At Home in the Dark Read online

  “I’d like to see her,” Christian said. “The sleeper. Hey, Mr. Stockton. You never said. Is she a little girl, or like, a grown-up girl?”

  “Well, I’ve only seen her from a distance, but I’d say—”

  Fallows reached back with one hand in a gesture that called for silence. Peter stiffened, staring through the slot that faced the slope below. Without looking back, Fallows beckoned Christian to join them at the window.

  Three figures mounted the steps. One of them, the tallest, held a torch that blazed with blue fire. Ram’s horns rose from either side of his skull and he walked with his hand on the shoulder of his kid, a child in a loose flapping vest, with fuzzed budding horns of his own. The doe was close behind them, carrying a basket.

  “It’s all yours, Peter,” Fallows whispered. “I loaded your gun myself.”

  “Nail the big one,” Stockton said.

  Peter stared out at the targets with inquisitive, thoughtful eyes. He seemed to weigh the gun in his hands, as if he was going to throw it instead of shoot it. At last he said, “If I shoot the kid, they’ll stop to look after him, and we can nail all three.”

  “Oh, that’s thinking,” Stockton said. “You got a good head on your shoulders. And in a minute you’re going to have an even better one for Charn’s wall.”

  “Do it,” Christian said.

  Peter pulled the trigger.

  The Hunter Racks up His First Kills

  The gun made an unsatisfying clack.

  Frustrated and confused, Peter threw back the bolt. The rifle was empty.

  “Fucking thing,” Peter said. Behind him, a chair fell over. “Mr. Fallows, this isn’t loaded.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. His face darkened, then went pale, and Christian tore his gaze away from the fauns to look for himself.

  Peter’s father had toppled over in his chair, the black rubber handle of a combat knife in his chest. His red, heavy, souse’s face was perplexed, a man reading a bank statement that suggests somehow, impossibly, his savings have been wiped out. Christian had a distant, distracted thought, that it was the knife Peter had been unable to find in the morning.

  Peter stared at his father, “Dad?”

  Fallows stood over Stockton, his back to the boys. He was tugging Stockton’s rifle off the dying man’s shoulder. Stockton didn’t make a sound, didn’t gasp, didn’t cry out. His eyes strained from his head.

  Peter lunged past Christian and grabbed for Fallows’ big CZ 550, which was leaning against the wall. His fingers were stiff and clumsy with shock and he only knocked it over.

  Fallows couldn’t pull Stockton’s rifle away from him. The strap was still snagged over his shoulder, and Stockton himself was clutching the butt, in a last, failing effort to resist.

  Fallows glanced back at the boys.

  “Don’t, Peter,” he said.

  Peter finally grabbed the CZ. He slid open the bolt to make sure it was loaded. It was.

  Fallows stepped over Stockton and turned to face them. Stockton still had the strap of the rifle over his shoulder and was clutching the butt, but Fallows had one hand under the muzzle and a finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at Peter.

  “Stop,” he said again, his voice almost toneless.

  Peter fired. From so close the blam of the gun was deafening, a great roar followed by a deadening whine. A chunk of blazing white wood exploded from the tree trunk to the right and just behind Fallows. As the splinters flew past him, Fallows slapped Stockton’s hand away and squeezed the trigger of his gun. Peter’s head snapped back and his mouth dropped open in an expression that had been common to him in life: a look of dim-witted bewilderment. The red-and-black hole above his left eyebrow was big enough to insert two fingers.

  Christian heard someone screaming, but there was no one left alive in the blind except for Fallows and himself. After a few moments he realized he was the one making all the noise. He’d dropped his notepad and held up both hands to protect his face. He didn’t know what he said or promised, couldn’t hear himself through the ringing in his ears.

  The trapdoor rose about a foot and Charn looked in on them. Fallows wrenched the rifle free from Stockton at last and turned the barrel around to point it at the old man. Charn fell, just as quickly, the trapdoor slamming behind him. Christian heard a leafy crunch as the tall man hit the ground below.

  Without a look back, Fallows flung open the trapdoor, dropped through it, and was gone.

