Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  She ran into the cold, blowing vapor, shouting Joel’s name. As hard as she ran, she felt she was not going nearly fast enough. She almost ran past the spot where the carcass had been. It wasn’t there anymore, and in the mist, with the water surging up around her bare feet, it was hard to tell one stretch of beach from another.

  But she spotted Heather’s drawing pad, sloshing in on the combers, soaked through, pages tumbling. Gail caught in place and stared out at the plunging waves and tormented water. She had a stitch in her side. Her lungs struggled for air. When the waves drew back, she could see where the carcass had been hauled through the hard dirt, pulled into the water, going home. It looked as if someone had dragged a plow-blade across the beach and into the lake.

  “Joel!”

  She shouted at the water. She turned and shouted up the embankment, into the trees, toward Joel’s house.

  “Joel!”

  She spun in a circle, shouting his name. She didn’t want to look at the lake but wound up turned to face it again anyway. Her throat burned from yelling, and she was beginning to cry again.

  “Gail!” Heather called to her. Her voice was shrill with fright. “Come home, Gail! Come home, right now!”

  “Gail!” yelled Gail’s mother.

  “Joel!” Gail shouted, thinking this was ridiculous, everyone shouting for everyone else.

  The lowing sound came from a long way off. It was mournful and soft.

  “Give him back,” Gail whispered. “Please give him back.”

  Heather ran through the mist. She was up on the embankment, not down on the sand, where the water was still piling in, one heavy, cold wave after another. Then Gail’s mother was there, too, looking down at her.

  “Sweetie,” Gail’s mother said, her face pale and drawn with alarm. “Come up here, sweetie. Come up here to Mother.”

  Gail heard her but didn’t climb the embankment. Something washed in on the water and caught on her foot. It was Heather’s drawing pad, open to one of her ponies. It was a green pony, with a rainbow stripe across it, and red hooves. It was as green as a Christmas tree. Gail didn’t know why Heather was always drawing horses that looked so un-horse-like, horses that couldn’t be. They were like double negatives, those horses, like dinosaurs, a possibility that canceled itself out in the moment it was expressed.

  She fetched the drawing pad out of the water and looked at the green pony with a kind of ringing sickness in her, a feeling like she wanted to throw up. She ripped the pony out and crushed it and threw it into the water. She ripped some other ponies out and threw them, too, and the crushed balls of paper bobbed and floated around her ankles. No one told her to stop, and Heather did not complain when Gail let the pad fall from her hands and back into the lake.

  Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time, the sound was down deep inside her, a long, wordless cry for things that weren’t never going to happen.

  Faun

  PART ONE: OUR SIDE OF THE DOOR

  Fallows Gets His Cat

  The first time Stockton spoke of the little door, Fallows was under a baobab tree, waiting on a lion.

  “After this, if you’re still looking for something to get your pulse going, give Mr. Charn a call. Edwin Charn in Maine. He’ll show you the little door.” Stockton sipped whiskey and laughed softly. “Bring your checkbook.”

  The baobab was old, nearly the size of a cottage, and had dry rot. The whole western face of the trunk was cored out. Hemingway Hunts had built the blind right into the ruin of the tree itself: a khaki tent, disguised by fans of tamarind. Inside were cots and a refrigerator with cold beer in it and a good Wi-Fi signal.

  Stockton’s son, Peter, was asleep in one of the cots, his back to them. He’d celebrated his high-school graduation by killing a black rhinoceros only the day before. Peter had brought along his best friend from boarding school, Christian Swift, but Christian didn’t kill anything except time, sketching the animals.

  Three slaughtered chickens hung upside down from the branch of a camel thorn, ten yards from the tent. A sticky puddle of blood pooled in the dust beneath. Fallows had an especially clear view of the birds on the night-vision monitors, where they looked like a mass of grotesque, bulging fruits.

  The lion was taking his time finding the scent, but then he was elderly, a grandfather. He was the oldest cat Hemingway Hunts had on hand and the healthiest. Most of the other lions had canine distemper, were woozy and feverish, fur coming out in patches, flies at the corners of their eyes. The game master denied it, said they were fine, but Fallows could tell looking at them that they were going down fast.

