Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  “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’d 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’d 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 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 onto the floor of the rental 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 till 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 doorframes had settled over the centuries (centuries?), and some of them were crooked, and all of them were too low for a twenty-first-century-size man. The bedrooms were on the second floor: small, tidy rooms with lumpy single beds, Shaker furniture, and ornamental chamber pots.

  “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 longlegs 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 ’twon’t open into t’other place again.”

  The daddy longlegs 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 that 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 that he hid the gesture behind his body so no one else could see.

  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 had 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’s 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 11:00 P.M., 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 needed only 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 t
he 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’d 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. An old sewing table with an iron foot pedal had a spot under the eaves. The moss-colored rug 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 crawl space,” 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 A.M. on the night of September twenty-third, 1982. 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 over, 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 downstairs, 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 a flash caught my eye. A gold coin it was, with a stag engraven ’pon it, glinting on one of the steps. I have it still. Well. I climbed the rest of the way in a baffled, bemused, 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 crawl space back there. I shot my first faun in the spring of 1984, and I brought my kill home with me and was pleased to discover it tasted better than mutton. In 1989 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 the 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 duffel, 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 secondhand 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-as-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 cold, bare 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 semicircle, 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 equiva
lent of a scenic turnoff. Who could say? Not Peter Stockton.

  His father’s hand fell onto his shoulder. The wind hissed through the blades of 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 rock ledge. Charn crawled through last and closed the door behind him.

  “Regard your watches,” Charn said. “I make it 5:40 A.M. By 5:40 P.M. 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 one hundred and eleven years here.”

  “A century of twilight,” Christian said, with a prickle of delight.

  “A century of shadows,” Peter replied, in a tone of hushed awe.