At Home in the Dark Page 30

  the little door is opened for curated hunts twice a year.

  Charn services cannot guarantee a kll and full payment is required regardless of outcome.

  Stockton heard Fallows exhale, a brief hard snort of disquiet. The old soldier was frowning, three deep wrinkles in his brow, his body language stiff with unease. Up until now, Stockton thought, Fallows had assumed the little door was the name for a private compound. He had not expected an actual little door.

  The titles zipped off the screen. Then the camera was outside, on a hillside, in the dusk—or the dawn, who knew? The sun was below the horizon, but only just. The sky was striated with thin, crimson clouds, and the rim of the earth was a copper line.

  A flight of stone steps descended through high strands of pale, dead-looking grass and disappeared among bare, desolate trees. It didn’t resemble the land around Charn’s house, and it didn’t look at all as if it had been shot at the same time of year. The earlier material had depicted high summer. This was Halloween country.

  The next cut took the viewers inside a hunting blind, situated well off the ground, and placed them in the company of two hunters: hefty, silver-haired men dressed in camouflage. The one on the left was recognizable as the CEO of one of the biggest tech outfits. He had been on the cover of Forbes once. The other was a highly regarded lawyer who had defended two presidents. Fallows rocked back on his heels and some of the tension went out of his posture. There—he wasn’t going to walk out of the room just yet. Nothing reassured a man about an investment like knowing richer and more powerful men had already gone first.

  The CEO settled onto a knee, the butt of the gun against his shoulder and about an inch of barrel sticking out through the opening in the side of the blind. From here it was possible to see that staircase of rough stone blocks, descending into the valley below. The steps were no more than thirty yards away. At the bottom of the hill, through a screen of wretched trees, it was possible to detect a flash of dark moving waters.

  “Hunting is not permitted on the other side of the river,” Charn said. “Nor is exploration. Anyone discovered to have crossed the river will have their hunt terminated immediately and will not receive a refund.”

  “What’s over there? State land?” Fallows asked.

  “The dolmen,” Stockton murmured. “And the sleeper.” He spoke without meaning to, and his own tone—reverent, wistful—drew an irritable glance from the other man. Stockton paid him hardly any mind. He had seen her once, from across the water, and some part of him longed to see her again, and some part of him was afraid to go anywhere near.

  A flickering light moved into the shot, climbing that distant, crude staircase. It was the figure of a man, holding a torch with a lurid blue flame. He was too far away to see clearly, but he appeared to be wearing baggy, furry pants.

  They were coming to it now. The boys on the couch sensed it and leaned forward in anticipation.

  The camera zoomed in. The CEO and the lawyer disappeared from the shot, and for a minute the figure on the stairs was an indistinct blot. Then the picture sprang into sharp focus.

  Fallows stared at the TV for a long, silent moment and then said, “Who’s the asshole in the costume?”

  The figure on the steps was hoofed, his legs sleekly furred in a glossy brown coat. His ankles bent backward, close to the hoof, like the ankles of a goat. His torso rose from the flanks of a ram, but it was the bare, grizzled chest of a man. He was naked, except for a stiff looking vest, faded and worn, patterned in gold paisley. A pair of magnificent curling horns curved like conch shells from his curly hair. His torch was a bundle of sticks wired together.

  “He’s carrying a devil-thorn torch,” said Charn. “It crackles and turns green in the presence of . . . menace. But fortunately for our purposes, its range is limited to just a few yards. A Zeiss Victory scope will put you well beyond its reach.”

  The camera zoomed back out, to include the shoulder and profile of the gunman in the frame.

  “Shit,” muttered the CEO. “I’m shaking. I’m actually shaking.”

  The bearded grotesque went still, froze in place on the faraway stone steps. He had the quick, almost instantaneous reactions of a gazelle.

  The gun cracked. The faun’s head snapped straight back. He tumbled bonelessly, end over end, down three steps, and wound up crumpled in the fetal position.

  “Yeah, bitch!” the CEO shouted and turned and gave the famous lawyer a high-five. There was the sound of a beer can cracking and fizzing.

