off them, and then a floorboard creaked somewhere above, and he went still. He stood at the foot of the stairs and tuned his senses to the farmhouse. It was common to say that one knew a place like the back of one’s hand, but in truth Charn knew the Rumford farmhouse quite a bit better than the back of his own hand. He needed only to listen to the hush for a few moments to locate, with an uncanny degree of precision, everyone in the building.
The rackety snore in the rear of his house was the wife. He could picture the way she slept, with her head cocked back and her mouth open, a corner of the sheet bunched up in one fist. Springs creaked in a room on the second floor, off to the right side of the landing. From the heavy sproing of it, Charn guessed that would be Stockton. The pharmaceutical man was carrying about sixty pounds more than was healthy. His son, the boy Peter, farted and moaned in his sleep.
Charn cocked his head and thought he heard the soft, light pad of a foot on the staircase leading to the third floor. That couldn’t be Fallows, the soldier, who’d been torn apart and put back together in some war or another; Fallows was sinewy and hard but moved with pain. The process of elimination left only Christian, the young man who so resembled an idealistic prince from an inspiring story for young boys.
Charn removed his own boots and climbed the stairs with far more care, bringing the bell jar with him.
Christian was in striped pajamas of a very old-fashioned sort, the kind of thing one of the Darling children might’ve been wearing on a Christmas Eve in 1904. He was at the far end of the attic. An old sewing table with an iron foot pedal had a spot under the eaves. The moss-colored rug was so old and dusty it was almost the exact shade of the floorboards it covered. The little door—it was like the door to a cupboard—waited at the far end of the room. Charn was silent while the boy turned the brass latch and drew a deep breath and threw it open.
“Just a crawl space,” Charn said.
The boy sprang partway up and clouted his head on the plaster ceiling: a satisfying reward for a snoop. He sank back to his knees and twisted around, clutching his head in his hands. Christian’s face was flushed with embarrassment, as if Charn had discovered him looking at pornography.
Charn smiled to show the boy he wasn’t in trouble. The ceiling was at its highest close to the stairs, but Charn still had to duck to move a few steps closer. He held the bell jar out in front of him with both hands, like a waiter from room service carrying a bedtime snack on a tray.
“I never saw anything except the space behind the walls, until two-thirty A.M. on the night of September twenty-third, 1982. I heard a sound like a goat loose on the third floor, the trip-trap of hooves across the planks. I made it into the hall just in time for something to come barreling into me. I thought it was a kid—not a child, you understand, but a baby goat. It struck me in the abdomen with its horns, knocked me over, and kept going. I heard it crash down the stairs and out the front door. Edna—my wife—was afraid to leave the bedroom. When I had my breath back, I went downstairs, doubled over in pain. The front door hung open on a splendid summer night. The high grass rolled like surf under a fat golden moon. Well. I thought p’raps a deer had got into the house somehow, terrified itself, and escaped. But then I was never one to leave the doors open at night, and it struck me peculiar that one would’ve got all the way up to the third floor. I began to scale the stairs to the attic. I was halfway there when a flash caught my eye. A gold coin it was, with a stag engraven ’pon it, glinting on one of the steps. I have it still. Well. I climbed the rest of the way in a baffled, bemused, half-scairt state. The little door was shut, and I don’t know what impulse made me lift the latch. And there, on t’other side. The ruin! The murmur of another world’s breeze! That dusk