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. The CEO and the lawyer disappeared from the shot, and for a minute the figure on the stairs