Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  A birdcage sat on the coffee table, covered with a sheet of red linen. Or maybe it was white linen and only looked red in the horror-house light, Stockton wasn’t sure. If Stockton were running the presentation, he would’ve started with the birdcage, but he wasn’t, and Charn wouldn’t.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet me, Mr. Charn,” Fallows said. “I’m very interested to hear about the little door. Stockton tells me there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world.”

  Charn said, “A-yuh. He’s right enough. Thank you for comin’ all t’way to Boston. I don’t much care to leave Maine. I don’t like to leave the door for long, and ’tisn’t necessary for me to travel widely to drum up business. Word passes around. The truly curious come to me. I only offer the two hunts a year, and next is on the twentieth of March. Small groups only. Price nonnegotiable.”

  “I heard about the price. That’s most of the reason I came—the sheer entertainment value of hearing what kind of hunt a person could get for a quarter of a million dollars. I can’t imagine. I spent forty thousand to kill an elephant and felt I overpaid.”

  Mr. Charn raised an eyebrow and cast a questioning look at Stockton. “If it’s beyond your means, sir, then—”

  “He’s got the money,” Stockton said. “He just needs to see what he’d get for it.” He spoke with a certain smooth, confident humor. He had not forgotten how he himself felt when he was in Fallows’s boots, recalled his own disgust at the price tag and his icy unwillingness to be conned. The pitch had turned him around, and it would turn Fallows around, too.

  “I’m just wondering what I could possibly shoot that would be worth that kind of bread. I hope it’s a dinosaur. I read a Ray Bradbury story about that when I was a kid. If that’s what you’re offering, I promise not to step on any butterflies.” Fallows laughed.

  Charn didn’t. His calm was almost uncanny.

  “And if I do shoot something—I understand I can’t even keep the trophy? All that money and I bring home squat?”

  “Your kill will be preserved, mounted, and kept at my farmhouse. It may be viewed by appointment.”

  “For no additional fee? That’s decent of you.”

  Stockton heard the edge in the old soldier’s voice and fought down an urge to put a restraining, comforting hand on Fallows’s arm. Charn wouldn’t be offended by a brittle tone or a sarcastic implication. Charn had heard it all before. He’d heard it from Stockton himself only three years ago.

  “Of course viewing is free, although should you like to take tea while you’re visiting, there is a modest service charge,” Charn said in a blasé tone. “Now I should like to share a short video. It is not professionally produced. I made it myself, quite a while back. Still, I feel it is more than adequate to my needs. The video you are about to see has not been altered in any way. I don’t expect you to believe that. In fact, I am sure you will not. That is no matter to me. I will establish its veracity beyond any doubt before you leave this room.”

  Charn pressed a button on the remote.

  The video opened with a view of a white farmhouse against a blue sky on the edge of a field of straw. Titles whisked onto the screen, sliding from left to right.

  Charn Estate, Rumford, Maine

  They were the sort of titles you could create in-camera if you didn’t care that it made your video look like childish junk.

  There was a cut to a second-floor bedroom, with homey New England touches. An urn, patterned with blue flowers, stood on the bedside table. A brass bed dressed with a handmade quilt took up most of the space. Stockton had slept in that very bed on his last trip to Rumford—well, not slept. He had lain awake the whole restless night, springs digging into his back through the thin mattress, field mice scuttling frantically in the ceiling. The thought of the day to come had put sleep well out of reach.

  New titles swept in, chasing off the previous titles.

  4 rustic bedrooms, shared bathroom facilities

  “Pretty sure ‘rustic’ means cold and uncomfortable,” Stockton heard his son murmur to Christian. Good Christ, the kid was loud, even when he whispered.

  Peter had been too young to go the last time. He wasn’t much more mature now, but maybe Christian would keep him in line. Stockton had arranged this meeting to thank Fallows for saving his son. Not for the first time, it crossed his mind he might be even more grateful to Fallows if he hadn’t saved the fat little nose-picker.

  The video jumped to a shot of a small green door—a grown man would have to crawl through it—set at one end of a room on the third floor of the farmhouse. The door! Stockton thought, with the passion of a convert heedlessly crying out hallelujah at the sight of a holy relic. The sight of it inspired and delighted him in a way his son never had, not even on the day of his birth.

  The ceiling was low on the top floor, and at the far side of the room, opposite the camera, it banked steeply downward, so the far wall was only about three feet high. The room contained a single dusty window with a view of the field outside. A new title swept onto the screen:

  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 that 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’d 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 abandoned his posture. There—he wasn’t going to walk out of the room just yet. Nothing reassured a man about an investment like knowing that richer and more powerful men had gone first.

  The CEO settled onto a knee, the butt of the gun against his shoulder and about an inch of barrel protruding 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 his 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. T
he 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 spiraled 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 to give the famous lawyer a high five. There was the sound of a beer can cracking and fizzing.

  “Okay, kids,” Fallows said. “This was fun, but now we’re done. I’m not getting diddled out of a quarter mil to play paintball with a bun-cha clowns dressed like extras from The Lord of the Rings.”

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

  “Do you remember what you said the 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 a 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 recognize reality only 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 recognize reality only 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 away with a shout. The sudd
en force of his reaction knocked Mehitabel onto her back. Hutch helped her up, muttering, “Oh, my dear, my love.” She spit the blood on the floor of the cage 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 that 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.