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 sudden 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