  It had been a bad-luck season on the preserve all around. It wasn’t just sick lions. Only a few days before, poachers had rammed a dune buggy through the fence along the northwestern perimeter, took down a hundred feet of chain-link. They roared around, looking for rhino—the horn was worth more by weight than diamonds—but were chased out by private security without killing anything. That was the good news. The bad news was that most of the elephants and some of the giraffe had wandered off through the breach. Hunts had been canceled, money refunded. There’d been shouting matches in the lobby and red-faced men throwing suitcases into the backs of hired Land Rovers.

  Fallows, though, was not sorry he’d come. He had, in years before, killed his rhino, his elephant, his leopard, and buffalo. He would get the last of the big five tonight. And in the meantime there’d been good company—Stockton and his boys—and better whiskey, Yamazaki when he wanted it, Laphroaig when he didn’t.

  Fallows had met Stockton and the boys only a week ago, on the night he arrived at Hosea Kutako International. The Stockton gang were fresh off a BA flight from Toronto. Fallows had flown private from Long Island in the Gulfstream. Fallows never bothered with public aircraft. He had an allergy to standing in line to take off his shoes, and he treated it with liberal applications of money. As they were all arriving in Windhoek at roughly the same time, the resort had sent a G-Class Mercedes to gather them up and bring them west across Namibia.

  They’d been in the car for only a few moments before Immanuel Stockton realized he was the very same Tip Fallows who operated the Fallows Fund, which held a heavy position in Stockton’s own pharmaceutical firm.

  “Before I was a shareholder, I was a client,” Fallows explained. “I proudly served my nation by feeding myself into the woodchipper of a war I still don’t understand. I crawled away in shreds and stayed high on your narcotic wonders for close to five years. Personal experience suggested it would be a good investment. No one knows better than I how much a person will pay to escape this shitty world for a while.”

  He was trying to sound wise, but Stockton gave him an odd, bright, fascinated look and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “I understand more than you might think. When it comes to the luxury goods—cigars, furs, whatever—nothing is worth more than an escape hatch.”

  By the time they spilled out of the big Mercedes, four hours later, they were all in a jolly mood, and after check-in they took the conversation to the bar. After that, Stockton and Fallows drank together almost every single night, while Peter and Christian horsed around in the pool. When the boy, Christian—he was eighteen but still a boy to Fallows—asked if they could come with him to see him bag his cat, it never even crossed his mind to say no.

  “The little door?” Fallows asked now. “The hell’s that? Private game reserve?”

  “Yes.” Stockton nodded sleepily. The smell of Laphroaig exuded from his pores, and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d had a lot to drink. “It’s Mr. Charn’s private game reserve. Invitation only. But also, the little door is . . . a little door.” And he laughed again—almost giggled—very softly.

  “Peter says it’s expensive,” said Christian Swift.

  “Ten thousand dollars to look through the door. Ten thousand more to walk on the other side. Two hundred and thirty to hunt there, and you only g
et the one day. You can bring a trophy back, but it stays with Mr. Charn, at the farmhouse. Those are the rules. And if you don’t have your big five, don’t even bother sending him an e-mail. Charn doesn’t have any patience for amateurs.”

  “For a quarter a million dollars, you better be hunting unicorn,” Fallows said.

  Stockton raised his eyebrows. “Close.”

  Fallows was still staring at him when Christian touched his shoulder with the knuckles of one hand. “Mr. Fallows. Your cat is here.”

  Christian was all alertness, close by the open flap, gently offering Fallows his big CZ 550. For a moment Fallows had half forgotten what he was doing there. The boy nodded at one of the night-vision monitors. The lion stared into the camera with radioactive green eyes as bright as new-minted coins.

  Fallows sank to one knee. The boy crouched beside him, their shoulders touching. They peered through the open flap. In the dark the lion stood beneath the camel thorn. He had turned his great, magnificent head to look at the blind, with eyes that were intelligent and aloof and calmly forgiving. It was the gaze of a king bearing witness to an execution. His own, as the case happened to be.

  Fallows had been closer to the old cat, just once, and at the time there’d been a fence between the lion and him. He had studied the grandfather through the chicken wire, staring into those serene golden eyes, and then told the game master he had chosen. Before he walked away, he made the lion a promise, which he now meant to keep.

  Christian’s breath was shallow and excited, close to Fallows’s ear. “It’s like he knows. It’s like he’s ready.”

