Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  When he had emptied all 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 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 walk the tall grass in the savanna 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.

  “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’s 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!”

  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 accessible only 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.

  Whether he ought to open fire . . . well, that was another question. The faun war party might yet be led away. The boy Christian could still make a convenient appearance and draw them off. On the other hand, if the numbers below swelled, perhaps it was best to simply slink away. He had survived in this world for nine months once before, and he knew a golem who would make a deal. General Gorm the Obese always had work for a bad man with a gun.

  Charn pulled himself behind a rotting log and swiped the sweat from his brow. A single lightning-struck tree, like a beech, loomed over him, partially cored out. Below him some brush rustled at the edge of the clearing, and the one named Forgiveknot slipped into the glade, bolas hanging from his belt. Charn knew him well. He’d misjudged a shot at the old faun years before and given him that scar across the face. He smiled grimly. He so hated to miss.

  The sight of him made up Charn’s mind: kill them now, before any more showed up. He slipped the Remington off his shoulder and rested the barrel on the log. He put the front sight on Forgiveknot.

  Something clattered in the dead tree over him. There was a chittering and a rustle.

  “Assassin!” cried a whurl gazing down at Charn from one branch of the blasted tree. “Save yourselves! A Son of Cain is here to kill you all!”

  Charn rolled and swung the barrel up. His sights found the whurl, and he pulled the trigger, and the gun made a flat, tinny click. For a moment he just stared at the old Remington in a kind of blank bewilderment. It was loaded—he had put in a fresh cartridge himself only a few minutes before. A misfire? He didn’t believe it. He cleaned and oiled the gun once a month, whether he used it or not.

  He was still trying to come to grips with that awful, dead click when the loop of rope fell. It caught him around the face, and Charn sat up, and as he did, it dropped around his neck and tightened. The lasso yanked. The rope choked off his air, and it jerked him back, over the rotten log and over the edge. He spun as he fell. He hit the earth with enough force to drive all the air out of him. Ribs broke. Pain screamed in his shattered ankle. A thousand black specks wheeled around him, like midges, only they were in his head.

  He sprawled on the ground, ten feet from his little door. As his vision cleared, it seemed the sky was lighter, almost lemon-colored. He could see fair clouds in the distance.

  His right hand fumbled for the rifle, but just as his shaking fingers scraped the butt, whoever held the other end dragged him away. Charn choked, tried to force his fingers under the rope and couldn’t. He rolled and kicked as he was dragged and wound up on his belly, beneath the single corrupted, dead tree that leaned out over the whole natural amphithe
ater.

  “Rifle wouldn’t do you any good anyway,” Fallows said from above him. Charn stared at his black hooves. “I took the firing pin out last night, while you were upstairs with Christian.”

  The tension on the line slackened, and Charn was able to loosen the noose a few centimeters and capture a breath. He stared up at Fallows. His skull was shaved clean to show the stumps of two horns, long since sawed off, and he was backlit by a sky the reddish gold of new-minted copper.

  A little girl stood beside Fallows, holding his hand. She looked gravely down at Charn—the stern, cool, appraising look of a queen.

  “It’s come for you, Mr. Charn,” the little girl said. “It’s found you out at last.”

  “What?” Charn asked. “What’s come?”

  He was confused and frightened and desperately wanted to know.

  Fallows cast one end of the rope over a bough of the overhanging tree.

  “Daylight,” the girl said, and with that, Fallows hoisted Charn kicking into the air.

  Late Returns

  WHEN MY PARENTS WENT, they went together.

  My father wrote a couple letters first. He wrote one for the Kingsward PD. His vision was very poor—he’d been legally blind for three years—and the letter was brief, composed in a hardly legible scrawl. It informed police that they would find two bodies in a blue Cadillac, parked in the garage, at his home on Keane Street. My mother had been able to look after my father until three months before, but she had received a diagnosis of progressive dementia, and her condition was worsening fast. They both feared leaving their only son with the burden of their long-term care and had decided to act before the power to choose was taken away from them. My father sincerely apologized for “any mess and any stress” their choice caused.

  He wrote another letter for me. He said he was sorry about his shitty handwriting, but I knew about his eyes, and “Mom is worried she’ll get too emotional if she tries to write this.” She had told him that she wanted to die before she forgot the people who made her life worth living. She asked him to assist her suicide, and he admitted to her that he’d been ready to “get this shit over with” for a couple years. He was only sticking around because he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her on her own.

  My father said I’d been a damn good kid. He said I was the best part of his life and that my mom felt the same. He asked me not to be angry at them—as if I ever could be. He said he hoped I understood. They’d never wanted to hang on for the sake of hanging on.

  “I’ve said it a thousand times, but I still believe some words never lose their power, no matter how many times they’re repeated. So: I love you, Johnnie. Mom loves you, too. Don’t be unhappy for too long. The child outliving the parents is the only happy story us human beings get.”

  He stamped both envelopes, put them in his mailbox, and snapped the red tin flag up. Then he went into the garage, where my mother was waiting for him in the passenger seat of the Caddy. The car ran until it was out of gas and the battery died. The car was old enough to still have a tape deck, and they went down listening to Portrait of Joan Baez. In my mind my mother’s head is on my father’s chest and he has an arm around her, but I don’t know if that’s how they were found. I was in Chicago, driving a semi for Walmart, when the police entered the garage. The last time I saw my parents was in the morgue. The suffocation had turned their faces the color of eggplants. That’s the last look at them I ever had.

  The shipping and logistics company I was working for fired my ass. When the cops called my cell, I turned the truck straight around without delivering my freight. A couple midwestern Walmarts didn’t get red grapes for their produce section, and my supervisor went batshit and told me to take a walk.

