its meal that even its long legs could barely reach the ground and it tottered unsteadily atop the bulge of gut and tensed. Hank felt its throat muscles clench down for the last time and felt the great double bulge of his feet move through its neckfur. He slipped and slid against the slimy stomach walls as he curled up inside it and finally it was over.

Swallowed by a fox. What a way to go. Twenty or so pounds of skinny fox stretched around a whole man. Hank felt the sphincter between throat and stomach close and here he was, curled up in a ball inside a thin coat of foxfur.

It was so gorged it couldn't possibly walk. It was going to have to lie here in the shallow depression that used to be a pit. It was going to have to digest him, or most of him, before it could take a single step.

And digest him it would. Now that the valve at the top of its stomach was closed he could feel thick droplets of stomach acid trickling over his skin. It was little, but it was a carnivore. With the boy's magic backing it up Hank was sure it could digest a whole man. It just needed time.

Hank swore in the slimy dark and tried to kick. It was no surprise that the bear was waiting and wrapped its forepaws around the bulge of man to keep him from hurting the fox. The fat badger leaned its bulk against the part of him the paws didn't cover.

The pressure squeezed the slimy stomach wall in against Hank and he heard the fox let out a long burp. So thinly was the fur and flesh stretched around him that he heard the witch-boy laugh. Fingers all too practiced in knowing where to push forced the fur in against the gaps where the stomach wall didn't quite touch him. The fox belched again and Hank knew his time was short. It would probably need days to digest a whole man but it wasn't the stomach acid that would get him. It was the lack of air.

Hank was conscious of the shape he made in the fox's swollen body. He was a curled up sculpture with a thin coat of fur. If he craned his head up the stomach wall pressed in against his eyes and mouth and made dimples in the outside fur just like the ones in the wood the boy had whittled. Like the man in the sculpture, he wouldn't get out of the fox the way he got in.

There was enough stomach acid now to sting his skin, and it was worse on the bottom side, where a pool of the stuff was accumulating. Naked except for a few scraps of cloth the badger didn't manage to rip away, there was nothing between him and the stomach juices of a creature that should rightly be hunting mice. Rabbits, maybe. Not men.

The fox burped a last time and Hank felt gentle fingers stroking the bulge over his face.

"Some people are more use to the world after a trip through one of my friends than before," the boy said. "Yer one of them."

It would have said at least one good thing about Hank if his last thoughts were of his daughter. They weren't. As the gurgling dark closed in he instead wondered, briefly, if anyone would find his clothes and figure something had happened to him. Maybe they'd realize the boy was responsible. He was sure, though, that the boy had thought of that and would make sure all the evidence was good and buried.

*****

Hank was right.

The Weird Kid was back at school Monday, sitting by himself as usual. He'd spent most of the weekend watching over Dana. Digesting a meal five or six times your weight is a lot of work. Even after two whole days the fox was too full to move. It would be days more before she could resume hunting, assuming she wanted to. When she passed the last of Hank she'd be so fat she wouldn't need to hunt for weeks. For now his other friends kept an eye on her.

It was at school that the Weird Kid learned that the new girl had already been taken in by a local family. Her father had disappeared the Friday before. A mouse overheard the teachers talking about it. They'd found Hank's car where the Weird Kid left it at the train station. The rusted-out junkheap barely made it there.

The ticket machine at the train station was probably the most modern piece of equipment in the whole town. You put in money, out came a ticket. The Weird Kid had used some of Hank's money and done that, just in case they could somehow check to see if a ticket had actually been bought. He threw the ticket in his campfire that night. He didn't need it and neither did Hank. Hank's need for train tickets had passed, even if all of him hadn't yet.

The teachers were sure Hank had abandoned his daughter and left. No one planned to file a missing person report. That had happened the time the two school bullies ended up inside Ray the bear. Not most of the other times, though. No one seems to care much when a bad person disappears.

The Weird Kid saw the new girl on the other side of the playground and smiled, as much as he ever did at school. She seemed happier already. Maybe he'd say hello to her. Most of the other kids thought he was weird for hanging out with animals instead of people, but maybe she'd be different.

The Weird Kid had an idea. He'd introduce her to Dana, once the fox was mobile again. Some people thought raccoons were cute, too, and he had raccoon friends. Maybe he could make a human friend for a change.

The weird kid smiled, there by himself at lunch. It seemed a little cruel even to him, introducing her to the fox that ate her dad. But it didn't look like she missed him at all, and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her.