  Fallows nodded, as if the boy had spoken some sacred truth, and gently squeezed the trigger.

  At the rolling boom of the shot, Peter Stockton woke with a little scream, twisted in his tangle of sheets, and fell out of the cot.

  Christian Tears His Shirt

  Christian followed the man Fallows out of the tent. The killer crossed the ground in slow, careful steps, always planting his feet just so, like a pallbearer lugging one corner of an invisible coffin. He laughed and smiled easily, but he had attentive, chilly eyes, the color of lead. Those eyes made Christian think, randomly, of the moons around Saturn, airless places where the seas were acid. Peter and his father enjoyed a good shoot, would yell with pleasure when a bullet thwacked into the hide of a crocodile or raised a puff of dust off a buffalo’s flank. The way Fallows killed, it was as if he himself were the weapon and the gun was only incidental. Pleasure didn’t come into it.

  The lion’s tail lifted slowly and slapped the dust. Lifted—held in place—and thumped the dust again. The big cat lay toppled on its side.

  For a time Fallows sat alone with his lion and the others hung respectfully back. Fallows stroked its wet muzzle and stared into its patient, still face. Perhaps he spoke to it. Christian had overheard Fallows saying to Mr. Stockton that after he got his lion, he might give up hunting, that there was nothing left to go after. Stockton had laughed and said, “What about hunting a man?” Fallows had looked at him with those chilly, distant eyes and said, “Hunted them and been hunted by them and have the wounds to prove it.” Peter and Christian had debated, ever since, how many men he’d killed. It delighted Christian to know a no-kidding agent of death.

  Some Saan ranch hands materialized out of the night from their own hideaway, and a cheer went up at the sight of the dead lion. One unzipped a canvas cooling bag and dug in the ice for beers. The tail struck the ground again, and Christian imagined he could feel the earth vibrating from the blow. But then Christian had a colorful imagination. Stockton helped Fallows to his feet and handed him an icy Urbock.

  Peter pinched his nose. “God. Smells like shit. They ought to groom them before a hunt.”

  “That’s the chickens, dumb-ass,” Peter’s father said.

  The tail rose and fell with a whap.

  “Should he shoot it again?” Christian asked. “Is it suffering?”

  “No. That’s one dead cat,” Stockton said. “Never mind the tail. They do that. It’s a mindless postmortem spasm.”

  Christian sank down by the lion’s head, sketch pad in hand. He stroked the lion’s vast, trembling mane, tentatively at first, then more firmly. He leaned close to one velvety ear, to whisper to it, before it was all the way gone: to say fare thee well. He was only barely sensible of Peter hunkering down beside him and the two older men talking behind them. For the moment he was alone with the lion in the profound stillness between life and death, a separate and solemn kingdom.

  “Will you look at this paw?” Peter asked, drawing Christian back to the now. Peter lifted the lion’s great limp foreleg, spreading the leathery pads with his thumb.

  “Hey there,” Fallows said, but Christian wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

  “Make a hell of a paperweight, wouldn’t it?” Peter asked, and growled, and waved the paw at Christian in a lazy swipe.

  The paw extruded smooth, sharp hooks of yellowing keratin. A tendon in the foreleg went taut. Christian sprang, throwing his shoulder into Peter’s chest. He was fast. The lion was faster. Fallows was faster still. Old, and broken more than once, but fastest of them all.

  Fallows hit Peter, who jolted into Christian, and all three of them slammed into the hardpan. Christian felt something snag his shirt, as if the fabric caught on a branch for a moment. Then he was flattened under the other two, and all the breath smashed out of him. Fallows kicked, turning onto his side and rolling the rifle down off his shoulder and into his hands in one fluid motion. The barrel settled into the soft underside of the lion’s jaw. The gun went off with a shattering crack that made Christian’s ears ring.

  Stockton’s beer slipped out of his hand and hit the dirt, where it spouted foam. “Peter? Peter! The fuck is wrong with you?”

