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