At Home in the Dark Page 31

  They studied the cyclops in mute, awed silence for a time, and then contemplated a pair of gray-skinned orcs, their ears studded with copper rings, their lolling tongues as purple as eggplants. One of the orc heads was at waist level and Peter surreptitiously mimed face-fucking it. Christian laughed . . . but he also wiped at a damp brow.

  The first course was a pea soup. Even though it looked like something Regan barfed in The Exorcist, it was hot, and salty, and Peter finished his so quickly he felt cheated. The entrée was a leg of lamb, crispy and bubbling with liquid fats. Peter tore off pieces in long dripping strips—it was just about the best mutton he’d ever had—but Christian only poked at it with his fork. Peter knew from experience that Christian had a nervous, excitable stomach. He threw up easily, always on the first day of school, usually before a big exam.

  Mrs. Charn noticed too. “There’s some get that way. They get vertigo here. The more sensitive ones. Especially this close to an equinox.”

  “I feel like a fly on the edge of a drain,” Christian said. He spoke with what sounded like a thickened tongue, sounded like a teenager who has found himself drunk for the first time in his life.

  Across the table, Fallows held lamb under the table for Mrs. Charn’s little dogs, three rat terriers who were scrabbling around his ankles. “You didn’t say what Mr. Charn is up to.”

  “Taxidermist,” she said. “Picking up his latest.”

  “Can I excuse myself?” Christian asked, already shoving back his chair.

  He batted through a swinging door. Peter heard him retching in the kitchen. It used to be that the smell of vomit and the sound of someone puking turned his stomach, but after four years of sharing a room with Christian he was inured to it. He helped himself to a second buttery biscuit.

  “I had a touchy stomach my first time here too,” Peter’s father confessed. He tapped Peter affectionately with one elbow. “He’ll feel better after we get where we’re going. When the waiting is over. By this time tomorrow he’ll be famished.” He looked to the head of the table. “Do save Christian some leftovers, won’t you, Mrs. Charn? Even cold faun is better than no faun at all.”

  Charn Discovers a Snoop

  Mr. Edwin Charn let himself in a little before eleven PM, carrying a bell jar under a sheet of white linen. He stomped his boots and cakes of snow fell off them and then a floorboard creaked somewhere above and he went still. He stood at the foot of the stairs and tuned his senses to the farmhouse. It was common to say that one knew a place like the back of one’s hand, but in truth, Charn knew the Rumford farmhouse quite a bit better than the back of his own hand. He only needed to listen to the hush for a few moments to locate, with an uncanny degree of precision, everyone in the building.

  The rackety snore in the rear of his house was the wife. He could picture the way she slept, with her head cocked back and her mouth open, a corner of the sheet bunched up in one fist. Springs creaked in a room on the second floor, off to the right side of the landing. From the heavy sproing of it, Charn guessed that would be Stockton. The pharmaceutical man was carrying about sixty pounds more than was healthy. His son, the boy Peter, farted and moaned in his sleep.

  Charn cocked his head and thought he heard the soft, light pad of a foot on the staircase leading to the third floor. That couldn’t be Fallows, the soldier, who had been torn apart and put back together in some war or another; Fallows was sinewy and hard, but moved with pain. The process of elimination left only Christian, the young man who so resembled an idealistic prince from an inspiring story for young boys.

  Charn removed his own boots and climbed the stairs with far more care, bringing the bell jar with him.

  Christian was in striped pajamas of a very old fashioned sort, the kind of thing one of the Darling children might’ve been wearing on a Christmas Eve in 1904. He was at the far end of the attic, a single long landing with gable windows. An old sewing table with an iron foot-pedal had a spot under the eaves. The moss colored rug on the floor was so old and dusty it was almost the exact shade of the floorboards it covered. The little door—it was like the door to a cupboard—waited at the far end of the room. Charn was silent while the boy turned the brass latch and drew a deep breath and threw it open.

  “Just a crawlspace,” Charn said.