  Peter was the first to struggle out from the pig pile. He left Christian and Fallows sprawled in the dirt, both of them panting for breath, as if they’d collapsed together after a hard sprint. The old soldier groaned exquisitely. Peter stood over them, staring down at the lion in a dazed sort of way and slapping his own bottom to get the dust off his shorts. He remained in a foggy-eyed trance until his father grabbed him by the shoulder and wrenched him around. Mr. Stockton’s face was an alarming shade of red, except for a branch of arteries in his brow, which bulged, pale and shiny, in high relief.

  “You fuckin’ asshole,” Peter’s father said. “You know what you just did? You just wrecked his fucking trophy. Mr. Fallows paid thirty thousand for that cat, and now there’s a hole the size of a golf ball in its face.”

  “Dad,” Peter gasped. His eyes were shiny with shock and grief. “Dad.”

  “It’s not ruined,” Fallows said. “Easily fixed by the taxidermist.” He stared up into the darkness. “I might be ready for the taxidermist myself.”

  Peter Stockton looked from Fallows to his father and back again with brimming eyes.

  “How you like that, Pete?” Christian said. His own giddy voice was muffled and distant, as if he had cotton wadding stuffed in his ears. “Mr. Fallows just saved your ass. Lucky for you! That’s your best feature.”

  The Saan bushmen had gone still in the tense aftermath of the gunshot. Now, though, they roared with laughter and erupted into cheers. One of them grabbed Peter by the hands, and another shook a beer and let it foam over the teenager’s head. In a moment Peter went from close to tears to crying out in laughter. Stockton gave his son a resentful, furious look—and then his shoulders dropped and he laughed, too.

  Christian felt a cool trickle of air on bare skin and peered down, fingering two long slashes in his shirt. The very white chest beneath was unmarked. He laughed and looked at Fallows.

  “I’m going to keep this shirt the rest of my life. That’s all the trophy I need.” He considered for a moment, then said, “Thanks for not letting me get clawed to bits.”

  “I didn’t save anyone. You moved first. You jumped like a deer.” Fallows was smiling—but his eyes were thoughtful. />
  “I don’t think so, Mr. Fallows,” Christian told him modestly.

  “We know what’s what around here, Fallows,” Stockton said, reaching down with his big hands to squeeze the little man’s shoulder. “We know a man when we see one.” And he turned his beer over and poured it on Fallows’s head, while the Saan whooped it up.

  Christian gently collected up his drawing pad from the dust so no one could see what he’d been drawing.

  Stockton Repays a Debt

  When the bell chimed, Stockton went to the door of the suite and opened it a crack. Fallows was in the hall.

  “Come in. Be careful, though. It’s dark in here,” Stockton warned him.

  “What’s with the lights?” Fallows asked as he slipped into the room. “Are we attending a presentation or a séance?”

  The lights were off and the curtains drawn in Mr. Charn’s corner suite on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons, across from the Boston Common. A single lamp shone, on an end table, but the usual lightbulb had been swapped out for one that was tinted red. Stockton had expected the red light. Stockton had seen the Edwin Charn show before.

  He opened his mouth to explain—or try to explain, or at least press Fallows to be patient—but Charn spoke first.

  “Get used to it, Tip Fallows,” came the reedy voice, wavering with age. “If I offer you a spot on my next huntin’ party, you’ll need to get used to the half-light. What’s to be shot on the other side of the little door will be shot at dusk, or not a-t’all.”

  Charn sat in a striped easy chair to the left of the love seat. He wore a sprightly yellow bow tie and suspenders that pulled his pants too high. Stockton thought he dressed like the benevolent host of a television program for small children, one where they practiced naming the colors and counting to five.

  The boys sat together on the love seat, Peter in a tailored Armani suit, Christian in a blue blazer. Christian didn’t come from money, had made it to private school on his wits. Stockton was proud of his son for looking past the other boy’s secondhand wardrobe and for quietly accepting Christian’s broke, shy, strictly religious foster parents. Of course, Christian was probably the only reason Peter had himself graduated from private school—Stockton was sure Christian let him copy on exams, and he’d probably written more than a few of Peter’s papers. That pleased Stockton as well. You looked out for your friends, and they looked out for you. That was the very reason Stockton had insisted on introducing Fallows to Mr. Charn. Fallows had been looking out for Stockton’s boy in Africa, three months ago; Stockton took a certain mellow satisfaction in knowing he could pay the man back with interest. To be honest, a trip through the little door was probably worth any number of overweight, intellectually lazy sons.