  My folks got to die the way they wanted, and they lived the same way. It didn’t look like they had so much from the outside: a one-floor ranch in a New Hampshire podunk, a twenty-year-old Caddy, and a heap of debt. Before they retired together, my mother taught yoga and my father was a long-haul trucker. They didn’t get rich, they didn’t get famous, and they lived in their house for twenty-five years before they could say they owned it.

  But she read to him while he cooked, and he read to her while she folded clothes. They did a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every weekend and the New York Times crossword every day. They smoked prodigious amounts of weed, including sharing a spliff in the car before they gassed themselves. My mother had memorably whipped up a pot-laced stuffing one Thanksgiving when I was nineteen that made me awesomely sick. I was never able to pick up the pot habit, a failing they accepted with a certain amused resignation.

  My father umped over a thousand Little League games. My mother volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern. No one has ever worked harder or with more optimism for so many lost causes. I told her she was allergic to winners, and my dad shouted, “Hey! Don’t knock it! If she wasn’t, I’d never have stood a chance!” They held hands on walks.

  And they both loved the library. When I was little, we took family trips there every Sunday afternoon. The first Christmas present I remember receiving was a shiny blue wallet with showy stitching, my library card tucked in to it.

  For some reason whenever I think about our weekend library visits, it’s always the first snow of the year. My dad sits at one of the scarred wooden tables in the periodicals room, reading the Atlantic by the light of a green-shaded lamp, beneath a stained-glass window that shows a monk inking an illustrated manuscript. My mother leads me to the children’s library, where there are oversize couches in bright primary colors, and sets me loose. When I need her, she will be reading Dorothy Sayers under the giant plastic statue of an owl in bifocals.

  It was an important place for them. My parents met in a library. In a sense. My mother lived in the nearby town of Fever Creek, in a little brick vicarage, her stepfather being a humorless, neurotic Anglican priest. My dad wound up spending a summer down the Creek, working in his uncle’s scrapyard. They met waiting for the library’s Bookmobile, which did a weekly swing through Fever Creek. At that time you could borrow LPs as well as books—it was the Summer of Love, after all—and my not-yet-parents had an argument when they both grabbed for the lone copy of Portrait of Joan Baez at the same time. They reached a truce when she said that if he let her take it out, he could come by the vicarage to listen to it anytime he liked. They listened to Joan Baez together all summer long, at first on the floor of her bedroom and later up in the bed itself.

  I DIDN’T ACTUALLY MEAN to become a librarian. When I walked in there, five weeks after I buried my parents, I didn’t have anything in mind beyond returning a grotesquely overdue book.

  My parents had left behind a teetering pile of unpaid medical bills and still owed a hundred thousand dollars on the loan they took out to put me through college. Wasted money. I’d netted a bachelor’s in English at Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver’s license.

  I had no job, about twelve hundred dollars to my name, and there was no insurance payout coming, not in the wake of what amounted to a murder-suicide. My father’s lawyer, Neil Belluck, suggested that my best option was to get rid of anything I didn’t absolutely have to keep for myself and sell the house. If I were lucky, it would pay their outstanding bills and leave me with enough to float on until I booked a job with another shipping company.

  So I propped open the doors, bought a couple of boxes of heavy-duty garbage bags, rented a steam vacuum, and went to work. My parents had let the place go in the last year of their lives. It got away from them, and I hadn’t wanted to see it: the dust on everything, the mouse droppings in the carpet, half the lightbulbs out, and mold spotting the wallpaper in the dark hallway between the living room and the master bedroom. The house smelled like Bengay and abandonment. It came to me that in the last year I had abandoned them. I was glad to get rid of their stuff. Everything I unloaded was one less thing to
remind me of their last unhappy months, facing blindness and dementia alone, making up their minds to take one final ride in the Caddy together, to drive away from their troubles without ever leaving the garage. I brought musty comforters and piles of dresses to Goodwill. I put the couch out in the yard with a cardboard FREE sign on it. No one wanted it, but I left it out there. It rotted in the rain.

  I stuck a broom under the bed to get at the dust bunnies and swept out a pair of my dad’s jockeys and one of my mother’s shoe boxes. I took a peek in the box, expecting to find a pair of heels, and was stunned to discover that it contained nearly two thousand dollars in unpaid parking and speeding tickets—there was an unpaid parking violation from the City of Boston that dated to 1993. There was also an unpaid dentist bill from 2004, a VHS copy of When Harry Met Sally . . . from Blockbuster Video, and a paperback titled Another Marvelous Thing. I didn’t understand how the book connected to the other items until I flipped open the back cover. It was a library book, and I knew at first glance that my mother had borrowed it in the last century and never got around to returning it. There was a lending card in the back, tucked into a stiff beige pocket, stamped with a return date. A relic from that ancient, fabled era before Facebook. At a dime a day, we probably owed the library our whole house. Or at least the cost of a replacement book.

  The dentist my mother had stiffed retired in 2011 and now lived in Arizona. The local Blockbuster had long since been replaced by a cell-phone dealership. I figured my mom was off the hook for the parking tickets; you couldn’t try a dead woman. That left the book. I stuck Another Marvelous Thing into the pocket of my baggy army jacket and got moving.

  It was the end of September but still felt like summer. Moths batted at the old-fashioned wrought-iron lampposts on the street corners. A trio of accordion players in striped shirts and suspenders entertained a sparse audience on the town green. Kids out with their parents crowded the patio tables at the ice-cream parlor. If you ignored the cars, it might’ve been 1929. The walk to the library was the first time I had not felt ugly with grief in weeks. It felt like I’d been paroled.