  The boy sprang partway up and clouted his head on the plaster ceiling: a satisfying reward for a snoop. He sank back to his knees and twisted around, clutching his head in his hands. Christian’s face was flushed with embarrassment, as if Charn had discovered him looking at pornography.

  Charn smiled to show the boy he wasn’t in trouble. The ceiling was at its highest close to the stairs, but Charn still had to duck to move a few steps closer. He held the bell jar out in front of him with both hands, like a waiter from room service, carrying a bedtime snack on a tray.

  “I never saw anything except the space behind the walls, until two-thirty am on the night of September twenty-third, nineteen eighty-two. I heard a sound like a goat loose on the third floor, the trip-trap of hooves across the planks. I made it into the hall just in time for something to come barreling into me. I thought it was a kid—not a child, you understand, but a baby goat. It struck me in the abdomen with its horns, knocked me down, and kept going. I heard it crash down the stairs and out the front door. Edna—my wife—was afraid to leave the bedroom. When I had my breath back I went down the stairs, doubled over in pain. The front door hung open on a splendid summer night. The high grass rolled like surf under a fat golden moon. Well. I thought p’raps a deer had got into the house somehow, terrified itself, and escaped. But then I was never one to leave the doors open at night and it struck me peculiar that one would’ve got all the way up to the third floor. I began to scale the stairs to the attic. I was halfway there when something flashed and caught my eye. A gold coin it was, with a stag engraven ’pon it. I have it still. Well, I climbed the rest of the way in a bemused, baffled, half-scairt state. The little door was shut and I don’t know what impulse made me lift the latch. And there, on t’other side. The ruin! The murmur of another world’s breeze! That dusk that I think may presage an eternal night. I opened the door every day after that. I kept a calendar. T’other place waited on equinoxes and solstices. On all other days there was nothing but crawlspace back there. I shot my first faun in the spring of nineteen eighty-four, and I brought my kill home with me and was pleased to discover it tasted better than mutton. In nineteen eighty-nine I began the hunts. Since then I’ve taken down everything from faun to orc, whurl to whizzle, and now my joy is giving other men the opportunity to kill fairy tales themselves, to slaughter the beasts of bedtime stories. Did you know if you eat the heart of a whurl, for a while you can understand the language of squirrels? Not that they have much to say. It’s all nuts and fucking. I went bald in my thirties, but have recovered my youthful head of hair since I began eating faun. Though I never speak of it to Missus Churn, I fuck like a bull when I’m away. I get to Portland to see their ladies of leisure twice a month and I’ve left some walking bowed-legged. Powdered orc horn. Makes Viagra look like an aspirin.” He winked. “Go to bed, young fellow. Tomorrow you will see your companions strike down daydreams in the flesh.”

  Christian nodded obediently and pushed the little door shut. He walked on bare feet, with head down, toward the stairs. But then, just as he crossed by Charn, he looked back, at the bell jar covered in the linen sheet, the same sheet that had previously covered the birdcage.

  “Mr. Charn? What’s that?” he asked.

  Charn stepped forward into the moonlight, set the jar on the sewing desk. He slipped the linen cloth off it, folded the sheet over one arm. “This room is rather bare, isn’t it? I thought it needed something to liven it up.”

  Christian bent to look into the jar. Two whurls had been stuffed and dramatically posed. One stood on an artfully positioned tree branch, holding a sword as long as Christian’s pinkie and baring his teeth in a fanged roar. The other, in a green cape, huddled beneath th
e branch, eyes narrowed in sly thought: a conspirator preparing to spring.

  “Good old Hutch,” Charn said. “Good old Mehitabel.”

  PART TWO: THEIR SIDE OF THE DOOR

  Stockton Wishes For Better Company

  Peter was in a pissy mood in the morning. He had forgotten to pack his tactical knife, an MTech with a pistol grip, and he bitched and moaned and stomped around in his bedroom, tossing the contents of his duffle, sure it had to be in there somewhere, until Stockton told him to give it a fucking rest or he could stay behind on earth with the old ladies.

