If you can’t get a hardcover copy of At Home in the Dark, blame Joe Hill. Pre-orders for the signed-and-numbered Subterranean Press limited edition were strong early on, but they exploded upon the announcement that Netflix had won a spirited bidding war and would be dramatizing Joe’s novelette,”Faun.”
Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman and Heart-Shaped Box. His second novel, Horns, was made into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe; his third, NOS4A2, is forthcoming as a TV series from AMC. His book of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, won the Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. His most recent work, Strange Weather, a collection of novellas, was published in the autumn of 2017. He earned the Eisner Award for Best Writer for his long-running comic book series, Locke & Key, featuring the eye-popping art of Gabriel Rodriguez. Look for that one as a Netflix show, too, in the not-too-distant future.
But you knew that, right?
Here’s a taste of the novelette. I’ve never read anything like it. And neither have you.
FAUN by Joe Hill
PART ONE: OUR SIDE OF THE DOOR
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 wifi 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 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 cancelled, money refunded. There had 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 had 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 had 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 gang were fresh off a BA flight from Toronto. Fallows had flown private from Long Island in the Gulfstream. Fallows never bothered with public aircraft. He had an allergy to standing in line to take off his shoes, and he treated it with liberal applications of money. As they were all arriving in Windhoek at roughly the same time, the resort had sent a G-Class Mercedes to gather them up and bring them west across Namibia.
They had only been in the car for a few moments before Immanuel Stockton realized he was the very same Tip Fallows who operated the Fallows Fund, which held a heavy position in Stockton’s own pharmaceutical firm.
“Before I was a shareholder, I was a client,” Fallows explained. “I proudly served my nation by feeding myself into the woodchipper of a war I still don’t understand. I crawled away in shreds and stayed high on your narcotic wonders for close to five years. Personal experience suggested it would be a good investment. No one knows better than me how much a person will pay to escape this shitty world for a while.”
He was trying to sound wise, but Stockton gave him an odd, bright, fascinated look, and clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “I understand more than you might think. When it comes to the luxury goods – cigars, furs, whatever – nothing is worth more than an escape hatch.”
By the time they spilled out of the big Mercedes, four hours later, they were all in a jolly mood, and after check-in, they took the conversation to the bar. After that, Stockton and Fallows drank together almost every single night, while Peter and Christian horsed around in the pool. When the boy, Christian – he was eighteen, but still a boy to Fallows – asked if they could come with him to see him bag his cat, it never even crossed his mind to say no.
“The little door?” Fallows asked now. “The hell’s that? Private game reserve?”
“Yes,” Stockton nodded sleepily. The smell of Laphroaig exuded from his pores and his eyes were bloodshot. He had had a lot to drink. “It’s Mr. Charn’s private game reserve. Invitation only. But also, the little door is… a little door.” And he laughed again – almost giggled – very softly.
“Peter says its expensive,” said Christian Swift.
“Ten thousand dollars to look through the door. Ten thousand more to walk on the other side. Two hundred and thirty to hunt there, and you only get the one day. You can bring a trophy back, but it stays with Mr. Charn, at the farmhouse. Those are the rules. And if you don’t have your big five, don’t even bother sending him an email. Charn doesn’t have any patience for amateurs.”
“For a quarter a million dollars, you better be hunting unicorn,” Fallows said.
Stockton raised his eyebrows. “Close.”
was still staring at him when Christian touched his knee with the knuckles of one hand. “Mr. Fallows. Your cat is here.”
Christian was all alertness, down on one knee, close by the open flap, gently offering Fallows his big CZ 550. For a moment, Fallows had half-forgotten what he was doing there. The boy nodded at one of the night-vision monitors. The lion stared into the camera with radioactive green eyes as bright as new minted coins.
Fallows sank to one knee. The boy crouched beside him, their shoulders touching. They peered through the open flap. In the dark, the lion stood beneath the camel thorn. He had turned his great, magnificent head to look at the blind, with eyes that were intelligent and aloof and calmly forgiving. It was the gaze of a king bearing witness to an execution. His own, as the case happened to be.
Fallows had been closer to the old cat, just once, and at the time there had been a fence between the lion and him. He had studied the grandfather through the chicken wire, staring into those serene, golden eyes, and then told the game master he had chosen. Before he walked away, he made the lion a promise, which he now meant to keep.
Christian’s breath was shallow and excited, close to Fallows’ ear. “It’s like he knows. It’s like he’s ready.”
Fallows nodded, as if the boy had spoken some sacred truth, and gently squeezed the trigger.
At the rolling boom of the shot, Peter Stockton woke with a little scream, twisted in his tangle of sheets, and fell out of the cot…
FAUN by Joe Hill is one of 17 unforgettable stories in At Home in the Dark. NB: Ebook and paperback editions are on sale now for immediate delivery. DON’T try to order the hardcover, as it’s sold out at the publisher, and while Amazon is still taking orders they’ll be unable to deliver.
