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