  When they assembled in the attic after coffee and pancakes, they were in autumnal camo, beiges and murky greens. They all had guns, except for Christian, who was armed only with his sketch pad. He was fully recovered from the previous evening’s queasy spell and now his eyes shone with happiness. He looked from man to man as if it were Christmas morning and he was bursting with feelings of good fellowship. Stockton wondered if you could get a headache from spending too much time with someone so cheerful. Too much uncontrolled optimism ought to be prohibited; people needed to be protected from it, like second hand smoke. To soften the dull throb of pain behind his eyes, it was necessary to unscrew the lid of his thermos and have a sip of coffee, liberally punched up with some Irish Cream.

  Charn was the last to join them, and today looked nothing like the host of a program for children on public television. With his Marlin 336 over his shoulder, he carried himself with the casually assertive bearing of the seasoned, lifelong hunter.

  “One amongst you was too eager to wait for morning and tried the door last night,” Charn said, looking around at them. Christian blushed and Charn smiled indulgently. “Would you care to give it another go, young Mr. Swift?”

  Christian sank to one knee by the little door. He held the latch for a single dramatic moment—and then pulled it open.

  Dead leaves blew across the wooden floor, carrying with them the scent of fall. Christian stared into the gloaming on the other side for the time it took to draw a single breath and then crawled through. The gay, bright, brass tinkle of his laughter echoed strangely from the far side. Stockton tipped back his thermos and had another swallow.

  Peter Yearns For Action

  Peter followed Christian through, across the dusty attic floorboards, onto bare, cold earth, and then out from under a low ledge of rock.

  He rose and found himself in a clearing on the side of a hill, a natural amphitheater overgrown with pale grass. He turned in a complete circle, looking around. Boulders capped in moss had been scattered helter-skelter around the glade. It took a moment of study to recognize they had been deliberately positioned, creating a semi-circle, like teeth in the lower jaw of some enormous antediluvian brute. A single dead-looking tree, deformed and hunched, cast wild branches out over the ruin. Ruin of what? Some place of cruel worship, perhaps. Or maybe just the equivalent of a scenic turnoff. Who could say? Not Peter Stockton.

  His father’s hand fell on his shoulder. The wind hissed through the blades of the grass.

  “Listen,” his father said and Peter inclined his head. After a moment his eyes widened.

  The grass whispered, “poison, poison, poison, poison.”

  “It’s murder-weed,” his dad told him. “It says that whenever the wind blows and men are about.”

  The sky above them was the dull color of a bloodstained bedsheet.

  Peter looked back at the door as Mr. Fallows pulled his way out of one world and into the other. On this side, the doorframe was made of rough stone and the door itself was built into the slope of the hill, which rose steeply away above that ledge of stone. Charn crawled through last and closed the door behind him.

  “Regard your watches,” Charn said. “I make it 5:40 am. By 5:40 pm we must be on our way back. If you open that door one minute after midnight, you will find naught but a slab of rock. Oh, and then you are in for it. In our world, the door opens every three months. But three months there is nine months here. You must wait the term of a woman’s pregnancy before it will open again, on the summer solstice, June twenty-first. And in case you can’t do the math . . . yes. It has been thirty-seven years since I first opened the door in our world. But it has been nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine years here.”

  “Number of the beast,” Christian said.

  “Number of the beast is six-six-six,” Peter said. Peter knew a lot about Satan and the Inquisition and Tom Savini.

  Christian said, “Yeah, but turn nine hundred and ninety-nine upside down.”

  Charn talked over them. “I speak from terrifying personal experience, you do not want to risk being caught here. I spent most of nineteen eighty-five in this world, was hunted by fauns, betrayed by whurls, and forced to strike a vile bargain with a golem in the service of General Gorm the Obese. It was always twilight; nine months of shadows fighting shadows. If we are separated and you do not find your way back here, you will be left.”

  God, he loved to talk, Peter thought. It seemed to Peter that Charn’s true calling was not hunting but lecturing.

  They followed Charn down the meandering flight of rough stone steps. The branches of dead trees creaked and rustled and ancient leaves blew around their ankles.

  Once, they all stopped, at the sound of a great distant lowing.

  “Ogre?” Peter’s father asked.