  “Okay, kids,” Fallows said. “This was fun. Stockton, my room cost, what, eight hundred? You might want to keep that as a down payment on your first therapy session.”

  He took one step toward the door and Stockton moved . . . not as fast as Fallows had moved in Africa, when he saved Peter from getting his face clawed off, but not too slow on the hoof for all that.

  “Do you remember what you said, first time we ever sat down together? You told me no one knows better than you how much a person will pay to escape the world for a while. And I said I knew. And I do. Give him five more minutes. Please, Tip.” And then Stockton nodded at the birdcage. “Besides. Don’t you want to see what he’s got there?”

  Fallows stared at the hand on his arm until Stockton let go. Then he moved his gaze—that look of almost terrifying emptiness—upon Charn. Charn returned the look with a daydreaming calm. At last, Fallows shifted his attention back to the TV.

  The video cut to a trophy room, back in Charn’s Rumford farmhouse. It was decorated like a men’s smoking club, with a deep leather couch, a couple of battered leather chairs, and a mahogany liquor cabinet. The wall was crowded with mounted trophies, and as Stockton watched the CEO—dressed now in flannel pajama bottoms and an ugly Christmas sweater—hung the latest head. The bearded faun gawped stupidly at the room. It joined a little over a dozen other bucks with glossy curving horns. There was also a trophy that looked, at first glance, like the head of a white rhino. On closer inspection, it more nearly resembled the face of a fat man, with four chins, and a single, stupid, piggy eye above the tusk of a nose.

  “What’s that?” Peter whispered.

  “Cyclops,” Stockton replied, softly.

  Titles swept across the screen:

  trophies are kept in a climate controlled room at Charn’s.

  Successful hunters may visit with 48hours advance ntice.

  Tea and refreshments provided at small additional charge.

  “Mister,” Fallows said. “I don’t know what kind of asshole you think I am—”

  “The kind of asshole who has too much money and too little imagination,” Charn said, mildly. “I am about to take some of the former and provide you with a bit of the latter, much to your benefit.”

  “Fuck this,” Fallows said again, but Stockton squeezed his arm once more.

  Peter looked around. “It wasn’t faked. My Dad’s been.”

  Christian nodded to the covered birdcage. “Go on and show us, Mr. Charn. You knew anyone who saw that video would figure it was a fake. But people have been paying you scads of money anyway. So there’s something under that sheet that’s worth quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Yes,” Charn said. “Almost everyone who sees the video thinks of costumes and special effects. In an age of artifice, we only recognize reality when it shows us its claws and gives us a scratch. The whurls have sensitive eyes and ears and the electric lights of our world cause them exquisite pain . . . hence the red lightbulb. If you remove your smartphone from your pocket and attempt to video what you are about to see, I will ask you to leave. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway. No one will believe what you recorded, much as you do not believe my video . . . and you will never travel through the little door. Do you understand?”

  Fallows didn’t reply. Charn looked at him with bland, speculative eyes for a moment, then leaned forward and tugged the sheet off the birdcage.

  They resembled chipmunks, or maybe very small skunks. They had black,
silky fur, and brushy tails, with silver rings running up them. Their tiny hands were leathery and nimble. One wore a bonnet and sat on an overturned teacup, knitting with toothpicks. The other perched on a battered paperback by Paul Kavanagh, and was awkwardly reading one of the little comic strips that came in a roll of Bazooka Joe gum. The tiny square of waxed paper was as large, for the whurl, as a newspaper would’ve been for Stockton.

  Both of the creatures went still as the sheet dropped away. The whurl with the comic strip slowly lowered it to look around.

  “Hello, Mehitabel,” said Mr. Charn. “Hello, Hutch. We have visitors.”

  Hutch, the one with the comic, lifted his head and his pink nose twitched, whiskers trembling.

  “Won’t you say hello?” Charn asked.

  “If I doesn’t, will you pokes my beloved with a cigarette again?” said Hutch, in a thin, wavering voice. He turned to address Stockton and Fallows. “He tortures us, you know. Charn. If one of us resists him, he tortures the other to force our obedience.”