  Christian in Flight

  It was a long while before Christian moved. Or at least he felt it was a long while. In that half-lit world, the passage of minutes was difficult to judge. Christian did not own a watch and had left his phone, by command, in the other world. He only knew he’d had time to dampen his crotch, and then time for that dampness to grow cold.

  He trembled in convulsive bursts. He lifted his head and peered through the lookout. The fauns had long disappeared from the steps. The hill was silent in the gloaming.

  It came to him, with a sudden, sickened urgency, that he had to get back to the little door. He picked up his sketchbook, hardly thinking why—because it was his, because it had his drawings in it—and crawled across the plank floor of the blind. He hesitated beside the corpse of Mr. Stockton. The big man stared at the ceiling with wide, startled eyes. His thermos lay close to hand. The coffee had spilled out and soaked into the floorboards. Christian thought he should take the knife and he tried to pull it out of Stockton’s chest, but it was buried too deeply, the blade jammed between two ribs. The effort made him sob. Then he thought he should crawl back to Peter and pull the CZ 550 out of his hands, but he couldn’t bear to look at the hole in Peter’s forehead. In the end he left the blind as he had come, unarmed.

  He made his unsteady way down the rope ladder. It had been easy going up. It was much harder going down, because his legs were shaking.

  When he was on the ground, Christian scanned the gloom and then began to move across the face of the hill, toward the flight of rough stone steps. A black silk ribbon caught his eye and he knew he was not turned around.

  He had hiked far enough to work up a good sweat when he heard shouts, and a sound like a herd of ponies running through the trees. Not a dozen feet away he saw a pair of fauns dart through the shadows. One carried a curved blade. The other had what looked like a throwing bolas, a mass of hanging leather straps with stones tied at the end.

  The one with the scimitar leapt a fallen trunk, scrambled with the vitality of a stag up the hill, and bounded out of sight. The one with the bolas followed for a few yards—then caught himself and looked down the hill, fixing his gaze on Christian. The faun’s leathery, scarred face was set in an expression of haughty contempt. Christian screamed and fled down the hill.

  The trunk of a tree rose out of the darkness and Christian slammed into it, was spun halfway around, lost his footing, and fell. He rolled. His shoulder struck a sharp stone and he was spun again, continuing to tumble down the hill, picking up speed. Once it seemed his whole body left the ground in a spray of dead leaves. At last, he struck hard against another tree and was jolted to a stop against it. He found himself in the bracken at the bottom of the hill. Just beyond the ferns was a mossy path and the river.

  Christian was too afraid to pause and consider how badly he might’ve been hurt. He looked up the hill and saw the faun glaring down at him from fifty feet away. Or at least that’s what he thought he saw. It might’ve been a gaunt and hunched tree, or a rock. He was mad with fear. He sprang to his feet and ran limping on, breath whining. His left side throbbed with pain and he had twisted his ankle coming down the hill. He had lost his sketchpad somewhere.

  The lanky boy followed the path downstream. It was a wide river, as wide as a four-lane highway, but at a glance, not terribly deep. The water rushed and foamed over a bed of rock, spilling into dark basins before hurrying on. In the blind, their shared body heat had created a certain stuffy warmth, but down by the river it was cold enough for Ch
ristian to see his own breath.

  A horn sounded somewhere far off, a hunting horn of some sort, a long bellowing cry. He cast a wild look back and staggered. Torches burned in the almost-night, a dozen distant blue flames flickering along the mazy staircases that climbed the hills. It came to Christian there might be dozens of parties of fauns in the hills, hunting the men. Hunting him.

  He ran on.

  A hundred yards along his right foot struck a stone and he went down on hands and knees, hard.

  For a while he remained on all fours, gasping. Then, with a start of surprise, he saw a fox on the far side of the water, watching him with avid, humorous eyes. They gazed at each other for the length of time it took to draw a breath. Then the fox bayed at the night.

  “Man!” The fox cried. “Man is here! A Son of Cain! Slay him! Come and slay him and I will lap his blood!”

  Christian sobbed and scrambled away. He ran until he was dizzy and seeing lights, the world throbbing and fading, throbbing and fading. He slowed, his legs shaking, and then shouted in alarm. The light he had been seeing at the edge of his vision, a wavering blue glow, was a torch. A man stood on the hill, a black shape against a blacker background. He held the torch in his right hand. In his left was a gun.

