"How?"
"It made me love more, and hate more. It made me old. It got into my dreams. It took away two things that were a big part of me, and nothing good can take their place. You have this hole inside, and you've got to protect it, keep the bad things out. I don't know-it's hard to explain."
"I think I understand."
He can feel her looking at him. She drinks more wine. "Yes, you do. When I saw the way you looked at Rusty, I knew you would understand. And when I was sitting across from you at dinner, I knew you'd understand. You're old, too."
"A lot older than you."
"Not years old. Life old. Miles old."
John looks at her bedstand clock: 3:53 a.m. "It's late."
"Who are you?"
He smiles a smile of falsehood. "John."
"Besides that."
"What I told you."
"I'm not fully convinced."
"I'm not who I say I am?"
"No. You're more than that. Much more than that."
"Well," he says, opening the bedroom door. "Let me know when you find out the truth."
At 4:08 a.m. John is back in his cottage, snatching his penlight from the bedstand drawer. A moment later he crouches under the rear bumper of his truck to find the magnetized hide-a-box containing his tension wrench and lockpick.
At 4:16 a.m. he is in Vann Holt's private library office shooting copies of all of Holt's handwritten notes in the "B" file Brief and unrevealing as they are, John has wondered if perhaps Baum is being discussed somewhere here, under a code that only Holt knows. He holds the penlight camera to his eye and listen; to the faint click of the shutter opening and closing as he rotate: the shaft.
At 4:24 he is standing in front of the basement door of what he assumes is the trophy room. It takes him five minutes to get in because the deadbolt has eight springs and he is half drunk and nervous as all get-out crouching here with the penlight in his mouth, the pick clicking in the lock and the sweat running down his neck.
He steps inside and turns on a light.
The room is not what he was expecting. There are no head: on the walls, no antlers, no horns, no ivory, no racks. There are no skins or pelts. There are no flattened bodies with stuffed head: tacked to the wall as decoration.
Instead, there is the natural world. Or something that look: like the natural world.
It is an astonishingly large room, and standing in it John feels like he is in a natural history museum.
Along the eastern wall are dioramas of what appear to be India, China and Nepal. Each stretches from floor to ceiling and is probably forty-feet wide. They are built out from the far wall and literally spill forward into the room. They are separated by massive stanchions of river rock that form a kind of border for each. Opposite, along the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward John.
The dioramas teem with figures that were once alive and now, almost, seem to be living again. Greater Kudu stand alert, on guard for danger, their horns gently tapering and their beards full and pale. A black rhinoceros moves through the veld, one huge foot raised, mid-step. A pride of lions lounges in the savanna, watching a splendid female drag down a fleeing zebra. Hippopotami loiter in a lake while bongo and wildebeest and hartebeest and gnu race past. Water buffalo bathe; tapir drink; a leopard jumps from the jungle, tail trailing up and back, ears back and mouth open, feet extended and claws out, eyes focused on the startled axis deer in front of him. A grizzly bear towers and bares its teeth. A Marco Polo's ram stands at the highest point of Central Asia, his horns curled up, back and out in a spiral more stupendous than any John has ever seen or imagined. Many of the animals are beyond his experience. Tiny red antelope spring through a meadow; spotted, yellow-eyed cats lounge in an Asian treetop; a pure white buck with an eight-point rack peers over his shoulder with an indifferent, patriarchal majesty.
John moves within the world, a tourist. He meanders, walking sometimes forward and sometimes backward, lost in a state of amazement, unwilling to miss anything, eager to see it all at once. Standing in front of the Africa diorama, he begins reading the plaques.
He is even more astonished when the general introduction to Africa blurb instructs him to push the red button on the stand before him when he's finished with this scene. Though unfinished, he pushes the button anyway. His heart jumps as the entire ceiling-high display begins to rotate, smoothly and almost noiselessly disappearing into the wall as another tableau circles forward to take its place.
A bull elephant looms above him, trunk up and tusks hooking toward the sky. His ears are extended-each one, John thinks-the size of a bedsheet. He looks ready to charge, because the taxidermist has captured the huge shift of weight to the animals' columnar rear legs, leaving the front legs lighter, their flesh looser, one mammoth knee just now bending and one immense foot almost ready to leave the grass.
John pushes the red button again and the original diorama returns, like an alternate world gliding into place.
He stands there, heart thumping, ears buzzing, amazed. Then he tries more red buttons. He moves through the great shifting room, pushing one after another. The world is a kaleidoscope.
Australia becomes Montana.
China becomes Kodiak Island.
A wolfpack tears down an elk.
A Cape Buffalo tilts a Jeep.
And perhaps the most interesting thing of all are the little horizontal platforms beside each information plaque. They are tall and narrow as candleholders. And topping each, like a golden flame, is a rifle cartridge. In the light of the trophy room John can see that the casings contain written information. He leans forward to read the engraved brass that is displayed in front of the Cape Buffalo. . 458
Win.
Mag.
500 gr.
Silver tip
He notes that the engraving looks very much like the engraving on the shells Joshua showed him, with the cursive script so similar to the Declaration of Independence.
Leaning in with his camera, John shoots several of the gleaming, textual brass casings.
Finished and sweating harder now, he presses the red button again.
But when the last diorama rotates, he's not looking at wildlife at all.
Now, to John's continuing astonishment, he is staring at the front of what might be a pub. In fact, John can see a bar, a long mirror and a row of empty barstools through one of the mullioned windows. The front door is wooden also, with a large window in its center. Green curtains hang on brass rods inside. He thinks of the alcohol he's drunk this night and rubs his eyes. No, the pub remains, and it is inviting.
John steps up to the door and opens it. He feels as lost and curious as Alice herself. The lights go on automatically as he enters. It is indeed a little pub. There are three stools at the burnished bar, and plenty of bottles lined along the opposite wall mirror. There are three thick cardboard coasters on the counter and three clean ashtrays, each with a boxes of matches in it. John leans across the wood of the bar and sees the duckboard behind it, the small refrigerator, the ice bin with a folded hand towel on top of it, the little overhead glass rack. It is all genuine and real. It is neither facade nor mock-up. John feels almost dazed, pulled between the illusion of wildlife-animal and human-"outside" and the reality of the "civilization" in which he now stands. He feels as if he is in some last outpost.
To his right and down a step is a comfortable little room arranged around a big screen television set in a cabinet along the far wall. There are half a dozen chairs set up, all facing the screen. In the midst of the chairs is an electronics control console so the viewer doesn't have to get up to change channel or volume, start or stop tape, etc.