  “This torturer,” Charn said, “doesn’t have to bring you picture stories to read, or yarn for your wife.”

  Hutch flung aside the Bazooka Joe strip and jumped to the bars. He looked through them at Christian, who shrank back into the couch. “You, sir! I sees shock in your eyes. Shock at the indecency and cruelty you sees before you! Two intelligent, feeling beings imprisoned by a brute who displays us to wring money out of his fellow sadists for a hunt with no honor! I pleads with you, run. Run now. Spread the word that the sleeper may yet awake! Someone may yet revive her with the breath of kings so she may lead us against the poisoner, General Gorm, and free the lands of Palinode at last! Find Slowfoot the faun, oh, I know he lives still, but has only lost his way home, or been bewitched to forget himself somewise, and tell him the sleeper still waits for him!”

  Christian began to laugh, a little hysterically. “Wild! Oh, man. For a minute I didn’t get it. It’s, like, ventriloquism, right?”

  Fallows glanced at the boy and exhaled: a long, slow deflation. “Sure. Pretty good. You’ve got a little amplifier in the base of the birdcage, and someone transmitting in the next room. You had me there for a minute, Mr. Charn.”

  “We only recognize reality when it shows us its claws and gives us a bite,” Charn repeated. “Go on then. Put your finger in the cage, Mr. Fallows.”

  Fallows laughed without humor. “I’m not sure I’m up on my shots.”

  “The whurl is more likely to get sick from you than the other way around.”

  Fallows eyed Charn for a moment . . . and then poked a finger into the cage with a brusque, almost careless courage.

  Hutch stared at it with golden, fascinated eyes, but it was Mehitabel who sprang, clutched the finger in both of her sinewy little hands, and cried, “For the sleeper! For the empress!” And fastened her teeth on Fallows’s finger.

  Fallows yanked his hand back with a shout. The sudden force of his reaction knocked Mehitabel onto her back. Hutch helped her up, muttering, “oh my dear, my love.” She spat the blood on the ground and shook her fist at Fallows.

  Fallows squeezed his hand closed. Blood dripped from between his fingers. He stared into the cage like a man who has been administered a powerful, numbing sedative . . . a Stockton Pharmaceutical special, perhaps.

  “I felt her shouting into my hand,” he muttered.

  “It’s all real, Fallows,” Stockton said. “Real enough to sink its teeth into you.”

  Fallows nodded, once, in a dazed sort of way, without looking from the birdcage.

  In a distracted tone, he said, “How much is the deposit again, Mr. Charn?”

  Peter Feasts

  The men sat up front and Peter sat in back with Christian. The car glided through a deformed tunnel of whiteness, heavy flakes of snow falling into the headlights. Cell phone reception sucked. It was a rotten drive. There was nothing to do but talk.

  “Tell me about the sleeper,” Christian said, like a child asking for a favorite bedtime story.

  Peter could never decide if he loved Christian or secretly kind of despised him. There was something almost otherworldly about him, about his shining gold hair and shining joyful eyes, about the easy grace with which he carried himself, and the easy pleasure with which he attacked his studies, and the infuriating skill with which he drew. He even smelled good. They had shared a dorm room for the last four years, and the door was often open, and the room was frequently half full with honor roll kids and girls in pleated skirts on their way to Vassar, and when Peter stood next to Christian, he felt like a gnome lurking in the shadows a few steps from a blazing torch. Yet Christian adored him and Peter accepted this somewhat as his due. After all, no one else was going to take Christian to Milan or Athens or Africa . . . or through the little door.

  “That’s the other side of the river,” Stockton said. “She stays on her side and we stay on ours.”

  “But do you have any idea who—what—she is?”

  Peter’s father unscrewed the cap on an airline size bottle of Jim Beam. He had cadged it off the flight attendant on the jump from Toronto to Portland, Maine, which was where they had met up with Fallows. He took a nip.

  “You can see her if you go down to the riverbank. She’s in a clearing, beneath what you would call a dolmen, which is a little like a prehistoric . . . shed. A stone house with open walls. And there she is . . . this girl, holding a bouquet of flowers.”