  He acted without thought. Because the man was on his right, Christian swerved to the left and crashed into the river. It was deeper than it looked. In three lunging steps he was up to his knees. In moments he had lost all sensation in his feet.

  He ran on and the ground dropped away and he plunged in to his crotch and cried out at the shock of the cold. His breath was fast and short. A few desperate steps later he fell and all but went under. He struggled against the current, had not expected it to be so strong.

  The boy was halfway across when he saw the dolmen. A plate of gray stone, as big as the roof of a garage, stood on six tilting, crooked rocks. Beneath the roof of gray stone, in the center of the covered area, was an ancient, uneven altar stone, with a girl in a white nightdress, sleeping peacefully upon it. The sight of her terrified him, but fear of his pursuers drove him on. Fallows had moved out from beneath the darkness of the trees. He was already up to his ankles in the river, having removed his shoes before stepping into the water. While the boy had stumbled, sunk, and half-drowned, somehow Fallows knew just where to step so he was never more than shin deep.

  The water along the bank was hip high and Christian grabbed at handfuls of slippery grass to pull himself up. The murder-weed hissed “poison, poison!” at him and came out in clumps and dropped him back into the river and he went up to his neck and exploded into sobs of frustration. He threw himself at the bank again and kicked and squirmed in the dirt like an animal—a pig, trying to struggle out of a mire—and floundered onto dry land. He did not pause, but ran beneath the dolmen.

  It was at the edge of a grassy meadow, the nearest line of trees hundreds of feet away, and Christian understood that if he tried to make it to the forest, Fallows would easily pick him off with the rifle. Also, he was shaking and exhausted. He thought desperately he might hide and reason with Fallows. He had never shot a thing. He was an innocent in this. He felt sure that Fallows had killed the others as much for what they had done as what they had intended to do. The unfairness of it raked at him. Fallows had killed too. The lion!

  He ducked behind one of the standing stones and sat and hugged his knees to his chest and tried not to sob.

  From his ridiculous hiding place Christian could see the child. Her golden hair was shoulder length and looked recently brushed. She held a bouquet of buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace to her chest. Everything Christian had seen in this place was dead or dying, but those flowers looked as fresh as if they had just been picked. She might’ve been nine and had the sweet pink complexion of health.

  Firelight cast a shifting blue glow across the dolmen as Fallows approached.

  “Have you ever seen a more trusting face?” Fallows asked, softly.

  He stepped into view, the gun in one hand, the torch in the other. He had collected Christian’s drawing pad and carried it under one arm. He did not look at Christian but instead sat on the edge of the stone, beside the sleeper. He looked upon her like one inspired.

  Fallows set down the sketchbook. From inside his camouflage coat he produced a small glass bottle, and another, and a third. There were five in all. He unscrewed the black top of the first and held it to the little girl’s lips, although it was empty, or seemed empty.

  “This world’s been holding its breath for a long time, Christian,” Fallows said. “But now it can breathe again.” He unscrewed the next and raised it to her mouth.

  “Breath?” the boy whispered.

  “The breath of kings,” Fallows agreed, with a mild nod. “Breath of the lion and the elephant, the leopard and the buffalo, and the great rhino. It will counteract the work of the poisoner, General Gorm, and wake her and wake the world with it.”

  When he had emptied all of the empty bottles, he sighed and stretched his legs. “How I hate shoes. God save my kind from shoes. And those awful prosthetic feet!”

  Christian dropped his gaze to the black, shining, bony hooves at the end of Fallows’s ankles. He tried to scream again but was all screamed out.

  Fallows saw him recoil and the faintest smile twitched at his lips. “I had to shatter my own ankles—smash and reset them—you know. When I first came to your world. Later I had them broken and rebuilt again, by a doctor who was offered a million dollars to keep my secret, and was paid in lead to confirm his silence.” Fallows brushed back his curly hair and touched the tip of one pink ear. “Thank goodness I am not a Mountain Faun, but only a mere faun of the plains! The Mountain Faun have ears just like the deer of your world, whereas we simple country faun have the ears of men. Though I would have gladly cut my ears off for her if it had been necessary. I would have cut my heart out and offered it to her slippery and red and beating in my own hands.”