  Charn nodded. The groan came again, a sound of aching despair. “Mating season,” Charn said and chuckled indulgently.

  Peter’s rifle thudded and banged against his back and once the barrel caught on a branch. Mr. Fallows offered to carry it for him. His voice did not quite disguise an edge. For himself, Peter was relieved to get it off his back. He felt he was already carrying too much. He hated hunting for the most part. There was too much waiting around and his father wouldn’t let him bring his phone. Shooting things was fun but often hours went by and nothiiiiiiing happened. He sent a mental prayer up to whatever barbaric gods ruled this world for a good quick piece of slaughter before he himself dropped dead, of boredom.

  Christian Longs For Night

  They went down and down. Christian heard the rushing of water in the distance and shivered with delight, as if he were already up to his waist in the frigid stream.

  Charn led them off the steps and into the woods. A yard from the path, he touched a black silk ribbon hanging from a low branch. He nodded meaningfully and walked on into the poisoned forest. They followed a trail of the discreet ribbons for not quite half a mile and at last arrived upon the blind, set twenty feet off the ground. It was a shed resting on cross-planks in the boughs of a tree that resembled but was not an oak. A mossy rope ladder had been draped up out of reach on a high branch. Charn dropped it with the help of a long forked stick.

  There were a couple camp chairs in the blind, and a wooden shelf holding some dusty glasses, and a dirty looking paperback called $20 Lust if someone wanted something to read. A wide slot, about a foot high and three feet across, faced downhill. Through the trees it was just possible to see the flash of black water below.

  Charn was the last up the ladder, and he only stuck his head and shoulders through the trap.

  “I built this blind in two thousand-five and haven’t shot from here since two thousand-ten. As every year of ours is three of theirs, I think it safe to assume none of them will be on their guard should they pass near. From here you can sight on the stairs, and also pick off anyone moving along the footpath beside the river. I must be out to check the condition of my other blinds and to place a few snares for whurls. With luck I will have some new prizes to replace Mehitabel and Hatch before we exit this world. If I hear a shot I will return at a brisk pace, and you need have no fear of shooting me in the half-light. I know what you can see from this blind and have no intention of crossing into your field of fire. Watch for faun! They are plentiful and you are sure to see some before long. Remember, there are no laws here against taking down a doe or a young’un and the meat is just as tender . . . but we only
mount the bucks as trophies!”

  He lifted two fingers in a wry salute and descended, gently dropping the trap shut behind him.

  Christian had settled in one of the camp chairs with his drawing pad, but leapt up to study a cobweb in a high shadowed corner. The spider had spun a few words into the web:

  FREE BED FOR FLYS.

  Christian whispered in a breathless voice for Peter to come look. Peter studied it for a moment, then said, “I don’t think that’s how you spell flies.”

  Stockton dropped into a camp chair, unbuttoned one of the snap pockets on the front of his camos, and produced a small canteen. He had a sip of coffee and sighed and offered it to Fallows. The other man shook his head.

  “Hard to believe it’s real,” Christian said, turning his drawing pad to a new page and idly beginning to sketch. “That I’m not dreaming this.”

  “What time do you think it is? Almost night or almost day?” Stockton asked.

  Christian said, “Maybe it hasn’t made up its mind. Maybe it could still go either way.”

  “What do you want it to be?” Fallows asked.

  “Night for sure! I bet the best things come out at night. The real monsters. Be great to bring back a werewolf head for the wall.”

  Peter guffawed. He took his rifle back from Fallows and flung himself on the floor.

  “Let’s hope we don’t see a werewolf,” Stockton said over the rim of his thermos. “After what we spent to get here, we didn’t have much left over for silver bullets.”

  Fallows Prepares

  One hour went by, then another. Christian and Peter ate sandwiches. Stockton sagged in his camp chair, drinking Irish coffee, looking sleepy and content. Fallows waited by the open window, staring into the night. His pulse beat rapidly and lightly, a feeling of anxiety and excitement in him that made him think of waiting in line for a rollercoaster. Fallows always felt this way before a kill.