  Peter leaned forward and asked the question Christian wouldn’t. “What kind of girl, dad? The kind of girl who goes to third grade? Or the kind of girl who goes to third base?”

  Christian laughed. That was something else Christian got out of his friendship with Peter. Peter got help with his history final; Christian had someone to say the things and do the things a polite boy wouldn’t say or do.

  “What do you think would happen if someone crossed the river to look at her?” Fallows asked.

  “Don’t even joke. Remember your smart-ass line about going to shoot a dinosaur?”

  “Sure. I said I’d be careful not to step on a butterfly. Because of the story, the Ray—”

  “I know the story. Everyone knows the story. Walking across the river? That’s stomping on the fucking butterfly. We stay in the hills. We stay on our side of the river.”

  Stockton abruptly switched on the radio and tuned it to a country and western station. Eric Church sang through a thin, grainy layer of static.

  Fallows was his father’s most interesting friend. Peter wanted to know how he had killed people in the war. He wanted to know what it was like to sink a knife into someone. Peter had read about soldiers who killed the enemy and then raped their wives and daughters. Peter thought that sounded like a pretty exciting reason to enlist.

  He was daydreaming about soldiering when they slowed at a military style barrier, a mechanical arm lowered across the road at a gap in a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Fallows rolled down the driver’s side window. Peter’s father leaned across him and saluted the fish eye lens of a security camera. The barrier went up. The car went on.

  “Charn forgot to install a machine-gun nest,” Fallows said.

  Peter’s father finished his bottle of Beam and let it drop on the floor of the car. He burped softly. “You just didn’t see it.”

  They carried their own bags in across a wide porch that stretched around two sides of the house. There was a Mrs. Charn, it turned out: a short, heavy, shuffling woman who didn’t make eye contact with them, but continuously looked at the floor. The coolest thing about her was the big gross red wart below her right eye. It was like a belly-button in her face.

  She said Mr. Charn wouldn’t be home until later, but that she would be glad to show them around. Peter hated the way the house smelled, of old paperbacks and dusty drapes and mildew. Some of the floorboards were loose. The door frames had settled over the centuries (centuries?) and some of them were crooked and all of them were too low for a 21st-century-sized man. The bedrooms were
on the second floor: small, tidy rooms with lumpy single beds, Shaker furniture and ornamental chamberpots.

  “You hope they’re ornamental,” Stockton said, as Peter nudged one with his foot.

  “Good one, Mr. Stockton,” Christian said.

  The more he saw, the more depressed Peter got. The toilet in the upstairs bathroom had a pull chain and when he lifted the lid, a Daddy Long Legs crawled out.

  “Dad,” Peter whispered, in a voice that carried. “This place is a dump.”

  “You’d think with an income stream of a million dollars a year—” Fallows began.

  “The house stays as it is,” Mrs. Charn said from directly behind them. If she was disturbed to hear her farmhouse referred to as a dump, one couldn’t tell from her voice. “Not a single crooked doorway to be straightened. Not one brick replaced. He doesn’t know why the little door opens into t’other place and he won’t change anything for fear t’won’t open into t’other place again.”

  The Daddy Long Legs crawled across the floor, to the toe of one of Peter’s Gucci sneakers. He squashed it.

  But Peter cheered up when they arrived at the terminus of the tour. A grand table had been set up in the trophy room. The sight of all those decapitated heads gave Peter a funny tickle of sensation in the pit of his stomach. It was a little like the nervous pulse of desire that went through him whenever he was gearing himself up to kiss a girl.

  Peter and Christian wandered down the length of one wall and along another, staring into shocked, wondering, dead faces. To a man, all of the bucks sported hipster beards; if you ignored the horns, it was possible to imagine Mr. Charn had massacred an artisanal chocolate company in Brooklyn. Peter paused at one, a blondie with elfin, feminine features, and reached up to ruffle his hair.

  “Looks like we found your real dad, Christian,” Peter said. Christian gave him the finger, but he was such a goody-goody, he hid the gesture behind his body, so no one else could see.