  Fallows rose and took a step toward him. The torch, which he had never set aside, shifted from blue to a lurid, polluted emerald. Sparks began to fall from the flames.

  “I don’t need my torch,” Fallows said, “to know what you are. And I didn’t need to see your sketches to know your heart.”

  He tossed the sketchbook at Christian’s feet.

  Christian looked down at a drawing of severed heads on sticks: a lion, a zebra, a girl, a man, a child. The breeze caught the pages and leafed through them idly. Drawings of guns. Drawings of slaughter. Christian’s stunned, frightened gaze shifted to the torch.

  “Why is it changing color? I’m not a menace!”

  “Charn doesn’t know much about devil-thorn. It doesn’t change color in the presence of menace, but of wickedness.”

  “I never killed anything!” Christian said.

  “No. You only laughed while other men killed. Who is the worse, Christian, the sadist who serves his true nature honestly, or the ordinary man who does nothing to stop him?”

  “You killed! You went to Africa to kill a lion!”

  “I went to Africa to free as many of my empress’s friends as I could, and so I did, after putting a little money in the right hands. A dozen elephants and two dozen giraffes. The lions, I infected with one of your unclean world’s many diseases, to give them their dignity and release. As for the grandfather I shot, he was ready to hunt the tall grass in the savannah of ghosts. I asked his forgiveness the day before the hunt and he gave it. You spoke to him too . . . after I shot him. Do you remember what you said as he bled out?”

  Christian’s face shriveled with emotion and his eyes stung terribly.

  “You asked him how it felt to die. He tried to show you, Christian, and he almost did it. How I wish you hadn’t escaped him. It would’ve saved me an ugly bit of work here.”

  “I’m sorry!” Christian cried.

  “Aye,” Fallows said. “Aren’t we both?”

  He lowered the barrel of the gun. The steel kissed Christian’s right temple.r />
  “Wait, I—” Christian shrieked.

  His voice was lost to the rolling sound of thunder.

  The Sleeper Awakes

  After, Fallows sat by the girl to wait. For a long time nothing happened. Fauns crept close to the dolmen, but stayed respectfully outside the circle, looking in. The oldest of them, Forgiveknot, an elderly faun with a rippling scar across his leathern face, began to sing. He sang Fallows’ old name, the name he had left behind in this world when he fled through the little door with the last of the empress’s treasures, to find the breath of kings, and return her to life.

  The light had taken on a faint, pearly glow when the girl yawned, and rubbed one fist in a sleepy eye. She looked up, her eyes fogged with drowsiness, and her gaze found Fallows. For a moment she didn’t recognize him, her brow creased with puzzlement. Then she did and she laughed.

  “Oh, Slowfoot,” she said. “You’ve gone and grown up without me! And you have lost your proud horns! Oh, my darling. Oh, my old playmate! I shall never forgive you.”

  By the time Fallows had shed his human clothes, and Forgiveknot was cutting his hair with a wide-bladed knife, she was sitting on the edge of the stone altar, swinging her feet above the grass, as the fauns formed a line, to kneel before her, and bow their heads, and receive her blessing.

  A World Awakes with Her

  For the third time, Charn gritted his teeth to keep from passing out. When the woozy feeling passed, he went on, crawling arm over arm, staying down. He went slowly, crossing no more than ten yards in a single hour. His left ankle was broken—badly. It shattered when he fell from the blind and it had been a narrow thing, giving Fallows the slip.

  There were six fauns in the circle of worship, set there to cut off any escape through the little door. But Charn still had a gun. He had methodically worked his way higher, avoiding the murder-weed that would whisper if it saw him—Poison! Poison!—moving so slowly that the crackle of dead leaves beneath him was all but imperceptible, even to the sharp ears of the fauns. There was a shelf of rock, jutting out over the clearing. It was only accessible from one side, as the slope on the other side was too steep and the earth too loose. Nor could it easily be approached from the crag above. For an armed man on this outcropping, though, firing into the clearing would be like shooting faun in a barrel.